Unitarian Universalism – Page 6 – Dan Harper

The Importance of Community

Readings

The first reading is a tale titled “The Strength of Community,” from the book Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, translated by Olga Marx.

It is told:

Once, on the evening after the Day of Atonement, the moon was hidden behind the clouds and the Baal Shem could not go out to say the Blessing of the New Moon. This weighed so heavily on his spirit, for now, as often before, he felt that destiny too great to be gauged depended on the work of his lips. In vain he concentrated his intrinsic power on the light of the wandering star, to help it throw off the heavy sheath: whenever he sent some out, he was told that the clouds had grown even more lowering. Finally he gave up hope.

In the meantime, the hasidim who knew nothing of the Baal Shem’s grief, had gathered in the front room of the house and begun to dance, for on this evening that was their way of celebrating with festal joy the atonement for the year, brought about the the zaddik’s priestly service. When their holy delight mounted higher and higher, they invaded the Baal Shem’s chamber, still dancing. Overwhelmed by their own frenzy of happiness they took him by the hands, as he sat there sunk in gloom, and drew him into the round. At this moment, someone called outside. The night had suddenly grown light; in greater radiance than ever before, the moon curved on a flawless sky. [Book 1, p. 54]

The second reading is from Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods, Rez Dogs, and the Sacred by Vic Glover [Summertown, Tenn.: Native Voices, 2004, pp. 83-83]. In this book, Glover writes about living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, keeping alive the Lakota Sioux ways, including the sacred ceremonies of weekly sweat lodges and the annual Sun Dance.

Had a house full of people again today…. We got a load of wood [for the sweat lodge] and then met back up here, where Lupe made some bean and cheese burritos. Tom came up from base camp, the Old Man stopped by, and some other Sun Dancers came through….

While sitting around the table and drinking coffee, talk led to the Sun Dance, now only four and a half months away. A number of things were discussed, including the presumptuousness of some people who circumvented the protocols of the invitation process and thought they could just show up and start dancing, without speaking to the sponsor, Tom, or the lead dancer, also Tom.

While the discussion shifted to the preparations, the same sentiments were expressed. One of the dancers remarked about his eleven years of preparing before entering the arbor, and now, ‘after three sweat lodges, they think they’re ready to dance,’ he said….

“Overnight Indians,” said another of the men seated around the table. “Everybody wants it to happen right now, and they don’t know how to go about it. They think they’re ready, but they’re not.”…

Maybe it’s the planetary alignment. Maybe it’s the Age of Aquarius. Maybe it don’t take as long as it used to. Maybe there’s a sense of urgency now…. At this Sun Dance we’ve seen more than one person come and dance one year, never to return. “Those people don’t understand,” said Loretta, one day in her kitchen. “They don’t know what commitment means, and their lives are gonna be like that. They didn’t know how hard it was going to be.”

Sermon: “The Importance of Community”

You know the phrase “kumbayah moment.” It’s a derogatory, cynical phrase. When management tells employees they all have to come to some stupid group activity in order to build community, management is trying to create a “kumbayah moment.” During the 2008 elections, conservatives made fun of Barack Obama’s calls for unity, accusing Obama of giving “kumbayah speeches.” Liberals have balked at calls to make common cause with conservatives by saying “Stop the kumbayah.”(1) “Kumbayah” has become synonymous with sappy, manipulative platitudes calling on everyone to just get along. It comes from the folk song “Kumbayah,” which was introduced into popular culture in the 1950s by white singers of the Folk Revival. Then the song became a staple of day camps, overnight camps, and church camps: the song evokes images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song.

