A UU Faith Story: John Murray

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 8, 2013

Rev. John Murray brought Universalism to the New World. How did he get from an English debtor’s prison to being chaplain in General Washington’s army?

Reading
John Murray

Go out into the highways and by-ways of America, your new country. Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling Calvinism, something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair. but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

Sermon: A UU faith story: John Murray

One of the six sources UUism draws from is the prophetic deeds of men and women throughout history and in our time. We could study the life of Nelson Mandela to see what spiritual depth looks like, to see courage and persistence in the face of violence and injustice. ,This morning I’m going to tell you about John Murray, who came to the New World in 1770, a defeated man, trying to start over again in a land where he could disappear. He was 29 years old, a widower. His wife Eliza and their one-year-old baby died in England, and medical bills had crushed him, landing him in debtor’s prison. John was a deeply religious man, raised by strict religious parents. His father would quiz him when he was 7, 8, and 9 years old, asking him questions about the sermon they had heard that morning. If he couldn’t answer the questions he would get caned or have his ears boxed. Most sermons back then were about hell, as people back then took its threat very seriously.

Unfortunately, you still can hear a good many sermons preached by people who believe in hell. We are surrounded by people steeped in that belief, preachers who will use a funeral service to warn the grieving family and friends that they won’t see their loved one again if they don’t repent and believe in just the right way, so they will end up in heaven. Our UU children, along with the Presbyterian, Methodist and other more progressive denominations’ kids, hear from classmates at school about how they are doomed to eternal torment for not being the right kind of Christian. We call our movement Unitarian Universalism because we believe in Universal salvation. That means we believe a loving God would not send anyone to hell. I think a belief in hell makes people dissociated – holding two deeply rooted opposite thoughts in their minds at the same time, not really able to look at either of them, not able to be a whole and integrated person because of that. I heard a songwriter from Lubbock on NPR years ago. He said “We learned two things in Sunday School. One, God loves you and he’ll send you straight to hell. Two, sex is dirty and dangerous and you should save it for the one you love.” We prosecute parents who burn their children even once for disobeying. Do we believe we are more moral than God? Would anyone you know send one of their children to hell for eternity for any kind of misbehavior, much less for having the wrong thoughts or beliefs? No! Are we better parents than God is? To hold in your mind that God is love and that he will send you to hell requires a twisting of good sense and a good heart. To believe that we should be one way as humans, but worship a God who behaves in a less moral way doesn’t make sense. It would build your understanding on a deep fear and mistrust, and it would make you abandon trust in your own sense, which, after all, cannot understand how love and torture should go together.

People have been thinking this over, fighting about it, for a long time. In the second century, before all the Christian doctrines had been decided by church councils convened by Emperor Constantine, a theologian named Origen of Alexandria taught that humans were born, not in a state of sin and separation from God, but in a state of primal blessedness. Here is what I think is corollary to that premise: If people are born innocent, with free will, then all you have to do is teach them. You don’t have to beat the sin out of them, they don’t have to be changed, they don’t have to be born again into right relationship with God, they are there already. Humanity is not fallen, evil, the world is not wicked in itself, the creation is not jinxed, marred, doomed until it is made whole by some cataclysmic event still to come. This world is good and the people in it are good. People did not discuss these things calmly in those days, and he ended up in his old age being fettered in an iron collar and stretched on the rack for his beliefs, dying for his “heresy.”

John Murray was never put on the rack. He lost everything, though, because he was converted to Universalism in England. He had been a lay preacher and Bible scholar with the Irish Methodists, and he loved good preaching. He visited every church in London, which is how he heard James Relly, a Universalist preacher. The idea that God was loving and that everyone would be saved in the end appealed to him and to his wife Eliza. Their friends begged them to come back to normal church. Their families cried. His business dried up. When he ended up bereaved, in prison, bailed out by Eliza’s brother, he just wanted to disappear, never preach again, never talk theology again, start all over with no history where no one knew him and he didn’t have to face either looks or words of loving concern or a self-righteous “I told you so.” He booked passage on the Hand In Hand, which was sailing for New York. The captain landed in Philadelphia instead, due to a miscalculation. Lots of the passengers got off. They sailed again for New York, but ran aground on a sand spit off the coast of New Jersey, at Good Luck Point.

