Sermons

November 8, 2009
Radical Trust

Radical Trust
(Belief For Non-Believers)
a sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From the Rev. Steve Eddington, “Belief For Non-Believers,” Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire, September 27, 2009
“The term Non-Believer is generally used to refer to persons who have rejected the beliefs (small ‘b’) of one traditional religion or another; or who have rejected any of the more traditional concepts of God. But such a rejection, in and of itself, does not make one a ‘non-believer.”

2. From the Rev. Frederic John Muir, Heretic’s Faith: Vocabulary For Religious Liberals, 2001
“...faith is a complex subject with many dimensions and levels. Don’t be too eager to embrace too much or dismiss the obvious or the hard-to-understand. We all have faith, and deciphering what it is and how we arrived at it is an exploration well worth the effort.”

3. From the Rev. A. Powell Davies, Without Apology: Collected Meditations on Liberal Religion, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998
“Faith is not a thing of contemplation only, but of our experience on the earth. There is no way of knowing how much meaning there is in life unless we trust the meaning that we find. All too many people want to argue themselves into a meaningful religion. It cannot be done. We live ourselves into religion, and thinking is only a part of living. A deepening of spiritual awareness is never casual. It must be sought. It must be looked for in experience. Truth never reveals itself as an ultimate principle to those who do not serve it as a rule of life.”

THE SERMON
I am a non-believer. I do not believe in the Roman god Jupiter, nor his wife Juno; nor do I believe in Apollo, Mars, or Venus. That means that Romans in the first or second century of our Common Era would have regarded me as an atheist, in the same way that they thought the early Christians were atheists. The Christians were considered atheists because they did not believed in the gods that everyone else believed in. They were non-believers.
We are all non-believers in someone’s eyes. Maybe you don’t believe in Vishnu, Shiva, or Brahma. Maybe you don’t believe in Xenu, or in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And maybe you don’t believe in Allah or Yahweh. Maybe you don’t believe in any god. Or maybe you do. But whatever you believe, you also disbelieve some things, and so in someone’s eyes, you are a non-believer.
Non-believers have been in the news in the past couple of years. No fewer than five books by a group of writers who have been dubbed “the New Atheists” have appeared on best-seller lists in the past few years. Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great have delighted some readers and scandalized others.
The New Atheists are alarmed by Muslim extremists who hijack jetliners in order to crash them into buildings; Christian extremists like Jim Jones who convinced his followers to give poisoned Kool-aid to their children, and David Koresh’s followers who battled the ATF in Waco; Catholics and Protestants who spent decades bombing one another in Northern Ireland; fundamentalist Christians who look forward to a violent Battle of Armageddon, when Jews, liberals, and other heathens will either convert or be wiped out; Jewish extremists who believe they have a right to take over the West Bank by force and bulldoze the homes of the Palestinians; Palestinian extremists who fire rockets into Israel; and Hindu and Muslim extremists who murder one another in India, just to give a few examples.
Sam Harris writes, “Millions among us, even now, are willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.” He continues, “The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not ‘cowards,’ as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith – perfect faith, as it turns out – and this, it must be finally acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.”
The New Atheists have suggested that all religions are not only wrong, but are, in fact, evil. As Richard Dawkins puts it in The God Delusion, “But my point ... is that even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes. ... Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. ... If children were taught to question and to think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.”
But the New Atheists seem to dismiss the thousands of food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, orphanages and hospitals run by religious people all around the world. They make it easy to miss the fact that Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hahn, the Dalai Lama and many others were all inspired by their religious beliefs to work for peace, justice and equality. While many people cloak their prejudices and bigotry in religious language, and use religion as an excuse for oppression, discrimination, and war, religion has also been a force for good in the world.

