Category: Unitarian Universalism

Flower celebration, 2006

This flower celebration was led by Rev. Dan Harper and Emma Mitchell, Director of Religious Education. As usual, the material below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Homily and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Story for all ages — The Story of the Flower Service

83 years ago, Norbert and Maja Capek were ministers of a Unitarian congregation far away from here in Europe, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most members of their congregation had left other religions to become Unitarians, and many of these people did not want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind. So Norbert and Maja Capek decided to create a new ritual for their congregation — a Flower Ceremony.

One Sunday in June, they asked everyone in the congregation to bring a flower to the worship service. When people arrived on Sunday morning, all the flowers were gathered together in vases, and Norbert Capek said a short blessing over the flowers. It seems to me that the flowers became symbols of what it means to be a human being: every flower was different, every flower was beautiful in its own way. And at the end of the worship service, everyone went up and took a flower, a different flower from the one that they had brought, took that flower home with them as a symbol of their connection to everyone else in the congregation.

We are going to have our own Flower Celebration, or Flower Communion, right here in our own congregation. In just a moment, we will all have a chance to come forward and place a flower in the vases on the table here. If you forgot to bring a flower with you this morning, or if you didn’t know that you were supposed to bring a flower, you will find extra flowers on the table over there, and you can come up, pick a flower you like, and place it in the central vase.

Because we value our children highly — for our children represent new beginnings and new possibilities — I am going to let the children be the first ones to place their flowers in the vase here. I invite the children to come forward now, and you may bring an adult along if you wish….

[Children come forward]

And now I invite everyone to come forward and place a flower in the vase here.

[All come forward]

This short blessing was written by Norbert Capek:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask your blessing on these, your messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and in devotion to your will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of your most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do your work in this world.

[All come forward during this.]

Now that we have gathered all the flowers together, I will read a short prayer written by Norbert Capek:

In the name of Providence, which implants in the seed the future of the tree and in the hearts of men [and women] the longing for people living in [human] love; in the name of the highest, in whom we move and who makes the mother [and father], the brother and sister what they are; in the name of sages and great religious leaders, who sacrificed their lives to hasten the coming of [peace and justice];– let us renew our resolution sincerely to be real brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges [one from another]. In this holy resolution may we be strengthened, knowing that we are [one] family, that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us, [that we] endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life. Amen.

Readings

The first reading is from a short biography of Norbert Capek, written by Richard Henry for the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

“On the 28th of March, 1941, [Norbert] Capek and his daughter, Zora, aged 29, were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pankrac Prison. Zora was accused of listening to foreign broadcasts and distributing the content of some BBC transmissions; Capek himself of listening to foreign broadcasts and of “high treason.” Several of his sermons were cited as “evidence” of the latter charge. Listening to foreign broadcasts was a capital offense under the Protectorate. Two separate trials were held, the first at Pankrac Prison soon after their arrest; the second, an appeal of the original decision, at Dresden in April 1942. The appeals court found Capek innocent of the treason charge, recommending that, given his age, the year between his arrest and the appeals trial be counted toward his jail time. The Gestapo, ignoring the court’s recommendation, nonetheless sent Capek to Dachau, Zora to forced labor in Germany. Capek’s name appears among prisoners sent on an invalid transport on October 12, 1942 to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, where he died of poison gas.”

Not long before he was put to death by the Nazis, Dr. Capek wrote this prayer:

It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals.
Oh blow ye evil winds into my body’s fire; my soul you’ll never unravel.
Even though disappointed a thousand times or fallen in the fight and everything would worthless seem,
I have lived amidst eternity.
Be grateful, my soul,
My life was worth living.
He who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes.
He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.

HOMILY — “Maja Capek, Flowers, and Totalitarianism”

You all probably know that our congregation dates back to 1708. It started out as one of the established Puritan congregations of the Massachusetts theocracy, but eventually the congregation gradually moved towards a more liberal Unitarian theology. So it is we often think of our congregational history as a single long chain of existence from those early beginnings nearly three hundred years ago; and so it is that we post bronze plaques at the front and the rear of this room listing all the ministers who have served this congregation.