Originally, the song had an entirely different meaning. A folklorist for the Library of Congress recorded the earliest version of the song in 1926, as sung by Henry Wylie. Wylie begins the song with: “Somebody need you Lord, come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” And he ends the song with: “In the morning, morning, won’t you come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” According to the Library of Congress, this song was widely known in the American South. When White northern folksingers discovered the song in the Library of Congress archives, they misinterpreted the Southern Black dialect of Henry Wylie, and turned “Come by here” into “Kumbayah.” (2) In so doing, they unintentionally obscured the original meaning of the song. “Come by Here” is not a feel-good, let’s-all-get-along song. On the surface, it’s a song about hard times, and asking the Lord for comfort. Knowing that it’s an African American song reveals a deeper meaning: it’s a song about oppression and the potential for relief from oppression, and it’s a song of hope that a new day will dawn when oppression will end.

The word “community” has started to become a lot like the word “Kumbayah.” Some corporations tell their workers about the importance of community in the workplace. Some public figures talk about the importance of community in the United States, though often their notion of community only extends as far as their political allies. We give our children vague instructions to “build community,” whatever that means in practice. Like “kumbayah,” the term “community” is beginning to evoke images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song, whether they want to or not.

That is a serious misunderstanding of what “community” means. As we heard in the first reading, community can enable you to do things that you could not do on your own. At its best, community allows us to work with others to stop or to prevent oppression. Let me tell you two brief stories that illustrate this point.

The first story is about a young Unitarian minister named James Luther Adams; he later became the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century. But in 1927 he was in Nuremberg, Germany, watching a parade during a mass rally of the Nazi Party. Partway into this four-hour long parade, Adams asked some of the people watching the parade about the significance of the swastika symbol. He soon found himself in the middle of a heated discussion, when suddenly he was grabbed from behind and marched down a side street. The person who grabbed him, however, was not a Nazi, but an unemployed merchant marine sailor. This friendly sailor told Adams in no uncertain terms that he was a fool, that in another five minutes he would have been beaten up by the people he was in a heated discussion with, that in Germany in 1927 (six years before the Nazis officially seized power), you learned to keep your mouth shut in public. The sailor then invited Adams to his tenement apartment in the slums of Nuremberg to join his family for dinner.

During that dinner conversation, Adams learned how (to quote him) “one organization after another that refused to bow to the Nazis was being threatened with compulsion. The totalitarian process had begun. Freedom of association was being abolished.” Adams felt this last point was key: freedom of association was being abolished. Nearly a decade later, when he returned to Germany, he witnessed how churches had finally begun to offer what he called “belated resistance” to the Nazi regime; and in this resistance, Adams saw the power of free association. Adams later wrote: “At this juncture I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done [aside from voting] that would help prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country?… More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”(3) So ends the first story about the importance of community.

The second story happened in New York City sometime around 1784. A group of enslaved and free people of African descent gathered together to found an organization called the New-York African Society. They formed this organization for at least three main purposes: to “promote a sense of common purpose”; to promote Christianity among people of African descent; and to provide aid and assistance to each other, and to all people of African descent. This organization was the first voluntary association organized and run by African Americans; it was organized during the early Federal period when many Americans were forming voluntary associations throughout the new country, in order to promote social welfare.

Among its early activities, the New York African Society provided education for those who were still enslaved, and of course they began organizing to bring an end to slavery. The New York African Society also felt it was imperative to organize an all-Black church. New York churches that were run by White people were not especially welcoming to Black New Yorkers. The New York African Society founded its own church, which they called African Zion, though it soon came to be known as “Mother Zion.” This was not just an group of people who got together to pray and sing hymns. They wanted a church building and a paid minister, they wanted to create a strong social institution, and they organized themselves accordingly. According to historian David Hackett Fisher: “Four of the nine [original trustees] could not write, but they knew what they were about. The trustees issued subscription books, raised money for land and a building in 1800, and paid their debts on time. … Mother Zion [church] became a major presence in New York.” Fisher documents how the Mother Zion church served not just as a spiritual resource, but also as political force. In just one small example, when crowds of young White racists disrupted Sunday morning services, the church demanded — and received — police protection from the city council.(4) So ends the second story about the importance of community, and the power of community.

And now, since this is a sermon, I’m going to draw a couple of brief lessons from these two stories.

