How Shall We Think of God? A Thanksgiving Sermon
Anne Bancroft
November 19, 2006

Reading - From Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation – October 3, 1863
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

Reading - From Ecclesiastes 1:16-18
I said to myself, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, . . .

Good morning, and – in anticipation – Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May your celebration be joyous, your meal hearty and your gratitude profound.

Several years ago I spoke at this service about the concept of gratitude, and about whether it’s necessary to have an entity, a being, a recipient in mind to be thankful to. Not surprisingly, my answer was no. Living with gratitude, being intentionally grateful qualifies as viable spiritual practice all by itself.

I really believe that. But at the same time, it is interesting, isn’t it, how often the two are linked - gratitude and the to-whom-we-are-grateful - and that so often, in our inadequate and limiting language, the reference is to the entity, the image, the concept, the symbol we call “God.” Now Thank We All Our God, and I thank thee god for most this amazing day. The question of how to think of God is never far from my own curiosity, but certainly this holiday, filled with moments of pause and gratefulness, invites us to consider it here together. How shall we think of God?

OK – I’ll be honest. I wanted to speak with you about this topic, and I happened to get this date – but I think they work together. And I’ll also admit I thought more than twice about taking on this topic. We’re very conflicted about our ideas of God, and talking about it can be quite a challenge. It’s like my daughter’s asking what I wanted to do next year for my birthday – “you know,” she said, “when you turn ‘hmm-hmm.’” Some words seem to make us – for whatever reason – a little uncomfortable in mixed company. But let’s be brave, I thought. Let’s take it on.

I find the issue of God puzzling. And I imagine that my struggle is not so dissimilar from many in our Unitarian Universalist experience. We are people who have been invited by our tradition to re-think, to question. And for those of us who have been raised primarily in the Western monotheistic environment God is something we questioners often can’t quite make sense of. We feel somehow confused, frustrated and sometimes even slightly annoyed by it. It’s so tempting to want to package God in anthropomorphic wrapping and put the whole idea down. “I don’t believe in the long beard, long white hair, father in heaven thing – so let’s just not worry about it.” But it doesn’t go away, you know. This concept, this way of thinking, this terminology is so enmeshed in our cultural existence that even when we try to place it out of worry’s sight, we are confronted with it on a regular basis. Theologian Gordon Kaufman maintains that, “though God may be dead or largely irrelevant for many in our world, this symbol remains much more powerful and meangingful than any other . . . “

Perhaps it is hubris that we challenge the idea. I was driving down Centre Street some time last year and passed by the Eliott Church that had a sign on their wayside pulpit that read, “God doesn’t question your existence!” In fact, a friend of mine suggested to me recently that challenging the reality of God is something only white upper-middle class liberals feel they have the right to do.

I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Doubt is available to all humans. Unitarian Universalists may represent a particularly left end of the questioning spectrum but we are not alone on the continuum.

From a very academic perspective, God represents an answer to the human quest for certainty: our need to know, our desire to explain the inexplicable. We are not very good, as the poet Keats says, at “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without . . . reaching after fact and reason.” We like answers, and God is a concept through which we have allowed ourselves to exhale, lower our shoulders and relax. It’s as though we are thinking, “I don’t need to know everything, because God knows.” The reading from Ecclesiastes, which is what this morning’s hymn # 62 is based on, suggests that our human search for answers through knowledge, through wisdom, even through madness or folly is all essentially the same. It is all chasing after wind. It’s the downeaster’s lament: you can’t get the-ah from he-ah. As humans, we can’t know everything with our minds, so those things which we are unable to know, to find answers for – how we came to be, what our purpose is, what death is – have been assigned as God’s purvue.

And a reconciling purvue it is, too – or could be, if we all were to get on board. From the reading earlier, we recall that Abraham Lincoln linked God with Thanksgiving in an effort to encourage the reconciliation of a nation divided by war. He called upon the citizens of this country to be grateful, as if with one heart and one voice, to the “beneficent Father, who dwelleth in the heavens.” He was not the first President to reference God in the interest of national unity, nor – of course – the last.

The problem is, not everyone’s on board. Or, at least, not on board with the same God. John Buehrens, a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has said, “Tell me the god you don’t believe in because I probably don’t believe in him either!” And isn’t that frustrating? Every time we have a conversation, we have to make sure we leave time for everyone to describe what they mean by the same word!