Of course, life is rarely that simple; and the history of our congregation is more complex than the list of ministers would have it seem. For in fact, our congregation today is the carrier of the institutional existences of two other New Bedford area congregations: First Universalist Church, which had its start in the 1820’s, became a part of our church in 1930; and North Unitarian Church, founded by First Unitarian as a settlement house in the North End in 1894, affiliated with the American Unitarian Association as separate congregation in 1941, but when their building burned down in 1974, they essentially merged back into First Unitarian. Therefore, our single list of ministers should really be three lists of ministers: the ministers of First Unitarian, the ministers of First Universalist, and the ministers of North Unitarian.

I wish we had those other two lists of ministers posted on bronze plaques here in this room, because if we did I could point to the name of the minister whom I consider to be the most remarkable minister who ever served one of the three root congregations of our present congregation. That minister’s name is Maja Capek, who was minister of North Unitarian Church for the first three years of its existence as a congregation.

Maja Oktavek was born in Bohemia on April 8, 1888. She came to the United States in 1907 when she was 19 years old, obtained a degree in library science from Columbia University, and went to work for the New York Public Library. There in the library she met Norbert Capek, a liberal minister affiliated with the Union of Baptist Churches of Moravia and Slovakia. (In 1910, he had tried to get the American Unitarian Association to support his efforts to promote liberal religion, but to no avail.) Capek had escaped the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of his writings which promoted Czech nationalism, and were critical of the state-supported Roman Catholic church. Norbert and Maja were married on June 23, 1917.

Norbert tried to continue working as a Baptist minister in this country, but he and Maja were becoming increasingly liberal in their religious views. Then in 1920, they decided to send their children to the Sunday school of the First Unitarian Church of Essex County, New Jersey. The children loved it so much, Maja and Norbert attended the church; and Norbert and Maja liked it so much they became members of the congregation in 1921.

By this time, the Capeks had decided to return to their homeland. After the end of the first world war, Czechoslovakia had achieved independence, and once the Roman Catholic church was no longer supported by the state, many people left Catholicism, searching for a new and more liberal alternative. Maja and Norbert Capek founded the Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship; I say that Maja and Norbert founded the congregation together, even though the standard histories give all the credit to Norbert; because we all know perfectly well that in those days, the wives of male ministers did as much work as their husbands while receiving none of the credit. And the Prague congregation, and Norbert, recognized Maja’s contributions, for Maja was ordained in 1926.

The Prague congregation searched for alternatives to the Roman Catholic worship that had dominated them before national independence. It was in response to that search that Norbert — probably with help from Maja — developed the Flower Celebration. The very first Flower Celebration was celebrated on June 23, 1923. The celebration was seen in part as a replacement of the Roman Catholic communion service:– stripped of all the weighty Catholic theological baggage, stripped of the Biblical references to bread and wine, the Flower Celebration became instead a way to celebrate the essential connection of all persons to one another.

During the next decade and a half, the Prague Unitarian congregation became the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with over 3,200 members. That is more than twice as large as today’s largest Unitarian Universalist congregation. I believe liberal religion in Czechoslovakia in those years between the two world wars represented a new sense of freedom for Czechs; it represented the end of domination by the outside forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by the Roman Catholic church. But soon a new spectre of domination would rise over Europe.

In 1939, Maja Capek came to the United States to raise money to assist refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany. Not long after she left, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, ending that small nation’s brief history as an independent country. It was not safe for her to return to occupied Czechoslovakia, and in 1940 she wound up settling in the North End of New Bedford, where she found a vibrant community of people from central and eastern Europe. Of course she immediately became involved in the Unity Chapel affiliated with First Unitarian’s settlement house, and soon she had arranged for North Unitarian Church to have separate institutional existence; and she became the first minister of North Unitarian Church.

But Norbert and their youngest daughter Zora remained trapped in Nazi Germany. Norbert and Zora were arrested on March 28, 1941; and Norbert was executed by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp on October 12, 1942.

I cannot help but think that the Capeks’ Unitarianism represented a threat to the tyranny and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. Any religion that preaches the essential connection of all human beings must be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants maintain their power by driving people apart. Any minister who preaches that one spirit of love unites us all must also be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants push hatred on us, and love is always a threat to manipulative hatred.

I cannot help but believe that even today the Flower Celebration developed by the Capeks remains a threat to totalitarianism. When we celebrate flowers, we celebrate a spirit of beauty that feeds our souls, a spirit of beauty that encourages us to be better human beings, a spirit of beauty that encourages us towards new life. But the would-be tyrants try to seduce us with a lesser beauty:– an empty beauty that cuts us off from other people, a selfish beauty that tries to get us to consume selfishly, a hateful beauty that divides us along the lines of race and gender and class.

