The Salvation of Universalism

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson

	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield

	Oct.  3, 1999

Brothers and sisters, are you saved?  Have you opened your hearts, are
you washed in the blood?  Maybe you?ve made your plans for the
millenium, but have you made your plans for eternity?  Maybe you?ve
got reservations for your next vacation, but have you reserved a spot
on that cruise that lasts until the end of time?  Have you looked into
your hearts?  Have you found the true path?  (Say Amen) Are you
S-A-V-E-D?

Now I could go on in that vein for hours, but most of you would be out
the door in minutes and the rest of you would be wondering whether you
had come to the right church this morning.  I give you a taste of
evangelical preaching, as I earlier sang a song from that tradition,
not to mock its tone, its language or its theological underpinnings,
but just to point out how different it is from the contemporary
culture of Unitarian Universalism.  And in particular, by asking the
standard evangelical question of whether we?re saved, I want to focus
our attention on what salvation means to us, as illumined by
Universalist thinking.

Now when someone starts asking us if we?ve been saved, the reaction of
most of us is probably to change the radio station - hold on, this
isn?t NPR!  - or to slip away as quickly and quietly as possible.
Most of us probably don?t spend much time worrying about whether we?re
going to heaven when we die, since (1) a lot of us don?t believe in
any kind of afterlife or (2) don?t believe that residence in the
afterlife has much to do with either faith or works during our
lifetimes.  But I submit to you that salvation is still very important
to all of us.  We live in Western culture and we cannot escape a
mindset informed by two millennia of Jewish and Christian ideas.  When
we read a novel or watch a movie in which the hero or heroine
overcomes great difficulties to win happiness in the end, we have
witnessed a kind of salvation.  Think of Hawthorne?s The Scarlet
Letter - it is the tale of Hester Prynne?s progress from damnation by
the community, where the letter she was forced to wear stood for
"adulteress" to her salvation by the end of the book, where the "A"
had come to stand for "Angel".  We all love this.  Writers know that
screenplays and stories that don?t have salvation built into them
don?t sell.  The Clinton-Lewinsky morality play which was staged last
year in the press and the U.S.  Congress was all about salvation;
those who wanted to keep the President were saying, in effect, that
his soul could be or had been redeemed, while those voting for
impeachment were damning him for his conduct.

Though I am a religious liberal in my conscious waking mind, my
subconscious inhabits a very Calvinist world.  When I?m facing a
crisis, it often plays down deep inside me as Judgment Day.  At three
o?clock in the morning, I?m lying awake sweating bullets while my
black-robed accusers, speaking in voices which sound suspiciously like
my stern Presbyterian aunt or uncle or my ex-wife, let me know just
how low a worm I am for what I?ve done or thought about doing or even
thought.  I am cast into the fiery pit; I don?t ask for these
salvation dramas to play; they just do.

So salvation is a very live issue, if not in our churches then
certainly in our consciences and in our culture.  You know by now that
I have a love of wordplay, and the title of this sermon, "The
Salvation of Universalism" can be taken at least two ways.  First, can
the essence of Universalism as a religious movement be preserved 38
years after the Universalist denomination merged with - some would say
was swallowed up by - the much larger Unitarians; second, what kind of
salvation does Universalism preach to us today?

The reading this morning was from Rev.  Richard Trudeau, minister of
the U.U.  Church in Weymouth and leader of the New Massachusetts
Universalist convention, a movement within Unitarian Universalism
seeking to revive the spirit of Universalism.  It directly poses the
second challenge to us:  what can we take from the old Universalist
tradition in which this church was founded that can guide us into the
new century?  To answer this, we have to look backwards as well as
forwards.

Our District Executive Tim Ashton was kind enough to send me a very
helpful book called Foundations of Faith by Rev.  Albert F.  Ziegler.
This book, published in 1959, is probably the last articulation of
Universalist theology before the merger with the Unitarians in 1962.
It is of no small interest here that Mr.  Ziegler served this church
as interim minster for a year in the mid-1940s.  I hope someday I
might run across some sermons he preached here.

Ziegler is very clear that the core of a Universalist faith is the
belief in Universal salvation, that all persons will be saved.  Some
scholars trace this doctrine to Origen of Alexandria in the Third
Century A.D., but for our purposes Universalism began in England in
the mid-Eighteenth and was brought to these shores by an Englishman
named John Murray, whose picture graces the Order of Service this
morning.

The first Universalist Convention was held in 1790, but the most
important early meeting was that held in Winchester, New Hampshire in
1803.  At that meeting, a statement of faith was drawn which served as
the official expression of Universalist belief until 1899.  The
Winchester Profession had three tenets, and I want as you listen to
them to compare them to what we say now in this church when we light
the chalice:

Article I.  We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New
Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the
duty, interest and final destination of mankind.

