Is God a Verb?

“Is God a Verb?”

February 20, 2005

Preached by Stephen E. Phinney

Mt. Vernon Unitarian Church

Alexandria, Virginia

READINGS:

(From Pilgermann, a novel by Russell Hoban)

“Earlier I have had the thought of many mysterious unseen fragile temples in which God used to dwell among us; now I perceive that these temples are each of us however unreliable, each of us for good or ill, each of us as the total of our actions and our being. . . As far as I can see, the will of God is simply that everything possible will indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice is ours, the reckoning God’s. And God is in us, one can’t get away from God; that is the fire of it, that is the Garden of it, at the center of every soul and contiguous with infinity.”

(From Gary Kowalski quoting Albert Einstein)

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us,” universe,” a part limited in both time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us. Yet we are an outgrowth of the same process that produced the universe in its entire splendor. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. It may no longer be possible to believe in a deity that is omnipotent or immutable, but in the One who accompanies all creation and invites us to expand the horizons of our concern to all the earth, we can still affirm that God is Life and God is Love.”

SERMON

Several years ago, when I was beginning my quest for ministry, I was serving as a chaplain in a large hospital. Part of the work was the daily visits to the intensive care and recovery floors to provide pastoral visits for the patient’s needs. I was talking to an elderly patient. After telling me what her concerns were, she asked me to say a prayer with her. This was a challenge for me. I needed to say an intercessory prayer in her own prayer language. She was so hopeful as I said the prayer. After I was done, the most amazing smile and peace came over her and she said her pain was almost gone. Her reaction spread to me so that I felt it deeply within me. It was as though at that moment, she connected to her God. I felt that because I was giving her the love and attention she needed in our relationship, this amazing connection was made.

In reflection, I seemed to have a conflict because I didn’t believe in a personal God to which I could pray. Did she connect to a personal God that I didn’t believe in? The way I interpreted this experience was to believe that the connection to the holy was made for this patient because the love and trust in the chaplain-patient relationship was strong between us. I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we had. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love. God is a verb. The conflict this event caused totally changed my belief in the God that I had firmly held for most of my life. Singular experiences like this can result in the growth of our own theological understanding, if we are open to experiences like this. Today, in this sermon, I am exploring what it may mean if God is a verb.

Many of us have tried on and later shed different beliefs or systems of faith that have brought us here. A living faith is a journey, just as is life. No matter what we believe now, we have moved here from the days where we learned the word “god” for the first time and had trouble understanding what it really meant. Our understanding of such ideas as god, love, freedom, and truth, grow and deepen as we encounter experiences to challenge us along our life journeys. Our Unitarian Universalist faith is intentionally creedless to give each of us the freedom to give meaning to the changes we honor in our journeys.

Today, I want to challenge each of you by introducing alternate theological views. I found in preparing for this sermon, I have opened more doors in my own journey that I’ll have to take time to find out what is behind each of them.

Is God a verb? What does this mean? We already have problems with the ambiguity in referring to God as “He, or She or It.” How do we express God in the grammatical form of a verb? We can get a better insight into the language of verbs with a thought experiment developed by Dan Moonhawk Alford. Physicists use thought experiments to help people see certain physics concepts. I will use a thought experiment to examine the grammar in the following sentence: “The man hugged the woman”.

In English, we use verbs with nouns and pronouns to show relationship between the nouns. In addition the nouns have properties of such as names, animation, and connection to the spiritual ideas such as God. We also use the verbs, “to have” and “to be”.

In the Algonquin Language, there are no pronouns, words have no gender and the verbs, “to be” and “to have” don’t exist. Algonquians add the sense of “Animate” to fill this vacuum. Animate applies to a larger concept than just for living beings. Animate refers to humans, or animals or even clouds, plants, trees and spirit. More important, “Animate” is no longer a fixed property of the nouns, but are a property of the relationship, itself.

Nouns are not needed anymore to make complete or grammatical sentences. In English we might say “The light flashed”. But what is the difference between the flashing and the light? Our language tells us to create a fictitious substance, light to do the flashing. In the Hopi language, all they say is “flashed”.

Now we drop all the nouns, articles, etc from the original sentence: “The man hugged the woman.” and have the sentence left: “hugged”.

This verb alone gives the sense of the original English sentence. But now, this verb has an implied meaning and relationship. Remember the movie with the characters “Dances with Wolves” and “Stands with Fist”? We know a lot about who they are from their verb description.

What happens to the notion of God? In different tribal cultures, God is translated into a language of only verbs as “dwells above”, “large animate mystery”, “spirits of direction” and “Great Mysteriousing”.

From 13^th century Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, the task of developing a relationship with the mystic or unnamable God, the source of creation is the lifeblood of Jewish practice. The closest that they come to thinking about God is as a process. We might call it God-ing, a verb which implies a relationship between God and us. God is God-ing, creation is creation-ing, and every aspect of creation is in process and continuously unfolding like an infinite flower opening its petals. Since we have free will to change reality, all of creation is changed because all creation is interconnected.