First lesson: Many people think the sole purpose of religious congregations in our society is to support the religious beliefs of individual people. That was definitely not the case in Nazi Germany. Those German churches that stood up against the Nazis were certainly sustained by their Christian beliefs, but one of their primary purposes was working against authoritarianism. We Unitarian Universalists remember that when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Unitarian congregation in Prague became one of those congregations resisting the Nazis; and because of that resistance, Norbert Capek, their minister, died in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.

Similarly, the African Zion church founded by the New York African Society was founded as a spiritual resource to Black New Yorkers. But that church also served as a moral and physical center where Black New Yorkers could work together against slavery, and organize themselves to influence the politics of the city of New York. In other words, religious congregations do serve as spiritual centers, but religious congregations also have long served as places where individuals join together in order to become a force for good in wider society. So ends the first lesson.

Second lesson: These days, I think many Americans have the tendency to think of congregations as a kind of leisure time activity. An American adult can spend time with Netflix and video games, or listening public radio, or indulging in sports and boating, or having fun with any number of fun hobbies. Americans with children have all the children’s activities on top of that: school plays, music lessons, Model U.N., sports, Scouting, and so on. Americans ration out their limited leisure time among all these attractive leisure activities. Americans also ration out their limited financial resources; so that, for example, a parent may tell our child that they cannot play hockey this year because they don’t have two thousand dollars to spend on equipment and rink time. With all these attractive leisure-time activities, it’s kind of hard for increasing numbers of Americans to justify spending time and money on old-fashioned religious congregations.

A new documentary film is coming out that provides an interesting response to all this. Brother and sister filmmakers Rebecca and Pete Davis have titled their new film “Join or Die.” In the film, they profile Robert Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, whose famous book Bowling Alone documented the demise of community organizations in America. Putnam concluded that civic organizations — everything from congregations, to Parent Teacher Associations, to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows — make major contributions to democracy and good governance. Putnam, and the fmilmmakers, argue that the demise of these organizations is one of the things contributing to the erosion of trust in America today. In a recent interview, filmmaker Pete Davis puts it this way:

“A lot of people think of religion theologically. One of the ways [Robert Putnam] thinks of it is sociologically. Religions are not just beliefs. They’re organizations where people meet. They’re places where you build relationships and develop leadership. They’re places where you meet people different from you and do a lot of volunteer work and political work. Religious spaces provide half of all social capital in the U.S.”(5)

I will make a stronger statement than that: When Americans play videogames at home instead of going to Sunday services, they are actually contributing to the erosion of trust and the weakening of democracy. When we are sitting here in our historic Meeting House, we are not engaging in another leisure time activity. We are not just exploring our personal spiritual beliefs. We are participating in democracy. We are making democracy stronger. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are resisting the growing trend towards authoritarianism.

To this you might respond: But what about those Christian evangelicals who espouse Christian nationalism? They go to church, but they’re using church as a means to promote authoritarianism. This is true, but at the same time, they’re doing exactly what I’m talking about: using the power of freedom of association to promote their own particular agenda. They get it. They understand the power of freedom of association. Yes, they’re using the power of freedom of association in order to restrict the freedom of association for others. What I’m telling you is that we need to use the power of freedom of association to stop them from taking over our country.

So it is that First Parish is not merely a leisure time activity, it is one of the bulwarks of democracy. To use Robert Putnam’s term, it’s where you build social capital. In today’s political climate, I would say that religious congregations and similar organizations are critical for maintaining our democracy. Those who prioritize leisure time activities over building social capital are acquiescing to the growth of authoritarianism.

In fact, if First Parish were just another leisure time activity, I wouldn’t be here. But over and over again, I’ve seen how our Unitarian Universalist congregations actually do make a difference in the world through building social capital. We actually do change society for the better.

I’ll conclude by noting that this is Stewardship Sunday. The Stewardship Committee wants me to make to talk about our fundraising campaign. I feel this whole sermon has been about why you should support First Parish with your presence and your money. But to keep the Stewardship Committee happy, I’ll add three short sentences. It’s a matter of public record what I earn each year. To show my commitment to my principles, I’m pledging three percent of my gross annual earnings to First Parish for the coming year. I wish it were more, because I believe strongly in the power of our congregation to be a force for good and a bulwark of democracy.