Article II.  We believe that there is one God, whose nature is Love,
revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who
will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and
happiness.

Article III.  We believe that holiness and true happiness are
inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to
maintain order and practice good works, for these things are good and
profitable unto men.

You might find that the similarities with our current statement are
much more apparent than the differences.  Note too, that the universal
salvation which is the keystone of the faith is articulated as
"holiness and happiness," which allows a lot of room for
conceptualizing whether this takes place on earth or in an afterlife.
The final sentence makes clear that, despite the fact the we are all
ultimately saved, we shouldn?t misbehave but act morally because
virtue is it own reward.  This was, of course, aimed at the orthodox
who insisted that without the threat of eternal punishment, people had
no incentive to act morally.

By the time of the Winchester Profession, Murray had been replaced by
Hosea Ballou as the leading theoretician of the movement, and the
Winchester Profession follows Ballou?s views rather than Murray?s.
One of the hardest things to swallow in Ballou?s theology was that he
didn?t believe in free will, for if humans had free will, God was not
omnipotent.  Surprisingly, Ziegler in his mid-Twentieth Century
updating of Universalism hangs onto Ballou?s determinism, but ties it
into a theory of sin.  (I have retained the sexed language of the
original in these quotes to remind us of the era they came from):

"If free will means anything significant, it must mean that somehow,
to some degree, man has the ability to act without regard for
influences on him, without regard to laws of the universe to which
other parts are subject.  As such, freedom is an evil too awful to
contemplate.  If, out of the freedom of his will, man has chosen to do
wrong (and reason tells us that he has done and does do wrong), there
is no force in heaven or earth that can move him from it.  His case is
hopeless.  Even the religion which weeps over his plight is powerless
to save him.

"What awful ailment seemed to us to call for such a noxious remedy?
The problem of evil, the fact that he does not do as he ?ought?  to
do; in short, the dilemma of man?s imperfection.  The whole structure
fails when we realize that it provides a solution for a dilemma which
does not exist.  Imperfection exists, but it is not a dilemma.
Orthodoxy supposed a completed universe, a perfect, finished creation,
and so finds a problem in the existence of imperfection in it.
Reason, and any healthy fate that illumines it, must know that
creation is moving on, not running down; that the universe is in
process; that life did not begin in perfection, but in the working out
of a perfect purpose, is still moving from chaos into order.  What is
more natural, then, than that there is imperfection, in the universe
and in man?"  (pp.  40-41)

I find this truly astonishing.  Not only do we not have free will, we
don?t have sin, or rather, the problem of evil is a problem of the
starting point from which evil is measured.  But it does make some
sense.  If we posit an original state of perfection as in the Garden
of Eden story we read last week, we measure down from that and we call
the gap between our present imperfection and the supposed original
state of perfection, the problem of evil.  But if we realistically
measure from where we have been in history, we make progress from time
to time.  We are subject in the media to a lot of reviews of the
Twentieth Century which highlight its brutality, and certainly
technology has increased our capacity for mass destruction and harm
over times past.  But I think Ziegler is right that the term "problem
of evil" is a human construction which is made to fit a variety of
cases - is the AIDs epidemic an example of "evil" or of an amoral
virus run amok?  And calling evil a "problem" is a step towards
personifying it - towards creating a devil on whom we can cast blame.

But let?s bear with Ziegler a little longer.  He says that
Universalism sets its face against all kinds of dualisms:

"In the religious revolution that is Universalism, many of the old
familiar concepts and terms lose their meaning.  The expounding of our
faith is unnecessarily complicated and confused when we allow
ourselves to be drawn into the conflicts arising with and out of the
old philosophies.  We have no business talking of free will and
determinism, good and evil, natural and supernatural, sacred and
secular.  These and others are concepts native to the religions of
dualism, which we deny.  Universalism is a thoroughly monistic faith
which allows of no reality to these contradictions on the extensile
level, and sees them so changed on the existential level that these,
and all terms arising out of a belief in opposing forces, are too
cumbersome and diffused in meaning to best serve us."  (P.51)



Now in this, Ziegler anticipates the postmodern mentality of the past
two decades.  Dualism is a dirty word.  In fact, I have been tempted
to start a protest movement where people would march carrying placards
saying "down with dualism."  Today?s postmodern wants to see behind
any set of oppositions a unity which lies at a deeper level.  But
while I can get into a postmodern frame of mind, and can collapse the
duality of mind and body, natural and artificial, natural and
supernatural, I must say that my mind really balks at collapsing good
and evil.  That habit of thinking is deeply engrained.  Here?s what
Ziegler says this about this particular opposition:

"Even less does the antiphony of ?good?  and ?evil?  serve us.  We
deny the infinite existence of opposing forces.  There is not God and
the devil.  There is one source of life, and one divine purpose
operating in life.  And we cannot suppose it is otherwise on the
finite plane, since what we see and arbitrarily designate as finite is
not different from, but a part of the infinite."

