Incarnation: Embodied God

Advent, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister 

Advent. The season of dark, of quiet, of waiting. The story most often told during these weeks in December is that of Mary, a pregnant woman, travelling home with her love, waiting for her baby, anticipating a whole new stage of life as a wife and mother. For millennia, Christians have been living into this story as we inch through the month toward Christmas. It’s part of the Christian paradigm, defining these December weeks, beckoning us deeper into the dark of the season, promising joy and good cheer when Christmas comes, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the birth of God into the world.

The entire story- pregnancy, travel, birth, visitors, a baby – the whole thing is so human, so, familiar in its normalcy, so embodied as we all are. Some of us get pregnant, some give birth. We all travel to some extent, all get tired, get sick, experience our bodies injured and aging. In its simplest form, this is a story of bodies.

Mary was pregnant. Nine months. Her feet are swollen, her back is aching. Simple things like getting up from a sitting position were painful and complicated. She and her husband were back in their hometown when she went into labor. Cramps turned to contractions to cries of pain and pushing, blood and tearing, sweat, tears, breathing, squeezing people’s hands while letting out primal screams. It’s hard to imagine a more embodied experience than birth. And then a child. A baby boy. Slimy, crying, getting air into his lungs, cold, bright, eyes closed, screaming. He’s handed to his mother, also crying- a mix of joy and pain and relief.

They were in a manger, meaning they were on the bottom floor of a home where the animals lived. People usually went upstairs to sleep in the lofts, but there was no more room there, so Mary and her betrothed, Joseph, stayed downstairs. When we were in Jordan, we got to see a village more than two thousand years old. The doorways and stone frames and sometimes staircases still stood, letting us stand on the same ground, in the same rooms as people did millennia ago. Our guide casually noted as we visited one of the houses that the alcoves on the ground floor where we stood were the manger, the part of the house where the animals fed and slept. The stairs or ladders led to the second floor, the upper room, where the people stayed. Mary and Joseph would have been downstairs when their baby was born, down in the manger because so many travelers had come to town, there was no more room upstairs.

Advent isn’t the time to talk about Jesus’s birth. I’m ruining the entire spirit of waiting! But every year we talk about anticipation, and then we skip a few weeks focusing on the Jewish and Pagan traditions and land on Christmas when we sing and celebrate, but don’t dig into the theology of the story, so this year I’m exercising a little preacher-privilege to use this Advent sermon to talk about incarnation. What exactly are we waiting for? Why are we on the edge of our seats?

I’ve spoken before about the corners of truth, those particular insights that each religion of the world offers the rest of us. Religion, by definition, is how communities face mystery together, how we live into the big questions of the world. Having done that for centuries, or millennia, those communities have stumbled into wisdom they can offer the rest of us, even if we don’t adhere to all the tenets of the entire faith. Christians offer the world a profound truth related to the nature of humanity, and of what it means to be both human and divine. To demonstrate, or maybe to balance, that for all of us, they tell the story of Jesus’s birth. Stories about gods abound, but stories about children, about tiny, vulnerable babies who are also divine, are a gift offering us an unusual insight.

The image of Jesus as a baby is one of the most profound spiritual images offered by any of the world’s religions. That’s a big statement, so let me explain. Ignoring the infinite ways Jesus has been painted or drawn or sculpted as a child-king, as an infant-idol, with an adult gaze and halo, I’m talking about the actual image of a baby. A real infant. Tiny. No language. Very little sight at first. Sounds are too loud. Crying is the primary mode of communication. Eating, pooping, sleeping. No way to move around. Rolling over from back to front is a big deal. Then crawling. Walking, holding on to a table. A few independent steps. It’s some time before that child can successfully get food into his mouth on his own. This is God.

I’ll say it again because it’s mind-blowing- This is God.

What a profound Truth, what a theological offering, given to us through this Christian story. This is God. The baby. The one whose diapers his grandmother changed, the one who used his tiny hand to grab his grandfather’s finger for balance, the one who is washed and fed and rocked and scolded. This is God.

