Our Theological House:
Sin and Salvation

A sermon written to be delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), December 10, 2006, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie. This sermon is the fourth in a series called “Our Theological House.” The metaphor of a theological house comes from a series of lectures by the Rev. Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley California. (Starr King is one of our two Unitarian Universalist seminaries.) You will find a fuller description of Rev. Parker’s thoughts in the first sermon of the series, “Our Theological House: A Tour of the House,” which is on our congregational Web site at this URL.

Has the spirit of Christmas caught you yet? Do you find that your precious free time is spent shopping, decorating, shopping, addressing Christmas cards, shopping, baking, taking the kids to see Santa? And, oh yes, shopping? Perhaps in keeping with the “true spirit of Christmas,” your family is making some special gifts to and Angel Tree Child or Toys for Tots or a favorite charity.

We are just a couple of weeks away from the Big Day, and you might wonder why your minister has chosen this particular Sunday to speak to you on the topics of sin and salvation. Why choose such a grim and gloomy subject when all the carols in the supermarkets and malls are singing “Joy the to World”? Because, dear friends, despite what the commercials on TV and the newspaper ads tell us, sin and salvation is the true reason for the season.

The traditional Christian understanding of Christmas is that Jesus, as God incarnate, come down to earth to do what we human beings could not do for ourselves — break the bonds of sin that were forged when Adam and Eve violated God’s admonition not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Their violation was the first sin that destroyed the paradise God had created for all creatures. This act of rebellion doomed every human being to the eternal torments of hell. Try as we might, we sinners cannot overcome our fate, and so God sent Jesus to do the work of reconciliation on our behalf.

This message is found in the traditional words of many of the Christmas carols that we love to sing — even though we’d find the theology totally unacceptable and repugnant any other time of the year. Listen to a couple of lines from old favorites:

O holy Child of Bethlehem! Descend to us we pray. Cast our sin and enter in, Be born in us today!

Hark the Herald Angels Sing! Glory to the newborn King!

Peace on earth and mercy mild. God and sinner reconciled!

Our modern Unitarian Universalist understanding of sin and salvation doesn’t resonate with these words. But our rejection of this does not mean that we reject the concepts of sin or salvation. Both our branches our Unitarian Universalist heritage addressed these issues in ways that offer encouragement and hope to us today as we try to answer the inevitable questions that we struggle with when we try to understand the hurtful and sometimes things that human beings do to one another, to other living beings, and to our planet.

I’ll begin with the Universalist side of the family. John Murray was the first Universalist preacher in America of real prominence. He was an Englishman and had been ordained as a Methodist minister. He was influenced by the heretical teachings of James Relly, a defrocked Methodist minister. Relly had been an important and powerful Calvinist preacher who gradually began to struggle with the conflicting ideas of free will and the teaching that we are saved only through God’s grace. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that if sin were the lot of humanity as a result of their connection with Adam, then salvation was the gift to all humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The purpose of the Church was not to terrify people with images of damnation, but to proclaim the gift of God’s love and mercy: salvation for all through Jesus. He believed that if people were aware of this gift, they would rejoice in it, strive to be moral and just out of their own love for God, and share the good news with others. Murray became one of Relly’s more ardent followers, and was also defrocked by the Methodists hierarchy.

This was just the beginning of a tragic period in Murray’s life. His wife and child died, he was sent to debtor’s prison, and in despair he decided to start a new life. In 17970 Murray set off for America with a plan to bury himself and his grief in the wilderness. Instead, his faith was rekindled, and he brought the message of God’s universal mercy and love for all to New England.

Critics complained that Murray’s theology was nothing more than what we might call a “get out of jail free” card. But this is not so. Murray taught that sin was still a serious matter and all who sinned would face judgment and punishment for their deeds. Murray believed in the doctrine of the Trinity and that Jesus’ crucifixion was an essential part of the work of salvation. But his God was not a harsh, angry, vengeful God who had predetermined the fate of every human soul, as the Calvinists taught. Once the sinner realized the gravity of his or her misdeeds, God’s boundless love would rescue the now-clean soul and bring it into the eternal glory of heaven. Murray said that he offered hope, not hell, to all people, and that his message would eventually win the hearts and minds of all people.

