Sermon #25 (5th November 2017 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
It’s up to me, once again, to kick off our new theme for the month here at Essex Church. Throughout November we’re going to be looking into ‘The Unknown’, and today, in particular, we’re focusing on the concept of God – the idea that God is, in some sense, unknown – and ultimately unknowable – that God is so unlike anything else we humans have experienced or gained knowledge of, so utterly beyond the limits of what we can understand, that we can never really hope to grasp whatever it is we mean by ‘God’. On this view, it could be said that when we speak of God, as we do most weeks at church, we literally do not know what we are talking about! None of us. Certainly not me, anyway.
Not an especially reassuring thought to be bringing to you from the pulpit, but there it is. As the Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Walsh put it (in the reading that Antony gave for us earlier), ‘God is a mystery – [a creating, transforming, sustaining mystery] – and is always and forever beyond every mortal attempt to figure God out and settle God once and for all.’