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Where God Has Passed: A Sermon on Belief
Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Unitarian Church of
Edmonton, October 19, 2003
One great question plaguing religion has always been: How do you
prove the unprovable? How do you prove the existence of God?
You can’t, of course, at least not by any reasonable scientific
standard that we have yet discovered or devised. The great mistake
of many organized religions in the past has been belief that they
could find such a proof. For example:
Some have parsed Scriptures, searching for specific proof texts
that demonstrate the existence of the divine. The logical failure
here is the assumption that the Scripture was written by a divine
being either through inspiration or direct dictation. This creates
a false logical circle in which the text is used to prove God and
the same God is used to prove the text. It sounds good, especially
when expounded upon with a passionate disregard for logical inconsistencies,
but it fails as a proof. The Emperor has no clothes.
A second approach has been to use signs or miracles to prove the
existence of God. Bad weather… or good, strange events in Nature,
visions sometimes accompanied by seizures or mystical appearances
of saintly figures on restaurant walls have all been cited to justify
God. The problem here is that over time the ever-growing body of
scientific knowledge has debunked these claims one by one.
The fact is that you just can’t prove God’s existence
by any meaningful or rational method. And while there are fundamentalists
who still expect miracles and choose to see them in random events,
a good many believers from all faiths have come to understand and
accept that God can’t be proved. But they have not abandoned
God. Instead, they argue that while they cannot prove, neither can
anyone else disprove God with any certainty.
Instead these believers contend that there are other ways of knowing.
We each have the ability to reason, but we also have the ability
to intuit, to feel emotionally and to sense with abilities we cannot
yet explain. These people believe that a person can sense the divine… can
feel the divine presence.
One such person is Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of Who Needs God
and When Bad Things Happen to Good People. A few weeks ago I heard
a radio interview with the good Rabbi. He recounted a story that
I believe comes from Jewish midrash… those commentaries and
stories the Jews have developed over centuries to expand and explain
the Bible’s teachings.
In this story Moses tells his brother of his first encounter with
God. In the course of the retelling it comes out that he did not
actually see anything…nor did he hear anything, for God said
nothing in this first meeting. Aaron asks, “Then how did you
know it was YHWH?” “I saw where his feet had passed,” said
an awe-struck Moses.
Kushner paused, then went on saying that this was the way of God.
We could not see or hear God in any direct manner. For us God is
remote and distant. There is no way for us to catch God in the act
of doing something, but sometimes, just sometimes, we can tell where
God has been by what has been left behind.
Now, as it happens I heard this interview a few days after our daughter
Lily was born. I was still very high from the experience of birth.
It was about that time that I had that revelatory moment I reported
in the newsletter. I was sitting holding her. We were alone for the
first time since just after her birth and I was overwhelmed by feelings
of gratitude and responsibility. I was also in awe of birth itself. “Biology
alone just cannot explain this,” I said to Lily.
When I heard Kushner speak of where God has passed I thought immediately
of that moment and understood his point exactly. Did the divine intervene
in this specific birth? I don’t know. I doubt it. Was some
spiritual presence in the kitchen when Teilya called on her higher
power in the last moments of labour? I can’t say. Again, I
doubt it. Except that I saw her draw on unseen resources, center
and regain her strength for the last push. Was that self-discipline
or divine intervention? I may have an opinion, but I have no way
of knowing or proving the answer convincingly.
All I can say is that I have a feeling, an emotional response, a
sense of wonderment, a sense of the miraculous. “Where God
has passed,” was as good a way as any to describe the feeling,
the momentousness of the feeling.
Look at the language of religion. Look at the sacred texts from
around the world. Look at the metaphors we have assigned to the divine
over time. Gods and goddesses have been great warriors and great
mothers. They have been the sun, moon and stars. They have been the
wind and the water and the growing earth. They have been the bear
and the eagle and the raven. They have been parental figures. They
have been ghosts and devils and the spirit inside each one of us.
It is an almost endless list of forms, guises and persona. And what
does each of these metaphors share in common? They are the feeble
struggling efforts of mere humans to describe a sense of something
outside of themselves, a sense of something unseen, but greater than
themselves.
