“If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.”
If we agree in love, no disagreement can do us any harm.
Hosea Ballou was one of the founders of American Universalism. In the early years of the 1800’s, Ballou traveled on horseback to preach at four congregations in southern Vermont and New Hampshire. He was a circuit rider.
A story is told that he encountered a Baptist minister on the road and they fell to talking theology. The Baptist questioned Ballou’s Universalism. “Well, if I were a Universalist,” said the Baptist, “I could beat you, steal your horse and all your belongings…and I wouldn’t worry a moment about going to hell.”
Ballou responded: “That’s right. But if you were a Universalist…that thought would never cross your mind.”
The early Universalists believed in the abundance of God’s love…present for all of us, even the worst of us, all of the time.
And they believed in conversion…
Stealing Ballou’s horse would not have entered that Baptist’s mind, if he had a conversion and become convinced of the abundance of love that the Universalists knew.
From its inception and at its heart, our Universalist tradition believe in abundant life…not life limited by scarcity.
The possibility of abundant life.
This week, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, met by stiff and popular resistance. The invasion actually began 8 years ago with the taking of Crimea. Thousands have already died. Many thousands more almost certainly will.
We know that Vladimir Putin is trying to re-create the Russian Empire. He speaks of Catherine the Great…and justifies the carnage by the need to reunite the Russian peoples…the Russian Volk…
The enterprise is ethnic empire.
I did not plan this sermon with Russian empire on my mind…
But if there ever was a good time to reflect on the power of love versus the love of power… and the possibility of grounding our lives in abundance rather than scarcity…
Well, the events of these days call out for that sermon.
I’m no expert on Eastern Europe. And Ukraine does feel like it is half a world away…because it is. This war feels distant.
And yet, I feel and perhaps you do, that there is importance in this tragic drama that brings this closer to where we live.
Some of us have family connections or friends from that part of the world.
Some of us hear resonances from 1939…when talk of the German Volk led to the genocide of Jews and queer folks and gypsies and others who were not “racially pure. That brings it home for some of us.
Others, in my generation, hear Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling and remember the Cold War years when we learned to duck under our desks in school whenever the warning sirens were tested…a time when fear was never far from our lives.
And some of us listen to a former US president and his acolytes praising Putin and realize that the invasion of Ukraine grows out of the same soil as the assault on truth and diversity, the same soil as the petrochemical economy, the same soil as the greed and privilege that threaten our future here at home.
The invasion of Ukraine raises questions that matter to all of us, even if the current struggle feels far away. Questions of how we see the world and of what kind of world we want to inhabit.
Is abundant life even possible to imagine or are we so wedded to scarcity that we will insist on living in a world of winners and losers until we all lose in the end?
There is so much more at stake here than just higher prices at the gas pump.
Ethelred Brown, in our Responsive Reading, recognized the weight of the world on our spirits:
“Our courage fails, our spirits droop [and] our faith trembles,” he wrote. We are tempted to “bow our heads in despair.”
There is so much evidence in the world that the power of love will be overcome. I feel that pull to despair about the future.
And I know that many of you do as well…
But there is a better way. The story we are living does not need to end with despair.
Ethelred Brown was a Jamaican who discovered Unitarianism and attended Meadville Theological School, the first black man to become a Unitarian minister. After calling two Unitarian congregations together in Jamaica, in 1920 he immigrated to New York where he founded a store front church…in Harlem…
It was called the Community Church of Harlem, not the Unitarian Church of Harlem… because the leaders of the American Unitarian Association would not allow him to use the Unitarian name…
The AUA gave him very modest and grudging support. Resources were just too scarce…not enough…never enough to support a Black minister serving an integrated congregation of folks who knew they needed a spirit of abundant love to see them through. Money and goodwill were just too scarce.
Brown was finally removed from Unitarian fellowship in 1929. His populism and his socialism and his race were too much for the AUA.
We can lament that decision, but here is the question I would pose…that goes beyond lamentation.
What might Unitarian Universalism look like today if our faith had been represented in NYC not just by cathedral congregations on Lexington Ave. and Central Park West and Park Ave….but also by a thriving congregation in Harlem? How might our religious culture have developed differently?
What shape might our spiritual life have taken if our faith had been willing to take a different path…a path grounded in abundance and hope?
Despair is not an unreasonable response to the evidence of the world. If you look at the violence in Ukraine …and the voter suppression here at home and the assault on truth and the retreat from the modest amount of democracy we have been able to achieve…
Despair is not an unreasonable response…there is so much evidence of the wrong turns we have taken…
But we cannot allow despair to colonize our spirits.
We value facts in this sanctuary…but we live by our faith. And our faith tells us that love can win…that there is a different way…that there must be a different way…
‘We know that without love there will never be peace”, wrote Ethelred Brown.
“Teach us therefore to love.”
Teach us therefore to love.
How do we find, how do we frame a religious response to the violence and the scarcity and the greed?
