We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts -- but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.

This topic was actually suggested by the teenage son of a friend or ours, a Unitarian Universalist. "If Unitarians aren't sure what we believe about God, and may not even believe in God," he asked, "who or what do we worship, and why?"

We are UUs are inclined to say we can all worship in our own way. We worship in the out-of-doors, we worship in the sunshine, at the beach, in the mountains. But why do we get together in a community to do something we call worship?

What About a Deity or Sacred Object for our Worship?

I love to read mysteries, and P.D. James is one of my favorite writers. In her novel Original Sin, two young detectives converse as they walk together to interview a suspect. They are talking, and flirting, in the process. James writes:

Some weeks ago, I mentioned that Mordecai Kaplan, a founder of the Jewish Renewal movement and one of the most influential and controversial Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, said that the God of the Jews is whatever the Jewish people say God is at any point in time. The God of the Jews is whatever the Jewish people say God is at any point in time. What God is now is what the people say God is. In a sense, then, God is God by consensus.

Now, using this idea, imagine what it would be like in 2002 if we tried to define God for UUs in this way (some of you are way ahead of me here). Even in this congregation, there is certainly no consensus. And more to the point, what if we had to reach consensus on Deity, on the object of worship, before we could plan and conduct a worship service? We would never hold one.

For a long time, UUs never raised the question of a deity. In many congregations, the "G" word was/is almost taboo. Some months ago, one life- long UU said to me, "I think that all of this emphasis on God and spirituality in UU congregations today is a real step backwards." His thought was that UUs had long ago outgrown the need for a deity. Indeed, even this question, like almost any idea raised in a UU congregation, is likely to seem to be an important step forward for some, and a step backward for others.

Robert Davidson, in his book Philosophies Men Live By (yes, it was written long enough ago that the masculine pronoun did not raise any eyebrows at the time), tried to summarize the ongoing and cyclical debates about the meaning of life. He postulated four basic categories -- Pursuit of Pleasure (with such thinkers as Epicures, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer), the Life of Reason (the Stoics, Spinoza, Lippman), the Urge of Progress (Nietzsche, William James, John Dewey), and Compulsion of the Ideal (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Reinhold Niehbuhr).

One factor that makes this book still worth reading is that Davidson makes no attempt whatsoever to make a case that any one idea or philosophy is a point of progress over any other. In fact, by making the "urge of progress" just one of four categories, Davidson seems to be saying that the ideas of theology, philosophy, or organizing principles of life have no logical progression. The meaning-of-life debate is important not because we get better answers as civilization evolves, but because the questions are ongoing and continuous questions.

Carl Jung said that "Whether you call the principle of existence God, Matter, Energy, or anything else you like, you have created nothing. you have simply changed a symbol."

Bernard Loomer, who I consider to be one of the great unsung UU theologians of the last half of the 20th century, used to challenge us to look at our assumptions. He let us know that at the root of every examined life there are assumptions which we believe, and on which we base much of our lives, that cannot be proven.

There have been a number of noble attempts to define what UUs, at least UUs who think about deity at all, mean by the idea of the sacred, of God, or universe, or organizing principle, or whatever term we might use. Forrest Church, minister of Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York, said in the introduction to UUism called simply A Chosen Faith," "'God' is not God's name, but our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each."

John Buehrens, past President of the UUA, said in that same book that whenever someone tells him they don't believe in God, he replies, "Tell me about the God you don't believe in. The chances are that I don't believe in 'Him' either." Buehrens also says that when someone says that they are nor religious, he simply asks them to tell him about their experience.

As most of you know, I often speak the word God, but I struggle with the concept. Am I a theist? I don't know. Am I an atheist? I don't think so. At the core of my belief system are three key ideas that, taken together, I call God -- Truth, Creativity and Love. Does believing in three organizing ideas like that makes me a Trinitarian? I don't think so.

I do, however, like the words of Dag Hammerskjold, who said that "God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily."

We UUs will probably never come to an agreement about God, no God,, God-out-there or God-in-us. So our worship must be something other than the adoration of a single "deity."

So then, what in the world can we mean by the term "worship?" Many UUs find comfort in the term, and find that words like prayer give them sustenance and hope.. For others, however, the phrase "worship service" has little or no meaning. And some people just tolerate the fact that we call this weekly time of meeting and being together, or sharing and fellowship, by the name "worship." They would come if we called it something else.

