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1 WHY GOD IS NOT ONE A SERMON BY REV. WAYNE B. ARNASON WEST SHORE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH – NOVEMBER 3, 2013 READING by Rabbi Rami Shapiro Let me be blunt: Interfaith as most of us practice it is a postmodern liberal democratic heresy, no more representative of the world’s religions as they are actually lived, taught, and believed by the vast majority of their adherents than pro wrestling is representative of Olympic wrestling. To which I say – Amen! Let’s be clear on two essential points. First, the peoples of the world do not believe in the same God or affirm the same truths. The God who chose the Jews and gave his Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai is not Lord Krishna whose message is found in the Bhagavad Gita. The Tao that flows like water and promotes con-coercive action is not the Christ who returns for blood and demands loyalty even unto martyrdom. Allah, whose final prophet is Muhammad, is not the god of Baha’i whose progressive revelation denies the essential truth of Islam that the Qur’an is God’s final revelation. Buddha rejects out of hand the idea of Atman, the eternal soul, so vital to Hinduism. Religions exist and flourish not because they all say the same thing, but because they all say different things, often conflicting things. SERMON PART 1 “God is Not One” Rabbi Rami Shapiro apparently believes that God is not One. But how can that be? He’s a Jew! He represents the oldest of the monotheistic western faiths! And what’s up with the sermon title today? Aren’t we supposed to be the Unitarians? Didn’t we break away from the rest of the Protestant Christians because we believed that God was a Unity rather than a Trinity? 2 These days, I must admit, we are more likely to proclaim that there is, at most, one God. We have moved from being a Christian breakaway that could not see the Trinitarian idea of God anywhere in the Bible, to being a non-creedal faith that is interested in how the divine is experienced by all religions. We have moved from being a group of dissenters that wanted to argue about fine points of doctrine to being a church that is more interested in what your beliefs tell you about how to live your life. We have moved from being believers who proclaim “one way” to being practicioners who appreciate that there are many paths. So aren’t we the ultimate interfaith church? From the motto that stands over our entrance to our building “One Church Many Paths” to the world religions banners that hang in our sanctuary, any first time attender at West Shore Church will surely come away with the impression that this is church that believes that there is wisdom to be found in all the world’s religious traditions. But does that mean we believe that all religions are true? Or that all religions have a piece of the truth? Does it mean that we believe that the same God is going to be found at the end of any of the many paths a religious seeker might follow? Today as we begin a month of worship services that invites us to “Tell the Truth”, I wanted to come to terms with one of the most widespread misconceptions about interfaith religious dialogue, and one of the most common misunderstandings about theology that many Unitarian Universalists proclaim, and that many other people think we proclaim. That misconception, that misunderstanding, is that despite all the differences in how it is expressed, the religions of the world have a common ground in theology, and that common ground is where we will find God. The popular metaphor for this belief is that the world’s religions are different paths up the same mountain, but they all lead to the top. 3 Historically, this idea has been very important to the evolution of Unitarian Universalism from a Christian denomination to a post-Christian community of religious practice . We sang one of the hymns that represents the early history of this approach at the beginning of our service today. The hymn’s author, Rev. William Channing Gannett, was one of the foremost advocates of the liberalizing movement in late 19th century Unitarianism away from an exclusively Christian identity, a movement sometimes known as “Unity”. Gannett would not have believed that we could all know the same God in the same way, but he believed that word of God, God’s teachings, was discernible in all the world’s faiths. As Unitarians began to test the boundaries of their Christian identity, he could write in 1887, 125 years ago, a Protestant sounding hymn like “It Sounds Along the Ages” with lyrics pretty astonishing for its time : “From Sinai's cliffs it echoed, It breathed from Buddha's tree, It charmed in Athens' market, It hallowed Galilee”. What is “IT”? IT is the word of the One God, which Gannett believed was present in all faiths. Even though this verse in the hymn specifically references only Moses in the Sinai, Buddha under the Banyan tree, Socrates in Athens’ Market, and Jesus teaching at Galilee, I imagine Gannett would have been willing to write verses that included Confucius at his home altar, Mohammad in Medina transcribing the Koran, and Arjuna speaking to his vision of Lord Krishna. But is this vision really true? Can we honestly say that the religions of the world teach about the same God? If we’re really honest and not sentimental about this , we have to say NO. Let me illustrate why this is so by giving you a tour of the