SERMON

I'm going to begin this morning with an experiment. As you are able, please clear your minds and, as much as possible, bring your mind into the present moment. I'm going to say a word and I want you to catch the first image of that word which comes into your mind. Please don't try to figure out what the right answer is. There is no right or wrong image. Stay with the first image you receive. Then allow that image to be as crisp, clear, and detailed as possible. Are you ready? Okay, here is the word: dog.

(people asked to call out the breed, age and color of dog they imagine)

The reason I began with this thought experiment is because I wanted to put before you in a clear way the difficulty of discussing dog spelled backwards: God. We could repeat the same experiment with the word God and everyone would likely concoct a very different image to describe this word. But rather than enjoying the variety of images which came into each other's minds, there would be a strong temptation to judge each other's image of God. If someone said "a man with a white beard" some might whisper to their neighbor, "Isn't he childish and immature." If someone said "the force" some might think: "She has been watching too many reruns of Star Wars." If someone said "Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior" the atheists would get uncomfortable. If someone said "An imaginary mythological figure" the Christians would squirm. If someone said, "An ongoing creative process which is the source of human good" many would scratch their heads and wonder what the speaker meant.

Discussing the theology of Henry Nelson Wieman, one of the prominent Unitarian thinkers of the twentieth century is very difficult for two reasons. The first reason is our strong emotional associations with the word God. If I were to introduce you to a new way of understanding the nature of dogs as author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas did in her book, The Hidden Life of Dogs, I imagine I would easily capture your attention and interest. But if I present you with a new vision of how to understand God, some minds will shut down before I finish my first sentence. Too often in our midst, the attempt to transmit a life giving religious vision is heard as a life denying doctrinal cage. Because of the authoritarian, abusive ways some of us have had our ears twisted and nose poked into the Bible, the very thought of touching those painful experiences causes a recoil from the topic of divinity.

Wieman knew the dangers of these errors of transmitting a religious message well and had this to say about the difficulty of trying to define God:

look upon your idea of God as a very poor, very unsatisfactory, extremely inadequate instrument, to be used only because you have nothing better for the time being, to be discarded just as soon as you find a better [one].[1]

This morning I want to encourage some discarding of antiquated God images and open you to a very modern way to look at God brought to us through the teaching and writing of Henry Nelson Wieman. I have found him quite engaging because he takes for himself the mission of finding a way to express the nature of God which is compatible with our modern empirical way of thinking while at the same time enjoying a strong mystical connection and devotional commitment in his personal religious life.

Wieman was born in August of 1884 in Rich Hill, Missouri. He writes of his strong personal relationship with his mother which prepared him for a life working in the field of religion:

When I was a boy we had long intimate talks in which each tried to express to the other what either most deeply felt and thought. We did not talk about religion particularly, but about anything which at the time seemed to be of chief concern. I would come from those talks with a feeling of exultation, release and aspiration, as though there was something great to live for.[2]

His early childhood experiences of rapture at his mother's side and his enjoyment and integration of the sensuous and the passionate qualities of immediate experience as he grew up left a deep impression on him. One experience in particular during his senior year at Park college set the direction for the rest of his life. He had been contemplating a career in journalism until, as he records later:

I came to my room after the evening meal and sat alone looking at the sunset over the Missouri River. Suddenly it came over me that I should devote my life to the problems of religious inquiry. I never had a more ecstatic experience. I could not sleep all night and walked in that ecstasy for days.[3]

He studied at San Francisco Seminary not so much to be a Presbyterian parish minister but to pursue "the religious problem."[4] He did try his hand at campus ministry in Davis, California before entering the doctoral program in the Philosophy department at Harvard University to pursue the study of the philosophy of religion. He began teaching in 1917 at Occidental College, published his first book in 1926 at the age of 40 titled, Religious Experience and the Scientific Method, moved to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1927 where he did the work for which he is most noted remaining until his retirement in 1947. It was after his retirement that he became Fellowshipped as a Unitarian minister in 1949. Throughout his entire career he remained engaged by that original ecstatic experience asking the question:

What operates in human life with such character and power that it will transform men and women as they cannot transform themselves, saving them from evil and leading them to the best that human life can ever reach[5]

The second reason Wieman is difficult to discuss is because of his affinity with the Process school of theology. What is notable about his view of God which originates with Alfred North Whitehead in his book Process and Reality, is it's difficulty of comprehension. I took an entire class in seminary to prepare me to read this book which scared me away from ever wanting to read it, although it occupies space on my bookshelf. Many Process thinkers write in a terminology which reads like a foreign language to most people. Whitehead was a mathematician before turning to theology and continued to write in an extremely abstract way inventing his own terminology as if he were inventing a new kind of mathematics. Wieman was a genius at taking Whitehead's idea's out of the clouds and bringing them down to earth.