Later Universalists would alter certain aspects of Murray’s teachings, but the optimistic view of human nature and of the nature of God would be hallmarks of Universalism right up to the present time.

Universalists held a strong conviction that their love for God and for their neighbor must be manifested in this world. Inspired by the teachings of Jesus, they reached out to the poor and the oppressed, providing educational opportunities for men and women. They were devoted to prison reform, and they stood strongly against the death penalty as an interference with God’s desire to transform even those who turned from love and mercy and caused pain and suffering to others. They also opposed slavery and the denial of equal rights to women. They took these unpopular positions as an expression of their love to God and love to fellow man and woman out of gratitude for the gift of salvation for all. If there is such a thing as hell, it is a human creation brought about by greed, fear, violence, and hatred. The antidote is not divine intervention, but human love, self-giving, and understanding.

The Universalist conviction of the goodness of God is countered by the Unitarian sense of the goodness of humankind. They also believed that human beings had the ability to affect their salvation through their own actions. Heaven and Hell were real, but God did not predetermine the fate of a human soul. We could — and should — act to affect our own salvation.

We’ll dig into this a more deeply in a minute, but first I want to tell you a story about William Ellery Channing and a very early experience that put him on the road to Unitarianism. He was fairly young — nine or ten years old — when his father took him to church one Sunday. The sermon was the typical fire-and-brimstone Calvinist message of the depravity of human nature and the wrath of God. The boy was terrified by the message, and his conviction that the preacher’s words were true was confirmed when his father commented to a fellow parishioner, “Sound preaching that!”

But his fear soon gave way to doubt. Channing noticed that his father whistled on the way home, and after enjoying his Sunday dinner, sat down to read. There was nothing in his father’s demeanor that indicated that he was the least bit troubled by the message he’d heard in church. Suddenly the boy realized that his father didn’t believe the teaching he’d heard that morning.

Young Channing was stunned, and he began to question the theology that he heard in sermons and read in religious tracts. Doubt took hold, and his life was never the same again. His personal theology evolved until he found himself most comfortable with a heretical position called Unitarianism, that emphasized the moral goodness of God and the humanity of Jesus. He also held to an unusual understanding of human nature.

Channing believed that every human being had something of the nature and goodness of God within. This “divine seed” of God’s nature was carried within the soul — so each one of us carries the image of God within. This meant that every person bore certain divine faculties that could be called upon to help us as we did the work of developing our character and talents.

Channing identified the divine faculties of the soul as reason, emotion (especially those feelings that created relationships among people), imagination, religious sentiments or an awareness of the presence of the holy, the ability to create and make things, our five senses and the ability to enjoy them, appreciation of the beautiful, and the moral conscience that allows us to inwardly know the good.

Unlike other theologians of his time, Channing was not a dualist. He did not believe that the flesh was the source of sinfulness while the spirit was the source of goodness. He said that we had to know life and know ourselves if we would know the divine. Our work was to explore and develop the faculties of our soul. As we did this, we would come to experience the unfolding and growing incarnation of God within ourselves. This was salvation, but it was not simply self-serving or self-glorifying. It was one part of preparation for service to the world. Unitarians too believed that one’s faith must be expressed in the arena of the larger world.

Channing’s fundamental spiritual discipline was education and he believed that everything we do is a form of education. Reading and study are important, but so are physical activity, relationships and social encounters, creative activities, religious inquiry and devotion.

He had a unique and liberal understanding of formal religious education for children and adults. Channing claimed that the purpose of religious education was not to impose doctrines or creeds upon the mind, but to awaken the soul and stir up the faculties so that they would begin to grow like seeds in a garden. He believed that the human soul is potentially perfectible and that we see this potential fulfilled in the example of Jesus perfection. This is the unique and saving gift the Jesus offers to us, and it is the reason we should revere him.

