Stand On These Heights, Catch This Vision, Sing This Song
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- Created on Sunday, 03 October 2010 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
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Originally preached on March 26, 2006
When I began work twenty-five years ago at the headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association on Beacon Street in Boston, riding the elevator up to the top floor, there were three dates engraved on the floor of that elevator: 1793, 1825, and 1961. 1793, for the first organization (term used loosely) of the Universalist Church of America; 1825, for the organization of the American Unitarian Association; and 1961, for the date of the merger of the two. We are in our fiftieth year of this merger, worth celebrating all year, culminating in the spring with Peter Morales, the President of the U.U.A., preaching here in April, and with a very special event in May.
I have the honor of announcing today the beginning of a special endowment, the Legacy Fund for Ministerial Interns, the earnings of this fund to be applied toward the ongoing support of ministerial internships here at First Parish. When I consider my long ministry here with you, I am most proud of the ministries that have begun here among us: begun in these internships and then gone on to Yarmouth, Maine, Brewster, Massachusetts, Cincinnati, Rockport, Massachusetts, West Hartford, Connecticut, Hartland, Vermont, Amherst, Massachusetts, Rochester, New York, Albuquerque, the Assistant and Associate Ministers who have gone on to serve elsewhere, Karen, Beth, Nancy, Adele, and those in this congregation who have followed their own call to ministry, Becky, Jim, Diane, Cricket, Dan, to name only a few, and most recently Lissa Gundlach. We intend to celebrate all of this on May 8th and expect to have some of these former interns and others here with us.
But it is early October, the beginning of our golden anniversary, and it is the faith of Universalism that I lift up today, half of what you signed up for when you signed the book here, what came with Unitarianism in the package you bought. Jenny will follow in three weeks with the Unitarian side of the family. I came to Unitarian Universalism through the Universalist gate. It was the church of my mother and of her family on both sides for generations before her, there on the back roads of western Maine, these rural crossroads where Universalism thrived throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the rocky soil of Yankee independence. I came to know Universalism through these relatives of mine, the All Souls Universalist Church of Oakland, Maine, where I worshipped with my grandmother. The dominant symbol of that church in my memory was the globe, the world, this earth, all souls.
And I served a Universalist Church in Bangor, Maine from 1976 to 1985, a wonderful congregation of dear people who had, for the most part, successfully fended off the 1961 merger with the Unitarians, contributing the barest minimum to keep an affiliation with the Unitarian Universalist Association but repeatedly hiring Congregationalist ministers like me. To their astonishment and mine, I became a Unitarian Universalist minister midway through my tenure there, and this congregation came along with me, finally merging fourteen years ago with the struggling Unitarian Church across town.
David Johnson writes that “Universalism has many roots, one of its oldest [is found] in the ferment of the ‘Radical Reformation’… a movement of sensitive, thoughtful, learned and common people who shared the conviction that faith was a direct and individual experience… a personal experience of holiness not mediated or dictated by any church, priest or power.” Listen to the words from Quillen Shinn that Craig read earlier, this personal, almost romantic experience of holiness in flowers, stars, and breezes, in sorrow and pain, hope, sympathy and remorse. These are all personal experiences, and this was surely the faith of my forebears. Faith was an individual experience within a closely-knit community.
It was in response to Calvinism and the belief that only an elect few would be saved, a predetermined few; it was in response to a Calvinist orthodoxy of the eighteenth century (and now I am quoting David Johnson again) an orthodoxy “that condemned unbaptized infants and children to an eternity of torment, labeled good and honorable folk of other faiths God-despising heretics, and fomented bitter religious warfare in towns, churches, and even families”; it was in response to this theological climate of despair that one John Murray brought to the American shore a message of hope.
There in the late eighteenth century, first in New Jersey, then spreading to Pennsylvania, and then here to the First Universalist Church in America, to Gloucester, Massachusetts, John Murray preached the heresy of God’s unconditional love for us all. “Go out into the highways and byways of America, your new country,” he wrote. “Give the people, blanketed with a decaying crumbling Calvinism, some of your new vision. You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”
These courageous early Universalist preachers returned to the same Biblical texts that the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards was using and found in the teachings of Jesus a generous and loving God. John Murray, Hosea Ballou, Olympia Brown, Quillen Shinn, all these Universalist preachers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found a God who could actually love the world and its people. (Do you hear in this debate the same back and forth we hear today from religious leaders and self-righteous politicians who would tell us who God loves and who God does not? But don’t get me started.)
Love will triumph, these early Universalists said. The Kingdom of God is surely found here on earth. And the bells rang from the Universalist church steeples, “no hell. No hell. No hell.” There was a Universalist congregation here in Concord from 1838 to 1860, standing today as the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, right across Monument Square, dedicated by Hosea Ballou himself in 1840. Their founding minister was Addison Fay, ordained and installed in 1842.
