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I rarely just post other people’s articles here – there’s plenty of that elsewhere. But in our continuing conversation about generational dynamics, and particularly the recent talks we’ve been having about the forgotten GenXers, I want to highlight this article from Salon, entitled “Generation X gets really old: How Do Slackers Have a Midlife Crisis?”

Sara Scribner’s entire article is a must-read, especially as we consider what Xers bring into our congregations in terms of how they view life and what they’re experiencing. Consider the following:

The economic reality for most Xers is much harsher. According to this year’s Pew study, Xers lost 45 percent of their wealth during the Great Recession. More than a few experts suggest that Xers – finally buying their starter homes in their 30s — unwittingly helped inflate the real estate bubble. They certainly bore the brunt of the collapse.

So just around the time that we were on schedule to settle down, our midlife economic peak became the worst market failure since 1929. “Our entire life has been punctuated by economic disasters from the time we were born,” says Gregory Thomas. “At every major milestone there’s been an economic collapse. There is no rest for Generation X. There’s no time to sit back and think ‘Am I happy or not?’”

For many of us, who waited to prepare things just so before we started a family, the idea of waking up to family-and-career complacency and wondering how we lost track of our youthful dreams sounds like the luxury of a more secure generation.  David Byrne’s suburban lament “How did I get here?” has become the more practical “How can I pay my rent?” John Lennon’s love-struck refrain “It’s just like starting over” is, for many of us, not a romantic lark. It’s real life. And it’s a lot less fun.

“If anything,” says Wendy Fonarow, a social anthropologist and the author of the indie-rock chronicle ”Empire of Dirt,” “our generation is characterized by not hitting a wall of midlife crisis but having crises throughout.”

Yes… life HAS been a struggle. This article identifies these issues quite clearly. Sadly, of course, there’s still some negative commentary in the piece – by no less than generational expert Neil Howe himself:

 It’s about time, [Howe] says, for Xers to acknowledge limits and step up to the plate. “These Xers spending their lives with this sardonic view, never taking anything that’s happening in public at face value, but always to find the failing, that expresses a bigger problem with X — they are always outsiders,” he says. “These boomer CEOs say that they are maturing to the extent that they should be heading into leadership roles, but they simply don’t want to accept responsibility to the bigger community.“

What Howe misses here is that we WANT to step up. We WANT responsibility. We CARE DEEPLY about the bigger community. But we keep finding there’s no room from the Boomers above and we’re being pushed from the Millennials below. We are the Prince Charles of generations.

But…on the whole, this is a good article. No matter our generation, we should read it – and then consider how we minister to the GenXers in our congregations and encourage their roles as leaders (and make room for them too.)

And to GenX specifically, I say, Sara Scribner is right: “If we’re going to make the country a better place, more suited to our values, we need to do it ourselves.”

 

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Pardon the interruption into what is obviously a really important conversation between Boomers and Millennials. Obvious, because in the last couple of weeks, there has been a flood of blog posts and articles about how Boomers need to rethink church to capture Millennials.

And yes, it’s important; every time a new generation of young adults comes up through the ranks, we wring our hands about their lack of interest and attendance. These ideas come around every 15 years or so, and with good reason. What keeps one generation interested doesn’t always attract another.

The difference this time is that the conversation is most clearly between Boomers (aged 53-70)* and their Millennial children (aged 9-30) but not involving the aging Silent generation (aged 71-88) or Generation X (aged 31-52).

And that’s a problem.

Now we don’t want to come off as complaining, but GenX is tired of being forgotten. We are tired of being disenfranchised. We are tired of being maligned. We are tired of being overshadowed.

It doesn’t help that there are so few of us – only 44 million Xers were born, compared to 78 million Boomers and 88 million Millennials.

It doesn’t help that no one could ever actually come up with a name for us – though eventually we wore the un-name “X” with pride.

It doesn’t help that the movies that defined us – The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, War Games, etc. painted us as inscrutable slackers and apathetic rule breakers.

It doesn’t help that we are a doing, not a talking generation, more likely to ‘just do it’ than discuss it.

It doesn’t help that many of us grew up as latchkey kids and learned early to fend for ourselves.

But we are adults now; in the public sphere, we invented Google and Amazon, we have made great improvements to electric cars and wind power, and we have excelled in politics, with one of our number currently serving as President of the United States. In our congregations, we’re ministers and religious educators and music professionals and lay leaders. We’re moving into positions of leadership – or trying to, anyway. We’re waiting for Boomers to let go and move into the equally important stewardship roles. But we’re worried; what if the Boomers only move on when Millennials are old enough to take over? What if we miss our chance?

Time_Magazine_Cover_Generation_XYou haven’t heard us complain. We don’t do that.

We watch, and much of the time we put our heads down and just do our own thing. We get things done – sure. We’re hard workers. We’re scrappy, innovative, inventive. A recent paper by Douglas Keene and Rita Handrich (written from a legal perspective) suggests that as we have aged and proven ourselves, attitudes have changed. But unlike Boomers and Millennials, we actually did have to work pretty hard to prove ourselves to not be grungy, cynical, apathetic losers but rather optimistic, savvy, ambitious, independent adults.

But we don’t complain out loud much.

Until now.

Until this recent rash of articles about Millennials and church, whose authors have acted as though GenX doesn’t even exist. (And don’t get me started on the Silent generation – sidelined by the GIs for not serving in World War II, the forgotten Korean War heroes, yet on the front lines of justice and civil rights – again, doing, not talking.)

GenXers are gathering in Facebook posts and email groups and Google chats, wondering how we became forgotten again. We’re worried that our Silent parents are being silenced again. We wonder if we’re really just supposed to take the Silents out for pie while the Boomers and Millennials rule the world.

