A Sermon by Rev. Clare Butterfield
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
June 15, 2003
What a year we've had together. So much has come and gone. I wasn't supposed to be up here today. Fern was supposed to be here saying goodbye. Then we learned that she had already said it. And that was hard. She had such method to the way she passed the year with us. Took us so deliberately through a process - a process we probably could have stood to go through at other times even since I've been a member here, and didn't. The work she did makes change easier.
And Alan is coming and it's clear that there is a strong positive feeling about that. A feeling that would have been more diluted if we had known about Fern's condition before his candidating week - keeping that secret at her own expense was her last gift to this congregation.
So much change.
And I am out of rotation. The deal with me is two sermons a year, and you know pretty much by now what you're going to get, don't you? It'll have nature in it and will probably go heavier on biblical sources and lighter on transcendentalists than other sermons you have heard from this space. But the day is not what it was expected to be and I think the subject of the hour is not my usual subject, but change itself, or what we might call the process of change.
Change has its theological aspects, of course.
So I thought would be useful for us to spend this time together talking about a framework for change. The theology that I follow is such a framework. It is called process theology, and it is based in the religious writings of Alfred North Whitehead in the 1920's and later, after he stopped being a famous mathematician and became a famous religious philosopher instead. What a show-off. But the framework for understanding constancy and change, and God in the midst of them, is one that I find powerfully useful. It is useful to me, and so I think it might be useful to some of you.
Talking to my friend Pat Cavanagh about this sermon I told her a story that I then thought I would share with you. It happened to me when I was doing clinical pastoral education at Loyola hospital something like five years ago now. I got called to an older woman's room at two o'clock in the morning. She was facing a heart transplant the next morning and she felt the need for a chaplain to spend some time with her. What was really on her mind of course was the very real possibility that she was living through her last few hours on earth. And what she wanted to do about this was to pray. Now this woman had, by what she told me, lived a pretty hard and hard-working life. But somehow she had it in her head that she wasn't a good enough person to come before God as a petitioner. She asked me whether I didn't think that God got tired of people coming to him when they're in trouble, and leaving him alone the rest of the time. Which is actually a pretty perceptive question, but what this woman was really asking me was whether I agreed that she was unworthy. And all I could ask her, all I could wonder, was "who told you that?" In asking that question I gave her the permission she needed to pray. This happened to me at other times at the hospital and it's happened to me in other places since then. A young mother who felt that her own history of drug addiction meant she couldn't ask God to save her seriously ill child. Or that she simply didn't know how to pray. "What do you want?" I asked her. And we made the answer to that question her prayer.
What I want to tell you is that there is someone here who is waiting to be given permission. It might be you. It might be the person sitting next to you.
Now in classical theology there is an idea of God as both immanent and transcendent. "Cleave the wood and I am there," says Jesus in the hidden gospel of Thomas. This is the Immanent Kingdom. An immanent God is a God who is intimate in human and earthly affairs - who is right here. A transcendent God is the remote one - the all-powerful, all knowing - the one who set things in motion out there on the edge of the universe and who now hangs around out there watching it. If you look in the dictionary of religion that this congregation gave me when I left the secretarial position to head off to seminary it says that immanence refers to the "the relation of God to the created order. The total transcendence of the unproduced producer of all that is would allow no relation to a created order; consequently, all theistic religions allow some degree or mode of immanence. At an extreme the created order is understood to be the mode of God's self-manifestation and thus to be the body of God. See also, Pantheism, Process Theology." Process theology, you will note, is located at the extreme end of the immanence argument.
Well, theologically, I would expect to find myself located at the extreme end of something, and among students of theology within our movement this process idea has a lot of traction these days. Our most important modern theological thinker, Charles Hartshorne, was a process follower, as is Rebecca Parker, the current president of Starr King seminary. And so, for what it's worth, am I.But here's what I want to offer today about that idea of immanence and transcendence. The transcendent God doesn't change. He (this God is always a he) stands apart from creation and is unaffected by it. But as Whitehead points out in Religion in the Making, unfortunately for this wholly transcendent God, he is not provable. He's also not knowable by us. He might be out there, but given that he never interacts with creation, we wouldn't know about him. Pretty disappointing position for a God to be in.
