Sermon
Sept 30, 2018
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Hosea Ballou, one of our spiritual ancestors, came to be a Universalist by having the wrong emotional experience of God. As a young boy, he went to a revival service with his dad, who was a Baptist preacher. At the end of the service, they had an altar call.
Altar calls are typically where the preacher invites anyone to come up to the front who wants to rededicate themselves to God and Jesus.
Well, when Hosea Ballou was a boy and he went up for that altar call, he realized something was wrong. He wasn’t afraid of God. He had been told that he was a sinner, and he need fear God. But he found that he wasn’t God-fearing. He was God-loving. He was told that was the wrong way to think about God.
He started studying Universalism, which taught that God was too good to damn anyone to hell.
Hosea Ballou liked to refer to God as a loving parent. The story goes that he was riding the preaching circuit when he stopped for the night at a New England farmhouse. The farmer was upset. He confided to Ballou that his son was a terror who got drunk in the village every night and who fooled around with women.
I tell this story purposefully and mindfully this week (given recent national news).
The farmer was afraid the son would go to hell.
“All right,” said Ballou with a serious face. “We’ll find a place on the path where your son will be coming home drunk, and we’ll build a big fire, and when he comes home, we’ll grab him and throw him into it.”
The farmer was shocked: “That’s my son and I love him!” Ballou said, “If you, a human and imperfect father, love your son so much that you wouldn’t throw him in the fire, then how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect father, would do so!”
This is a picture of a Universalist tent revival with a typical big banner: “God is Love.”
This was radical heresy for the time.
At these revivals, they’d basically preach “God loves you. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re saved. Go home.” ((My colleague Rev. Aaron White says this in this sermon, which serves as a great introduction to Universalism))
Universalists were dismissed from juries because people thought you couldn’t possibly judge morality if you didn’t believe in hell.
But my guess is that if you’re here, the idea of there not being a hell isn’t outrageous.
Maybe at some point in your religious journey, that idea felt like a relief, but by the time you’ve shown up here – especially if, like most church-goers in 2018, you’ve already looked at our website and facebook page – that question of hell is pretty clearly answered for you. There is no hell – no place of eternal torment – that inspires us to live right.
But if we come here just to agree that there’s no hell, we’re not really doing much.
The Universalist pastor Lyman Squires said:
Universalism is more than cushioned seats and no hell.
Even early Universalists quickly understood the logical outcome of their radical theology.
If all are saved, then there are no “bad people” over there and “good people” over here.
The Universalist Gordon McKeeman said
Hell is, in fact, a burning issue
for it is the issue of separation,
whether we can, with safety and impunity,
set up little islands in the human experience
and therefore protect ourselves
against any relationship with the mainland.
And Universalism says unequivocally, it cannot be done.
So, what then do you say about the farmer’s son who would go out drinking and fool around with women?
If you’re a Universalist, you’d say that we cannot separate ourselves from him.
We are all bound up together in the same social structures. We are all responsible for one another.
So this is where Universalists ended up locating hell – in the toxic and unjust social norms and structures of this world that cause suffering. Hell is what we create right here on earth.
And we must all work together to save one another from that hell.
So UUs inherited our social justice spirit in part from this Universalist commitment to social causes.
Universalists were early advocates for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, & prison reform.
For Universalists, being saved is not that one person going up the aisle for the altar call…because there is no “individual” salvation.
There is only communal salvation, collective liberation from that which creates hell on earth for all of us.
Modern Universalism has as its motto the mission to Love the Hell out of the World.
This is not an easy theology.
Again, what do you do about “the farmer’s son” who would go out drinking and “fool around” with women? What do you do about the hateful white supremacist? Or the unrepentant murderer? What about those politicians you despise?
What does it mean to love those people?
Dostoevsky said that Hell is the “suffering of being unable to love.”
I’d argue when we are unable to love it is because we have been hurt – either directly and/or by simply growing up in this often toxic culture of ours.
Ours is a culture that teaches us difference is bad and must be repressed, that men must only be strong, that women must only be soft, that darkness is to be shunned. Ours is a culture that typically neglects to teach us how to live in our bodies, how to be present with our emotions, how to cultivate loving relationships, how to understand power, how to relate to difference in ourselves and in others…
We are all affected by this culture – certainly in different ways based on our gender, race, class, etc. But all affected. And to various degrees, we are left with a deep psychic and spiritual pain, that whether we are aware of it or not, leaves us afraid, or numb, or ashamed, or arrogant, or angry, or addicted, or close-minded.
So when I look at that “farmer’s son” – that man who might be confirmed to our highest court of justice in the land – and yet, who clearly has some issues with drinking, and women, and anger, and bias… sometimes I want to write him off.
I want to be that angry, punitive God who separates the good from the bad and sends some as unredeemable to Hell. But then I remember that while he may, yes, be a perpetrator, he is also a victim. Stay with me here…
In this case, let us ask yourselves if he is perhaps both a perpetrator and a victim of toxic masculinity? Because I find myself wondering what earthly hell he got caught up in. Did he have anyone teach him how to be tender? How to listen? How to make mistakes, apologize, be held accountable, and grow?
And don’t get me wrong! Perpetrators create hell for their real victims. And they must be held accountable.
I certainly do not want to silence those victims’ voices.
But my guess is it’s not hard for us to love them. It’s not hard for us to side with the poor, the oppressed, the refugees, the outcast. And we should! Their voices must be privileged. And there must be justice.
But where Universalism – our faith – gets difficult is when we have to figure out how to love the people we’d rather cast aside. What does it mean to hold them accountable and love them? What does it mean to love the hell out of the world – this world that both we and they live in?
I hope you’ve heard me preach enough on love to know that I don’t mean a weak, mushy love. I don’t mean a love that doesn’t understand power.
If we are going to love the Hell out of the World, it’s going to be a ferocious, demanding love.
Love is the furious eruption of the heart in the face of all that feels wrong and broken and deadly. – John Pavlovitz, progressive Christian pastor. ((https://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/12/23/fighting-hate-saving-love/))
Think again of a parent. A loving parent does not really serve their child if they never set any boundaries…if they never hold their child accountable.
So loving the hell out of the world sometimes means drawing lines in the sand, while still extending a hand.
Love means assuming responsibility for another human being…Love of its very nature involves suffering: sharing the sufferings of the loved one and, besides, suffering over the limitations of the other human being, not excluding those of which the loved one is not even conscious. Love is the antithesis of peace. – Walter Kaufman, Faith of a Heretic
Love is the antithesis of peace.
So loving the hell out of the world is not an easy mission. Love requires us to wade into the mess. Love requires us to call for justice. To overturn the money-changers’ tables. To hang out with both the prostitutes AND the tax collectors. To say “no” to the powerful and the coercive. Love demands we side with the oppressed while also working to abolish all sense of “sides.”
Modern Universalism is about building a big enough tent that everyone is welcomed and has access to the grace and love that could radically transform them and their hate. Even if they choose not to stay, we must keep working to build that space and extend its reach.
Today Unitarian Universalists don’t typically consider themselves evangelists, but many of our Universalist ancestors were fierce evangelists, and the truth is we also have a life-saving message to share.
Ours is the message that no one is irredeemable. We cannot do it all for them, and we cannot look away while they create more hell. But we can show them through our courage and commitment a love that is more powerful than the powers of this world.
We certainly also saw a lot of courage and commitment in the news this week.
And when we are the ones who have gone astray, when we are the ones who feel stuck and irredeemable, we can come back to that big tent that says God is Love, and we can recommit ourselves to that community and that holy work of loving the hell out of the world.
May it be so. Amen.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon