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A Horizontal God | Rev. Brock H. Leach
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So a Martian walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation one Sunday— I guess he’s attracted to the “universal” part of our name. He goes up to the first person he meets who is greeting people at the door. “Excuse me”, he says, “but can you tell me what Unitarian Universalists believe about God?” Now being a UU, the usher answers a question with a question: “Well, what do you mean by ‘God’?’”, he asks.
The Martian is a little confused by this, but he figures it’s just some communication problem stemming from his Martian accent, so he goes on in and sits down in the sanctuary next to a friendly looking woman who is wearing a Black Lives Matter button and a chalice pin, and he turns to her: “Excuse me”, he says, “but can you tell me what Unitarian Universalists believe about God?” Now being a UU, the friendly lady answers a question with a question: “Well, what do you mean by ‘Believe?’” she asks. “For us, it’s really about objective facts and reason.”
By now the Martian is thinking that his language skills aren’t quite as good as he thought, and he gets even more confused during the service. He wonders: “What is this Spirit of Life they’re singing about? Is that God?” But he doesn’t want to embarrass himself by asking any more unanswerable questions, so he decides not to stay for the coffee hour.
Now of course the official answer to the Martian’s question about God is that we UU’s are non-creedal. We don’t ask our members to subscribe to any particular image or depiction of God, and we welcome people from all different traditions as well as those from no tradition. The only problem with this answer is that, while it’s completely accurate, it can sound to the uninitiated like when it comes to God we collectively hold to everything… and nothing.
When it comes to the concept of belief, we tend to shy away from the word because we don’t want to speak for what others might believe and because “belief” is a term we associate with doctrines that don’t comport with reason or reality. Yet we actually do passionately believe in many things, like for example the inherent worth and dignity of every person and our other six principles, not all of which can be supported by objective facts.
So we can get a little hung up on these words, and we can unintentionally confuse people about what we really believe about how the world works and what really matters. I want to suggest this morning that maybe it’s time for us to be just a little clearer about what we believe and maybe just a little more adept at translating some of this religious language. I say that not because I think there’s anything wrong with our way of being religious. I say it because I think that our way of being religious is exactly what more and more people long to know about and be a part of, especially right now. Many are just showing up with a different vocabulary.
This question about language became front and center for me when I served for several years as a resident chaplain at Tampa General Hospital. For those of you not familiar with Tampa General it’s an 1,100 bed Level One Trauma Center and the primary teaching hospital for the USF School of Medicine. It runs one of the nation’s top 10 organ transplant centers, and operates a fleet of helicopters that bring patients from 23 surrounding counties. And it’s a safety net hospital that serves everyone, regardless of who they are, or where they come from, or their ability to pay.
The role of chaplains there is to meet the needs of patients and families in crisis and help them find their own resources for dealing with the situation they find themselves in, and the first principle is to meet them wherever they are religiously. During my time there I worked with people of every imaginable faith and walk of life. Occasionally, I’d run into Jehovah’s Witnesses who wouldn’t talk to anybody outside their community, but pretty much everybody else would welcome me warmly, and would invite me into their personal lives. They’d share their deepest hopes and fears and beliefs, and it felt like a real privilege.
At first, though, I wasn’t sure how I could help someone who held radically different beliefs about God than I had, but slowly I began to realize that when push really comes to shove, our beliefs about what’s really important aren’t very different after all. At the end of the day we all want to know that our lives matter… and what matters most are the people in our lives and the love we share with them.
I came to understand that much of the religious doctrine and language most of us use is just the framework and vocabulary that we inherited for expressing these ideas. The great majority of people I met professed a belief in a God of some kind and the power of prayer, but unlike most of us UU’s, almost none of them spent much time thinking about the finer points of doctrine.
So at first when someone would ask me to pray for God’s help, I struggled with the fact that I don’t personally believe in an anthropomorphic male God floating above us in the clouds who hears prayers and intervenes in people’s individual lives. And I assumed that’s who they wanted me to pray to.
