Is God a Democrat?

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

August 17, 2008

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

 

A small plane develops engine trouble. The pilot runs back to the cabin where the three passengers are – a boy scout, a priest, and a nuclear physicist. The pilot’s words tumble out, “The plane is going down! We only have three parachutes, and there are four of us. I have a family waiting for me at home. I must survive!” With that he grabs one of the parachutes and jumps out of the plane.

The nuclear physicist jumps to his feet…and declares, “I am the smartest man in the world. It would be a great tragedy if my life was snuffed out!” With that, he also grabs a parachute and exits the plane.

With an alarmed look on his face, the priest says to the boy scout, “My son, I have no family. I am ready to meet my Maker. You are still young with much ahead of you. You take the last parachute.”

At this point, the boy scout interrupts the priest: “Hold on, Father. Don’t say anymore. We’re all right. The world’s smartest man just jumped out of the plane wearing my knapsack!”[1]

Take a survey of the bumper stickers in the parking lot. I bet you’ll find there’s a pattern of what I would call “liberal,” or “progressive,” issues and candidates.  No NRA – National Rifle Association – or “Right to Life” decals. It’s no wonder that many would assume that UUs would argue that God – if there is a God – must be a democrat. Nonetheless I’m going to claim that would be a mistake. “Gott mit uns” on the belt buckles of German soldiers was bad theology. It doesn’t work any better if you spell “uns” with two “u”s.

There’s a good reason that the second of the Ten Commandments prohibits an image of God. “Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image.” Now, I’m a visual person. I love painting and visual images of all kinds.  I didn’t understand that prohibition for the longest time. I could get into the ethical commandments – not killing, stealing, even no coveting – but why prohibit images! 

Now I know. How many times do we make God into our own image? Wiser, more mature, for sure, but essentially like us. We can scoff at the images of Jesus which portray him as a long-faced Nordic type with flowing chestnut hair that’s been shampooed and conditioned like a Clairol ad. Given that Jesus was a poor peasant from Nazareth, we can guess that he would have looked much differently. Even so, we know the temptation: The temptation is always to make the divine look like one of us. I would guess that even many of those who don’t believe in God, who have never experienced God, still have an image of that being they don’t believe in. Someone has quipped, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. Chances are I don’t believe in that God either.”

My understanding is something like this: if you’re going to make an image of God, what do you do? You use something familiar, even if in a new context. A face, a circle, something that humans recognize. But right there’s the problem. Anything familiar can’t possibly catch the mystery of the divine. Any name that humans give God, is just that – a human name. The problem comes when we mistake the name for God in God’s own right. It’s like the Buddhist saying: The finger pointing to the moon, is not the moon. The experience of the moon unmediated through human language is something else. Languages, images get in the way, even as they are the only means we have for communicating human experience. Therefore the metaphor! God is something like this. God is not the same as this, but this quality begins to describe my experience of God.  Better to avoid the mess all together: no graven images! Period, end of story.

Here’s the paradox: we humans strive as if there are no boundaries to our knowing. And there are things beyond our knowing. We both yearn to know God; and God is beyond our knowing. The second commandment humbles us with its prohibition. Yet, we are urged to love God with all our hearts and minds and strength. Go figure. It’s not rational; it’s a koan.

Beside the impossibility of using human experience to describe the beyond-the-human, there’s yet another reason I would assert that it’s a mistake to assume God is a Democrat. Making that assumption interferes with our spiritual hospitality as a religious community.

It is true that we have boundaries to our community. We are not a wide-open, welcome-to-absolutely-anyone religion. We do have principles that define our boundaries. If you hold our seven principles, welcome. If you do not, sorry.

While we share basic principles, we do not necessarily share strategies. Principles we hold in common, but we may disagree how about to get to those principles. For example, each of our hearts opens in compassion when we see someone suffering with an illness.  We respond out of our principles: we affirm the worth of every human life. We respond with caring to another. We promote justice and equality within our community. However, we may not agree on the best social, economic, political policy to respond when one among us gets sick.

Many among us will argue for universal health care as the best way to get the broadest alleviation of suffering. Even though that may be the majority position of most Unitarian Universalists, it’s not creedal. It should not be that you have to support universal health care in order to be a UU. 

Some among us may disagree heartily with that strategy, fearing that universal health care destroys something critical in the human being – the motivation to be self-sufficient. Placing the responsibility on the individual through individual health insurance may be the best strategy in these individuals’ minds. I would argue that one can be a UU religiously and vote for candidates who support privatizing health insurance – and pensions.