Evil in Our Time

Readings

The first reading is from The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11, by Richard J. Bernstein:

“This new fashionable popularity of the discourse of good and evil … represents an abuse of evil — a dangerous abuse. It is an abuse because, instead of inviting us to question and to think, this talk of evil is being used to stifle thinking. This is extremely dangerous in a complex and precarious world. The new discourse of good and evil lacks nuance, subtlety, and judicious discrimination. In the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ nuance and subtlety are (mis)taken as signs of wavering, weakness, and indecision. But if we think that politics requires judgment, artful diplomacy, and judicious discrimination, then this talk about absolute evil is profoundly anti-political. As Hannah Arendt noted, ‘The absolute … spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.’”

The second reading is from A Pocketful of Rye, a murder mystery by Agatha Christie. In this passage, Miss Marple and a police inspector are discussing who might have committed a murder:

“[Inspector Neele] said, ‘Oh, there are other possibilities, other people who had a perfectly good motive.’

“‘Mr. Dubois, of course,’ said Mis Marple sharply. ‘And that young Mr. Wright. I do so agree with you, Inspector. Wherever there is a question of gain, one has to be very suspicious. The great thing to avoid is having in any way a trustful mind.’

“In spite of himself, Neele smiled. ‘Always think the worst, eh?’ he asked. It seemed a curious doctrine to be proceeding from this charming and fragile-looking old lady.

“‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Marple fervently. ‘I always believe the worst. What is so sad is that one is usually justified in doing so.’”

Sermon: “Evil in Our Time”

I’ve noticed something recently. In our society today, we like to talk about evil in the abstract. We like to say that racism and sexism and homophobia are evil. We like to say that the other political party is evil — or that all politics is evil. We say that violence is evil. We like talking about evil in the abstract.

But we’re less willing to talk about the specifics of evil. When we do talk about the specifics of evil, we choose a few small examples of a greater evil, and focus on that. So when we talk about the looming global ecological disaster, we talk about how people need to drive electric cars, but we don’t talk about how first world countries like the United States need to make major policy changes regarding both corporate and private energy use. Nor are we likely to talk about the other large major threats to earth’s life supporting systems, including toxication, the spread of invasive species, and land use change.

I understand why we tend to focus on a few small examples of evil, rather than seeing the big picture; I understand why we see the trees but not the forest. When we reduce evil to abstractions, or to small specific actions, we don’t have to give serious consideration to the political and social change necessary to put an end to racism. It’s a way of keeping evil from feeling overwhelming.

But when we reduce evil to an abstraction, we cause at least two problems. First, reducing evil to an abstraction tends to stop us from thinking any further about that evil. Second, by reducing evil to an abstraction, we ignore the individuality of human beings; to use the words of philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, we “transform [human beings] into creatures that are less than fully human.” We stop thinking, and we stop seeing individuals. I’ll give an example of what I mean.

Prior to coming here to First Parish, a significant part of my career was spent serving congregations that needed help cleaning up after sexual misconduct by a minister or other staff person. (Just so you know, I’ve served in ten different congregations, many of which were entirely healthy. Although I’m going to give you an example based on sexual misconduct by a minister, I’ve changed details and fictionalized the story so innocent people can remain totally anonymous.)

Once upon a time, there was a minister who had engaged in inappropriate behavior with someone who was barely 18 years old. I was hired to clean up the resultant mess. Because I’ve done a fair amount of work with teens, I was ready to demonize this particular minister, thinking to myself, “Legally this minister may be in the clear, but morally I’m going to call this person evil.” Because I thought of this minister as evil, I assumed anything they did was bad.