world religions banners that hang behind me I our sanctuary. We often get asked about these banners – about where they come from and why we have them and what we mean. Not everyone these days has had a chance to learn about the world’s religions or their symbols and so not all of them are always familiar to people, so we produced a little pamphlet this year that describes what they represent. The more 4 important question that gets asked about them is what they mean to us. Do they mean that we believe all religions are equal and teach more or less the same thing? The answer to that is No. This church teaches that all religions are worthy of respect, and that the human beings that believe in them are persons of worthy and dignity, and in that sense equal. But we don’t teach that all religions believe the same things or that our respect for them should prevent us from questioning their teachings or challenging their beliefs. Let’s look at the banners one by one and ask ourselves whether what they teach about God sounds the same. The Star of David represents Judaism, and the God described by the Jews not only brought the world into being, but chose a group of people to have a special relationship with God and in return for keeping up their end of that relationship, promised them a Land. The Cross of Christianity is below that. Christians honor the story of creation and the relationship with God that the Jews talk about but takes that story one step further and say that God made a decisive intervention in the relationship with humanity by becoming human in the life and person of Jesus and in an act of sacrificial atonement for human sinfulness. The Star and Crescent that represents the religion of Islam, a faith that respects the same stories of common ancestors with Judaism and Christianity, but disagrees about how God intervened in world. Islam believes that God intervened seven hundred years after the time of Jesus by appointing one decisive prophet, Muhammad, and giving him a book of wisdom and law to guide humanity. If we move over to the Asian religions that we depict on our wall, we find the Sanskrit word “OM”, representing a name of God associated with Hinduism. Notice I said “A Name”. Hinduism is the ultimate religion of diversity, believing in many gods, or if you like, many different and sometimes contradictory things about God. The yin-yang symbol represents the religion of Taoism, which has an impersonal and pervasive concept of God very different than 5 anything that the western religions describe or that Hindus teach – a source of all things, that is both transcendent and immanent. That Tao or Way is both ultimate reality and a human way of life. Then we have the Lotus flower banner, representing Buddhism, which is not interested in talking about any God at all because God is just a concept. Buddhism is interested in the human experience of suffering that lies beneath all the interpretations we make of how the world is, and proposes an answer and a way of life that responds to that suffering without a God being involved. Now all these world religions banners do not by any means encompass all the world’s most widely believed religions. This collection of banners was being sold by another Unitarian Universalist congregation back in the sixties and West Shore church purchased them, so we had nothing to do with what was selected for this the collection. I have several symbols of other religious traditions on my stole. Notably missing on our banners are two major religions that we hardly ever speak about and that don’t have readily identifiable single symbols, the Yoruba traditions of Africa and the Confucianism of China. The dense populations of both these parts of the world and the number of people who live by their teachings make them significant world religions, and in fact, I would say that the western manifestation of Confucianism is the style of religious humanism that many Unitarian Universalists practice. But that’s a sermon for another day. So what about us?? The Unitarian Universalist banner is obviously the flaming chalice, depicted in a style popular in the sixties. The fact that so many of our congregations adopted the chalice symbol to the point where it became the emblem of our faith around the world is testimony to the popular power of the symbol of the flame. I have an ancient flame on my stole that represents the fire altar of Zoroastrianism. The flame in the chalice represents for us the light of truth explored through reason, the warmth of community that supports our common practice, 6 and the heat that can be generated by the fire of commitment which we believe can transform the world. Nothing about God there, because we accept that in this church our beliefs about God can be just as diverse and even contradictory as all those that are represented by the world’s religions we have just explored. Now, there is one more banner up there that often mystifies people. What do the intersecting circles represent? Are they a world religions symbol? I’m going to get to that in the second part of the sermon, after we receive the offering that keeps buying the fuel that keeps the flame of our chalice burning. As the ushers take up the financial offering, let’s enjoy another offering from the Free Spirit Band. OFFERING AND OFFERTORY READING from God is Not One by Stephen Prothero Huston Smith’s (book), The World’s Religions has sold over two million