An aphorism frequently attributed to the Catholic writer GK Chesterton says that those who do not believe in God will believe in anything. Actually he never said this –  he was a brilliant novelist and a far more nuanced thinker than this quote would lead us to believe.

Many people who reject a traditional view of faith do so for philosophically impeccable reasons, and many atheists and agnostics can offer much more persuasive versions of reality than many believers.
The excellent Christian theologian and philosopher Philip Clayton suggests that in order to think about God we must commence from the proposition that there is no God – and proceed from there to build our case.

Beginning from no-thing allows us the liberty I think to dispense with some unhelpful stereotypes and moving on from old and conservative conventional views of God has been fundamental to our progressive Unitarian faith. Our religious ancestors removed the need to place doctrine at the centre of worship, for them the essential thing was the Spirit; they took as a central text that God is a spirit and those who worship God worship in spirit and truth. Their departure from God as described by Church tradition opened an interesting spiritual pathway – they began to recognise that many different ways of perceiving the truth could be equally valid. One of the first of them, the 16th century writer Francis David said: ‘We need not think alike to love alike’. They began to recognise democratic principles, they worked against authority and for liberty, opposed slavery, and were amongst the first religious movements to begin to recognise women’s equality, Mary Woolstoncraft the writer of the early feminist text ‘A vindication of the rights of women’ was a Unitarian who worshipped in the church at Newington Green in London where they still remember which pew she sat in.

If we seek to find a better model for our belief than the top down, Old man on a cloud version of religion, we’d better have a clear idea of what we want to establish in its place.
Curiously I believe one of the best places to look for an alternative version is the Bible itself.

Richard Rohr says  “One of the few subversive texts in history, believe it or not, is the Bible! The Bible is most extraordinary because it repeatedly and invariably legitimizes the people on the bottom, and not the people on the top. The rejected son, the barren woman, the sinner, the leper, or the outsider is always the one chosen of God! Please do not take my word on this, check it out. It is rather obvious, but for some reason the obvious needs to be pointed out to us. In every case, we are presented with some form of powerlessness–and from that situation God creates a new kind of power. This is the constant pattern, hidden in plain sight.”

The constant pattern hidden in plain sight.

We took as our reading today a passage from the Old Testament story of Ruth – it fits Richard Rohr’s definition rather well. It is a story that tradition often tells at Harvest time although in fact the act of harvesting is rather unimportant compared to what I think is the real heart of the story.
Its a story of refugees from starvation – economic migrants. disaster after disaster befalls them in a pattern that is bitterly familiar to todays refugees, precariously struggling all over the world.
In the story, Ruth declares that her allegiance is not to her home-land – or even her family which are quite persuasive allegiances, but to Naomi, her mother in law. Ruth opts to stay in the most dangerous most precarious situation and be loyal to the most vulnerable person – a widow who would otherwise be alone.

In doing so she asserts the power of the network over the power of lineage or descent, she affirms the bonds of community, of loving friendship between women over family or home and in doing so establishes a recurrent example of the way in which god is revealed in the Bible, the constant pattern hidden in plain sight. She’s an outsider – a Moabite not an Israelite and yet as the story turns out she becomes the Grandmother of Jesse, David’s father. Her industry in the story is also indirect she gathers up the fallen and disregarded corn she isn’t directly harvesting the crop itself – she brings something out of suffering back to Bethlehem and establishes through the twists and turns of the narrative the line of David. She – a woman, remember that the Jewish line of descent is via the mother, establishes the line of descent from which Jesus is later to come according to the genealogy in Matthew.

The whole story is one of indirectness the power of powerlessness and the network not the line – and its central figures are women.

The beautiful window on the east wall of the chapel depicts Ruth with sheaf in arm. The design is by the Utopian philosopher William Morris – Ruth was an important subject for the pre-Raphaelite artists movement, of which Morris was a part, she is a recurrent theme for this group of vitally important artists, perhaps they recognised something of her in their marginal position. They’re important because they believed in realism not embellishment, real colours, real scale people, doing real work. Their vision was a radical refutation of the high Victorian norm, and the figures in this window are unique in being depictions of real people, we can even say with some confidence the names of the women  who were the models; Jane Morris was William Morris wife and she is clearly the model for Magdalen, the other panels are other women from the biblical narratives all of whom are representatives of scriptural witness to the spiritual power of Women and it is this spiritual  pattern that I take as my theme over the next few weeks of lent – next week which is International Womens day and the following week which is Mothering Sunday.

It is this spirituality that is attributed by the writer of Proverbs to Wisdom, Sophia, a vision of divinity which is emphatically feminine, in stark  contrast to the orthodox view; (and yet it is there, hidden in plain sight in Proverbs as well as in Wisdom which is here in this Bible between the Old and New Testaments),

I believe that we can as religious seekers find all that we need to nourish and spiritually sustain us from the deep roots of tradition which surround us – but in rejecting patriarchalism we don’t need to also reject Wisdom – if we are prepared to read the patterns around us.
Some etymologies claim that the word religion is related to the term for reading, specifically the term for re reading, One possibility is an interpretation traced to Cicero, connecting lego “read”, i.e. re (again) + lego in the sense of “choose”, “go over again” or “consider carefully”.

My Unitarian Free Christian reading of the faith from which I come has taught me not to accept the inherited interpretations but to re interpret, to see again with fresh eyes the old tradition. Seeing from a broader perspective and understanding according to networks rather than data.

All this would confirm the example given symbolic narrative in the story of Ruth of a divinity which is more horizontal than linear, a sacredness in interconnection rather than by authority, a sense of the divine which is not so much believing in anything as believing in everything.