At Play With God

At Play With God
A Sermon Given 7-17-05
By The Reverend Arline Conan Suthernland

When the idea for this service first occurred to me, I was dreaming of summer and the lightness of being I hope for each year. Something playful I thought, because there’s meaning to be found in play as well as in suffering.

Thinking about God can be heavy serious work, work more suitable perhaps for a winter afternoon, when, as Jane Kenyon writes,

I was reading about rationalism,
the kind of think we do up north
in early winter, where the sun
leaves work for the day at 4:15.

Maybe the world is intelligible
to the rational mind:
and maybe we light the lamps at dusk
for nothing...

Then I heard wings overheard.

The cats and I chased the bat
in circles-living room, kitchen,
pantry, kitchen, living room...
At every turn it evaded us

like the identity of the third person
in the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary

It’s that spirit: the one that astounded Mary, the one that eludes us, the one Kenyon likens it to a bat, the spirit that often surprises us, the one we greet with a shout of laughter perhaps of delight, perhaps of fear -- that I want to explore. As I begin, I thought it might be helpful to give more content to what I mean when I use the word, God.

The person from whom I have learned the most about helpful ways to think about God is the theologian, Gordon Kaufman. I first met Gordon in the summer of 1985, when he was teaching a course at the Iliff School of Theology entitled,” Constructing a Concept of God.” That encounter with Kaufman and his methodology he taught was a revelation. You know how there are times when you read something or hear something, and react by saying, “That’s just what I would have said, if only I had had the words to say it.”   I went to Harvard Divinity School to study with Gordon Kaufman.

Five summers later at General Assembly, at a gathering of the UU alums of HDS, the minister we asked to speak started by saying that Gordon Kaufman had taught her, a dyed in the wool humanist, to think about God in ways that complimented her liberal skepticism. I regret to this day that no one thought to record that session, because as we went around the room introducing ourselves, every single minister there spoke of how their ministry and indeed their deepest religious convictions had been affected by Kaufman’s teaching. By the time we reached the table of those who had graduated before Kaufman joined the faculty, they spoke of how much they wished they had had the opportunity to study with him and about the lectures they had attended and the books they had read.

Now, please don’t ever tell Professor Kaufman that I said so, but his insight is really quite simple. God, he says, is a concept; it’s an idea, a word that humans have created to describe something and here he most often uses St. Anselm’s definition of God, “That than which nothing higher can be conceived.”   But just because we have created this idea doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily something there; it doesn’t mean there isn’t either. But think about it, God is not the name of some entity – it’s an idea. If there is something that is higher or deeper or wider or simply more than anything we can ever imagine, it doesn’t have a name. And every time we think we’ve got it, that we have grasped the idea, we are wrong, cause it’s always more than that.

Whenever we settle on an understanding of God, as hard won and precious as that understanding may be, we are in danger of committing idolatry. Another way of saying this is that a perhaps partially correct vision if it becomes too fixed, is a false God. It can be wrenching to even consider the idea that what we imagine the highest to be, an idea that has sustained us through hard times, may not be the last word and may even be seriously incomplete.

As you heard earlier, we teach the children that there is a great mystery that some people call God. We don’t define the notion much more than that. We tell them that this mystery is everywhere and we demonstrate that abstraction for the younger ones who are not yet capable of abstract thought, like this -   . And we tell them that there are all kinds of ways to learn about God – by listening, by drawing, by singing songs, meditating, practicing martial arts, saying thank-you, and by hearing stories about God.   The stories they hear are ones that are of significance to us UU’s they include stories from the Hebrew Bible, the parables of Jesus, Buddhist teaching stories, and others. They all heard the story of Norbert Capek and Flower Communion the Sunday before the service here in the sanctuary. In September, the first lesson most of them will experience will be about the water communion we will hold on Ingathering Sunday – by the way don’t forget to collect some water from a place or a time that is special to you this summer – a film canister is arguably the ideal container.

And you know, it doesn’t seem to bother the children one iota that in, for instance, a Hindu story there can be two or three gods. We use the old-fashioned method of teaching through story, poetry, song, and ritual. We see this as worshipping with our children, helping them to experience the great mystery that some people call God rather than teaching them about religion or about God. Our children need to worship as much as we do. Conversely, we need to worship as much as our children do. And being that we are, after all, Unitarian Universalists, there is no way that we leave the mind or the brain out of the conversation. We actively encourage an attitude of questioning and even from time to time, irreverence. Cause in my humble opinion nothing takes the joy out of religion like taking ourselves too seriously.