copies. One source of its success is Smith’s earnest and heartfelt proclamation of the essential unity of the world’s religions. Focusing on the timeless ideals of what he calls our “wisdom traditions”, Smith emphasizes spiritual experience, keeping the historical facts, institutional realities, and ritual observances to a minimum. His exemplars are extraordinary rather than ordinary practicioners… I understand what (Smith and other perennial philosophers like Karen Armstrong or Joseph Campbell) are doing. They are not describing the world but reimagining it. They are hoping that their hope will call up in us feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood. In the face of religious bigotry and bloodshed, past and present, we cannot help but be drawn to such vision, and such hope. Yet, we must see both for what they are, not mistaking them for clear eyed analysis. And we must admit that there are situations where a lack of understanding about the 7 differences between , say, Sunni and Shia Islam produces more rather than less violence. Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are –not just at their best, but also their worst. We need to look not only at their awe-inspiring architecture and gentle mystics but also their bigots and their suicide bombers. SERMON PART 2 “The Elephant in the Room” Stephen Prothero’s book “God is Not One” was the inspiration for the title of today’s sermon, and even though it is a book that may never equal the two million copies sold by Huston Smith, I think that Prothero’s picture of what the world’s religions represent may replace Smith’s vision as to what is taught at the high school and college level. Prothero is a professor at Boston University, and is a very engaging popular writer about religion. In his book, Prothero references another one of the oft-used metaphors for the belief that God is One, and that even though all the religions have different ways of describing God, they are all really talking about the same thing. That metaphor comes from the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. I think most of us know this story which originated in ancient India: a group of blind men are examining an elephant and describing to each other what the elephant looks like. The one touching its trunk says the elephant looks like a snake. The one who is holding the elephant’s tail says that the elephant must look like a rope. The story goes on with the other blind men each in turn declaring that the elephant must be like a wall, or a fan, or a spear, or a pillar , depending on which part of the elephant they are touching. The story is a favorite of everyone whose imagination is captured by the belief that there is a God common to all and experienced by each, but in different ways. 8 It’s a story that isn’t much help to those who have concluded that there is no God, and that question is the real “elephant in the room” when it comes to the study of world religions. In his book on world religions, which had to be limited to the eight that he saw as the most influential in the world, Stephen Prothero did decide that it would be important to include a chapter on atheism. Atheists believe that the elephant doesn’t exist; that there has been a widely circulated story that almost everyone believes that there is this magical creature called the elephant. For the atheists, these blind men are wandering around a house examining all kinds of everyday objects like a rope and a fan and a spear and believing that they have something to do with an elephant. In this church, we treasure our atheists, and we appreciate the ways that they hold to the same standard of respect for the worth and dignity of all people, including believers, that we expect from everyone who comes here. No one here believes that theists are somehow intellectually inferior to atheists, and that they need to be intellectually pummeled into submission. If the blind men and the elephant story has any wisdom for all of us, it is the wisdom of humility within the blindness that we all share, the blindness that is represented by the limits of our senses, our reason, and our minds. One of the things that I want to believe about a church like ours and the people who are attracted to it is that we come here not just because it’s a place where we can make friends, but we come here because we have a genuine interest in religion, both as a personal issue and as a human phenomenon. There is no point in being here if you think religion is stupid and what you are looking for is other people who will enjoy self-congratulatory conversation about how stupid religion is. That’s not what we do. We’re here because we think religion is a marvelous human creation that in all its flawed forms can help and support the human enterprise. 