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2009 Jerry Davidoff Sermon Award winning entry

Hear, O Unitarian Universalists!

Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons
August 23rd, 2008

Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Oak Park, IL

Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai elohenu, Adonai echad. Observant Jews will repeat this statement when they first wake up in the morning and last thing before they go to bed at night. A traditional translation would be: Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. It’s not a prayer, exactly. It’s a statement of faith -- an affirmation. And it’s followed by a passage from the Bible that tells us to remember this truth, keep it alive in our consciousness at all times. It says to repeat this truth when you get up and when you go to bed, when you are home and when you are away. It says to teach it to your children, bind it to your hands and your brow, write it on the doorways of your house and your gates. Remember it.

If there’s one thing Jews are really good at, it’s remembering. There are all kinds of Jewish rituals and holidays and foods designed specifically to pass memories from generation to generation. Jews know that if you don’t keep your faith at the forefront of your mind, it’s easy to forget about it. Priorities get out of whack and we become so preoccupied with the management of our lives that we forget the purpose of our lives.

This is a great wisdom that I think we UUs could learn from. We have our faiths, our convictions, our values, but how often do we really remind ourselves of them? How often do we remind ourselves of what God we’re serving, by which I mean the principle we’re serving, the truth we’re declaring to the world, the values we’re expressing with our lives? I think most of us, myself included, go through our lives, generally trying to be a good person, but with most of our energy devoted to the day-to-day matters of being alive in this world; having families, jobs, health struggles, dog troubles, assorted varieties of daily annoyances and pleasures of all kinds.

There is something to be said for having some kind of system for reminding ourselves of why we are here and what our central truth is. A way to zoom the camera out at regular intervals, at least once a day, and get the big, panoramic view; to keep our bearings in the ocean. Reciting a statement of your truth is a way to do this.

When we recite our Covenant here on Sunday mornings, this is what we’re doing. But I think it’s helpful to also have a personal affirmation for daily use as a spiritual practice. Something like the Jewish Sh’ma. Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. A more modern translation might be: Hear, o humans: the unnamable is our God, and God is one. And a UU translation might be: Listen up everyone: the power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

This translation not only could be the creed of Unitarian Universalism, but I believe it already is. And I’m going tell you why I think this. The power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

First, some history: Unitarian Universalism, as many of you know, is a merger of two separate streams – two denominations with two theologies that were compatible enough that in 1961 they were combined into a single religious body.

Universalists shared the belief that all people would ultimately be saved – nobody would be punished eternally for their sins in a fiery pit of hell. All people would ultimately be reconciled to God – the wounds of the world would be healed. Hosea Ballou’s “Treatise on Atonement” was all about this process of becoming reconciled to God – that God was too loving to damn us all to eternal suffering. Universalists had a sense of God drawing us in, always bringing us back into the fold no matter how far we strayed.

The other stream was Unitarianism – the belief that, rather than a trinity of Gods (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) there was one God. Unitarians thought of Jesus not a God but as a human – a very special human tinged with divinity, but a human nonetheless. This way of thinking in the middle ages was not very appreciated by the Catholic Church which taught a Trinitarian doctrine that was not to be messed with. Those who questioned the Trinity were persecuted and even killed.

So these two theologies comprised Unitarian Universalism – the Universalist half, that God’s loving power ultimately transforms all sin and draws us all to Godself; and the Unitarian half, that God is one.

Interesting that the Sh’ma, that prayer I started with, also has two components. It says two things: Adonai is our God and Adonai is one. It seems to me that there are some very interesting parallels between the two halves of the Sh’ma and the two halves of Unitarian Universalism.

First, “Adonai is our God.” Who is this Adonai character? Adonai is the Hebrew word for lord. But Adonai or lord is not the word that is actually written in the prayer. The word written in the prayer is spelled Y-H-W-H (the word printed on the cover of your order of service). This is the unpronounceable name of God; the holiest name in the Hebrew Bible and the one that expresses God’s complete ineffability. You’re never supposed to even try to pronounce it, because to name God is to objectify God – to make God into a mere being. So Jews will say Adonai or lord or “the name” instead, to preserve that indefinable quality of the divine. I think it’s a very UU notion that divinity is abstract – if you turn it into a “being” that you can name you’ve missed the point.