"It is the genius of Universalist thinking that no entity in life can
be so low in a scale of values as to be unacceptable, so low that it
does not express some good, the development of which is essential to
life.  Life is not a patchwork of good and evil.  Nothing in life is
evil, if by evil is meant that which should not have been.  Nothing in
life is good if by good is meant that which does not stand in need of
some improvement."  (P 52).

These are powerful and challenging ideas, and they are profoundly
Christian.  Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of
these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.  No soul is lost in the
here as no soul is lost in the hereafter.  But in the real world, can
we really give up our cherished notions that some people and some
things in the world are evil?  This would mean we would be compelled
to treat all persons as human, as having inherent worth and dignity -
to take the U.U.  First principle seriously.  Can we really do that?

You are aware that within 50 miles of where we sit probably 20,000 of
our fellow humans are confined in institutions which they are not free
to leave - jails, mental hospitals, half-way houses, nursing homes.
We have had in this country a toilet mentality whereby we seek to
remove from our presence those whom it is inconvenient to tolerate, we
simply flush them away.  We have different rationalizations for this.
One of the things we tell ourselves to allow ourselves to do this is
that it?s for their own good, but another thing we tell ourselves is
that they are evil people and therefore they don?t deserve to be
treated the way we are treated.  Universalism challenges that
assumption.  Listen to Mr.  Ziegler:

"The power of traditional Universalism was that, in its teaching of
universal salvation, it spoke to every man of his infinite value.  As
the ancient Hebrew saw himself to be of divine importance, rescued and
chosen by God; as the orthodox Christian found his eternal
significance in the sacrifice of the Son of God for his welfare; so
the Universalist saw his and all men?s divine stature and destiny in
the unfailing love of God.  If "universal salvation" does not today
carry that message to us, we must find another way to sing the great
gospel that every person and what he does and how he does it is of
ultimate concern, of infinite significance.  As civilization develops
more intricately, as the world becomes ever smaller and the machines
ever larger, man needs increasingly to know that the creative source
of good is not in nations or supernations, nor in machines, however
electronic, nor in laws, nor treaties nor propositions, but within his
own heart."  (p.57)_

So salvation, my friends, the salvation that means something to me, is
not something that happens after I die, or at the end of time when the
last trump has sounded and the tombs of the dead are opened and the
lamb opens the seven seals.  No, salvation is happening, can be
happening, every day, every hour as we make or don?t make judgments
about people.  As we rub against people, as they rub against us, we
can save them or we can damn them to hell.  When they rub us the wrong
way, the temptation is great to simply dismiss them, to say, well,
he?s just a jerk or well, she?s just a whiner, what can you do?
Instead of listening to the person and trying to figure out what it is
that makes them rub us the wrong way.  If we take seriously their true
value we realize that we can?t afford to damn them to hell.

For in damning others we damn ourselves, and in saving others we save
ourselves, and it is ourselves that are most in need of love from
ourselves.  Ziegler writes

"The way of salvation is in self-fulfilling.  It is seeing onself in
all about, and going forth to claim it; and no one can do it for us.
In Whitman?s Song of Myself he wrote:  ?Not I, nor anyone else, can
travel that road for you; you must travel it for yourself.?

"The ?sin against the Holy Spirit,?  the sin for which there is
traditionally no forgiveness, but for which some payment is always
exacted is not, as the liberal sometimes feels, a sin against society,
against others, the sin of selfishness.  It is the sin against one?s
self, the sin of self-less-ness, the failure to love one?s self.  More
fundamental than our social inadequacies, than our hatred and
suspicion of each other, is our distrust, our fear, our failure in the
creative acceptance of ourself.  The primary place of religion in our
lives is not to reform our society, is not even to relieve us of
oppression and injustices, but so to help each one of us to understand
and believe in himself that we will have the strength, and will and
faith to take whatever comes and grow in it and then to send our
creative spirit out to remake the world."  (p.  33).

That is to say, the means of our salvation is not "out there" in the
heaven or in Valhalla or Olympus, nor is it "back there" on the cross
of Calvary 2000 years ago.  The means of our salvation is "in here,"
my friends, it is in the heart, and it is in the acceptance of
ourselves as broken creatures, creatures who will fail time and time
again to meet the high standards of conduct which we set for
ourselves, but who can see in our hearts the spark of the creative
force which truly runs the universe.

So maybe there?s some life in Universalism after all.  Maybe the well
on which this church was founded still connects to aquifers of the
spirit that we need to nourish us in our lives today.  Maybe
Universalism can be our salvation so we can be the salvation of
Universalism.

Amen.