at the New Madison Universalist Church

by Paul Britner

This morning, I want to share with you some moments in my personal faith journey. My outline this morning is very simple. It only has two major parts. Part 1 is the about the God I fired and Part 2 is about the God I hired. As an example of the God I fired, I’m going to use the God depicted in the book of Job.

I have promised my friends that, one of these days, I will deliver a sermon entitled, "What I like about the Bible." You are not going to hear that today. I will deliver such a sermon – as soon as I get enough material to fill 20 minutes. OK, that’s a joke. There are lots of things I like about the Bible. That would be starting my story at the end, though. For a very long time, I didn’t like the Bible at all, and I blamed the Bible and organized religion for everything that was wrong in the world. I’ve made a lot of progress since then, and that journey is really what my message is about this morning.

Job is part of the wisdom tradition contained in the Hebrew Bible. It is not history, and it doesn’t pretend to be. My Old Testament textbook calls it theater. Scholars believe it was written in the fifth or sixth century before the common era. It is often seen as a critique of the conventional wisdom of the time that righteousness will be rewarded with prosperity and that wickedness will be punished with misery. Instead, Job stands for the proposition that God is responsble for everything that happens, both good and bad, and that it is not our conduct that determines the outcome of events, but God’s will.

For me, this represents two steps forward and one step backward. This wisdom allows us to get past the theology – still practiced by fundamentalists—that things like AIDS are curses on wicked people.That’s a good thing. On the other hand, it it still means that somehow, some way, the September 11 attack was God’s will. I’ll come back to that later.

It validates the very real human experience of feeling abandoned by creation itself. Again, though, it presents a mixed message to me. It tells me that that it’s OK to feel abandoned by God, which is good, because it’s as natural as any other feeling. On the other hand, when I feel distant from God, I’ve been taught to ask the question, who moved? It’s me, of course, and there are lots of things I can do to renew that connection, things like prayer, meditation, worship, devotional reading, Yoga, exercise, dance, or even a hot bubble bath. You get the idea.

In this story, though, God moved. There was nothing Job could do to renew that connection that he felt had been lost. I simply don’t get that.

What disturbs me most about Job is the character of the God revealed through this story, specifically: human life is not valued equally, God is to be feared, and God is not to be questioned, or necessarily understood. Now, let me back up and take these thee obseravations one at a time.

First, human life plainly is not valued equally. God allowed an unknown number of servants and all of Job’s 10 children to be killed as part of this experiment with Satan, apparently for no reason having to do with the servants or the children. Not only did Job lose all of his children, so did his wife, and it bothers me greatly that this did not bother God.

Second, Job’s God clearly is to be feared – not in the sense of awe, but in the sense of terror. Let me digress just a moment. Deciding not to do something is making a decision. I believe that when confronted by wrongdoing and injustice, the failure to act is itself wrong and unjust. With that in mind, recall that God set out the boundaries of what Satan could do. God gave Satan permission to do anything to Job that Satan wanted except to kill Job. Satan was no more than God’s agent in this story.

If you believe that – as the text plainly states – it was God who sent the fire to consume the livestock and that it was God who caused the Chaldeans to kill all the servants and that it was God who caused the wind to blow down the house killing all of Job’s children, then you cannot escape the conclusion that it was God who sent those planes into those buildings.

I don’t belive that, though. That’s not how the God of my understanding works. I don’t pretend to have a fully-developed theology that fully explains the nature of God or the nature of evil. The God of my understanding is not a supernatural, external being that intervenes in the daily affairs of human beings. I don’t have to know where evil comes from to know that it does not come from God.

Most people in most churches would insist that they, too, don’t believe that God would do such a terrible thing as we witnessed on September 11. Yet, if these same people would compare this view with their liturgy, they would have a hard time reconciling the two.

Almost every so-called mainstream church includes in its liturgy some confession of sin and prayer for mercy. Here’s an example from the Methodist liturgy, but it hardly is unique to Methodism: "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed by thought, word, and deed, against they divine majesty . . .Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father."

Let me ask you a question to which I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer. What would you think about the father of a three-year old child who told you every night that she prayed that her father would show her mercy?

Again, I don’t pretend to know everything about God. Yet, I know that I want to love my God, whatever it is. I refuse to believe in a God from whom I must beg for mercy.

My third objection to the God in Job is that God is not to be questioned, or necessarily understood. For many believers, the moral of the story of Job involves the idea of the mystery of God’s personal plan for us. When Job dared to question God about this, God’s reply, essentially, was, "who are you to ask me."