(I would want to argue strenuously with them, but I would not want to exclude them from a UU congregation because of their “conservative” political positions.)

I would maintain that just as there is no creedal test theologically, there should be not creedal test economically, or in terms of social policy.

We should welcome anyone into our community, as long as they are willing to engage in respectful dialogue. Our boundaries are not ideological, but behavioral. Our boundaries have to do with the way you express your thought, and the way you respond to those who disagree; not with the content of your opinion.

This is hard to live. How many times have I grown hot under the collar, and said things that I regretted later when confronted with people who disagree with me! I have hot-button topics, for example the Palestinians and Israel, in which I find it enormously difficult to be truly curious about the person’s thoughts, feelings and experiences, who disagrees with me.

How often do I hear, “I love this Fellowship because at last here I’m with like-minded people!” On the one hand, I value that expression, and I am happy for the feeling of solidarity that such a perspective provides. On the other hand, I wince a little when I hear that, because I imagine the voices that are not being raised, the people who drift away because they don’t match the dominant ideology here.

If we are truly hungry for truth – if we are indeed committed to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, as our fourth UU principle says – we will welcome a variety of viewpoints. Seldom does new truth come from the established way of thinking. Often, instead, it comes from a minority position, a person like a Galileo, who challenged the whole received structure of opinion. In our own time, we must remember to welcome the divergent opinion – as bothersome as it may appear.

Being willing to entertain a variety of political ideologies is essential to being hospitable.

Along with embracing political, social and economic diversity, there’s something very useful in an image of God who is grander than any ideology. An image of God that transcends current partisan labels invites us to be intellectually and spiritually humble. 

 

Might it be that representative democracy is not the end of the road in human governance? Might the primacy of global free-market capitalism become as anachronistic as the Guilds and Manor economy? Might it be that our American value of “freedom” misses something that would enrich human community? I ponder the questions. When people look back on our forms of human organization a millennia from now, will they be as condescending as we are today when we reflect on the monarchists and papists of Medieval Europe? What of our received truths will bring a smile to generations hence? I believe that our spirits are healthy when they are humble, i.e., when we know that we are limited, fallible beings.

 

Do not misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that we avoid political entanglements. To the contrary! We must get our hands dirty, ever with the knowledge that we are limited beings – and that we will make mistakes. We do the best we can, with the knowledge we have at hand. This is not about apathy, rationalizing itself as humility. We act. We get involved. We throw ourselves fully behind a cause, a candidate. But we do so with a part of our soul prepared to be surprised. We never claim infallibility. Rather we put our weight behind the cause, the candidate, knowing that, if we are indeed humble, new revelations, new truths may appear. We may change with new understanding.

This is why a God who transcends party politics – a God who surprises - is such a powerful concept. Henry Nelson Wieman, a Unitarian theologian of the mid-twentieth century, articulated a naturalistic image of God. You heard me correctly “a naturalistic theology.” He suggested that we think of God as the process of creativity. The mistake that humans make, he argued, was to confuse that which had been good in the past with what will be good for the future. He argued that if we are to be true to an ongoing creative process we must let go off past goods in order to align ourselves with fundamental creative process that calls us to a new way of being. What appeals to me in Weiman’s thinking is this. How tempting it is to settle for that which has been good. How challenging it is to be open to the newness that is breaking through each moment! To think of God as that process of creativity, ever stretching, ever breaking through the bonds of the conventional, the received, the presumed good of a time – that is awe-inspiring!

Given this kind of image, it would indeed be demeaning to box God into a transient category like Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialist, Communitarian. For the sake of our souls, we need a much, much grander understanding of the source of it all.

I resonate with the mystics who exult in God’s transcendence – the creator of the universe, incomprehensively large - billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars like our sun – and in God’s intimacy in every aspect of life. Kabir says: “Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.” 

May we never box such an illuminating presence into our human categories of party affiliation.

In the thick of this campaign season, may we throw ourselves behind the candidate of our choosing. But may we hold our heart of hearts for the something grander, something that transcends the particularities of this moment in human history on this planet in a back corner of the universe. Whatever our image of the divine, whether we have one or not, may we be open to the creative process that continually surprises, never boxing it in to lifeless dead-ends. May we be open to the unexpected, the new and fresh. May our sense of ourselves be ever learning, ever curious, and ever engaged. Amen.

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