Religious ignorance and fear ~
When I read the New Atheists I find quite a lot I agree with. For instance, I am both amazed and amused by the large number of American Christians who claim that they live by the Ten Commandments, but then can’t name more than two or three of them. 93% of Americans own at least one Bible, but most don’t know what’s in it. Comedian Jay Leno has great fun going out on the street to interview people about religion. He’ll ask a passerby a question such as, “On the first day of Creation, God said, ‘Let there be ______.’” And people will respond, “Um, peace!” A 1997 survey found that 12% of Americans believe that Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife. Nearly one in ten Americans think that Moses was one of Jesus’ Twelve Disciples.
But the New Atheists will tell us that it doesn’t matter whether or not Americans know their Bibles or understand what their churches teach, because religion is a bad thing anyway. Well, I agree that there are a lot of people who accept simplistic beliefs so literally, and hold on to those beliefs so fanatically, that it sometimes frighten me. The recent vote here in Maine in which 53% of the voters decided to unfairly discriminate against gays and lesbians, denying them a basic human right, the right to marry, was based, I believe, on a combination of fear and prejudice. When people are different from us, whether they are Black, Hispanic, Native American (Indian), left-handed, gay, etc., there is a tendency to fear the unknown. So those who wanted to repeal equality ran a campaign that played on people’s worst fears. And who was behind the effort to demonize our gay and lesbian neighbors, friends, relatives and church members? The Religious Right – Christian fundamentalists allied with the Catholic Diocese of Maine, and secretly funded by a group that refused to comply with Maine law to reveal their donors. It’s all disheartening that in this day and age we can’t let people who love one another have the same rights as the rest of us, and get on with their quite ordinary lives. But the Religious Right has somehow made their obsession with sex into a central political issue. In a world filled with war, poverty, disease and starvation, the Religious Right manages to focus everyone’s attention on who is sleeping with whom and why that should scare us.

What Kind of God?
So I have many agreements with the New Atheists. My quarrel with them has very little to do with their arguments against fundamentalism. But I disagree with their insistence that all religion is bad, and that all belief in God is ridiculous. They are able to make fun of the idea of God because they choose to define God in a certain way, and dismiss all other definitions. Dawkins, in The God Hypothesis, decides that the old man in the sky is what all religious people believe in, and is the only definition worth discussing. His definition of God is this: “There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it including us.” Okay, he has described the Hindu god Brahma, and also has described what many people believe about Yahweh, the God of the Bible – but Dawkins goes on to state that this is the only idea of God that is worth debating! He creates a straw man and knocks him down, defining the debate on his own terms; and, no surprise, he wins the debate! It’s not hard to win the game, after all, when you make the rules. Dawkins could be right, that his definition of God is the most commonly held definition among Jewish and Christian lay people. But it certainly is not the most commonly held view in main-line theological schools.
Dawkins is describing the simple God of Sunday school children. Yet when I was about fourteen I decided than any God worth the name must transcend the categories of male and female, and must be a spirit, power, force, or process far different from the “old man in the sky.” And I was barely out of childhood when I came to that conclusion! Yet the New Atheists, for all their brain power, are too busy rejecting the superman in the sky to consider that there might be more sophisticated views.
The Epistle of 1 John says that “God is Love,” and even though that’s biblical the New Atheists won’t debate that proposition. Go back to the 1600s and we can find people such as Baruch Spinoza who taught that God is not external to existence, but is the totality of existence. Thomas Jefferson believed in a Divine Providence active in the universe but not controlling it.
But the New Atheists seem to be profoundly ignorant of the past several hundred years of theology. They seem unaware of 20th century theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) who said the God is not a being but is being itself, the ground of being. God is not a supernatural entity; God is the ultimate reality that precedes all beings. Then there is the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) which identifies metaphysical reality with change and dynamism – change is the cornerstone of reality. Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), building on Whitehead, said that God is the cosmic creative process, and because we take part in the creative process, we matter to God. God contains the universe, but is more than the sum total of the universe.
Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are rejecting a Newtonian-era theology, but we are in a post-Einstein world, and theology moved on long ago. The New Atheists don’t discuss God as understood by Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Tillich, Barth, Niebuhr, Whitehead, Cobb, Wieman, or Hartshorne. With sneering condescension they demolish the God of small thinkers, but refuse to engage with the ideas of serious theologians. It’s easy to knock down a simplistic faith, and ignore the more challenging ideas of thoughtful theologians.

