Amazing Grace

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 16, 2013

The sermon topic is “salvation.” What does the word mean? Is it something we want? How do we get it? We have yielded the ground on words like this to the more traditionally religious communities, but we really can go there. It will be okay.

Last fall this church held an auction, and one of my contributions was that people could bid to request a certain topic for a sermon. One person won the bid, and then another person paid that as well for his request. “God the Huntress” was one “auction sermon,” and I preached that last February. This one is “Salvation.” What would a UU view of salvation be?

Most sermons start with questions. What does “salvation” mean? What are the views of the religions in which Unitarian Universalism has its roots? Are we being saved from something? Saved for something? Are we broken, in need of some kind of fixing or are we good the way we are?

I’ll start with the word. When it is translated from the Hebrew, the language of the Jewish scriptures, it has the connotation “to keep alive,” “to redeem,” “to deliver.” In Greek, the language of the Christian scriptures, its root is “sozo” which means to save, to rescue, to deliver, to protect. “Sozo” is also translated in the New Testament with the words to heal, preserve, save, do well, and to make whole.

There is a range of meanings in the word “salvation,” from being delivered from something, kept safe, rescued, or healed. It has to do with the endpoint of the soul, with a state of being that is clean and free and peaceful.

Even though the word from the auction question comes out of the Jewish and Christian traditions, I would like to range farther afield into a more ancient religion to see what it was its adherents were trying for. I suppose the most ancient religions are the earth-based ones that Christian scholars call “fertility cults.” You find yourself in this great world and you have to feed your children, which are formed somewhat miraculously inside your bodies. Well, the female ones, anyway. Of course, matters of how to stay alive will be at the forefront of your thinking. Sometimes the berries are thick and sometimes they don’t grow. Sometimes your children are healthy and other times they are in trouble. Is it something you did? Can you do the things that will make everything good? Are there spirits or gods involved who want certain things? Do they need to be reminded to make things grow? Do they need to be appeased to make your childbirth go well, to give the hunters luck with the hunt? In this system, keeping the gods awake and appeased so that things happen well would be what was most desired. Salvation would have to do with being in favor with the earth and the sky so that your life is sweet and your children live.

In the middle east, Judaism was stirring between two and three thousand years BCE. Its main teaching was that there was one God, and that the best way to look at things was not as an endless cycle, the view of earth-based religion, but as a timeline with a beginning, a middle and an end. The primary relationship was not between the people and the Earth, it was between the people and the God. A person was called to be righteous, doing what the God said to do, but as the religion developed though the time of slaver, through the Exodus from Egypt, and the time as the people of Israel, Salvation was seen, not as an individual matter as much as it was that the people of Israel were to be redeemed as a whole. What redemption meant in that context was that they were free from oppressive rule, that they were keeping the Torah, the commandments, living righteously and pleasing to God. In the Jewish Scriptures, you are righteous even when you fall. The righteous person can sin, can fall, can disobey, but the righteous get up again and keep their faces turned toward God. Hope continues for the salvation of the people, and for the healing of the world.

In the earliest Hindu Scriptures, the Vedas, which come from about the time of the Exodus, the beginning of the Jews as a people, the main concern is for doing things in the right ways that would appease the gods so life would be good. Later on, in the Upanishads, the concern becomes more about how to attain eternal peace, how to get enlightenment. The earliest Upanishads were being written around the time that Buddhism was beginning, around 500 BCE. Both Hinduism at that time, and the new offshoot, Buddhism, were concerned less with how to make sacrifices to the gods and more about how to understand reality and the self in order to let go of the rollercoaster of happiness and suffering. How to come into peace. That peace would be the understanding of salvation from the Hindu and Buddhist point of view (and I want you to know I am painting with a very broad brush). Salvation is getting to the point where you are no longer weighed down by either good karma or bad karma. Karma is the energy generated by actions. You are born the last time and then escape from the endless wheel of rebirth. Some sects of Buddhism believe that you can be helped along the way by borrowing some of the good karma of the saints, or bodhisattvas. Others teach that you are on your own, doing good deeds to build merit for a better reincarnation each lifetime until you achieve release from the endless round of rebirth is salvation.

For most segments of Christianity, salvation means being rescued from the punishment due you for your individual sins. This is the system of thought I know the most about, having spent my childhood in a Christian family and studying for the ministry for three years at Princeton Seminary. Some Christianities teach that humans are born in sin. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians believe this. The action of God is necessary to lift you into salvation, which basically means you get to go to a place called Heaven when you die. Methodists believe that humans are born good, and that they can choose to do good or bad things. Even if you aren’t born in sin, you still choose to do bad things, and you need forgiveness. The teaching of most Christianities is that salvation comes from understanding that the death of Jesus the savior atones for your sins, as he took our punishment on himself to save us. So your sins are paid for. Forgiven. Paid for?

