The basis of any spiritual system is the recognition of something greater than yourself: something beyond you that also includes you and holds you accountable. For many folks that spot is filled by a divine being of some sort. But it could also be something like world community, or the earth, or the “spirit of life.”

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For several years, I and a couple of UU minister colleagues of mine, led a program for UU ministry students in the area called, “In Care.”  It later got taken over by the UUMA as a national program called Ministerial Formation.  Our idea was that while the next generation of UU ministers was coming up through serminary and doing the other necessary parts of preparing for ministry, they were under a lot of stress and could use some comforting guidance.  We knew that the seminary provides the necessary academic foundation, but the job of ministry requires more than that.

We wanted to give our new UU ministers-in-formation the kind of practical education that would help them be successful when they actually got to a congregation.

So we set up a mentor program between students and established ministers.  And we invited students to minister gatherings to make collegial connections.  And we offered retreats, twice-a-year at deBenneville Pines, to share what they don’t teach you in seminary programming:    tips and tricks about how to organize your work, red-flags to watch out for, how to read a budget, recruit volunteers, organize a stewardship campaign, or negotiate a lease.

One of the programs we offered was about how to plan your preaching.  Seminarians worry they won’t have time to write a sermon every week.  They worry that they’re going to run out of sermon ideas.  They wonder how to make the shift from the theology papers they’ve been writing and the lectures they’ve been hearing toward the inspiring, gently challenging, pastoral, preaching of a sermon.

I tell preachers to think of a sermon as a conversation.   A sermon is just one person talking, of course, but the trick is to remember while you’re talking that the congregation is listening.  A sermon isn’t a performance.  It’s a conversation.  It’s not just your ideas, it’s their ideas, too.  It’s about them:  their lives, their concerns, their hopes and passions and needs.

But that creates a problem when you’re preaching for the first time to a new congregation, whether you’re a new minister, or an old minister, like me, coming into a new community.  I don’t know you.  So how can I preach about you?  I’m just barely starting to learn about your lives, your concerns, your hopes, passions, and needs.

So in order to get my preaching going for this year, the first thing I felt I needed to do was to find out about you and your community.  So I looked up Bakersfield on Wikipedia.  And I subscribed to the Bakersfield Californian.  And I went to the Fellowship’s website.  And what I found on the UUFKC.org website, on a page called, “Our Faith” was some information that someone had posted as a way to introduce yourselves.

Now, I don’t know how intentional that webpage, “Our Faith” really is.  I don’t know who put it together or how long ago, or where the text actually came from.  But it felt to me like a good place to start.  If I’m looking to find out who you are so I can preach to you, here, at least, is what your website says you are.

So I was intrigued by that title first of all, “Our Faith”

“Our Faith” is actually kind of a tricky thing for Unitarian Universalists to define, because our faith is plural.  You’ve probably been stumped by that yourself when someone asks you about your church.  We don’t all believe the same things.

But that trickiness also made the topic of “our faith” feel like a rich topic for preaching.  There’s enough there for several months of preaching as we got to know each other, or even for a year of worship.

What is, our faith as UUs?  What is your faith, as a UU?  Those are good questions.

Now, I’m using the word faith in a particular way, here, so don’t get too hung up if that’s not a word you relate to.  Sometimes we use faith in the narrow meaning of having blind trust when we don’t have evidence.  I’m an evidence-based person myself, whenever possible, so that’s not the kind of faith I mean.  

I mean faith in the larger way, in the way that your website uses that word on the page titled, “Our Faith.”  In this sense “faith” encompasses all the aspects of what we count as our religious, or spiritual life.

In this sense, “faith” encompasses three areas:

Our faith is our beliefs, and our values, and our actions in the world.

All three together, supporting and reinforcing each other creates your true faith.  It doesn’t count if you say charity is important to you, but you don’t give to charity.  It doesn’t count if you say you believe in a god of justice, but don’t particularly care about injustice around you.  Faith is all three:  your beliefs, plus your values, plus your actions.

Beliefs are what we hold to be true, about the world, and ourselves.  Beliefs are our description of reality, both what we can prove to be true through science, and, for those parts of reality where science cannot reach, our best, most sincere hunches.

Values are what we hold to be important:  concepts like love, and peace, equality of all people, the use of reason, the benefits of community and so on.

And actions are what we do with our faith, the actions that we take guided by our values in response to our beliefs about the way the world really is.

So faith is beliefs, values, and actions:  what is; why it matters; and what we do about it.

That’s how the uufkc.org webpage talks about faith, too.  There’s a section called “Our Beliefs”, that’s part of faith  And there’s a section about the Seven Principles, which is about our faith values.  And there’s our Fellowship’s Mission statement, which is about what we do with our faith.

My practice, as a minister, as I’m planning my preaching for the year, is to think of each church year as one long project, the way that a teacher thinks about the school year.  A teacher says, “Here we are in September and when we get to June we need to have covered this much material.”  I do the same with my preaching, arranging a year with the intention and hope that when we get to June, having taken a long look at a big topic, we will have grown in our spiritual lives, that we’re not just spinning our wheels, but that we have advanced, or deepened, and become a little more confidant or clear.

I want worship to be more than just entertaining for a day.  I want each Sunday to be a step on a journey:  this and then this and then this, leading, hopefully, to some kind of transformation in our lives, year upon year.

So for this year, I’ve organized my preaching for you into three chunks based on those three aspects of a complete faith life.

Beliefs, from now through December

Values, for the winter months

And actions for the spring.

And then July for some rest and August for gearing up for the next church year.

If you want to look at the whole year, by the way, it’s posted on my website:  rhmcd.com.

So let’s get started.

