READINGS

From "In the Beauty of the Lilies" by John Updike

The Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot felt the last particles of faith leave him. The sensation was distinct – a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. . . . He was standing, at the moment of the ruinous pang, on the first floor of the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, wondering if in view of the heat he might remove his black serge jacket, since no visitor was scheduled to call until dinnertime, when the Church Building Requirements Committee would arrive to torment him with its ambitions. The image of the chair's broad assertive face . . . slipped in Clarence's mind to the similarly pugnacious and bald-crowned visage of Robert Ingersoll, the famous atheist whose Some Mistakes of Moses the minister had been reading in order to refute it for a perturbed parishioner; from this perceived similarity his thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that Ingersoll was quite right: the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be.

From a sermon, "If Not God, What?" by the Rev. Kendyl Gibbons

What we are hungry for is not God. "God" is only a name we give to one way of trying to describe the experience that comes when we are someone, simply, mysteriously filled; when we get past our distractions and illusions and pride, to the reality upon which existence itself is founded. Something about that reality is a needless, gracious gift; the eternal surprise that there is anything instead of nothing, and that the anything includes us and our awareness.

Something about it makes us understand that we are painfully finite; that our time is limited, our individual abilities and understandings are limited, that we are parts and participants in a project that endures beyond us and is greater than ourselves. And something about that reality calls us, allures us, demands of us that we grow into all the wisdom and justice and love of which we are capable, because that is the fulfillment of the deepest reality of what we are.

SERMON:

In his novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," John Updike depicts the Reverend Wilmot's loss of faith as a kind of hollowing out of his life. As the promise of God the creator ebbs away, so does much of his joy. As the theological puzzles, the habitual mental contortions that occupied so much of his working life evaporate like so much morning mist, Wilmot feels an immense strain lifted. And yet, Updike writes, "the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. . . . There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness."

To many a believer, such is the fate that awaits anyone who would deny God's existence: a dull, empty, disenchanted life, devoid of meaning or hope, a pointless plodding toward nothing greater than personal extinction, or worse, a fiery fate for eternity. It is a grim picture that has been elaborated on time and again from many a pulpit, to the point that many who identify themselves as atheists often find themselves pitied, shunned, or distrusted. Indeed, for many the very title of this service is nonsensical. For most believers, and I'll wager many atheists as well, to speak of atheism as a religious path is a contradiction in terms.

Like John Updike's Rev. Wilmot, most of those who abandon or steer clear of a belief in God, abandon or steer clear of religion entirely. And that's fine. My point today is not to say that atheism necessarily is a religious path, but that it can be: that one can develop a path of meaning within community that is satisfying, provides a grounding for ethical action and satisfies the human need for depth and connection without reference to God or any supernatural being.

This is the second in a series of sermons I'm offering this fall exploring different theological paths. In October I explored the way with God, or theism as a religious path, and in December we'll investigate the way in the company of mystery, or mysticism as a religious path. I want to emphasize as I did in October that my point is not to advocate for one particular path, or ask you to choose among them, but to invite you into a discussion.

In our lives, each of us develops a religious perspective that arises out of our upbringing and our responses to the world. Over time that perspective shifts and grows as we grow, sometimes deepening, sometimes undergoing a dramatic change. It is a tenet of our tradition that none of these perspectives offers a final answer, none embodies absolute truth. Each is a partial answer to the quandaries that we confront in our lives, to our need for hope and meaning.

We also believe that each of us benefits from open dialogue, from challenging each other and being challenged in a spirit of love. And so, throughout this series, let me invite you to leave yourselves open to being stretched, to listen with sympathy and respect, so that we might deepen our understanding of each other and also model the kind of wider acceptance and interchange so needed in our fractured world.

Rev. Wilmot notwithstanding, the experience of most atheists is not one of despair. Instead, for most the notion of God is just not part of the equation in how they organize their world.

As it is constructed, the word "atheist" suggests an opposition to the belief in God. Strictly speaking, it means the denial of the existence of God. And, certainly there are angry atheists who see it as their purpose to refute or belittle the concept of God, but for most this active opposition is not part of their belief system. They are simply satisfied to accept the world of their experience – the birds, the bees, the oceans, the stars – as all there is. Supernatural beings or forces are not something they experience, and they don't play into it.

