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God Is Love
"I've decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."I have to admit, current events pose a challenge to the religious doctrine that I want to speak to you about today. One could argue that the burden of proof certainly lies with me and my Universalist forebears, and that the preponderance of evidence lies mostly on the other side.--1 John 4:16
These are certainly divisive times. Mel Gibson insists that his new film "The Passion of the Christ" is not anti-Semitic, in spite of the reservations of respected Biblical scholars, Jewish groups, and folks on both sides of the Jewish/Christian divide who have worked for years to build bridges between those two faiths, to erase the millennia- old implication of Jewish "guilt" for the death of Jesus Christ, and to expose the inherent anti-Semitism of the last 2000 years of historical Christianity. But Mel apparently knows best. (Frankly, I think most of his performances have been over the top, anyway. Did you know that he belongs to a conservative Catholic group which questions most of the progressive innovations of Vatican II?)
Islamic extremists value the gift of life so little that they willingly blow themselves and others to smithereens, believing that they are following the will of God. Some God. Most definitely not a God of love. And, many would argue, not the God of Islam, either.
The issue of same-gender marriage is exposing a huge divide in our populace and bringing out the worst and the best in our fellow citizens. As of today, the outcome of that debate is still very much in question, but the God of love is strangely absent in much of discourse resounding in the State House corridors.
Not, perhaps, since our former minister, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, preached his famous 1854 sermon "Massachusetts in Mourning," in response the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law in the case of Anthony Burns, has there been a more inflammatory issue brought before the judiciary, the legislature, and the electorate of our state. The issue then, we remember, was whether citizens of Massachusetts should be required to return fugitive slaves to their owners in southern states. When Massachusetts enforced the law, many citizens, including Higginson, chose civil disobedience instead. (Sadly, Higginson was by then the minister of the Free Church in Worcester, having been strongly encouraged to vacate his pulpit here at the First Religious Society because of his strong anti-slavery views.)
The Fugitive Slave Law, you might also remember, destroyed the career of Daniel Webster, one of the greatest orators of the 19th century, who supported it; and redeemed that of Higginson and others, who were considered completely radical at the time, who did not. Then, as now, it was an issue involving civil rights and equality before the law which caused the great divide, and indeed which led eventually to the American Civil War. Of course, it all had to turn out as it did, right? Slavery was definitely wrong, right? But of course, when Higginson preached his sermon, the outcome was by no means assured, and wouldn't be for another eleven years. And in some ways still isn't.
Then, as now, God was enlisted on both sides in the battle for people's consciences. It took a more sophisticated theologian than most of his day, Abraham Lincoln, to recognize that God's will is a lot more difficult to discern than most of us think, and that in all probability all shared some guilt in God's eyes [see Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address], and all would share equally in God's mostly inscrutable judgement, the visible embodiment of which was the terrible civil war then raging.
Great change never comes without social upheaval, and it is certainly not inevitable, but some of us still share the Unitarian Theodore Parker's view that "the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Parker, minister in Boston's 28th Congregational Society, kept a loaded pistol in his desk drawer in the event that he should be called upon to return one of the former slaves that he was charged with shielding from the law.
So, maybe we should say that God is "tough love."
As the morning's reading [from "Love's Labors Not Lost. . ." by Christopher Raible] indicated, the great Universalist motto was "God is Love." As Christians whose faith was founded upon their reading of the Bible, they believed that this doctrine was clearly indicated in the Bible, in texts such as the one on your orders of service from 1 John 4: 16, and in Jesus' summary of all "the law and the prophets" as "love to God and love to one's neighbor." Believing that God was infinite, omniscient, all-powerful, all good, all-loving, they could not believe in a God who would damn people to eternal punishment. If there was divine retribution, they said (and many doubted it), it would not be forever, but would vary depending on the nature of the crime. Eventually, God would "save" everyone, that is, return everyone to that state of perfect health and wholeness for which he or she was intended. God would forgive everyone, including you and me. And if God was all-loving, how could there be such a thing as Hell? Hell, they said, was in the here in now, in the many ways we fail to live up to God's loving desire for us. We create our own heavens and our own hells right here on earth.
This doctrine had implications for those who followed its calling. Writing in 1916, Universalist minister Harry Westbrook Reed said,
Whatever you may feel called upon to doubt do not doubt that God is love. God's character must be as good, true, and noble as the highest character of which men can conceive. God's dealings with men must correspond with what we know is right, just and merciful. There can be but one standard of character.You may be surprised, or not, to learn that the Affirmation of Faith which we share each Sunday is from the Universalist side of our heritage, not the Unitarian, though historically this church was Unitarian and not Universalist. It was composed by L. Griswold Williams in 1933, and is sometimes known as the "Covenant for Free Worship." The only change it has undergone is that "mankind" has become "humankind." It appeared in the 1937 joint Unitarian and Universalist hymnbook "Hymns of the Spirit," which was in use in this congregation as late as the early 1990's, and on the hymnbook commission of which Williams served as the Universalist chairperson. "Hymns of the Spirit" was one of many early cooperative ventures of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America, predating the merger of those two religious movements by almost a quarter of a century.
