Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: God

  • What Do We Tell Children about God, Death, etc.?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Reading

    The reading was from an essay titled “Home-grown Unitarian Universalism” by William J. Doherty. Dr. Doherty recently retired as professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and has worked with couples and families as a therapist since 1977. This essay was published in UU World magazine in 2008.

    “It was 1980. I had been a Unitarian Universalist for about two years when my seven-year-old son Eric said to me, ‘Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?’

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever,’ I replied, ‘and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.’

    “‘What do you believe?’ said Eric.

    “‘Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven, and other people believe….’

    “‘But what do you believe?’

    “‘OK,’ I said. ‘I believe that when we die we live on through other people but not in a heaven.’

    “Eric took this in and responded with words I will never forget: ‘I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.’

    “My seven-year-old was teaching me something. He was being a developmentally appropriate UU child, but I was not being a developmentally appropriate UU parent. He knew he needed answers, for now, to an important religious question, and he also knew that he could seek his own answers when he was ready. For my part, being a former Roman Catholic still fleeing dogmatism, I was afraid of imposing my beliefs on my child. So I responded to him as if he were a 20-year-old taking a course on world religions. I had a better sense of what not to do as a UU parent — don’t impose my beliefs — than of what to do, namely, give him religious guidance.”

    Sermon

    Here’s the question I’d like to consider with you: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? In many religious traditions, I’d answer that question by giving you scripted answers to all the most important religious questions. But Unitarian Universalism has no dogma — no scripted answers to life’s big questions. This complicates matters somewhat. If we don’t tell other people what to believe, then what are we supposed to say to children when they ask these big questions?

    Yet as we heard in the first reading, sometimes Unitarian Universalist kids want a firm and definite answer. When professor William J. Doherty’s seven year old child Eric asked, “Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?” Doherty reacted as a good Unitarian Universalist. Doherty gave his son a college professor’s lecture: “Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever … and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.” This was not the reply Eric wanted, and he demanded to know what his father believed. And when Doherty finally told him, Eric said: “I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.”

    So if you’re a parent, and like Bill Doherty you have a child who has not yet reached puberty, often there will be a fairly simple answer to the question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious and existential questions? You tell your child what your answers to those questions are, assuming they will accept your answers for now. Sometimes you may find it challenging to provide ready answers to questions of what you believe, but for the most part children will be more or less content with the answers given by their parents.

    However, if a child asks you one of those questions, and you are not their parent, then you have to give a different kind of answer. If the child is not your own child, you cannot simply say, “What we believe is this.” If you did that, you’d be stepping into the role of their parent; not even grandparents can get away with that. That leaves you with three options. First, you can give an answer that sounds like the first answer Bill Doherty gave to his son Eric, something to the effect of: “Well, some people think, thus and so, while other people think something else.” Second, you could tell the child what your personal answer to that question might be. And the third option is to combine those two — so if, for example, a child asks you, “What happens after we die?” you can reply something like this: “Different people have different answers to that question; some people believe that you go to a place called heaven after you die; some people believe that you are reborn as another person or animal after you die; some people believe that you when die you can live on in other people’s memories; and what I believe is….” Thus in the third option, you first tell the child some of the answers that other people give, and you conclude by stating what you believe.

    These strategies work fairly well for children. Once a child hits puberty, though, everything changes. Developmental psychologist tell us that in the middle school years, young people begin for the first time to have the ability to reason abstractly; developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this the formal operational stage of cognitive development. When young people achieve the ability to reason abstractly, this new stage of cognitive development gives them the ability to question everything. While this can be exhausting for their parents, for the young people themselves it can be an incredibly exciting time. When you’re in your middle school years, your cognitive horizons begin to expand rapidly: all of a sudden, you can understand things that you couldn’t understand before; entire new worlds open up before you. And while this can be an exhausting developmental stage for their parents, those of us who teach or mentor young adolescents can also find this an incredibly exciting time. Personally, I love talking with young adolescents as they use their new ability to reason abstractly to tackle big existential questions; I love their fearlessness and excitement as they begin to think hard about life’s biggest questions for the first time.

