The nominal theology of our historic faith, that God is a unity not a trinity, may seem obscure to us.  But the premises behind that theology are still valid and still important to our contemporary faith.  We’ll look back at what Unitarian meant then, and means now.   And in these High Holy Days look even further back to our roots in Judaism.

Shortly after I joined a Unitarian Universalist church, about 30 years ago, I started to hear the Unitarian jokes.  You’ve probably heard them, too.

A Unitarian missionary is one who rings your doorbell and when you answer has nothing to say.

When people get to heaven, most folks follow the sign that says, “This way to God.”  The Unitarians walk the other way following the sign that says, “This way to a lecture about God.”

Here’s a Unitarian prayer:  “Dear God (if there is a god). Save my soul (if I have a soul).”

Or the joke about Unitarians singing hymns so badly because we’re always reading ahead to make sure we agree with the next line.

Here’s a joke you can probably figure out the punch line for:

A traveler couldn’t find the local Unitarian Universalist church. After looking in the center of town, in the suburbs, and then out in the surrounding countryside, the traveler finally came upon a farmer plowing his field.  The traveler leaned out his car window and asked, “Am I too far out for the UU church?”

The farmer replied, “Nobody is too far out for the UU church.”

But there’s one joke that always meant a little bit more than just a joke to me.  It’s not really a joke, even.   It’s what they call a wisecrack.  It’s this:

“Unitarians believe that there is, at the most, one God.”

That remark isn’t exactly true, at least not any more.  I know of a lot of Unitarians who believe in more than one god:  whole pantheons of gods.  And any sentence that begins with the words, “Unitarians believe…,” is almost guaranteed to be untrue, because we define the Unitarian faith by shared values not shared beliefs.

But it is still a sort of funny thing to say.  Unitarians believe in one God, at the most.  The idea that belief in one of something is the most that we can tolerate is funny.  And it is sort of true because the pantheists and pagans not-with-standing, most of us probably do believe in one god, or none.  One being the most we can believe in.  Where other faiths have mysteries and miracles over-flowing, and shrines and retreats and giant temples with chapels and altars and niches crammed with saints, we can tolerate only a sliver of divinity.  Given all the abundance of gods and goddesses and angels and demons and saints and mythologies and demiurges and manifestations and incarnations we look at the offering, spilling-over like a generous mother holding out a heaping plate of cookies just come from the oven and we say, “I’ll have one.”

I did a quick google search to see if I could find out where that wisecrack came from.  I found a reference in Time magazine from 1948, but even then, the article describes it as “an old wisecrack” and the article doesn’t give any longer-ago source.

But the context for which that particular wisecrack makes the most sense is the early 20th century or late 19th century, when most Unitarians still thought of ourselves as Unitarian Christians.

Because that is, after all, what Unitarian, actually means.

We believe in one God, at most, because we are (in the simplified realm of that wisecrack) either atheist, or we are theists who believe in the unity of God rather than the Trinity of orthodox Christian doctrine.  We are Unitarian, because we are not Trinitarian.

Contemporary Unitarians often think “Unitarian” must have something to do with the way we seem to gather all religious beliefs together like that “Coexist” bumper sticker that combines all of the world religious symbols.  But that’s not what Unitarian actually means.

Orthodox Christian doctrine, and I mean small “o” orthodox in the meaning of “correct thinking”, not the eastern branches of Christianity called Orthodox with a capital O, teaches that God is a trinity.  Three persons in one being.  God the Father, God the Son (meaning Jesus), and the Holy Spirit.

Unitarians argued, back in the time when we felt it was important to argue about such things, that the doctrine of the Trinity made no sense, that it wasn’t justified according to scripture (God is never described as a Trinity anywhere in the Bible), and that it must be a false religious doctrine because it wasn’t something that a spiritual seeker would ever reason out or intuit on their own.  God wouldn’t make a secret of such an important spiritual truth.

Unitarians argued, that the proper doctrine of God, following a plain-reading of the Bible, and what we actually feel when we have a sense of the holy, and the use of reason, is that the God that Jesus calls “Father”, is God, not a trinity, but an uncomplicated, approachable, and logical, unity, and Jesus is something else.

