The Laughing God
Preached 4/5/2020 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
Give or take, about 30% of Americans today don’t believe in god. That is, about 30% of us are either atheist or agnostic, or some similar disposition. It’s widely known that the trend is that each sucessive generation identifies as less religious and less spiritual than the one before it. As someone who believes that divinity exists in every human person and every living thing, I am saddened by the growing numbers of folks who cannot even find god in themselves.
But perhaps that’s not the right way to look at it. Maybe rather than asking “Do you believe in God?” The better question is, “Tell me about the God you do not believe in.”
All of us have Gods that we do not believe in. Even folks who believe in a god or many gods certainly exclude some gods. It is said that Hinduism alone has over 300,00 gods, so certainly nobody believes in every god. So, I’d like to ask you to think about your answer for a moment. What god or gods, or for that matter goddesses, do you not believe in?
If a pollster was to approach me and ask me whether I believed in God, my gut instinct would be to say no, because I’d assume that the questioner was asking whether I believed in their definition of god, which I imagine I certainly would not. Many, many of us have been hurt by gods that we refuse to believe in. What god do you not believe in?
Does the word “god” conjure up an image of an angry Zeus on a cloud, throwing lightning bolts at unsuspecting humans? Perhaps you do not believe in an angry God, or an unjust God. Perhaps you cannot bring yourself to believe in a God who lets the innocent suffer.
You may be familiar with a term that I learned in seminary: theodicy. This is the question of, if God is all-powerful, why is suffering permitted?
It seems as if only one thing can be true - either God is all-powerful but evil, because he can control everything but he lets innocent people suffer, or God is not all-powerful but he is good. So he can’t help it when innocents suffer. Most people who do believe in god go for this second choice, coming up with reasons that a kind-hearted God needs to allow suffering to happen - so that humans will grow, learn, help each other, blah blah. But if God needs to let suffering happen for ANY reason, if God is bound by some rules that are bigger than himself, if he cannot erase our suffering, then he is not all-powerful.
As an aside, remember that we are talking about Gods we DON'T believe in, so I'll go ahead and keep using Male pronouns.
So this question of theodicy, this question of God. It's a tough one.
That’s a tough one. And after much pondering and reading, I think the answer is….
Just kidding. Obviously there is no answer. If anyone could solve the problem of theodicy, religion would break down and there would be no more atheists or agnostics. We’re not going to figure it out. Not in this lifetime. Nobody is going to figure out whether there is a god, or what god is or could be.
But we all know in our hearts which gods we do not believe in.
Where do you see divinity? Do you see it anywhere? I hope that we can all find some sort of divinity within ourselves and around us. I wonder if the pollsters first took the person to a beautiful waterfall and then asked if they believed in god, would the answer change? The question really isn’t so much is there divinity? Or does the divine exist? But where do we see it? And where do we struggle to see it?
One of my favorite sources around the subject of god is mystics. It’s fascinating to me that so many different world religions have their own tradition of mystics. They seem to be the people who are able to see the divine in surprising places. Mystics are often people to seem to understand that God does not want to be taken seriously.
A 14th century Persian poet named Hafiz called laughter “God waking up” and wrote this wonderful poem about God and laughter:
I have a thousand brilliant lies For the question: How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies For the question: What is God?
If you think that the Truth can be known From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing –Now!
One of my favorite poems is by an eighth-century Sufi mystic named Rabia. She is considered a queer saint, and is one of my personal heroes. The poem is short and it encapsulates everything I believe about the human relationship to God. It goes like this:
I know how it will be when I die: My beauty will be so extraordinary that God will worship me.
He will not worship me from a distance, for our minds will have wed.
Our souls will have flowed into each other.
How to say this: God and I will forever cherish myself.
Rumi called all of existence the “ocean of God.”
There is something gorgeous and transcendent here. But something also very light, as though our heavy associations with the word God -
the reverent seriousness of bishops and priests dark cathedral domes and guilt, is all very far off base. The God of the mystics is a god of silliness and laughter, too much a part of creation to be able to angrily judge it.
