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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
January 21, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Our Universalist heritage professed that God is love and would save everyone – “universal salvation”. No one would be condemned to hell. We have come to think of this as a universal love that calls us to “love the hell out of this!world” (thank you, Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford). Universal love calls us to create universal salvation in this world and in this time.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.”
– bell hooks
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
IF BELL HOOKS WROTE FIRST CORINTHIANS
Rev. Sr. Tess BaumbergerLove is caring, affectionate, and loyal
It recognizes, knows, and respects the other.
Love is committed and trusting.
Love takes the risk of loving
Love is never hurtful, abusive, or neglectful. It does not coerce or dominate, Neither does it spoil or over-indulge.
Love is ethical, accountable and responsible.
Love does not lie to avoid conflict or to manipulate.
Love does not lie to trick or deceive.
Love is open and honest, but with a positive slant.
Love lives with integrity that wills cooperation
Though it is satisfying to love, Love is not about getting one’s needs met, nor solely about meetings others’ needs. True love is made of mutuality.
Love is a generous giver, and in giving it learns to receive.
Love places another’s interest on the same footing as our own.
Love is not so much a feeling as an action, A continuing active choice to nurture another’s wellbeing.
There can be no love without justice and equality. Therefore love requires that we subvert patriarchy, white supremacy, consumerism, ableism, anti-queerness, and all other forms of oppression.
Sermon
“Love is the doctrine of our church: The quest of truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace, To seek knowledge in freedom, To serve humanity in fellowship, To the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with the divine Thus do we covenant with each other.”
Those words are from a covenant written by early 20th century Universalist minister, Rev. L. Griswold Williams that many our our fellow Unitarian Universalist congregations still affirm during their worship service each Sunday, including our Texas sibling, First Unitarian Church of Dallas.
Actually, it originally ended with “Thus do we covenant with each other AND WITH GOD, but the God part got removed in many later versions because, rather than reclaiming the term, we seem to have sometimes developed an allergy to the word “God”. In fact some of our churches use a similar version of it, written by a Unitarian Minister, that begins with “Love is the SPIRIT of this church”, instead of “doctrine. Rather than reclaiming it, we also seem to have developed an allergy to the word “doctrine”.
But I digress. Anyway, I wanted to start with this heritage of centering our faith in covenant, the promises that we make to one another about how we will be together in the ways of love, which we inherit from both our Unitarian and Universalist forbearers.
Today we’ll be particularly considering how our Unitarian Universalist or UU faith has begun to much more explicitly reclaim also centering our faith in a theology of universal love, bequeathed to us by that second U, Universalism.
Now, this religious community, our church, has a covenant that we call our “Covenant of Healthy Relations”, which I think is wonderful, because it acknowledges that love is not just a feeling.
It is also a verb.
We have to know what actions we will take, how we can live out love as a religious community on an ongoing basis.
At our December congregational meeting, we adopted a new version of our covenant, as a result of the great work of our healthy relations team, Julie Paasche, Tomas Medina, and our lay leader this morning, Margaret Borden.
They listened carefully to you all, folks from the congregation and engaged with another in some great discussions to discern how our covenant might better help us embrace things like our UU 8th principle and its call for us to dismantle racism and oppression.
So to begin, I would like to invite Julie, Tomas, and Margaret to lead us in a unison reading of the result of their great work – the new version of our covenant.
As a religious community, we promise:
To Welcome and Serve by:
- Being intentionally hospitable to all people of goodwill Celebrating all aspects of diversity
- Treating others as they wish to be treated
- Being present with one another through life’s transitions Encouraging the spiritual growth of people of all ages
To Nurture and Protect by:
- Communicating with one another directly in a spirit of compassion and goodwill
- Ensuring those who wish to communicate are heard and understood
- Speaking when silence would inhibit progress Disagreeing from a place of curiosity and respect Interrupting hurtful interactions when we witness them Expressing our appreciation to each other
To Sustain and Build by:
- Affirming our gratitude with generous gifts of time, talent, and money for our beloved community
- Honoring our commitments to ourselves and one another for the sake of our own integrity and that of our congregation
- Forgiving ourselves and others when we fall short of expectations, showing good humor and the optimism required for moving forward Thus, do we covenant with one another.
Many thanks to our wonderful healthy relations team! “Thus, do we covenant with one another.”
Thus, do we promise to dwell together in the ways of love.
And that love is love with a capital L – a Universal Love that we draw theologically from our Universalist heritage.
Now, differing variations of Christian Universalism go all the way back to the very earliest days of Christianity.
Universalism was, and for some still is, a belief that God is all loving and would never condemn any of us to an eternity of damnation in hell – that God would eventually offer salvation to all souls.
This is why the term All Souls often shows up in the names of some of our UU churches.
This idea that God’s love is pervasive and includes everyoneGod’s love is universal- shows up over and over again in some form throughout the history of Christian religion.
And the idea that God’s universal love leads inevitably to universal salvation has been extremely controversial, also throughout Christian history.
It turns out, a lot of people really hate it when you get rid of hell. More on that shortly.
It was here in America though that the IDEA of Universalism actually came to take the institutional form of churches and societies of churches.
Now, our origin myth and miracle story for how universalism came to America (and eventually our UU faith) involves John Murray, a Methodist preacher from England who had converted to Universalist beliefs there.
After the death of his first wife and their infant son, as well as then being thrown into debtors prison, a dispirited Murray, his faith in doubt, gave up preaching and immigrated to America in 1770.
Upon arriving on the American coast, Murray’s ship got grounded on a sandbar.
