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	Unitarian Universalist Idolatry:

	An Oxymoron?

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson

	Unitarian Universalist Church in Wakefield

	October 24, 1999

Last week we talked about acceptance, and I said that one of the
biggest obstacles to acceptance of other people was our problems
accepting ourselves.  Today?s talk will be something of a continuation
of this, only the focus will be not on the limits of our acceptance of
other people, but the limits on our acceptance of gods or divine
entities.  Today we examine whether any gods are out of bounds or, to
put it another way, whether we the concept of idolatry has any meaning
for us in our pluralistic religion.

Let?s start by looking back to the root of this idea.  The Bible
reading for today sets forth the story which I think is the source of
the Judeo-Christian concept of idolatry.  In the second of the Ten
Commandments given by God to Moses is, in the New Revised Standard
translation:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, [the King James version reads
?any graven images?]  whether in the form of anything that is in the
heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water
under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

The Israelites go on to ignore this warning by constructing a golden
calf and worshiping it even while Moses was on the mountain getting
the ten commandments engraved in stone.  When Moses saw what they had
done, he sent out the faithful simply to slaughter the calf
worshipers, apparently with the approval of Jahweh.  This is the first
reported religious pogrom, and it is no wonder that we who descend
religiously from lines of heretics should feel a little uncomfortable
at the way God is portrayed as siding with the orthodox here.  But as
they say, history is written by the victors and the calf-worshipers
never got a chance to write their version of events.

The choice of the first idol is interesting.  Why would a calf be
worshiped?  In American culture of the present day we might think of
any number of material objects to worship, but a calf wouldn?t be one
of them.  It suggests to the rusty anthropology major in me that the
economic organization of the society was pastoral, that these were
nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who lived with their herds.  Now we
know that pastoralists and agriculturalists sometimes don?t get along
too well - the Genesis story of the farmer Cain killing the
sheepherder Abel is often interpreted as an early allegory of this
conflict.  The conflict continues right down to the musical Oklahoma -
remember the song about the farmer and the cowhand?  They aren?t
always friends.

To the pastoralist, the calf represents that around which the
community has organized its life.  The herds are everything, the
source of meat, milk, and clothing necessary to sustain life.  Both
farmer and herdsman are vitally concerned with fertility but of
different kinds.  The farmer prays for good soil and the right amount
of rain.  The herdsman prays for abundance of offspring, absence of
disease, good grazing land.  It is natural for a pastoral people to
sacralize cattle as it is natural for an agricultural people to
sacralize the land and personify it in such deities as Demeter.

Why should God get so exercised when some of the children of Israel
imitate their pastoral neighbors in the Ancient Near East?  The
recorded explanation, in the "small print" to the Second Commandment,
is that "I the Lord your God am a jealous God.."  What, we may ask,
does the Creator of the Universe have to be jealous of?  We can?t do
much mindreading of God, but we can speculate on the reasons why this
passage was written this way.  Modern scholarship on the Hebrew Bible
places the composition of the Torah, of which Exodus is a part, during
the time called the Babylonian Captivity (Seventh to Fourth Century
B.C.E.), during which time the Hebrews were struggling to maintain an
identity in diaspora after the destruction of King Solomon?s Temple
and the political defeat of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea.  This
threat to identity gives the writer a strong incentive to portray a
rigid monotheism that brooks no competition.

Interestingly enough, we can find in the Book of Genesis clues
suggesting that the children of Israel were not always so rigidly
monotheistic.  Some of the eponyms or names used for God are cognate
with gods of other Ancient Near East peoples.  And in Genesis 6,
sandwiched in after the generations from Adam and before the flood
story, we have the following curious four verses:

"When People began to multiply on the face of the ground, and
daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair,
and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.  Then the
Lord said, ?My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are
flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.?  The Gnaphalium
were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of
God went into the daughters of humans, who bore children to them.
These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown."

What is going on here?  A group of divine offspring of God mating with
human women and producing a bunch of demigods?  Sounds a lot like
Greco-Roman pagan mythology.

Well, here I am sniping at the monotheistic tradition instead of
embracing it, and you can see that I do this because I resist, even
reject, the notion of one god putting down rivals.  I don?t resist the
idea of there being one god, a divine unity behind the apparent
multiplicity.  But I resist the idea that there is only one approach
to this divine unity and everyone who takes a different approach needs
to get in line or be killed.  That attitude, to my way of thinking,
leads to religious persecutions, martyrdoms, inquisitions, expulsions
and genocide.

When I appeared before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the
UUA, I had prepared an elevator speech.  What?s an elevator speech?
An elevator speech is what you say when someone gets on the elevator
at the eighth floor, notices your chalice lapel button and asks you
what Unitarian Universalism is all about and you have to explain it
before you get to the ground floor.  My elevator speech went like
this:  Unitarian Universalism is a religion founded on the proposition
that some questions are too important to have only one right answer.