Well no more.

The youngest members of our generation are in their early 30s – cresting from Young Adulthood into Adulthood, having families, starting careers, finding their feet. They need grounding. They need a strong foundation while the job market is still soft, while the economy still favors the 1%, while there is so much inequality and injustice. Older GenXers are tired of being assistants and vice-chairs; they’ve raised their kids and are ready to lead, ready to deepen spiritually, ready to try new things and innovate our governance, our social action, our stewardship, and our worship.

We are here.

There may not be many of us, but we are here. We have strength of will and an entrepreneurial spirit. We are perceptive and highly protective (sometimes too protective) of younger generations; we are equally protective of our parents, the Silents. We have leadership skills and spiritual insights and new ways to think about money and mission. We worship, we serve our communities, we build coalitions. We want to do when the spirit says do – putting our money where our mouth is, putting mission before mortgage, breathing into the depth and breadth of our faith.

We are here.

We want to be treated respectfully. We want to be valued for our abilities and knowledge. We want to be trusted.

We are here.

 

 

 

*I am using the generational divisions as defined by Strauss & Howe in their book Generations: The History of America’s Future from 1584 to 2069.

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Many years ago, I worked with an intuitive woman named Coral, who was part astrologer, part therapist, part mirror. For the years we worked together, she held a mirror up for me to see parts of myself I couldn’t see, and couldn’t trust. Part of what made Coral so valuable was her unquestioning trust in her intuition; there were times when she would say something that was right on the money that surprised her after she said it – her own mind and heart led her to speak, and instead of filtering or thinking before she spoke, she just spoke. She trusted herself enough to know she was speaking from the heart. And she moved through her days trusting her intuition, living a full and rich life.

zaphodI have always admired that about Coral, always wanted to unquestioningly trust. But instead, I have this second mind that a friend calls “Zaphod” from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – this second mind worries, watches, considers, analyzes, and fears.

Mostly fears.

Fears being rejected, fears being hurt, fears being judged, devalued, scorned. My Zaphod Brain is anxious, envious, jealous, worried, nervous, and jerky. For years, I have longed to get rid of my Zaphod Brain, but I haven’t known how. I haven’t felt strong enough, old enough, daring enough, secure enough. It has kept me from speaking my mind, from living into my fullest self, from properly navigating relationships, from feeling free.

But something has shifted.

I’m not sure what it is; maybe some of it is having swallowed the red pill and seeing endless possibilities for serving the world and loving the expansive and infinite Divine. Some of it may be realizing that as I approach 50, I really do know a thing or two, and my seminary career has deepened my knowledge. I know some of it is my recent interactions with an old friend, whom I trust completely – “pre-certified trust” he calls it – and who encourages me to put my Zaphod Brain aside.

So in the last month, I have found myself doing things that are showing me what trusting myself is like: I’ve engaged a debate from antagonism through to a burgeoning friendship; I’ve conducted a discussion group where I realized I have theological knowledge despite believing I am not a theologian; I’ve called out an ex who was doing me emotional harm and haven’t backed down. I’ve stood on the side of what’s right over what’s convenient. I’ve stood on the side of love. I am speaking truth as I see it from the pulpit without apology.

Now for many people, these may seem like no-brainers. But my Zaphod Brain has been quite nervous, second guessing, sabotaging. Or at least has wanted to. It has long convinced me that there is only so much room, and stepping out means breaking the reasonable, much-needed protective barriers.

But what I have discovered is that the space has been there for a very long time.

I’m reminded of an early episode of the animated series Futurama, where the protagonist, Fry, needs a place to stay. His new best friend, a robot named Bender, invites him to stay at his apartment; of course, it’s tiny, with just enough room for a robot to power down. But when Fry gets a plant as a housewarming gift, he longs for some sunlight. Benders says “oh, there’s a window in the closet” and opens the door to a huge room – perfect for a human, wasted on a robot.

That’s me – that room has been there all along. Space for trust – in myself, in others. I am not pushing out through the protective barriers; for the first time, I am living into all the spaciousness of my mental, emotional, and spiritual capacity.

I am still surprised at it – and I’m sure my Zaphod Brain is freaking out as I write. But I can show my Zaphod Brain the big open spaces, the huge picture windows, and the magnificent view.

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After the service Sunday, we had a small group conversation – what some congregations call a talkback but which Saratoga calls “church chat.” It was a lively discussion about the series of sermons I just wrapped up on God – over three weeks, I talked about the transcendent, the immanent, and the creating-creator aspects of the Divine as we see them in our principles and our hymns.

During the conversation, one member asked me “did you put process theology at the end on purpose?” The question was probably meant to tease out my own beliefs, which I addressed – yes, process theology clicks for me, and it feels like a broader idea of God that encompasses the transcendent and the immanent.

But I think there’s more to it than that. And I have been thinking about it a lot. There are many reasons I put this  relational, creative, dynamic God at the end of the series – and what I keep coming down to is that this image of God – this ever-expanding, ever-changing Divine energy/spirit/infinite all – doesn’t coerce us but rather entices us toward beauty and goodness. This creating-creator God embraces us in the family of humanity and shows us infinite possibility in every choice we make. This way of being in the world, with each other, as artists of time and space, as painters of beauty and truth, as sculptors of dignity and justice, is what we are each called to be at each moment.

This calling vibrates through the hallowed halls of our theological house. Our Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian-Universalist roots call us to choose, at each moment, a path toward goodness and healing, to create a community of well-being, to reach out.