But then I found out that this minister had helped someone else in the congregation escape from a domestic violence situation. This required extended effort on the part of that minister, extending over a period of several years. This minister whom I had thought of as evil helped the domestic violence survivor to get out of the abusive relationships, find safe housing, extricate the children from the control of the abusive spouse, and settle down to a new life of safety. I was very suspicious of this story — surely this evil minister must have done something inappropriate with the person whom they had helped, or engaged in some other evil act. But it slowly became clear that in this case, the minister had done nothing wrong, and by extricating that person from domestic violence, that minister’s actions were wholly good.

This little story was a useful reminder to me: individual human beings are neither wholly good nor wholly bad. A person whom I had considered wholly evil was not, in fact, wholly evil; was, in fact, capable of amazing goodness. I had been in the wrong: when I called that person evil, I stopped myself from seeing the good they had done; I transformed that person into someone who was less than fully human. Mind you, I still kept my distance from that minister, feeling it was safer to do so, but at last I could see them as more than a caricature, I could see them as a complex individual.

We human beings are complex creatures. I would venture to say that no one is wholly evil — no, not even that politician that you’re thinking about right now. Even that politician whom you love to hate has redeeming qualities, though you may not be able to see them. We must always keep an open mind, and assume that every human being has the potential of doing good.

By the same token, I’d have to say that no one is wholly good. This is point the fictional character Miss Marple makes in the second reading this morning. Even someone who is essentially good can carry out evil actions. I don’t quite agree with Miss Marple when she says, “I always believe the worst. What is so sad is that one is usually justified in doing so.” Unlike Miss Marple, I don’t go around always believing the worst of everyone. But I do live my life in the awareness that everyone is capable both of evil and of goodness. Every human being has the potential of doing evil, but also of doing good.

If every human being is capable both of evil and capable of good, then you can see why we should not brand someone as wholly evil, or as wholly good for that matter. When we brand someone as wholly evil, that stops us from thinking about the evil that they caused. In that example of the minister that I just gave, when I branded that minister as wholly evil, I stopped thinking. When I started seeing them as a human being who was capable of both good and evil, I began to think more clearly, and I realized that there were external factors that led them into misconduct — external factors that were still at play, and that could lead to someone else engaging in misconduct. As I began to think more clearly, I was able to work with others to make that kind of behavior less likely in the future. It was only when I started thinking again that I was able to begin to work with others to try to prevent evil from happening again.

From a pragmatic standpoint, then, it’s foolish to brand someone as wholly evil; but it’s also morally wrong to brand someone as wholly evil. When we do that, we remove their individuality; we turn them into something less than human. We deny their individuality and deny their freedom, their capacity to make free choices in the way they act. The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein points out that this is the way totalitarianism works: he writes, “totalitarianism seeks to make all human beings superfluous — perpetrators and victims.” When we brand other people as evil, we are doing exactly what totalitarian regimes do: branding opponents as evil, denying human individuality, stopping everyone from thinking. Totalitarianism thrives when people stop thinking.

It is this tendency that troubles me about politics in the United States today. We brand our political opponents as being evil. Democrats say that Donald Trump is evil, and Kevin McCarthy is evil, and Marjorie Taylor Green is evil. Republicans say that Joe Biden is evil, and Nancy Pelosi is evil, and Barack Obama is evil. Even those who are independents — and here in Massachusetts, more people register as independent than either Republican or Democrat — even political independents play this game when they say all politicians are corrupt.

This kind of thing stops people from thinking. When Democrats brand Donald Trump as wholly evil, not only are they denying his essential humanity, but they have started walking down the road to totalitarianism. When Republicans say that Nancy Pelosi is evil, they are denying her essential humanity, and they too are starting to walk the road towards totalitarianism. When political independents claim that all politicians are corrupt, they are denying the essential humanity of all politicians, and — you guessed it — they have started walking the road towards totalitarianism.

Evil exists, but totalitarianism is not the solution for evil. Totalitarianism means that one person, or a small group of people, make all the decisions. But that one person, or that small group of people, can easily slip into doing evil themselves — and there will be no one to hold them accountable, to tell them to stop. This is what is happening in Russia right now: Russia has become a totalitarian state, so when Vladimir Putin decided to do evil by invading Ukraine, there was no one to stop him.