    Once people get to the age where they can reason abstractly, you can’t respond in the same way you respond to children. When a young adolescent asks, “What happens after we die?” they don’t want the same kind of response that a child wants. In fact, if a young adolescent asks you a question like that, the best way to answer is to respond in exactly the same way you’d respond if one of your age peers asked you that same question. Most especially, it’s important not to be condescending or patronizing — no more than you would condescend or patronize someone your own age who asked a serious question. This is true no matter what age you are; I’ve actually seen older teens condescend to younger teens, and not surprisingly, it didn’t go well. I’ve also seen middle aged adults patronize their elders — once again, it didn’t go well.

    I actually have a couple of theories that explain why some people are condescending or patronizing when asked one of life’s biggest questions like what happens after we die, or is there a deity, or is there any meaning to life. First theory: If someone asks you a big question like that, and you haven’t really thought it through, you may try to avoid answering the question by being condescending or patronizing. Second theory: Some people turn condescending or patronizing because they don’t want to have to talk about that subject to that person. So, for example, when your aging parent who’s in poor health asks you, “What happens after we die?” — and you know they’re asking that question because they’re thinking about their own imminent death — you might try to dodge the whole subject by saying something like, “Now let’s not talk about such things right now. Let’s make sure we feel all comfy and cosy” — which while well-meaning sounds a bit patronizing or condescending.

    Let’s dwell for a moment on that particular situation of someone who’s in ill health and who is probably already thinking about their own death. If someone in that situation asks you “What happens when we die?” — you may find it emotionally difficult to give your own answer. If so, you can simply turn the question back to them, and say: “Well, I’d have to think about it. But what do YOU think happens after we die?” And then all you have to do is listen carefully to what they say.

    Indeed, it’s always a good idea to be prepared to listen carefully to the other person whenever someone brings up one of life’s biggest questions. Even when you’re talking to your own child, you can give them your answer to whatever big question they raised, then check to make sure what you said makes sense to them — did you use words they could understand, and did they follow what you said? If you’re talking with a child, it’s also important to remember that children can have profound spiritual experiences at a very young age, experiences that they might not be able to articulate well. The author Dan Wakefield, in his 1985 memoir “Returning,” described a profound spiritual experience he had when he was a child:

    “On an ordinary school night I went to bed, turned out the light, said the Lord’s prayer as I always did, and prepared to go to sleep. I lay there for only a few moments, not long enough to go to sleep (I was clearly and vividly awake during this whole experience) when I had the sensation that my whole body was filled with light. It was a white light of such brightness and intensity that it seemed almost alive. It was neither hot nor cold, neither burning nor soothing, it was simply there, filling every part of my body from my head to my feet.”

    Dan Wakefield’s parents were nominally Christian, and so of course he understood this experience in Christian terms, as the light of Christ. Now Wakefield wrote that he didn’t tell anyone about his experience for some years. But when finally he did tell an adult about this experience, I hope that adult would not be dismissive of something that felt like a very real experience to him. Sometimes when children ask a parent one of life’s big questions, they not only want to know what they parent thinks; sometimes they also want the parent to listen to something they have to say.

    Whether it’s an aging parent confronting their own mortality, or a child who’s had a profound spiritual experience, sometimes when people ask one of life’s big questions, they’re using that question as an opening to tell you about something they’ve experienced, or something they’ve thought hard about. So when one of these big questions arises, you have to be prepared both to give an answer, and to listen carefully.

    It’s even more important to be prepared to listen carefully if you’re talking to someone who has reached the age where they can reason abstractly, whether that person is a teen or an adult. I’ll give a couple of examples of what I mean. When someone asks, “What happens after we die?” — it might be that they’re simply curious to know, it might mean that one of their friends brought the subject up, or the question might be prompted by a health scare they have had. Or when someone asks, “is there a God?” — it might be they have a straightforward intellectual interest in the question, it might be they’ve heard something in popular culture the piqued their interest, or it might be that they’ve had some kind of transcendent experience (like the one Dan Wakefield had) which they’re trying to make sense of. In other words, sometimes what seems to be a simple question has other layers of meaning — and of course at other times, what seems to be a simple question actually is a simple question.

