This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.
Readings
First reading — “Gods” by Langston Hughes
“The ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond and jade,
Sit silently on their temple shelves
While the people
Are afraid.
Yet the ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond-jade,
Are only silly puppet gods
That the people themselves
Have made.”
…
Second reading — Margaret Atwood, “In the Secular Night” from her book Morning in the Burned House (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 6.
Sermon
This morning, I’d like to speak with you about humanism. Humanism is a religious system that does not require a belief in God. In my opinion, humanism has been the most influential thought system in Unitarian Universalism over the past century. This is not to say that all of us Unitarian Universalists are humanists — although about 45 per cent of us are — but the simple fact that many Unitarian Universalists don’t feel the need to believe in God, nor to accept any divine or supernatural agency whatsoever, has, I believe, helped keep us from drifting into rigidity of thought, and has contributed in other ways to the overall health of Unitarian Universalism.
I suppose I had better define humanism before we go any farther. Although humanism does not ask any belief in God, it is not the same as atheism. Atheism tends to be defined by what it rejects — it rejects a supernatural God — whereas humanism tends to be defined by what it affirms — the boundless potential of human life. Nor is humanism the same as the rejection of religion; the people who reject religion generally don’t come to church, whereas there are plenty of humanists in our churches.
I’d say the defining characteristic of humanism is this: humanism places human beings at the center of religion. Humanists don’t place God at the center of religion — indeed, most of the humanists I know don’t pay much attention to God, and many humanists would simply reject the whole notion of God. What humanists want to do is to make sure that religion is centered around human beings. In so doing, the humanists have helped us in our work for justice and liberation; they have changed the way we provide comfort to one another; and they have helped us better understand what it means to be a part of a religious community. Let’s take a look at each of these three humanist contributions.
I/ And let’s start with justice and liberation. Originally, Western religion taught us that the reason we should be nice to one another is because the Bible says so, and the Bible says so because God says so, and if we follow God’s plan everything will be fine. But during the twentieth century, some people began to question whether God had a good plan for humanity.
When I was young, my parents were friends with a couple who had escaped Germany during the 1930s; they had been born Jewish, and as the Nazis came to power they knew they couldn’t survive in Germany. By the time I knew them, they refused to have anything to do with religion. I remember one of them asking how anyone could believe in God, since to believe in God meant believing in a God who would allow millions of Jews to be slaughtered in concentration camps. How could the horrors of the Holocaust be a part of God’s plan?
And then there’s the racism endemic in the United States. When you look at the horrors of racism — shortened life spans, violence against people of color, an inordinate quantity of environmental problems located within communities of color, and so on — how could all this be part of the plan of a supposedly good God?
Back in 1971, Dr. William R. Jones wrote a book titled, “Is God a White Racist?” Dr. Jones, an African American humanist theologian who also happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, had a subtle answer to the question posed in this title. He said that if we believe in a God-centered religion, then God must be a white racist because God allows the evil of racism to continue unchecked. But, says Jones, there’s another possibility, which is to have a human-centered religion where we take responsibility for fighting the evils of the world. The real divide is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t believe in God — Dr. Jones says that the real divide is between the people who have a God-centered religion, and the rest of us who know that we have to go out there and do the hard work of making the world a better place. So it is that Dr. Jones outlined one of the most important aspects of humanism: that human beings must take responsibility for their own destinies.
You probably know the old joke about the fellow who is trapped in a flood. As the flood waters cover the street in front of his house, he lifts his eyes up to heaven and prays to God to get him out of the flood. Just then, a police officer drives by and asks him if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, he tells her, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising until he has to move up into the second story of his house to stay dry, and just then some guy comes by in a boat and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising, and finally the man is up on the roof of his house. Just then, a woman in a balloon comes floating by and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, finally the flood waters rise up so high that the man is perched on top of the chimney of his house. He looks up into the sky and says, God, what’s the matter? I prayed to you to save me. And this big booming voice comes out of the sky saying, Look, pal, I sent you a car, then I sent you a boat, and finally I sent you a balloon, what more do you want?
This old joke gives us a basic humanist truth: that whether or not we believe in God, we human beings have to take charge of our own destinies. Humanists teach us that if you believe in God, you don’t wait around for some miraculous divine act to make the world a better place — you take the initiative yourself, and when your street is flooded and that police officer drives by, you get in her car and drive safely to higher ground.
Notice that someone who believes in a human-centered God acts almost exactly the same way that a humanist would act. The only difference is that the humanist wouldn’t bother to pray to God in the first place. But the end result is that same: whether we’re trying to escape from a flood — or trying to end racism, for that matter — it’s up to us to take action to make the world a better place.
II/ Because humanism challenges the orthodox notions about God, humanism can also be a comfort to those of us who do not experience religion the way the orthodox tell us we’re supposed to experience religion. Let me give you an example from my life, not because I think I’m particularly interesting, but because I think it’s a representative example.
For the last eight years of her life, my mother had supra-nuclear palsy, a particularly aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease that typically kills you in less than a decade. This disease led to all kinds of other problems, and at one point about three years before she died there was a time when she was in the hospital, and I was scared. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, and then going out to take a long walk along this road near the hospital. While I was walking, I decided to try prayer:– why not? I was a Unitarian Universalist, and prayer has long been one of our central spiritual practices, and I felt I needed some kind of spiritual practice to get me through that time.
