“Atheist, Agnostic, or Believer?”

Rev. James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

February 22, 2004

 

(This sermon, originally delivered February 22, 2004, was read from the pulpit again on February 25, 2007, when I was sick with a cold.)

 

I was not with you last Sunday because I was in Victoria, British Columbia, attending a joint meeting of the Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Canadian Unitarian Council. About 300 lay leaders and ministers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, and parts of Canada were there. Eighteen people from this congregation went.

And I had a wonderful time.

It was nice just being in Victoria. It always surprises me just how annoyingly nice Canadians are. Not only the staff at the Empress Hotel where we stayed, not only store clerks and restaurant servers, but even strangers I met on the street.

If people were dogs, Canada would be a nation of Golden Retrievers. They’re just always happy to see you.

It was also good to be with other religious liberals from around the Pacific Northwest. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association spoke, and he told us about the UUA’s efforts to focus its public advocacy on three issues: family values for all people, racial justice, and separation between church and state.

I’m not going to tell you everything else that happened in Victoria, but I do want to share one story, because it has to do with my topic this morning.

The last scheduled event of the gathering was a service on Sunday morning. Before the service, I sat down next to an older couple from a Canadian congregation. Their congregation was very small, they said, but they loved it dearly.

Marilyn Sewell, the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon, led the service that morning. Marilyn’s an excellent preacher, but I know that she sometimes surprises those who hear her for the first time. Her southern accent is strong and something that many Unitarian Universalists aren’t used to hearing from the pulpit. Marilyn also does not hesitate to use religious language. She talks about God a lot. This is also something that at least some Unitarian Universalists aren’t used to hearing.

As I was listening to Marilyn’s sermon, out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help watching the older couple sitting next to me. Every time Marilyn mentioned “God” they jumped a little bit in their seats. It was if there was some kind of electric wire running straight from the microphone on the pulpit to their seat cushions.

“God” Marilyn said, and they jumped.

“Spirit,” she said, and they jumped again.

“Will you pray with me?” she said, and the wife fell over onto the husband’s shoulder.

I felt sympathy for the couple.

Many of us Unitarian Universalists aren’t very comfortable with the G word. Have you ever noticed that in most of the hymns in our hymnal, God isn’t mentioned at all until the third of fourth verse when most of us are no longer paying attention to what we’re singing?

It’s sometimes quipped that Unitarians believe in one God at most. For much of the 20^th century, religious humanism - - a nontheistic world view - - was the most popular theological  position in many of our churches. In this church, I am told, for some years, religious language was rarely used during services. More recently, God talk has become more prevalent among Unitarian Universalists.

This sometimes causes conflict in our congregations. Sometimes people will ask me, “How can you be a minister at a church where people believe so many different things?” “It all works out,” I say, but then I go home and wonder.

One of the problems is this: The God that some Unitarian Universalist disbelieve in is not the same God that other Unitarian Universalist believe in, and there lies the rub.

So this morning, in hopes of ameliorating that problem, I’d like to talk about what I mean when I say the word “God.”

To do this, I have to tell you a little bit about my own religious journey because there have been times in my life when I have called myself as an atheist, an agnostic, and a believer, and still today, I’m not sure which one to use to describe myself.

What do I mean?

Despite being unchurched, I had fairly typical religious beliefs when I was growing up. Sometime during my childhood, I had read through a book of Bible stories, and my brothers and sister and I had been dragged to church a dozen times or so by well-meaning friends or relatives. So I supposed I believed in God, at least knew about Jesus, and thought that good people went to heaven when they died. Not only did I believe these things, but I thought that everybody did more or less.

Then in junior high school, I began to have doubts. I remember riding the bus back and forth to school everyday, and as I rode the bus to school, I would look out the window of the bus and wonder about the existence of God. Sometimes by the time I got off the bus at school, the idea of God seemed to make perfect sense. “How could the world exist without God?” I asked myself. Then riding home at the end of the day I would think of something else, and by the time I got off the bus near my home, the idea of God seemed to be ridiculous.

When I was in high school, my skepticism grew stronger, especially as I studied science and history. Like most adolescents, I saw the world in black and white terms - - either there was a God or there wasn’t. I decided there wasn’t.

Why? I had naturalistic understanding of the universe, believing that everything that is, including consciousness, could be described in naturalistic terms. There was no need or room for a personal supreme being. Also, the idea of an old man with a long white beard up in the sky, pulling the strings of the world like some kind of puppet master, just seemed goofy. The idea of a God who was sometimes angry and sometimes jealous and acted more like a second-rate gangster, threatening human beings with the fires of hell if we didn’t obey seemed clownish. The idea of a God that only sometimes intervened in human affairs, but other times allowed human suffering to happen, seemed unworthy of either worship or belief.