This creator, creating, relational, dynamic God IS the God of Unitarian Universalism. This is the faith that calls us to action. This theology is how we make our way in the world. And we must make the choice, at every moment, to act. How will we act?

And more to the point, how will I act? What choices do I make? How am I an artist of creation, painting and weaving and sculpting my corner of the universe to make it more compassionate, beautiful, healing, just?

I put the God of process theology at the end of the series because we cannot just sit and sing and think about God. We have to do. We HAVE to take an active role. Life is not a spectator sport; we must all act in this participatory universe.

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 Listen here.

In my first semester of seminary, I took a course in systematic theology from Dr. James Cone, known as the father of black liberation theology. Dr. Cone is a force of nature – a slight black man from the backwoods of Arkansas, with incredible passion and intellect, and who at age 73 can literally run circles around even the fittest 20-somethings I know. His class lectures were a tour de force – right off the bat, he encouraged us to build our own theologies; he said that his job was to show us how theology worked and then we were to build a theology that worked for us.

The first time I heard this introduction, I was enraptured. The second time – the very next week, I thought “okay, he really wants us to get this point.” By the third week, it was clear that Dr. Cone would pretty much say the same thing for the first 20 minutes of class each week, and we all became a little less anxious to get to the lecture hall on time.

I tell you this story because I feel a little like that – for those of you who have been here for the first two parts of this sermon series, my introduction will seem a bit familiar. On the plus side, this is the last week of this series, so unlike me and Systematic Theology, you escape another 10 weeks of the same introduction.

For those of you here for the first time, the good news is that it won’t take long to get up to speed. Our working metaphor is the universal translator from Star Trek that allowed the crew of the Enterprise to understand the languages of everyone they encountered without struggling with Google Translate. The problem – not just for the Enterprise crew but for us, without universal translators – is that even when we understand the words, we don’t always understand their context; much like strangers to western culture wouldn’t understand the image produced when we say “Juliet on her balcony”, we aren’t well equipped to understand the narrative imagery other cultures use to communicate. Thus, we have to build our own universal translators – especially when it comes to talking about God.

What we know is that we struggle when we talk about religious ideas with others, because our ideas vary greatly, even when we use the same word. Now of course as Unitarian Universalists, we try to mitigate that problem with many words to substitute for “God” – spirit of life, creator, infinite all, the divine – we have such a litany of names to whom we pray it’s a wonder we ever get to the prayer itself.  But the word “God” – as laden as it is, is a kind of shorthand that lets us get into the real questions, about the nature of the Divine.

It’s this nature that we’ve been exploring – not just in general, but in how we Unitarian Universalists understand it – in our principles, in our theology, in our songs.

Two weeks ago, we looked at the transcendent God – the God that is above and separate from us, and who – for us anyway – is loving, forgiving, and comforting, the God we sing of in hymns like “immortal, invisible, God only wise.” Last week, we looked at the immanent God – the God that is in everything: the trees, the rocks, the animals, the air, the fire, and the people; this is the God we sing of in hymns like “for the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies.”

But of course, being a pluralistic faith, there are other ideas of God in our faith tradition, imbedded in our hymnals – this week, we’ll examine an idea of God that seems somewhat new but is in fact much older: this is the god of process theology.

Now one of the struggles in talking about this particular aspect of God is that it is a fairly new way of thinking about God, and the language is still morphing. We have narrative imagery, but not a concrete word or phrase to describe that imagery. When I sent the descriptions for this sermon series, I called this god the creating-creator God. But I could have just as easily called this god the relational God, the dynamic God, the responsive God, the big picture God, the persuasive God, the changing God.

Why such difficulty? Perhaps it will help to look at what we mean by process theology and where it comes from. Now the scientists and engineers among us are going to like this next bit – because process thought starts with Einstein.

More specifically, it begins with a mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead, who was fascinated with Einstein’s work, in particular, quantum physics, where we see that everything is in motion; everything – from the biggest bodies of mass to the tiniest quark, is in motion; it turns out that everything we thought was fixed, stable, and solid, is actually vibrating, changing, and shifting. Whitehead realized that this didn’t just apply to the physical world, but to the metaphysical world as well, and he developed a philosophy that proposed that events are the discrete base of reality, not matter. Essentially, the core of Whitehead’s philosophy is “if it seems static, don’t trust it.”

Soon, process philosophy found a home in theological circles; Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb realized that if everything was an ever-changing event – then surely God and all of creation was equally ever-changing. Instead of a transcendent God – above us, creating the rules of nature but not in nature; or an immanent God – present in the material world; this God is as mutable as the quark – at once a vibration and a particle. This God – like us – is always being created, is always creating, is always happening; this God – like us – is eternally becoming.

Now in Unitarian Universalist thought, our ideas of God – or the divine, the collective unconscious, the universe, the infinite – is one of benevolence. God is good and wants what’s best for us. Thus, when we apply process theology, we find a God who isn’t controlling us but is inviting us to imagine, to grow, to dream, to create – enticing us toward goodness and wholeness. This God invites us to be architects, as we see in hymn number 288, All Are Architects; please join me in singing verses 1 and 2.

I used a word a few minutes ago that I’d like to reflect on – “becoming.” What does it mean to be always becoming rather than being? This is a bit contrary to what we think of in the Eastern traditions, where nirvana is a state of being. Yet I think we can find, even in Buddhism, the idea that we are ever-changing, always striving for that nirvana.

My own understanding of becoming comes from thinking about concepts of time. There is the idea that time is linear, with a rather causal past, present, and future. But there’s also an idea that time is not linear; rather, we have all that is known, the eternal now, and then all that is unknown. At every moment of the eternal now, we have a choice; we create reality in relation to all that is known and all the possibilities of the unknown. In that eternal now, we are constantly becoming.