But that’s not so new either, folks. Even Moses was uncertain. The book of Exodus tells us that when confronted by the burning bush and told to go into Egypt to free his people from slavery, Moses responded, “Why me? Who’s going to believe me? And by the way, when they ask me who sent me, what am I supposed to say?” It’s quite interesting that the response is far less of a pronoun than one might anticipate. “Ehyey, asher, ehyey,” is the response. “I am who I am,” or perhaps, “I will be that which I will be.” “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

How did such an active, verb-laden identity become our too-often ideolized noun? How did the I AM that appeared as a flaming bush of spirit and justice become the packaged “God” of contemporary Western parlance. And is there any use in re-opening this proverbial box?

In answer to the first of those questions – where did the noun come from - translation is part of the problem, I think. Our present term God comes most directly from the Old English meaning “supreme being, or deity.” But if we go back a bit further, we find the origins in the Proto-Indo-European ghut, meaning “that which is invoked.” And interestingly, that in the German form it was neutral, only shifting to masculine gender after the coming of Christianity. Thus in its original form we might understand that it was intended to be a more expansive concept. “That which is invoked” is undeniably more flexible than the masculine, paternalistic imagery we so often attach to the word God.

As to the second part – the question of whether there is any use in re-opening this box, in unpacking this term to find a way to make better or broader use of it, I would respond in true UU fashion: Good question!

The Rev. David Bumbaugh, well-known Unitarian Universalist humanist, maintains that we need an altogether new vocabulary. In this post-secular age, he says, in which religious language has become the common currency of our public life, cheapened and trivialized by over and inappropriate usage, the words have lost their meaning. “If there is any truth in this evaluation,” he says, “then to call for us to use traditional language and symbols and concepts to speak about what is deepest and dearest, about what is the focus of our ultimate commitment, about what is the source of human good . . . is to ask us to employ a tongue that has been so corrupted and exploited as to fail to convey the very depths of reverence the times call for.”

Bumbaugh writes so beautifully of a language of reverence, that “begins with a story rooted in the sum of our knowledge of the universe itself . . . a religious story,” he maintains, “a vision of reality that contains the sources of a moral, ethical, transcendent self-understanding. We are challenged to recognize the paradox that our individual well-being is rooted in the understanding that at heart we are one with all things and our sense of separateness is an illusion . . .”

The problem is that this new language of reverence doesn’t yet exist, and in eschewing the old and familiar, even if worn and ill-used, I fear we cut off our noses to spite our faces. If we insist that God-speak has little or no value for us, we risk isolating those among us who still find not only respite but wonder in that language. And, we risk placing ourselves, as a faith tradition, over and against the broader culture in which we live.

I’m convinced there is a middle road for these times, even if it is not yet fully paved. If we are willing to recognize theology as human imaginative construction, and as fully purposeful in giving us functional ways to live together in this world, then I believe there is a way to imagine a God that might draw us together in our differences rather than incline us apart.

My intent here is not to suggest that you must believe in God, but to suggest that there is a way to think of God that creates a bridge to those who do, and a possibility for those among us who are struggling to figure it out. I think we need to be willing to allow God to exist within and among us – within Unitarian Universalism and in our relations with other faith traditions - even though, and especially as we recognize the growing disparity between our knowledge of the world, our growing scientific understanding, and the Biblical creator God that has been.

The fact that we humans have the ability to literally destroy everything we have previously credited God with creating unalterably changes the dynamic of previous belief. We need to re-think, reconstruct, re-imagine.

Might we be able to imagine an “I AM” that is experienced as grace? Is that spirit that is somehow beyond our individualism not present at the birth of a child, in the morning dew, in the death of someone we love? If we recognize that there is something bigger than each of us, and even something powerfully moving the world that is greater than human capacity to understand, might we be able to name a moment of wonder, dynamic and tangible, as God? Our hubris is not in the doubting. There is much in living that inclines us to be skeptical. Perhaps our hubris instead, is in the judging and discarding.

How shall we think of God? Creatively, expansively, with fresh curiosity and a new perspective. Let’s have conversations about it, and trade ideas. Let’s talk and challenge. Let’s be gentle with each other and make room for our varying thoughts, so that all are welcome and that possibly, in between us and around us, we might feel the grace of I AM.

Amen.