Last week we talked about acceptance, and I said that one of the biggest obstacles to acceptance of other people was our problems accepting ourselves. Today’s talk will be something of a continuation of this, only the focus will be not on the limits of our acceptance of other people, but the limits on our acceptance of gods or divine entities. Today we examine whether any gods are out of bounds or, to put it another way, whether we the concept of idolatry has any meaning for us in our pluralistic religion.

Let’s start by looking back to the root of this idea. The Bible reading for today sets forth the story which I think is the source of the Judeo-Christian concept of idolatry. In the second of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses is, in the New Revised Standard translation:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, [the King James version reads ‘any graven images’] whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

The Israelites go on to ignore this warning by constructing a golden calf and worshiping it even while Moses was on the mountain getting the ten commandments engraved in stone. When Moses saw what they had done, he sent out the faithful simply to slaughter the calf worshipers, apparently with the approval of Jahweh. This is the first reported religious pogrom, and it is no wonder that we who descend religiously from lines of heretics should feel a little uncomfortable at the way God is portrayed as siding with the orthodox here. But as they say, history is written by the victors and the calf-worshipers never got a chance to write their version of events.

The choice of the first idol is interesting. Why would a calf be worshiped? In American culture of the present day we might think of any number of material objects to worship, but a calf wouldn’t be one of them. It suggests to the rusty anthropology major in me that the economic organization of the society was pastoral, that these were nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who lived with their herds. Now we know that pastoralists and agriculturalists sometimes don’t get along too well – the Genesis story of the farmer Cain killing the sheepherder Abel is often interpreted as an early allegory of this conflict. The conflict continues right down to the musical Oklahoma – remember the song about the farmer and the cowhand? They aren’t always friends.

To the pastoralist, the calf represents that around which the community has organized its life. The herds are everything, the source of meat, milk, and clothing necessary to sustain life. Both farmer and herdsman are vitally concerned with fertility but of different kinds. The farmer prays for good soil and the right amount of rain. The herdsman prays for abundance of offspring, absence of disease, good grazing land. It is natural for a pastoral people to sacralize cattle as it is natural for an agricultural people to sacralize the land and personify it in such deities as Demeter.

Why should God get so exercised when some of the children of Israel imitate their pastoral neighbors in the Ancient Near East? The recorded explanation, in the "small print" to the Second Commandment, is that "I the Lord your God am a jealous God.." What, we may ask, does the Creator of the Universe have to be jealous of? We can’t do much mindreading of God, but we can speculate on the reasons why this passage was written this way. Modern scholarship on the Hebrew Bible places the composition of the Torah, of which Exodus is a part, during the time called the Babylonian Captivity (Seventh to Fourth Century B.C.E.), during which time the Hebrews were struggling to maintain an identity in diaspora after the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple and the political defeat of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea. This threat to identity gives the writer a strong incentive to portray a rigid monotheism that brooks no competition.

Interestingly enough, we can find in the Book of Genesis clues suggesting that the children of Israel were not always so rigidly monotheistic. Some of the eponyms or names used for God are cognate with gods of other Ancient Near East peoples. And in Genesis 6, sandwiched in after the generations from Adam and before the flood story, we have the following curious four verses:

"When People began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.’ The Gnaphalium were on the earth in those days–and also afterward–when the sons of God went into the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown."

What is going on here? A group of divine offspring of God mating with human women and producing a bunch of demigods? Sounds a lot like Greco-Roman pagan mythology.

Well, here I am sniping at the monotheistic tradition instead of embracing it, and you can see that I do this because I resist, even reject, the notion of one god putting down rivals. I don’t resist the idea of there being one god, a divine unity behind the apparent multiplicity. But I resist the idea that there is only one approach to this divine unity and everyone who takes a different approach needs to get in line or be killed. That attitude, to my way of thinking, leads to religious persecutions, martyrdoms, inquisitions, expulsions and genocide.

When I appeared before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UUA, I had prepared an elevator speech. What’s an elevator speech? An elevator speech is what you say when someone gets on the elevator at the eighth floor, notices your chalice lapel button and asks you what Unitarian Universalism is all about and you have to explain it before you get to the ground floor. My elevator speech went like this: Unitarian Universalism is a religion founded on the proposition that some questions are too important to have only one right answer.