In this spirit we celebrate our own Flower Celebration this morning. We celebrate the true beauty of the world, as symbolized by flowers. We celebrate a beauty that seems fragile; but it is a beauty which is vibrantly alive, and like the grass that grows through concrete, it is a beauty that can quietly resist tyranny. We celebrate beauty, and we celebrate the freedom inherent in liberal religion: not just a freedom of mind, but the freedom of our hearts, the freedom of our spirits, the freedom of our bodies; we celebrate freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from violence.

The symbolism of this Flower Celebration is simple: we commit ourselves to spreading beauty in the world; a wild, free, raging beauty that will brook no tyranny, that will not allow domination of body or spirit or mind. May it be so.

Music service

On May 7, instead of a sermon, our music director, Randy Fayan, played an extended piece on the organ — J. S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 582). Unfortunately, we are not able to present a recording of this worship service. However, here is Rev. Dan Harper’s introduction to the music:

Today, instead of hearing a sermon, Randy Fayan, our music director, will play an extended piece of music. I shouldn’t say he will play the music instead of a sermon: it will be the sermon. And instead of a reading this morning, I’d like to say a few words about music in churches.

As I was talking with Randy about this worship service, I asked him what his thoughts w ere about music in churches. Randy pointed out that In Unitarian Universalist churches, people brings many of their own ideas to church; as a non-creedal religion, we Unitarian Universalists have a great openness to a variety of religious ideas. And nowhere is that more obvious than when music — because when you’re listening to music, you have to bring yourself into contact with the music; you have t o bring your own ideas, your spirit, to the music; for only then can it make sense.

Randy put it this way: “The more you invest in listening to the music, the more you get out of it.”

At this point, I said to Randy that this sounds a lot like religion. Not only that, I said that more and more these days I believe that both listening to music and doing religion are more meaningful when they are done in community.

To which Randy responded that he listens to recorded music less these days; there’s something about listening to live music, with all its imperfections, that is superior to even the best recorded music. I believe t he same is true of religion: you need to be there in the room with other people.

This helps explain why we come to church to listen to Randy’s music. We could just as easily stay home and listen to a CD of the exact same music: but something would be missing. We could even drive to Boston or Providence or New York and hear some famous performer play the same piece of music: but while this would be better, it would still be different. Part of the difference is that when you listen to music in a church, you are listening to music in the way it’s really meant to be played: for listening to and playing music is always a sacred act. And music is meant to be heard, not in some big anonymous group, but in a crowd with people you know and care for.

Here in a worship setting is where music is meant to be heard. Here, you can invest yourself into the music, let it move you, knowing that you are surrounded by people who care. Here you don’t have to applaud — in fact Randy has asked that you completely refrain from applause until after the postlude is over — you don’t have to applaud, because in a community like this, everyone knows that we appreciate Randy’s music, and we don’t have to show him that by applauding — and that way, too, we’ll hear the music as it is meant to be heard: as a prelude to meditation, as an accompaniment to your own soul-work. So during the sermon, when Randy is playing, you can sit and let the music move you and take your spirit places you may not have known existed.

A Universalist Easter

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading comes from the Christian scriptures, the book known as the Gospel of Mark. In this snippet, the rabbi Jesus quotes from the Torah, first from Deuteronomy, and then from Leviticus:

“One of the teachers of the law [asked Jesus]… ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’

“‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no greater commandment than these.'” [Mk. 12.28-30]

The second reading this morning, which I take in part as a commentary of the first reading, comes from the Treatise on Atonement, written by the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou in 1805. I should add that the First Universalist Church in New Bedford, which merged with this church in 1930, traces its history back to the moment when Hosea Ballou once preached in New Bedford. Ballou wrote:

“The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree, that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries. The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those principles which are to be dreaded by men, have been believed to exist in God; and professors [of Christianity] have been molded into the image of their Deity, and become more cruel than the uncultivated savage! A persecuting inquisition is a lively representation of the God which professed Christians have believed in ever since the apostacy. It is every day’s practice to represent the Almighty so offended with man, that he employs his infinite mind in devising unspeakable tortures, as retaliations on those with whom he is offended.” [p. 147]

So end this morning’s readings, with these scornful words of Hosea Ballou.