But I overcame that problem by offering what I thought of as “horizontal” prayers. Instead of praying vertically to a God above to intercede or prepare a place in Heaven, I would pray horizontally to a God alive in the hearts and hands of the people I met in the present world. I would pray with patients for peace for their minds and rest for their bodies; I would pray for the support of family and friends; I would pray in gratitude for the teams of nurses and doctors who were working day and night to help them heal; I would pray for their own inner strength and determination to see them through; I would pray in gratitude for all the lives touched by theirs, the ripples of which stretch to eternity.
In other words, prayers for me became an opportunity to give voice to our most fervent hopes-- that we find the resources within ourselves and our whole human community to heal and to lead lives of meaning.
What’s more, I became very comfortable naming that motive power of love alive in all these human beings… and calling it ‘God’. The amazing thing is that my patients were too. Not once did anyone question the object or content of my prayer. They all understood that, as Emerson said, “the Highest dwells within us,… the sources of nature are in our own minds.”
I think the same kind of translating might be needed when we talk about belief.
I mentioned earlier that a friend recommended Fantasyland, the book I excerpted for our reading. My friend is somebody whose parents placed a lot of emphasis on education and science and objective truth and who grew up entirely outside of religion. For him the book was eye-opening because it describes how Americans have a propensity to believe whatever they want to believe. Andersen’s premise is that from the beginning, European migrants chose to believe things that surpassed objective truth-- that America was a place where gold literally littered the landscape, the Biblical land of milk and honey-- and they went on to establish new colonies based on their own beliefs, not those of the old world order.
In Andersen’s telling, American religion is the worst-case example of this inclination toward fantasy, and our UU religious ancestors, the Puritans, come in for a lot of the blame. For starters they had the audacity to believe that they contained within themselves a certain divine intuition and had the right to call their own religious leaders from amongst themselves. But then many of them were also caught up in the idea that witches were possessed of evil spirits. As you probably know, the Salem Witch Trials were prosecuted by our Puritan ancestors and took place in what is now a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Later still, the Unitarians gave birth to the Transcendentalists who practiced seances and communicated with the spirits of the dead. Like people all over, our religious ancestors were pretty imaginative.
And when you look at the larger landscape of American religion, I have to admit that Andersen has a point. In addition to Unitarianism and Universalism, America is the birthplace for everything from Unity and Christian Science to Mormonism, the Nation of Islam, Scientology, the Prosperity Gospel, and every stripe of charismatic evangelical from Billy Graham all the way to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. The diversity of religious traditions and beliefs in this country is like no other, and some of the belief systems are outlandish creations that don’t conform to any reality I can identify. But it’s who we are.
As David Letterman said, “America is the only country where a significant portion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.”
But against the backdrop of all that fantasy, there are some other truths:
The first is that imagination, and a belief in possibility and human agency, have animated the American dream and actually made possible a quality of life and prosperity that none of those early migrants could have imagined. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” and he proved that you have to have both to accomplish breakthroughs.
The second truth is that we all believe in things that we can’t objectively prove, and what we choose to believe is critically important. As Emerson said, “a person will worship something—have no doubt about that. . . That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
As we see right now in our national politics, some foundational beliefs are life-giving and some are downright toxic. If we believe that the world is a zero sum game of winners and losers; that what matters most is that we get ours; that we’re witnesses to the end of the world and our reward awaits in heaven-- well then we might as well just build some more walls and jails and grab everything we can.
But I have to believe that even the people who profess to believe these things really have a hard time clinging to them, if only because it makes for such a lonely, empty existence. I think they profess these kinds of beliefs only out of sheer desperation because they don’t see any other reason to hope.
Never has it been more important “to be careful what we worship.” And never have Unitarian Universalists had something more important to offer the world than right now. We can offer an understanding of God that most Americans, whether religious or not, can actually believe in—and one that’s worthy of their reverence. What’s more, we can do it authentically, because it comes out of our 450 years of religious tradition. Like chaplains ministering to people in the hospital, we only need to meet people where they are and help translate some of these concepts for them.