In that, we actually agree with a lot of folks who don’t call themselves Unitarian, but actually hold the same, unitarian, theology.

Judaism, for instance, agrees that God is God.  The Jewish affirmation of faith called the Shema states, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4).  And Jesus is just a guy:  a good Jewish boy.

Islam is also a unitarian faith.  The Islamic profession of faith, called the Shahada, is “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.”  And Jesus to the Muslims is a sort of prophet akin to the other Jewish prophets.

It might surprise you to know that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are also unitarian.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is also unitarian.  Both of those religions believe that God is a Unity, and that God created Jesus as a separate being: an angel in the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who became human, and as a literal human son of God in the case of the Mormons.

But if all of those folks are small u unitarians, what does it mean for us to be capital U Unitarians?  What did it mean when we first got that name?  And what might it mean to us now?

The idea that there is at most, One God, begins in Egypt.  Most historians credit the first monotheism to the Egpytian Pharoah, Ahkhanten, who ruled in the 14th century before the Common Era.

Ahknaten worshipped the Sun god, Aten.  His name, Ahknaten, actually means, “Working for Aten”.  Initially Ahknaten allowed Egyptians to worship other gods, but later in his reign he required that only Aten be worshipped.  He closed temples and dismissed priests who served other dieties.

Egyptian monotheism was short-lived, for obvious reasons.  Akhnaten faced the same problem that the Hebrew-speaking people faced a few centuries later.  People were gathered in extended families or small tribal groups.  People had their “family” gods.  Or they worshipped a deity associated with a particular holy site near where they lived.  You can’t abandon that kind of worship because some distant ruler demands it.

There is power in those community connections, or power in connection to a place.  The local, personal god, is an important signifier of a person’s place in the world.  If disconnected physically from the family or the place of origin, a person could stay connected by continuing to worship their home god.  Like a person who moves across the country but still cheers for their hometown football team.  There are stories in the Hebrew Bible of people packing statues of their house gods in their bags and carrying them as they moved from place to place.

The religion of Abraham wasn’t actually monotheistic.  Henotheistic is the technical term, the worship of one god while acknowledging that other gods exist.  That other gods exist and have power is commonly admitted in the Old Testament.  The point isn’t that Yahweh is the only god that exists, the point is that Yahweh is our god, the other gods are for other people.  Ours is a jealous god.  “Thou shall have no other Gods before me” is the first commandment.

Monotheism in the sense that God is the god for everyone and no other gods have real existence wasn’t firmly established until later in Judaism and then Christianity and Islam.  But it’s wrong therefore to think of monotheism as a sophisticated development in religion, a spiritual improvement on primitive religions.  Instead, think of monotheism and polytheism as two intertwined and dependent spiritual energies present within all religions because each describes a truth of reality and satisfy a spiritual need.

On one hand we see a multitude of things in the world:  sky and land and sea, people and animals and trees, rocks and rivers, storms that come and go, cycles of seasons.  All of these are clearly different.  Separate.  Yet each important.  And to certain kinds of spiritually-minded people, all seem sacred, worthy of respect.  Worthy of honor and gratitude for the ways these various things work to bless our lives.  And so it’s natural to respond with an urge to bless them in return, to call them divine.

But from that place, one might start to philosophize.  The divine essence that I feel in this tree, feels similar to the divine essence I feel in this mountain, and also in the storm when it comes, and the moon when it rises.  Could it all be one essence?  Though the divine might have different expressions depending on where I find it, isn’t that just like a person who is sometimes strong and sometimes gentle and sometimes loving and sometimes full of wrath?  Could there be one unified divinity behind the several manifestations?

So many polytheistic religions also have a monotheistic interpretation.  Like the ultimate reality of Brahman that stands behind and unifies the hundreds of Hindu gods.  

But that monotheistic god, when it can be imagined, starts to feel far-off and impersonal.  The one God starts to feel like a theological concept rather than the kind of companion of comfort and healing and wisdom that people need.  So God might be pushed away entirely as irrelevant, leaving the world to humans and materialism.  Or the push and pull of polytheism and monotheism might encourage the spiritually-minded to bring god out of the heavens and back down to earth again, and into the earth and the things of the earth, until the world that had started to feel separate from divinity becomes infused with divinity again.  Everything is holy now.