We can only stop evil through communal action, through cooperating with as many people as possible. This is the principle behind democracy: by cooperating widely, we minimize the chance of totalitarianism. But it’s hard to cooperate with other people when you brand half of the population as evil — as happens when Democrats brand Republicans as evil, and Republicans brand Democrats as evil, and Independents brand everyone else as evil, or at least corrupt. Calling other people evil is not serving us well. We don’t want to sound like Vladimir Putin.

There’s actually a religious point buried in all of this: Every single person has something of value in them. That something of value might be buried pretty deep, but it’s there. That’s what the Unitarian Universalist principles mean when they talk about the “inherent worth and dignity of every person.” That’s what the Universalist minister and theologian Albert Zeigler meant when he said, “every person and what they do and how they do it is of ultimate concern, of infinite significance.” When you brand a person as evil, you deny their inherent worth and dignity, you say that person somehow lacks infinite significance. We can say that a person has done something evil; we can say that we no longer trust that person, and that we don’t want to have anything to do with them if we can help it. But that does not mean the person is evil; some of their actions were evil, yes; but the person is not evil.

There’s another religious point that goes along with this. When we recognize that each and every person is of infinite significance, we make a statement of great hope. Each person, each individual, has within them an infinite capacity for goodness; they may also have a capacity for evil, but evil is finite and good is infinite, so their capacity for evil can be overpowered by their capacity for goodness. Every person, even someone who has done something evil, can be redeemed. Remember the fictional minister I told you about: that minister did something horribly evil, but they also had within them the capacity for amazing goodness.

In the end, the collective human capacity for goodness will win out over the collective human capacity for evil. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Dr. King was actually paraphrasing a sermon from the great Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.” So said Theodore Parker a century and a half ago.

Today, we still have a long way to go before we overcome evil. I’m pretty sure we won’t overcome evil in my lifetime. I doubt we will overcome evil in the lifetime of anyone alive today. But I’m sure that the universe bends towards justice. Like Moses leading the ancient Israelites, or like Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, we know the Promised Land is somewhere ahead of us; we hope to catch a glimpse of it before we die; but we will not reach it ourselves. Yet we continue to strive towards justice.

We continue to hope. We continue to see the good in others whenever we can: so that we may cooperate as much as we are able; so that one day, justice may one day roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Universalism for Such a Time as This

Readings

The first reading is from the book Foundations of Faith, by the Universalist minister and theologian Albert Zeigler, published in 1959. Gendered language has been updated:

“The power of traditional Universalism was that, in its teaching of universal salvation, it spoke to every person of their infinite value. As the ancient Hebrews saw themselves to be of divine importance, rescued and chosen by God; as the orthodox Christians found their eternal significance in the sacrifice of the Son of God for their welfare; so the Universalist saw humanity’s divine stature and destiny in the unfailing love of God. If [the phrase] ‘universal salvation’ does not today carry that message to us, we must find another way to sing the great gospel, that every person and what they do and how they do it is of ultimate concern, of infinite significance.”

The second reading is by Hosea Ballou, one of the founders of Universalism in the United States, from his 1805 book Treatise on Atonement.

“The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to such a 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 Christianity 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 and more cruel! … It is every day’s practice to represent the Almighty so offended with humanity, that he employs his infinite mind in devising unspeakable tortures, as retaliations on those with whom he is offended…. Even the tender charities of nature have been frozen with such tenets, and the natural friendship common to human society, has, in a thousand instances, been driven from the walks of man.”

Sermon: “Universalism for Such a Time as This” (1)

When I was in my teens, I used to go with my parents to serve as one of the ushers at our Unitarian Universalist church in Concord, Massachusetts. On one particular Sunday, the other person on our usher team was a long-time member of the church named Bob Needham. I immediately liked Bob because he talked to me the same way he talked to adults; he didn’t talk down to me, as too many people do when they talk to teenagers.