When it comes to thinking about God in human terms, our tradition goes back to Arius at the Council of Nicea who argued that Jesus was a divinely inspired human – not one of a trinity of divine parts. He lost that argument in a close contest, because Constantine wanted God on his side and insisted on a uniform Christology for his empire.
In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, Miguel Servetus, a physician, got burned at the stake by Calvin for espousing the same Unitarian idea. And the American roots of Unitarianism trace to William Ellery Channing who created a split in the Boston clergy by asserting that Jesus was a divinely inspired human, suggesting that the Bible was not to be taken literally, and that people of other faith traditions had wisdom to share too.
Throughout our history the idea that Divinity is present in the natural world and in all of humanity has been at the very center of our tradition. Hosea Ballou’s Universalist belief that all of us are saved; Thoreau’s “Faith in a Seed;” Emerson’s “small still voice within.” These are all expressions of a divinity that is immanent and made manifest in the here and now through us and what we do.
And we have a long history of reconceiving of ‘God’ in new ways. Many early Universalist churches proclaimed in big letters right above the altar that “God is Love.” That’s my faith. Unitarians were early thinkers in Process Theology—the idea that God is not a being separate and apart, but is a verb expressed in our living; the divine expressed in love and action. In the mid-twentieth century Religious Humanism expressed our deepest faith in human ingenuity and reason and our ability to overcome our fears and rise to our better nature.
More recently, Religious Naturalism identifies the divine inherent in all the natural world, revealed through science in intricate, complex webs of relationship that we have yet to fully comprehend. It recognizes the unique role we humans play as the conscious agents of evolution. And that we are responsible for furthering life on the planet.
For Unitarian Universalists it doesn’t matter which of these particular ideas you resonate with or what you choose to call them. But what does matter is that we ultimately place our faith in the potential and possibility of people. And we do it despite momentary evidence to the contrary! All seven principles derive from this faith. For us it’s crystal clear that “that-which-is-larger-than-ourselves” acts in the world through us and is made real by our human creativity, compassion and care. And that belief sets us apart as a religion.
It also means that we have a life-affirming, hopeful way of being religious that makes sense to millions of Americans, whether religious or not, because we are the religion of human potential.
What if instead of worrying so much about religious language and doctrine, we made our congregations into places where people of all backgrounds come to find inspiration and be awakened to meaning and possibility? Places where people discover their sense of purpose in life and connect it with others who share it? Places where all people feel the opportunity to grow, and work together to remove the obstacles that hold us back. What if our congregations were places where people know they are never alone-- there for each other in times of joy and loss, triumph or catastrophe. What if every day we focused on calling out the best in each other, celebrating the beauty and mystery of life and revering the human capacity to create a better world together? What if we were a place where people could even pray to a horizontal God if they chose? I think we are that place or we can become it.
And guess what? There really are Martians walking into Unitarian Universalist congregations every Sunday. I’m referring to “MARTIANS” the acronym— M-A-R-T-I-A-N-S or Millennials Approaching Religion To Inspire And Nurture their Spirits. Just like the ones from Mars, these Martians don’t understand who we UU’s are or what we’re talking about it. Most of them aren’t fleeing bizarre religious beliefs because they’ve never been part of any faith tradition. They’re just working with the limited religious vocabulary they’ve inherited from the culture. What they do know is alienation. They’re worried about the future of the planet and coming generations. They believe they have some obligation to do something about it and that they can. But they know they can’t do it alone.
They long to know that there are religious communities that comport with reality and embrace an entirely different understanding of how love is at work in the world. They yearn for places where people worship together in awe, with reverence for what we human beings are capable of being and doing together.