On our UUFKC.org website, again on that page, “Our Faith”, under the section titled “Our Beliefs” there’s a bit of text that I took as my inspiration for this first Beliefs part of our exploration of a complete faith.  It says:

“Unitarian Universalists believe more than one thing. We think for ourselves, and reflect together, about important questions.”

And then it lists four important questions:  “The existence of a Higher Power” “Life and Death”, “Sacred Texts” and “Prayer and Spiritual Practices”.  I’m going to devote a sermon to each one of those over the next couple of months, starting with some thoughts today about the existence of a higher power.

When people learn I’m a minister they usually assume I believe in God.  

But hopefully the conversation doesn’t stop there, because they probably assume I believe in a god that I most definitely do not believe in, and they probably assume that belief in God is required in my faith and it certainly is not.

Beliefs of any kind are a secondary issue for Unitarian Universalists.  We put values at the core of our faith.  But most people think religion means beliefs and they start from there.

As it turns out, I do believe in God.  But if anyone ever asks me what I think about God I answer, “I call myself a theist, but I’m a kind of theist that most God-believers would call “atheist,” and that doesn’t bother me.”

The God that I believe aligns best with the kind of theology could Process Theology.  Briefly, I believe that there is a divine nature flowing through the universe of things.  God is not an additional “thing” beyond the material stuff of the universe, but God exists in the conscious quality that I believe is part of all material existence.  This is called, “pan-psychism” by the way.  I think of God as the “mind” of the universe.

And, as the “mind” of the universe, God adds non-material qualities, such as meaning and purpose and direction to the unfolding universe.  God adds a goal for creation and a judgment of better and worse about different paths we could take, a judgment that wouldn’t exist if the universe were only physical stuff and a freedom that couldn’t exist if the universe were only following physical laws.  Occasionally, some sufficiently organized forms of matter, like human brains, and other life forms, achieve a level of consciousness where we can intuit the divine goals and make a choice about what we do that moves the universe toward the goal that God hopes for us.

This god is a co-creator with us, and with other conscious beings, luring us to make good decisions by persuasion but never by force.  God rejoices when we choose well, and sorrows with us when we choose poorly.  God is active in every moment, a part of the subtle background for every choice we make.  And God is changeable, because God’s nature changes as our choices change the world around us.  And God is responsive, shifting the divine vision to whatever is the then best possible future given the reality of whatever we have created together thus far.

So, I hope you see that this is very different from the god-belief where the eternal, omnipotent God pushes us around, and punishes us, and uses miracles to interrupt the natural order and so.  My god is constrained by the laws of nature, just as we are.  My god moves through time with us toward an open future.  My god is a companion and a partner, not a ruler.  God values our freedom to make our own choices, even to the point of risking that we might make very bad decisions indeed.

So some theists say that this is a god without power and not much use.  But a God that loves us and walks with us and honors us with freedom is worth something to me.

This isn’t a grand theism, but it is a more than atheism, to me, because this sort of theism allows me to talk about a universe filled with meaning and purpose, not just stones and stars.  My theism allows me to talk about right and wrong, and better and worse, which would have no meaning in an unconscious universe.

And, I admit, like all theologies, I don’t have any evidence for my belief.  I just have a feeling as I go through my day, that my choices matter, and therefore as a partner in creation, I matter to something larger than just myself alone.

So that’s my belief about the existence of a higher power.

But it is that last part of what I said that I think is the most important for defining any kind of faith life:  the idea that our lives matter to something larger than just ourselves alone.

I think that once you can say that your life matters to something greater than just yourself then you have spirituality.

A lot of people think of that something greater as God, or a higher power, or some kind of supernatural being.  But you don’t need to go that big, or that mystical.  Anything larger than just yourself alone, that includes and encompasses you, and to which you feel yourself accountable, will work.

That might be just one other person.  It could even be you and a pet.  You and your dog are larger than just you alone, and your dog makes you accountable to something beyond yourself.

Or that larger thing could be a community of people like this Fellowship and the covenant we say together at the beginning of worship each Sunday:  “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve human need.”

Or if your imagination reaches that far (and there’s no spiritual reason it has to) the thing larger than yourself might be all of humanity, or all living things, or the “earth forever turning.”  As we sang in our opening hymn.  The thing larger than just yourself might be, “the spirit of life”.  Or it might be, “the womb of stars” and the natural history of the earth and our human ancestors who gave us birth and hold us accountable to act carefully with the awesome inheritance they left to us.

Once we have identified that thing larger than ourselves that has meaning for our imaginations, then spirituality begins.  And if we are accountable to that larger thing, then it can be called a form of “higher power” for us, power over us, or at least with us, beyond our own power,.  Then, because now that we are accountable to something, judgments of right and wrong and better and worse start to matter.  If we make good choices, humanity, or the Earth, or our dog, will flourish.  If we make bad choices they will suffer.  And then, because our living matters to something beyond ourselves then spiritual questions like, “what happens after I die?” or “Can I make free choices or am I controlled by fate?” start to have weight.

And we will get to some of those questions in the next few months.

If you go to our website and click on the “Our Faith” page.  And then click on the link on the words “higher power” under the “Our beliefs” section, you’ll be directed to a page on the UUA website, titled, “Existence of a Higher Power in Unitarian Universalism.”

The page talks a little about god beliefs and it points out that UUs are all over the place on that.  And then it says something that I think is true for all of us, and also describes a “something larger than ourselves” which I think we all believe.

It says this:

“We join together not because we have a shared concept of the divine. Rather we gather knowing that life is richer in community than when we go it alone. We gather to know and be known, to comfort and be comforted, to celebrate the mystery that binds us, each to all.”