In process thought, time is not linear; instead, it is unfolding in many directions all at once, each new moment ripe with possibility. Each new moment carrying the known, offering an opportunity for creativity, always becoming, always in that eternal now. We are always making choices, small and large. When applied to our faith’s call to action, we know that our choices lead us to fight for economic justice, reproductive rights, immigration reform. Our choices lead us to follow this call from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

Another aspect of this God of process thinking is that God is relational – perhaps the most relational reality of all. Human choices to hurt others hurt God. And maybe that is evil – when we make choices that hurt others. Process theologian Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki suggests that “In positive choices, we blend our own interests with the interests of the wider communities within the world. In negative choices, we secure our own interests against all others. Process thinking affirms that God calls us beyond violence toward communities of well-being.”

Like the immanent God we spoke of last week, the creating-creator God calls us to action, to “come build a land where we’ll bind up the broken” and “I’ll bring you hope, when hope is hard to find…” and “ ‘til there is peace for us and everyone, we’ll take one more step…” We also hear the call in hymn number 6, Just as Long as I Have Breath. Let’s sing verse 1.

So when we embrace the idea that we are not just experiencing God in all living things, and not just experiencing God as a big eternal separate idea – but are experiencing God as co-creative force calling us into communities of well-being, we see a God that is a Living Whole of which you and I and others in the “cosmic conversation” are active parts and partners. In a “participatory universe” where all have a role in the construction of reality, God participates in all life and every act of creation. And we in turn must participate too. Einstein put it this way:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

And we see our place in the whole of the universe reflected in hymn number 22, Dear Weaver of our Lives’ Design. Let’s sing verses 1 and 2.

 

When I first read about process theology in our Wellspring spiritual deepening course a few years ago, I felt as though the Universe opened up to me with a resounding Yes. If I’d been reading in the tub, I would have been like Archimedes jumping out naked and running through the streets shouting Eureka! For the first time, I discovered there was a theology that matched what I believe: process thought jives with my Unitarian belief in human potential and reason as our way toward truth and meaning; it jives with my Universalist belief in universal goodness and love, which propels me to serve my human family. And apparently, I am not alone. UUs all over are realizing that we understand this idea of God intimately. As Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar points out in her book Fluent in Faith, process thinking affirms many of the threads in our theological heritage:

We are a part of an interconnected web of life in which each affects all. There is a sacred spark, a spiritual energy and power, in each of us. It matters what we do with our lives. The great, ultimately unnamable mystery of life is a call to goodness and love. As we choose love, decide for love, stand on the side of love, we are part of the growing God in the universe. This is process theology made real.

This creating-creator God affirms our long-held belief in the goodness and progress of humanity; we find this in James Freeman Clarke’s affirmation of the “the progress of humankind onward and upward forever.” In the early 20th century, John Dietrich, considered the father of religious humanism, spoke of a ‘cosmic theism, which “interprets God as the indwelling power in the universe rather than an individual, separate power.”

No wonder this God – this creating-creator, relational, dynamic, responsive, big picture, changing, becoming God – is so familiar. And our hymnal shows it; the Center for Process Studies did an extensive review of a variety of hymnals – ours, along with hymnals from the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ – and named 349 out of 414 hymns as representing this creating-creator God – that’s 85%. And that’s not even the teal hymnal, which further reflects this god of process thought.

This God…who is an artist and reminds us, as Arthur Graham puts it, that “Each of us is an artist whose task it is to shape life into some semblance of the pattern we dream about. The molding is not of self alone, but of shared tomorrows and times we shall never see.”

Yes, this is most assuredly a god I believe in – to me, this God encompasses the transcendent and the immanent and brings us in deep relation to the wide universe. This is the God who reminds me that everything evolves – not just life forms but thought and ethics and understanding and relationships. This is the God who reminds me that truth and revelation are not static but are forever unfolding. This is the God who reminds me to be open to the eternal now, to be open to becoming. This is the God who persuades me gently with love and compassion and the promise of a new day. This is the God who accompanies me, as God accompanies all of creation, on this journey. This is the God that is at the heart of our universal translators; this is the Unitarian Universalist narrative image for God.

This is the God I pray to when I sing “our world is one world – what touches one affects us all” and when I sing “we are blessed with love and amazing grace, when our heart is in a holy place” and when I sing “when we live in deep assurance of the flame that burns within, then our promise finds fulfillment and our future can begin…” and when I sing “woyaya…woyaya…”

 

We live in a participatory universe. We do not leave things up to a remote God….we act with the divine energy…we too create out of mystery….we share in the opportunity and responsibility of creating reality. We are all artists…creators of what is, and what is becoming.

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 Listen here.

Last week, we started cobbling together our own universal translators. Unlike the Star Trek universe that Gene Roddenberry created, we aren’t equipped to automatically understand the many different languages of many cultures, and even if we were, we wouldn’t always know what people really meant. What we know is that real communication relies not just on vocabulary and syntax, but also on the metaphors and idioms we use. We rely more heavily on narrative imagery than we realize – the example I used last week was that of Juliet on her balcony; to those of us immersed in western culture, we understand this phrase to indicate young romantic (and maybe doomed) love. And every culture – whether a local culture or a corporate culture or a religious culture – uses different and sometimes confusing narrative imagery to communicate. Thus, we have to build our own universal translators – especially when it comes to talking about God.

What we know is that we struggle when we talk about religious ideas with others, because our ideas vary greatly, even when we use the same word. Now of course as Unitarian Universalists, we try to mitigate that problem, with many words to substitute for “God” – spirit of life, creator, infinite all, the divine – we have such a litany of names to whom we pray it’s a wonder we ever get to the prayer itself. But the word “God” – as laden as it is, is a kind of shorthand that lets us get into the real questions, about the nature of the Divine.