When these Martians ask us what Unitarian Universalists believe about God, wouldn’t it be great to answer that question with clarity and conviction-- telling them straight up that we believe the Highest dwells within each of us—it is the motive power of love out that calls us to purpose in life and is evident in our best moments, waiting to be uncovered. And that we place our faith in the power of people, together, to unleash our full human potential, to affirm our living, and to create the world we know is possible.
The Martian is a little confused by this, but he figures it’s just some communication problem stemming from his Martian accent, so he goes on in and sits down in the sanctuary next to a friendly looking woman who is wearing a Black Lives Matter button and a chalice pin, and he turns to her: “Excuse me”, he says, “but can you tell me what Unitarian Universalists believe about God?” Now being a UU, the friendly lady answers a question with a question: “Well, what do you mean by ‘Believe?’” she asks. “For us, it’s really about objective facts and reason.”
By now the Martian is thinking that his language skills aren’t quite as good as he thought, and he gets even more confused during the service. He wonders: “What is this Spirit of Life they’re singing about? Is that God?” But he doesn’t want to embarrass himself by asking any more unanswerable questions, so he decides not to stay for the coffee hour.
Now of course the official answer to the Martian’s question about God is that we UU’s are non-creedal. We don’t ask our members to subscribe to any particular image or depiction of God, and we welcome people from all different traditions as well as those from no tradition. The only problem with this answer is that, while it’s completely accurate, it can sound to the uninitiated like when it comes to God we collectively hold to everything… and nothing.
When it comes to the concept of belief, we tend to shy away from the word because we don’t want to speak for what others might believe and because “belief” is a term we associate with doctrines that don’t comport with reason or reality. Yet we actually do passionately believe in many things, like for example the inherent worth and dignity of every person and our other six principles, not all of which can be supported by objective facts.
So we can get a little hung up on these words, and we can unintentionally confuse people about what we really believe about how the world works and what really matters. I want to suggest this morning that maybe it’s time for us to be just a little clearer about what we believe and maybe just a little more adept at translating some of this religious language. I say that not because I think there’s anything wrong with our way of being religious. I say it because I think that our way of being religious is exactly what more and more people long to know about and be a part of, especially right now. Many are just showing up with a different vocabulary.
This question about language became front and center for me when I served for several years as a resident chaplain at Tampa General Hospital. For those of you not familiar with Tampa General it’s an 1,100 bed Level One Trauma Center and the primary teaching hospital for the USF School of Medicine. It runs one of the nation’s top 10 organ transplant centers, and operates a fleet of helicopters that bring patients from 23 surrounding counties. And it’s a safety net hospital that serves everyone, regardless of who they are, or where they come from, or their ability to pay.
The role of chaplains there is to meet the needs of patients and families in crisis and help them find their own resources for dealing with the situation they find themselves in, and the first principle is to meet them wherever they are religiously. During my time there I worked with people of every imaginable faith and walk of life. Occasionally, I’d run into Jehovah’s Witnesses who wouldn’t talk to anybody outside their community, but pretty much everybody else would welcome me warmly, and would invite me into their personal lives. They’d share their deepest hopes and fears and beliefs, and it felt like a real privilege.
At first, though, I wasn’t sure how I could help someone who held radically different beliefs about God than I had, but slowly I began to realize that when push really comes to shove, our beliefs about what’s really important aren’t very different after all. At the end of the day we all want to know that our lives matter… and what matters most are the people in our lives and the love we share with them.
I came to understand that much of the religious doctrine and language most of us use is just the framework and vocabulary that we inherited for expressing these ideas. The great majority of people I met professed a belief in a God of some kind and the power of prayer, but unlike most of us UU’s, almost none of them spent much time thinking about the finer points of doctrine.
So at first when someone would ask me to pray for God’s help, I struggled with the fact that I don’t personally believe in an anthropomorphic male God floating above us in the clouds who hears prayers and intervenes in people’s individual lives. And I assumed that’s who they wanted me to pray to.