The idea that Jesus, a human being, was god, was dismissed as part of our original Unitarian founding. I’ve preached on this history before and if you’re interested, I will again, but for now just a quick reminder – There was a debate after Jesus died about whether he was god and because of a variety of political forces, it was decided that the doctrine would include this god-man, fully human and fully divine. Plenty of people believed it and even those that weren’t so sure understood that in a Greco-Roman world with plenty of other god-men in the mythology, this was likely the path of least resistance. The Council of Nicaea declared it doctrine in 325, but the controversy lived on and it was again determined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Jesus is one being with 2 natures.

As final as church leaders thought they were being, the question remained. Having added the Holy Spirit, the official doctrine was of a Trinitarian God. One God, Three Faces. It was complicated and debated and embraced and dismissed through history, including by our Unitarian forebears in Europe. In the early part of the 19th century, our own Rev. William Ellery Channing formally preached on Unitarian theology, recognizing that Trinitarianism didn’t prioritize reason which would clearly recognize Jesus as human, a truly great human and model for other humans, no more god than anyone else. Letting go of all supernatural implications, Channing and the Unitarians who went after him, removed Jesus from the realm of a deity.

Which makes sense. Totally reasonable. But with that declaration, we lost the brilliance, the genius, the earth-shattering insight that is the core of the Christian offering. Jesus was god. Jesus, that tiny newborn, fragile, vulnerable, dependent baby born to a young woman on the ground floor of an ancient home surrounded by sheep and camels, was god.

I’d like to suggest that we got sidetracked with that original Unitarian declaration and forgot that the theology of Jesus’s divinity didn’t elevate one man as much as it elevated all of us. We got distracted by one story – his story – and forgot that it’s all our stories. We are all born, we are all dependent, we are all human. Christianity became a cult of One instead of a cult of All. While theologians throughout history were trying to capture Jesus, to enlarge him, they forgot that we are all equally human, all equally divine.

Jesus wasn’t the only one. He was one of the people who became awake to the magnificence of what it means to be alive. He lived communally, he loved unconditionally, he valued life over material things, valued health over money, believed we are all here to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out in service to each other.

Those early Unitarians rejected the idea that Jesus was god, claiming that there is only one God. They upheld Jesus as a role model, a good person who had a strong and necessary message about how we treat each other.  They declared a humanist Christianity that focused on serving the poor and feeding the hungry and healing the sick and visiting the imprisoned and generally caring for and being responsible to each other. There was no reason to get involved with complicated trinitarian theologies or questions about salvation after life; there’s certainly enough to keep us busy here and now without ever asking questions for which we’ll never have the answers. This made sense to thousands of people, and here we are to prove it.

But rejecting that insight, removing Jesus from the realm of incarnate god, of embodied god, separated divinity from humanity for all of us. We’ve done it in the rest of the natural world, too. Removing god from the body of Earth and sending god into the world of the stars separated from our embodied-ness, all of Earth became a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We have made it our habit to remove or deny divinity, separating it from the bodies of our lives.

Russian soldiers have been executing Ukrainian civilians and dropping their bodies into mass graves. Iranian women are being imprisoned for as little as letting a lock of hair show. Unhoused Americans are sleeping and starving on city streets across the country. China is enslaving Uyghurs in an attempt to convert them from their Muslim faith.

We don’t do this when we see the face of god in each other’s eyes.

When I know you are god, that you are part of the great divine mystery, I do not let you starve. I do not let you suffer at my hand. I do not forget you, neglect you, abandon you.

And when I know god is tiny, fragile, embodied and becoming like the rest of us, I know I’m responsible for being god’s hand, god’s eyes, god’s feet. I know I am called to living a life of partnership with Love.

The divine spirit is embodied in each of us. Each of us born. Each of us as children, as teenagers, as young adults, as reproductive parents, as working people, as aging people. We are divine in our wrinkled skin and graying or thinning hair, in our aching knees and failing sight.

Waiting for the birth of god is waiting for us to know that god is here, in each of us, that hope is here because we are here. There is joy already alive. Advent is the time for waiting- but maybe it’s time for us to stop waiting and wake up to the magnificence of who we are, so fully human, so fully divine.

