Gods and Humans

Sermon for the U.U. Church of

Winchendon, Massachusetts

by:  John H. White

October 21, 2007

A while back someone started a thread on the local forum, The Backyard Fence, entitled About Theology. I read some of it and it got me to thinking again about God. I know, in most churches everyone thinks about God all the time. But this is a Unitarian Universalist church and God seems, somehow, less immediate than in the churches that consider themselves Christian.

I'm no bible scholar and neither am I any kind of authority on Christianity. But I still have learned quite a lot about the Christian concept of God. Let's look at what God is like using biblical concepts.

Starting In the book of Genesis, God had to have been around before the earth because he created it. So he is very old. He is pictured as walking in the Garden of Eden so he must have legs and a body. He talks with Adam and Eve so he has to have a voice. He continues to speak from a burning bush in the book of Exodus. He uses his finger to write the ten commandments onto tablets, twice, I believe, since Moses broke the first tablets. God speaks out of the whirlwind in another book. He uses his hands. He must have a right hand since Christ sits at God's right hand. If Christ sits, so presumably does God. At least so says the Book of Revelation. He sees and hears so presumably he must have eyes and ears.

God is regularly portrayed in the Old Testament as a jealous God, particularly when it comes to other gods. He caused Israel to be carried off to Babylon because the Jews worshipped other gods. He also brings down his wrath from time to time like he did on Sodom and Gommorah. Yet, by the time we come to the Gospel according to John, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. So he also loves and is able to beget children. The whole concept of God's love permeates the New Testament.

Let's put all these characteristics together: God has a body, he has legs, he has hands and fingers. He has a voice. He has eyes and ears. He can reproduce. God has emotions: jealousy, wrath, and love. If you hadn't told me that this was God, I would think you were describing a human. Some have pictured him as an old man with a long beard. His being a man is pretty clear. He is always referred to with the pronoun he. Old is clear. Perhaps someone took liberties with the beard part.

In Christian tradition, God is considered to be omniscient, meaning he knows everything. He is also omnipresent, meaning he is everywhere at once. He is omnipotent, meaning he can do everything. In the form of Jesus, which is considered part of the trinity of God, he loves everyone. Or at least everyone who believes in him since that is the only way one can be saved and join him in heaven according to many present day Christians. The alternative isn't pushed as hard as it once was: the hell of fire and brimstone.

It seems to me that the Christians are describing their God as a superman: a person possessing the characteristics of a man but with super powers. I hold that the Christian God is essentially anthropomorphic meaning simply that he has a human form. Why would that be? Could it be that men, at least in biblical times, just could not imagine anything greater than a superman? And God had to be the greatest thing. They knew, as do we, that there are things that we humble humans cannot control. Since humans cannot, someone or something must. The lack of any controls would be chaos and was just unacceptable. It would seem that modern Christians are locked into biblical era thinking and still characterize god the same way.

What is the relation of gods to men, whether we are referring to the Christian God or to any number of other deities that various humans have recognized at various times throughout history? Gods, be they one, or many, represent powers that humans do not understand. And like everything we don't understand, we tend to fear it.  Gods have blessed us in various ways and we are grateful and thank them. We acknowledge their worth and their power; in other words, we worship them. We presume they have human type characteristics that allow them to hear and understand, so we seek their assistance in our human endeavors. We presume they can use that great power we know they possess to our human advantage.

There seem to be any number of gods that are or have been worshipped in various parts of the world. I think of the sun god, worshipped under various names in many cultures. There was even a hierarchy of Gods. In Greece, Zeus was king. In Rome he was called Jupiter. There are also gods of rain, wind, water, fire, war and many others. There are gods of the sea (Poseidon to the Greeks; Neptune to the Romans), of the gods of fire (Hephaestus and Vulcan respectively), goddesses of fertility (Artemis, Diana), of  grain and crops and innumerable other things (Demeter, Ceres). I think it was the earth gods and goddesses of fertility and of various places (Elohim and the Baals who were said to inhabit many different places) that Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews and presumably the Christian God, hated most since they competed directly with him for supremacy in Israel.

That raises an interesting point. Was it really Yahweh, who is presumably all powerful and who could have disposed of these other gods that he presumably so hated, or was it the priests? After all, it was the priests who got their living from people's sacrifices to Yahweh. Priests, who had no power over Elohim and the Baals and the other gods that people worshipped. And Yahweh spoke to the people only through the priests. Or at least the priests said it was Yahweh who was speaking through them. But I digress.