Eleanor Billings says Fay was “strong-minded and outspoken.” She tells the story of “two gentlemen who were financial pillars in his parish and deeply engaged in the liquor business, [who] called to remonstrate with him for preaching on the subject of temperance. ‘Gentlemen,’ he replied, ‘I do not know that I am above the weaknesses of other people, and if my salary were fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars, considering your position, perhaps I should be tempted to hold my tongue; but on four hundred and fifty dollars, I think I can afford to keep a conscience.’”
It is said that Universalists believed God is too good to damn us, while Unitarians believed we were too good to be damned. While Calvinism had proclaimed (as do orthodoxies of any shape in any age) that those of other faiths are heretics, the Universalists were saying that “being or becoming Christian was not essential to… salvation.” Most Universalists, as those I served in Bangor, were Christian, but Christians in the sense of living out the teachings of Jesus. But they did not hold themselves above the teachings of other religions.
Universalists were often asked what they believed, where they stood. “The only true answer,” they replied, “is that we do not stand at all; we move.” As with my grandmother and her family, the Universalists were mostly rural, fiercely independent, uncomplicated folk, who wanted to govern their own churches and find there a simple message of God as love, to be accepted and not frightened, to be forgiven and not damned, to believe that heaven and hell are as much a part of this world as the next.
To be accepted, and to accept others – that was the point. They believed that the gate to the Divine Mysteries is as wide as the Mysteries themselves. It is not a narrow gate. It is a belief that comes right up against the Gospel of John and the statement attributed to Jesus that “no one comes to the Father but by me.” “We believe in God as love,” the Universalists said in 1935, “and in the authority of truth, known or to be known… and in the power of men and women to overcome evil.” This is what the Beloved Community must be like, the Kingdom of God must be like, they said, and this is something quite different than imagining yourself out in the darkness looking through the windows at a party to which you were not invited.
We proclaim a wider gate. We celebrate Divali with our Hindu brothers and sisters, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Hanukah and Passover with our Jewish brothers and sisters, Christmas and Easter with our Christian brothers and sisters; we have had an Imam here in years past, calling us to Muslim prayer; we have bathed the baby Buddha; visitors from the Rissho Kosei-kai visit our meetinghouse regularly; we celebrate the moon and the seasons and the earth itself. The gate to the Divine is a wide gate, we say.
And we teach the same to our children: our seventh graders through Neighboring Faith visits throughout the area; a curriculum that proclaims a greater understanding of the religious beliefs that people hold in this world and a commitment to an understanding of their culture and their traditions. The gate is a wide one. Universalism, by the early twentieth century, had come to be seen as “a faith broader than Christianity,” finding truth and hope and courage in many places, in many times and circumstances. Universalists believed that their mission was not to save people from damnation but rather to persuade people that they were already within the province of a holy love. There was nothing to save because nothing was lost. Universalists believed that there was hope in the eventual outcome of the struggles of this world, a struggle we all share, a struggle toward whatever wholeness might mean for us, whatever compassion might mean, whatever inclusion might mean.
And because the Universalists saw themselves as the announcers of God’s love, they were right in the “forefront of efforts to improve the human lot,” to make their own heaven on earth. The ordination of women, women’s suffrage, abolitionism, educational reform, separation of church and state, free speech, multicultural diversity, and more – the Universalists could have justifiable pride in the accomplishments their members made to the fabric of American society. It is this religion of the heart that the Universalists brought to the merger with the Unitarians in 1961.
Bill Schulz has written of the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism and the strength of that relationship. “When Unitarianism,” he wrote, “declared that human beings can understand creation, can make sense of it, can affect the future, when Unitarianism taught this, it was beckoning us to keep our eyes fixed upon the Golden City… For more than four hundred years, our Unitarian tradition has called us to keep our eyes fixed on the horizon. Unitarianism is the religion of those who keep their eyes open,” of those who see the Golden City just there, ahead of us.
And then, Bill says, when Universalism “proclaimed the universal love of God, the availability of grace to every one of us, it was saying that if we never reach the Golden City, if we look around at where we are standing now, we will find it blessed. Unitarianism asks us to save the world,” Bill says. “Universalism asks us just to love it. Put those two faiths together, Unitarian power and Universalist grace, and you create a combination that can transform existence. Ground them in a heritage and embody them in a church and you can sustain that faith across the centuries.”
This Universalist faith HAS been sustained across the centuries, and when I remember my grandmother, I am proud of the Universalist blood within me, this passion to love the world as it is, joined with a vision for the world as it might be. Our task in this generation is to remember this heritage, to keep open the gate and to own the power we have to overcome evil, one love at a time.