Address: God is Good©
The Rev.
I was raised to believe that God is an omniscient,
omnipotent being. “God is Great, God is good,
and I thank him for this food.” The
Episcopal tradition I grew up in was not particularly heavy on the wrathful,
angry, damning side of God. The God of
my childhood was relatively mild – merciful and forgiving of our sins for the
most part with some major exceptions – the banishment from paradise, the flood
of Noah’s ark, and the seven deadly plagues being examples that come to mind.
It was confusing in a way. God loves you so much that he sacrificed his
only son for you. Yet; you are also a
lowly sinner and you better watch out – or at least feel generally guilty for
your fallen ways. I certainly didn’t want
God the father to get angry with me – it was bad enough when my own dad was
angry with me. I remember praying
fervently in the sixth grade when I lost a $5 text book from school, promising
to be eternally well behaved if he could only deliver me from the wrath of Mrs.
Braden, my teacher that year. I
miraculously found the book, but it was a hard bargain to maintain!
Over the next two Sundays, we are
going to be taking a look at God and religion.
Is God good or is God not good? I
imagine that some of you have opinions about that. This may actually be the sermon series in
which I manage to offend nearly everyone on both side of the theistic equation,
because I want to look critically at the ways we imagine the divine, reject the
divine, how God and religion has polluted humanity, and how God and religion
has shaped the best in humankind.
Someone here quipped to me recently that it is easier to take on an
issue like abortion here than it is to talk about God. That makes us fairly unique across the
religious landscape of this nation!
So, let’s see if we can talk about
God over the next two weeks – not by looking exhaustedly at every depiction of
God in every time and culture, and also not by taking a theological poll to see
how we line up on the spectrum from atheism to agnosticism to theism,
panentheism and beyond. This week I want
to start by taking a look at an often neglected part of our particular brand of
religion – the Universalist view of God as Love. I’m going to challenge you to look at God
from the inside out – not as an outer force to be bowed down to, but an inner ideal
to live up to. If we consider that
whatever is divine in us is expressed in love, how might we then live?
Next week, we’ll take on some of the
ideas on writers and cultural critics like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and
Christopher Hitchens. All of these men
agree passionately that God is a delusion, and religion a scourge upon
civilization. Science, on the other
hand, is held up almost uncritically by these men as the “salvation”, if you
will, of our race and our world. Can
Science study religion? Is the God
question hard-wired into the human brain?
Has religion played a part in shaping positive values in our culture,
and can it make us moral? What would the
world look like if we imagined with John Lennon, that there was no heaven, and
no religion too?
For this week, I want to talk about
a vision of God that arose from a different cultural context and time – the
vision of the Universalist God. While Unitarianism has roots that reach back
some five centuries to the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation,
Universalism is a distinctly American religion, born in the same ferment that
led to the war for American Independence.
The second half of the 18th century was a time of political,
intellectual, and theological questioning in
The
Universalists were certainly not alone in rebelling against exclusive claims of
orthodoxy held by more conservative Christian churches. There were the Deists, the Unitarians, the
Congregationalists, the Quakers, Baptists and others staking their own
identities and claim to religious truth.
What made the Universalists distinct was their particular view of
salvation. While the more conservative
Christian churches claimed that salvation was made available only by accepting
Jesus as one’s personal Lord and Savior, and used the threat of eternal
damnation to guide people away from sin, the Universalist message focused on
Love. God is Love, said the Universalists,
and love is our guiding principal. God
so loved as to send his son Jesus to atone for human sin, yes, and that is
that! In other words, Jesus saved
everyone – not just an elect few – and God is too loving to damn anyone
eternally.
Universalist views on the divinity of Jesus were not
uniform – some believing that he was merely human, and others that he was a
part of a Trinitarian godhead.
Universalists, like Unitarians, rejected all forms of religious test or
creed, so there was room in the fold for differing interpretations on fine
points of theology. Actually, there were
Universalists at the heretical edge of every denomination. One of the most famous preachers in the
There rose
up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners – not of saints, but of
sinners unconverted, before they were any better – because they were so bad and
needed so much; and that view has never gone from me. It did not at first fill the whole Heaven; it
came as a rift along the horizon gradually, little by little, the cloud rolled
up. It was three years before the whole
sky was cleared so that I could see it all around, but from that hour I felt
that God had a father’s heart;…He did not frown on me for cast me off, but
cared for me with unutterable tenderness…and it seemed to me that I had
everything I needed.
