A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds;

Most Gracious, Most Merciful;

Master of the Day of Judgment.

Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek.

Show us the straight way,

The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.

O Thee, Comforter, Lover of my soul, who is the Peace that passeth all understanding, the Guardian of all life, the Preserver of what is Just and Good, Thou Creator and Sustainer of Life, the Forgiver, the Restrainer, the Exalted, the Bountiful, the Generous, the Redeemer, the Giver of this great gift, Thou Spirit of Life, come unto us this hour that we might feel thy Spirit move with us, healing us of our enmities, redeeming our misdeeds and mistaken thoughts, forgiving us our trespasses, urging us on to forgive those who have trespassed against us, filling us with righteous indignation at the evils and injustices of our days, and transforming that into courage and perseverance, free us, liberate us, from all that constrains our minds to narrow thoughts and restricts our hearts from the Love that is you. Be with us, O Spirit that is beyond God. Be with us, Source of all Creation. Teach us to be free. Lead us to love all your children as we are loved by You.

Hymn singing is such an odd practice today because in a consumer driven world people are tempted to consider whether they personally like the hymn tune, as though they were shopping to buy it at Meijers, or whether each line doctrinally squares with their personal theology, so as not to sing something they personally don’t believe. How contemporary! But hymn singing has always had deep, hidden other meanings, too, that remain hidden as long as singing personally likeable tunes or lyrics with personal theological purity hold sway. The morning hymn, “Praise God,” is a good example. It is historically significant as representative of a time in Western history when the idea of God was just beginning to be relativized by thinkers such as Nietzsche. It carries hidden inside it the revelation that human beings shape the meaning of the word, “God,” and often shape it into an idol. And the hymn is an exquisite example of how to protect one against that idolatry by singing and, thereby, reinterpreting the word every line: God is love, then beauty, hope of good to be, and freedom, all of which deserve the reverence and allegiance humanity often idolatrously reserves only for the word “God.” Singing this piece expresses something significant about our faith tradition and something for which it has stood for millennia.

Our faith tradition represents the knowledge that human beings will take their narrow, prejudice-laced, sometimes even hatred filled ideas and worship them as attributes and preferences of God. This idolatry has fed colonialism, racism, sexism, totalitarianism, imperialism, fascism, and a whole host of other “isms” and humanly finite propositions that at any particular time in human history have been lifted up as God’s Will. Our faith tradition also represents the hope that such a realistic view of human nature concerning the evils and oppressions of which we are capable, and the capacities to do those in the name of God, is not all that we are. The divine likeness in which we are created can unfold, too. Personal examples from history uphold this our faith. If Moses, Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Mohammed can aim for such a fulfillment of this divinely inspired creation, than so should it be our aspiration, too. There abides throughout history a unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

But idolatry - ascribing as Divine particular things, notions, ideas, doctrines, and attributes - is humanity’s chief nemesis in the spiritual journey according to the wisdom of our faith. This is why some of us are loathe even to use the word “God” as signifying anything significant, so sensitive are we to the human susceptibility to misuse and distortion. Religious faith therefore cannot be synonymous with “believing in God,” but is, instead, a devotion to live life connected to a something more than mere materialism.

But, strangely enough, we live in a time in human history when personal belief in God is identified as the primary, and maybe only, religious question; as if the paltry, finite, and wavering belief of an individual, or the certainty of any one person, can of itself determine the origin of creation!

That’s part of the hubris of the age we live in: That my personal belief is related in any way to the way the grandeur of creation was originated or its ultimate aim is shaped. “I believe in God,” or “I don’t believe in God” is, in our time mistaken for being a profound utterance, or important at all to universal machinations. This is the hubris of both the atheistic and theistic worlds upon hearing the news of the “conversion” of Anthony Flew. The 20^{th century’s chief atheist and philosopher of religion, a powerful 81 year old Oxford intellect, recently related a late in life confession. The potentate of falsification had previously insisted religious beliefs have no foundation because they cannot be falsified, and therefore have no rational grounds for assent.}

“The Chicago Sun Times reports that Flew, age 81, has changed his mind.  Investigation into DNA has, he claims, ‘shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved.’  The emergence of life backs scientifically the rationality of the idea of ‘God.’  Flew quickly noted that his ‘God’ is more of a deistic version than traditional theism, an intelligence or first cause rather than a personal God.  As the Sun Times reports (12/10/04), Flew mused that ‘I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins.’  Flew's God is about intelligence, purpose, and design but ‘utterly uninvolved in the lives of human beings.’"