But I overcame that problem by offering what I thought of as “horizontal” prayers. Instead of praying vertically to a God above to intercede or prepare a place in Heaven, I would pray horizontally to a God alive in the hearts and hands of the people I met in the present world. I would pray with patients for peace for their minds and rest for their bodies; I would pray for the support of family and friends; I would pray in gratitude for the teams of nurses and doctors who were working day and night to help them heal; I would pray for their own inner strength and determination to see them through; I would pray in gratitude for all the lives touched by theirs, the ripples of which stretch to eternity.
In other words, prayers for me became an opportunity to give voice to our most fervent hopes-- that we find the resources within ourselves and our whole human community to heal and to lead lives of meaning.
What’s more, I became very comfortable naming that motive power of love alive in all these human beings… and calling it ‘God’. The amazing thing is that my patients were too. Not once did anyone question the object or content of my prayer. They all understood that, as Emerson said, “the Highest dwells within us,… the sources of nature are in our own minds.”
I think the same kind of translating might be needed when we talk about belief.
I mentioned earlier that a friend recommended Fantasyland, the book I excerpted for our reading. My friend is somebody whose parents placed a lot of emphasis on education and science and objective truth and who grew up entirely outside of religion. For him the book was eye-opening because it describes how Americans have a propensity to believe whatever they want to believe. Andersen’s premise is that from the beginning, European migrants chose to believe things that surpassed objective truth-- that America was a place where gold literally littered the landscape, the Biblical land of milk and honey-- and they went on to establish new colonies based on their own beliefs, not those of the old world order.
In Andersen’s telling, American religion is the worst-case example of this inclination toward fantasy, and our UU religious ancestors, the Puritans, come in for a lot of the blame. For starters they had the audacity to believe that they contained within themselves a certain divine intuition and had the right to call their own religious leaders from amongst themselves. But then many of them were also caught up in the idea that witches were possessed of evil spirits. As you probably know, the Salem Witch Trials were prosecuted by our Puritan ancestors and took place in what is now a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Later still, the Unitarians gave birth to the Transcendentalists who practiced seances and communicated with the spirits of the dead. Like people all over, our religious ancestors were pretty imaginative.
And when you look at the larger landscape of American religion, I have to admit that Andersen has a point. In addition to Unitarianism and Universalism, America is the birthplace for everything from Unity and Christian Science to Mormonism, the Nation of Islam, Scientology, the Prosperity Gospel, and every stripe of charismatic evangelical from Billy Graham all the way to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. The diversity of religious traditions and beliefs in this country is like no other, and some of the belief systems are outlandish creations that don’t conform to any reality I can identify. But it’s who we are.
As David Letterman said, “America is the only country where a significant portion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.”
But against the backdrop of all that fantasy, there are some other truths:
The first is that imagination, and a belief in possibility and human agency, have animated the American dream and actually made possible a quality of life and prosperity that none of those early migrants could have imagined. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” and he proved that you have to have both to accomplish breakthroughs.
The second truth is that we all believe in things that we can’t objectively prove, and what we choose to believe is critically important. As Emerson said, “a person will worship something—have no doubt about that. . . That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
As we see right now in our national politics, some foundational beliefs are life-giving and some are downright toxic. If we believe that the world is a zero sum game of winners and losers; that what matters most is that we get ours; that we’re witnesses to the end of the world and our reward awaits in heaven-- well then we might as well just build some more walls and jails and grab everything we can.
But I have to believe that even the people who profess to believe these things really have a hard time clinging to them, if only because it makes for such a lonely, empty existence. I think they profess these kinds of beliefs only out of sheer desperation because they don’t see any other reason to hope.
Never has it been more important “to be careful what we worship.” And never have Unitarian Universalists had something more important to offer the world than right now. We can offer an understanding of God that most Americans, whether religious or not, can actually believe in—and one that’s worthy of their reverence. What’s more, we can do it authentically, because it comes out of our 450 years of religious tradition. Like chaplains ministering to people in the hospital, we only need to meet people where they are and help translate some of these concepts for them.