We are waiting for each of us to become awake. We tell the story year after year, and we keep thinking it’s a story of someone else. Mary and her baby 2000 years ago. But it’s our story. It’s the story of humans who are born, who are vulnerable, who are dependent. It’s the story of god who is born, vulnerable and dependent. It’s the story of loving so well and so much people celebrate your birth every year for ever. It’s the story of learning how to love that well, of being that love for each other. Advent is our time to be born into our own magnificence, and to see that same divine spirit in the eyes of everyone around us, no matter how broken or frightened or angry or lost they are.

Because they are god. And we are god. And until we all know that, we wait.

State of the Union

November 13, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

No one felt as good or as bad as they thought they would on Wednesday morning. After a rollercoaster of an election season, we neither saw the blue sweep in response to the end of reproductive freedom, nor did we see the red wave rebuke of the President’s economic policies. It was an unusual year after a whole lot of unusual years. Some purple states went blue. Some went red. Democracy was on the ballot and people voted to save it. Ish. Some extremists won, and some lost.

Last week I brought you 6 candidates, all GOP extremists, all, as far as I can tell, a threat to our values of truth-telling, peace-making, unity and equity. Of them, 5 lost. This includes the man calling for civil war, the one who said our astrological signs can help us make decisions about our health, the one who doesn’t believe women have a place in public life, the one who rejects evolution, and the white supremacist. On the other hand, Lauren Boebert, the one wondering how many AK-47s Jesus would have owned, won re-election to her seat in Congress, even though she has either never read or completely misunderstands the Bill of Rights, and is calling for an end to the separation of church and state. But, she stands alone in that particular random grouping of candidates I mentioned last week.

The good news is that voter turnout was high, a sign of a healthy democracy and of a continued trust in the system. Without faith in the process, democracy is dead and this week we learned that most people still believe that showing up matters. Our faith in the system hasn’t been degraded such that we no longer see a value in active participation, which would have been a sign that democracy is fading. We also learned that Americans aren’t as divided as we might have thought, evidenced by the number of people who split their ballots, voting both red and blue depending on the particular candidate, rather than blind party allegiance. During interviews outside polling places, people said they were voting for balance, voting against conspiracy theories, looking for stability, maturity, and honest leadership. And whether they were thinking the democrats were rigging the ballots or the republicans were suppressing the vote, people voted for whatever free and fair election initiatives were available to them. They voted to save democracy.

I Know This Rose Will Open

There are reasons, though, for our continued diligence. While a majority of Americans want to defend democracy, there are signs of something more sinister entering the mainstream. More than half of the election denying candidates won. There were 370 running for a variety of offices across the board, and 220 won. Of the 370 running, 100 of them were extremists, claiming intentional voter fraud in the 2020 election and seeking to remove President Biden and restore former President Trump. Of that 100, 40 won.

The others were more moderate in their denial, saying things like, “we need further investigation”, suggesting that this is an open question, when, in fact, it is not. About one third of the incoming House of Representatives includes people who question or deny the previous election. Of them, about 25 are extremists. Most states have at least one Representative who casts doubt on the election. In five states, 100% of the election deniers running won. In another 10 states at least 75% of them won. Of 100 Senators, 17 will be election deniers. Some of the newly elected positions will be populated by people who were at the capitol on January 6th, people who actively sought to overturn the 2020 election. The Governor of Alabama, reelected on Tuesday, said clearly that, “fake news, big tech, and blue state liberals stole the election from Trump”, and the incoming Secretary of State in Indiana said 2020 was a scam.

The problem we’re facing is that fringe conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, finding themselves in seats of power throughout the nation where they are far more difficult to ignore or dismiss and where their extremists views are becoming normalized.

I Know This Rose Will Open

At the same time, misinformation didn’t spread at the speed it did two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reportedly removed thousands of posts with misinformation during this election cycle, usually before those posts got any traction. YouTube added $15 million to their budget to hire content moderators for both the US and Brazilian elections, establishing what they called a war room on election day to take things down in real time. Even things that got through temporarily failed to garner the attention the 2016 and 2020 elections taught us to expect. A conservative talk show host in Arizona shared a video on Twitter Tuesday about what he called intentionally broken voting machines. The video was shared 20,000 times, often by people with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. But, in an unusual turn, people stopped sharing it almost as quickly as they’d started and within a few hours, it had lost its audience.

Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights said that demand for misinformation was lower this year than in the last election cycle. We saw candidates who traded in blatant misinformation lose, like Senate nominee Bolduc from New Hampshire who said that schools were providing kitty litter to students who identified as cats, playing on fears around transgender people. There was ample evidence that Russia reactivated its massive system of trolls and bots to feed our hunger for conflict and reinforce our confirmation biases, but this year, if they punched through the nets placed on social media, we largely ignored them.

I Know This Rose Will Open

One of the more alarming things we heard from candidates, and from citizens all over this country is a call for, or an expectation of, civil war. Here in NY, those voices are muted, but we can’t deny the January 6th attempt to take down Congress and install an unelected government through force, nor can we ignore the reality that while the red wave didn’t take the country, it did crash on our state, with some of the most extreme now representing us.

Some experts who study the onset of civil wars, the loss of democracies and the rise of authoritarianism have been working hard since 2016 to get our attention. We have trusted – and maybe the whole world has trusted – that the American Constitution is strong, that our democracy is deeply ingrained in our law and culture, and that we are nearly invulnerable to any serious threat. These experts are trying to warn us that while many of us are confident that our institutions are secure, there’s a far-right movement gaining significant traction and while they started small, we are no longer able to ignore them. The presence of armed men at rallies, the visibility of paramilitary groups on American streets, and the waving of alternative symbols like confederate flags or American flags with a thin blue line have become commonplace.

We know, if we watch how this happens through history, that when governments topple, when civil war erupts, when authoritarianism takes over, many people are surprised. This is partially because we get used to the symbols of war, the symbols of democratic breakdown. We dismiss people as fringe, we see them as outsiders in some way, and we rest in the strength of our systems. But, here in NY, a far right candidate for governor got 2.7 million people to vote for him, just a few hundred thousand votes away from the winner, and four House seats flipped, all with far right, Trump aligned, candidates. We might see this shift as something happening to our south or west, but that isn’t in congruent with the facts.

I’m not saying this to frighten you, and I hope I’m not doing that. I’m saying this because I know we are ready to look at what’s real. It’s something I love about our faith. We don’t pretend. We face things directly, honestly, and we aren’t afraid to break through convention to speak truth. Today, this is our truth.

I Know This Rose Will Open

Last week when worship was over, a few of you encircled me because you were worried and you asked me what to do if a country that feels combustible actually ignites. I told you I’d have a better idea today. And I do. I’ve read key books on this subject, listened to advice from our top leaders, and have reviewed what I know from my years of study and here’s what I have. What will save us? Faith, Hope, and Love. Don’t roll your eyes at me.

One of the most dangerous things about this moment in history is our isolation. After years of pandemic lockdowns and quarantines, the rise of video as the primary way people meet, and the dramatic reduction of people working in the same physical spaces, our communities are smaller if they exist any more at all. When we add to that the disintegration we experience in families both because of real distance and because of political divisions, we are living in a nearly unprecedented time of social fragmentation.

This makes us vulnerable in a variety of ways. A good friend, living in a very conservative town, is single and has rainbow and a black lives matter flags on her home. She wondered recently if she should remove them given the political climate. Understanding how mob mentality works, she knows if people take to the streets, she will be quickly targeted. Some of you have expressed similar worries.

While history tells us that these things happen and no one is immune, we also know that people are less likely to harm someone they know. My friend will spend some time knocking on her neighbor’s doors to introduce herself. She’ll pay specific attention to those she thinks are more liberal or moderate, hoping to build a network. In that same town, she and other progressives are scheduling gatherings in each other’s homes. They’re also organizing to support more progressive policies in the school system, hoping to stave off a sharp right turn parent-activists have taken. In other words, they are building community. They are building systems of relationships, with the intention of creating safety nets for each other.