-Sightings, William Schweiker, 12/16/04

That may be conceived of as a triumph by some theists and a disappointment by some atheists. But I move with brother Waldo: “It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” I do not think his personal pronouncement now, or before, necessarily related to the structure of the cosmos! Instead, I look around and see gods of all sorts being the object of worship: mammon, greed, politeness, regulation, tyranny, indifference, a thousand and one objects of intense devotion. I endeavor to continue the spiritual search that defines our faith tradition, for what 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich called “the God beyond God.”

* * * * *

A few weeks ago I talked a bit about our historical connection with Islam. The earliest forms of the modern Unitarian Church have their roots in Eastern Europe of the 15th and 16th centuries. Many historians point to the financial support of the Ottoman Empire and Suleyman, the most influential Islamic Ottoman emperor, for Protestantism’s survival and success. Especially in modern Hungary of the early 16th century, where our forebears, Christian anti-Trinitarian Unitarians, and Islamic anti-Trinitarian Moslems found common theological ground in dissent against the idolatry of the Christianity of the creeds, with its institutional doctrines and ritual conformities. Both rightfully pointed out that Christianity had, since the doctrines of the creeds were established in the three and four hundreds, turned the gospel of love articulated and lived by a Jewish peasant into the oppressive colonialism of doctrinal idolatry. Following a life of love had been transformed into worshipping Jesus as a god, something to which neither the Moslems nor the emerging 15th and 16th century European Christian Unitarians could assent! Even our early ancestors in the North American British colonies and then the United States were called Mohammedans by their enemies!

When the Moslem declares, “There is no God but Allah,” it is meant as a twofold statement, one pertaining to human nature and the other to the nature of ultimacy. It is spoken to remind the individual Moslem of the human inclination to idolatry. Yet, it is also spoken to proclaim that the Spirit that drives creation is beyond our categories of thinking and naming; yet exists nonetheless. These two aspects of human existence are often at odds with one another. We endeavor to name what is nameless, and think about what is beyond our categories of thought. Our search for connection with the “God beyond God,” the Spirit behind “There is no God but Allah,” leads us to concretize that Spirit and then worship what we have fashioned as if it is Allah! But to the Moslem the Qur’an protects humanity against this. It is the definitive statement that disintegrates our inclination to idolatry by its nature as being the product of the Spirit that drives creation and is beyond human categorization: Allah.

We Unitarians stand with Islam is acknowledging the human inclination to idolatry. Our particular witness is theological and historical. Because human beings are inclined to take finite declarations and treat them as gods, our tradition has long held the theological viewpoint, and still does, that it is in individual conscience and the human heart that God (or no God) is perceived and related to. God cannot be declared as thus and so by religious doctrines, and then men and women made to obey those doctrines as if the doctrines themselves were divine. And historically, since the 15th and 16th centuries, many of our brethren have faced scorn and shunning, punishment and death because they obeyed conscience and the individual heart over the doctrines others insisted they must obey. So, our faith tradition parallels Islam not only in our historical connections in the European Ottoman Empire of the fourteen and fifteen hundreds and in this country, but also in our insistence that human idolatry be resisted.

But we also see the idolatry that can come of an uncritical allegiance to a scripture like the Qur’an. It, too, can become an idol, elevated by human beings above its origin as a humanly written text, until assent to it becomes dangerous as well. So we would part with the Moslem who insists the Qur’an is Allah unmediated word meant to be taken and followed uncritically, in the same way we would judge the holiest Scriptures in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Scriptures are the products of men, not gods, though they may have been inspired in some way by the Spirit that upholds all creation. To adjudicate what inspiration is and means to the lived life, and constantly to adjust and correct and discard and reshape our lives to deepening understandings, is all part and parcel of the spiritual search, uncertain as it may sometimes seem or feel.