St. Francis of Assisi, the Christian mystic, said that “God’s admiration for us is greater than anything we can conjure up for him.” And if you are feeling uncomfortable with all of the male pronouns, St. Francis envisioned an all-female trinity.
St. Catherine of Sienna spoke of a God who, refuses to take no for an answer, in her words, “when he opened his arms each night, wanting us to dance.”
The great bhakti poet Mirabai seemed to tease God in her prayers. She jokingly wrote in an ecstatic poem that certainly God chose to appear in human form as Jesus “to redeem that gender.” She said, “God knows he owes us women big time for the way those brutes usually act!”
But possibly my favorite mystic is Tukaram, a 17th century Indian who, in ecstatic trances, said things like this about God: “I think God gave us the wrong medicine. Let’s take a poll: How enlightened have you been feeling? I bet he keeps a private stash of something that really works.”
He also said, “If God would stop telling jokes, I might act serious.”
I’ll end with this sweet poem by Tukaram:
“I said to a squirrel, what is that you’re carrying? And he said, it’s my lucky rock, isn’t it pretty? I held it and said “Indeed.”
I said to God, what is this earth? And he said It is my lucky rock, isn’t it wonderous? “Yes, indeed.”
Yes indeed. Let’s hold onto that god, that divinity. The divinity that cannot be separated from who and from what we already are. Let’s keep our eyes on the extraordinary beauty of that God that is no different, that is no distance from us. The God in us who laughs and who has no gender and who carries our dear mother earth like a lucky rock.
I invite you to sing with me for our closing hymn, a song written by our own Mary Grigolia, I know this rose will open. Here is what Mary has said about her inspiration for this song:
I am the rose; opening is in my nature. Even when it comes time to let go of this body practice, I know this rose will open.
And although I may feel afraid of the changes, afraid of the unknown I can’t control, afraid of allowing the ego to follow the calling of something deeper, I know those fears will burn away (in the fire of transformation, this very physical practice of loving and living and letting go).
And as my fear burns away, I know, I trust that the wings of my heart, my soul, will unfurl their (my) wings.
Yes, I know this rose will open. I am the rose. We are all the rose. Opening.
May we all trust in the opening!
Preached 4/5/2020 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
Give or take, about 30% of Americans today don’t believe in god. That is, about 30% of us are either atheist or agnostic, or some similar disposition. It’s widely known that the trend is that each sucessive generation identifies as less religious and less spiritual than the one before it. As someone who believes that divinity exists in every human person and every living thing, I am saddened by the growing numbers of folks who cannot even find god in themselves.
But perhaps that’s not the right way to look at it. Maybe rather than asking “Do you believe in God?” The better question is, “Tell me about the God you do not believe in.”
All of us have Gods that we do not believe in. Even folks who believe in a god or many gods certainly exclude some gods. It is said that Hinduism alone has over 300,00 gods, so certainly nobody believes in every god. So, I’d like to ask you to think about your answer for a moment. What god or gods, or for that matter goddesses, do you not believe in?
If a pollster was to approach me and ask me whether I believed in God, my gut instinct would be to say no, because I’d assume that the questioner was asking whether I believed in their definition of god, which I imagine I certainly would not. Many, many of us have been hurt by gods that we refuse to believe in. What god do you not believe in?
Does the word “god” conjure up an image of an angry Zeus on a cloud, throwing lightning bolts at unsuspecting humans? Perhaps you do not believe in an angry God, or an unjust God. Perhaps you cannot bring yourself to believe in a God who lets the innocent suffer.
You may be familiar with a term that I learned in seminary: theodicy. This is the question of, if God is all-powerful, why is suffering permitted?
It seems as if only one thing can be true - either God is all-powerful but evil, because he can control everything but he lets innocent people suffer, or God is not all-powerful but he is good. So he can’t help it when innocents suffer. Most people who do believe in god go for this second choice, coming up with reasons that a kind-hearted God needs to allow suffering to happen - so that humans will grow, learn, help each other, blah blah. But if God needs to let suffering happen for ANY reason, if God is bound by some rules that are bigger than himself, if he cannot erase our suffering, then he is not all-powerful.
As an aside, remember that we are talking about Gods we DON'T believe in, so I'll go ahead and keep using Male pronouns.