The only answer to the criticism that God as arbitrary is that it only seems arbitrary to us because of our human limitations of understanding. It makes no sense to me, though, that the source of all creation somehow is incapable of communicating a plan to humans in terms that humans can understand. The great Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing explained this better than I ever could when he said, in 1819:

"[I]f God be infinitely wise, he cannot sport with the understandings of his creatures. A wise teacher discovers his wisdom in adapting himself to the capacities of his pupils, not in perplexing them with what is unintelligible, not in distressing them with apparent contradictions, not in filling them with a skeptical distrust of their own powers."

In my view, Channing got it right. That’s not the perspective I was taught as a child, though. I grew up in the Methodist church, and Methodists, pretty much like every other church, are pretty committed to the concept with which I started this critique of Job: that God is responsble for everything that happens, both good and bad, and that it is not our conduct that determines the outcome of events, but God’s will. I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe that now. As soon as I was too old to be forced to go to church, I stopped, and I entered a wilderness period that would last at least 10 years.

During this time, I alternated from being indifferent to God to being openly hostile toward God. I never had the kind of day that Job had, but I was in a lot of pain, and the pain was compounded by my feeling that I had no place to go. I was both angry and alone.

I’m sure most of you can guess how this story ends. Before I share where I am today in my faith journey, I have to back up and tell you a little bit more about my history.

Almost 15 years ago, I joined a 12-step group for people with eating disorders. On another occasion, I’ll tell you more about that part of my story. The essence of the 12-step concept is that addictions, both substances and behaviors, are three-fold in their nature: physical, emotional, and spiritual, and that recovery requires all three. Real, sustained recovery requires finding some way to connect with what in some places we call, "a power greater than ourselves." The fellow members of my group emphasized that I didn’t need to believe in God, or at least their ideas of God. The did emphasize though, that I needed to believe in something. One of the most useful pieces of advice I got was, "If you don’t love the God you believe in now, fire it and get a new one," which is exactly what I did.

Until this time, I thought spirituality as something that came with religion. In my recovery, though I saw spiritual forces at work that had nothing to do with origin of the earth or the nature of evil or what happens to us when we die. It’s easier for me to define spirituality by what it is not. It is not material. That is, it is not something that can quantified, measured, observed, or recorded. By being with people who shared my problems, having people call me just to say that they were thinking of me and doing it with me that day, I was able to do what I never was able to do alone. I found myself empowered by some sort of energy that can’t be described using the periodic chart of the elements. I found a connection to something greater than myself, yet something without any particular creed, doctrine, or ideology.

Yet, my recovery was not built on an empty foundation. I brought to my 12-step program a core set of beliefs and values that I cared deeply about. I still had a yearning to be connected to be connected to a spiritual community that shared those values and beliefs. I was in recovery for 8 years before I was willing to try another church. At that time, a fellow member invited me to his church, the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Rockville. The rest, as they say, is history.

Some other time, I will put together a message about the differing images of God, and I’ll share with you some of the images that I now use to understand the source of our creation. This morning, though, I want to close, with a few comments about how important this church has become to me.

As you might have surmized, this is no theological abstraction for me. I’m convinced that if I had not found some way to connect with something greater than myself -- what many of us call the interdependent web of existence—something that helped me to believe, as author Gerald May has put it, that creation would miss me if I were not here, that I would be dead. I mean that literally. I would have died of a heart attack or suicide, and near brushes with both of those are part of my story.

I’m equally convinced that I could not have found my way to that connection without Unitarian-Universalism. The God of my upbringing deprived an innocent mother of 10 innocent children and killed an untold number of servants for some larger unstated purpose. Yet, Unitarian-Universalism affirms the worth and dignity of each individual. Job is told that it is a sin to even question God. Yet, Unitarian-Universalism affirms and promotes a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

In short, what I was searching for during all of those wilderness years was a safe place to find my own understanding of my creation and my purpose in life without the constraints of anyone else’s doctrine, creed or ideology. And that’s what I found in Unitarian-Universalism.

There are millions of people out there, and quite a few within a few miles of this building, who need desperately what we have here. Unfortunately, when they hear the word "church" they think of God, and when they think of God, they think of the image of God presented in Job. They are looking for a place where they can find some power greater than themselves that can nurture their spirits. This church is such a place.

So, I’m glad you’re here. I need what you have to offer. I hope that over the three years I will be studying at Earlham, that I will be able to give you something in return. We are not starting a journey today, but we are joining each other on journeys that have been started in different places and at different times. We are all together now. Let us go forward.