The Rev. Khoren Arisian, long-time minister of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, tells of experiencing a hurricane when he was a boy. His mother, he said, was awestruck by what she saw as the fury of the Lord and sought to protect him, but Arisian said it never occurred to him to be afraid. He was fascinated and excited by all the chaos of which Nature was capable, and he traced his own naturalistic worldview to that experience.

Throughout his youth, he said, God was a concept that he never found of much use. In later years as he himself was drawn to the study of religion, Arisian said he came to the conclusion that the image related in the Bible's Book of Genesis had the order reversed. It was not so much that humans were made in the image of God, but that we had envisioned a God in the image of humans. He saw God as a concept constructed to serve humans' needs and offer them a favored place in the universe.

Then, as he continued his religious studies he learned that for many that quaint, homespun image of the deity had faded in favor of an image of God as immanent in the world, a creative process or unknowable ground of creation. This was a very different concept. Indeed, he noted, in advocating such a view, the 20^th century theologian Paul Tillich had dismissed all conventional concepts of God as idolatrous: false images that detract from God's true nature. Yet, such a move, Arisian said, raises questions about what in the end we understand God to be, and certainly what role he may have in people's everyday lives.

In the end, Arisian said, he decided that "for me the continuous use of that word (God) to represent humanity's vast and varied spiritual questing is, though understandable, nonetheless confusing and gratuitous. Nothing is gained, and I believe much is lost, by the emotional insistence that God and religious be coterminous. The word becomes simply more misleading as history goes on."

Many atheists hold a similar perspective: for them, the concept of God doesn't add anything. It merely confuses the picture. Unlike Rev. Wilmot, they do not view the world as empty or devoid of meaning because there is no God in it. The world as it is, is enough. All the meaning there is as well as beauty and wonder can be found there.

That's all well and good, the theist responds, but what guides you to act ethically, and how do you deal with death? That first question was once put to a friend of mine this way: If you don't believe in God, why are you good?

The premise behind that question is that without a rule-maker dictating what is right and wrong or the threat of cosmic punishment we have no reason to act ethically. Indeed, in the mind of many a believer, atheism is the first step on a road to a libertine lifestyle. And yet, if history is evidence of anything, it is that a belief in God is no sure ticket to ethical behavior. The litany of horrors perpetrated in the name of faith ought to be enough to give pause to anyone insisting on such a thing. As the Rev. Donald Jacobsen once wrote, "There is a belief in God that says that we should beat our swords into plowshares, and a belief in God that says we should praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. There is a belief in God that commands us to love justice and mercy, and there is a belief in God which sanctifies almost every injustice and oppression."

My experience is that a more reliable indication of moral behavior than an avowed theological belief is one's ability, as evidenced in one's actions, to see beyond the end of one's nose, the recognition that each of us owes a duty to others.

Several years ago our members Clark and Anna Olsen, the former Trustee to the UUA from the Thomas Jefferson District, gave me a lovely calligraphy that you will find hanging in my study that illustrates the fundamental precept underlying ethical action that reaches across all cultures. In the West we know it as the Golden Rule, but you will find similar language in the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and more: treat others as you would be treated.

We sometimes understand this as a principle of reciprocity: be nice to me and I'll be nice to you. But it also suggests something more. Implied in the Golden Rule is the understanding that each of us has value, not because of who we are, or what we do. Our value is inherent, not contingent. We are not required to justify our existence. The fact of our humanity is claim enough for a duty owed to us by other humans.

Now, why should this be? The theist points to the belief that we are all God's children. God chose to create each of us, to give us life. Who are we to argue whether we have value? God has already decided that question.

The atheist, though, has no independent authority to point to, no source that somehow confers value, and is left, instead, with the simple fact of existence itself. I cannot know why or how I came to be. I am here. That is enough. I have a place in the vast, interwoven web of existence, and that is a source of value in and of itself. The same may be said of my fellows and the many beings with whom we share this time on Earth. Down to the chemistry of our DNA we share a heritage and a destiny. We are bound up with one another, and that association, that embrace of mortality, gives us all a natural affinity, and that affinity, whether we call it divine or arising from our own evolved natures, it is root of all ethical action. We may give it many names, but in the end all names are reduced to one: love. Love is not just passion; it is the source of hope, of courage. It is that which gives life meaning and purpose.