So this question of theodicy, this question of God. It's a tough one.
That’s a tough one. And after much pondering and reading, I think the answer is….
Just kidding. Obviously there is no answer. If anyone could solve the problem of theodicy, religion would break down and there would be no more atheists or agnostics. We’re not going to figure it out. Not in this lifetime. Nobody is going to figure out whether there is a god, or what god is or could be.
But we all know in our hearts which gods we do not believe in.
Where do you see divinity? Do you see it anywhere? I hope that we can all find some sort of divinity within ourselves and around us. I wonder if the pollsters first took the person to a beautiful waterfall and then asked if they believed in god, would the answer change? The question really isn’t so much is there divinity? Or does the divine exist? But where do we see it? And where do we struggle to see it?
One of my favorite sources around the subject of god is mystics. It’s fascinating to me that so many different world religions have their own tradition of mystics. They seem to be the people who are able to see the divine in surprising places. Mystics are often people to seem to understand that God does not want to be taken seriously.
A 14th century Persian poet named Hafiz called laughter “God waking up” and wrote this wonderful poem about God and laughter:
I have a thousand brilliant lies For the question: How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies For the question: What is God?
If you think that the Truth can be known From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing –Now!
One of my favorite poems is by an eighth-century Sufi mystic named Rabia. She is considered a queer saint, and is one of my personal heroes. The poem is short and it encapsulates everything I believe about the human relationship to God. It goes like this:
I know how it will be when I die: My beauty will be so extraordinary that God will worship me.
He will not worship me from a distance, for our minds will have wed.
Our souls will have flowed into each other.
How to say this: God and I will forever cherish myself.
Rumi called all of existence the “ocean of God.”
There is something gorgeous and transcendent here. But something also very light, as though our heavy associations with the word God -
the reverent seriousness of bishops and priests dark cathedral domes and guilt, is all very far off base. The God of the mystics is a god of silliness and laughter, too much a part of creation to be able to angrily judge it.
St. Francis of Assisi, the Christian mystic, said that “God’s admiration for us is greater than anything we can conjure up for him.” And if you are feeling uncomfortable with all of the male pronouns, St. Francis envisioned an all-female trinity.
St. Catherine of Sienna spoke of a God who, refuses to take no for an answer, in her words, “when he opened his arms each night, wanting us to dance.”
The great bhakti poet Mirabai seemed to tease God in her prayers. She jokingly wrote in an ecstatic poem that certainly God chose to appear in human form as Jesus “to redeem that gender.” She said, “God knows he owes us women big time for the way those brutes usually act!”
But possibly my favorite mystic is Tukaram, a 17th century Indian who, in ecstatic trances, said things like this about God: “I think God gave us the wrong medicine. Let’s take a poll: How enlightened have you been feeling? I bet he keeps a private stash of something that really works.”
He also said, “If God would stop telling jokes, I might act serious.”
I’ll end with this sweet poem by Tukaram:
“I said to a squirrel, what is that you’re carrying? And he said, it’s my lucky rock, isn’t it pretty? I held it and said “Indeed.”
I said to God, what is this earth? And he said It is my lucky rock, isn’t it wonderous? “Yes, indeed.”
Yes indeed. Let’s hold onto that god, that divinity. The divinity that cannot be separated from who and from what we already are. Let’s keep our eyes on the extraordinary beauty of that God that is no different, that is no distance from us. The God in us who laughs and who has no gender and who carries our dear mother earth like a lucky rock.
I invite you to sing with me for our closing hymn, a song written by our own Mary Grigolia, I know this rose will open. Here is what Mary has said about her inspiration for this song:
I am the rose; opening is in my nature. Even when it comes time to let go of this body practice, I know this rose will open.
And although I may feel afraid of the changes, afraid of the unknown I can’t control, afraid of allowing the ego to follow the calling of something deeper, I know those fears will burn away (in the fire of transformation, this very physical practice of loving and living and letting go).
And as my fear burns away, I know, I trust that the wings of my heart, my soul, will unfurl their (my) wings.
Yes, I know this rose will open. I am the rose. We are all the rose. Opening.
May we all trust in the opening!