Now this was only a dozen or so years after the Unitarians and Universalists merged, and many people still considered themselves either Unitarians or Universalists, rather than Unitarian Universalists. My mother had been brought a Unitarian. Our minister was a life-long Unitarian. Our church was a Unitarian church. I guess I was a Unitarian too, because while I knew what it meant to be a Unitarian, I knew nothing about Universalism.

Bob Needham, on the other hand, was a Universalist. As we stood there doing all the usual things ushers do — handing out orders of service, ringing the bell, holding the door open for people — Bob told me that just a few years earlier he had celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of Universalism in North America. That was the first I had ever heard of that anniversary. Bob didn’t really tell me much more about Universalism, but I learned a lot about what it means to be a Universalist by seeing the egalitarian way he treated me. That made me curious; I wanted to learn more about this religious tradition that was a part of Unitarian Universalism. Several years later I learned that after Henry David Thoreau resigned from the Unitarian church, he said the only church in town he’d want to be part of was the Universalist church, because of its strong abolitionist position. More years went by, I learned more about Universalism, I found I liked it more and more, until I finally decided that I was a Universalist more than I was a Unitarian or a Unitarian Universalist. And this morning I’d like to talk with you about why I think Universalism is a religious approach well suited to our time.

But first let me give you a little bit of history. You probably already know that here in New England, Universalism arose as a reaction to the old time Calvinists who claimed that human beings were tainted with what they called “original sin.” Those old time Calvinists believed that human beings were so sinful that nearly all of us would go to hell, where we would suffer eternal torments. A few human beings, said those old Calvinists, were predestined from the beginning of time to be saved from hell and go to heaven. Because of this predestination, there was nothing you could do in this life to affect whether you went to heaven or to hell. However, we could probably tell which people would go to heaven, because the people who were predestined from the beginning of time to go to heaven would lead better lives than the rest of us. In practice, of course that meant that people who were more financially secure, who were higher in social status, were the ones going to heaven.

I know this sounds kind of silly to some of us here today. But before you feel smug and dismiss those old Calvinists as irrelevant, let me point out two things. First, in the first one hundred years that First Parish existed, many of its member were Calvinists. Second, today in the United States there are still a great many people who believe in heaven and hell and predestination.

Universalists turned Calvinism on its head. First of all, they pointed out that heaven and hell are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Next, the old Universalists pointed out that a God who was truly all-loving would not condemn the vast majority of humankind to eternal punishment. Some of the old Universalists thought there might be a limited time of punishment after death. Others of the old Universalists thought that God’s love was so powerful that everyone, even the very worst people, would be forgiven as soon as they died. But all Universalists were sure that in the end, everyone would wind up in heaven. To say anything else would put limits on God’s love, and would put limits on God’s power.

The Universalists infuriated all the other Christian denominations in the United States. Nearly everyone else wanted to believe that God would punish evil-doers. Nearly everyone else wanted to condemn evil-doers to eternal punishment. The Universalists pointed out the uncomfortable fact that the other Christians denominations were governed by fear, which of course infuriated their opponents.

Fast forward a hundred years, and by the late nineteenth century Universalism had grown and changed with the times. P. T. Barnum, the great circus impresario, was a Universalist and in 1890 he said this about his religion:

“It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not. I have faint hopes that after another hundred years or so, it will begin to dawn on the minds of those to whom this idea is such a weight, that nobody with any sense holds this idea or ever did hold it. To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life. … Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere. … This present life is the great pressing concern.” (2)

Now we can fast forward another century or so to the present day. If we look around, we can see that many people in the United States still believe in variations of this old myth of eternal punishment and retribution. Perhaps the most prominent variation of this old myth can be seen in our prison population. According to the U.S. government, “The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world’s prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in … other democracies.” (3)

While there are many causes for the high rate of incarceration in the United States, in my opinion one of the causes is a modern day variation of that old Calvinist myth of predestination. At a mythic level, our desire to punish so many people is linked to our Calvinist belief that most people are going to go to hell anyway. If someone is predestined for hell, why not stick them in prison now, and keep them there for as along as possible?