    It might seem that you’ll have the easiest time when someone asks you a simple question that really is nothing more than a simple question. But a simple question that is nothing more than a simple question might actually be the hardest one to answer, because then you have to give an answer that is honest and genuine. If your aging parent starts talking about what happens after you die, and you figure out that what they really want to talk about is their own feelings about their own approaching death (which once happened to me), then all you have to do is listen to their their feelings and concerns; you don’t have to try to articulate your own half-formed answer to the question. If, on the other hand, another adult asks you what happens after we die and you realize they sincerely want to know, I feel we have a duty to do the best we can to answer that question; and this is true whether the person asking the question is a child, a teen, or an adult. We have a duty to take other people seriously.

    This implies that we should spend some time thinking through some of life’s biggest questions, so that when we are asked one of those questions, we can give a more or less coherent answer. Because of my job, I actually have these conversations fairly often, and I’ve come up with five basic questions that cover most — not all, but most — of life’s big questions. I’ve found it helpful to think through these questions on my own, so that when someone springs a big life question, I won’t be completely at a loss. I offer these questions hoping they might be useful to you in the same way.

    Here’s the first big question: What should I do with my life? — or you might ask: What’s the purpose of my life? For most Unitarian Universalists, this question is the most important of all religious questions. We are a pragmatic people, and this question forces us to think about our own ethics and morality, to think about what we want to prioritize in our lives.

    Second big question: Who am I? — which goes with several related questions, including: What am I capable of? What kind of being am I? This question often comes up after you’ve tried to think through the first question. Because if you want to figure out what you should do with your life, maybe first you have to figure out who you are.

    Third big question: What’s the nature of goodness? — and there are other questions related to this, like: Where does goodness come from? Where do suffering and evil come from? The question of goodness is also a major concern for most Unitarian Universalists. As a pragmatic people, we want to make the world a better place. And if you want to make the world a better place, then it’s probably a good idea to figure out what you man by “better.”

    Fourth big question: What can I know? — which goes along with related questions like: How do I know what I know? How do I know what is true? For many Unitarian Universalists, questions about truth encompass many of the traditional religious questions like: Is there a God? and: What happens after death? Thus if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do not believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends may treat this as a question of how we know what is true, saying: How do you know that God does not exist? Or if a Unitarian Universalist says that they do believe in God, their Unitarian Universalist friends are going to ask the same question: How do you know? There’s a reason why we tend to lump these traditional religious questions together and treat them as questions about truth. Most of us know people who hold a vast range of beliefs. Thinking just of the people I happen to know, my acquaintances include people who are atheists, agnostics, New Age-ers, Pagans, many different varieties of Christian, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, even a Zoroastrian. Each of these people has a worldview that claims to be true, yet they disagree in fundamental ways. So how can I know which of them is right; how can I know what is true?

    Fifth, and finally: Does my life have any meaning? (And if so, where does that meaning come from?) For many Unitarian Universalists, the question about what happens after death often resolves to the deeper question of whether an individual human life has any meaning or not. And many of us are existentialist who believe that there is no pre-existing meaning but that we create meaning through our actions; so to ask if my life has meaning is to inquire into the meaning I’m already making through the way I’m living right now.

    Now let’s circle back to my opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions? One partial answer I’ve given is that we parents are going to provides answers those questions for their own children, at least until their children develop the ability to reason abstractly. Another partial answer: when someone asks one of those questions, we should listen carefully, because sometimes when people ask you those big questions they’re really saying something else. Another partial answer: because we are part of the human community, we have the responsibility to take such questions seriously, and not try to dodge them or dismiss them. So those are some partial answers to the opening question: What do we tell children about God, death, and all those other big religious questions?