It’s this nature that we’ve been exploring, not just in general, but in how we Unitarian Universalists understand it; last week, we looked at the transcendent God – the God that is above and separate from us, and who – for UUs anyway – is loving, forgiving, and comforting. I am sure it amazed some people that this God even exists in our hymnal, but we found many songs and readings expressing this very idea of God.

But of course, being a pluralistic faith, this isn’t the ONLY idea of God we find in our hymnal – so this week, let’s look at a different idea, one that may seem a bit more familiar to many of you – particularly those who are big fans of Emerson. This is the immanent God.

The immanent god is the divine presence seen in the material world – the god that permeates the mundane. It is also the God that inhabits the material in visceral ways. It is the god we saw in the verses we sang this week in Down the Ages – “the present God-head own where creation’s laws are known.” It is the God that sometimes makes the choice to come to church difficult, as nature beckons for its own communion.

The spiritual practices of the Hindus perhaps most explicitly explain this narrative image of God; they begin with the concept of sacred perception, where the devotee enters into a state where they can truly receive the image of the deity as given by the deity.

It is a visceral, real, tangible experience. For Hindus, the deity isn’t just represented in the statue or image; the deity is in the statue or image. The Divine is immanent, present, touchable, seeable, knowable. And this isn’t a one-way experience; the deity is present with, knows, communicates, and touches the devotee as well. The devotee begins by bathing, dressing, adoring, and anointing the statue; once properly clothed and honored, the deity is fully present, and allowed to be seen by others. And… they understand the deity to be fully present and fully whole everywhere at once.

The Hindu understanding of the immanent God was especially attractive to the early Transcendentalists; encountering Hindu texts meant that for the first time, Americans were exposed to a view of the divine that wasn’t transcendent; that is, separate and above us. Henry David Thoreau was one of the earliest American readers of the Bhagavad Gita, and the ideas of the immanent Divine spoke deeply to Thoreau, as well as other transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. They began to see the same fully present and fully whole divine presence in nature. The idea that God might be in the trees and rocks and the very water they sat by was remarkable and expansive in a time when Unitarian theologians sought to limit God to being, as William Ellery Channing described, the creator of nature, not within it.

We don’t see much of the immanent God in the Abrahamic traditions; occasionally, the immanent God appears in the rocks, or in the air, or in a burning bush. We do, however, see it in the words of the mystics. Let us look at responsive reading 607, by the Islamic mystic Hafiz.

By and large, the immanent God is not represented in Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. Thus, it was quite a remarkable shift for Unitarians in the 19th century to embrace the immanent God in nature; to us in the 21st century, it feels, well, natural. We resonate with the words William Wordsworth uses to describe God in his poem “Tintern Abbey”:

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

And we find this immanent God in nature quite vibrantly in hymns such as number 25, God of Earth. Let’s turn to this and sing verses 1 and 2.

I have encountered this god several times – perhaps the most memorable was during a trip to England about a decade ago. A friend and I went to Avebury, the less commercial and more interactive version of Stonehenge. We began at a collection of stones at the center of the village, the center of the concentric circles of monoliths placed there by a long-ago people. And we touched the stones; they were warm, and they gave off an almost imperceptible vibration. We went to the next stone…and the next…and touched every stone in the inner circle. Something clicked for us, that we needed to commune as our ancestors might have. Soon, we were going over streams, through corn fields, and over rocky cowpaths to touch every stone in Avebury… because for reasons we could not explain, we had to connect. We knew we weren’t just connecting to the stones themselves – although we imagined the many stories they could tell of the many events through the many millennia they’d born witness to. We were connecting to the people who first set the monoliths into these wide circles… and to both the earth that they rested on and the earthiness of each stone itself. At the end, I felt as one with the world as I have ever felt.

It was a remarkable day; it is a now part of my universal translator that helps me better understand those who would rather hike to the top of a mountain than read in an air conditioned coffee shop. And it helps when we are confronted with less-than-hospitable attitudes toward the earth. We need to add to our universal translators the note that some believe we are simply visitors on this planet, and stewardship of the earth isn’t part of our call. But as eco-theologian Sallie MacFague points out, we are earthlings; we belong to the earth. Because Unitarian Universalists understand the idea of an immanent God who inhabits the very earth itself, we see ourselves as part of – not separate from – the interconnected web. And we sing about it quite emphatically in hymn 317, We Are Not Our Own. Let’s sing the first verse.

We find this connection to the earth and this immanent God in some of our favorite hymns: “for the earth forever turning” and “the wide universe is the ocean I travel, and the earth is my blue boat home.” Even more, we find that the immanent God leads us to broader connections. In her new book Fluent in Faith, UU minister Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar suggests that the immanence of God in nature actually directs us to “move beyond material realities to the meaning of life and love, to the truth that there is more beauty and care in this world than we can comprehend or capture in our scientific explorations.”

Thoreau got it when he realized that ice cut from Walden Pond was sent to India and thus likely mingled into the Ganges, which is a holy river for Hindus. As he wrote in Walden,

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well … In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic]… I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

It is this connection that we see in Emerson’s words: “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.” Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” is beautifully interpreted in Jim Scott’s song “The Oneness of Everything” – number 1052 in the teal hymnal. If you can, sing along with me on the first verse.