As If God Were There ~
The New Atheists are, as we have said, non-believers. The term “non-believer” generally refers to people who reject the beliefs of one traditional religion or another, or who reject any of the more traditional concepts of God. But as we mentioned earlier, everyone is a non-believer in the eyes of someone. And as my colleague the Rev. Steve Eddington points out, this doesn’t, in and of itself, make one a non-believer. We can reject traditional beliefs, we can reject the credulous beliefs of fundamentalism, and still have strongly held and worth-while beliefs.
In his book, As If God Were There, the Rev. Terry Sweetster, a UU minister, tells a story about what we might call an encounter with theology that he had when he was seven years old. Terry’s mother had made a batch of fudge, placed it in the refrigerator, and declared to the family that it could not be sampled until after supper. Terry, who apparently wasn’t doing well with delayed gratification at that age, wasn’t happy when he was told to wait.
He wanted a piece of that fudge, but it seemed that there was always someone in or near the kitchen, and he couldn’t get to the refrigerator without being seen. But around four o’clock he got what seemed to him to be an unbelievable break. His mother and sister had to go to the store, leaving him at home alone for a while. His mother, who seemed to be able to read his mind, told him, “Just because I’m not here, don’t think you are alone with the fudge. God is watching you.”
Now, the word “theology” means the study of God. And as his mother drove off, Terry was studying hard. He says, “It didn’t take long to conclude that I was a seven-year-old atheist. Boy, did that fudge taste good.”
But, unfortunately for Terry, his mother had counted the pieces before she left. When she came home she counted again and saw that three were missing. She asked him how he could take three pieces of fudge right in front of God, but Terry replied, “I don’t believe in God.” Terry’s mother told him, “It would be in your best interests to act as if God were there,” and she gave him a spanking.
Whether we accept or reject any idea about God, many serious-minded people have put a good deal of thought into their beliefs. We should not accept any concept of God blindly, nor should we reject it out-of-hand. And we Unitarian Universalists can get pretty worked up around the issue of God-talk. Whether God is there or not, there can be tension around the subject.
Terry Sweetser’s story about the fudge in the fridge is a humorous way of getting at the deeper spiritual issue of what it means to be a person of faith – a Believer. Living by faith does not mean accepting without question everything we have been taught. That’s not belief, it’s credulity. Only when we are we willing to entertain doubt can we achieve any kind of faith. In order to arrive at any kind of faith in any understanding of God, we must first be willing to doubt the existence of God. Then there still can be no certainty that there is a God, no matter how we define God.
But we don’t have to just accept what we were taught in Sunday school. We don’t have to be credulous. There is another way to arrive at faith, and that is living as if certain truths abide – as if God were there, as Terry Sweetser’s Unitarian mother put it.

Trustful Agnosticism ~
On most days I’m an agnostic – or I might say I’m a religious naturalist. I do not see any evidence an all-powerful God is in charge of this world. If a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God actually existed, there is no way that the Holocaust would ever have happened, or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, or the genocide in Rwanda. Sadly, we have discovered that there is no superman in the sky who will intervene to prevent epidemics, plagues, starvation, hurricanes, pestilence, or mass murder. It is up to us to do our best to make the world a safer, more peaceful, and compassionate place.
We cannot know for certain what might lie beyond this life, but we do know that we have this life and this world. We have today. While the Buddhists and Hindus speak of reincarnation, and the Christians and Muslims speak of heaven, all we really know is that we are alive now, and we have an opportunity to make the most of the life we have been given. I don’t claim to know what the mysteries of the universe are all about, and yet I live by faith. Whether we want to talk about our Higher Power, as AA and other Twelve Step groups do; or Divine Providence as so many of our nation’s founders did; or the Way of the Universe (the Tao), as taught by Lao-tze and the Taoists; or God as the Cosmic Creative Process; or simply the Great Mystery – whatever name we use, I choose to live “as if God were there,” because that seems to work best for me. God may not see me taking the fudge from the fridge, but I function better in this world when I live a faithful life.
I’ve been borrowing some ideas today from the Rev. Steve Eddington, who passes along an idea that comes from philosopher of religion Sam Keen. Dr. Keen talks about the notion of “radical trust,” a choice to walk through life as if certain things were true; as if you will be supported and sustained as you take that walk.
Dr. Keen’s metaphor of radical trust comes from the kind of cartoon we may have seen when we were young. A dog is chasing a cat, and the cat comes to the edge of a lake. Of course the cat can’t swim, and yet keeps running along the surface of the lake. As the cat runs, lily pads keep coming up to meet his feet. The cat is doing fine until he becomes anxious about the process – he begins to look down to see whether the lily pads are really there, and that is when the lily pads stop appearing and he sinks into the lake, much to the delight of the dog on the shore.
This is how many of us have chosen to live our lives. We don’t claim to understand all of the mysteries of the universe. We can learn from the theologians, the philosophers, the gurus and the mystics, but in the end we have to choose to step into the unknown and live our lives based on some kind of trust. As A. Powell Davies (1902-1957) put it, “All too many people want to argue themselves into a meaningful religion. It cannot be done. We live ourselves into religion, and thinking is only a part of living.”
The New Atheists tell us that we have to choose between a simplistic dogmatic faith, or an atheistic non-belief. Well, I choose neither. I choose radical trust. I choose to live as if God were there. Sam Keen’s alternate term for it is, “trustful agnosticism.” We hold hands, take a leap, and somehow we learn to fly.
Amen.