© Hannah Wells
October 26, 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
SERMON
I get puzzled when people from other religions ask me where I think I’ll go when I die. I want to say “That’s not the right question! The right questions are about what quality of life I’m hoping for here, and now.”
Nowadays, we liberal religious types don’t discuss life after death that much – we are more likely to discuss the lack thereof. Like so many of our beliefs, what you think happens to you after you die is your own business – you are encouraged to decide this for yourself, and you’re also welcome to not decide anything. It’s also quite acceptable to say, “how would I know what happens after I die? I’ve never died!”
I suspect our beliefs about death vary as much as our beliefs about God do – some do believe in life after death, some aren’t sure, some don’t care, and some are certain we are just dead. It’s pretty cool that we allow for such a diversity of opinion here – it wasn’t always like this.
In fact, 100 to 200 years ago, the members of our liberal religious heritage were pretty obsessed with this topic, particularly the Universalists. Back then, folks were much more concerned with arriving at the correct interpretation of life after death, and they wanted to be in agreement about it. It was completely dependent on what they believed about God, because God was the architect of life after death. If God was mean, then God had built a house of hell. If God was nice, then no hell had been constructed. Back then, they were not questioning the existence of God, nor were they questioning the powerful role Jesus played. What they were questioning was just what exactly God and Jesus cooked up together – they treated the whole Christian story like a murder mystery that they had to get to the bottom of.
This may shock some of you, but our UU historical roots were about as Christian as you can imagine. In fact, they tended to believe they were the only ones who got the Christian story RIGHT.
So this is a sermon that reveals some of UU’s historical adventures in Christian theology, particularly on the Universalist side. It will contain some hardcore history and some hardcore discussion around theology – or what people way back when believed.
The holiday season of All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead, and Halloween is the perfect backdrop for this – these are all holidays that treat the topic of death, and vary in religiosity. All Souls’ Day is originally Roman Catholic – it comes after All Saints’ Day to shift the attention of souls in heaven to souls in purgatory. I tend to believe that this must be how our Halloween celebrations came to emphasize the morbid and the spooky – focusing on loved ones suffering in some kind of hellish limbo is a much freakier image than the pagans celebrating the Autumn harvest. You are probably familiar with the arguments about the origin of Halloween – I think it came to be what it is today through an amalgam of Catholic, Pagan, and American Capitalist influences.
So let’s get to it, early Universalist theology – a lot of Unitarian Universalists don’t know much about Universalism in general. Three years ago when I showed up at Seminary the most I could say about it was, “they merged.” Yes, American Universalism was a separate religion – older than Unitarianism, and they merged in 1961. What else does a modern day UU need to know? Let’s travel back in time and see.
Okay, so it’s the dawn of our nation, 1790’s, early 1800’s. What the heck is Universalism? Like the early Unitarians, the early Universalists reacted to the judgmental and retributive God of the Calvinists, who believed in pre-destined election. That is, God decides whether a person will be saved – sent to Heaven as opposed to Hell – even before he or she is born. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” does apply here. The Universalists thought this was ridiculous. Like the Unitarians, they were some of the earliest heretics in our country’s history. However, they didn’t think of themselves as heretics. Rather, they felt they were offering an improved version of Calvinism. Like the Unitarians, they inserted reason, or rationale, into the old theology to make it more palatable and practical.
So the Universalists’ “heresy” was this: they chose to believe in a God who was loving and benevolent, a God who ultimately wanted humanity to be united, fulfilled, and happy, both before and after death. In other words, we are all saved, even the most disreputable of characters. Since every being is held in one universal love by God, then all beings return to this love after the journey of life. We are all reunited to the One. Or, God brings us all home, and that means everybody, even Hitler, even bin Laden, even the boogey man. Nobody is left out. So the universal in Universalism originally referred to the central belief in universal salvation, or universal love and forgiveness by God. Nobody is excluded from the Christian belief in heaven, and hell does not exist in the afterlife.