    And the ultimate answer is this: The only way to provide answers to the big questions about life, the universe, and everything — is to spend time thinking about those questions yourself. That’s actually why I keep coming here every week, to keep myself in practice at answering these big questions — because this congregation is a place where people do ask those big questions, where people do think seriously about them.

  • Who Deserves Our Love?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. Once again this week, more than the usual number of typos and errors, but I didn’t have time to correct them — sorry!

    Readings

    The first reading was June Jordan’s poem “Alla Tha’s All Right, but”

    The second reading was June Jordan’s poem “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

    The final reading was from Jordan’s introduction to her book of poems titled “Passion.”

    In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and unity… and a deliberate balancing … of sensory report with moral exhortation.

    Sermon: “Who Deserves Our Love?”

    The English language has some distinct limitations. For example, we only have one word for “love.” Contrast this with ancient Greek, which has half a dozen words that can be translated by the one English word “love.” This creates some problems for us English speakers, because we’re the inheritors of the Western intellectual tradition which extends back to ancient Greece. When you’re speaking English and you hear the word “love,” you have to automatically do some internal translation.

    When this person says “love,” do they mean erotic or romantic love? Do they mean the love that can exist between good friends? What about the love that exists between parents and children, which is different than the love that exists between good friends, because where friends are more or less equal, there’s an imbalance of power between parent and child — at least there is when the child is young. Then there’s love of oneself, which is a virtue when it’s tied to ordinary self respect, but is a vice when it becomes self-obsession.

    Finally, there’s a kind of selfless love, the kind of love where you continue to love even when you get nothing out of it. The early Christians picked up on this last kind of love — the ancient Greek name for it is “agape” — and integrated it into their conception of God, and their formulation of the Golden Rule. The story of the Good Samaritan is a story of agape-type love.

    As English speakers, we have all these different kinds of love sort of mushed together into the one word. This can cause a certain amount of confusion. But I think it’s also useful for people like Unitarian Universalists, who spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how we can be the best people possible. We also spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get through the day to day challenges that life throws at us, things like the death of people we love, or betrayals by people we thought we loved, and so on. Life rarely breaks down into neat, tidy categories. So I find it helpful to know that love doesn’t necessarily break down into neat tidy categories either.

    And this brings me to the book of poetry that June Jordan published way back in 1980. The title of the book is “Passion.” The poems in the book cover a wide range. There are poems about passionate erotic and romantic love, as we heard in the first reading — and here I should point out that June Jordan was part of the LGBTQ+ community, so when she’s talking about passionate erotic and romantic love, she’s not restricting that love to opposite sex attraction. June Jordan also has a couple of poems in that book that are about rape. These particular poems are pretty graphic, and I find them very difficult to read — I’m giving you fair warning, in case you decide to pick up this book and read through it. But these poems are included for a reason. Jordan wants us to understand how for her as a woman, passionate erotic love can also become something twisted.

    There are also poems about relationships between equals, the love of friendship between equals. That’s what we heard in the second reading, the poem titled “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades.” I’ll read you the last few lines of the poem again:

    Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant
    or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight
    or are you gay?
    And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind

    I love this poem because I’ve had this sort of thing happen to me in my own friendships. And I’ve done this to others. We humans tend to put each other into boxes. We put people into boxes based on skin color, age, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, political party…. Let me pause here and focus on political party, because that’s where people are putting other people into boxes a lot right now. And it’s pretty ugly. I hear Republicans talking about “Sleepy Joe” Biden, and I hear Democrats talking about “Dementia Donald” Trump. There’s no love lost here — there’s no love present here, none at all, just rank stereotyping and sometimes naked hatred.

    This is what we humans do. We strive for love. We want to create a world where all people are loved equally. But when reality confronts us with other people who are doing things which we find distasteful or reprehensible or misguided, we can switch from universal love to individual hatred pretty quickly.

