Dr. John Young 12/14/08
Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville
Thank God We’re All Saved
The foundation principle of our Universalism is that every one is saved because of a benevolent God and a loving Jesus. Our tradition has argued since its beginnings at the birth of the Protestant Reformation that this was Jesus’ intention: to model a relationship that everyone could have with God, not treating Christ as the only child of God, but celebrating the fact that all people are children of God, and that Jesus witnessed beautifully to that truth. The Apostle Paul, see First Corinthians 15:25, even saw ‘all enemies being freed by Jesus.’ Several of the early Christian Church leaders were Universalists; most prominently was Origen who spoke of the restoration of all things to their original perfection. He wrote, “We think the goodness of God through Christ will recall all creatures to one end, even the enemies being conquered and subdued.” Universalism was rejected by Augustine, Luther and Calvin and most Christians for 1200 years.
Universalism has been revived by liberal theologians who found the idea of eternal punishment incompatible with a benevolent deity. Even the prototypic modern conservative Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, believed that “all people were elected by Jesus Christ.” Certainly universalism seems to be appropriate if you believe in a God of love. How could such a God rest until everyone was saved? Certainly, the whole tenor of Jesus’ life and ministry, so obviously inclusive of outcastes, sinners, strangers and foreigners, with love and compassion as its central teachings, cries out for a belief in universalism.
Universalism’s greatest denominational success was on the American frontier. At the end of the American Civil War, Universalists were the sixth largest denomination in the United States. There were then more Universalists than there were Roman Catholics in America, since the great Roman Catholic immigrant populations had not yet arrived on our shores, and most other Christian traditions were stuck in theologies based on hell, damnation, sin, and predestination. In this context, with millions of Europeans coming to America for a new life, a theology based on a benevolent God and a loving Jesus, holding out hope to all people seemed an obvious denomination to adopt.
The usual retort to our Universalist belief is that people will not be good unless they fear the fires of hell, the terrors of endless retribution, and the breathlessness of eternal judgment. Theologians, in addition, worry that accepting universalism evaporates peoples’ free will to make ethical and moral choices, or that the stuffing has been taken out of the Christian creed by a universalistic belief. Why did Jesus die on the cross, if everyone was already saved by a benevolent God?
From our Unitarian Universalist perspective, those are exactly the points. We believe in Jesus, as an ethical model and as a model of our relationship of love with life. We know that life is tragic, and that people and institutions, as well as nature itself, are often unfair from our human perspectives. But, we do not believe that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross saved either only believing Christians or all people. We believe that all people can find meaning and value in life, and that all people find peace in death.
We are well aware that people constantly have moral and ethical choices, that they and their institutions make many poor choices, often out of ignorance or inattention, and sometimes out of conscious intention and malice. Just because everyone can find meaning and value in life, and will find peace in death, does not mean that free will has evaporated or that moral quandaries and ethical hazards have lost their gravity. It seems pathetic to us that people would actually believe that humans do good only out of fear of punishment.
We would argue that people do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God, or their sense of ultimate reality, because they believe that is in their own and their world’s long-term best interests. They learn to be just, and they develop an individual conscience and set of self-disciplines and people together develop laws and cultural traditions that reinforce their ideas of justice, mercy, and godliness, humanity, or ultimate reality.
If you are a free thinker, wanting to dismiss God and Jesus, think about it this way. If the world is random and life is meaningless why should you do good, be ethical, or altruistic? I would challenge you to admit that in fact you find significant hope in life, or you would stop getting up in the morning. You believe that benevolence exists in nature and human culture, or you would not keep on keeping on. So, in fact, you have working concepts of natural justice, human love, and the beloved community. It is presently more comfortable for you to disassociate these beliefs of yours from beliefs in a caring universe and a happy ending, but the truth is that your working assumptions are quite like traditional Universalists. Some of us find the comfort outweighs the quandaries produced by theology, others of us want to keep it simpler. We want to dismiss the mystery and the quandaries, and that’s ok with us believers here. We’re completely ready to embrace and make room for our free thinking siblings.
Now, what do we Universalists, whether atheist, secular free thinkers or happy Christian, pagan or other liberal believers do with the reality of persistent evil in the world? We resist it with all of our resources. But we refuse to personify it in a demi-god like the Devil or eternalize it in a Hell. I do not believe that people are born sinful, that they inherit sin, that any single culture or tradition has all the right answers, that there is such a thing as human perfection, and I do not believe that thinking a sin is the same as doing it. We Unitarian Universalists are liberated from these false and awful loads of guilt weighing upon most of humanity.