In our Unitarian Universalist heritage, there was a time where our understanding of our universe was based on Isaac Newton’s description of solid, hard, and moveable particles. The universe was made up of these particles tied together by the mysterious force called Gravity. The material of the universe is “dumb” so theologically we needed some agent to get things moving or to create it, namely a deistic God. Today, physicists say that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating in the void, intertwining matter and energy and that exerts invisible force fields stretching across the universe. Yesterday’s theology is challenged by newer perceptions of reality.

For four hundred years, Unitarians were theists, having a belief in one personal God or deists having a belief that God started the Universe. We were people who believed in reason, in continuous revelation and in the growth of our theology. When the Humanist movement came along in the early 20^th century, it swept us up with a new and exciting way to think religiously. In one generation, we went from people who believed in one God, to people who believed in, at the most, one God. Many people joined our churches as religious humanists to find a community that didn’t believe in a deity. Some expected this humanism would be the only religious path of our future. Invariably, a new generation came along who had a different set of questions and needs. This generation is more spiritual and has some pagan focus. We have gone from one God, to no God, to. . . where God is a verb, not a noun. (R. Finkelstein)

As Roberta Finkelstein notes, Contemporary paganism takes us back to the ancient idea that divinity is spread throughout all of nature, or pantheism. This is the nature of God described in today’s first reading taken from Pilgermann. In this realm, gone is the idea of a transcendent God, separate from our world and lives.

Now think of the changes the physicists have defined in our reality, where nature is best explained by either particles or waves, or is it both particles and waves? Modern theological thinking has come to the “both-and” conclusion. We have gone from a people who believe in only one God, to people who believed in no God (or at most one God) to people who entertain the possibility that God is neither. We have combined the ancient pagan beliefs, ancient theistic beliefs with some of the newest thinking in philosophy and theology. A new paradigm, a new process called Panentheism was created.

It is the attempt to reconcile the insights of pantheism on one hand and those of theism on the other. The Unitarian Universalist philosopher, Charles Hartshorne, who recently died at the age of 101, refined what was started as Process Theology by a British Mathematian, Alfred North Whitehead and developed what we now call Panentheism.

Panentheism says that God has a real love for us, a deep love that takes risks for us and bears our risks. God is love, with the ever-present possibility of intimacy and compassion. The Panenthestic God does not control what happens or sanction the status quo. Nothing is predetermined. The future is genuinely open; the outcome is of this adventure, called life, is unknown. This freedom opens our existence to joys and sorrows or even evil. This freedom is generally a source of life’s joys.

In process thinking, the future is open. There is real freedom and creative spontaneity. God is involved in that process as a persuasive lure, the promise of a richer, more rewarding experience to those to choose wisely and well. Gary Kowalski says that the process model of reality could be likened to a simultaneous conversation, which arises and flows without any prior plan, but with an order born of free association and free will. One way to think of God is as that Living Whole of which you and I and others in the “cosmic Conversation” are active parts and partners. God is a partner in our lives, feeling our joys, pains, successes and disappointments. As we breathe, God breathes.

Many process thinkers are naturalists rather than theologians. Process naturalism sees the vitality inherent in creation within nature. This vitality is in the unfolding of ever more complex forms of life. The intricate relationships between apparently unconnected events are rooted entirely within the natural processes. These interrelations mirror the connections we see at all the physical levels of matter. Therefore, our insights into the physical world give us an approach to discover new ways to see God.

I have introduced the ideas of Process theology, Panentheism and Process Naturalism. These approaches to theology are in the mainstream of modern liberal theologies. There are further approaches of process theology that see God as power, or love or friendship or the creative events in our lives. I believe our religious beliefs need to reflect the values that are driving our lives.

Each of us is on our own faith journey, but we are partners in a divine adventure. I challenge you to open new doors and discover what is behind them, finding newer meanings in what may be divine relationships.

We live in the moment. This is the process view. In each and every moment, we receive the result of what has happened. With this we affect what happens next. All existence is actively and inherent interactive and relational. In the process view, we are in a universe of creativity and risk.

In conclusion, I return to the basic question for each of us to ponder, “Is God a verb?” Amen, so be it.

References:

Alford, Dan Moonhawk, “God is a Verb, Worldview thought Experiment, internet. (About the grammar of verbs)

Cooper, David A., ”God is a Verb”, Kabbalah and the practice of mystical Judaism”, 1997, Riverhead Books, New York.

Kowalski, Gary, “The Ultimate Canvas”, Article in World, Vol. 17, no 4, July/August 2003. (About Charles Hartshorne, panentheism)

Kowalski, Gary,” Science and the Search for God”, 2003, Lantern Books.

Mesle, C. Robert, “Process Theology, A Basic Introduction, Chalice Press, 1993.

Southworth, Bruce, “At home in Creativity”, Skinner House books, 1995. (About the Naturalistic Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman)

Other process theologies are included in the following references:

Heywood, Isabel Carter, “The Redemption of God, a Theology of Mutual Relation”, University Press, 1982 (look for more recent books) (a theology where God is the power in relationships.)

Hunt, Mary E., “ Fierce Tenderness, A feminist Theology of Friendship”, 1992, Crossroads, New York

Martin, Clarence L., ”God is a Verb, Roots of a Rational Religion”, 1980, National Writers Press, Roseville, CA.