Story for all ages

This morning, I’m going to tell the Unitarian version of the Easter story. This is the Easter story I heard as a child, and I thought I’d share it with you this Easter. Why is our version of the story different? When we retell that story, we don’t assume that Jesus was God. And that leads to all kinds of little changes that add up in the end…. Tell you what, let’s just listen to the Unitarian story of Easter and find out.

If you were here to hear last week’s story, we left Jesus as he was entering the city of Jerusalem, being welcomed by people carrying flowers and waving palm fronds.

On that first day in Jerusalem, Jesus did little more than look around in the great Temple of Jerusalem — the Temple that was the holiest place for Jesus and for all other Jews. Jesus noticed that there were a number of people selling things in the Temple (for example, there were people selling pigeons), and besides that there were all kinds of comings and goings through the Temple, people carrying all kinds of gear, taking shortcuts by going through the Temple.

The next day, Jesus returned to the Temple. He walked in, chased out the people selling things, and upset the tables of the moneychangers. Needless to say, he created quite a commotion! and I imagine that a crowd gathered around to see what this stranger, this traveling rabbi, was up to. Once the dust had settled, Jesus turned to the gathered crowd, and quoted from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Isaiah where God says, “My Temple shall be known as a place of prayer for all nations.” Jesus said it was time that the Temple went back to being a place of prayer — how could you pray when there were people buying and selling things right next to you? How could you pray with all those pigeons cooing?

I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus did the right thing in chasing the pigeon-dealers, the moneylenders, and the other salespeople out of the Temple. But the way he did managed to annoy the powerful people who ran the Temple. It made them look bad. They didn’t like that.

In the next few days, Jesus taught and preached all through Jerusalem. We know he quoted the book of Leviticus, where it says, “You are to love your neighbor as yourself.” He encouraged people to be genuinely religious, to help the weak and the poor. Jesus also got into fairly heated discussions with some of Jerusalem’s religious leaders, and he was so good at arguing that once again, he made those powerful people look bad. Once again, they didn’t like that.

Meanwhile, other things were brewing in Jerusalem. The Romans governed Jerusalem at that time. The Romans were also concerned about Jesus. When Jesus rode into the city, he was welcomed by a crowd of people who treated him as if he were one of the long-lost kings of Israel. That made the Romans worry. Was Jesus planning some kind of secret religious rebellion? How many followers did he have? What was he really up to, anyway?

Jesus continued his teaching and preaching from Sunday until Thursday evening, when Passover began. Since Jesus and his disciples were all good observant Jews, after sundown on Thursday they celebrated a Passover Seder together. They had the wine, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, all the standard things you have at a Seder. (By the way, if you’ve ever heard of “Maundy Thursday,” which is always the Thursday before Easter Sunday, that’s the commemoration of that last meal; and while not all Bible scholars agree that least meal was in fact a Seder, many scholars do think it was a Seder.)

After the Seder, Jesus was restless and depressed. He had a strong sense that the Romans or the powerful religious leaders were going to try to arrest him for stirring up trouble, for agitating the people of Jerusalem. He didn’t know how or when it would happen, but he was pretty sure he would be arrested sometime.

As it happened, Jesus was arrested just a few hours after the Seder. He was given a trial the same night he was arrested, and he was executed the next day. The Romans put him to death using a common but very unpleasant type of execution known as crucifixion. (And the day of Jesus’ execution, the Friday before Easter, is called “Good Friday,” a day when many Christians commemorate Jesus’ death.)

Because the Jewish sabbath started right at sundown, and Jewish law of the time did not allow you to bury anyone on the Sabbath day, Jesus’ friends couldn’t bury him right away. There were no funeral homes back in those days, so Jesus’ friends put his body in a tomb, which was a sort of cave cut into the side of a hill. There the body would be safe until they could bury it, after the Sabbath was over.

First thing Sunday morning, some of Jesus’ friends went to the tomb to get the body ready for burial. But to their great surprise, the body was gone, and there was a man there in white robes who talked to them about Jesus!

When I was a child, my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teachers would tell me that what had probably happened is that some of Jesus’ other friends had come along, and had already buried the body. You see, there must have been a fair amount of confusion that first Easter morning. Jesus’ friends were upset that he was dead, and they were worried that one or more of them might be arrested, too, or even executed. The burial must have taken place in secret, and probably not everybody got told when and where the burial was. Thus, by the time some of Jesus’ followers had gotten to the tomb, others had already buried his body.