In Hebrew scripture there is a long, gradual process of God moving away from a three-dimensional being who can somehow be the creator and still wander about in creation - in the Garden of Eden, for example, to a pillar of smoke, to an all powerful-power who is never seen or directly spoken to any more.
And as Christian theology developed God moves very far away indeed. God gets so powerful that he really can't lower himself any more to wandering around the garden of his own creation - it would be unseemly. And yet something has to preserve our own sense of God's presence among us. This need is what accounts, my Unitarian friends, for the development of the trinity. Jesus becomes the immanent God which allows God the father to be very transcendent. The holy spirit then acts as a sort of intermediary between the other two. The trinity is a theory that absorbs immanence and transcendence. Early Christianity needed it because early Christianity wasn't ready to give up on the idea of an all-powerful God. Trintarianism offered an explanation that allowed God to remain both immanent and transcendent. Unitarianism compromised this, probably without intending to initially. So a problem of theology became how to maintain immanence, and therefore a God we could love and worship, and at the same time maintain transcendence - God's all powerful power. The tendency historically when these two notions of God collide has been to sacrifice immanence for transcendence. That's why the thorny question of why bad things happen and why there is evil in the world tends to get answered so unsatisfactorily - God has a plan, God's purposes are mysterious.
What process theology has the courage to do is the reverse. It sacrifices transcendence in favor of immanence. This idea of God is, to my way of thinking, much more satisfactory. Not because it's fun to give up the idea of someone who could bail you out in an emergency - that God of last resort was comforting. But he has, and this is my humble opinion, the marked disadvantage for modern people of not being believable. And if that God does exist and can stop bad things from happening and has so repeatedly failed to do so as to bring us the calamitous twentieth century then he has a flaw much deeper than the one of not being believable. Then he is not worthy of worship. If God could have stopped the holocaust and didn't, if God could have stopped the slaughter in Rwanda and didn't, then we may still believe in him but we can't worship him any more.Now I think that a lot of the people who end up here are people who came in to our movement after they realized this unworthiness about the God who continues to be described in whatever movement they came from. And if they came from that movement twenty or thirty years ago, this would be particularly true. The migration toward immanence from transcendence has begun in most denominations and is pretty far advanced in a number besides our own, but if you left before that started there, and before we got back to talking about theological ideas, as we have fairly recently done, this whole development might have passed you by. Or you might have followed it from here, without knowing that it really is going on in a whole lot of places from Judaism to Catholicism to the United Church of Christ.
The longstanding tradition in western theology has been to sacrifice immanence for transcendence. That allows for a God of power, but not so readily for a God of love. God's loving aspects are expressed in God's immanence. Which is a long way round to getting back to Whitehead, who talks about this very thing in the lectures that came out as Religion in the Making. He even quotes the gospel of Thomas "Cleave the wood and I am there."
This is what Whitehead said in 1927. "The modern world has lost God and is seeking him." And for Whitehead this seeking had to be conducted in a manner that had historical and scientific integrity. He set up parameters for God (if you can overlook the presumption), that would embrace the discoveries in physics that were still quite new at that time, and addressed the whole question of why bad things happen if God is good, and still allowed God to exist in a form worthy of worship. "If the modern world," Whitehead said, "is to find God, it must find him through love and not through fear, with the help of John and not Paul."
Whitehead talks about the need for a description of God to intersect with metaphysics - that the emotional reaction that belief can generate not obscure or draw us to abandon the rules that we understand to apply to the world around us. In his extremely dryly humorous way, he refers to a God who remains consistent at all emotional temperatures. And Whitehead's God is one that emerges from interaction with creation. God is changed by change. In every emerging situation there lies a universe of possibility, but within this realm of possibility is the harmony of all, which is God. The limitation of God is goodness.
Whitehead makes the following extremely heretical statement, and he makes it so matter-of-factly that you could easily miss how heretical it is. He says: "It is not true that God is in all respects infinite." Do you love that? "It is not true that God is in all respects infinite." Transcendence flies out the window. Lightning strikes. God is the ground of every act, of every event in time and space, drawing toward goodness, but in no way able to control the choices of creation.