People learn and earn their sins or grievous errors, and they can un-learn them and strive to gain restitution from them. Restitution is making good on a mistake. It is the effort to give the equivalence of good as you have taken with your act of harm. So, we are all saved, but we have a lifetime of work to do. We need to maximize the good we do, and minimize the evil. We need to learn better how to be good, and we need to make amends and restitution for the substantial errors we make.
I do not know what happens after death, but I do not know from 40 years as a minister and 65 years as a human being that everyone does find peace in death. I do not know whether that is simply the dreamless sleep of oblivion or some better and different existence, but those who face death do not fear it, they welcome it, and if they got close, they await it expectantly. Perhaps most of us have several lives, as the Hindus and Buddhists believe, slowly learning the lessons that we need to learn. Perhaps we return as a contented portion of the cosmos or the natural world, now a conscious element of the cosmic ocean or a fresh bloom in the Florida wetlands. Perhaps there is a heaven, and perhaps we have new lessons to learn there, new tasks to refuse or embrace. I am content, as Thoreau said to live in one world at a time. There is so much here. There is so much we can do as liberated people. For we, as Unitarian Universalists, believe in the ultimate benevolence of the world and the potential goodness of humanity and human culture, whether we espouse those doctrines as scientific truths and sociological findings or as theological truths and spiritual experiences.
In closing, let me quickly share with you a series of lessons in being saved that I experienced recently. Yesterday, I performed the wedding of new UUCJ members Tonya Pauly and Ivette Blanco. They work as helping professionals at Ten Brook Hospital and at Matrix House. Tonya has a 19 year old daughter and Ivette a 26 year old son. They met six years ago, and they have formed a loving family together and found a spiritual haven in this congregation. As I said in their wedding ceremony yesterday: ‘When two people say their sacred vows of love to one another, they are married in the sight of God. Jesus taught us to love one another, to see all people as children of God, and to do unto others as we wish others to do to us. There is no one who does not wish their love respected, supported, and nurtured.’ Ivette and Tonya have ‘saved’ others, and it was wonderful to see them surrounded by love and respect yesterday n this chapel.
Since the beginning of my UU ministry, 40 years ago, I have cherished the opportunity to create ceremonies, whether weddings, baby celebrations, or memorial services as personal and individual. My usual process has been to get the service mostly together, and then to be directed intuitively or by the spirit to try to find that poem, scripture or reading that seems to fit that particular occasion correctly. When I wrote their wedding, I was mystically led to May Sarton’s wise poem called Havens:
Though we dream of airy intimacy, open and free,
Yet sheltering as a nest of passing bird, or mouse, or ardent bee,
Of love where life in all its forms can rest
As wind breathes in the leaves of a tree;
Though we dream of never having a wall against
All that must flow and pass, and cannot be caught,
An ever-welcoming self that is not fenced,
Yet we are tethered still to another thought:
The unsheltered cannot shelter,
The exposed exposes others,
The wide open door means nothing if it cannot be closed.
Those who create real havens are not free,
Hold fast, maintain, are rooted, dig deep wells;
Whatever havens human love may be,
There is not freedom without sheltering walls.
And when we imagine wings that come and go
What we see is a house and a wide-open door.
In the new The Week [of December 19] in its Last Word column a New York Times reporter writes about her experiences having a surrogate mother bear her and her husband’s baby. The reporter was 39; she and her husband had tried unsuccessful for 5 years to have a child themselves, including 4 miscarriages. The page and a half are a starting revelation about being saved by another, and how that makes everyone better, and the world a healthier place.
Finally, I want to end with a prayer by new UUCJ member and international aid expert Manuel Lluberas. I believe it contains several of the life lessons I hope this sermon have helped you with today.
Let us pray: “Thank you God for the things I have. Help me learn to appreciate their value. Thank you for the things I don’t have. Help me so that acquiring them does not become my goal. Thank you for the things I’ve lost. Show me how losing them can become my gain. Thank you for the people around me. Help me grow old with those who love me, mature through those who don’t, and understand the meaning of love from both.”
Amen, Alleluia and Blessed Be!