What this gets at is that pluralism is at heart of our religion. In the Eighteenth Century they called it the right of private conscience, the right of each individual to decide what to believe. Many of us embrace a plurality of deities, and many others embrace a plurality of approaches to the holy. Now it is not necessary to embrace more than one tradition; you can be a good Unitarian Universalist if all of your inspiration is within Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or humanism. What you can’t be around these churches is exclusivist: if you make the claim that the way that works for me is the only way and all the rest of you are wrong, you won’t be warmly received or comfortable in a modern Unitarian Universalist church.

Historically, most varieties of Christianity have been supercessionist and triumphalist. Supercessionist means the belief that Christianity transplanted Judaism as the true way to worship the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Triumphalist means that Christianity ultimately will beat our all other religions of the world. Obviously these exclusionary aspects of Christianity no longer hold sway with most Christian liberals, but they are still felt among the moderate to conservative elements. It is this aspect of Christianity which I most strongly reject.

So far so good, but we need to get down to business here. The question that sparked my interest in this topic is this: given that we permit ourselves to embrace and worship a variety of gods, is there any such thing as a false god? Or put another way, if the important questions in life have more than one right answer, do they have any wrong answers?

My first reaction to the question of whether our religion admits of false gods is a divergence of mind and heart. My mind wants to say no, logically, we can’t say that some gods are false because we don’t reserve to ourselves the right to pass judgment on someone else’s beliefs. That’s what the inquisition did, that’s what the orthodox have always done to our heretic forefathers and mothers. The civil liberties lawyer in me reverts instinctively to the old familiar slippery slope argument: if we allow ourselves to judge the validity of other’s peoples choices of objects of worship at all, we have lost the liberty which is the heart of our movement.

But my heart, and maybe my common sense, says, of course there are religious approaches I can deplore. There are wrong answers. In the first place, there are plenty of out-and-out frauds in the religious scene today, as there always have been. I don’t accord Jim Bakker or Sun Myung Moon or Rev. Jim Jones any great respect. Beyond the obvious frauds, there are the blind alleys. Psychotropic drugs, for example, have a legitimate religious use in Native American spirituality, but your typical suburban teenager is not likely to find God while day-tripping at the local mall. Worship of money, or fame, of glamor, of guns, of power, of golf courses or baseball champions is a religious dead end, my instincts tell me.

Before we try to resolve my head/heart conflict, it might be well to consider this word "worship." Some of the more humanist among us may be saying by now, "what’s the problem?" Some of us won’t see a problem because in our minds we don’t worship anything, god, material possessions or any of the things I’m talking about. In fact, some of us don’t even like to call our Sunday services "worship" because we don’t acknowledge any being higher than myself. Well, I think each of us does worship something whether we call it worship or not. The word "worship" is a combination of the root "worth" and "ship." It originally meant the act of giving or acknowledging worth to something. So in this sense we all worship, it’s just a question of what our object of worship will be. Or, to put another way, if there is nothing we worship, that amounts to saying that everything is worthless to us, including ourselves.

Let me refine the concept a little further. In my first semester in Divinity School, I attended a panel discussion between a Roman Catholic nun, a Lutheran and a Congregational pastor. At the question period, my colleague Robin Zucker, who I hope will be able to preach here sometime soon, had the temerity to ask the direct question, "what is god to you?" The two Protestants gave what sounded to me like a fairly scripted response, but the nun nswered from her heart: "Sometimes, like when I just finished reading this book about Australian aboriginal religion, God is every rock and tree; other times, like when I sat with my friend who is dying of cancer, God is a comforting, nurturing mother." This nun had been very active in setting up prison ministries for women with AIDS, and I knew she had totally dedicated her life to serving God. What struck me is the paradox: here is someone who has centered her life around God, but still has no idea what God is.

Well, since I had that thought three years ago, some of the strangeness has worn off, because I see that we each build our lives around something. Therefore for each of us, that something that we build our lives around is our god, whether we are aware of worshiping it our not. We give it worth by the very act of making it the foundation of our lives.

This god-in-life may or not be the same as the deity we say we believe in and are talking about in church on Sunday morning. This god arises organically out of the choices that we make, the words we speak and the actions we take and don’t take. All of these express to what we give worth, what we worship.

Now that we have refined it, let’s return to the question Can I say that some of these gods-in-life are false, that some of the answers are wrong, even if I can’t say definitively which of them are true and right? Maybe false is a little bit of an overstatement. Maybe we should adopt Tillich’s notion of god as "ultimate concern" and say not that some of these gods are false but they are not ultimate.