And this old myth of predestination and eternal punishment seems to me to be linked to the ongoing racism here in the United States. When I look at all the times traffic stops involving Black men have wound up with the innocent Black man being beaten or even killed by police officers, this seems to me another variation of the old predestination myth. We’ve known about this problem at least since the beating of Rodney King, yet somehow we never manage to do anything about it. It’s as if many Americans have this strange unconscious belief that African American men are predestined for punishment. No wonder, then, that I’m a Universalist.

Beyond repudiating these old myths of eternal punishment, Universalism has many other things to say to our contemporary postmodern multicultural world. I’d like to point out four.

First, many people in the United States still retain a literal belief in hell and damnation and eternal punishment. Some of those people may be a part of your life. For example, I’ve had parents tell me about people who said to their children that the children were going to hell because they were not Christians. When you have relatives like this, mostly you don’t want to get into religious discussions with them, but I think it’s helpful to know that the old Universalists could quote the Bible proving that hell does not belong in any Christian religion. (Actually, I think this kind of thing is harder on parents than on children. Unitarian Universalist children have told me about their relatives who told them they were going to hell, and uniformly the children dismissed them as holding bizarre outmoded beliefs, similar to believing the earth is flat.) I think it’s also helpful to know that many mainstream Protestant churches in the United States today don’t believe in hell, or they think of hell metaphorically but not as a literal place. Thus the oldest Universalist argument, against a literal belief in hell, is still important today.

And second, if you’re looking for a more updated Universalist message for our world today, look no further than the first of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism. That first principle states that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This can be stated in other ways, one of which we heard in the first reading by Universalist minister Albert Ziegler: “Every person and what they do and how they do it is of ultimate concern, of infinite significance.” We live out this Universalist principle over and over again — when we help people who are hungry or homeless; when we help people who are victims of domestic violence; when we strive for full equality of all persons regardless of race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, and so on; when we offer financial support to a child in Guatemala so that she may receive an education. Many of the things we do in the world, to make this world more fair and more just, stem directly from our Universalist belief in the worth and dignity of every person.

Third, I feel Universalism has a great moral teaching for us today: Universalism tells us that love is a more powerful tool for establishing morality than is punishment. Universalism learned this originally from the teachings of Jesus, but all the great religions and philosophies of the world contain the same central message. This is also quite pragmatic. Think about the three year old who hits another child at preschool. If you, the adult, respond by spanking that child, you’re teaching them that hitting someone is an appropriate response. Now obviously we’re enlightened enough that we’re not going to engage in corporal punishment, but other kinds of punishment easily carry the same message; punishment is meant to hurt the offender, and so the child learns that hurting someone is an appropriate response. Instead, what we aim to do is to teach that child that hurting other people is wrong, and teach them ways to manage their behavior so they don’t feel a need to hurt other children. This is the pragmatic side of Universalism’s great dictum that love is a more powerful tool for establishing morality than is punishment.

Fourth and finally, Universalism offers us a great resource for our own personal spirituality. The Universalist tradition is a happy tradition. When we know that love is the most powerful force in the universe, then we can look forward to a future where love prevails. This may not happen in our lifetimes. But we can hold on to a confident belief that love will somehow prevail; somehow love will overcome all obstacles. And this might be the most powerful Universalist message of all.

Notes

(1) The sermon title comes from an old UUA pamphlet, dating back to the 1970s if I recall correctly. Way back in the 2000s, I once preached a very different sermon under this same title. Several other Unitarian Universalist ministers have also used this as a sermon title, including an old friend, Greg Stewart.

(2) P.T. Barnum, “Why I Am a Universalist” (Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1890).

(3) “The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences,” National Institute of Corrections, United States Department of Justice — https://nicic.gov/growth-incarceration-united-states-exploring-causes-and-consequences