All Souls: The Calling of Universalism in the 21^st Century

Sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

On October 30, 2005

By the Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Reading

From Bishop John Shelby Spong

Whatever else we know about creation, we are now certain that it is an ongoing, evolving, still-incomplete process.  Our humanity is not flawed by some real or mythical act of disobedience – it is rather distorted by the unfinished nature of our humanity.  We do not know yet what it means to be human.  The idea that Jesus had to pay the price of our sinfulness is an idea that is bankrupt.  When that idea collapses, so do those violent, controlling, and guilt-producing tactics so deeply part of traditional Christianity.  A system of rewards and punishments, in this life or beyond, does not produce wholeness nor issue in loving acts of a self-giving person.  It produces a self-centered attempt at survival.  It leads not to do good for good’s sake, but to win favor or avoid punishment. 

We are not fallen sinners who need to be rescued; but incomplete creatures who need to be empowered to step into the possibilities of an expanding life.  It is not appropriate to wallow in our inadequacy or to accept as our due being denigrated by religion.  We need the power to take the next step into a newer more complete humanity. We need to see that the evil we do to one another is the result of this incomplete humanity.  Evil cannot be controlled by threats or discipline.  Security can never finally be built on violence.  To be saved does not mean to be rescued.  It means to be empowered to be something we have not yet been able to be. Now, Jesus emerges as a symbol for a humanity that is portrayed as so whole and so complete that it is experienced as infused with the divine.

Sermon

When the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones founded his new church in Chicago at the turn of the nineteenth century he called it All Souls because he wanted to announce on the very front of the church that All Souls were welcome, that all souls were precious, and that the church he wanted to serve was the one great enough for all souls to enter and to find strength, wisdom, and courage. It became a rallying name so that there are Unitarian Universalist churches of All Souls all around our nation. 

            Ours is a church – a faith – that embraces all souls and works for the healing and wholeness of every soul.  So it was that when I learned two and a half weeks ago that a Hell House was coming I became curious … because the notion of hell is usually meant to separate souls from one another.  Through Kyler and Kitty Laird and Charles Coley – learn I did.  I learned that Hell Houses are cropping up around our country – they’re a highly commercial form of fundamentalist evangelism.  As they do here – they advertise as though they are a haunted house around Halloween – the time of year when ancient souls are thought to hover near the earth again and haunt the living.  But this sort of amusement they are not.  Though they are full of ghouls – they are a tour of fear through ignorance, violence and judgment.  The Hell House in our city (and other towns where this production franchise travels), called Final Exit, focuses on the evil of choice – the ultimate evil: for choice leads to human sin and error and only by exactly following the word of the Bible can a soul break free. 

Kyler, Charles and I, decided to witness this so that we could truly respond to it.  At the beginning of the tour we were pounded by music warning:

“Time is ticking….(played by DC Talk a Christian Rock group)

Once inside the noise level is intense and your tour guides are Sith style demons who appear out of pitch darkness and materialize before your eyes. 

They surround you as a demonic voice – intended to be the voice of the Devil says: And you thought you had more time… Nothing like a heightened sense of reality to get your heart working. Welcome to everything you’ve lived for -- the meaning of your entire existence all wrapped up in a little walk on the wild side.  Because you chose to enter you’ve given up any right to return from where you came. But I’m here for you because you deserve a choice. Oh you know you do – you’ve whimpered and whined and given a thousand “poor mes” in defense of your freedom to have and live whatever you want.  Well good for you because you’ve decided your own fate. By your own choices.

And as he finishes his manifesto against choice chaos begins and the lower demons  press close to you yelling in your face and behind you to keep moving. This yelling accompanies every move in the tour and only ends … well … later.

The tour begins and it illustrates the story of a young girl, a survivor of incest and child abuse who reaches adolescence and makes poor choices. You follow as the demons blame her for every tragedy that has befallen her and her family – she becomes pregnant, contracts AIDS, has an abortion, and commits suicide.