When it comes to thinking about God in human terms, our tradition goes back to Arius at the Council of Nicea who argued that Jesus was a divinely inspired human – not one of a trinity of divine parts. He lost that argument in a close contest, because Constantine wanted God on his side and insisted on a uniform Christology for his empire.
In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, Miguel Servetus, a physician, got burned at the stake by Calvin for espousing the same Unitarian idea. And the American roots of Unitarianism trace to William Ellery Channing who created a split in the Boston clergy by asserting that Jesus was a divinely inspired human, suggesting that the Bible was not to be taken literally, and that people of other faith traditions had wisdom to share too.
Throughout our history the idea that Divinity is present in the natural world and in all of humanity has been at the very center of our tradition. Hosea Ballou’s Universalist belief that all of us are saved; Thoreau’s “Faith in a Seed;” Emerson’s “small still voice within.” These are all expressions of a divinity that is immanent and made manifest in the here and now through us and what we do.
And we have a long history of reconceiving of ‘God’ in new ways. Many early Universalist churches proclaimed in big letters right above the altar that “God is Love.” That’s my faith. Unitarians were early thinkers in Process Theology—the idea that God is not a being separate and apart, but is a verb expressed in our living; the divine expressed in love and action. In the mid-twentieth century Religious Humanism expressed our deepest faith in human ingenuity and reason and our ability to overcome our fears and rise to our better nature.
More recently, Religious Naturalism identifies the divine inherent in all the natural world, revealed through science in intricate, complex webs of relationship that we have yet to fully comprehend. It recognizes the unique role we humans play as the conscious agents of evolution. And that we are responsible for furthering life on the planet.
For Unitarian Universalists it doesn’t matter which of these particular ideas you resonate with or what you choose to call them. But what does matter is that we ultimately place our faith in the potential and possibility of people. And we do it despite momentary evidence to the contrary! All seven principles derive from this faith. For us it’s crystal clear that “that-which-is-larger-than-ourselves” acts in the world through us and is made real by our human creativity, compassion and care. And that belief sets us apart as a religion.
It also means that we have a life-affirming, hopeful way of being religious that makes sense to millions of Americans, whether religious or not, because we are the religion of human potential.
What if instead of worrying so much about religious language and doctrine, we made our congregations into places where people of all backgrounds come to find inspiration and be awakened to meaning and possibility? Places where people discover their sense of purpose in life and connect it with others who share it? Places where all people feel the opportunity to grow, and work together to remove the obstacles that hold us back. What if our congregations were places where people know they are never alone-- there for each other in times of joy and loss, triumph or catastrophe. What if every day we focused on calling out the best in each other, celebrating the beauty and mystery of life and revering the human capacity to create a better world together? What if we were a place where people could even pray to a horizontal God if they chose? I think we are that place or we can become it.
And guess what? There really are Martians walking into Unitarian Universalist congregations every Sunday. I’m referring to “MARTIANS” the acronym— M-A-R-T-I-A-N-S or Millennials Approaching Religion To Inspire And Nurture their Spirits. Just like the ones from Mars, these Martians don’t understand who we UU’s are or what we’re talking about it. Most of them aren’t fleeing bizarre religious beliefs because they’ve never been part of any faith tradition. They’re just working with the limited religious vocabulary they’ve inherited from the culture. What they do know is alienation. They’re worried about the future of the planet and coming generations. They believe they have some obligation to do something about it and that they can. But they know they can’t do it alone.
They long to know that there are religious communities that comport with reality and embrace an entirely different understanding of how love is at work in the world. They yearn for places where people worship together in awe, with reverence for what we human beings are capable of being and doing together.
When these Martians ask us what Unitarian Universalists believe about God, wouldn’t it be great to answer that question with clarity and conviction-- telling them straight up that we believe the Highest dwells within each of us—it is the motive power of love out that calls us to purpose in life and is evident in our best moments, waiting to be uncovered. And that we place our faith in the power of people, together, to unleash our full human potential, to affirm our living, and to create the world we know is possible.