    I feel like this has become a spiritual crisis in our country. There is a lot of demonization going on all around us. Going back to June Jordan’s poem, we all find ourselves saying unpleasant things about other people — that other people are too racist or too anti-racist, that other people are too much of a nationalist, that other people are too stupid, or too angry, or too idealistic. This kind of thing tips over into demonization very quickly. We demonize people, imagining them as demons rather than humans, when we feel those other people are too angry, or too old, or too different. To which June Jordan replies — “Hey! it’s not about my mind.” She’s right. Demonization is always about the mind of the person who does the demonizing. I’ve done my share of demonizing recently, mostly aimed at politicians and public figures with whom I don’t agree, and that demonizing that I do is more about me than about the person at whom I direct it. When I demonize someone, it damages me, and it damages our public discourse.

    We need to find a way out of this — a way out of these demonizing behaviors that dominate our public discourse right now. To do so, I’m going to go back to one of our great spiritual resources, our Universalist tradition.

    The early Universalists were Christians, of course, and not all of us now are Christians. But those early Universalists got at some universal truths through their liberal Christian tradition. One of those truths is encapsulated in the phrase, “God is love.” If you’re a Christian, this phrase might focus you on the Christian God. From that perspective, this phrase defines God as being all about love. If you’re not a Christian, though, this phrase can still make sense. Here in the West, the term “God” serves as a philosophical placeholder for the object of our ultimate concern. So this phrase need not be taken literally. It can be understood quite simply as saying that love is our ultimate concern.

    The old Universalists wanted everyone to see the truth of that phrase, “God is love.” They understood that if God is love, there can be no such thing as eternal damnation, because love must eventually overpower hatred and evil. Instead, hell is something that happens here on earth, during our lifetimes, when we forget that love is supposed to be our ultimate concern. In particular, hell can arise here on earth when one group of people demonizes another group of people. Of course it feels hellish to be on the receiving end of the hatred that comes with racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ageism, and so on. But hell also arises in the hearts of those who demonize others. When we demonize others we throw ourselves into hell, into a place where hatred is more important than human connection.

    So the old Universalists wanted us to get ourselves out of any hell that is here and now. They wanted everyone to truly feel in their bones that love is the most powerful force in the universe. They wanted to build their religious communities centered on love. The early Universalist Hosea Ballou put it like this: “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, and if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”

    Over the next century or so, the Universalists pulled back from that early trust in the power of love. The power of evil seemed so strong that they returned to the old idea that there must be some kind of punishment after death. They decided that God would in fact condemn some people to hell, it just wouldn’t be forever. In other words, they decided that God might be love, but that God’s love had limits to it.

    But in my view, they weren’t really thinking about God, they were thinking about themselves. They weren’t asking: Who deserves God’s love? Or to put it in non-theistic terms: Who deserves to be included in our ultimate concern? Instead, they were asking: Who deserves my love? IThey were saying: ’m not so concerned with ultimate concerns, I’m narrowly concerned with whom do I love? And whom do I not love? Even: whom do I hate?

    Now remember the different meanings that the word “love” has in the English language. Of course we limit our romantic love to our romantic partners. Of course we limit parent-child love to our own families. Of course we limit the kind of love that exists in friendships to our friends. But there is also that larger love, that unconditional love, which extends to all of humanity.

    It takes a truly great person to be able to extend universal unconditional love to all persons. Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to extend a universal unconditional love even to the White racists who beat him and jailed him and reviled him, the people who hated him and did everything they could to keep him in the little box they constructed for him. When I say he extended a universal love to the White racists, I don’t mean that he wanted to become best friends with them. I don’t mean that he liked them. I don’t even mean that he loved them personally. What he did was to see that even those White racists had an inherent worthiness, they had an inherent human dignity. From within his progressive Christian world view, he saw that God loved those White racists, and he respected that universal love.

    By doing this, Martin Luther King, Jr., set an example for the rest of the world. In fact, he changed the world. His understanding of universal love changed the world. It might not have seemed like it at the time, but his unconditional love for all humanity, expressed through nonviolent action, changed even those White racists permanently.