What this gets at is that pluralism is at heart of our religion.  In
the Eighteenth Century they called it the right of private conscience,
the right of each individual to decide what to believe.  Many of us
embrace a plurality of deities, and many others embrace a plurality of
approaches to the holy.  Now it is not necessary to embrace more than
one tradition; you can be a good Unitarian Universalist if all of your
inspiration is within Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or humanism.
What you can?t be around these churches is exclusivist:  if you make
the claim that the way that works for me is the only way and all the
rest of you are wrong, you won?t be warmly received or comfortable in
a modern Unitarian Universalist church.

Historically, most varieties of Christianity have been supercessionist
and triumphalist.  Supercessionist means the belief that Christianity
transplanted Judaism as the true way to worship the god of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob.  Triumphalist means that Christianity ultimately will
beat our all other religions of the world.  Obviously these
exclusionary aspects of Christianity no longer hold sway with most
Christian liberals, but they are still felt among the moderate to
conservative elements.  It is this aspect of Christianity which I most
strongly reject.

So far so good, but we need to get down to business here.  The
question that sparked my interest in this topic is this:  given that
we permit ourselves to embrace and worship a variety of gods, is there
any such thing as a false god?  Or put another way, if the important
questions in life have more than one right answer, do they have any
wrong answers?

My first reaction to the question of whether our religion admits of
false gods is a divergence of mind and heart.  My mind wants to say
no, logically, we can?t say that some gods are false because we don?t
reserve to ourselves the right to pass judgment on someone else?s
beliefs.  That?s what the inquisition did, that?s what the orthodox
have always done to our heretic forefathers and mothers.  The civil
liberties lawyer in me reverts instinctively to the old familiar
slippery slope argument:  if we allow ourselves to judge the validity
of other?s peoples choices of objects of worship at all, we have lost
the liberty which is the heart of our movement.

But my heart, and maybe my common sense, says, of course there are
religious approaches I can deplore.  There are wrong answers.  In the
first place, there are plenty of out-and-out frauds in the religious
scene today, as there always have been.  I don?t accord Jim Bakker or
Sun Myung Moon or Rev.  Jim Jones any great respect.  Beyond the
obvious frauds, there are the blind alleys.  Psychotropic drugs, for
example, have a legitimate religious use in Native American
spirituality, but your typical suburban teenager is not likely to find
God while day-tripping at the local mall.  Worship of money, or fame,
of glamor, of guns, of power, of golf courses or baseball champions is
a religious dead end, my instincts tell me.

Before we try to resolve my head/heart conflict, it might be well to
consider this word "worship."  Some of the more humanist among us may
be saying by now, "what?s the problem?"  Some of us won?t see a
problem because in our minds we don?t worship anything, god, material
possessions or any of the things I?m talking about.  In fact, some of
us don?t even like to call our Sunday services "worship" because we
don?t acknowledge any being higher than myself.  Well, I think each of
us does worship something whether we call it worship or not.  The word
"worship" is a combination of the root "worth" and "ship."  It
originally meant the act of giving or acknowledging worth to
something.  So in this sense we all worship, it?s just a question of
what our object of worship will be.  Or, to put another way, if there
is nothing we worship, that amounts to saying that everything is
worthless to us, including ourselves.

Let me refine the concept a little further.  In my first semester in
Divinity School, I attended a panel discussion between a Roman
Catholic nun, a Lutheran and a Congregational pastor.  At the question
period, my colleague Robin Zucker, who I hope will be able to preach
here sometime soon, had the temerity to ask the direct question, "what
is god to you?"  The two Protestants gave what sounded to me like a
fairly scripted response, but the nun nswered from her heart:
"Sometimes, like when I just finished reading this book about
Australian aboriginal religion, God is every rock and tree; other
times, like when I sat with my friend who is dying of cancer, God is a
comforting, nurturing mother."  This nun had been very active in
setting up prison ministries for women with AIDS, and I knew she had
totally dedicated her life to serving God.  What struck me is the
paradox:  here is someone who has centered her life around God, but
still has no idea what God is.

Well, since I had that thought three years ago, some of the
strangeness has worn off, because I see that we each build our lives
around something.  Therefore for each of us, that something that we
build our lives around is our god, whether we are aware of worshiping
it our not.  We give it worth by the very act of making it the
foundation of our lives.

This god-in-life may or not be the same as the deity we say we believe
in and are talking about in church on Sunday morning.  This god arises
organically out of the choices that we make, the words we speak and
the actions we take and don?t take.  All of these express to what we
give worth, what we worship.

Now that we have refined it, let?s return to the question Can I say
that some of these gods-in-life are false, that some of the answers
are wrong, even if I can?t say definitively which of them are true and
right?  Maybe false is a little bit of an overstatement.  Maybe we
should adopt Tillich?s notion of god as "ultimate concern" and say not
that some of these gods are false but they are not ultimate.