The hard work of developing abilities and character is done bit-by-bit over time. Channing did not believe salvation was something that came all at once in an overpowering emotion laden experience. Progress happened slowly and gradually as we learned the lessons our lives had to teach.

But of course, not every person would naturally take this path. And to refuse to undertake this disciplined and difficult work was to miss the great works of human life. Channing understood that many people would choose a less rigorous life, not because they were inherently wicked or depraved, but out of selfishness, greed, sloth or indifference to the health of the soul.

Sin, which Channing defined as “voluntary wrong-doing,” was the worst of all evils and put the wrong-doer in peril of divine judgment. To do wrong willingly put the sinner in terrible danger. He warned that God’s love was not based on tender sentimental feelings, and that forgiveness was not an easy matter. Hell existed, not on this earth as some claimed but in the afterlife. Those who chose to do evil would suffer the torments of hell, though perhaps not for all eternity. Channing believed that the guilt of any individual could only be in proportion to his or her nature and powers. We are all limited beings, and so our punishment would be equal to our wrongs. The moral perfection of God would make the punishment fit the sin.

Most of us today do not believe that our voluntary wrongdoing offends a divine being who, like Santa Claus, keeps a record all our lives of what’s naughty or nice. We are more likely to understand sin in terms of harm done to others, either to individuals or particular groups of people who experience hurtful or dehumanizing acts because of who they are. The horrific situation in Darfur comes to my mind, or the issue of racism.

Like our Universalist and Unitarian forebears we too have an optimistic view of human nature, and we tend to a naturalistic understanding of death. Despite our more “enlightened” views, we too still struggle with the problems of human failings and wrongdoing as well as the suffering caused by human behavior. We have a very human need to maintain hope of a future that is more just and peaceful, and the wish to feel that our brief lives have some meaning. So how might a modern UU understand these theological issues?

Let’s start with the idea of sin.

Most of us don’t understand sin as the violation of some rule that was given to us by a supreme bring. We are more likely to think of sin as the missing of the mark set by human ethics and by our own values. The cause of sin is not our depraved nature, but our selfishness or greed or hatred and fear. We might be blind to the hurtful consequences of our actions or words. Worse, we may refuse to respond when we become aware of the pain we cause, claiming that we are motivated by our own painful past or our own needs. But we know that we all fall short and miss the mark over and over again. The remedy for our failings is to learn from what we’ve done, acknowledge our responsibility, forgive ourselves and others, and try to avoid falling into the same behavior the next time. If we are serious about improving our character and righting our wrongs, we will take this spiritual discipline seriously and practice it faithfully over and over and over. We cannot avoid causing hurt to others or to the planet, but we can become more aware and try to make amends and live with greater consciousness of the consequences of our words and deeds. And this greater consciousness is a part of the work of salvation.

To my way of thinking, salvation is the work of healing our broken and dysfunctional aspects, and the awakening and strengthening of those inner drives for wholeness, justice, compassion, and joy. We learn to do this first for ourselves, then with those we love, and then as a ministry to the larger world. This probably sounds like hard work — and it is. But it is our path to salvation, and through this practice we create a fuller stronger self along with a life of purpose and love.

I believe that salvation is available to us in the here and now, not in some realm that we will inhabit after death. I believe that while we must take on this work ourselves, there are unbidden events, or helpful and unexpected words that come at just the right moment, or relationships with others that heal us and offer encouragement. Some would call these moments of unexpected assistance “signs of grace” or perhaps simply happy coincidences. Whatever you call them, I hope you take hold of these gifts from the hand of life and use them!

This work of salvation is urgent. Not because we fear the hell that awaits us after death, but because, as my colleague Dennis Daniels puts it,

“This is the one life we have been given, the one life we know we can shape. This is the world where we must do our work...this is where we bump into god or holiness or meaning...THIS IS IT, here...now...today!”

Or to quote Edward Markum, the author of the words to one of our hymns,

“Here on the paths of every day, here on the common human way, is all the stuff the gods would take, to build a heaven, to mold and make New Edens, ours is the task sublime to build eternity in time.”

May it be so.

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