Henry spoke about the feeling that a terrible weight had
been lifted from his heart that day, so that he went through the fields
laughing, singing, raying and shouting “like a lunatic escaped from
confinement.” In later retellings he
sometimes described this new God in female imagery, as one “who felt toward me
as my mother felt towards me” and “who always makes me happy so that happiness
makes me good.”
Unless you were raised in a holy roller blast ‘em and
scare ‘em fundamentalist tradition, it may be hard for you to imagine what a
radical departure the idea of a Loving God was for most Christians in this
country, who were fed a regular sermonic diet of fear of God’s wrath. Beecher himself would go on to become active
in the abolition movement, and his pioneering use of humor and story in the
pulpit along with his emphasis on Jesus as a soul mate rather than the Lord as
lawgiver would eventually bring him audiences of thousands on Sundays as well
as many detractors who accused him of heresy.
The religious papers were aghast, for instance, that he preached with a
vase of flowers on his pulpit desk one Sunday (false idols I suppose!), but
soon his entire church was brimming with flowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, another cultural iconoclast of his
day admired
It is difficult to look around our world and to hold that
great confidence that Emerson and Beecher carried about the upward and onward
progression of humankind. Standing in
line yesterday at the local bagel store, I read through the headlines of the
Bergen Record: “Mayor, wife face extortion charges,” “Man arrested in purse
snatching case.” “Fire stresses cigarettes deadly risk,” “Undocumented students
await aid.” Where’s the love? Where’s the love in
What would our world look like if we treated Love as the
only God worthy of our reverence? Mystics
from all traditions, such as Rabia, Rumi, Hafiz, and St. John of the Cross
write in strikingly similar, intimate fashion of God as Lover; God as dissolver
of all limitation:
“I said to God, “What are you? And he replied, “I
am what is loved.”…”What is grace?” I asked God. And he said “All that happens.” Then He
added, when I looked perplexed, “Could not lovers say that every moment in
their Beloved’s arms was grace?
Existence in my arms, though I well understand how one can turn away
from me until the heart has wisdom.”
Or, this
from Rabia, a female Islamic Saint of the 8th century: “Prayer should bring us to an altar where no
walls or names exist. Is there not a
region of love …In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church,
that dissolve, that dissolve in God.[2]
This has
been a week of funerals for me. First, a
memorial service for
Here’s what I learned, or perhaps
re-learned, this week about living as if Love were what truly mattered: From
All of us are doing the best we can
with what we have. Sometimes we fail in
life – there are failed marriages, failed attempts to reconcile with difficult
family members, failed careers, and failures to live up to what we know we are
capable of. What if we decided that
doing our best, and loving with all our hearts was good enough? I don’t know the finer points of each of your
theologies, but to me we tap into the potential of God – actually create the
divine or at least uncover the sparks of divinity – when we embrace the
practice of love as the greatest spiritual discipline – day by day, and moment
by moment.
Universalism no longer exists as an
independent faith movement in our country.
In 1963, after a long period of decline, the Universalist merged with
the Unitarianism, although I’m not sure that we’ve yet achieved a balance in
terms of honoring and shining the light on this aspect of our religious
heritage. Recently, a Pentecostal TV
evangelist, The Rev. Carlton Pearson, experienced a conversion to Universalism
not unlike that of Henry Ward Beecher back in the 19th Century. After 30 years of preaching a message warning
people to follow the rules or burn in hell, he suddenly came to believe that a
loving God would not damn anyone to eternal hell, and that if Jesus’ death
saved anyone, it must have saved everyone.
Like many UU’s he also came to believe that hell is not something in the
life to come, but is and experience that arises here in this world out of greed,
fear, and ignorance.
It appears that Pearson came to this
understanding all on his own, having never been exposed to the long tradition
of Universalist heretics dating well back to the 2nd Century. My colleague in Paramus, The Rev. Justin
Osterman, (who will be guest preaching here in February), noted that over
280,000 people have visited Pearson’s website to read about his “theology of
inclusion” – most of whom we can be fairly certain, have never heard of
Universalism or Unitarian Universalism for that matter, and our message that
links individual worth with the understanding that we are all connected on this
earth, and that love, mercy and justice are the ways we covenant to treat one
another.
I don’t know if Love can ever unite
a broken humanity on a broken earth. But
for me, it is the closest I come to understanding what God might be, a God who
is good. I see the light of love in your
eyes, I hear it in the strains of music that fills our hall, I taste it in cup
of fellowship that we share. May love be
our only guide, in all that we say and do.
So
be it.