Encountering God
A Sermon
By Rev. Daniel Gregoire
Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton
2/7/2021
Reading:
An Excerpt from “The Creative Encounter” By Howard Thurman
...The central fact in religious experience is the awareness of meeting God. The encounter; sometimes, a confrontation; and sometimes, a sense of Presence. What is insisted upon, however, without regard to the term used, is that in the experience defined as religious, the individual is seen as being exposed to direct knowledge of ultimate meaning, ne plus ultra being, in which all that the individual is, becomes clear as immediate and often distinct revelation.
...The mind apprends the whole --the experience is beyond or inclusive of the discursive. It is not other than the discursive, but somehow it is inclusive of the discursive.
Sermon:
In Judaism there are seven names for God.
Including:
- Elohim - God (Council of Gods)
- El Shaddai - The Almighty
- And, my favorite Ehyeh - I Am
In Islam there are 99 names for the divine, called the 99 Beautiful Names of Allah.
The first one is Ar-Rahmaan the most merciful and the 99th is As-Saboor the patient one.
In Hinduism there are 33 million names and forms of God or Brahman. (The universal principle or unchanging ultimate reality)
This month our Spiritual theme invites us to name the name the holy in our own lives, and to hear and appreciate what others call the holy, the ultimate, the divine.
We are encouraged to feel the essential quality of community and the perceived power of places that some call God.
Today I also hope to celebrate the bonds of friendship and understanding that can exist between our community and others.
Ours is a rare faith community; we are home to humanists, naturalists, pantheists, theist, atheists, and agnostics. Whereas most communities of faith adhere to a more explicitly theistic frame of reference, which is quite alright.
With this difference in mind, one could wonder can Unitarian Universalists and Evangelical Christians be friends, for instance?
Can Unitarian Universalists and African-American Baptists be friends?
I wonder can an agnostic UU be friends with a deeply trinitarian African Methodist Episcopalian?
This being Black History Month, lends some urgency to the exploration of these questions.
The answer to these questions is, yes, of course!
Absolutely!
Mutual respect and appreciation of shared values, and commitment to work for the common good is what makes such friendships, and all cross-cultural friendships possible.
Our theme Spirit, is also a special challenge to Unitarian Universalists.
It is a challenge for us to get out of our heads; out of our comfort zone of the hyperrational. We will be pushed all the way into our feelings.
To feel something is a different thing to know facts and figures, it is beyond reasonable, beyond deduction.
Feelings call upon the faculties of body and more often of soul; and, many of us, regard these faculties with deep suspicion.
We are suspicious of these “feelings” in ourselves and in others. We are cautious around the enthusiastic expressions, the zealotry, the near fanaticism of feelings, worried perhaps that new feelings might infect us, or awake something in us, and perhaps take us over!
We still wonder if we can trust our feelings, our sense of intuition, our wonder.
Can we trust the embodied knowing that is oftentimes at odds with our devotion to logic, and our somewhat elementary understanding of science.
This so-called logic that we are expected to apply to every aspect of our lives, does not always serve life.
We even suppose that we can continue the very medieval conceit that we can apply logic, order and reason to our religious lives too as Unitarian Universalists.
And, when we do this we find ourselves masquerading as “free thinkers” when our dogma is actually “unfeelingness.”
I often get tripped up by the orthodoxy of logic, and the idea that there must be some structure and coherence, a theory of everything, a rational, red thread, at the very least, running through it all.
And, if I could but find the red thread, it will allow me a sense of understanding, and perhaps, more importantly to me, a sense of control.
We are all possessed with this intense will to predict and control. It might be a western thing, but we see it many cultures. This will to control extends to every area of our lives, our health, family. We want to control the lives of our children, our neighbors and friends.
We even want to control our system of government. Our democractic system of governance often suggests that we can control our government, but that is not always true.
We want to control our economic systems, and even will the continuance of a high performing stock market through the magic of our “overthinking” about it.
We allow ourselves to believe that if we gather enough information, if we take all of the correct actions, we can control the course and outcomes in every arena of our lives, and ultimately outwit the complex probabilities engine that is Life.
An example of this is way so many of us fritted over the recent election.
We agonized trying to divine; would it be more years of what we knew, or would the necessary regime change come to Washington?
What could we do to reduce the chance of the former, and increase the likelihood of the later?
More reading, more talking, more writing, more protesting, more convincing, more what? But, always more?
So many of us could never be persuaded that we were doing enough, even if we worked ourselves into exhaustion. But, the great mystery before us was what the next thing should be.
One of my colleagues related to me how they were filled with worry and anxiety about the outcome of the presidential election. This person like many UUs is white, educated, comfortably middle class and living in the farthest reaches of suburbia, in what one might call:
“... [a] fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.” (John of Gaut speech, Richard II, William Shakespeare)
My friend, and colleague, a long time activist themself, was confessing their confusion about an African American pastor that they know, also a long-time fellow activist in an urban setting.
That pastor, seemed to my friend, unbothered, insufficiently worried, about the election outcome, one way or another.
Well, how could that be?
How could that be? When clearly he (the pastor) was a black man, and his community, so long disenfranchised. How could he be so oblivious when people he knew and loved have so much to lose or gain depending on the outcome of things.
How could he be so well anchored, when all those around him, especially in more comfortable positions were so adrift with dread and apprehension?
My colleague said, that he was simply able to “leave it up to God.” Those were his remarkable words.
The pastor was able to leave it up to God, and get on with his life.
When I heard this I recognized something that excited me. This was a chance to offer a different and important perspective, one that would be crucial for us at UUSGU as we flesh out our Social Justice agenda under the banner of Racial Allyship and Racial Amity.