Finally, you’re shoved into a coffin in utter darkness and when the coffin opens you have arrived in hell where pitiful figures – including the poor girl whose misery you have most graphically witnessed – reach out to you crying to be saved.  Finally you are ushered over the pit of hell on a narrow path and into a room where a woman stands on a platform before a living, crucified and blood-soaked Jesus. As this suffering Jesus looks on the woman preaches in tears and anger and gentle tones about your only possible means of salvation.  She speaks of how his blood covers your sin and is the only means to salvation.  She wipes her hand along his body, smearing blood onto her hand and then pushes it into your face and tells you that this precious blood was the price that God asked to wash away your sin and yours and yours. And it does not matter what you do in this life – but you do not want to go back to that hell and only the blood of Jesus and accepting him as your lord and savior can save you.  Not Muhammad, not the Buddha – only Jesus.  Then you pass through a room where angels smile at you and send you on to an auditorium where people are ready to ask for your confessions of sin and faith.  They target younger people – who have reported being badgered in rooms off to the side. 

            Why should we care about this?  People have a right to evangelize!  But we do care because the idea of salvation and of free – un-coerced religion is at the heart of our faith.  Winding back to early church fathers and heretics who debated these very questions.  And in the late 17^th century a hell fire evangelist name Jonathan Edwards was making the circuit in this country and preaching the same message that they are charging nine dollars a head for at Final Exit. 

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. Yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire.

This is the God of Final Exit alright – a God who would set children down into cruel and abusive homes and then watch with hard eyes as they stumble in pain and ignorance and then condemn them to eternal fire for their errors and sufferings.  Our forebears – the New England Unitarians and the Universalists responded and our modern movement of Unitarianism and the blessing of Universalism came into being. For a long time the message of Universalism spread – it was a relief for people to know that we could do good in love and not in fear – to know that we were not sinners in the hands of an angry god – but rather human beings learning and growing.  The punitive face of Christianity dwindled in America and was in quieter minorities until recently when – in the face of global conflict, economic uncertainty, social change, and spiritual seeking – it began to arise again – shocking and even intimidating mainline Christians of all stripes.  And changing the face of our national religious and political life in the United States.   This theology is walking among us today and it matters that we respond and let out our own good news – the good news that we have striven for centuries to publish and to preach.  It matters for Christians, who seek strength from a loving God and wisdom from a larger God and who seek comfort from a Jesus who was not a blood sacrifice but an immortal figure of justice, prophecy, and, above all, compassion.  It matters for non-Christians – like many among us or those who meet as Bahais, Jews, or Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and ethical humanists.  It matters because we strive to enrich our lives with diversity, to grow in understanding and to seek the common threads between faiths rather than making one supreme and right for all – we seek to bring hope each according to their own light and yet on a common ground of respect and care.  I am haunted by the knowledge that on Yom Kippur, while worshippers were gathered for the holiest day of the Jewish year, that representatives from Final Exit entered the synagogue and passed out leaflets for Hell House.  This is an invasion and a sacrilege.  For Unitarian Universalists it is a violation of our faith that many paths may lead to the divine and that the divine is not in only one person or location – but awaits humanity around the world. We cannot return to the days when diversity is only tolerated until it can be melted down.

            I am haunted by the worried face of the caring, devout Christian father whose heart was full of fear for his precious daughter whose sin was only to love another woman.  This father, who cared so deeply that his daughter might suffer eternal torment and that they might see each other in the next life.  This theological difference matters to me and to Unitarian Universalism.  This fear shared by so many matters to me and to Unitarian Universalism.

            We preach a very different message here today.

            By and large, while we may wish in our worst moments that the cruel and the wicked would burn in hell at least for a little while – Unitarian Universalists do not believe in an infinite deity of perfect intelligence, cosmic vision, and almighty power who would create a such an finite and incomplete creature as ourselves and then design an infinite punishment for our finite crimes – our finite sins and errors.  How could a wise creator worthy of belief be so pain thirsty?  How could a great deity deny mortals infinite time in which to learn but allow infinite time for punishment -- is this deity just bad at math?  Justice holds a scale – in the earliest stages of Jewish Law, before the Rabbis and Sages recognized that justice demands mercy – before mercy there was a mathematical balance – an eye for an eye… as the sages and rabbis grew to recognize that justice must be tempered with mercy – why should any deity be less balanced and mature?  The woman who preached in the final room was clear – if you think an evil thought you are evil, if you think with hatred you are a murderer in God’s eyes.  For that thought you will burn in hell.  Further this God – the God of Jonathan Edwards and of Extreme Reality Productions is said to have created the world in 6 days – how could such a deity have created this complex marvel of creation but lack the ingenuity to construct a wiser system of eternal justice or repair? 

