Download 1 why god is not one A SERMON BY REV. WAYNE B. ARNASON

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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?
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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.
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.