For example, you may look at your life and find that what you devote
most of your time and energy to is making a lot of money.  Wealth may
be your god, what you worship, as it is to many people in our society.
You surround yourself with the trappings of wealth-the expensive house
and car, luxury vacations, kids in good schoolsSto remind yourself and
everyone else that you are a person of wealth.

Now what shall we say to you:  that your god is false?  No, that might
get us on the slippery slope.  But I think we can say that your god is
not ultimate.  Wealth, as we know from a thousand novels and Hollywood
films, is not an end but a means.  As a means to happiness, it can be
very useful; as an end in itself, it denotes a stunted spiritual
outlook.  There is something higher than this god wealth.

Notice what?s happening, though, with this line of thought.  We?re
getting into the game of whose god is higher.  St.  Anselm defined god
as that which nothing higher can be conceived.  To some today this
definition will be actively offensive and to others not especially
helpful.  For example, a modern neo-pagan may reject the god of
Abraham Isaac and Jacob, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, on the
grounds that this god is too patriarchal and too removed from
creation.  The neo-pagan may prefer a spirit indwelling in particular
rocks and trees, a deity immanent but not transcendent, particular not
universal, embodied not immaterial.  To the monotheist, such a pagan
god may not be as "high" as the Ruler of Creation set forth in the
Bible, but there is no neutral point of view from which to judge these
competing claims.

As another example, take the Hindu idea of Brahman as set forth in the
excerpt from the Baghavad Gita which we read responsively this
morning.  This passage starts off by identifying God as the "self of
everything."  This statement does not refer to the spark of the
divinity within every person, but rather that there is a divine
essence in everything that is in the world.  This is close to what
Emerson called the "oversoul."  In Hindu terminology, the piece of god
that is present within every person is called "Atman."  And the goal
of enlightenment as set forth in the Upanishads is finally to realize
that "Atman" the individual god-essence and "Brahman" the universal
god-essence are one and the same.  In order to do this, you must go
through a long training in the disciplines of meditation wherein you
can pierce the veil of Maya, of illusion and see the underlying unity
behind the world?s apparent multiplicity.

Now we simply can?t rank these three conceptions of God on any kind of
meta scale; if we are honest with ourselves about the limits of our
understanding, about all we can say among these three is that one
approach appeals to us and another one doesn?t.

But the fact that we can?t usefully apply a scale to rank gods doesn?t
mean that we are left with no discrimination whatever.  I would put
any one of these three conceptions of the divine above the worship of
money, power or any of the other things I listed a moment ago.  And
that is simply because I have a rough sense, from my own values, that
Brahman, the tree-spirit and Jahweh are all more worthy objects to
take seriously than money, power etc.

In the recognition that this springs from my own sense of values is
the limit of the sense in which I can say that a god is false:  I can
say that a god is false for me.  I cannot with authority say that any
god is false for you.  For me, a God is false if I cannot be true to
that God and true to myself.

As for your God, you must judge the truth or falsity by the light of
your own life story.  The most I can do is suggest alternative
conceptions that you might consider.

As we move through the stages of life we move through different
conceptions of God.  The conception of God I had in my childhood is
different from the conception I have now, just as God depicted in the
Baghavad Gita is different from the God depicted in the Hebrew Bible.
It is a commonplace observation that those who conceive of God as a
punitive, angry being were often abused as children.

It should not be a surprise that we see God through the lenses of our
own personal histories, for we see everything else in the world that
way, too.  One of the benefits of the postmodernist way of thinking is
to show us that every idea and perception we have is tied to our own
social location and history.  There may be theoretically a neutral,
independent conception but human minds will never reach it.

This is why the Hindus are not bothered by the paradox of recognizing
30 million gods but saying that in ultimate reality they are all one.
For they understand that all of our understandings are partial, all of
our truth relative.  Psychologists tell us that we only perceive about
a tenth of the data that are impacting our sense organs at any given
moment, and only pay attention to about 10% of what we perceive.  We
always have a partial picture of what is going on.  As we train
ourselves to be more aware, we can take in more, and come to realize
that some of our earlier ideas about life were formed on inadequate
data.  As we outgrow these earlier conceptions of the world, we
outgrow the God that went with that conception.

So, are there false Gods?  Yes, there are false Gods, but nobody can
make the judgment that your gods are false but you yourself.  I?ll
close with this:  think of how the Bible story we read this morning
would play if Moses had been a U.U.  Some would say, well, he wouldn?t
be on the mountain talking to God, but let?s pass over that.  I think
he would have come down from the mountain, seen the Israelites
worshiping the golden calf and said far out.  Rather than slaughtering
them all, he would have called a big meeting and resolved the problem
by putting the calf worshipers on the Worship Committee and letting
them do one Sunday a month!

Amen.