But the call of the immanent God is not just one of appreciation. The call of the immanent God is one of action. Yes, we can commune with nature and we can connect with one another, but, as UU minister Kathy Huff notes, “being part of a conscious universe means that each moment profoundly matters; everything I do, say, think, or feel relates to everything else and may have consequence and meaning beyond my comprehension.” The immanent God calls us to protect our mountaintops from strip mining, to protect wildlife endangered by climate change, to stand for any person whose inherent worth and dignity is compromised. The immanent God expands on Frederick Buechner’s comment that “there can be no peace for me unless there is peace for you also;” this expands beyond humanity, to all who inhabit the earth and the very earth itself.

As I said last week, I find myself at times thinking many different things about God, sometimes all at the same time. And yes, the immanent God is one in whom I believe. I turn to the immanent God when I am too much in my head and need grounding. I turn to the immanent God when I lose faith in humanity’s goodness. It is the immanent God who compels me to a life of compassionate service. This is the God to whom I pray “we would be one, as now we join in singing” and to whom I pray “for the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies” and to whom I pray “listen more often to things than to beings…tis the ancestor’s breath, when the fire’s voice is heard…tis the ancestor’s breath in the voice of the waters…. aaahh.”

The immanent God is present – here, now, among us and in us and with us. It is the divine in you, connecting to the divine in me, which we honor in this simple gesture: Namaste.

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 Listen here.

Many things would be a lot easier if we lived in the Star Trek universe.

You see, in the Star Trek universe, it is important to be able to communicate with sentient beings from other planets and galaxies – in English, of course – and thus, Gene Roddenberry created a universe where everyone is implanted with a Universal Translator. Rarely does anyone – not Kirk, Picard, or Janeway – encounter another culture without being able to speak their language.

But even so, in the Star Trek universe, there are communication problems – not with the words themselves, but with how those words are used. In my favorite episode, “Darmok,” the Enterprise encounters the Tamarians, whose words are intelligible but whose meaning is baffling. Sentences like “Darmok and Jilad, across the ocean” and “Mirab, his sails unfurled” make up the entirety of their discourse. As you can imagine, the crew is baffled; and Captain Picard is even more so when he is stranded on a planet with their leader. But eventually, they come to realize that the Tamarians speak exclusively in narrative imagery. Their meaning is deeply enmeshed in their narrative; as the crew of the Enterprise discover, it is analogous to our saying something like “Juliet on her balcony” – it portrays an image of youthful romance, but if you don’t know the Shakespearean play or its use in our Western culture, you would not understand.

We run into the same problems when we talk about religion – particularly about God. How handy it would be to have a universal translator, so we could move from church to church, from theologian to theologian, from congregant to congregant, from song to song – and know exactly what the narrative imagery behind the word “God” really is for them.

Well, sadly, despite many great strides in science and technology that are bringing us closer each day to that Star Trek Universe, we don’t have universal translators yet, so we have to rely on more primitive means of understanding for some of these big ideas – like this sermon series, which I feel blessed to be able to share with you.

Now some of you may already be antsy; you may feel, like Murray Penney did at the end of a service we did many years ago about the Ten Commandments, that there was just too much God talk. Yes. I will be using the word “God” a lot over the next three weeks. But here’s the first piece for your universal translator: when people like me talk about God in Unitarian Universalist circles, we are using the word as shorthand for a particular aspect of belief; you may want to translate that word into your own language: creator, spirit of life, the divine, holy one, infinite, the collective unconscious… whatever makes sense to you. But I will use the word “God’ as we look at some of the aspects – the narrative imagery, if you will – of the Divine.

And it’s important, what we’re about to do. Having this universal translator doesn’t just connect us to other religious cultures – like Muslims, pagans, Hindus, and Methodists; it connects us to the people sitting next to us, with their own beliefs about the Divine; it connects us to our own sometimes contradictory ideas about God; and it connects us to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. It allows us, as Rebecca Parker says, “to enter a theological house that has already been built – a theology of a heritage, of a tradition, of a community.” And because that house contains a plurality of beliefs, we can’t necessarily know even from one hymn to the next exactly what image of God we’re singing about.

But over the next three weeks, we’ll be figuring out exactly that – what the songs and readings in our hymnals say about the ideas Unitarian Universalists have about God.

You’ll note that we’ve put a hymnal on every chair – we’ll be flipping around, looking at readings and singing some verses of songs. This is one instance where looking at the hymnal during the sermon will not be frowned upon.

So let’s begin. We’ve already sung a few verses of Down the Ages We Have Trod – and learned that some think God is “a being throned above, ruling over us in love.” This is what we would call transcendent – the aspect of God’s nature and power which is wholly independent of (and removed from) the material universe. This is an all-powerful, all-knowing, always-present God, whom some turn to for something greater than themselves. We see the transcendent God in Islam – a single and absolute truth that transcends the world; a unique and indivisible being who is independent of the entire creation. We see the transcendent God in Hinduism: “Brahman is supreme; he is self-luminous, he is beyond all thought.” We see the transcendent God in Judaism and Christianity – a parent figure who exists outside the realm of natural occurrence. And it is this aspect that Unitarians and Universalists inherited from our Protestant forbearers, including Martin Luther himself.

We find Luther’s most famous hymn in our hymnal – number 200, A Mighty Fortress. Let’s look at the first verse – please sing along with me, or just listen.

 

“On earth is not an equal.” We won’t find the transcendent God in the trees and the rocks – this is most assuredly a God above. It is an image of God that is steadfast, unchanging – an image that says no matter what happens here on earth, there’s always a safe haven in this God that is watching over us, protecting us, mightier than us.