“True religion goes beyond making sense,” says Kushner, “It
does not offend reason, it transcends reason. People do not start
to see the world differently because someone has written a book giving
them reasons for doing so. They do it because they feel that they
have been touched by the presence of God – incarnated sometimes
in words, sometimes in stories, sometimes in memories triggered by
a written passage”
Does any of this prove God? No. Absolutely not. You can’t
prove God. You can only decide about God, using the senses and tools
that seem appropriate to you.
But according to the Kushner reading I shared a few moments ago,
the real question is not even about God’s existence:
“Paul… told me that when he contemplates the beauty
and intricacy of the world, he has to believe that God exists. That’s
very nice, I told him, and I’m sure God appreciates your vote
of confidence. But for the religious mind and soul, the issue has
never been the existence of God but the importance of God, the difference
God makes in the way we live… The issue is not what God is
like. The issue is what kind of people we become when we attach ourselves
to God.”
Believe in God is really a tool. It is something we use to sculpt
our understanding of the world around us, and the moral values that
guide us. We each have a bag of such tools. Reason is one, experience
another, training in various arts and disciplines a third. We can
use belief to comfort us and to give us hope. We can use belief to
explain the unexplainable in order to lessen our inborn fear of uncertainty.
We can use belief to dispel a natural sense of loneliness that seems
to be a part of the human condition. And we can use our belief to
shape who we will be in our actions and in our relationships. Belief
helps keep things in their place. It helps us make sense of our world.
Belief is a tool that certainly has been and continues to be misused.
In the hands of some belief becomes a vicious weapon used to attack
and condemn those who think differently or who live by a different
set of values. Even more malevolently this weapon of belief has been
used to manipulate hatred for more venal means: for territorial expansion,
for consolidation of political power, to justify the plundering of
lands and resources.
Belief is a hammer that can be used to build or to destroy. It is
a knife that can be used to sculpt or to cut to pieces. It is just
a tool, one that everyone uses.
There are some in this room who believe in a divine presence in
some form. There are others who believe just as fervently that no
such entity or force exists. And there are some who really don’t
know what to believe. One great thing about Unitarian Universalism
is that this is a place in which all of those views are welcomed.
Here we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. To
me, that means we respect their beliefs, as long as the beliefs are
not used as a weapon to belittle or harm others.
In this church we encourage a free and responsible search for truth
and meaning. We impose no standard of belief. Here the existence
God is an open question. Each person must decide for themselves if
there is a God or not, and if so, what that God is like and how they
will resond.
Here we will speak the language of science at times and the language
of religion at other times, for it is our task to search through
all available sources for wisdom and insight. We seek understanding.
We seek guidance for the next step. We seek inner peace. We seek
forgiveness for things done and undone. We seek an end to isolation.
We seek deep satisfaction and proof of our worthiness. These are
the tasks of religious community and practice.
For some, those things will come from ideas. For others, they will
come from a sense of the presence of God. Who can say if one is right
another wrong? I can’t, can you?
In the end, God is not a thing, not a person, not a rock nor an
eagle. In real terms for us today, God is a decision we have to make.
Once upon a time I decided that God did not exist, because I could
not prove God, nor could I feel God for a while. Time and experience
have changed my decision. Intellectually I have engaged in debates
that have expanded the possibility of God for me. My understanding
of the divine is no longer confined by human metaphor. It is a long
while since my God looked or acted like a human being. My God is
much larger, not a being at all. My God is more a presence, an order
in the universe we humans have only dimly begun to discern. But my
God does not sit watching my actions like some great hall monitor.
If my God even has consciousness, I doubt it knows I am alive. I
do not look for its intervention in my life. I have to make my own
way with the help of the people around me, and the timeless and universal
qualities that seem to guide and shape nature and all life.
But my God exists. I know, because I have held my newborn daughter
and felt God’s presence.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you share my views of God.
It is still a decision each of you has to make. For some, it’s
a decision that can be made rationally. For many others, perhaps
it’s better to say that God is a decision we make based on
our intuition and our need, but that we use reason to define the
scope and impact of that decision on our lives.
Like all of the really important decisions in life, no one can make
it for you. No preacher or professor has THE answer to the mystery.
No one let’s you off the hook. The idea of God belongs to you
and you alone. Enjoy the journey, enjoy your decision.
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