            Hosea Ballou – one of the great preachers of Universalism said: Your child has fallen into the mire and its body and garments are defiled.  You cleanse it and array it in clean robes.  The query is: Do you love your child because you have washed it?  Or Did you wash it because you have loved it? 

            Two thousand years of fear have not made a sweeter world – nor more virtuous people but seem to have us caught in an ever expanding cycle of terror and retaliation – which violates the best messages at the heart of all the worlds great religions and certainly violates the message of radical love that Jesus taught. 

            All our many arguments against the existence of hell and the doctrine of eternal punishment do not matter nearly so much as the recognition that we share as Universalists that love is a more powerful force than fear.  What matters is the sincere desire to free people from this bleak cosmos where goodness counts for little and confessions of faith are all.  What matters is that the voice of gentler faith be heard – it matters that religious people everywhere cease preaching faith in fortresses and figures and instead preach lives of faithful goodness.  We have good news here …

Here each child that’s born is welcomed not as a sinner to be saved but as a good soul and a new radiance in our world.

The good news is that we believe that each child that born is in fact a new savior of our world – not a single handed savior – but a being in rich human community endowed with choice and power and responsibility to be devoted to acts of right action.  The good news is that we believe that each person here has a responsibility to help create the circumstances under which all people will have wider horizons of possibility so and the isolation that so often leads to suffering is diminished.  In this place we believe in an ethic of love as the teachers of all great religions have taught and that we are lifelong – students of the affirmation of the creative power of the universe.  In every moment your soul is born anew in you and new possibilities can come into being for your life.  Your soul is not being held for ransom here but rather you are welcomed to the table of all souls and the hope that love and justice will beget love and justice. Your soul is not being held for ransom here but rather the best of what you have cherished and the lessons you have learned on your spiritual journey are welcomed here.  Your soul is not being held for ransom here – for the terrors and errors of the past can be overcome with understanding and healing.  Your soul is not being held for ransom here – you are free to believe though you are challenged to live and to believe in those things which help to shape a just and loving human community. 

You are already saved from the terrors of hell – the worst hell we face is at the hands of other human beings and in the legacy of the choices that human beings have made through the generations.  Hell and heaven are metaphors for the legacy we enter at birth and leave behind us at death.  Hell and heaven are in history -- not beyond it.

You were saved before you walked in our doors -- as Spong said -- to be saved does not mean to be rescued.  It means to be empowered to be something we have not yet been able to be -- having walked in our doors you now have the opportunity to grow and to become both as individuals and as a community of faith – a powerful movement of love and reason, a powerful voice for healing and justice.

But now I want to invite you to do something different – something new – for behold you are each something very new.  I want to hear if you know that children are born sinless?  I want to hear – if you know that the threat of hell no longer hangs over you?  I want to hear if you know that you can be good for goodness sake?  I want to hear if you know that you are already saved?  Was there a moment in your life when you realized this – when you realized that the threat had been removed?  If you are like me that moment only deepened your desire to be of use in the world.  Now – perhaps you have never feared hell and I am grateful if you have had that in your life because I know that so many people have not and yet live in a cosmos of satanic threats and sulfurous fears.  But perhaps for you there a moment when your heart was liberated from fear?  Perhaps there was a moment when the scales fell from your eyes and realized that you were a part of the family of all souls?  If you have that moment of recognition – if you can offer your witness that you know that you are already saved – not by the agency of one deity – but by the creative power of life itself blossoming within you I would invite you to come forward to this microphone only if you want, only if you are moved and knowing that you will not be judged for either choice – I ask you to come forward and to offer your witness.

Altar call and many people came forward to share their stories of freedom from fear.

Closing words by the Reverend William Schulz

Unitarian Universalism affirms:

That Creation is too grand, complex, and mysterious to be captured in a narrow creed. That is why we cherish individual freedom of belief. At the same time our convictions lead us to other affirmations . . .

That the blessings of life are available to everyone, not just the Chosen or the Saved;

That Creation itself is Holy -- the earth and all its creatures, the stars in all their glory;

That the Sacred or Divine, the Precious and Profound, are made evident not in the miraculous or supernatural but in the simple and the everyday;

That human beings, joined in collaboration with the gifts of grace, are responsible for the planet and its future;

That every one of us is held in Creation's hand -- a part of the interdependent cosmic web -- and hence strangers need not be enemies;

That no one is saved until we All are saved, where All means the whole of Creation;

That the paradox of life is to love it all the more even though we ultimately lose it.