I believe in God, a quiet God, a fragile God, a powerless God, but God nevertheless. Over the past few months, my sermons have focused on the place of theology in Unitarian Universalism. It has always been my intention, once this series of sermons felt complete, to then tell you what I actually believe-my personal theology.

I have believed in God as long as I can remember. I doubt I was born with this belief. As far as I can tell, I learned to believe in God through stories my grandmother told. That belief was encouraged by my mother's tacit support of my grandmother's theology. When my grandmother spoke of God, or required my brothers and I to say our bed-time prayers, we'd look to my mother: "Mommy, is this right?" She never said it wasn't. Children take seriously the beliefs of their caregivers. My Pennsylvania Dutch, pietistic, farm-girl, moderately evangelical, Reagan Democrat, God-fearing grandmother used to tell us stories about God, and we took her seriously. She told us stories from the Bible, like Jonah in the belly of the whale or Jesus walking on water. I remember an extra-Biblical story about a man intending to climb some rocks down to the ocean, when a little girl came to him saying not to climb. "That little girl was an angel of God, sent to protect that man," my grandmother would say. Gramma loved the "footprints in the sand" story. "Look," says the man who meets God in Heaven, "in my most difficult days, there is only one set of footprints in the sand. Why did you let me walk alone?" God's response: "those were the days I carried you."

These stories stuck. I was surprised at how much Bible I knew by the time I got to seminary. I had only ever heard Biblical stories from my grandmother, yet virtually every passage I studied was familiar to me. Even so, my belief in God is not grounded in the story content. My belief in God is not Biblical. Gramma told us many stories of Christ the savior, but that's not my belief. When I say the stories stuck, I'm not referring to the content or the plot lines or the characters. What stuck was the feeling in the telling, the feeling of God, the sensing of God, not only in the stories, but all around. My grandmother felt God. She sensed God everywhere. As I grew, the story content became harder and harder to accept. But the feeling and sensing remained.

I remember a moment, a beautiful, autumn Sunday morning after a hard rain. I was perhaps thirteen years old. My brothers and I were getting ready for our weekly walk to the Unitarian Society of New Haven where God was not in vogue. Standing in the driveway a gust of wind filled the sky around me with brightly colored leaves. In that moment I was, like the sky, filled, with a powerful feeling of joy and serenity-the very same feeling my grandmother's stories used to evoke in me. The presence of God. It wasn't intellectual. It was in my body, in my bones, in my heart. This experience of feeling and sensing has happened again and again throughout my life. It happens in the midst of nature, in the midst of suffering, in the midst of authentic community, family, worship, and justice struggle. I can't stop it; I don't want to. In fact, I long for it. I long for experiences that bring me back to my grandmother's lap, marveling at her love for a first century peasant rabbi feeding the multitudes by the shores of Galilee

For many years I never spoke about this feeling and sensing of God, a silence due largely to the strength of my Unitarian Universalist religious education. I loved my UU RE, because it took me seriously as a spiritual being. It trusted me to learn. It did not impose truth. It taught me about the historical Jesus, a Jesus very different from my grandmother's Jesus. It taught me about evolution, about the religions of the world, about famous Unitarian Universalists, about healthy sexuality, about seeking justice. It gave me a meaningful community of friends with whom I had a common bond. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me to approach my religious life with rationality. "Demand evidence in matters of spirit," said my teachers. If someone tells you something too fantastic, too unbelievable, it's ok to be skeptical. It's ok to say "I can't go there," to say "I need proof." While it didn't allow much room for feeling and sensing, this emphasis on rationality was very appealing to me because so much religion seemed unreal, unbelievable, made up. Even my grandmother's stories seemed made up. And worse, I was coming to see how religion was hurting people, excluding people, diminishing people, frightening people, killing people, waging war, all in the name of God.