So I started praying. Mind you, I wasn’t praying to ask God to somehow miraculously heal my mother, because I knew that ultimately wasn’t possible; rather, I was praying as a way to try to connect with something larger than myself, in order that I might find some peace, some relief from being scared and sad. I gave it my best shot, but praying did absolutely nothing for me. So I stopped praying. Eventually, I took my cue from those great Unitarians Emerson and Thoreau, and found a healing spiritual practice in spending time outdoors in Nature. After my mother finally died, I spent a lot of time walking and canoeing and fishing — and it was that non-traditional spiritual practice, the spiritual practice of spending time outdoors in Nature, rather than praying to God, that comforted me and helped me through my grief.
One of the greatest gifts humanism has given to us has been to show us that spiritual comfort does not require belief in the traditional Christian God, nor does spiritual comfort require participating in the traditional Christian spiritual practices such as prayer. The humanists have shown us that spiritual comfort is, above all, a human phenomenon; and because individual human beings differ from one another, because different human cultures differ greatly from one another, it is therefore obvious that each individual human being may have different spiritual needs, and may find spiritual comfort in different ways. I know many people who find great comfort in praying; I know many of you find great comfort in praying; but some of us happen to be made up differently, and we find our spiritual comfort in non-traditional ways. By emphasizing the human dimension of spiritual practices, humanists have relieved all us of feeling inadequate if it should happen that we don’t find comfort in traditional spiritual practices.
III/ Next I’d like to consider how it is that humanism has strengthened our local Unitarian Universalist churches, strengthened our local religious communities. Most Christian churches are united around beliefs: if you believe certain things about God, then you belong in a certain kind of church. But thanks to the humanists we Unitarian Universalists know we don’t have to believe in God at all, and this strengthens our conviction that we can find unity without adhering to any specific set of beliefs about God.
Because we are not united by a specific set of beliefs about God, we rely on something else to hold us together in religious community: we are held together by the idea of covenant, that is, by a set of promises that we make to one another about how we are going to treat each other. Another way to say this is to say that we can be held accountable to one another for our behavior. You can’t be a Unitarian Universalist just because you have some specific set of beliefs — you become a Unitarian Universalist when you make a commitment to a religious community that you will live your religion by treating other people with the same dignity and respect that you yourself deserve.
I believe humanists have helped us to realize that we can not only hold each other accountable for our behavior — but logically speaking, those of us who believe in God can also hold God accountable for God’s behavior. It’s like the old joke:
A woman goes down to the beach with her grandson. The little boy is playing in the waves when suddenly a huge wave comes out of nowhere and swallows up the little boy and drags him out into deep water. The woman stand for a moment in shock, watching where her little grandson was playing. She can’t swim, he’s completely disappeared anyway, what else can she do but pray to God. So this is what she does, she prays to God to return her grandson. Nothing happens, but the woman is absolutely insistent, she refuses to give up. Nothing happens, but she just prays louder. Finally, this voice comes down from heaven, saying, “All right, enough already, here’s your grandson back.” Out of nowhere, a wave comes, crashes on the beach, and there’s her grandson, completely unhurt, although he looks pretty wet, dirty, and disheveled. The woman look up to where the voice came from and says, “He had a hat.”
OK, so this is just a joke, but it seems to me that there’s some deep truth in this joke. If there is a God, it is completely unjust for that God to take the life of an innocent young boy playing on the beach. And if all that is true, then when the grandmother prays to God to correct this injustice, the boy should be fully restored to her; even if his hat is missing, it is not good enough. The woman in this joke holds God accountable to the highest ideals of religion; just as Prometheus holds the gods accountable.
Do you remember the ancient Greek story of Prometheus? — it is a favorite story of many humanists. Prometheus was the fellow who stole fire from the Greek gods and brought it down to humankind, so that human beings could live better lives. For his disobedience, of course, the gods punished Prometheus; but humankind got to keep the knowledge of making fire. Once Prometheus had given fire to humankind, the gods realized that they could not take fire away from humankind, they couldn’t take away fire which relieved so much human suffering; for if they took away fire, then the gods would be shown to be cruel and heartless. In this way, Prometheus held the gods accountable to their highest ideals.
It is in this way that humanists uphold rebellion as a key religious value. Humanist rebellion is not a blind, destructive, striking-out at authority; humanist rebellion is carefully calculated to build community by holding ourselves and others to the highest ideals of humanity.
Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is a waste of time. But rebellion for the sake of upholding the highest ideals of humanity:– this was the life work of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is the kind of rebellion that we need in our religious communities:– a rebellion that never settles for good enough, a rebellion that is willing to take on sacred cows, a rebellion that holds us accountable to the highest ethical standards. Humanism reminds us: religious belief is useless if you don’t live out your religious beliefs in the real world; and humanists suggest to us that belief should be a lower priority than making the world a better place.
Before I end I do want to acknowledge that humanism is capable of its own excesses. In some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations I have seen a phenomenon I call “humanist fundamentalism,” where no one is allowed to believe in God, or even use the word “God” in a worship service. Some of these humanist fundamentalists, just like Christian fundamentalists, can be annoying and oppressive.
However, unlike other kinds of fundamentalism, and unlike plain old atheism, humanism contains its own corrective to “humanist fundamentalism.” In its highest and best form, humanism cares little about what others believe, while it cares deeply about making this present world a better place to live. The best humanists don’t care so much you may or may not believe, but they do care about bringing out the best of humanity in each one of us.
Humanists remind us to place human beings at the center of religion, humanists remind us to uphold the highest ideals of humankind. By downplaying the importance of belief in God (or disbelief in God), humanists help all religious people to stay focused on what is most important about religion: that religion should be focused on human beings. When we remember to keep religion focused on human beings, thus helps us to create healthy religious communities in which we are accountable to one another; it helps us in our work for justice and liberation; it helps us to provide spiritual comfort to one another, and spiritual comfort to ourselves. So it is that religion be a gift and a pleasure to us, to help us to spread the light of love throughout the world.