This morning, my hope and deepest prayer is that something will touch the deepest part within us, the part that some people call soul. There are many ways for that to happen. Perhaps it will be a piece of music or a song we sing or maybe it will be the way the light plays against the banner or the reverie evoked by simply sitting here breathing with one another. Or it might happen when a metaphor or an image sneaks in behind our usual defenses and expands our imagination of the mystery some people call God. Or, God forbid, it might happen by a burst of laughter so strong that tears run down your cheeks.

Poets are helpful in exploding or expanding our notions of the Holy.

A long time ago, some of us memorized poems. I suspect that if asked, everyone in this room could recite at least one poem. Was it Kenneth Burke who spoke of literature as equipment for life? Poetry is making a comeback these days. We seem even more sensitive to our need of words and metaphors that jumpstart our imaginations and speak to our hearts. Most of you know that my car has a bumper sticker – Imagine! Open you mind and your sense of how things ought to be how things are and dream.

Cynthia Rylant’s poems: God Woke Up and God Got a Dog are found in her new book, God Went to Beauty School. I’ve got to read you that one! I have had such a good time with these poems! I pretty much agree with Rylant’s theology, the images of God she constructs speak to me. I’m surprised cause I usually prefer more abstract evocations – ones in which God isn’t pictured as any thing. Maybe I’m moving into a new phase of development in which anthropomorphic images aren’t repellent at least as long as they are as laugh at loud funny and humanizing as Rylant’s are.

I chose a psalm because these poems have touched the souls and helped heal broken hearts for millennia. Deep calls unto deep. It’s difficult to imagine phrasing it more perfectly. Deep calls unto deep    and . The psalms often open with laments “O god, my God why have you forsaken me?” or wailing or even down right whining. And then, there is a pause, a moment when the tone changes. We don’t know or aren’t told what happens, but we can rest assured that a shift of mood can take place.

Milosz’ poem “On Prayer,” makes room for the agnostic, for those of us seeking new ways to image God. The poem speaks to the value of prayer regardless of whether anyone is there to answer. Even if there is no other shore, “We will walk that aerial bridge just the same.” Prayer is not dependent on an answerer; prayer is not even necessarily a request. Prayer is a way of contacting the deep within ourselves and it can provide us with a way of understanding that WE are all in this together. “ That bridge leads to the shore of reversal/ Where everything is just the opposite and the word is/ Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned./ Notice I said we: there, every one, separately,/ Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh.

These days images of holiness that only reflect the individual and her or his personal relationship aren’t as convincing as they once were. Any adequate notion of God has to be framed in the reality in which we live and have our being, the mess of it all! Things on this planet are not good.   How can those of us who have the great privilege of not being hungry or thirsty possibly imagine goodness that doesn’t extend those basics to every creature on the planet?

Ernesto Cardinal writes,

Harken unto my moaning
Pay heed to my protest
For you are not a God friendly to dictators
Neither are you a partisan of their politics

We know and affirm as an intrinsic part of our faith the inescapable knowledge that every thing on this planet is interconnected and we know, just as God did when he saw the cold hungry dog by the tracks, that somehow we are responsible. We know that there are people right here in Hartford, and in Iraq and Africa who are cold and hungry. Any vaguely functional adequate image or concept of God has to include our responsibility to all who live in the house of the Living God. We must burn with demands for equal rights of all kinds. No one of us is saved alone. We can only be saved as a community, as a people who gather here on Sunday mornings and ache with the desire to save our planet and every being on it, who commit our lives to making a world more just and true.

One of the poems I find myself returning to over and over is Robert Bly’s , “The Third Body”
A man and a woman sit near each other, and
           They do not long
At this moment to be older, or younger,
            Nor born
In any other nation, or time or place.
They are content to be where they are,
            Talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom
            We do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move:
            He sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
As they breathe they feed someone we do
not know,
Someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

As we sit near each other on this warm summer Sunday morning, let us breathe together in silence for a moment as we play with the concept of God and may our breath feed someone we do not know. Someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

Now let us sing, When In Our Music

Benediction:
Go out into the world in peace
Have courage
Hold on to what is good
Return to no person evil for evil
Strengthen the faint-hearted
Support the weak
Help the suffering
Honor all beings

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 7/17/05)