This sermon was given at Stevens Chapel on August 17, 2003 by Tom Duff

On Being Human

We like Tevye. Sholem Aleichem created him with seven daughters to marry off. This was cut to five for the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but even that deserves sympathy. But Tevye doesn't need our sympathy. He is not "hidden too well away" from his God. He can let it all hang out, even to God and tell exactly what he wants: to be recognized everywhere, to have and live with some excess, to have his wife diverted by what she can do best, and to have time just to meditate, if not to know all the answers. He wants mostly what we might want, but he can say so.

I grew up in a time when it was a virtue, even patriotic, to do without. Our money tree had died in Brooklyn. I learned how not to want about so many things, that I have trouble admitting I want anything. On that count alone, I can admire Tevye. He is quit clear about it, while most of us are less clear about everything.

I was given a brilliant, creative, but low powered mind. If you ask me what I think, better come back next week or next year for an answer. When my father became a professor of adult education and lifelong learning, I knew it was because he figured it would take me that long to learn anything. After twelve years in school, they were still trying to teach me about sentences, and I couldn't write a column of figures, much less add them. My jobs seemed to go on forever: doing dishes, weeding the lawn, painting around and around the house. I was never paid, so I couldn't earn more. The bible said that the Lord created the world in six days. I went with science. I could identify with a God who took his time about creation. So, if you were like me, you can identify with Tevye, and cut to the chase: Why doesn't God just make us all rich?

On the other hand, most of us have felt, along with A E Houseman, "I, a stranger, and afraid, in a world I never made." Religious experiences, for the most part, seem to be the opposite of this. They make us feel at home, secure in the whirlwind and power of the Universe, and - able to love it so much - we can love it, ourselves, and others. Or they can make us at peace, in a "steadfast" ordered world, which "endures and shall endure."

In attending a non-creedal church, we are allowed lots of chances for fuzzy, as well as clear, thinking. It is easy to slip away from what makes sense, into what would simply feel good. Tevye, much as I love and admire him, slips in to being an "Interventionist." Some of you have heard me preach against fuzzy thinking interventionists. The point is that Tevye wants God to intervene in life and make him rich. If God would just intervene into the world a little bit to make him rich, what difference would it make?

I want no more dealing with God by interventionists, nor hear their arguments, which are sometimes threatening, but can very seductive.

In theocracies people may be pushed by the priestly class with warnings about the negative things the intervening gods or God might do. He may drive you from Eden when your are trying to learn, take your first born son, use weapons of mass destruction like fire and flood, or perhaps chemical warfare and turn you into a pillar of salt. To protect you, the priestly class will demand livestock options, and tax indulgences for their friends. Your prayers will be reduced to a book of common voice mails, and God will be said to have limited his revelations of truth to a Central Incantations Agency. Draftees, women, and foreigners will be expected to sacrifice and follow orders, and inquisitions will be subject only to ecclesiastical law. Finally, you will be told that it is only with priestly help that your God will intervene on your behalf in a helpful way.

I am a Deist. I don't think that I can have an ordered universe in which I can be comfortable, and have an intervening God of any kind at the same time. I wouldn't be human, however, if sometimes I didn't wish for a God who would take my hand and pull me through the worst of things. Of all the species, we take the longest to grow up, to mature, and be responsible. A lot of us don't want the freedom to choose, we want to be taken care of. All of us get tired, and sometimes want to be done with the troubles of the world.

Let's look at the argument for a non-interventionist God. There are about six and a half billion individual, selfish people in the world today. Should God intervene in the world because of six and a half billion voice mails a day? And suppose several other species had their own means of praying to him, should he intervene for them as well? What if the sparrows wanted a change of territory? If crows got together and prayed the loudest, would they get all his attention? How could there be an ordered world in which we could be responsible and feel secure, if the rules by which it operated were suspended or changed billions of times a day to fill everyone's demands? I know that thought does not seem very comforting.

Then there is the problem of unintended consequences: When Jesus drove the devils out of the man called Legion, and they all went into swine that in turn ran into water and drowned, do you suppose the swineherd felt he was having a religious experience? And his situation wouldn't have been any different if had been a shepherd and his sheep all drowned. He might have felt pleased for the man called Legion, but what about his own circumstances?

I'm not saying God doesn't love you, or care about you, or that you won't get your reward in heaven. If he doesn't intervene in the world and give you just what you want, it doesn't say anything about that. Must you have M&Ms every time you go to the movies?

I'm sure he wants to treat you as a free responsible adult, and not clinging to him for help all the time. You must walk this lonesome valley, and have to walk it by yourself. And you may have strengths, supported by the love of others, which you never expected. If a pain cell, which has never been used, can fire off after seventy or eighty years, why not something that can give you peace? Who am I to say that you do not have spiritual strengths also built into you with their own thermostats, which will be available for you in times of extreme stress? If we do not hold ourselves "too well away from others," maybe you can trust them as well to be a support when you need it.

Unitarian-Universalists, with their mix including humanism and deism, will never be as popular as the theism of mainline Christianity. Most people want a "personal god," by which they mean one that will enter into the world, not two thousand years ago, but today and do something nice for them. -- A personal angel might do, if available when one screws up.

You may have to settle for a listening God. -- I'm not telling you what to believe, maybe only what not to believe. -- A God that is a good listener, rather than intervener, could make you feel at home in the world. And when you are most in tune with nature, then nature itself can feel personal, maybe even a Thou that shares. I once sang in a choir whose tones were so pure that we heard overtones from nature to what we were singing. And I have been in temples and churches that give peace beyond understanding. Surely there is a sharing going on there. Sometimes it may be with generations that have gone before. Now isn't that remarkable!

When we bring ourselves to church, we are only human. What we believe as mature adults can be a combination both of what feels good and what is rational. It needn't include an intervening God.