In order to strengthen our cross-cultural friendships, perhaps even extending the hand of friendship to a historically black congregation, becoming sister churches.
We’ve dreamed of doing such things together, but we’ve have yet to turn the dreams into reality.
If we hope to do this well, we must appreciate the unique frame of reference expressed by the black pastor and activist.
I think what my UU friend and colleague struggled to understand, what some in our congregation might struggle to understand is that feeling of presence, a companioning presence that attends all religious experience.
That presence, some choose to call God.
Without knowing the pastor personally, I know that he is naming the creative, and ultimately liberating encounter with the divine, in the black idiom. And, in so doing he is allowing room for all sorts of unimagined possibilities and aid to emerge and become real.
When we let go of that illusionary sense of control, we can take on a much grander point of reference, where so much more is possible. This is not to say that we don’t have to show up, and be an active participant in our liberation, but rather the work of getting free is not ours to do alone.
In our reading we heard the words of Howard Thurman the 20th century Quaker Theologian, and mystic.
He was the first Black dean and chaplain of a historically white institution, Boston University. He was also the founder of one of the first intentionally interfaith and interracial churches in San Francisco in 1944.
This church, The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples which still meets, has as its vision:
“...is an interfaith, interracial, intercultural community of seekers dedicated to personal empowerment and social transformation through an ever deepening relationship with the Spirit of God in All Life.”
This is pretty extraordinary.
This man wrote:
...The central fact in religious experience is the awareness of meeting God. The encounter; sometimes, a confrontation; and sometimes, a sense of Presence. What is insisted upon, however, without regard to the term used, is that in the experience defined as religious, the individual is seen as being exposed to direct knowledge of ultimate meaning, ne plus ultra being, in which all that the individual is, becomes clear as immediate and often distinct revelation.
In the Howard Thurman reading, what is really compelling about it is the way that Thurman captures the essence of feeling, coming from the encounter with God, which is imagined in the most electrifying terms.
It is a confrontation with presence!
It is being exposed to direct knowledge, ultimate meaning, that is in his words, immediate, distinct, revelatory.
Ne Plus Ultra, the ancient Latin phrase that refers to the quality of unsurpassed perfection. (There is nothing more!)
This experience can be described in words, but one needs so many of them, and in the end it includes concepts that are beyond, words, phrases, thought and logic, but are deeply felt all the same.
Thurman writes:
...The mind apprends the whole --the experience is beyond or inclusive of the discursive. It is not other than the discursive, but somehow it is inclusive of the discursive.
I really appreciate the word discursive because it describes a style of writing that is fluid and expansive.
Often it is used in the pejorative sense. It can also reveal a bit of contempt for the kinds of speech marked with digressions from subject to subject, with little sense of coherence or direction.
But, that’s just it, all of the words that we might use to describe the holy will fall short, it will land on the ear like a housefly trying to get our attention, petitioning for his release from captivity.
When the people in our lives, say “I am letting go and letting God.”
When they say “God Willing.”
When we hear “It is in God’s hands now.”
When we ourselves say “Only God knows how…”
This is not an abnegation, nor is it a rejection of real responsibility, or to deny a sense of personal agency. At least it doesn’t have to be.
It is not defeatism, resignation or simply giving up!
It is a courageous acknowledgement of the vast mystery and dizzying complexity of every aspect of life.
These turns of phrase, are a recognition of our limited humanity and these phrases lend that humanity the dignity and rest (sabbath) that we deserve.
These feelings come from life sustaining belief systems, systems that sustain life.
These, at times puzzling turns of phrase allow us to be present in the moment and to face life's many uncertainties with dignity and grace.
For the pastor/activist to say that the election and all else is in God’s hands, is an instance of life sustaining faith and feeling.
That energy, that power, that calm does not come from ambition, wealth or fame. It does not come from accounting for all of the outcomes, mitigating risks or trying to control them altogether.
Rather, it comes from the ongoing creative and liberating encounter with God.
But, where is God in Unitarian Universalism?
Where is God in the 7 principles?
There is indeed no mention of God or any deity in the seven principles.
And, therein lies the beauty of our living tradition and, the extraordinary elegance of the principles, in that they do not pretend to describe what is inclusive of the discursive, but is ultimately beyond discursive,
7 words,
99 words, 3
3 million words
These words would not be enough to describe the holy, and it is always silly when we try to circumscribe the essence of feeling.
But what our 7 principles together, do it to point us down the road where in the moment we will counter the holy.
The principles are a way of placing ourselves in the pathway of ...direct knowledge of ultimate meaning, ne plus ultra being, in which all that the individual is, becomes clear as immediate and often distinct revelation.
The principles are the means through which we encounter a God of our own understanding.
Our 3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations, would be the one principle we might focus our attention on as a means of connecting with others whether here in our meetinghouse or elsewhere.
Remember that our community is a place where we grow spiritually, and expand our knowledge and also our feelings.
We seek to embrace all on this soul growing journey we call Life; knowing that we will and should have different names for the divine.
I want us to hear the turn of phrase, “I let go and Let God”, “It’s in God’s hands now” not with pity, contempt or ridicule, or even empathy, but rather, as one of the many markers of courageous spiritual growth.
I want us to hear these words as a commitment to ongoing liberation through a generative encounter with God.
Our spiritual growth lies in the true appreciation of difference, including different points of view, and celebrating the diversity of ways that we name and the many ways that we feel the presence of God.
...God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land. - From “Life Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyZkRgQ4ZnQ
RSS Feed