Can Unitarian Universalists
Talk About God?

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), April 25, 2004, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

I was engaged in one of those difficult conversations that are simply a part of the work of a minister. A man, let’s call him Ted, who’d been attending services here with us for several months, concluded that this congregation didn’t offer the spiritual nurturing that he longed for. So he was moving on in his personal quest for a place that would provide what he felt he needed at this stage of his life.

Unlike some people who meet with me to express their disappointment in our way of the spirit and tell me of decision to move on, this man had a lot to say about what he wanted and didn’t find here. What bothered Ted was that we UUs never took the bull by the horns and really talked about what he saw as the issues and questions that belong to religion. It seemed to him that there was a gap — a huge yawning gap — in our willingness to deal with the human concerns and experiences that he felt belonged to every faith. He said there were words that he never heard when he was in our building — words that he felt he would hear in any other church or temple or mosque. He felt that the issues and ideas that these words talk about were present in people’s hearts and minds. But we never got around to talking about them.

“So tell me, can UUs talk about God? Or sin? Or redemption and forgiveness? Is there anything going on besides yourselves and your own personal concerns? Is there anything bigger than yourself that you connect to? “

Ted went on to say that he thought he caught a glimmer of that sense of something larger in some of the books he’d read by people like John Buehrens and Forest Church, but it troubled him that even these authors were “dancing around the edges,” as he put it.

I understood what Ted was talking about because every time I stand in here in front of all of you, or stand before people in our community to pronounce words of invocation, grace, or benediction, I’m cautious about the words I use and the sources from which I draw. I don’t want to close a door, or hang up a sign in someone’s mind that says that folks of a particular religious or philosophical persuasion aren’t welcome here.

I’m not the only minister who feels this way. In talking with my colleagues over the years and in reading their sermons, I find that most of us “dance around the edges.” We do this not just because we are a non-creedal congregation. I can think of other religious congregations — Quakers and Disciples of Christ, for example — who are also non-creedal, but who have a history and tradition that grounds their shared faith in a particular story and set of beliefs, in rituals and practices that are an accepted part of their shared life as a people of faith.

If you read about the history of our movement, you’ll find that there have been brief periods when Unitarians and Universalists each had a center or core set of assumptions and language that speak of a common faith. In the early 1800s, both groups were grounded in Christianity, even though their respective theologies were considered heretical by other Christians. By the late 1800s, and on into the next century, each denomination began to expand the parameters of its theology, moving away from a liberal Christianity and becoming open to other religions of the world. It became more difficult for either denomination to construct statements of belief or affirmations of faith. In the 1930s, Unitarianism became a home for Humanism. In the 1950s, Universalism was reframed from the foundation of universal salvation to the idea that there are universal values expressed by the various religions of the world that can’t be expressed through the beliefs and vocabulary of one particular religion. As each denomination continued to change, belief became a matter of personal conscience rather than agreeing with statement of faith or an affirmation that was held in common.

Our commitment to freedom of conscience in matters of religion is one of our most precious values. It’s the reason why many of us are here this morning. But I think we have to be honest and open to the reality that this freedom and the theological diversity that it allows us also creates some difficult problems for us as a religious community.

I find that trying to hold many different and even conflicting beliefs under one roof is a recipe either for conflict or a bland approach that is so careful not to offend that I often avoid anything that resembles traditional religious language or theology. It’s not that I’m worried about criticism from the congregation. My concern is that by using traditional religious language, I might cause someone to feel excluded from our community. I don’t want our Humanists, our Wiccans, our Christians, or anyone else to feel unwelcome because of the words that I speak on a Sunday morning. But I’m not sure that this cautious approach is serving us well.

It seems to me that our prized theological diversity has not brought us the richness of sources that is so eloquently named in the second section of our Principles and Purposes. Instead it has led us to steer a wide path around anything resembling traditional religion, especially Christianity or Judaism.

I suppose that for me, it all boils down to this: a loss of language that I believe inhibits our free and responsible search for truth about human concerns, human experience and human needs. Our commitment to openness and respecting each individual’s “right” to feel included has a shadow side that we as religious liberals must address and, come to terms with. I find myself wondering how to present the wisdom of the world’s religions if the language of world’s religions isn’t available to us. It’s not available because we have rejected works associated with ideas that some of us object to, or because these words have been used in ways that hurt us. So where might we go from here?

First, we must accept and live out the challenge of creating intimacy and acceptance in a pluralistic community. How can we be open, vulnerable and accepting of one another and our authentic differences? How can we agree to disagree on some of the details and definitions during our processes of shared exploration and yet hold on to our own sense of theological integrity? If I tell you that I experience the presence of God in my life and you tell me that you don’t, can we each respect the other’s reality without feeling that we’ve been attacked or put down in some way?

Can we become a community of “deeds” that includes reflections on the variety of sources that nurture and sustain our concerns for the world: science, sociology, political stance, our own UU tradition and history and our spirituality. Can we share those reflections and listen to each other without rejecting what isn’t our way? If I find the words of the Biblical Prophets as the ground for social action, and you are moved by the statements of a Humanist Manifesto, can we still work together with a sense of shared purpose? Can we tolerate messiness, surprise, ambiguity, accepting that living within the broad tent of diversity will inevitably create tension among us?

UU minister and theologian Paul Rasor says that theology is not something you do only with your head; you must also use your heart and your guts, your hands and your feet. Tom Owen Tolle calls UUs “Free-thinking mystics with hands.” Can we move from an emphasis on reason and head to a more holistic approach, truly embracing what we call “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder” as a source of our faith? Can we understand that while we all hunger for something to feed our inner beings, what is bread for one person is a stone to another?

We might even discover that what was bread for us at one point on our own journey has become inedible for us today and that we need to look to other sources.

At the end of an essay called “The Postmodern Challenge to Liberal Theology,” which was published in the latest volume of the Unitarian Universalist Christian, Paul Rasor speaks of his own spiritual journey. He was raised as a Protestant and in his college years he rejected the God of his childhood. For a few years he struggled to find a concept of God that made sense to him. He read a lot and talked to other people and discovered that there were a lot of very different ideas about God. Some of these ideas about the nature of God were contradictory with others. At first this fascinated Rasor, but as time went on, these conflicts annoyed him. He says that his “relentlessly logical mind concluded that they couldn’t all be right.” So he concluded that most of them were wrong. He became an atheist, a secular humanist, and for twenty years, he was committed to that path.

But after a while, he felt restless. Something was missing and that something was what he calls “theological substance and deeper spiritual grounding.” He writes:

“I know that some people are able to find these things along this non-theistic path, but somehow they just weren’t there for me. My commitment was strong, but my faith was weak.”

The problem for Rasor was that atheism, which he’d come to accept on an intellectual level, didn’t sit well with him emotionally. His ideas about a godless universe made rational sense, but they didn’t satisfy his soul. He has come to an idea of God that he says works for him both intellectually and spiritually — “at least most of the time.”

More and more often, I hear about the hunger for more spirituality in our services here. It’s not that these hungry people want to abandon reason, but they leave here hungry for something that feeds their souls. At the same time, I hear increasing concern about preserving and growing a space for humanism and the gifts that it offers to us. The work of creating a community that meets both the needs and the hopes of such a diverse group is not just mine. It belongs to all of you as well. We must all gather up the courage to speak with our authentic voices and to listen to each other with compassion and openness.

The need for a language that will help us with these conversations is evident. What that language will look like is something that we will discover in the course of time and experience. As we work together as individuals who choose to be in community with one another, I hope that we will remember the words of one our martyrs, Francis David,

We do not need to think alike to love alike.

May it be so.

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