Good morning! And God bless us! God bless us, every one! That’s one of my favorite blessings and I’m sure most of you recognize it from the end of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” The miser Scrooge has just completed his pilgrimage of redemption, led by a spirit into the depths of his misery, the times of his brokenness and to the lip of an uncertain future: is he doomed forever by the sins of his past? Or is he at the cusp where redemption can claim him? In a paroxysm of fear that turns into faith by the joy of opening his heart-and wallet-- and giving freely, he finally recognizes what it is to be joined with humble humanity-- the broken body of Tiny Tim the crux of redemption for the broken spirit of Scrooge. And Tiny Tim, in joy and wonder at the revelation, can think of nothing more suitable for the occasion than the only gift he can offer-— a prayer for God’s blessing on this now united band of human beings. “God bless us, every one!”

 “God bless you!” That was our childhood blessing for someone after the burst of a sneeze: an old blessing originating in the belief that at such a time the soul may leave the body:

the blessing was rooted in superstition, but given in concern, so there was something sweet about it. Occasionally, I still hear it, but most often it’s been shortened to “Bless you!” The loss is especially noticeable when it occurs in the classrooms of divinity school, where it does, often. God is suffering some loss of credibility-- or we wish not to offend the unbeliever.

“God bless!” How many remember that one? It was the ritual closing used by the comedian Red Skelton for his variety show in the sixties. Disconcertingly, it came after an hour of humor that was often ribald, casually insulting and filled with ritualized stereotyping. It always struck me as a little odd as I tried to puzzle out his piety.

 

As a child, I was taught that God loved me very much and that he would whale me good if I stepped out of line: a much deeper puzzle than Red Skelton’s piety.

 And God was all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing-- a kind of super CIA, I guess, a conceptualization re-inforced by Cold War fears. And God was, of course, male. I did not have enough historical knowledge at that time to understand that this was a vision of the Jewish patriarchy, a human vision of God modeled on the social conventions of a male-defined and sometimes landless society under constant threat of destabilization and even annihilation.

All these visions of God and the blessings of God animated my growing awareness as a child, helped to form me, for better or for worse, lightened my burden at times and made me feel terribly confined and conflicted at others. At age 18 or so, I was glad to leave this all behind and to embark on my own spiritual search. I learned the languages of Buddhism, Islam, and the Tao. I began a spiritual practice enlivened by new concepts, language and personal experience. I was a seeker without a mentor or a structure of authority and that’s the
way I liked it.

But I never quite left God behind just as I never left behind the scars of teenage acne, the feeling of exhilaration at the top of a Ferris wheel, the experience of a deep solemnity as a steady snow filled the landscape on a winter twilight. In all those places and times, I tried to measure my under­standings of the world against my developing understanding of who or what God is. “God language,” so called, will always be part of who I am because I am rooted there by the social conventions of the 1950’s, by my upbringing in a working class Irish Catholic household, by the rituals of the church, by the ties to extended family, by my intellectual, social and religious growth: I hope my more recent understandings have given wings to my faith, but to deny the reality of God to me would be to cut myself off at the root. The intellect would continue to ruminate, but the emotional intelligence would be deprived of nourishment.

I understand that not all here share that upbringing, that path toward understanding, that way of formulating that which is too large to be intellectually contained. I expect that in my time spent here, I will grow theologically and pastorally. I expect that I will be allowed to express myself freely-- that is the Unitarian Universalist tradition. And I expect that I will come to understand better the piety of the members of this congregation in a way that will move me to compassion and delight as I grow with you. And will help inform my ministry to you.

Sometime in the past two years, feeling overwhelmed by my academic reading, by the demands of my pastoral training and the trials of confronting the Regional Sub-committee of the UUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee, I got the inspiration to make a list-- I’m mad about lists, anyway-- of just what I understand by the term “God.” I was surprised at how long a list it was. I’d like to take a minute now to share it with you. I invite you to listen carefully for one, even one, term that resonates with your understanding of the Divine Mystery. I hope you find one: that’s a place where we can meet in our growing knowledge of each other-- a meeting place for dialogue at coffee hour or on Chalice Thursdays, in our general fellowship or at a tricky point in a future sermon. A place to forge understanding.

God is

the central organizing force,
the One who seeks intimate relationship with us,
the creator of a beloved creation,
the One towards whom we strive, the One beyond knowing, the poetry of poetries, the ultimate union in constantly unfolding creation,
the essence,
the source,
the be-all and end-all,
the One,
the unifier,
the social redeemer,
the dance of the creation across time and space,
the One in whose nature lies authority,
the truth beyond what we can know as truth,
the blessed one and blessing one,
the sum of all being in relationship,
the justifier of action done to God’s purpose,
the permanent transcience,
the crest of Creation,
the holy eternal solitude,
the carrier of our emotions,
the essence of our nature purified,
the sustainer of life,
the multifarious union,
the sum of all beings,
the essence of the eternal,
singularity in endless diversity,
that which inspires us,
the one known in intimacy and being,
the holy upright surrender,
the fulfillment of our purpose,
the unity of all times,
the testament of the universe,
the possibilities inherent in a mustard seed,
the invention of faith, insight and understanding revealed through omnipresent being,
the bearer of the news of the universe,
the transcendent made immanent,
the purpose of being and revealer of the purpose,
the holy hidden and revealed, the holy understanding,
the witness, the observer,
the inhabitor,
the one who reveals what will be revealed,
the depth of my being,
the stranger who is truth,
the convolution of lives,
the animator of life and death,
a cry in the wilderness and an answer to that cry,
God is.