Asked by the Captain to row ashore to look for food and water, came to a clearing in the pines and saw a large house and a trim looking church made of rough sawed lumber. A tall farmer stood in front of the house cleaning fish. The following dialogue is imagined in the collected stories for UU children called “UU and Me.”

“Welcome” called out the farmer. “My name is Thomas Potter.”

“And I am John Murray, from the ship Hand in Hand.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, “I saw your ship in the bay, stuck on the sand bar, she is.”

“May I buy your fish to take back to the ship’s crew?” asked John.

“You can have them for the taking, and gladly:” answered Thomas, “and please come back to spend the night with my wife and me. I will tell you all about this little church and why it is here.”

John gratefully carried the fish to the sailors, and then returned to Thomas’ home for the night.

“Come, my friend, sit in front of our fire, this chilly fall evening,” said Thomas. “I’m so glad you have come. You may be the very person I’ve been waiting for.”

Potter told Murray that he had often heard the Bible read, and had thought a lot about God, coming up with ideas that made sense to him. He built the little church hoping for a preacher who would teach about things that made sense to him.

“Today, when I saw your ship in the bay,” he said to Murray, “a voice inside me seemed to say, “There, Potter, in that ship may be the preacher you have been so long expecting.”

John said quickly,” I am not a preacher.”

“But,” said Thomas Potter, leaning forward, “can you say that you have never preached?”

“I have preached,” answered John slowly,” and I believe, as you do, in a loving God.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” shouted Thomas.” You are the preacher for whom I have waited for so long! You’ve got to preach in my church on Sunday!”

“No,” replied John firmly. “I never want to preach again. Tomorrow, as soon as the wind changes, I will be on my way!”

After John went to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He wrote later that he thought to himself as he tossed and turned,” I just want to get away from everything…if I preach I know there will be trouble. Why start all of that over again? “By Saturday night the wind had still not changed, and John finally agreed to preach the next morning. Thomas Potter was happy. And so, on Sunday morning September 30, 1770, the first Universalist sermon was delivered in America. Thomas Potter, a Universalist before he even heard John Murray, heard a preacher talking about love instead of an angry God and a fiery hell.

I would say that John Murray is the patron saint of people who are stuck. Our life runs aground, and the way we get it going again is by doing what we were born to do. Circumstances may conspire like border collies nipping at your heels, driving you to the place where you realize what you need to do. May we all find a guide like Thomas Potter, who will give us the push we need in the right direction.

The Revolutionary War came, and John Murray worked as a chaplain to the troops, under the orders of General George Washington. When the war was over, and the new US was founded, in 1779, John Murray organized the first Universalist church in America in Gloucester, Mass. After many years, he fell in love again and married. He and his wife, Judith Sergeant, had a daughter. He was right about having trouble. In Massachusetts, it was argued that Universalists should not be allowed to serve on juries or to testify in court “because no one who did not believe in eternal punishment could be trusted with such serious responsibilities. One Sunday in Boston, Murray was in the middle of his sermon when a large rock sailed through the large stained-glass window behind him, narrowly missing his head. “Murray, never at a loss for words, held up the rock to the congregation’s view, weighed it in his hand, and pronounced, “This argument is solid, and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.” Our job as Universalists is to live in this hell-haunted place and hold out the idea that a loving God would not torture anyone for mistakes or even for really bad behavior. People can make a hell for themselves or one another right here, but God doesn’t make one for us.

Let love continue. If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury; but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us keep a secret guard against the enemy that sows discord among us. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of spirit in the bonds of peace.
Hosea Ballou

(Owen-Towle, The Gospel of Universalism, Introduction, p.v). (Scott, These Live Tomorrow, pp.25-26)

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776