My father is a Presbyterian minister who has studied the Bible long enough to come to believe in Universal salvation. That God doesn’t send anyone to hell. That makes him a Universalist. He says “look, your sins can’t be both forgiven and paid for. If I owe you ten thousand dollars, and she pays you on my behalf, then my debt is paid for. If you say that you will forgive my debt and it no longer has to be paid, then it’s forgiven. Either one or the other, but not both.” He preaches that Jesus died, not , our sins, but he died because some people killed him. God forgives us with or without that, and also forgives those people for killing him. In that view, salvation comes from God’s forgiveness. You aren’t rescued from the consequences of your actions, no one teaches that. You are rescued from any kind of eternal separation from God because of your actions.

For Islam, the most recent religion we’re looking at (if we count Unitarian Universalism as starting back in the third century with the Arians “heresy) salvation has to do with going to heaven. You get to heaven if you believe in God (Allah) and in his message, Islam. If you just believe in God and not in Islam, your fate is in God’s hands. There is no heaven for people who don’t believe in God.

For Unitarian Universalists there is no danger of hell. People can create hellish lives for themselves and for one another, but it’s here in this life that hell is felt. If there is no hell, there is nothing from which to be delivered, except for our own guilt and regret over promises broken and damage done. Grace consists in forgiving one another, and in forgiving ourselves. Grace can be a realization, an insight that frees our thinking and feeling. It can be another person allowing us a fresh start, not holding our actions against us. Grace can be a touch from a book, a piece of music, a view on the hiking trail, a line from a movie that puts something into a new perspective. It can happen when someone else cleans up a mess you made. It can happen when someone decides that you are more than the mistake you made. Sin is, in Buddhist language “out-of-joint-ness,” in Christian language “missing the mark.” Both concepts have to do with something not fitting, not in harmony, not working the way it should. Unitarian Universalists have a sense of sin when we break promises, when we do not act out of our better selves, when we drink bottled water, or, worse, toss our empty water bottles in the trash. We have a sense of sin when we drive gas-guzzling cars or judge someone for something we’re supposed to tolerate. Sometimes we do things that are worse — – when we are abusing substances, being cruel to family, willfully turning our thoughts away from things we know we should be paying attention to. How do we get made whole from those things? How do we forgive ourselves, which is often the hardest step? Salvation, for us, means being made whole. It’s a process having to do with getting better and better at doing what we say we’re going to do. With our chosen spiritual practice, we get more stable, more emotionally disciplined, more sturdily rooted. With practice in compassionate and loving relationships, we get better at both giving and receiving love and compassion. We ask forgiveness for what we do wrong, and we make amends the best we can. What is salvation, wholeness after death? No one knows. Read “the Green After.”

Today I have too many friends who are dying. Sometimes at a Unitarian Universalist memorial service I feel dissatisfied-and I’m the preacher in charge. I think: What is going on that I can’t figure out how to preach my view of resurrection?

I know that people would want to hear it; I’m not worried about offending or confusing anyone; and I treasure the ability to speak the plain truth as I see it. The plain truth is no one knows for sure what happens when we die. That’s not a very stirring thing to proclaim at a funeral, though, honest as it is. We all have some kind of belief about it, even if that belief is that there is nothing after we die.

The reason I haven’t preached it yet is because when I call to mind my belief about the afterlife, it comes to me as a color.

At a camping weekend with friends, we were nestled in a clearing on a mountainside. Most of the folks were around the campfire, talking or dozing. Our chef was in the cooking tent, grilling and gossiping with his fiancŽe and a couple of others. I love those people, and they love me. Being surrounded by love is one fine way to spend your time. I wandered off to the hammock, and lay there looking up at the sky through early April leaves.

I was soaked with light, the blue of the sky, the green of young leaves, the sun shining through them like stained glass. I thought, “When I die, I want to have my ashes buried under this tree, so that for one spring after another my body can be part of this particular green.” I could feel my life flowing through the cells of a leaf, feel the leaf opening to the warmth and the light, feel myself part of that green, and I was happy.

If that is my afterlife, I will be deeply happy.

The hope of that afterlife doesn’t take any leap of faith. I know it can happen. The minerals and the water in my body can be soaked up through the roots of that tree. A part of my body will be unfurling, green in the sun.

My soul may be somewhere else. Sometimes I think my soul will float in an ocean of love. Will I recognize old friends, family, who have gone on ahead? I don’t know. I think I will know they are there. I will know this: there is not now nor was there ever any separation between us. I will know that they were with me as strongly when I was alive as when I’m part of the leaves.

The green of a new leaf, lit from behind with the spring sun-that color stays inside me, a glowing place of peace, the certainty of remaining part of life. During a memorial service I see that green, I feel that peace. It’s hard to preach a color, but I’m going to think of a way.

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

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