So it is key to understand that the Universalists in their earlier stages were Trinitarian Christians. In fact, they felt like they were the only real Christians because they believed that the message of Jesus, as well, was Universalist. That was the good news: we are ALL saved! – So what I have just told you is the nutshell version of early Universalist theology. The first major Universalist preachers actually had several different ways of describing or explaining the concept of Universalist salvation and indeed there was much debate among early Universalist ministers and itinerant preachers. From what I understand, it was actually considered fine Saturday night entertainment for preachers to engage in preach-offs, where they actually debate their theological arguments in turn and the people decided who was the most convincing through their applause. Back before radio and television, this was the best show in town. Can you imagine Davidson and I doing this? I would definitely charge a fee for that ordeal!
Now it is also very key to understand how this interpretation of salvation differed, and still does, from the vast majority of Christian belief, whether Catholic or Protestant. The conventional idea behind the Christ, the savior, the crucifixion, atonement, etc., blah blah blah, is that God needed to be reconciled. God was pissed. So Jesus, bless his heart, came along and died for us all, representing the ultimate sacrifice to appease an angry God. That’s the conventional theology that still thrives today – unfortunately.
But the pivotal difference in Universalist belief is that it’s the other way around. It is not God who needs to be reconciled, but rather humanity that needs to be reconciled. This reconciliation takes place when we practice the universal love of God that we are all held in.” But Jesus still served a purpose. Jesus came to teach us about this love – this incredible, holy, dynamic love – that is possible in the sisterhood and brotherhood of humanity. We are reconciled when we see that God comes through for when we treat each other with dignity, love, and respect. So – very important – universal salvation can also be thought of as worldly, as what can happen as we live – not just after we die.
For this line of thinking, Universalists were labeled heretical, radical, and eventually, liberal, kind of like the Unitarians. However, I want to make it very clear how the Universalist theology was totally different from the Unitarians. There is a saying that Universalists believed that God was too good to damn them while the Unitarians believed they were too good to be damned. I think this comes fairly close to accurate. Whereas the Unitarians threw out the trinity and embraced the ability of a person’s free moral agency to do right, the Universalists maintained the trinity and believed that it was only through relationship with God that living a good life was possible.
Now one might assume that the Universalists were quite a minority, kind of like the UUs are today. But you might be surprised. In the young decades of our nation, people were hungry for a religious identity that offered a positive and liberating outlook over the rigid, gloomy, and morbid doctrines of the Calvinists or the churches of the Standing Order. Universalists represented one of the earliest voices for freedom of religious expression in our country. In the spirit of a nation redefining its character from the Old World, Universalism was quite appealing indeed and enjoyed a fairly long golden period. The centennial celebration held in 1870 in Gloucester, Massachusetts was the largest organized religious assembly to date in the history of the United States, with 12,000 people in attendance at its peak. We’ve never even had a General Assembly that big!
A few other fun facts to be proud of is that first President George Washington picked a Universalist minister to be the official chaplain of the Revolutionary War, despite strong opposition from mainline Protestants. That was John Murray, whose words I used for the prayer. And early in the 20th century, the youth contingency of the movement was so active in their social service work that their organization was invited to visit the President at the White House – those kids were the pre-cursors to LRY and YRUU. That’s exciting stuff, but the main point to be made here is that Universalists were incredibly patriotic. They really felt that they offered the quintessential religion of democracy and New World ideals of freedom and equality. It was a religion in which everyone was invited to participate.
However, the Universalists began losing numbers when their theology became less radical as other Protestant faiths stopped preaching fire and brimstone. There were a few important people in the 20th century who, after the war, tried to pump new life into the denomination, and changed the face of Universalism very significantly. People like Robert Cummins and Ken Patton offered a radical switch from the more conservative and traditionally Christian bent of Universalism. The new focus was on what you may be more familiar with or recognize in our UU denomination today, the focus on universal world religion, or a religion for one world, drawing on all sources of religious faith, knowledge, and practice. A minister in Detroit named Tracy Pullman summarized this new liberal direction in a 1946 sermon by calling for a religion that is “greater than Christianity because it is an evolutionary religion, because it is universal rather than partial, because it is one with the spirit of science and is primarily interested in bringing out that which is God-like in man.”