For example, you may look at your life and find that what you devote most of your time and energy to is making a lot of money. Wealth may be your god, what you worship, as it is to many people in our society. You surround yourself with the trappings of wealth–the expensive house and car, luxury vacations, kids in good schoolsSto remind yourself and everyone else that you are a person of wealth.

Now what shall we say to you: that your god is false? No, that might get us on the slippery slope. But I think we can say that your god is not ultimate. Wealth, as we know from a thousand novels and Hollywood films, is not an end but a means. As a means to happiness, it can be very useful; as an end in itself, it denotes a stunted spiritual outlook. There is something higher than this god wealth.

Notice what’s happening, though, with this line of thought. We’re getting into the game of whose god is higher. St. Anselm defined god as that which nothing higher can be conceived. To some today this definition will be actively offensive and to others not especially helpful. For example, a modern neo-pagan may reject the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, on the grounds that this god is too patriarchal and too removed from creation. The neo-pagan may prefer a spirit indwelling in particular rocks and trees, a deity immanent but not transcendent, particular not universal, embodied not immaterial. To the monotheist, such a pagan god may not be as "high" as the Ruler of Creation set forth in the Bible, but there is no neutral point of view from which to judge these competing claims.

As another example, take the Hindu idea of Brahman as set forth in the excerpt from the Baghavad Gita which we read responsively this morning. This passage starts off by identifying God as the "self of everything." This statement does not refer to the spark of the divinity within every person, but rather that there is a divine essence in everything that is in the world. This is close to what Emerson called the "oversoul." In Hindu terminology, the piece of god that is present within every person is called "Atman." And the goal of enlightenment as set forth in the Upanishads is finally to realize that "Atman" the individual god-essence and "Brahman" the universal god-essence are one and the same. In order to do this, you must go through a long training in the disciplines of meditation wherein you can pierce the veil of Maya, of illusion and see the underlying unity behind the world’s apparent multiplicity.

Now we simply can’t rank these three conceptions of God on any kind of meta scale; if we are honest with ourselves about the limits of our understanding, about all we can say among these three is that one approach appeals to us and another one doesn’t.

But the fact that we can’t usefully apply a scale to rank gods doesn’t mean that we are left with no discrimination whatever. I would put any one of these three conceptions of the divine above the worship of money, power or any of the other things I listed a moment ago. And that is simply because I have a rough sense, from my own values, that Brahman, the tree-spirit and Jahweh are all more worthy objects to take seriously than money, power etc.

In the recognition that this springs from my own sense of values is the limit of the sense in which I can say that a god is false: I can say that a god is false for me. I cannot with authority say that any god is false for you. For me, a God is false if I cannot be true to that God and true to myself.

As for your God, you must judge the truth or falsity by the light of your own life story. The most I can do is suggest alternative conceptions that you might consider.

As we move through the stages of life we move through different conceptions of God. The conception of God I had in my childhood is different from the conception I have now, just as God depicted in the Baghavad Gita is different from the God depicted in the Hebrew Bible. It is a commonplace observation that those who conceive of God as a punitive, angry being were often abused as children.

It should not be a surprise that we see God through the lenses of our own personal histories, for we see everything else in the world that way, too. One of the benefits of the postmodernist way of thinking is to show us that every idea and perception we have is tied to our own social location and history. There may be theoretically a neutral, independent conception but human minds will never reach it.

This is why the Hindus are not bothered by the paradox of recognizing 30 million gods but saying that in ultimate reality they are all one. For they understand that all of our understandings are partial, all of our truth relative. Psychologists tell us that we only perceive about a tenth of the data that are impacting our sense organs at any given moment, and only pay attention to about 10% of what we perceive. We always have a partial picture of what is going on. As we train ourselves to be more aware, we can take in more, and come to realize that some of our earlier ideas about life were formed on inadequate data. As we outgrow these earlier conceptions of the world, we outgrow the God that went with that conception.

So, are there false Gods? Yes, there are false Gods, but nobody can make the judgment that your gods are false but you yourself. I’ll close with this: think of how the Bible story we read this morning would play if Moses had been a U.U. Some would say, well, he wouldn’t be on the mountain talking to God, but let’s pass over that. I think he would have come down from the mountain, seen the Israelites worshiping the golden calf and said far out. Rather than slaughtering them all, he would have called a big meeting and resolved the problem by putting the calf worshipers on the Worship Committee and letting them do one Sunday a month!

Amen.