Last week, I told you that hope is active, that hope isn’t the idea that things will be fine, but they might be fine if we work to make it so. As a people of hope, we are called to active engagement. Timothy Snyder, the author of the book On Tyranny, tells us to pick an institution and commit to defending it. An institution can be as small as a local library or as large as the Department of Education. Using your own interests and skills, ask yourself what institution is necessary for a free society and protect it. I’m committed to this one, the Community Church of New York, and with it, to freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a long history of fighting for justice, for centering the marginalized, for seeking equity. We pray in traditional ways, gathering our strength and expressing our gratitude, but we know if we aren’t also praying with our hands and our feet, our prayer is almost meaningless. We are a people of faith, which means we are a people of action, grounded in the shared and deep values of human worth and dignity, democratic principles, and radical interconnectedness.

Faith, Hope and Love. These are our salvation, the response to the eschatological anxiety of our time. We are not ungrounded. We are not helpless. We are not alone. 

This We Believe: On God and Prayer

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

September 18, 2022 

Long before becoming UU, the question “Do you believe in God” was the worst anyone could ever ask me. You might feel similarly. It’s a binary question and I’m not a fan of binary. It’s a yes or no question to the nature of the universe. It’s like asking, “What is the meaning of life: yes or no?”

I have no intention of asking or answering that question today – not for you and not for me. It’s a bad question. It’s particularly bad when people are sure they know the answer and then judge other people if their answer is different. I won’t ask the question and I don’t have an answer. And I’m sure if ever anyone ever comes close to an answer to that question, it won’t be “yes” or “no”.

The universe as I understand it is far, far more complicated than that. It’s profound with mystery- complex, unknown, unknowable. It’s wild, and chaotic with life teeming in the minute and in the magnificent. It’s loving. It’s violent. It’s unpredictable, and I’m not willing to even consider that there’s a “yes” or “no” question that comes close to apprehending the depth or breadth of what it means to be alive or in what ways we are alone and in what ways we are not.

There are times, though, when I seek people who wrestle with these big questions. Not people who answer them, but who live into them. Some are scientists, poets, philosophers. A few of my favorites are mystics. Mysticism, in its formal and academic context, is the radical experience of the divine. My master’s degree is in Medieval Mysticism, a subject I found tremendous comfort in in graduate school where we otherwise spent our time diagnosing and dissecting god. Courses on reason and doctrine were tempered by poetry written a thousand years ago by women and men overcome by Love.

We have mystics closer to our time period who have had similar experiences. The 20th century writer and spiritual leader Thomas Merton wrote of a conversion experience in Kentucky. He said:  “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Merton’s conversion on 4th and Walnut, - now so famous an experience it’s memorialized on that very corner in that city with a big sign marking the spot – that kind of experience isn’t common, but it’s also not entirely unusual. Caryll Houselander, a lesser-known 20th century English mystic had a similar experience. She was riding in an underground train. She writes:

“Quite suddenly, I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them – but because he was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here in this underground train, not only the world as it was at that moment, not only in the people in the countries of the world, but all those yet to come. I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passerby – Christ.”

Language isn’t our friend today. The word “god” – with or without a capital “G” – can be cumbersome, depending on your own personal history. “Christ” maybe even more so. These words have history. They have politics. They might be connected with very specific images and understandings. They might be connected to personal trauma. To religious trauma. To deep, unnecessary rejection, pain, longing and loneliness. Unitarians in particular have been trying to break open our assumptions and connections around the word “god” from an individual male, white, conscious, all-powerful and present being since the 19th century, but somehow we still default to that, even unconsciously, probably because that image has so saturated our culture and language it requires more discipline than most of us have time for to break free of it. In response, so many of us say we don’t believe in god. We answer “no” to the binary question. What I think we mean is we don’t believe in that, particular god and we haven’t had time to give much thought to the other ones.

Sometimes we find it liberating to hold the same kind of image, but this time god is female. And Black. That gets easier. Warmer. Maybe equally ferocious but on our side. That god might even be sexual. And lesbian. Now She’s starting to get interesting.