Some of Jesus’ followers began saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, and following that several people even claimed to have spoken with him. But in our Sunday school, we say that we Unitarian Universalists don’t actually have to believe that Jesus actually arose from the dead. It’s just that his friends were so sad, and missed him so much, that they wanted to believe that he was alive again.

SERMON — “A Universalist Easter”

I’ll start this morning by telling you a fairly stupid Unitarian Universalist joke. It seems that two Unitarian Universalists died and went to heaven. Somewhat to their surprise, they found themselves standing in line in front of a pair of large pearly gates, waiting to talk with someone who was unmistakably St. Peter. When they finally got to St. Peter, he asked them what religion they were, and they said, “Unitarian Universalists.”

“Unitarian Universalists?” said St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, you did so much social justice work on earth I’m going to let you in to heaven, instead of sending you to hell.”

The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and finally one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?!” — using the exact tone of voice that vegetarians use when they say to you, “You mean you actually still eat meat?”

“Oh yes,” says St. Peter.

So the two Unitarian Universalists start chanting, “One two three four, we won’t go in heaven’s door/ Five six seven eight, we are going to close hell’s gates,” and next thing you know they’re picketing the Pearly Gates carrying signs saying, “God Unfair to the Damned,” and “Ban Eternal Torment.”

Needless to say, we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in hell. To a Unitarian Universalist, the concept of eternal torment is most likely to be a fable used by certain religious leaders to try to frighten people into good behavior; and the more cynical among us would add that “good behavior” is defined as that sort of behavior that helps keep those certain religious leaders in power. We don’t believe in hell, and indeed the concept of hell is likely to fill us with a certain amount of righteous indignation, just as we heard in the stupid joke with which I began this sermon.

While we usually take this for granted, I would like us to take the time to explore a little of why we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in those hoary old stories of hell and eternal torment. Easter seems like one of the best days on which to do this exploration; because some of our more traditional Christian brothers and sisters know Easter as the holiday where Jesus (they would say “Christ”) rose up from the dead; and they would echo the words of Paul of Tarsus, who wrote: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…”; the third day being, of course, Easter. This is what our more traditional Christian brothers and sisters say and believe with all their hearts and minds; but we know this to be wrong, we know in our hearts and in our heads and in the depths of our soul that this is simply wrong. Let us, therefore, articulate why it is wrong.

At the most basic level, whether or not you yourself believe in God, it is quite clearly stated in the Christian scriptures that God is love. God is love; and God loves all persons, even the poor and oppressed. That God loves the poor and oppressed is one of the more remarkable innovations of Christianity; most earlier religious traditions were quite willing to neglect the poor and oppressed. Yet if God is love, and if God loves all persons no matter how despicable they might seem on the surface — how could that kind of god dispose of any person by throwing them into hell for eternal torment? To say that God would throw people into hell is illogical on an intellectual level; and it violates emotional logic as well, because a God of love would obviously be incapable of such vicious hatred.

That’s the argument at the most basic level; and really we shouldn’t have to go beyond that argument. God is love; therefore God will not damn anyone. Once we make that argument, it is up to people with other beliefs to explain to us why a God of love would dispose of persons; it is up to people with other beliefs to explain to how “love” can include torture, humiliation, and eternal torment. Nor do you have to believe in God yourself to make this most basic argument, because really what we are doing is pointing out the impossible contradictions bound up in the idea of the traditional Christian hell.

Let me give you an example of how this basic argument works. Each year on the second Sunday in September, a mile-long stretch of Solano Street in Berkeley is taken over by a street fair called the Solano Stroll. 250,000 people come to watch the clown parade (think Rasta clowns instead of Bozo the clown), to eat fantastic food, to listen to music from rock and roll to the Royal Hawaiian ukulele band; there are art cars, jugglers, and more. Naturally, the Unitarian Universalist church sets up a booth — these are obviously our kind of people. Well, the year I served at the Berkeley church, the organizers of the Solano Stroll put the Unitarian Universalists right next to a booth full of fundamentalist Christians. Some of these good people came over to find out what we believed in; needless to say, they were a little shocked by us. They wanted to argue with me, and we went back and forth, until I finally told them that everyone gets to heaven because God is love. That took some of the wind out of their sails. You could see the wheels turning in their heads, and almost hear them thinking: “If I tell him that he’s going to go to hell, he’s going to say, ‘You mean you don’t believe in a God of absolute love?’, and then he could say that I don’t believe that God is all-powerful….” And pretty soon, they all drifted away. All except for one young man whom I think I may have convinced; he kept talking to me, wanting to know more; but eventually he, too, went back to his friends.