This same swirling cycle of one god, or none, or many, happens historically as cultures move through centuries, and also in individual lives.  Think of how your relationship to ideas of the divine in the world or beyond the world or out of the world have changed over your life or even the course of a day, sometimes filled with wonder, sometimes mundane and dull.  Sometimes you need a personal god close at hand, “help me get this job, or help my son overcome his addiction.” And we light a candle to a saint on our home altar.  Sometimes the only possible god is the abstract god of philosophy:  the god of “justice” or “peace” who inspires our activism.  Sometimes even that god is one too many and we need to just deal with the hard facts in front of us.  Sometimes you need to pray, “God (if there is one) save my soul (if I have one).”  And sometimes you just need to pray.

The Jews found true monotheism only after the destruction of the Temple, in 587 BCE.  The Jewish Kingdom was overthrown.  The Jews were scattered.  In the Babylonian Captivity they wondered, “How can we be Jews, without a temple, far away from our home land?  What happened?

A polytheistic explanation would be to say that our god, Yahweh, was weak.  And our god, got overthrown by a more powerful god of the Babylonians.  We backed the wrong guy.

Instead, the Jewish prophets worked out the answer of ethical monotheism.  Our god, Yahweh, is the only god there is.  God is in charge of both blessings and curses.  God used the Babylonians to destroy our kingdom, because we broke our promise to be God’s people, to follow God’s commandments.  We weren’t kind.  We weren’t just.  We didn’t care for the widows and orphans and strangers.  We stole, and abused, and took advantage.  We went after wealth and selfishness.  We treated other people as objects of our lusts.  And so our god, the only god, took away our blessings as an effort to call us back to our best selves.

That one God can be with us here, in Babylon, or be with us anywhere.  That God still cares for us and wants us to be good.  The worship of that God doesn’t require a temple, or sacrifices, it requires ethical living. 

That was the God that Jesus called “Father,” or “Abba,” rather, which means something like Papa.  That was the god that the early Christians worshipped.

The doctrine of the Trinity was invented in the 4th century, at the council of Nicea, as a way to explain Jesus’s role in the Christian salvation scheme.  Jesus was human so that he could pay the price for sin, as humans do, through suffering and death.  But Jesus needed to be God, too, so that Jesus’ payment for sin would be undeserved for him, and could be credited to others.  I’ll talk more about that next week when we get to Universalism.

So the early Christians seemed to have two gods:  Jesus and the Father, or three if you count the Holy Spirit, but they didn’t want to lose the monotheism they had learned from their Jewish ancestors, so instead of resolving the contradictions they just said it was so.   A mystery.  Jesus is completely human, and completely divine.  And God is both three persons:  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and also, one being.

The Unitarians solved the problem a different way, by telling a different salvation story.  Jesus saves, not by dying on the cross, but by illustrating in his life and teaching in his words, the ethical principles that the God of ethical monotheism wants for us:  justice, peace, love.  Jesus doesn’t need to be a god to do that, in fact it’s better than he just be a human, because then he shows that we all can live ethically, with no special power except our humanity.

For that salvation story you don’t need a god, just human beings following humanist values.  Or you might believe in one God, who gives those values objectivity and universality beyond human preference.  Or you might believe in many gods, despite what the wisecrack claims, as long as those many gods lead you to the values that are the center of our communities and the core of our faith.

So though our Unitarianism has changed over time.  The religious principles that guided us when we earned our name, still guide us now.

We relate to the divine directly, not mediated through other beings be they priests or saints or angels.

We value reason and logic in our lives, and demand no less of our religious doctrines.

We trust in the possibility of human goodness and the natural human power to make our lives better for ourselves, and to make our world more just, peaceful and loving for everyone.

In the end it is not beliefs or rituals that save us, one god or none or many, but right actions that matter.

We see sacredness both in the many and in the one that connects the multitude, each individual, and the web that weaves a single creation.  We happily move back and forth between honoring the separate gifts of each individual, and the common human experience that unites us.

We believe in, well, we believe in a lot of things.  “Where is our holy One?  A mighty host respond.”  And still the many become one again, where “Love and truth shall meet” when “Justice and peace shall embrace.”

May it be so.