While waiting for his ship to get freed, Murray went ashore, where he met a farmer named Thomas Potter, who had built a chapel on his land to accommodate itinerant preachers.
Upon learning that Murray was a preacher, Potter was convinced that Murray had been sent by God to proclaim the gospel in his chapel.
Murray resisted, but Potter convinced him to preach if the ship was still not free by that Sunday.
God kept the ship stranded past Sunday (at least from Potter’s point of view), so Murray preached. He made such a great impression that he ended up getting invited to spread the good news of Universalism up and down the East coast of the American colonies, eventually founding a Universalist church in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
And like many if not most origin myths and miracle stories, this one is not entirely true.
It was more likely a seasonal lack of wind than God that got and kept Murray’s ship stranded.
Universalism had already taken root in several other religious sects in the colonies.
And, in fact, Murray didn’t even focus on Universal Love and Salvation in his preaching at first. It was more likely his charisma that got him invited to preach throughout the area, at least in the beginning.
So the story is more complicated than the way in which we often tell it. But complicated stories don’t make for very good miraculous origin myths!
Incidentally, it is absolutely true that we get a strong heritage of feminism from American Universalism.
Murray’s second wife, Judith Sargent Murray, was an essayist, poet, and playwright – in the 1700s.
She advocated for women’s progress, and, under pseudonyms, sometimes male, she published such articles as “Desultory Thoughts Upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, especially in Female Bosoms” and “On the Equality of the Sexes” in the 1700s!
In 1863, Olympia Brown became the first woman to gain full ministerial standing from any denomination in America when she was ordained by the Universalist Church.
Perhaps the most influential force in the development of Universalism though, was the self-educated minister, orator, debater and writer Hosea Ballou.
He espoused ultra-universalism, the idea that God would not condemn humans to hell for any period of time at all, which led to much controversy and conflict with more traditional Universalists who believed God would temporarily condemn the wicked to hell for some unspecified period of time before eventually saving all souls.
The leaders of other denominations that were firmly committed to hell as a means for controlling human behavior, REALLY hated the idea.
Ballou firmly asserted that God was the embodiment of eternal love and seeks the happiness of all humans. He was convinced that once people knew this, they would take pleasure in living a moral life and doing good works.
In a famous story, Ballou was traveling with a Baptist minister one afternoon. The Baptist minister looked at him and said, “Brother Ballou, if I were a Universalist and feared not the fires of hell, I could hit you over the head, steal your horse and saddle, and ride away, and I’d still go to heaven.”
To which Ballou replied, “If you were a Universalist, the idea would never occur to you.”
Another time, an elderly woman, firmly committed to religious beliefs involving the depravity of human nature queried Ballou on whether he frequently asked his parishioners, “0, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”
Hosea Ballou responded, “No Madam. That class do not attend my church.”
I kind of feel that way about this church!
So, here is why I have given you this extremely brief and thoroughly incomplete taste, this smattering of stories from our Universalist inheritance.
As I mentioned earlier, our UU faith is reclaiming the relational, love-centered legacy of our Universalist heritage that has sometimes been overshadowed by the also extremely important focus on reason and individual autonomy of our Unitarian roots.
Though again, it is more completed than that. Both of our traditions contained elements of all of this and more.
Anyway in the time since our two Us merged in 1961, we have translated the Universalist concept of an all loving God, offering universal salvation after death, into a Universal Love that offers salvation in this world, in this life, in the here and now.
A Universal Love that like that big umbrella from our story earlier shelters us all under a shield of justice -love that when practiced moves us all toward liberation and freedom, as bell hooks wrote about.
The early 20th century Universalist minister and scholar Clarence Skinner wrote that Universalism answers the primal question of how we can “transform this old earth into the kingdom of heaven”.
My friend, the Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford, lead minister of LiveOak UU church, just says it calls us to “love the hell out of this world”.
Our UU theologian, Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker refers to what I am calling Universal Love as being “alive and afoot in the cosmos … ” In this church, we sometimes call it as a river of love that flows through our Universe.
We began the sermon today with exploring how our UU faith is centered in covenant.
The covenant that we make with our fellow UUs throughout our faith is contained in Article II of our Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws.
These are the promises that all UUs make with one another about how we will dwell together in the ways of love.
Well, for over 5 years, our larger UU faith has been engaging in a process to update that covenant between all UUs, just as we did for our church covenant, though we didn’t take nearly as long.
Now, I do not have time to go into the details today. You can find more information at www.uua.org
Here though, is a graphic representation of the values we would covenant to affirm and promote under this proposed update.
Now being UUs, some of our folks affectionately refer to this graphic as “the love flower.” And some of our folks derisively refer to this graphic as “that love flower.”
However, you feel about the graphic, it does illustrate how we might center our covenant in love.
Universal Love practiced through the values of Generosity, Pluralism, Transformation, Equity, Interdependence, and Justice.
Universal Love that, when lived through these values, moves us “towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”
My beloveds, as we face the many challenges of this election year – the frankly terrifying wave of authoritarianism flowing through our country – the war and violence in our world – the rampant injustices – the ongoing violations of the inherit worth and dignity of so many – centering ourselves in Universal Love is going to be more vital than ever.
And perhaps, just maybe, by centering ourselves in that Universal Love – we can take George Harrison’s words from our anthem earlier and make them universal:
Give us, ourselves, one another, and our world, love Give us love
Give us peace on earth Give us light
Give us life
Keep us all free from birth.
Who knew George Harrison might be a Universalist?
Amen.
Benediction
TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL
by Maya Angelou:
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
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