As I said, the idea that "God is Love" had implications for those who believed in it. In 1936, the Rev. Harold H. Niles wrote,
Believing in the Fatherhood and Love of God, the Universalist is moved to live as a divine being should live and to be worthy of the Infinite Love which has an interest in him. . . .Thus Universalists were involved in many reform movements, including the abolition of slavery, women's rights, prison reform, opposition to the death penalty, temperance, non-denominational education, education for women, and reform of the mental health system. Many of them, including most famously in our century Clarence Skinner, were pacifists. They took their doctrine seriously. If God was love, they reasoned, how much more must we strive to be like unto God, and to be loving and forgiving people?
It is not surprising, given this heritage, that most contemporary Unitarian Universalists support equal rights for gays and lesbians.
Hard as it still is for our more orthodox brothers and sisters to understand, Universalists acted without the prompting of the fear of Hell. They strove to live good lives because they felt it was only reasonable to do so. Though they did not always succeed, they nevertheless promulgated no pogroms, they were open before most others to promoting understanding between different religions, they stood firm in most instances for human and civil rights, they worked for peace and justice. They believed in and supported the idea of international cooperation and "One World" as embodied in such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations. They believed that there was truth to be discovered in every place and every time and every person and every religious tradition. Unfortunately, their numbers were never large, and therefore their influence was not as great as they, and we, might wish.
A couple of mid-twentieth century definitions of Universalism give a flavor of what Universalists believed, most of which, with some degenderizing, it is still possible to affirm today. The first, by Robert Rice, states that,
Universalism emphasizes:How much of that is applicable to the contemporary scene, I leave to your judgement. The second definition is by Robert Cummins, one- time President of the Universalist Church of America and father of one of my mentors in the Unitarian Universalist ministry, John Cummins:
- The joy of living HERE and NOW. Eternity is NOW and the best preparation for any future is making the best use of the present.
- The INNATE goodness of man. This is a challenge to individuals and to society to work that this goodness may be developed in all individuals.
- INDIVIDUAL responsibility. No savior can pay for our wrong doings.
- The dignity and worth of EVERY human being. There is no chosen people, but all are children of God.
- The religion of NATURALISM. God, the creative spirit of life, works not by magic and miracle, but by eternal law and order.
- UNIVERSALISM rather than partialism. We accept goodness and truth wherever we find it. In our Christianity we would not be ANY MORE EXCLUSIVE than was Jesus himself. He drew truth from the best sources available. We would do likewise.
Universalism INCULCATES the doctrine of internationalism, or better, of One World, where there may be universal law and universal peace. MAINTAINS that Jesus, far more than does Paul, gives the true genius and direction for thought and life. BELIEVES truth is indivisible, and cannot be separated into sacred and secular. PRESSES for a full life for all, demands enlightened ethical conduct. CLAIMS that God is above the narrow divisiveness of human rivalries, that He is God of the universe, hence of all mankind. AVOWS confidence in the human faculty to reason, to rationalize, and thus to discriminate. SAYS mankind is not divided. HAS no boundaries of limitation. IS the religious philosophy matching the political concept of One World.It has been argued that Universalism as a separate religious denomination waned when its central doctrines of God's love and universal salvation were absorbed into the unofficial theologies of most mainline Christian denominations. Scratch most mainline Christians, some say, and you will find a small "u" universalist. Whatever the truth of the matter, in these difficult and challenging days I still find the central tenets of Universalism, and especially the idea that God is love, to be compelling. In fact, I can only conceive of being part of a religion which affirms God's love. With my Universalist forebears, I believe that God's love will ultimately triumph, though I am by no means certain that it will do so anytime in the immediate future, though, indeed, I see ample cause to despair of it any time soon.
Nonetheless, I hold fast to the belief that the only idea of God worth my commitment is that of a God of love. If that is naive, I plead guilty as charged. May each and everyone of us find God's love active in our lives, helping us to meet and overcome, in Paul Carne's immortal words, "the many causes of despair which life inevitably brings to us all." May we continue to fight the good fight, to remain courageous and committed, and to believe in the ultimate triumph of the true and the just. I pray it for each and every one of us. So may it be.
Amen.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