So it is that the old Universalist ideas retain their power even today, 200 years after Hosea Ballou. Universalism has a saving message for many people, if they can but hear it.

Using traditional Christian language, we could say that message like this: “God is love; everyone gets to go to heaven: doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor; doesn’t matter what religion you follow; doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight; doesn’t matter what color your skin is; doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman: all that matters is that because you are a human being you are deserving of love.”

Or we could use less traditional religious language, and actually leave out the word “God” altogether. We could say, “Love is the most powerful force in the universe; not television love, but the deep love we must have for all human beings; we know that all persons are worthy of dignity and respect no matter how much money they may have, no matter what religion they belong to, no matter what their sexual orientation, no matter what their racial or ethnic identity, no matter what their gender:– for your worth and dignity are an inherent part of you as a human being.”

Recently, I’ve been going even further beyond traditional religious language. I’m now willing to say that love is the most powerful force in the universe and I’m willing to extend that love to other living beings along with human beings. This isn’t romantic love; nor is this sentimental love limited to those animals and plants that I find cute and cuddly. It’s a love that extends to all living beings, to the entire biosphere, as ultimately sacred; and even though we have to eat other living beings in order to survive, we can do so with a sense of reverence; even though we have to fight against things like the influenza virus, we can do so in reverence for the awful beauty which is truly a part of all living things. But this is a pretty radical notion; and there are still quite a number of philosophical and theological points I’m trying to figure out. And I have to say I don’t recommend trotting out universal love for the biosphere when you get into a discussion with some of the more traditional Christians.

Yet no matter what kind of religious language we use, we can affirm the central principle of Universalism. Traditionally, Universalism referred to the universal salvation of all persons; in other words, everyone gets to go to heaven. Go beyond the old traditional language, and universalism calls us to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of all persons here and now. Go even further beyond traditional religious language, and we might say that all living beings should be valued, and saved from extinction, as we try to create an ecojustice heaven here on earth. But always, love is the central principle.

And I firmly believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a Universalist, although he wouldn’t have called himself that. But clearly he knew the power of love. He said that all the teaching of the old religious sages and prophets came down to two simple points: Love your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. By the way he said this, you know that Jesus’s God loved all persons without distinction; and so we are told did Jesus live out his life, consorting with the poor and the downtrodden, hanging out not with the elite but with ordinary fishermen, and with tax collectors and prostitutes. When he spoke of love two thousand years ago, it was in a time and place that was quite different from our time and place; and today some of us might say that we shall love the universe with all our heart and mind and soul, and love our neighbors as ourselves. No matter how we say it, we remain in the tradition of the great teachings of Jesus: ours is a religion with love at the center; ours is not a religion that threatens eternal torment to anyone.

And why then do we celebrate Easter, if we don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead in order to save us from eternal torment? I think Hosea Ballou, that old Universalist preacher, would say that Easter is a chance, not for us to recall that Jesus died to atone for our sins; but rather, that Jesus lived to help us reconcile ourselves to God, and to God’s love.

Today, we are likely to tell Jesus’s story in a different way, like this: Jesus was arrested on trumped-up political charges, and then he was executed to serve the interests of the powerful elite of Roman-ruled Judea. Jesus’s message of love threatened to change the way the political establishment worked; Jesus’s teachings threatened to replace a corrupt political establishment with a heaven here on earth based on love and resulting in true justice and true peace. That is why Jesus was executed; and we remember his story in order to remember that love is the ultimate subversive act, one which has the potential to bring about true peace and true justice in our world.

Nor do we necessarily believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead. But we do know that his ideas, his teachings, his message of love, did indeed rise up to take on a new life after he was executed. Those ideas are still alive; they are with us even today. Even though Jesus was executed, love remains powerful. Love is constantly renewed; even when we think it is dead, love rises up and astonishes us with its power.

May your life be renewed by love; and may you find new life in the firm knowledge that you, too, are worthy of love.