I would've become an atheist. I claimed atheism many times. Atheism was the most logical theology. But that childhood bodily memory, that theistic feeling and sensing, did not vanish simply because my mind had reached certain conclusions. It was always there, and despite my stated atheism, despite my rationality and skepticism, I still longed for that feeling and that sensing. I embraced it when it came, even if I didn't speak about it. Of course, I felt a contradiction. My mind was moving in an evidence-seeking, atheistic direction. My body remained grounded in a powerful, recurring experience of joy and serenity I associated with improvable God.

I owe much to the Rev. Thomas Mikelson, my mentor during my ministerial internship. Thomas helped me integrate mind and body. I asked him once why he believes in God. His answer was wonderful. He said, "it's more fun." It dawned on me: couldn't the fact that one is having fun serve as a kind of evidence for divine presence? And isn't fun a phenomenon of the body? And couldn't other such phenomena, like joy, sorrow, or serenity also serve as a kind of evidence for divine presence? Psalm 65: "You make the outgoings of the morning and the evening to shout for joy." We shout for joy when we're having fun. Thomas' point was not glib. I came to understand it is not irrational to take what your body says seriously. It is not irrational to experience deep joy and serenity, and to then wonder about your connection to a larger spiritual power. The fact that one's body feels and senses God is a kind of evidence. We can't measure it. It's not verifiable by traditional scientific methods, but it cannot be disqualified either. And for me, my reliable bodily experience is far more real at this point in my life than anything I might find in a book on theology, in the Bible, or in a doctrine.

I've been planning this sermon for months. It took me until last night to figure out what it's actually about. It's about the difference between knowledge of God and belief in God. Knowledge refers to those things I hold to be true based on evidence. Belief refers to those things I hold to be true despite a lack of evidence. Right now, I'm talking about knowledge of God. Over the years, I have come to accept the way my body feels and senses as evidence of God. I have moved from belief to knowledge. So what do I know about God? What does my body tell me about God? Above all else, my body tells me God is present. God is everywhere, all around, infused throughout creation. God is the hardest bedrock in the earth's crust, and the shifting currents of its highest atmosphere. God is ocean, dessert, mountain, rain, sun, tree, stone, insect, animal. God is autumn's falling leaves and spring's fragrant buds. God is earthworms and farmers turning soil through the centuries. God is medical doctors and shamans practicing healing arts. God is the hermit crab seeking a new shell and the homeless family seeking shelter. God is the human angels who gather around us in time of need. God is melody, harmony, and rhythm, the heart of a Debussy prelude. God is all these things and everything. God is immanent, immediate, pervasive, a view theologians might call pantheism.

Although God makes noise, I stop short of describing God's voice. So many theologians through the centuries have tried to articulate what God says to humanity. I have no knowledge of that. All of what I've described is God; none of it is God speaking for any particular reason I can identify. In terms of voice, God, for me, is very quiet. Nancy Sweetland says, "Listen for God's quiet things, like butterflies with velvet wings or raindrops making quiet rings on water…. Up high against the blue, blue sky a quiet cloud is drifting by…. Do you hear the darkness fall? The morning dew that comes to call?"¹ Though thunder and hurricanes are part of the noise God makes, in a more ultimate sense God is, for me, quiet, gentle, calm.

I won't say what God looks like, what kind of consciousness God possesses, what judgments God makes, or where God resides. I have no knowledge with which to answer these questions. I have no evidence upon which to base a response. When I say God is quiet, I'm telling you only what my body feels and senses, how my heart leaps when I recall the ancient Hebrew story of Elijah finding God in the silence of the mountain top. And I'm not just using the word 'quiet' as an adjective to describe God. Quiet, as I'm using it, is a noun, God's essence. I could just as easily say "Quiet is God." And I'm also using 'quiet' as a verb, as in God quiets, as in quieting is the only action of God for which I have any evidence.