    Universal love is a real spiritual challenges right now. I don’t know about you, but I’m not as good a person as Martin Luther King, Jr. I find it quite difficult to turn the other cheek. Yet when I think about it, it’s pretty clear that responding to hatred and demonization with more hatred and demonization is probably just going to make things worse. I’m not as good as Martin Luther King, Jr., so I’m not sure that I can rise to the level of feeling that universal love.

    What I can do — what all of us can do — is to do a little less demonizing. Asking ourselves to stop demonizing certain very public figures, such as the leading politicians of the other political party, is probably too much to ask. If you’re a member of one political party, you don’t have to love politicians in the other political party. Start small. Start with people you know here on the South Shore who are of a different political persuasion than you. When we see people who are different from us face to face, we can disagree with them, but we can also try to remember that they, too, are deserving of universal love.

    This is going to be difficult in this election year — and this is an election cycle that promises to be especially rancorous. But here’s what I’ve found. Every time I manage to stop myself from demonizing some political figure, I feel a tiny sense of relief. I feel better about myself, too; I like myself better. I find that I’m also just a little bit nicer to my spouse. It’s not a huge effect, but I can notice the difference. I’m a little bit happier, I’m a little more at peace with myself and with the world.

    Perhaps this is part of what Martin Luther King, Jr., was trying to tell us with his theory of nonviolent action. Real change begins within our hearts and minds, and then spreads outwards to affect others.

  • No God But You and Me

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, by James Turner.

    “On an autumnal day in 1869, Charles Eliot Norton sat down in his Swiss resort to write to his friend and confidant John Ruskin. Norton moved with ease among the most eminent writers of England and America. Son of the distinguished Unitarian theologian Andrews Norton, he had helped to found the magazine Nation and had recently retired as editor of the North American Review. He counted among his intimates James Russell Lowell, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Frederick Law Olmsted, and shared friendships as well with such men as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Louis Agassiz, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Few men were as well positioned to register the early tremors of any slippage in the primordial strata of Anglo-American culture.

    ” ‘There is a matter on which I have been thinking much of late,’ he confessed to Ruskin. ‘It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.’ As he tried to sort out the implications of his loss of faith, Norton wondered, ‘What education in these matters ought I to give my children?… It is in some respects a new experiment.’

    “It was in many respects a new experiment. For over a thousand years Europeans had assumed the existence of God. Their faith might be orthodox or heretical, simple or complex, easy or troubled — and for serious, thoughtful people, it was very often troubled, complex, even heretical. Yet failing to believe somehow in some sort of deity was not merely rare; it was a bizarre aberration. Then, in Norton’s generation, thousands, eventually millions of Europeans and Americans began to abandon their belief in God. Before about the middle of the nineteenth century, atheism or agnosticism seemed almost palpably absurd; shortly afterward unbelief emerged as an option fully available within the general contours of Western culture, a plausible alternative to the still dominant theism.” [pp. 1 ff.]

    The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, Matthew 12.28. In this passage, the radical Jesus has gone to Jerusalem, and has already upset the authorities.

    “One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ — this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

    So end this morning’s readings.

    SERMON — “No God but You and Me”

    Just to warn you: this is the first in an occasional series of sermons this year on Unitarian Universalist beliefs about God.

    Growing up as I did, a Unitarian Universalist in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the dominant religious influence in my life was religious humanism — or, as some people prefer to term it, religious atheism — the religious position that says that there is no God, no divine power of any kind, nothing supernatural about the world. I grew up in a church where most of the church members did not believe in God. Even though our minister at the time was an avowed Unitarian Christian, to the best of my recollection he never tried to impose his particular understanding of God on the congregation — not that it has ever been possible to impose such understandings on Unitarian Universalists.

    Not that I had all that much to do with the minister of the church. As a child, my church experience was mostly shaped by Sunday school classes, by adults who were friendly to me, by children’s chapel, and, later on, by youth group. We learned about God in Sunday school, to be sure. We were even given Bibles when we got to fifth grade. We had no pictures on the walls of the Sunday school classrooms that supposedly represented God. If we wanted to believe in God, that was fine; and if we didn’t want to believe in God, that was fine, too.