We don't always look at things that way. We take things for granted, sometimes mistake ourselves as having greater importance than others or consider that our needs should trump theirs. This is a mistake that theists, atheists, and any other stripe of believer makes. The corrective, however we frame it, is to bring us back to that first principle: the recognition that the interests of others bear on us; we have a duty larger than just to ourselves.

OK, the theist says, now tell me about death. If there is no God to receive you in loving arms, what happens? In the 1960s, the folk singer Pete Seeger complained that he was often asked to sing at funerals but always was dissatisfied at not being able to find exactly the right song to express what he called "the situation," his estimation of what we're talking about when we talk about death. And so he wrote his own, a funeral song he entitled, "To My Old Brown Earth," and these are the words:

To my old brown earth and to my old blue sky, I'll now give these last few molecules of I. And you who sing and you who stand nearby, I do charge you not to cry. Guard well our human chain. Watch well you keep it strong as long as sun will shine. And this our home keep pure and sweet and green, for now I'm yours and you are also mine.

I've thought a lot about the nonbeliever's reply to death in recent weeks as my family has experienced the death of my father, Jack, and of Debbie's mother, Elizabeth. Both would qualify as some stripe of nonbeliever. My father's views, which he mostly kept to himself, were a kind of religious naturalism. In his eulogy of my father yesterday in Florida, his best friend described my father's beliefs with words of Albert Einstein to the effect that the world as it is holds wonder enough for us all. Over the years, Jack would listen to the theological debates of the ministers in his family, but it was not where his true interest lay. For that you would have to join him in the garden.

Debbie's mother was always clear about her beliefs. Though raised Roman Catholic, she was from early adulthood an adamant atheist, with no use for God and no use for religion. She was aware of how involved Debbie and I were in Unitarian Universalist churches, and while she was tolerant of what we told her, they certainly held no interest for her.

You can imagine, though, that when I left journalism, a field she admired, for seminary, Elizabeth was thunderstruck. What on earth had come over me? We had some good discussions in the ensuing years, and I think reached something of an understanding. Next week I will be honored to officiate at her memorial service in Princeton, New Jersey.

Elizabeth and Jack both came to the ends of their lives bravely, concerned less about what would follow than that they end their lives in the company of those who cared for them. And it was that which those of us who attended them paid heed to.

I thought Debbie captured the spirit of those times best with a prayer that she said she came to her mind as she was out walking one day in Princeton while hospice volunteers were seeing to her mother. She was trying to think of how she could best be of help in her mother's last days. The words that came to her, which she agreed to let me share with you, were these: May love guide my hands; may love guide my words; may love guide my actions.

And so it did. Love guided us and our families throughout those difficult days, despite our mourning and grief, and guides us still. And whether it was of God or a deep source of caring within each of us, it was enough; whether it led them to their ends, to the fires and ashes of their last molecules that soon will join the good brown earth or passage to something else, it was enough.

The end, after all, awaits us all, and whatever our faith, uncertainty must surround that moment. Atheist or theist or however we frame the state of things, we rue the day. But to meet that moment held in some way in the embrace of love offers comfort one can be sure of.

I reflect on the words we heard earlier of Kendyl Gibbons, who is the minister, by the way, who succeeded Khoren Arisian at the Minneapolis church, about that hunger we all experience, that existential yearning for meaning, for belonging in this all-too-brief flicker of life to which each of us is treated.

There are moments, she said, when each of us comes to feel "somehow, simply, mysteriously filled; when we get past our distractions and illusions and pride, to the reality upon which existence is founded." We use different words to speak of those moments, those blessed glimpses of clarity that, in Gibbons' words, "call us, allure us, demand of us that we grow into all the wisdom and justice and love of which we are capable."

God, mystery, the best of our humanity: however we frame it, it is the assurance that finite as we are, we are also part of something great, that our existence is a precious gift: a gift that fills us and holds us and affirms us. And that's enough.

So be it.

Closing circle of hands:

(Holding hands or link arms as you read the closing words together)

May the Love which overcomes all differences,
which heals all wounds,
which puts to flight all fears,
which reconciles all who are separated,
be in us and among us now and always.