Is this starting to sound familiar to y’all? These are the same kind of beliefs that I think can easily be found in UUism today: respect for all the world religions and our appreciation of them. Now what’s interesting, is that really these are modern expressions of the theme of Universal salvation. Because it is very similar in meaning to the idea that nobody is left out. Let me repeat that. The idea that nobody is left out. For me, that could explain UUism in a nutshell, that we strive to not judge anyone to the point that they are not welcome in our circle of worship. Rather, we go to lengths to make the point that all are welcome, that difference is embraced and that we are all universally loved. I really feel that we have the Universalists to thank for this cardinal characteristic of Unitarian Universalism.
Because let’s face it; the Unitarians were a lot more, shall we say, snooty. I don’t like to emphasize the fairly well known fact that Universalists were, on the whole, less educated, less well to do, and were mostly farmers. When this distinction is made I think it runs the risk of belittling the integrity of Universalism in a denomination that values education so highly. Of course we UUs today can be very judgmental, even when we are trying hard not to be. But the ideal version of non-judgmentalism, which I think is one of our most distinguishing features as a denomination today, probably came more from the Universalists than the Unitarians.
Why didn’t the two religions agree to merge sooner? What made the Universalists try to hold on? It was the fear that what made them distinct would be swallowed up by the much larger, Unitarian denomination. It was the fear that the merger would represent more of a take-over than a collaborative effort. Well, I believe these fears were realized to a large extent. Many of you have probably heard this Universalist history today only for the first time. There are mountains of scholarly historical research that have yet to be done for lack of interest. I do think the Universalists got swallowed up by the Unitarians.
I want to move towards conclusion today by telling you what I believe. And that is, I believe this. I believe in Universal salvation. Now I know that in this church, there is a great spirit of humanism, and perhaps not a whole lot of interest in what happens after we die. And isn’t that great about Unitarian Universalists, that we can each live in peace with our eschatological beliefs, or our feelings about what happens after we die.
But I don’t believe in universal salvation so much for what I think happens once my body ceases to live. I believe in it for what it symbolizes in this life. To me, universal salvation is a great metaphor for what is truly precious in life, and it represents my deepest, most prized belief: that not only are we never ultimately separated from God, but never are we ultimately separated from each other. Humanity’s reconciliation to God can only happen through our reconciliation to each other, in this life, on this Earth. All enemies shall reconcile, all lost love shall reunite.
Even though Universal salvation is a dated theological concept, it’s still entirely relevant for folks who remain compelled by the idea of life after death – and it comes directly out of our liberal faith tradition.
Next week we will be celebrating the lives of those who went before us, for La Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It is all All Souls’ Day on the Catholic calendar. When we remember people we have lost, it is perfectly natural to also wonder – where they are now? Are they somewhere? – whether or not we believe in life after death, these questions may still arise in our hearts. I think it is comforting that the forbears of our religion were optimistic – they were not imagining their loved ones in purgatory, or in hell. No, when the Universalists of long ago celebrated the memory of their ancestors, they imagined them in Heaven. And, they were happy for them.
In the late 1800’s, Unitarian churches around the world were being named “All Souls,” borrowing from the liberal Universalist theology. When I was inquiring on the UU history chat line about the origin of the name “All Souls,” I received this response from a retired Scottish minister: He wrote, “All Souls appeared an ideal name for a Non-Subscribing Church. It was comprehensive, it excluded no one, and it expressed the fundamental principle of religion that all souls were God’s. Men and women and children, of all nations, sects, and parties, belonged to God, and were kindred with God. They were all souls, spirits, with a kinship to the Highest, with a longing and yearning for the kingdom of God.”
That may be too much religious language for some of you. But if you think it’s true, then you may be a Universalist.