Richard Rohr, the director of the Center for Contemplation and Action, poses the idea that God isn’t an individual being, but another name for Everything. Everything is connected to Everything. We aren’t saved alone, but in participation with everyone else, in community with people and with the planet. God is in all things, is all things. The world is both the hiding place and the revelation of God. There is no difference between the profane and the sacred. All life is communion, all life is coherent. Limiting God to a person, a single revelation, makes the world fragmented and small. But, the world, the universe is massive – and expanding. The Holy, the connection, the foundation for life, the platform for our living, is moving, stretching, expanding. And it is the body of God, another name for Everything.

A man who calls himself Wild Bill Balding goes even further. Breaking open the idea that God is the expanding universe, Balding tells us God is a Verb, not a noun. He writes:  

'I am who I am,

I will be who I will be.'

dynamic, seething, active

web of love poured out,

given, received, exchanged,

one God in vibrant community

always on the move,

slipping through our fingers,

blowing through the nets we cast

to hold and name,

confine to nouns, to labels,

freezeframe stasis,

pinned like a butterfly,

solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.

'I am who I am,

I will be who I will be' -

not pinned down by names, labels,

buildings, traditions,

or even by nails to wood:

I am: a verb, not a noun,

living, free, exuberant,

always on the move.

“I am who I am”. That’s what Moses was told. He saw a bush, engulfed in flame, but not burning and he tried to find out what was going on. Yahweh spoke to him and told him he was being called to liberate those who were enslaved by the Pharoah in Egypt. Moses, unsure about what was really happening here, asked who is sending him and the answer was “I am who I am”, sometimes translated as “I am who Is”.

I Am Who Is. An act of Being. And the conversation is an experience, not a belief. That conversation, often called prayer, comes up from our center, not always as words, but as laughter or kisses or sobbing. Prayer is primeval, it’s primordial, it’s our most ancient language, spoken long before we had words. We dance in joy and sorrow and fear. We make wishes, often secret, and howl, sometimes in pairs and every time we do, we are expressing our deepest desires, our longing for a world we once knew or never knew and can’t live without. Prayer is our most authentic expression when we allow it, especially if we don’t try to temper it with those pesky binary questions that end with “yes” or “no”. Once we move into our minds, seeking images or specifics, wondering to what or whom we are praying, we have moved from our hearts to our heads where Mystery is uncomfortable and usually unwelcome.

I remember long ago being told to kneel and pray daily, to say thank you and to ask for things like help and wisdom. I was told if there were specific things I wanted, I could mention those too, but to be aware that sometimes the answer is “no”. So, I did that. I got on my knees and talked. It was fine, and sometimes helped me get clear about things, or made me feel better about something. Sometimes I waited for answers – and I could wait a long time. Then I started feeling like this was a dysfunctional relationship with me doing all the talking and some guy out in the clouds with all the power. When I started studying religion, I asked a teacher how to pray and she genuinely didn’t understand my question. I wanted her to hand me a stack of papers with the right words on them so I’d be sure I was doing it right. Instead, she asked if I sing. Or walk in the woods. Or chant. She asked if I danced, which I did often. She asked if I loved people, which was also a big “yes”. So, she said, she doesn’t understand why I’m asking. It seems I know how to pray.

I thought I’d find the appropriate and accepted posture and start a conversation with the magic words and then I’d wait for an answer. What I didn’t know is that I didn’t need words and the conversation was going on all around me. All I needed to do was notice. I needed to breath. To see. To feel. To listen.

I don’t know the nature of the universe. I don’t know the meaning of life. I do know how it feels to stand in a summer rainstorm, drenched and laughing. I know how to take off my shoes and feel the grass beneath my feet. I know how to hold a door open for someone or how to thank them when they do that for me, how to live into each gift, how to offer gratitude.

Look around for yourself. Just outside this door, you will see giggling children and plumes of exhaust, regal buildings and people scrounging for food, warm winds and tropical storms – in awe and delight you will see all the things, dreadful and beautiful, more wonderful and terrible than is necessary. Let it strike you speechless with worship and fear. It is Everything.

And every once in a while, look around and see that everyone – no matter who they are or what they think or why they’re here,- everyone is walking around shining like the sun.

