Sunday, April 19, 2026
Reading: A poem, “No More Secondhand God” by R. Buckminster Fuller, read by Charlie Adler
Sermon: What If God Were a Verb? by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Reading and Sermon text below the video
Reading: No More Secondhand God, by R. Buckminster Fuller
Here is God’s purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction “love” commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law.
not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.
Naught is lost.
Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.
Sermon: Is God A Verb?
By Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Hello everyone! This Sunday is the last of a series of our month-long theme on possibility. The thematic question for this Sunday is “What if God were a verb?” Now, if God cannot exist without being a noun for you, fine! If the word God, whether it be a verb or a noun itself, conjures the horror of some narrow box, or other you have long outgrown, that’s fine too. By God, I don’t really mean that kind of God. By God, I mean a kind of loving, creative, sustaining, awe-inspiring force beyond description and language. I mean the Eh-yeh’ ah-sher’ eh-yeh’, of the unpronounceable, unknowable YHWH revealed to Moses in the burning bush Exodus story as, “I become what I become”, or “I will become what I will be when you get there.” It is the God, described by Tillich as “The ground of being”, but ground is not really a noun either, more of a continuum or field. If that still doesn’t do it for you, that’s okay, I respect your position. In our kind of polity, I don’t speak for the congregation, I speak to the congregation, and am entitled to my own opinions. ..Just bear with me a little.
The question remains, what if God wasn’t a noun but a verb? To me, if God were a verb, it makes so much more sense. And of course, even in the ancient literature, as described in Exodus, for instance, there is some notion of that. Quantum field theory and entanglement theory suggest a non-local universe held together by a quantum field like the Higgs Boson field, where matter is not really a particle but waves vibrating in various frequencies. It suggests that all things are interconnected, and no matter where you are, the same force and organizing principle at the beginning of the Big Bang is here right now and present to us still, even on an intuitive level and perhaps has been described by us for millennia now by the Indigenous metaphor of the spider woman, or the Hindu and Buddhist notion of Indra’s net.
At the same time, this does not at this point disprove a very separate notion that quantum mechanics of the micro level and quantum physics on the macro level are separate sciences and have no, so far proven, mathematical or scientific universally coherent system connecting them. It could also be true that each atom and each being floats alone, separate and alien, and destined for non-existence and final death. Let’s be clear, this notion, that God is a verb, is a question, not a statement of fact. For it could never be a fact anyway- at best it could only be a theory, no matter how many experiments could demonstrate it.
But still, here I am, aware of the challenge, but asking with a certain kind of urgency Is God a verb?
It’s kind of urgent because we have commanders of our military telling the troops that this war with Iran is part of God’s plan to establish the greater Israel, tear down the Dome of the Rock, construct the Third temple, and bring about the second coming of Christ- a kind of rhetoric a cynical leader like Netanyahu is only too happy to embrace.
It’s kind of urgent, because we have a president posting memes of himself as Jesus, and a vice president who has never even taken a theology class, accusing the Pope of bad theology for criticizing his attempt to label the assassination of foreign leaders and the bombing of Iranian schools and hospitals as a just war.
It’s kind of urgent because this notion that God is a noun, an entity, a something that exists as a point in space, something only able to be controlled by a certain priest or king, is a very old ruse, at the heart of the establishment, even of our first city states.
But God, the verb godding itself through creation, a generative force, would be clear with creative acts of kindness, love, exploration, invention, art, music, and stewardship. This verb could never be a reason for murdering species, killing innocents, and enriching a few people at the impoverishment of millions. The noun God, controlled by the powerful few, let that be as the inventor, polymath Universalist R. Buckminster Fuller Jr, (the direct descendant of the Transcendentalist editor Margaret Fuller), be “the false and nonexistent expelled.”
When I sit or swim deep in meditation, and I stop being swept away by the noise of thoughts and feelings and the stories they generate in my head, a kind of active stillness, an aware awareness descends. I experience reality as no longer two and beyond one. This verb and God are moving through each other now. It could just be an illusion, of course. My experience is subjective. …so it’s a question… But it’s a question I think is worth acting on and living. And I have called out to that force in the dark, and I have heard it answer. And it has moved through and spoken to many I have known. But that still doesn’t mean it’s a noun, or exists in the same way a chair or a tree does. That’s how I feel anyway.
Buckminster Fuller had a similar experience in 1927 after his four-year-old daughter died of polio, and he lost his job and was considering drowning himself in Lake Michigan. He describes a kind of light shining down on him in the deep darkness of his experience, and it said.
From now on, you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.
After this experience, he lived less as a person trying to create a career and more as an intellectual vagabond. He joined the Black Mountain community and started acting. This gave him the confidence to become a public speaker. He started experimenting with geodesic domes. The idea took off. He built one for himself and his family. He was commissioned to build giant ones. Next, he started designing cars. He started writing and speaking on all kinds of subjects.
Imagine for a moment living with the notion, if you do have a notion of God, that God wasn’t a noun but a verb- as that Sufi poem at the beginning of service suggests-the breathing of the world? Imagine living with the notion that you do not belong to yourself? Imagine continually converting your experience to the highest advantage to others? Think what that might do to your life? Wouldn’t your life start looking more like love? Might it not look more like freedom? Sure, it might be filled with risk, and maybe some pain, but it would also be joy and wonder. Think of the possibility! Blessed be!