Now it might seem that modern Unitarian Universalists wouldn’t be very into that God – yet, given the frequency of references to the transcendent God in our hymnal, we clearly still value this idea within our faith tradition. It is certainly in our history; notable 19th century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing believed that God was first and foremost beyond humanity and beyond nature. As he said in his famous “Baltimore Sermon”:

We believe, that in no being is the sense of right so strong, so omnipotent, as in God. We believe that his almighty power is entirely submitted to his perceptions of rectitude; and this is the ground of our piety. It is not because he is our Creator merely, but because he created us for good and holy purposes; it is not because his will is irresistible, but because his will is the perfection of virtue, that we pay him allegiance.

Channing also forwarded the popular notion that God is not the natural laws that permeate the natural world. God created the universe and nature, and the laws of nature are subordinate to God. In Channing’s thinking, it is perfectly natural to say that God can suspend the laws of nature without being contradictory. Indeed, for early Unitarians, miracles definitely happened.

Now for some UUs today, this is still true; it is certainly true in other Christian denominations, so it’s important for our universal translators to remember that miracles are, for many, their proof that God exists, and must assuredly be separate from us. Now to them, this is a given – much like Juliet on her balcony means young romantic love. It is their narrative imagery – a God who is beyond humanity and nature – thus, much of the conflict raised by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, Unitarians who talked about an immanent God, which we’ll discuss next week. This transcendent God isn’t one with us but is simply One, above us. This is the God we see reflected in Immortal Invisible. Flip to 273 and sing verses 1 and 2 with me.

 

Now you may notice at the bottom of the page that this hymn is based on a biblical verse – 1 Timothy 1:17. That’s not surprising; first, our Unitarian and Universalist roots are Christian, so we can’t long avoid Biblical references when looking at our faith’s heritage. But beyond that, there is a lot of transcendence in the Bible; you will find this transcendent God throughout the Abrahamic religions – no more poetically than in the Psalms. Let’s join Beth in responsive reading 535, which is based on Psalm 42.

 

We see in this reading – and in perhaps the most famous biblical passage of all, Psalm 23, which begins “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” – a transcendent God who is a comforter. It is this aspect of God – the comforter, the parent figure who takes care of us and makes things better – who is the God many people turn to in times of pain and sorrow. We see the comfort the transcendent God brings in hymns like “Nearer My God to Thee, nearer to thee” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole” – these and more, found in our hymnals.

The transcendent God we find here is loving; and this is a hallmark of Unitarian and Universalist thought. We have waged a battle against the Calvinists about this for centuries: a key theme of Channing’s Baltimore sermon makes this point:

We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.

We believe that God is infinitely good, kind, benevolent, in the proper sense of these words; good in disposition, as well as in act; good, not to a few, but to all; good to every individual, as well as to the general system.

Yes, there are many who believe that this transcendent God is a vengeful God – and if you read the bulk of the Old Testament, you might think that’s all this transcendent God is; after all, what kind of God gets itchy and floods everyone out but some guy and his pets? What kind of God sends a faithful man out to sacrifice his kid? What kind of God takes everything away from a guy just to prove his faithfulness? This is a mean, spiteful, angry, vengeful God – NOT the God of any aspect of Unitarian Universalism, but … one that exists in the world. Again, if I might add a bit to your universal translator, it’s helpful to remember that when some speak to you of God, they are actually afraid of what God will do if they behave badly. But because we see the transcendent God as a loving figure, we have an opportunity to offer a different view of God above, one that may offer comfort, forgiveness, and healing. This is the God of Hymn 10, Immortal Love. Let’s sing verses 1 and 2.

 

Now I realize I’ve been pretty cagey with my language, talking in generalities about Unitarian Universalist perspectives on transcendence while keeping my personal perspective out of it. But of course, I have a perspective. The truth is there are times when this transcendent God is the God in whom I believe. This is the God I turn to when I need comfort. This is the God who broke the silence when I refused to reach out. This is the God to whom I pray this song: “Open mine eyes that I may see / Glimpses of truth thou has for me / Open mine eyes, illumine me / Spirit Divine.” And when I pray this song: “Spirit of life / come unto me / Sing in my heart / all the stirrings of compassion.”

I believe this is the God who shines down when “we are marching in the light of God.” I believe this is the God who commands us to “do when the spirit says do.” Yes, I believe many different things about God – sometimes all at the same time. But this transcendent God, who is above us, who loves us unconditionally, who welcomes us into harmony, who, like the universe itself, is greater and bigger than we can possibly imagine – this particular narrative image of God – is part of my universal translator, offering me hope and comfort – and allowing me to offer others the greatest gift of all: Universal, unconditional love.

 

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I am pretty sure I was not the only person headed for a pulpit this morning who let out an extra moan after hearing the verdict in the Zimmerman trial.

In the midst of weeping for the Martin family, for our young black men, and the failed justice system…and after a while weeping also for women, for immigrants, for students, for the poor, for the marginalized… somewhere in the midst of my uncontrollable weeping, I let out a moan, knowing I had a sermon that felt like half a loaf compared to the shock, anger, sorrow, and fear we were all facing. How could I stand up and talk about a loving, father-mother god, when God was not in heaven and all was wrong with the world? How could I present this hopeful, encouraging service when we were faced with such pain?

That is when Pat Humphrey’s song came to mind (song begins at 1:53)…

I began to sing to myself and slowly began to stop crying. I knew I could not let this travesty of justice go unmentioned, but I also knew I could not write an entirely new sermon at midnight on Saturday.

But I could do something: I wrote a new call to worship for this morning – one that acknowledges our pain, our frustration, and our need to come together for comfort, for peace, for space, for nourishment. I invited us all to not get stuck, but to keep on moving forward. And we sang. And then we moved on to the rest of the service, talking about the loving, transcendent God that is found in Unitarian Universalism.