I haven't mentioned the many peoples who lived closer to the land and worshipped all kinds of animals. Animals who could hurt them and animals who provided them with food, clothing and all sorts of other things. I seem to recall elephant gods, lion gods, snake gods, and monkey gods. These they worshipped. Surely the hope of safety and securing sustenance were good enough reasons to worship something whose power you didn't fully understand.

Where does all this leave Unitarians and Universalists in the twenty-first century? There are vast reaches of space, both infinitesimal and infinite that we incompletely understand. We wrestle with why some things are alive and others not. We have but the faintest glimmers of understanding about this inner space of life and how its essence differs from the non living things. Yet we have learned a lot in the last two millennia. Many things that were mysteries in biblical times are now fully apparent. With so many old mysteries explained and the remaining mysteries poorly addressed by the old texts, I see it far less likely that the traditional concept of God, the one I described earlier as essentially anthropomorphic, is true. That is why I reject traditional Christianity.

In rejecting traditional Christianity I don't necessarily reject all of the Christian Bible or all of the Christian writings. The writers of the Bible offer some good poetry and a lot of good insight into human nature and good advice about how we should lead our lives. Human nature hasn't changed much. Things are good, not because God said they are good or because it is in the Bible but rather because our experience tells us these things are good and true and do apply to modern life. That is a lot different than the Christian position that we need to base truth and morality on the Bible, just because it is the Bible and God said so. That I find to be essentially circular reasoning.

I am sure the scientists will continue to extend the frontiers of knowledge. We will come to understand many things we do not now. I read an article last week about the effects of hormones, the brain and the nervous system on young people going through puberty. While the effects may be apparent, the level of the scientists' understanding of the mechanisms of hormones interacting with chemicals in brain cells to produce these effects was amazing. And other articles tell us of what happened in far distant galaxies hundreds of millions of years ago. While I understand a light year, I have no idea of how they measure these distances or ascertain these events. There are so many variables that affect the results of medical research that the reporters have to use statistics to show trends in matters of health, Yet the results are considered good science and are useful. I read recently that a positive outlook on life appears to extend the life expectancy of a person in his or her 60s by some 7 ½ years. That was said to be longer than the expected lifespan increase that can be attributed to not having high blood pressure or not smoking, or not being overweight. (That makes me feel good. At the same time I recognize the possibility of their having confused which is cause and which is effect.)

But there are still mysteries and innumerable questions. The first and most basic question of all is: Where did our universe come from?  You might mention the currently popular Big Bang theory. I ask what was there to go bang and what made it go bang? We aren't any closer to a real answer.

The next basic question is: Why are Humans here? Or to generalize it further: Why are all the various forms of life here and what makes them seek to perpetuate themselves? Hordes of writers have taken a crack at answering these questions ever since the invention of writing. I just haven't seen an explanation that will stand up in the face of modern knowledge.

I accept these questions as mysteries that cannot be answered. To that extent, I am a mystic. I just accept these things as they are without any further serious questions and move on to matters which I can understand. It is only from this point that our search for truth becomes fruitful. We can and do find truths that are relevant to our lives and make them work to increase our productivity and our happiness. This is much of what we talk about in our UU churches.

As UUs, we understand that we are a part of the interdependent web of all creation. What we do can do does affect other people and things in ever expanding circles. Circles that start with us as individuals and then expand to include our immediate families, our extended families, our organizations, our communities, our nation, and the whole population of the world. Because I see these as the most important things in our lives, I am a humanist. The human condition is of the greatest importance. That is most of what I have left after I have discarded the theological myths with which I started this morning and have accepted as eternal mysteries those things that are far beyond human ken.

Beyond humanity, the circles keep expanding. We are also in this world. In the circle of earth what humankind does has a profound effect. We are learning that more clearly day by day as human induced global warming becomes a more serious concern. It goes both ways though: the outside world affects humans fully more than we affect it. It is this effect that gave rise to the deities that I mentioned earlier. They were humanity's way of explaining the pressures on us. But we also have to recognize our part in the equation and conduct ourselves accordingly.

Further expanding circles include our solar system, our galaxy, and the whole cosmos. So far, in these humanity has had little effect. Ultimately human activities in space exploration could have effects. We must be careful in our efforts  so as not to upset natural events.

As UUs, we need to concentrate within those circles where we can have the most influence. It is in the circles of humanity and earth that we can do the most to help perpetuate our species, a goal that seems to be innate in every species of living thing. Personal efforts at reproduction are only a small part of accomplishing this goal. Considering the interrelationship of all humans, whatever we can do to improve the lot of humankind contributes to the goal of preserving our species. And efforts to preserve and improve our earth are essential to helping preserve humankind. We can do a lot of things, either individually, or in groups such as our congregation to make this world better. We can make a difference in our world! And most of us are taking on a duty to try.

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