Romans 7:15-25
Today’s Unitarian Universalist movement in America is diverse, a mixture of individuals from different faiths and no faith, and sometimes a compromise for an interfaith marriage. Much like the United Church of Christ, members are bound together by a personal commitment to a local congregation, and in the UUA, to a core set of Seven Principles, crazy ideas like “the inherent worth and dignity of all people” and “the democratic process” in decision-making.
There are many parallels and connections. Unitarian Universalism, like the UCC, is the result of a merger between different theological traditions. The Unitarian part of their heritage is partially the result of a schism within Congregationalism, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address.” Historically, many New England towns had a First Parish and a First Church, one now part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the other now part of the United Church of Christ, all depending on who won in that particular town, for the church building, silver, and graveyard were at stake, not to mention souls and damnation, which were secondary to the property, of course.
We have so much in common with Unitarian Universalists, share so much in our worldview, that there are churches that belong to both denominations. This is possible mostly because folks have mellowed, and when I say folks, I mean our Puritanical Congregationalist heritage, and some of the more rabid Atheist Humanists that dominated the UUA a half century ago.
But I’d like to turn to the other half of the Unitarian Universalist heritage, and to a modern day schism of sorts.
We’ll begin in the Biblical Age, as we do. The Israelite faith did not originally include a notion of life after death. Fidelity, pleasing God, resulted in blessings in this life. Except that didn’t always happen. Sometimes bad things happened to good people, and vis-a-versa, leading the ancient theologians to one of two strategies. One was to blame the victim. If bad things are happening to you, you must not be all that good. We see this a lot in the ancient prophets. The Assyrians are invading because of injustice, or because the Northern Kingdom wasn’t worshipping properly. This primitive theology of blessings and curses in this world is at the heart of today’s Prosperity Gospel heresy, co-mingled with the heresy of Fundamentalism.
The second strategy was the growing belief that if what we might think of as karma didn’t play out in this life, then there must be a future life, where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished.
The latter approach, the belief in life after death, really took off after the return from the Babylonian Captivity, and is fully developed by the time of Jesus. This belief, and sometimes the lack of this belief, shows up repeatedly in the gospels, in the teachings and promises of Jesus, in trick questions like who will the widow be married to in the afterlife.
There is a heaven in the gospels, “my Father’s house,” and a hell, albeit with different names and subtle variations, a theological work-in-progress further jumbled up in translation, so we end up with Sheol, Hell, and Hades, this last where the rich man who ignored the poor man at his gate ends up. Jesus also refers to Gehenna, a valley known as a cursed place because child sacrifice was practiced there up until at least the time of Jeremiah, despite the claims of the Abraham and Isaac story.
Of course, Christianity was and is diverse, chaotic, evolving, and gets warped by the gravity of other cultural practices, including the Greek philosophical tradition that was so powerful in that age. Humans projected human-like traits onto God throughout the Biblical Age, sometimes casting this Holy Mystery as violent and co-dependent, sometimes as an eternal spouse or parent who is always forgiving and pursuing the best for their creation.
The twisted rabbit hole of Jesus meets Plato reaches a sort of crescendo in our own tradition, with the Swiss Reform theologian Jean Calvin. The logic goes like this. God knows everything. Therefore, God already knows who is going to to be saved, and who will be damned. Therefore, God has decided in advance who is going to be saved and who is going to be damned. This is the theology of election, of predestination.
Now, well-intentioned Calvinists will try to soften this, but in the end, it comes to this: predestination is the belief that God creates some humans willing that they know heavenly bliss, and creates some humans willing that they suffer eternal torment. And those humans have zero say in the matter.
What sort of God is that? But this is what happens when humans try to fit God into the box of human understanding. God is not a philosophical concept, and their unchanging omnipotent God is no god at all, at least not one who is living, for living means change and growth and vulnerability.
Our God, in order to be in a relationship with Creation and creatures, must be alive, God who can be a parent, loving, frustrated, sometimes weeping.
The Universalism of the Unitarian Universalist tradition was a rejection of Calvinist predestination. It was the simple claim that if God was a God of Love, then salvation must be universally available. All could potentially be saved. Note that it did not claim that all would be saved, just that it had to be a possibility.
Of course, we still had the problem of hell itself, and especially the idea that since Jesus said he was “the way, the truth, and the life,” everyone ever born who wasn’t a Christian was going to hell. Though maybe not Israelites before Jesus. And maybe not unbaptized babies. They could go to Limbo, neither heaven nor hell. But definitely Buddhists.
And then humans being humans, they had to figure out how to monetize salvation, so you got purgatory. But that is an insanity for another day.
Now let’s go back to that damned Buddhist. So by conservative Christian standards, someone born into a Buddhist family who practices compassion, serves their community, is faithful in marriage, doesn’t even cheat at mahjong, that good Buddhist is going to burn in hell.
What sort of God is that?
Rob Bell, an American Evangelical mega-church pastor with thousands of worshippers, came to the same conclusion. In his 2011 book “Love Wins” Bell wrestled with but did not completely reject the idea of hell, flirted with the idea of universalism, or at least left room for doubt.
He was not the first to wrestle with limited salvation. As we heard in our first reading this morning, there have always been Christians who had their doubts about hell, even Isaac of Nineveh in the 7th century. There has never ever been one single form of Christianity, not even when Jesus still had sandals on the ground.
Of course, American Evangelicals being American Evangelicals, the idea that everyone else isn’t going to burn in hell was offensive, so thousands left Rob Bell’s church, leading him to leave his church. He still writes, does podcasts, but he is no longer on lists of most influential people. And then he came out as welcoming and affirming the LGBTQI+ community, so, you know, he might as well be dead. And in hell. Which is where American Evangelicals expect him to go.
Now, to be honest, I’m not that interested in life after death. God is good right now. Love and transcendence and beauty are right here. Love is needed right now, and there are broken people that need to be loved back to life right now. I’ll leave the eternal stuff to God, and the God I love and follow is not a giant human in the sky, and definitely doesn’t fit in some little theological box.
I also want to be extremely clear that the Bible is a human book and Christianity is a human construction. That isn’t to say there is no God, that people who encountered Jesus didn’t experience him as a presence of the holy, experienced what they believed were miracles, were healed. Its just that we are finite, limited, in a context. Our interpretations of the holy are always imperfect.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is pretty amazing. It is our cultural context, and there are fundamental truths there. But there is also some primitive stuff coded in there, stuff we ignore, stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore.
A God who creates humans as wholly unique and apart from all other living things on the planet doesn’t make sense anymore. A God who places a landmine, a forbidden tree, in the middle of a magic garden, just waiting to see if humans will blow up doesn’t make sense anymore. A God who is both loving and relational and at the very same time predestines some humans to eternal torment doesn’t make sense anymore. A God who saves Molly from cancer because she got enough get well cards and prayers, but damns Enrique to a painful death does not make sense anymore.
You can’t preach your way around old nonsensical theologies. And ignoring them is just another type of lie.
The force I call God, first-source and holy mystery, is found in evolution, and in the results of our evolution as a species, in this bizarre thing called love, in transcendence and creativity. We sin when we choose anger, hatred, and fear, when we make the decision to reject spiritual outwardness for bodily inwardness. But that is on us. That isn’t God.
What sort of God forgives? What sort of God calls each and every one to fullness of life and compassionate community? Our God, a God who lives and loves, who people experienced in an un-credentialed rabbi from Nazareth, and who is with us as Spirit as we live into radical restorative justice, and sing the songs of creation and grace. Amen.