This God with the unspeakable name introduces itself to Moses in the story of the burning bush. God is telling Moses to lead the Israelites to freedom from slavery and Moses asks, well, who should I say sent me? And God answers with this name. For you English teachers, the name is actually a word that is a future tense reflexive form of the verb “to be.” So it means something like “I will be what I will be.” The fact that God here is expressed in future tense I think is amazing – as if God is that which is in the process of becoming.

Even more significant, this unspeakable name is the name of God that’s used in the Bible almost exclusively to refer to God as the power of love and transformation. While other names, like Elohim, are sometimes used to refer to a God of punishment and judgment, this unspeakable name is used to refer to a God of reconciliation, forgiveness, and love – a God who, for example, would never send anyone to burn in hell for eternity.

This God who we call Adonai was the God that led the Israelites to freedom from slavery, this was the God who told Abraham NOT to sacrifice Isaac [a concept borrowed from Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Jewish Renewal]. This God is the most abstract conception of God and also the most loving, always drawing humans back toward itself when they stray into sin, like Abraham almost did with Isaac.

Adonai is a Universalist conception of God. Adonai is a god that is too big to be contained by primitive human formulas of crime and punishment. Adonai is a god that is too loving to stand by passively while humans suffer from their own sins. Adonai is a god that is in constant process of drawing us back toward itself, making possible reconciliation. Adonai is a god of transformation, constantly teaching us that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be.

So when the Sh’ma says Adonai is our God, it is saying that this power of love and transformation is our God; basically that the Universalist conception of God is our God. And then it says that Adonai is one. God is one! What could be more Unitarian? So we have the Universalist half of the equation and the Unitarian half of the equation. How amazing!

We’ve looked a little at the Universalist half – what about the Unitarian half? What does it mean that God is one? In the Channing passage I read earlier, all it meant was that, well, if you look in the Bible, there’s no mention of the Trinity, so presumably there’s only one God. But what about for those of us who don’t believe in God or who aren’t really concerned with proving that there isn’t a Trinity? What does this mean for us?

I think that for us today, the unity of God can mean the unity of being itself. Our seventh principle, that all of life is an interconnected web, we are all one, and our fate is inextricably bound up with that of the rocks and the whales and the microbes and the molecules. The fate of the wolves in Yellowstone is bound up with that of the farmers and the elk and the aspen trees and the beavers and the fish and other galaxies that we don’t even know about yet.

We are all made of the same basic stuff and our ultimate commitment as UU’s has to be a commitment to that stuff as a whole, not just to certain parts of it that we like better than others. This is what I believe “God is one” can mean for us today.

So we have a UU philosophy with two halves that are amazingly similar to the two halves of the central faith statement of Judaism. And Jews recite this statement every day as a reminder to keep one’s priorities straight and to keep faith at the forefront of consciousness. Maybe there would be some value in us doing this too, using our UU translation, “Listen up, everyone: the power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.” As a reminder that these should be our guiding principles in life: the oneness of the universe and the literally unspeakable power of love and transformation. This is what we are committed to, this is what we are striving to embody. And we know that we need reminders all the time.

This is why in the Sh’ma prayer, after reciting the affirmation, Jews will recite the Bible passage that tells us to recite the affirmation. It’s like reminding ourselves of our central truth and then reminding ourselves to remind ourselves again in the future. This is how great the risk is that we will forget if we don’t build in mechanisms to remember.

So maybe a UU version of the Sh’ma would read something like this:

Hear, O Unitarian Universalists!

The power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

Commit yourself to this truth with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

Take it to heart; teach it to your children.

Recite it when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night,

when you are home and when you are on your journeys.

Keep it in front of your eyes and let it guide the work of your hands.

If we took a moment to say this or something like it to ourselves every day, maybe even twice a day, it would make a subtle but real difference in our lives. It might improve our ability to keep our priorities straight. I invite you to give it a try. Whether and however we try it out, may we remind ourselves, and remind ourselves again, and then remind ourselves to remind ourselves later: the power of love and transformation is our God, and God is one.

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