The appearance of a Process view of reality is quite timely. We are in a time ripe for the emergence of a new way of thinking about God. The assumptions and beliefs about the nature of reality have changed dramatically over the past 500 years at an ever accelerating pace. We now know the earth isn't flat. Our planet in relationship to outer space is smaller than a grain of sand in the middle of a desert. As we look further out into the heavens from the Hubbell Telescope, we are realizing more and more just how tiny a speck of dust we are compared to the magnitude of the universe and the dramatic events recorded in delayed light shows which took place many light years away. We are not the axis mundi of the stars circling our planet as the ancients thought.

We are maturing from our intellectual infancy as a species. Like infants we have been preoccupied with our mother and father as being the center of our lives around which everything revolves. The early Hebrews and Christians envisioned God as a super father figure projecting the emotionally meaningful idealization of family life out into the universe. This projection doesn't work so well with what we know now. The more we know about evolution, mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry and logic, the harder it is to accept these first century scriptures as ruling principles in our lives.

Wieman was very interested in finding a vision of God which would be harmonious with the modern scientific methods and discoveries. He had no doubt that God exists and acts in our world. His problem was finding a way to express the nature of God only in what could be verified as true in a modern empirical language and symbols.

Towards that end, Wieman chooses to eschew speculation about the nature of God which cannot be witnessed and verified in human experience. Wieman felt speculation on the nature of divinity is a waste of time because it cannot be determined true or false and therefore cannot be worthy of our faith and commitment. Wieman's goal was to articulate a faith which is self-validating in our personal experience and can be embraced by the skeptic and mystic alike. Wieman, more than most other theologians, developed an engaging theology for the sort of people attracted to Unitarian Universalism. It's a no nonsense approach to God which avoids supernaturalism yet doesn't abandon the traditional wisdom of the past.

So if we are looking for some kind of trail which will lead us to as much as we can know about God as can be witnessed in human experience, what kind of tracks might we look for? Wieman suggests we look for that which is absolutely trustworthy. He suggests we look at what we would designate as good in the world and generalize the source of human good. We should also look at that which we would designate as evil which expresses the absence of God and see what distinguishes it from the good. We should investigate the process of transformation in which growth toward the good occurs and look for signs of divine influence.

Through the avenue of exploration of human thought and experience, Wieman comes to what he believes is as much as we can empirically know about God. The God we can know is identical with creativity.

Associating God with creativity shouldn't be too difficult for those who have read the first several lines of Genesis:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

Wieman's God is no clock maker God who creates everything then takes an eternal lunch break. Wieman's God suffuses everything making the opportunity for the expression of God as creativity universal in time and space. If we want to see God at work in the world, we must observe the creative process itself. What I find engaging about Wieman's view is that his God isn't operating from a divine plan since the actual opportunities which arise for creativity are not predetermined and are dependent on past free choices. God doesn't have a fixed plan for each life but is completely available to be creatively expressed in each life whatever course it may take. In this way, no matter what happens in the course of our lives, in each moment there is the opportunity for communion with the divine through creativity.

Clearly not all experiences of life express this divine creativity. Wieman differentiates between our tendency to attach ourselves to the previously created good which is not God and the present time process of creation in which the presence of the divine can be witnessed. One of the signs of that divinity is the connection between creativity and transformation. The presence of God is transformative.

There are tracks and signposts which can help us recognize experiences which are transformative and express the divine. It is through these markers we can get a better experience of the nature of God actually working in our lives.