    When I was older and a part of the church youth group, we talked about all kinds of things, including God and whether or not each of us believed in God. Our youth advisor was the assistant minister of the church, and as it happened he did believe in God. (In fact, he later left Unitarian Universalism and became a minister in the United Church of Christ, although he later told me the reason he switched denominations had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the fact that the United Church of Christ was more active in prison, which struck me as a very Unitarian Universalist sort of attitude.) The discussion from my youth group days that I remember most vividly had nothing to do with God; it was a discussion of Zen Buddhism, and ko-ans, and satori or enlightenment. When I was in youth group, I was much more interested in understanding what it meant to achieve enlightenment, than I was in arguing over God’s alleged nature or existence.

    I tell you all this by way of an excuse. The end result of my upbringing is that I’m not particularly interested in arguments about whether or not God exists. When someone tells me that she doesn’t believe in God, I’m likely to respond, What are the characteristics of the God in which you do not believe? When someone tells me that he does believe in God, I’m likely to respond in much the same way, What are the characteristics of the God in which you do believe? In asking these questions, I have found that there are nearly as many descriptions of the characteristics of God, as there are believers and non-believers combined. That doesn’t make me any more or less likely to believe in God myself, but it does make me far less likely to argue with someone over the existence or non-existence of God, because more often than not the person you argue with is arguing about a different God than you are arguing about. Such arguments seem fruitless to me. Such arguments seem like a kind of idolatry, where idolatry means attributing too much importance to something, an importance far beyond its actual worth.

    Now I’ve made my excuses about why I’m not particularly interested in arguing with you about whether or not God exists. Yet I remain very interested in the way different beliefs about God affect how people act in the world. And I suspect that my indifference to arguments about God’s existence, and my interest in how beliefs affect people’s actions, has very much to do with the fact that I was surrounded by humanists and atheists when I was a child. The humanists and atheists I knew didn’t give two hoots about what you believed, but they cared a great deal about what you did. And the humanists and atheists I knew were staunchly opposed to idolatry in any form; they taught me that action is always more important than belief.

    The Unitarian Universalist humanists I have known have all cared deeply about what people do with their lives. I have a theory about why this is so. As Unitarian Universalists, we are heirs to the great traditional of liberal Western Christianity. The liberal Christian tradition in the West has emphasized one teaching above all others. Other Christians have emphasized the mysteries of the Trinity, or the rules by which Christians are supposed to live, or they have emphasized the final fate of humanity, or humanity’s sinfulness, or fear of a vengeful God, or the liberating power of a God who’s on your side, or Jesus as Lord and Savior, or one of many other aspects of Christianity. But liberal Christians have emphasized one simple teaching, summed up in the words of Jesus that we heard in the second reading: “The first [commandment] is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

    Those of you who are particularly observant will have noticed that Jesus says a few different things in this passage. First, being a good observant Jew, Jesus recites the Shema Yisrael: “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad” — and forgive my bad pronunciation of the Hebrew. “Shema Yisrael,” which means: Hear O Israel; “Adonai,” a word we translate as “Lord” and which is substituted because it is improper to say the true, proper name of God aloud; “Eloheinu” meaning roughly “our god,” as long as you remember that this isn’t a name of God; “Echad,” which tells us that God is one, or that Jesus pays homage to God alone. This prayer formula, which comes from the book of Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4, is something Jesus would probably have said each and every day when he prayed.

    Then Jesus adds the next verses from Deuteronomy, as was likely done by Jews in his time as it is by Jews in our time. In Deuteronomy, the story is told that God says to Moses: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Jesus knew this old story about Moses. So after repeating the Shema, that’s what Jesus says next: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

    This is the first of two great commandments that liberal Christianity inherited from Jesus, who inherited it from Moses and the ancient writers of the book of Deuteronomy. When certain Unitarian Universalists chose no longer to believe in the God of Moses, or the God of Jesus, then as inheritors of this tradition, they were left with the second great commandment of Jesus, to wit: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

    This second great commandment also comes from the books about Moses, this time to the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18. In this part of Leviticus, God is speaking to Moses, giving rules for good and moral conduct, and God says, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am [Adonai].” Or, as Everett Fox more dramatically translates it, “You are not to take-vengeance, you are not to retain-anger… but be-loving to your neighbor (as one) like yourself: I am [Adonai].”