This We Believe: The Beginning

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

I’m not sure I remember learning about Adam and Eve as a kid, but I clearly remember learning about Moses and the Exodus. That was a story we told in detail for hours every spring with everyone in our extended family around a table. Passover served as a critical part of my own identity. This is the story of our heritage. These are our ancestors. I’m aware that as a parent, I haven’t done that with my own child. As a UU child, my kid might be able to tell you about lots of creation and origin stories, but none of them are his. It’s true for adults, too. The stories that hold us up often weren’t learned as part of our shared faith, but were brought in from somewhere else.

As Unitarian Universalists, we talk a lot about our faith, but when it comes time to define it, we often speak quickly about what we don’t believe rather than about what we do. If pushed, we lean heavily on ethics, and a few shared understandings of what the world should look like. From time to time, in moments that make every religious professional squirm, someone will pipe in with, “We don’t believe anything” which, of course, is absurd but no better than, “We can believe whatever we want” which is an adolescent response to our stated value of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Of course you can believe whatever you want. It’s a free country. But, it’s not an answer to the question. Unitarian Universalists do have a common theology, but we haven’t done a good job of articulating it which leaves us scrambling.

To combat that reality, many ministers talk about the elevator speech. We talk about rehearsing it for our members so they can adopt or adapt it and have something useful to say when asked the question. If you’re interested, mine is, “UUs are part of a covenantal faith. We don’t have doctrine, because we believe that revelation continues to unfold.” It’s short, it’s accurate, it gives a broad sense of who we are. I use it often. It’s fine. But when we’re talking about living into our faith, an elevator speech isn’t enough. We don’t live an elevator speech. We live a theology. We live, we are defined, we behave, we are liberated, by a living faith grounded in a shared theology.

Theology is a system, not just a line or two. It’s a deep and wide expanse of interconnected, interrelated stories that become the foundation for how we understand our lives. Theology is poetry and philosophy and ethics and mythology. It’s broad speculation sometimes made very small so we can hold it in prayer when we are most afraid. It translates out to culture and back in to identity and out again to politics and human systems. As UUs, we have theology, but we haven’t been very good about articulating it. Which is why I’m starting this series I’m calling This We Believe. Over the course of the next few years, I’ll take a systematic approach to theology. This will translate to some adult programming as well as we grapple with the big concepts that make up rich theological systems. It’s also, in its simplest form, the basis for this season’s podcast that I record with Rev. Sarah Lenzi called Hope and Heresy.

What better way to start this UU theology than at the beginning. Cosmology. Creation stories. And here at the dawn of a new year, starting at the beginning makes sense. Sort of. I’m not sure that January, 2022 is really a beginning. I think we’ve been in this doorway or portal, this transition into something else for almost two years. We’re living in a liminal space between what was and what will be. We’ll arrive somewhere and that will be the start of what’s next, but for now, we’re living in the meantime.

But if we’re starting our theological quest, it makes sense to start at the beginning. Every faith, every culture, has a creation story. Or two. The stories have a lot in common as you heard from our reading. Light and Dark. Land and Sea. People. Animals. Floods. Some traditions have more than one. Genesis serves as the creation story for Jews and Christians and in it there are at least two distinct stories. One is told by the day. There is a god who exists before anything else and that god creates it all from nothing.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”

It goes on like that. God separates the land and the sea, creates humans, all the animals…you know the story. It’s beautiful and rich. There’s a second story, too. In the first story, humans were formed as part of the creation of all the things. In the second story, it says, “The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” It goes on to say that God planted a garden in Eden and that’s where the man lived for what seems to be quite a while because God is busy creating trees and streams and naming things, but then God realizes the man is lonely, so he takes a rib from the man from which he creates Eve. “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

This is a foundational story and, for good or ill, it defines the Judeo-Christian tradition and the many countries founded on that tradition, like our own. These stories create order out of chaos. They tell us why things are the way they are. They give us context. We might let go of them in their literal forms, but the mythology lives in our culture and language, serving as the infrastructure for our collective lives.