This quiet is both beautiful and troubling. A quiet God seems to me intrinsically fragile, easily ignored, overlooked and forgotten. A quiet God cannot protect creation from the ravages of humanity's headlong rush towards environmental catastrophe. A quiet God cannot stop war and murder, rape and abuse, oppression and bigotry. A quiet God cannot halt pain and suffering. A quiet God seems virtually powerless in the face of evil. Soldiers and presidents may pray to God before going into war; athletes may pray before going into competition; people in the path of hurricanes may pray before the storm makes landfall. God may hear all these prayers, but what evidence does anyone have that God has any power whatsoever to influence the outcome of war or football or natural disasters? Imagine a large tree falls on and crushes a house in the midst of a raging storm. The next door neighbors, whose house suffers no such damage, say God was watching over them, keeping their house safe. What? God let the tree fall on the first house, but not the second? God did that? What evidence is there that God did that? Is any one of us so perfect that God would protect us, if God could, and not someone else? God does not have that kind of power. God cannot reach in with intentionality and change the course of earthly events. God is fragile and weak and quiet.

Some of you may remember my brother and his wife recently experienced a still birth. They live in a part of the country where people commonly console each other in such situations with words like "it's all part of God's plan." I believe with all my heart and all my soul God is not responsible for the death of this child or any child. God has no such plan. Nor could God save this child or any child no matter how much God may have wanted to. God can't save any of us from the tragic things that happen in this life. If you want to fantasize about God's power, read the Bible or any other sacred scripture. If you want knowledge of God's powerlessness, study the human condition and human history. God is quiet. God is fragile. God is easily ignored, easily forgotten, easily stepped over. God is powerless. This is knowledge I possess. Yet what I believe is very different.

Last week Penny Field recited Rumi's "Love Dogs." A man is crying out to God. A cynic says to him, "So, I have heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten a response?" The man cannot answer. Later, in a dream the man encounters Khdir, the guide of souls, who says, "Why did you stop crying?" The man says "because I never heard anything back." Khdir says, "This longing you express is the return message."² Thank you, Penny. This poem supports me in my belief. My belief in God, at its core, is a longing for God, and I submit that all belief in God, at its core, is such a longing. People who believe in the God of the Bible or the Koran, long for God to be the God about which they read in those scriptures. People who believe in angels long for angels to be real. People who believe in the goddesses of our ancestral religions long for those goddesses to be real. Belief is not knowledge. Belief is longing. I long for God to be something more than what I know God to be, quiet, fragile, and powerless. And some could argue, as I argue to myself from that intensely rational perspective which I value: isn't it self-indulgent to long for a God with a particular voice when you know God is quiet? Isn't it a waste of time and energy to desire a God who can intervene in human affairs when you know God has no such power? Isn't it a kind of madness to pray to a God of strength when you know God is fragile? And there, cuddled in my grandmother's lap hearing stories of footprints in the sand, the answer coming back to me is a resounding no. It is not self-indulgent to long for a God who demands justice. It is not self-indulgent to long for a God who cares for the poor and oppressed. It is not self-indulgent to long for a God who saves each of us. It is not a waste of precious time and energy to imagine a God who can intervene in human affairs. It is not madness to pray and to hope that maybe God could've saved my little niece's life, or to believe that even in the absence of such power God actually wanted her to live and wept and raged and held us and held her when she died.

When we long for God to be something more than quiet, fragile, and powerless, something astounding takes place. If we can truly give ourselves over to that longing-which is what it means to have faith-somehow this quiet, fragile, powerless God breaks through in us. Somehow, as we long for God whether out of grief, joy, anger, pain, elation, somehow we become transformed so that we can do the work we long for God to do, the work of healing, justice, mercy, love, compassion, even the work of salvation. We become healers; we become wise; we become generous; we become good stewards of the earth; we become blessed; we become the lone, wild bird; we sing out with joy! Somehow, through longing for God, we become the commanding voice in the midst of God's quiet; we become the unbreakable fortress in the midst of God's fragility; we become agents of change in the midst of God's inability to change anything; we become powerful in the midst of God's powerlessness.

I have knowledge of God. I know God to be quiet, fragile, and powerless, which is precisely why I believe.

Amen and Blessed Be.