"Every fact is what it is," Whitehead says, "a fact of pleasure, of joy, of pain, or of suffering. In its union with God that fact is not a total loss, but on its finer side is an element to be woven immortally into the rhythm of mortal things....The power by which God sustains the world is the power of himself as the ideal. He adds himself to the actual ground from which every creative act takes its rise." Sorry about the "himself" there - it was 1927.
Religion at its highest, in this view, is not a doctrine or dogma. It is not a practice or ritual, or a way of designing a building (even one as nice as this). Religion is the development of loyalty to the world that is stronger than loyalty to the self. And God is that which calls this loyalty out of us. God is, to quote Whitehead one more time, "that element in virtue of which the attainment of such a value for others transforms itself into value for ourselves."
God is, by this reckoning, the holder of the world's value.
This is the completely immanent God. The movement from transcendence to immanence is complete in this thinking. Cleave the wood and I am there. Whitehead was a mathematician and a contemporary of Einstein. For him the rules had to be what the rules were emerging as being. And God could not be an exception to them. The emergence of chaos theory, and the ability of so many variables to operate at one time that even if we could predict the outcome from each one of them we could not possibly predict the outcome for all together. That funny chaos phenomenon of order at low level, exploding into complete disorder on the large scale, emerging into order again at the highest level - if you can just back up far enough.
That order/disorder is all possibility. And God is the influence on it out of which the patterns rise. God is the holder of all value even in what is perishing, which is most of it, most of the time. Nothing is ever really lost, in this view of God, because the value is retained in the memory of God - as if that memory were almost a physical location in the universe described as everything that's happened here so far.
What this permits is a God who, while not able to stop bad things from happening, can endure with us as we suffer through them and continue wanting the emergence of love. What you get is a God you can love, and who can, in some way, love you back.
Now maybe your notion of God is way more transcendent than this. And maybe it's even more immanent (meaning that you don't really have a concept of God at all - only of the sum of creation). Either way is fine. The reason I'm standing up here on my hind legs today talking about this is that whether or not you find it compelling, this is a framework for a rational believer to accept change and go on believing.
This is a framework to accept that Fern would die of cancer before she even really had time to realize how sick she was, and this would not be a sign of the mysterious power of a cold creator, but an illness that was badly timed in a worthy woman's life. And God would be there in the midst of it, continuing to embody the value she created after Fern was gone.
This is a framework to accept that after having a truly uniquely gifted minister and preacher and friend with us for nine years in the person of Jay, he would go on to something else and we would call Alan, who is certain to be quite different. And yet we will continue to be a faithful community, continue to learn from the teacher we have called among us, continue in relationship with each other, as our covenant says, and with God.
Process is a huge shift in theological thinking, it's pretty recent, and, as you might expect from a thing called Process, it's still going on. I wanted you to know, if you didn't, that you have the option of believing in a God of immanence. I wanted you to know that in the midst of the whirlwind, when people you love are flying out the door and strangers are flying in, there is a power that is with you always, even to the end of the world. There is a light that shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. There is a holiness that animates and calls through all that lives, a preserver of everything of value that has ever passed this way, and you have the option of believing in it, knowing it, feeling its whisper right at your ear, worshiping what is good and powerful and true about it, and, if you choose to do so, naming it God. Maybe this is a useful framework for you, and maybe it's not. My excuse for going on about it today is two-fold: first, I don't think I've ever made you sit through it before and I probably won't again; but second - this is what keeps me alive - this is what I believe, this is what the world that I see reveals to me as the truth. And so I believe that there is someone here who needs it and didn't know it was a choice they could make. There is someone who came into this church this morning because they were waiting for permission. Maybe that is you, maybe it's the person sitting next to you. I'm not here to give you permission. I don't really have that power. But I am here to tell you that you don't need me to give you what you were born having.
It's been a hard year for this congregation in a lot of ways. But something new is constantly emerging from what was. Out of all the variables and possibilities order emerges - a form of harmony drawn by the sounding presence of love at the base of the universe. We are in many ways a stronger community than I have ever known us to be. . Good things are coming for us. We are becoming something new in the world, we are loyal to the world. Fern has gone, Alan is coming, new members will arrive, and some will leave us. The process goes on and something emerges, but love abides all, and nothing of value is lost. "A voice inside the beat says, 'I know you're tired, but come. This is the way.'"
May we be in silence together.