I called myself an atheist, and thought I would be an atheist forever. Then life happened.

When I went to college, I became a philosophy major. Reading Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others, and more importantly having found a group of peers who were willing to share their doubts with one another, strengthened my disbelief even further.

On the other hand, one of the things I learned as a philosophy major was how contingent human knowledge and understanding is. In each century, there have been great thinkers who believed they had the world all figured out, only to have their ideas changed or rejected in the next hundred years. It began to seem arrogant for anyone, including me, to say “there is no God.” I still rejected traditional understandings of God, but I also began to entertain at least the possibility that there could be “something more.” I began to understand that the ultimate nature of our existence is mystery, and to a certain extent, always will be. Why did the universe begin? Why are we here? For what purpose? These were questions that could never be answered.

I also discovered that I didn’t like having everything figured out. I liked the mystery, the impossibility of knowing. In some ways, this unknowing was like having a Christmas present under the tree and the pleasure of wondering what’s inside exceeds the pleasure of opening and having the gift.

I called myself an agnostic, and thought I would be an agnostic forever. Then life happened.

I was in my early twenties when I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church, and I learned that the liberal religious tradition encourages each person to turn first to our own individual experiences of the world as the best source of truth.. When I did this, I realized that there were times in my life when I did experience something. At times, I experienced this something within myself. At times, I experienced this something within the world. At times, I experienced this something as going on between me and the world.

And when I experienced this something, I felt  more connected to the world. I felt more alive. The world seemed more miraculous, and I felt  more appreciative of it.

Most often, I experienced this something at random moments, it came unbidden, and yet I  also learned that I could be intentionally open to this something, even inviting it into my life.

Poets have spoken of this something far more eloquently than I can.

William Wordsworth, a poet and a Unitarian, described his experience of this something in the following words: “And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects, all thought, and rolls through all things.”

While Wordsworth experienced this something in nature, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote of experiencing this something amidst the hustle and bustle of a crowded city. He wrote: “My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, in a crowded London shop, an open book and empty cup on the marble table top while on the shop and street I gazed, my body of a sudden blazed, and twenty minutes more or less, it seemed, so great my happiness, that I was blessed and could bless.”

The Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote of a similar experience: “I suddenly felt as if some ancient mist had in a moment lifted from my sight and the ultimate significance of all things was laid bare...Immediately I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side, and no person or thing in the world seemed to me trivial or unpleasing.”

The challenge was for me was how to make sense of this something intellectually. I asked myself, “How do I, having a naturalistic understanding of the existence and having rejected traditional images of God, make sense of this something that I sometimes experience?”

Fortuitously, around the same time I was asking myself these questions, I began theological school in Chicago, which turned out to be a pretty good place to figure such questions out.

One of the things that I learned in theological school was that there have always been traditional understandings of God, but throughout human history, there have always been alternate understandings of God as well. The picture of the old man with the long white beard in the sky that many learned about in third-grade Sunday school wasn’t the only option out there. 

One way of thinking about God had been to think of God as a supernatural being who is “out there” and who occasionally intervenes in human affairs, but mostly doesn’t. Another way of thinking about God, however, was not as a supernatural, personal, “out there” sometimes meddling kind of God, but rather as natural, impersonal, and immanent in all reality.

One of the best descriptions of this understanding of God is found in Alice Walker’s book A Color Purple in a conversation between the characters Celie and Shug…

 

“Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the wolrd with God. But only them that search for it inside find it...

“It?” I asked.

“Yeah It. God ain't a he or a she but, It."

“But what do it look like?” I ast.

“Don’t look like nothing”, she say. “It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you found it.”

 

I came to think of God as that creative power within the universe, within ourselves, and within all things, ultimately unknowable but best understood as permeating all reality.

I called myself a naturalistic pantheist, recognizing the spark of divinity in all things. To give a different meaning to an old phrase, a kind of Unitarian Universalism.

How do I describe myself today? When it comes to that old, angry, meddling God in the sky, I am still an ardent atheist. When it comes to the ultimate nature of existence, I am still content to be an agnostic, enjoying the mystery. When it comes to saying there is something within our experience of the world, some creative power within us and amidst us, to which we can open our hearts and live life more abundantly as a result, I am a believer.

Is this a God who answers my prayers? No (and here’s the lottery ticket from Friday to prove it!), but in times of challenge, frustration, and despair, when I intentionally open myself to this creative power that I sometimes call God, I am sometimes filled with tranquility, hope, and even courage. (I like, by the way, what C.S. said about prayer - - we don’t pray to change God, but we pray to change ourselves.)

Is this a God whom I trust to make everything turn out okay? No, but this is a God that I trust to help me make meaning out of whatever does happen.

Is this a God who forgives me for my sins? No, but this is a God that inspires me to forgive myself for my imperfections and others for theirs.