Of the many lessons I have learned since entering seminary, the one that’s been most remarkable and meaningful is the lesson about being present to the present moment of a congregation. You can have everything perfectly planned, but if they are hurting, or if there is strife, or if something tragic has happened, you have to be present to that pain and address it in a way that comforts and encourages. People want space for their pain to be acknowledged – and they want something to both nourish and distract them for a bit. We can’t let our inner preacher silence our inner pastor.

Nor can we let our own pains get in the way. Last month, in the midst of a bizarre crisis that hit my village and my family, I was slated to preach on the virtues of theism and humanism; the week, however, was difficult, and in my pain, all I wanted to say was “God’s dead and people suck.” Of course, I didn’t… I found a path through my pain to provide a message that was both authentic to the situation I found myself in and was nourishing to the congregation I spoke to. I had to keep on moving forward.

And that’s the lesson. We can pause and honor our pain. We can weep out of anger, fear, frustration. We can feel paralyzed by injustice. And we can pause with others who feel as we do. But then we have to take that next step. We cannot, CANNOT let injustice and hate win. We have to keep on moving forward.

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Whenever I encounter an article, photo album, site, or video I don’t have time or ability to view at the moment, I email the link to myself and shove them into a folder called “internet for later.” I always intend to go to the folder as soon as I can to see what I saved that day or week…but somehow it simply became a dumping ground.  Yesterday, I found myself with some time, so I decided to clean out the folder. And I found nearly 200 emails to myself. Some of them had articles that I had actually read, some had items I still need to hang on to, some had links that for the life of me I can’t figure out why I saved.

One of the links – found very recently – is to a site called Stuff Christian Culture Likes. The blogger, a former evangelical preacher’s kid, outlines in some great detail parts of this particular flavor of Christian culture. Some of it’s kinda fun, from the outside, to laugh at (like The Ungame). But much of what Stephanie Drury says points to the very thing Unitarian Universalists can’t abide: the need for certainty.

It hit me while reading Stephanie’s post on “Things that Edify“:

Edification is mentioned several times in the New Testament, basically saying we should do stuff that edifies ourselves and each other. It’s a lovely concept and Christians want to take it seriously. But the Bible doesn’t give a whole lot of specifics as to what is edifying and what isn’t. Christian culture wants to know exactly what that means, so they have filled in the blanks.

Over and over again, whether talking about social issues, church organizations, or family, she points to the need for certainty. They fill in the blanks so there is no unsurety, and all subsequent issues get measured against that created doctrine. Whether it’s blasphemy, homosexuality, money, or movies, there is such a need for certainty that certainty often overtakes reason.

And that is why we as UUs often have such a hard time. We value reason – some suggest it is our deity – but at the very least, we cherish our doubt, honor our ability to see many points of view, celebrate our plurality and variety, both in matters spiritual and cultural (although we’re more dogmatic than we’d like to admit in regards to our culture – but that’s a topic for another day). The point is, we are so strongly attuned to questioning, reasoning, debating, that we don’t know how to handle certainty – particularly when it goes against all reason.

I bring this up, because it is a failing on our part to not understand this mindset.

We know, as Kevin Smith wrote in his film Dogma, “you can change an idea; changing a belief is trickier” but we have a hard time recognizing that what we think are ideas are beliefs for others. We are so tied into following ideas to a logical conclusion, we can’t understand how people simply take things on faith. We dwell so easily in a sea of uncertainty, we can’t understand how some people drown in it.

In her presentation at General Assembly a few weeks ago, Ellen Cooper-Davis encouraged us to learn more about the cultures we find ourselves in, and learn how to speak to others about our own faith in the context of their faith. In a keynote at a St. Lawrence District Assembly a number of years ago, Fred Helio Garcia reminded us that we must be literate in both ideas and language – “words matter,” he said, because “those who control the words control the world.”

We must get better at approaching those who are swimming in the pool of certainty, not by chastising their lack of logic, but by showing them love beyond the pool – showing them the beautiful shores, glistening with hope and openness, showing them the gentle waves of compassion, showing them the rich waters of love and faith. We can’t do it by shoving them off the pier. We have to do it by meeting them where they are.

We can combat the sin of certainty and open minds and hearts to the awesome, expansive, inclusive, healing love that some call God, when we know what we’re saying and how it is perceived. Let us be loving and gentle to those whose certainties we are shaking.

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As I completed the manuscript for my sermon entitled “God and Democracy” I realized that I write and speak more passionately as a Universalist than as a Unitarian. While my Unitarianism compels thought, my Universalism compels action.

I also know that my recent exposure to the Red Pill Brethren, as well as both Michael Tino’s Murray Lecture and Beth Ellen Cooper’s compelling presentation (“Occupy Your Faith”) further engaged my Universalism – that part of me that knows my power comes from my faith, is grounded in justice and compassion, that we are called to serve the family of humanity, to stand of the side of love, to make sure the smallest voice is heard, to do, to speak up, to act.

And so I delivered a sermon that was perhaps the most passionate sermon I’ve delivered, despite my feeling like death on a cracker. I demanded action of the congregation, but also of myself. As bad as I feel, I know I too have to be an active, willing participant in the lives around me. Who am I if I ask a congregation to serve the needs of those next door if I am unwilling to do it myself? Who am I to talk about mission and servant evangelism and the call of democracy as a call of faithful action if I am not going to act as well?

So my passion – my deep faith in a loving, benevolent God who, as Clarence Skinner remarks, “loves the universe, who hungers for fellowship, who is in and of and for the whole of life” – compels me to action, to be intimately and actively engaged with this amazing family of humanity.

Here we go. Are you ready? Am I ready?