The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

UUCS Sermons
Sermon by the Reverend Richard R. Davis

In all the years I’ve been a member of Unitarian Universalist Congregations – about thirty years – I’ve been engaged in wide ranging, stimulating conversations about almost every matter under the sun.  But I don’t think I’ve ever heard any one of us ask another “Are you saved?”  If such a question was asked it would most likely be in jest.   In regard to this theological query, we have a superiority complex vis a vis [our attitude toward] conservative, fundamentalist and evangelical faiths who preach that unless you embrace a certain creed or confess a certain faith or accept Jesus Christ into your life you are damned for eternity. 

            The bizarre notion that there is an Almighty God of the universe who delegates to Satanic minions the job of running an eternal torture chamber for those who don’t pass theological muster is deeply disturbing and offensive to us.  Our Universalist forbears were among the first to reject this hellish and oppressive belief – they rightly regarded the doctrine of eternal damnation as the worst form of spiritual abuse ever inflicted upon humankind.  They endured considerable abuse and scorn for challenging this belief and were disparagingly called “no hellites.”  The underlying assumption of the conventional reward and punishment brand of theology they rejected is that unless the threat of hell is hanging over our heads, we’d all be immoral, unethical loose canons wreaking untold havoc in the world.   We don’t believe people need to be spiritually terrorized to be good.  

Both Universalists and Unitarians decisively tossed the notion of eternal damnation overboard over two centuries ago.  Good.  Naturally enough, we also tossed concern about salvation overboard since the Universalists preached that eventually everyone in God’s creation will be saved.   Yet now more than a few Unitarian Universalists have been jumping off the ship of our usual theological assumptions, diving down for a salvageable idea of salvation – one that could have meaning for us.  There has come a recognition that just because you don’t like someone else’s answer to a basic spiritual question doesn’t mean you have to toss out the question as well.   So some Unitarian Universalists are asking: “What is our saving message?”   

Taking the question of salvation off the table takes away opportunities for us to explore some spiritual depths that need to be explored if our faith is to have deep personal meaning.  To allow others - who have very limited, constrained, black and white, either/or views of salvation -  to have full possession of this rich concept is misguided.  It’s similar to how broad minded folks have been known to hand over our nation’s flag to intolerant jingoists who lack even a fundamental grasp of our nation’s constitution or the meaning of true patriotism, saying “since you wave this flag so much, it’s now associated with you.  So take it.  It’s your symbol now.”   Or consider how there is a tendency in liberal religious circles to cede sole possession of the bible to rigid fundamentalists who ignore its key message of love and compassion.   The flag, the bible and subject of salvation are too great, too wondrous, too deep to belong to any narrow minded group with their narrow agendas. 

            That said, let me ask you:  Are you saved?  I don’t mean “Are you going to heaven when you die?”  I mean “Where are you right now?   Heaven or hell or some purgatorial realm in between?”   I’ll be honest with you – I’m generally some place in between the two, although I can honestly say that my path these days more often leads me toward higher ground.  

            Let me tell you about one inspiration that has set me in the right direction.  It’s from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.    The central character of the play is Emily.  In Act I she is a child, in Act II she marries, and in Act III we learn of her tragic death during childbirth and see her in an afterlife.  After her own death Emily meets others who also have died and discovers they can witness those who are still living until such time as they are ready to let go of earth and move on to a transcendent hereafter. Emily also discovers that she can return, if she truly wishes, to witness her life again.  She can choose any day to witness herself and her loved ones yet again.  Other dead folks warn her that what she will see will be too painful, but she insists on going back to see for herself.   She chooses to witness what she imagines is one of the happiest days of her life. 

            Emily sees it all as an invisible, spiritual presence – she sees herself and her family as they go through their daily rounds.  How young her parents look, how good it is to see those she loves so dearly yet again. But then Emily is struck by the reality of the life they lived - how oblivious everyone seems to be to the depth and beauty of each moment of life.  She comments:  “I never realized how in the dark live persons are. From morning till night, that’s all they are – troubled.”  She sees herself and her family all sitting together and pleads, with a voice no one can hear:  “But, just for a moment now we’re all together.  Mama, just for a moment we’re happy.   Let’s look at one another.”  But this plea from beyond the grave cannot be heard in the land of the living.   

            Finally, after seeing a series of missed opportunities for love and happiness in each rich moment of life she wails out in a voice the living cannot hear: “I can’t. I can’t go on. Oh! Oh! It goes so fast.  We don’t have time to look at one another.  I didn’t realize.  So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.  But first:  Wait!  Good-by.  Good-by to the world.  Good-by Grover’s Corners .. Mama and Papa.  Good-by to clocks ticking.. and Mama’s sunflowers.  And food and coffee.  Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Emily asks:  “Do any human being ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute? 

And the answer comes:  “No.  Saints and poets, maybe they do some. 

Another now dead character chimes in:  “Yes, now you know.  Now you know!  That’s what it was to be alive.  To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you…To spend and waste time as though you had a million years.  To be always at the mercy of some self centered passion, or another.  Now you know.”