 

 [Reading from Boston Globe: “Words of Reverence Roil a Church”

 “They’re all here this weekend — the Christians and the Jews, the Buddhists and the Wiccans, the theists and the agnostics and the humanists – all members of one religious denomination not sure how it feels about God.

Prodded by a new president a onetime atheist who had a conversion experience in a hospital room, the Unitarian Universalist Association is embarking on a freewheeling debate over whether to reverse its decades-long drift away from what the president calls the “language of reverence” and instead begin to “name the holy.”

 

That doesn’t mean a full-blown religious revival, but for a church whose members for decades have been more comfortable with “humanism” than Christianity, Sinkford’s words are causing a stir.

 

With 7,400 Unitarian Universalists gathered here for the group’s general assembly at the Hynes Convention Cen­ter, Sinkford’s suggestion has captured the imagination of a crop of younger ministers and lay people who say they want to reclaim some of the language and ritual their parents had abandoned.

 

“I don’t want to drown in euphemism anymore, and I certainly don’t want to play

that old game of, ‘If you can’t prove it, I don’t want to hear it,” said the Rev. Victoria     Weinstein, the minister of First Parish Unitarian Church of Norwell, who freely talks about God and objects to what she calls “liberal fundamentalist censorship” in one of the nation’s most liberal­ eral religious movements.

“I’m talking about the hot-but­ton words, like ‘God’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘soul’ and ‘sa­cred’; the intangibles that frighten people because they’ve been used against them at some point in their religious life,” Weinstein said. “The culture today tosses words around in a thoroughly despicable way and that offends all of us, but that doesn’t mean we re­fuse to use the language, because then we’ve conceded defeat.

This sermon is entitled “A Language of Reverence” and it is so named on the order of service. On the wayside pulpit, though, the definite article reigns. Through some oversight, the “A” was presented as a “The.” And of course there is no sole language of reverence—- there are many. And the word “God” is not necessary for many understandings. We’ve been called to a challenge by Reverend William Sinkford, the president of our association of congregations, to join in a discussion about what it means for Unitarian Universalists to use a “language of reverence.” What does it mean to “reverse our decades-long drift” away from such language and seek, instead, to “name the holy?”

It is my hope that we here today are engaging in a little that work, the work of naming the holy and using a language that for us, holds “reverence.

In our secular lives, by which I mean the lives we live within a socially- and politically-described culture, the lives we live most days of our lives, in our workplaces, on the roads, in the supermarkets and retail stores, in front of the television set, in the worry over jobs and the state of the economy and the worry about war, we don’t employ a language of reverence.

We may use a language of “respect,” but our anxieties and our felt pressures, our time deadlines, our filled—to—the—brim schedules encourage us to contain our anxieties so that they don’t spill over and cause even more of a mess. These constant small tugs at our composure have a cumulative effect. We worry and then we have another cup of coffee or a cigarette or, if we are wise, we talk to a friend--- or spend impulsively or chatter aimlessly-- anything to avoid the devils nibbling on our organs. We are tempted to add our voices to those of the cynical, those who know the cost of each thing, but nothing of its value.

We feel caught in time and besieged and our instinct may be to retreat. Retreat makes itself known in many ways, but one of the most insidious is through our use of language. We feel compelled to “grow up,” admit the wickedness in the world and challenge ourselves to adjust, to learn the “ways of the world” and to use them to benefit ourselves. We have a tendency to mold ourselves to the expectations of a society we describe as amoral, a culture based on insecurity and compulsive behavior, insecurity and the search for power, insecurity and greed, insecurity and irrational violence, insecurity and consumption—— a culture of insecurity.

Traditionally, religious language has sought to name the good and name the holy in terms of righteousness, abundance, justice, transcendence, glory and mystery and a joy that is described as “eternal.” In the felt presence of abundance, we relax. A sense of ease comes with the enjoyment of a safe place and the hopeful expectation that this safety will blossom into a kind of security we will have reason to expect will

In this felt security we achieve a kind of open-heartedness that welcomes the other and fosters the conditions for fellowship and friendship, camaraderie and good humor. The conditions which foster fellowship are nurtured in a soil that is rich and nourishing under conditions which are healthful and generous and I expect to find them here. And there is something holy about that.

Holiness, I think, has a lot to do with wholeness and wholeness and holiness, we are coming to see in this century, have less to do with perfection as we were once taught to believe, and more to do with integration.

Through integration, we achieve integrity. It is the beauty of our tradition, more than any other I know, that diversity of thought and opinion and behavior are valued, even treasured. We are faulted for our diversity because by definition it can lead to no creed and most religions define themselves creedally.

But our diversity challenges us to find a way to integrate in ourselves systems of belief and behavior that are, in the end, holy, because we achieve a certain disposition to expect revelation. Each person we talk to brings a harvest of insight and opinion, even one grain of which can bring about a tiny transformation in the way we think and behave. These tiny transformations are formed in fellowship and deepen and inform our fellowship. We are carriers of the holy not just in the words we speak, but in the actions we perform.

If we need a language of reverence, it is to describe the