    Remove God from liberal Christianity, and what is left is this second commandment, this powerful moral injunction: Love your neighbor as yourself. Do not take vengeance, do not retain anger: be loving towards your neighbor who is another human being like yourself. And this has proven to be an adequate foundation on which to build religious humanism in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. Indeed, this has proven to be an adequate common ground for Unitarian Universalism as a whole to maintain its integrity as a coherent religious tradition, in spite of the fact that we differ widely in our views of the divine. The liberal Christians among us still repeat the other parts of Jesus’s dictum, that God is one and to love God with all your heart, etc.; and they say, love your neighbor as yourself. The Jews among us might still affirm that passage from Deuteronomy (or they might not); and they say, love your neighbor as one like yourself. The Pagans among us might pay homage to the Goddess, and they would say treat other beings with the respect you yourself are due. The humanists among us see no need for any gods or goddesses, and they affirm that we must love one another as we would ourselves be loved.

    I sometimes think that could more difficult to be a humanist and not believe in God, than to be someone who believes in a God or gods or goddesses. If the universe does not include some sort of benevolent higher power, perhaps it is harder to maintain one’s faith in the goodness of the universe, and particularly the goodness of human beings. For if there is no higher power, if it’s just you and me, then who are we to blame for evil? Love other people as we would love ourselves — those are fine words to say, but in a world filled with evil, it may be hard to live those words into reality. Ours is a world in which some people torture other people; when I read the horror stories of what torturers do to fellow human beings, I find it difficult or impossible to love those torturers as my neighbor. Whereas perhaps if there is a god or goddess, he or she or it would perhaps be able to love even torturers. Or what about people who engage in genocide? –how am I supposed to love them? If there is no higher power, if it’s just you and me, then you know who we must blame for evil — we must blame humanity, we must blame ourselves.

    So we come to one of the great teachings of the humanists. The humanists have taught us that we must take full responsibility for our own actions. We cannot blame evil on God, or on the devil, or on mischievous spirits. We human beings have to take responsibility for evil, because ultimately evil is caused by us human beings.

    The great gift that we all have received from the humanists, from the atheists, is a great big mirror. Instead of looking up at some abstract heaven for answers, the humanists have taught us all that we should look in a mirror first, and ask ourselves for the answers. That also means looking in the mirror and seeing our own limitations. We are limited beings; we don’t have all the answers. Even if you believe in God, or in goddesses and gods, or in some kind of higher power, you must learn how to know yourself; and next you must learn how to love yourself; and you must also learn how to love your neighbor as yourself. All this comes from the great gift that humanists have given to all of us.

    I said earlier that the humanists and atheists I knew were staunchly opposed to idolatry in any form; where idolatry means attributing too much importance to something, an importance far beyond its actual worth. It is fine if you are someone who finds God indispensable to your understanding of the universe; I know that I cannot understand the universe without some sort of higher transcendent power. It’s fine if you are a theist who believes in God, but religious humanism teaches us that to love your neighbor as yourself is of first importance; actions are more important than beliefs; what you do with your beliefs is far more important than the niggling little details of whatever beliefs you might have.

    Jesus reduced his religion to two great commandments, but the second is greater than the first. Yes, you should love your God (or goddess, or the universe) with all your heart, mind, and being. But then, love your neighbor as yourself. The first commandment cannot be complete without the second commandment. If you believe in God, the only way to prove that you truly are a believer is to love your neighbor as yourself. If you are a humanist, and you believe that there is no God but you and me, you still show your devotion in the same way: by loving your neighbor as yourself.