The first marker is evidence in a creative event of greater awareness and sensitivity with emergent perspectives. Passing through such an experience brings greater awareness of life which are emerging in the present, such as our growing UU commitment to be anti-racist voices in society. I've felt this greater sensitivity as I've attended the Diversity Day presentations at General Assembly over the last three years. As we struggled with our preconceived notions of those different from ourselves and our prejudices, the opportunity for a creative event arose and in it the possibility for my transformation.

The second marker is the progressive integration that happens in the process of creation. An interesting example of this characteristic of creativity is coming from the exciting birth of a new field called self organizing systems. Scientists have discovered computer simulations which, given the right kind of creative conditions, sort of an unstable, chaotic, but almost equilibrium condition, exhibit integrating behavior which looks a lot like what we see in evolution. Greater complexity of behavior seems to grow up out of the integration inherent in creative events whether in a silicon computer chip or in a cell.

A more down to earth example of progressive integration is group behavior. Our Religious Education committee last month was wrestling with how to structure our kid's program next fall. There were several different opinions expressed that seemed to be in opposition. But as we talked, new ideas came into our conversation from each member which allowed a progressive integration until we were all happy with the resulting programmatic framework. Wieman would say, God was present in our meeting helping us creatively come together.

The third marker of divine creativity is an expanded appreciation left in it's wake. For me, this is most vividly illustrated in ministry. One of the things I like most about ministry is having an ongoing relationship with each member of the congregation. As we get to know each other and creatively meet each other again and again be it during coffee hour, on a committee, or in a class or discussion group or one to one in the home or at the bedside, I find my appreciation continues go grow along with my love. I am not here to direct or judge members of this congregation but rather to love them. And my love is most easily expressed in my expanding appreciation of each one of you.

Finally, the last marker of the divine at work is the growth of connection and community. The process of creativity tends to pull people together rather than driving them apart when they enter the creative process together and remain engaged. This is why one's religious life is well expressed in a religious community committed to creating a congregation centered on greater awareness and sensitivity, progressive integration, an expanding appreciation of life and a commitment to growth.

To discover, accept and commit to this process of creativity which works around us, in us, and through us will be the source of our fullest actualization and deepest satisfaction providing vital meaning for our lives. The religious task is to organize and practice this commitment to the process of creativity which is equivalent with God to further open the way. That which is good and valuable, Wieman believes, will not be known by clinging to historic expression of creativity but will be known in the contemporary process of creativity as it is happening right now. Thus God cannot be possessed but rather witnessed and joined.

By revealing God as one with the process of creativity in which we can participate, Wieman provides a path for those who don't believe in historical religion or a supernatural God to discover and accept the fruits of traditional religion without having to sacrifice their intellects. Wieman has a Unitarian transformative God operating for the good of humanity and a Universalist loving God always present and willing to be engaged. His is a modern view which embraces empiricism without rejecting inspirational personal experience of divinity as a component of human life and motivation. His commitment is to the growth of truth and knowledge tested against our experience which will provide a reliable path to the divine. It is an open path we can explore in our daily lives with implications which can transform the planet.

I close with the Rev. Bruce Southworth's words from his book on Wieman titled, At Home in Creativity which I think express well the greatness of Wieman's legacy for us today:

God is not as hidden as we might think and feel. Wieman's purpose is to increase our sensitivity to the richness of felt-quality, new creation, which is always open to us within our experience. In this way, the world of matter becomes imbued with the spiritual. Material existence becomes spiritual as "things become expressive of human spirit.

Events cease to be material things merely and become a language, a prophecy and a song.[6]

Copyright (c) 1997 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Wieman and W. Horton, The Growth of Religion (Chicago, IL: Willet, Clark & Co., 1938), p.344 (as noted by Bruce Southworth in his book At Home in Creativity: The Naturalistic Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman, (Boston, MA; Skinner House Books, 1995), p 57. All my references come from this book.

[2] Wieman, "How I Got My Religion," Religious Education, 1931, 26:841, quoted in H. Rosen, Religious Education and our Ultimate Commitment, (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1985), p. 3.

[3] Wieman, "Intellectual Autobiography," in The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman, ed R.W.Bretall (Carbondale, IL,:Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 6.

[4] Southworth, p. 13

[5] Wieman in Empirical Theology, ed. Bretall, p. 3.

[6] Southworth, p. 125