9 In his classes Prothero teaches that what religions have in common is not an ideal of the one God that lies behind their various culturally conditioned efforts to describe that God. What religions have in common is that they are all trying to solve a problem, the problem of being human, the problem that our UU theologian Forest Church described as “being born and having to die”. Prothero says that each religion will articulate the human problem as they understand it, offer a solution to this problem, suggest a technique or techniques for moving from the problem to the solution, and holds up exemplars who have shown a path that takes from the problem to the solution. So for example, for most Christians the problem the world has is sin, which is disregard for God’s gift and disobedience to God’s laws. The solution is salvation from that sin which comes from acceptance of God’s gift of Jesus through faith and from good works following God’s laws. The exemplars are first, Jesus, and the saints of the church. For Buddhism, a non-theistic religion, there is no God which brought the world into being, or that is there to be disobeyed. For Buddhists the problem is human suffering, understood as the pain of attachment to the impermanence of this world. The solution is clarity and acceptance about how the world really is and the part we play in it. There is an eight part prescription, the Eightfold Path, which describes how to move from suffering to clarity and peace. Along with Buddha, the world has many exemplars who are called arhats, or Boddhisattvas, who have found their way down the path and can show the way. Looked at in this way, the religions of the world do have a kind of Unity. It is a unity of compassion for the human predicament and a desire to offer insight into how to live within this predicament. While many world religions would deny that their reason for being is primarily ethical living among their followers, in our church we are much more interested in how a 10 religion teaches its people to live than in what they teach their people to believe. Obviously the beliefs are important and I could not end this sermon without acknowledging that the beliefs of religion have proved to be as much a curse upon the human enterprise as they are a blessing. But that is why we see religion as so important, and why we come to a church like this one to understand and explore its role in our lives and in the life of the world. It’s because the stakes are so high. Badly taught, exploited, and turned towards selfish ends, religion can and has been and is today a deadly force in human affairs. So this brings us back to Stephen Prothero’s comments in the second reading we offered today. Of course, as he says, we must approach our engagement with religion with clear eyes and cogent analysis. We must not pretend that the God that the many religious traditions talk about is the same God and that if we all believed in the same God all would be well. One of the great ironies of religion is that even within the different faith traditions, within communities of belief where their idea of God is basically the same, the believers seem to inevitably fragment into different sects of belief around issues of doctrine and practice – and so Islam has Sunnis and Shias, and Christianity has Orthodox, Catholic, and dozens of different Protestants, and Buddhism has Theravadans and Mahayanists, and Vajrayanists. Isn’t it obvious that human beings are inherently diverse, and that if there’s anything we can determine about a God that may exists and may have created the world, it’s that this God loves diversity! In that light, then, let’s come back to the last banner on the wall, the one with intersecting circles. That banner literally was made to refer to the intersection that happened when the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations merged into the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961. Sometimes you see our chalice symbol depicted inside these two intersecting circles in some of our literature and documents. However, I have always looked at that banner on our wall 11 a little differently. One of the meanings it has for me is that it represents the possibility that each of the religious traditions can always draw a larger circle that can find an intersecting place with the circle drawn by another faith tradition. What I mean by a larger circle is that there are always going to be statements about our life in the world that two very different religious traditions can agree on, statements that represent a circle that can take each other in. That circle might be as big as the simple statement that we are all human beings who have been born and must die. But from that simple beginning, that intersection of two circles of experience and belief, there is something that you can build on. Many people belief that the ethic represented by the Golden Rule, an ethic of mutual respect and compassion, is an intersection among religious traditions that you can build upon. In defense of Huston Smith and his description of the wisdom traditions within religions, I believe and affirm his quest to identify these places of intersection. Stephen Prothero says that Smith focuses in human experience, rather than on historical events, institutional realities, and ritual differences, and that it is in human experience that religious scholars like Smith and Karen Armstrong and Joseph Campbell find their hope for re-imagining the possibilities for this world. This is what Unitarian Universalism begins with as well in our first source: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life”. Hope for reimagining our possibilities within this human enterprise is a kind of faith in and of itself. It’s a faith that we encourage in a church like this one. It is a way of being religious, and it is available to believers and non-believers alike. So even though God may not be one, in the human heart and in the human imagination, hope is a flame that burns brightly within us all and gives us strength and vision for the journey. May it be so.