What we know to do is to fight it…to battle it…to go to war with it…
Right?
I led UUs onto the streets to protest the Iraq war. And I stood in protest lines to end the Viet Nam War…
We responded to the violence by being strong against it.
And there is a virtue in being strong when so much is at stake.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Right? David and Goliath?
Despite the overwhelming odds, you show up in your strength, use the weapons at your disposal…and have faith that good will prevail.
We see the crowds protesting in Moscow, courageous, strong, risking arrest…Putin does not treat political disagreement…with love.
We see Ukraine fighting back against the overwhelming military odds of the Russian invasion…
There is a virtue in being strong. And battles are sometimes necessary. I do believe that.
But there is a risk when strength is our only refuge. Because it is hard to keep our hearts open on the battle lines. And we want…what we know we need…is for love to win.
“We enter a battle gravely” as Lao Tzu wrote in the Dao de Ching…
“We enter a battle gravely
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if we were attending a funeral.”
Battle and the strength it requires may be necessary, but we know the risk to our spirits…
Please understand me. Resistance is mandatory…when we have an opportunity to make a difference.
But I doubt that there is anything in my power that is likely to change Vladimir Putin’s mind…
The Universalists called for conversion…a change of heart…some Damascus Road experience when the truth of abundant love would be revealed….
And it is hard for me to imagine a way that I or we could prompt that kind of conversion in Putin…or McConnell…or Trump…
But there is no doubt in my mind…and I doubt that there is any doubt in your minds either…that our culture needs a conversion…
That we need to give up on scarcity as a way of life…that the winners and losers view of the world…the winner-take-all view of the world which has supported empires from Rome …right up to our own American Empire…
There is no doubt that scarcity has to give way…has to be replaced by a recognition of our interdependence and the possibility of living in abundance…
We know this even if we have a hard time imagining what that might actually look like…
We know it because we have glimpsed…somehow…we have glimpsed the possibility that could open to us all if we chose a new way.
And just as Isaiah and Jeremiah, the prophets of old, railed about the ways of their world and called the Israelites back to faithfulness…
We have our prophets speaking to us in this day and age.
Valerie Kauer, the Sikh activist, writes: “We can choose to see no stranger –to see the people of Ukraine as our family, and the soldiers of Russia as lost ones who can be called back home. We can let that [vision] shape how we grieve [this violence] and what we do.
What if we made a shield of love?” She asks.
Prophet bell hooks argued for a love ethic: “Domination cannot exist…where a love ethic prevails. . . . When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. … If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction. . . .”
I could go on. William Barber and the Poor Peoples Campaign, Jen Bailey and the Faith Matters Network…the preaching you hear from this pulpit and the embodiment of our message in the justice work so many of you do…
There are prophets among us…
The voices that I find most hopeful strive to make love more concrete:
“Be a wetland” writes Elizabeth Nguyen. “Detoxify what is upstream. Pass on liberation.”
What do wetlands do?
Wetlands help purify air and water, they detoxify wastes, they promote new life, restore degraded resources…
They harbor diversity.
Wetlands model sustainability. There are limits even to wetlands, of course. But they model the possibility of having enough even when invaded by what is toxic.
Elizabeth goes on:
“Let whatever touches you or your community come out with less harm.
Detoxify what is upstream [and]
Pass on liberation.
Be a wetland.”
Begin where you live and do what wetlands do…
Hold despair at bay, discover resilience and hope by modeling abundance in your living. Even in small ways let whatever touches you or your community come out with less harm.
Less harm. That is what living in abundance leads to…less harm.
Be a wetland.
I love that image. Because that is what I believe we are striving to do in this church. To prove that scarcity is not the truth of the world…or at the very least that it is not the only truth possible. To find ways to detoxify the culture that presses in on us and that we know we still carry with us …
To seek out conversion for ourselves…to find our own change of heart…by building the world we dream about…
We fall short again and again. I know. It takes faith to keep on keeping on.
And I know that we all wish there were some single, some simple thing we could do to get to some finish line where love could be declared victorious. Where some judge would put the gold medal of love around our necks.
But our faith is that what we do makes a difference. Sometimes in miraculous ways…
We keep on keepin on, even in the face of all the evidence of the world…because we have heard the call, we have heard the prophets speaking to us…
And we find that the only answer we can make is “Yes.”
Teach us how to love.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life…That promises that abundance can be real
Spirit of love…That tells us despair need not be the final word.
Be with us…
As we resist the temptation to act out of scarcity
And the temptation to settle for the
World as it is…as the best the world can be.
We live in this world and find so much of beauty
And of grace around us and within us
Help us remember that beauty and that grace,
Even as we hold all the suffering we also see
And help us remember the power that is ours to transform our lives
Open our hearts to wholeness
Open our minds so that we can look toward hope, even if that hope is in the distance
And open our hands to the work of building
The world for which we yearn,
The Beloved Community of our dreams
Leaving less harm with each new day
Teach us how to love.
Amen
Topics: Witness