What are the creation stories that undergird Unitarian Universalism? We begin with science and the Big Bang. It starts with fire. Creation doesn’t begin in one moment; it came into existence in a sequence of events unfolding from within as billions of galaxies. Eco-theologian Brian Swimme puts it this way, “In the depths of its silence, the universe shuddered with the immense creativity necessary to fashion the galaxies…These gigantic structures pinwheeled through the emptiness of space and swept up all the hydrogen and helium into self-organizing systems…” Sidney Leibes, in his book A Walk Through Time says, “The primal brilliance expands briefly and then suddenly, with great fury, enters upon an even more explosive expansion that physicists designate with the phrase inflation, an exponential billowing forth in which the elementary particles, the first material beings, are torn out of a deep well of potentiality and allowed to enter the adventure of evolution.”

About five billion years ago our sun was born and became a supernova seeding all the elements of our solar system. Four-and-a-half billion years ago spinning around the sun was a disc of the original subcloud just large enough to resist the cosmic rays from the sun. A cold remnant of the subcloud, a hanger-on, a residue, a swirling disc of elements, gave birth in time to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planets were formed, and the solar system took shape as a community.

Cletus Wessels wrote, “The earth was a privileged planet with its size producing a gravitational and electromagnetic balance, and its position with respect to the sun enabling it to establish a temperature range in which complex molecules could be formed. Out of these seemingly random conditions came the earth’s stupendous creativity over the next four billion years that brought forth all the beauty of its land, its plants, and its animals. And then between two and three million years ago, the earth became conscious in the human.”

This is our creation story and one that can lead us more deeply toward mystery and awe. This is our mythology. To be clear, to call something a myth isn’t to denigrate it. On the contrary, I’m looking to elevate this story. Myths are big stories, universal stories that we can hold our individual stories up to. They are mirrors, or lenses, ways for us to see ourselves and our place in the universe. To call something myth isn’t a comment about the facts of the story. It’s to say that the story is True. The creation story science has given us offers meaningful insight into our lives on this planet. One of our sources of Truth is science. And, science, like UUs, changes its mind sometimes. New information is made known and new theories are posited. UUs don’t have doctrine because we know that revelation continues to unfold. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t have myths. Myths can change with time, but they aren’t dependent on facts.

The creation story the scientists have given us is ready to be mined for Truth, necessary insights into what it means to be who we are. These stories tell us that the universe is self-organizing and alive. Creation comes from chaos. Everything from galaxies to solar systems to cells and atoms, everything evolves into collaborative communities. Every species helps shape every other, all of life is in an intertwined process of co-evolution. Sidney Liebes tells us the universe is a cosmogenesis – a developing community – with a role for everyone.

Like every great creation story, this one has implications for how we live our lives. We are wildly, radically, connected to and dependent on all life on this planet. Nationalism is absurd in light of the truth of our becoming. It’s also a call to know our place, to keep ourselves right-sized in this massive story. Thomas Berry, the groundbreaking geo-theologian warns us that humans have multiplied into the billions making us the most numerous of all Earth’s complex organisms. We’ve inserted ourselves into most of the ecosystemic communities throughout the planet, reducing Earth’s diversity and channeling the majority of the Gross Earth Product into human social systems. The future will be worked out in the tensions between those committed to what he calls the Technozoic, a future of increased exploitation of Earth as resource for the benefit of humans, and those committed to the Ecozoic, a new mode of human-Earth relations, one where the well-being of the entire Earth community is the primary concern.

I admit, this origin story is more complicated than “God separated the heavens and the Earth and on the 7th day He rested.” But, it’s beautiful in its complexity. Its proximity to facts is enticing. And its implications are transformative. We could embrace this story, adopt it as our cosmology, our central story of creation and the origins of our shared lives. We have it here to mine, to discover Great Truth that can hold us up when we feel overwhelmed or unsure or confused about the world. This gorgeous, ancient, poetic history of a story is the infrastructure for our lives, telling us who we are, holding us together as a community, providing insight into how we should move forward. I can imagine us telling the story to our children, sitting around a table, explaining that they are stardust, no less than the trees and the moon, that their ancestors became planets and oceans and apes, all evolving into the glorious world we’re now a part of.

As we begin this new year, as we continue on this journey into unknown territory, this story reminds us that we are part of something magnificent, a community of elements that organized into this awe-inspiring life and we are now active players in the long, poetry of our creation.