Without Creeds and Dogma, What Is There?

 “Without Creeds and Dogma, What Is There?”

Isaiah 6:1-8 NIV; selected verses from Mary Oliver's poem, "At the Lake"  

A meditation delivered electronically by Rev. Dr. Randy K. Hammer, Aug. 30, 2020

Without creeds and dogma, what is there?  This is the question I would have us consider today.  If you don’t have creeds and dogma in religion, then what do you have?  What is the substance or goal or polar star toward which we gravitate?

Well, what got me to thinking about this question and putting all of this together was something I read by Annie Dillard a few weeks ago.  During this COVID-19 isolation, I have done a LOT of reading.  Perhaps some of you have as well.  My reading has included three or four books by contemporary poet and naturalist Annie Dillard.  And then by chance or by providence, I read a short article Dillard had published in Christian Century magazine.  Annie makes this statement: “I can’t and don’t give intellectual assent to many very established and agreed-upon Christian dogmas.”  That statement got my attention; I resonated with it.  And many of our Chapel on the Hill members may resonate with it as well.  The United Church of Oak Ridge has been a non-creedal, non-dogmatic, progressive congregation from day one.  The more than a dozen denominations represented by those founding United Church members realized that establishing a congregation on the basis of shared doctrine, dogma, or creeds was not possible.  Rather, they chose to unite themselves in covenant and fellowship and the quest to know and experience God without the confines of doctrine, dogma, or creeds.

Dillard goes on in that article to pose some questions about God and faith and such.  But then Dillard affirms: “I know only one thing for certain: there is holiness.”¹  There is holiness.

Well, the prophet Isaiah, in one of the most prominent passages in the Hebrew Bible, speaks of holiness.  In a year of great national upheaval and unrest, Isaiah had a vision of God and some mysterious creatures around the throne of God crying, “Holy, holy, holy! The Lord Almighty is holy.  His glory fills the world.”  This passage, because of the way it progresses – a vision of God, recognition of and confession of failure, absolution, a call to service in the world, and a response – was studied in seminary worship classes as a foundation and good starting point for planning congregational worship services.

But for today’s purposes, what I think is important from this passage is that at the heart of religion or spirituality is a sense of holiness, or the Great Other: recognition of holiness or the Sacred, respect for holiness or the Sacred, and response to holiness or the Sacred.  Such is also what Annie Dillard points out.

It matters not whether we find ourselves in times of prosperity and blessings when everything in life seems to be good and going our way, or whether we find ourselves (as we do now and as did the prophet Isaiah) in times of national crisis and upheaval.  Perhaps even more so in times of national crisis and upheaval.  One constant is an awareness of the Holy, the Sacred, the Divine; recognizing, respecting, responding to the Holy or Sacred in our lives and the world around us.  Beloved poet Mary Oliver spoke of kneeling in acknowledgement of holiness as she experienced in the natural world.

Interestingly, last month the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada announced the results of a survey where more than 800 society members voted on what they believe to be “the greatest hymn of all time.”  Would you like to guess which Christian hymn came out on top?  It has been voted the most-beloved hymn in the past in other surveys as well.  “Holy, Holy, Holy!” was chosen as “the greatest hymn of all time,” at least by the majority of members of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.²

Well, in that Christian Century article, Dillard goes on to say, “Maybe there is a divide between people who honor holiness – who bow down before it, who pray on their knees – and people who don’t.  The opposite of holiness,” Dillard contents, “is selfishness, egotism, pride.”  I interpret Dillard’s words to mean it is important for us to exhibit a bit of humility; to realize and acknowledge that none of us is self-made; that there is a danger when a person makes himself or herself the center of the universe of becoming a demigod.  History has shown us what can transpire when someone makes himself or herself the center of the universe.

To acknowledge that there is a Higher Power, Something greater than ourselves that we recognize as the Source of Life, the Unseen Presence we honor who gives the gifts (to draw from the thought of the poet Rumi), can say a lot about our character, how we view the world, and how we relate to others and all creatures of the world.

Yes, in the absence of creeds and dogma, at least one common principle that serves as a gravitational pull, as it were, is the collective acknowledgment that there is that Something greater than ourselves that we strive to understand and experience.  The way the early members of the United Church of Oak Ridge put it was “Where people meet in their differences, but are one in their search for God.” 

So, drawing from the ancient image of Moses and Joshua removing the sandals from their feet as they stood on holy ground and acknowledged the Sacred, we, too, lay aside our creedal and dogmatic shoes, and put on a robe of humility as it were, in the quest to experience and seek to better understand God, the Sacred, the Holy. May it be so.  Amen.

¹Annie Dillard, “Holding on to Holiness,” Christian Century, June 3, 2020, p. 27.

²Top Tune, Christian Century, August 12, 2020, p. 9.