It’s a very poignant and moving play – a true American classic.   But what, you may wonder, has this got to do with salvation?  After all, doesn’t salvation only have to do with the afterlife?  Not necessarily. In fact, salvation is properly concerned with the here and now.   The future is a mental construct – often a useful one, to be sure, but a dangerous one, too – excessive concern with the future sucks all the life out of the present.  Really, the time is always NOW.  What time is it?  NOW.   It’s always NOW.  So salvation – the concern for spiritual health and wholeness – should focus on the only time there is:  NOW. 

From her unique vantage point Emily can see how everyone living can come to such health and wholeness if they will be truly present, aware of each rich moment of life, not worrying and fretting and being distracted and snared by private cares and obsessions.  She can see how, if folks would only come out of their protective shells of separateness to enter into the commonwealth of being, they would be saved into a meaningful life. 

Henry David Thoreau clearly understood this and issued this forthright challenge:   “Take time by the forelock.  Now or never!  You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.  Fools stand on their islands of opportunities and look toward another land.  There is no other land; there is no other life but this…Take any other course but this and life will be a succession of regrets.

This admonition is nothing you and I haven’t heard before, but it bears repeating.   Yet Thoreau goes on to say “One of little faith looks for his rewards and punishments to the next world.”  The conventional understanding is that it is people of greatest faith who believe in things unseen, who look to that which lies beyond the grave.  But Thoreau sees more clearly, I think.  Those who have a deeper, truer faith trust in life now, in the present.  They seek to find their eternity NOW, not in some future hereafter. 

There’s yet another angle to this that veers off the path of conventional understanding.  Generally, salvation involves a conversion to a set of theological beliefs and creeds.   For example, someone recently told me that a young relative had spoken to a dying Aunt telling her that since she had not accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior she would not go to heaven.  Other indignant members of the family who took issue with this had to restrain themselves from sending this young fellow to his final reward on the spot.  But if salvation is concerned with the here and now, what is called for is not conversion but rather an awakening – an awakening to the depth and grandeur of life now - not changing who we are but awakening to who we really are. 

Of course the awakening to who we are may well involve a moral and behavioral conversion from ways of living that are harmful.  Consider the 18^th Century British slave trader John Newton.  He had an awakening.  He awakened to the fact that he was a child of God.  Then he awakened to the fact the blacks he bought, sold and transported into life long bondage were also children of God.  After this amazing awakening, he became an ardent foe of the slave trade and wrote a hymn about his moral awakening – you may be familiar with it:  Amazing Grace.   It’s a hymn about salvation both in this life and in the life to come. 

John Newton truly awakened and was saved.  He was saved from the hell of monstrous cruelty and his sinful indifference to the well being of others.  He was saved by an Amazing Grace that awakened him to the nature of his higher self and the higher self of others.  He became aware of his connection with the sacred depths of life, of all creation. 

 Our salvation is generally not as dramatic and instantaneous.  Mostly it is an ongoing, gradual process.  The road to salvation takes us on a deep inward journey and on a far reaching outward journey.  Ours is a free faith tradition so I cannot prescribe the particularities of the inward and outward paths you should take.  But I can share two gems of timeless wisdom – wisdom that is not original with me, but increasingly wisdom that guides me in my day to day life.  Wisdom that I believe is essential to salvation.

The first gem of wisdom pertains to our inward journey toward salvation.  This same wisdom has been expressed by, among others, the Buddha, the Roman Stoic Marcus Aerelius, Shakespeare, the English poet John Milton and William Ellery Channing, often called the father of American Unitarianism.  As Milton put it:  “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.”  

 Every day of our lives, we choose –  either to dig ourselves, spade full by spade full, deeper into a pit of hell – that realm of alienation, isolation and rage.  When we harbor ill will, nurture an anger that grows into hatred, when we bow down to the god of greed and when we heed the commands of the spirits of fear, anxiety and despair – we dig further into that hellish pit.   Or we can choose to ascend to a loftier place as we choose a path of trust in life, in courage, hope and growth, we can embrace feelings of boundless goodwill and compassion and let go of the harmful thoughts and feelings that ill serve us or others.   Every day that basic choice is ours – whether to create an in our minds a heaven or a hell.

But the journey to salvation is not a solitary quest, as this second gem of wisdom confirms.  It comes to us through all the major faith traditions, and was memorably embodied by Jesus and Gandhi. As a Taoist text puts it:  “Therefore the Sage chooses to be last.  And comes to dwell in the foremost place.”   It is a spiritual paradox.  As you give, you receive.  Empty yourself and you will be filled.  As you offer yourself for the good of the whole – in small acts of kindness and great works of peace and justice - goodness and hope and love fills your heart.  As you work to save others - forgetting for a time your own narrow worries, fears, and concerns  - you save yourself.  

Salvation is not about striking some private bargain with God to save your own spiritual skin.  It is our common endeavor, an interdependent matter.  Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this.  He said:  “Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”    

            So, to turn the question I posed to you earlier back upon myself:  Am I saved?  As a Universalist who believes in universal salvation I say “Yes, ultimately I am.”   Yet I cannot be saved until and unless I work also to save you and others, to save our world, to save our planet and until you do the same.   Ultimately, the divisions between us are delusory.   We are part of one interdependent reality, and when we clearly see that, we shall be saved.