That’s the nature of human existence. As one modern religionist put it, “Conscious life is more about juxtaposition than straight-line narrative, more lateral association than logical connection. We learn to live with dissonance and contradiction, however neat our ideas are about reality.”

* * * * *

The religious challenges today, which shape our world for woe or weal, require us to understand human nature as much as speculations about the nature of God. There is an insightful revelation of human nature contained in the second creation story in the Hebrew Scriptures, the story commonly known as Adam and Eve. After God has formed Adam he brings to Adam all the creatures of the earth that have been created in order that Adam could give them names. In other words, it is part of human nature that we are namers. We name things, objects, feelings, thoughts, and qualities. We give names to everything in existence, even giving existence itself a name! To name is to have power over something and to be able to wield that power in a unique way.

I often tell the story of our 23 year old daughter when she was a toddler, a talker and a namer. We were sitting at the kitchen table in our small Milwaukee duplex, eating dinner, and watching the cars go by through the nearby window. She wanted to tell us of an experience she’d had that day that involved a vehicle. But she did not know its name. A car?, we asked, a truck?, a van?, a motorcycle? We went through all the vehicles we could think of, but no answer. She could not tell us of her day’s experience without the name, and the frustration grew, as the communication of an important experience was impossible without the name. We finally figured out what it was, gave her the name, and she was able to tell her story of a significant moment in her toddler life. The vehicle? An El Camino!

Words give human beings the power to conjure up objects, events, experiences, and lift them out of their context in order that others may have a portion of an experience to which they were not present. That is the power of words. Any educator knows that to teach a child to read and understand words is to teach a child the capacity to be transported to other lands, other cultures, other historical times, other universes, even inside the minds of others, authors and characters. Power comes with words and names. The human capacity to shape existence by giving it meaning is contained in words and in the act of naming. It’s why our Child Christening service is not just a dedication but something much deeper, something more. A bundle of tissue, muscle, neurons, protein, limbs, heart, and brain is symbolically becoming a word wielding, meaning maker by being given a name!

Days before the inauguration, President Bush presented Colin and Alma Powell with the John Thompson Legacy of a Dream Aware, named after Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, an award that honors Dr. Martin Luther King’s work for human equality. During the ceremony Colin Powell said Dr. King was “a warrior of words, not weapons… ‘Dr. King fought this war, not with weapons, but he fought it with truth.’” (Washington Post, 1/25/05) Powell, a military leader, who knows the power of weaponry and the capacities of bombs, guns, and men to reshape the world through brute force, likened the power of Dr. King’s words, the power of words themselves, to weapons; and, indeed, confessed the power of words are greater than any weapon because words, not weapons, persuasion not coercive force, is truth! So it is with naming, too, the conscious effort to give something status and shape our understanding of it, by giving it a name.

And so it is a characteristic of us as Unitarian Universalists, like our Moslem brothers and sisters, as a tradition of words, to ascribe many words to designate that ineffable Spirit that upholds creation. One name will not and cannot do, so strong and willful is our inclination to idolatry and to taking a single word and elevating it to the reality it symbolizes. But names for this mysterious Spirit are necessary, lest we come to think that individual belief or non-belief is the extent of the spiritual life. In Islam there are 99 names for God. In Unitarian Universalism there are at least that many, and more: Creator, Healer, Comforter, Spirit of Life, God, and the intriguing “no God,” as in “there is ‘no God’.” Indicative of a tradition which understands the human inclination to idolatry, there are many, many names for the divine, including no name, because there is no one word that can capture divinity once and for all.

We do things in this church, like lighting a Chalice at the beginning of worship, as a reminder of what our tradition has long stood for, and what men and women in our collective past have lived and died for. The human family is one though we find different words to express what each individual holds as dear. A contradiction? Surely. A dissonance and paradox which we endeavor to learn to live with and inside of? Certainly. For it is this freedom from conformity whereby dissonance, contradiction, and paradox can point us towards something more: A faith as well. There abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

AMEN.