Dr. William Parker, an American Baptist and dedicated social scientist, suggested that it does not matter what word we use. We can say Allah or Atman or God or Ground of Being or creative intelligence or universal law or whatever --whether our sacred core is best described by words like reason, thinking, knowledge, or by words like love, hope, joy and peace, By committing ourselves to worship, to prayer, to being in sync with the rhythms of life, we add healing, depth and meaning; we truly do change lives.

As with the term "God," I have struggled to define the meaning of worship in a UU context. Worship is generally understood, according to the dictionary in my study, as reverence or love of a deity, idol or sacred object, or a set of ceremonies, prayers, and other religious forms by which this love is expressed." As a verb, worship is defined as (1) To honor and love as a deity; to venerate; (2) To love or pursue devotedly; (3) To participate in religious rites of worship; (4) To perform an act of worship.

Over and over again I hear ministers echo the belief that what holds any UU church together is not shared belief, but shared worship in community. Worship (from "worth-ship") takes many forms, and differs by church and minister. But each experience is a celebration, an expression of love.

UUs say they come to worship to be renewed, refreshed, and challenged. They come to take a break from an otherwise hectic world. They come to sing, to hear music, to listen to a sermon. They come to be soothed or to be stirred up, to learn or to take a break from learning. They come to be with friends, to experience a loving and caring community where they are accepted.

For me, reasons for worship can vary from service to service, or even from minute to minute in the service. Sometimes I do worship out of habit; worship is something I have done all me life. Even then, however, I worship because worship has been meaningful to me in the past, and I expect it to be so again. C. S. Lewis in Reflections on the Psalms points out that when the psalmist uses the idea of "seeing the temple," it usually refers to the fact that something special happened, or was set in place, there.

My reasons for worship are directly related to my life, and for what seems important to me at the time. Worship seems to meet more of my needs when I bring to it expectations, intent and purpose based on my experience. My experience of this congregation, of the choir and the singing (this is a singing congregation, and I love it) and the warmth of the fellowship seems to be a miracle to me each time I am here.

It also seems to me that our experience of worship arises from our highest values. If our highest value is Love, if we believe what Karl Menninger says about love being the medicine for the sickness of the world, we must bow in wonder when we see a love like that of Mother Theresa, or perhaps of many of those who labor seemingly endlessly to uncover the last remains of the victims of 9/11.

If Knowledge or understanding are what we seek, a scientific breakthrough, the discovery of new knowledge can shake the foundations of what we once thought we knew. And this uncertainty, or the bewilderment in the face of a rash of new, seemingly illogical things like suicide bombings, gives us pause to worship and to search our hearts for new understanding to incorporate into the foundations of our lives.

When the highest goal we seek is Peace, either for ourselves or for the world, we reach out to our community when peace seems so far away. And we must pause in gratitude for the peacemakers, and sit in silence whenever we are overcome by that "peace like a river that attends our ways." So with Justice, where the lives of King, Gandhi and others stand out among those who have lived and died for justice and we are moved to thanksgiving or challenged by their lives or their message.

And when that which drives our lives is Hope, when our dreams or a better world are shattered with a wall of the Pentagon or the cries of worshippers at a Passover service in Israel, we must seek ways to express our shared despair, and then to sing in praise of those moments when hope holds us against all odds. We must celebrate when the human spirit rises on wings of hope beyond reason.

Whatever the highest value we hold, whatever meaning life has for us, whatever we believe underlies all of existence, whether or not we choose to call it God or attribute divinity to it, there is reason to worship. Our worship together is best, I believe, when it is intentional, when the worship grows out of the truth that forms our assumptions about life, and when we are open to experience, to learn, and to grow.

Worship, I believe, requires and deserves our attention. This intentional act by an intentional community is best when each of the people of the community understands why he or she chooses to worship. John Buehrans also wrote that UUs are free to believe not what we want to believe, but what we find we must believe. Similarly, UUs worship not because we want to, but because we must. In worship we can experience together the celebration of the sacred, of our highest values and the meanings we find in life. Together, in worship, in looking to that which is greater than us all but in each of us, we can experience the wonder and the mystery and the worthy "everydayness" of our lives.

Blessed Be.