A Sermon by the Rev. Daniel Charles Davis

For the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

October 8, 2006

Love.

Love is the easiest topic to preach about. In fact, all good sermons are in some sense about love.

Love is the Answer . . . All you need is love . . . Love makes the world go round . . . Love is a many splendored thing.

Love, the deepest human commitment, is also the most trivialized overused sentimental tripe . . . Ah Love to love you baby . . . “The Love boat,” exciting and new . . .

Twentieth century UU theologian James Luther Adams wrote: “To preach love is at best bad taste. But to make cool and critical analysis of the phenomenon of love and to unmask pseudo-love – tasks that cannot be separated from each other – is an obligation that the psychologist and the minister have no right to avoid.” (“God Is Love,” An Examined Faith, 1991)

What is this thing called love? It is more than pleasure. It is more than self-gratification. It is not sex or the biological imperative. It is a social construct, something that binds person to person.

It has many manifestations – lover to lover, parent and child, friend with friend. It is, when we get down to it, what makes life worth living. It is no wonder that this positive aspect of human relations has been expanded to cosmic proportions.

Early Universalists were enamored with the idea that God is love. The 1803 Winchester Profession states, “We believe there is one God, whose nature is love.” This profession of faith has profound consequences. It seems non-controversial, and most Christians would agree with it – up to a point, that point being that the concept of hell is incompatible with the notion of a loving God.

Say this statement and you will discover that a lot of people love hell more than they love God.

People enjoy the notion that other people will suffer and they won’t. Heaven would not be special if everybody got in. They would prefer a judgmental god to a loving one, just as long as the judgment is in their favor. But such a god is unworthy of reverence. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson:

He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory and with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our species miserable forever, for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians in general: ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies, or miracles convince you, or me, that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created and preserves, for a time, innumerable millions to make them miserable forever; For his own Glory? Wretch! What is his Glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain? Tickled with adulation? Pardon me, my Maker, for these aweful questions. My answer to them is always ready: I believe no such things.

– John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 15, 1813

 What type of god would create the overwhelming majority of his people in order to destroy them?

Hosea Ballou wrote:

…if the Almighty, as we believe him to be, did not posses power sufficient to make all his creatures happy, it was not an act of goodness in him to create them. If he have that power but possess no will for it, it makes a bad matter as worse as possible. I then reduce my opponent to the necessity of telling me whether if those whom he believes will be endlessly lost, be those whom God could save but would not, or those he would save but could not. If it be granted that god has both the power and the will to save all men it is granting all I want for the foundation of my faith.

– Ballou, A Treatise on Atonement 1805

If there is a hell, there is no way that God can be benevolent.

Quillen Shinn was a circuit rider who founded many Universalist churches, including one in Nashville. He was a fiery revivalist preacher, and his sermon “Affirmations of Universalism” pulled no punches.

Calvinism limits his [God’s] goodness. Simplified, it says: God can save all men, but he does not want to. Arminianism limits his power. It says: he wants to save all men, but cannot . . Now, then, when we limit God’s goodness or power or wisdom, we make him an imperfect God. If God is not perfect, there is no God. So this is atheism . . . The doctrine of endless brutality, politely called eternal punishment, must be utterly abhorrent to every thinking mind, revolting to every benevolent instinct. It is a hideous, ghastly, fiendish doctrine, heart-paralyzing, soul-stifling. It makes God infinitely worse than Nero, his malignancy transcending that of all the fiends of cruelty that ever lived.

Shinn’s Unitarian contemporary, James Freeman Clarke, had a gentler way of saying it: “God is essentially love, and that he loves all his creatures, both bad and good.” (Clarke, Manual of Unitarian Belief, 1884)

Clarence Skinner began the 20th century by saying: “The Universalist idea of God is that of a universal, impartial, immanent spirit whose nature is love. It is the largest thought the world has ever known; it is the most revolutionary doctrine ever proclaimed; it is the most expansive hope ever dreamed.” (Skinner, “The Social Implications of Universalism,” 1915) Note: This definition defines God not as a person , but as a Spirit, not a judge, not even a loving father,

but a Spirit, closer to the concept of love itself

The Transcendentalist Emerson equated love with God: “The superiority that has no superior; the redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal essence, is love.” (Emerson, “Worship,” The Conduct of Life, 1860)

Humanitarian Albert Schweitzer said that the human experience of love is how we can know about God: “The ethic of reverence for life is the ethic of Love widened into Universality . . . It is only through love that we can attain communion with God. . . All living knowledge of God rests upon this foundation: that we experience Him in our lives as will-to-love.” (Out of My Life and Thought, 1933)

“Anyone who has recognized that the idea of love is the spiritual beam of light, which reaches us from the infinite, ceases to demand from religion that it offer him complete knowledge of the supernatural.” (Midland (Michigan) Daily News, September 7, 1965)

Humanist Kenneth Patton redefined Universalism along the lines of love: “Our religion is as large as the inclusiveness of our understanding of love . . . Divinity is a style of poetry and prose, and divine love is in the arms of the human comforter. (Paxton, Hymns of Humanity, Meeting House Press, 1980)

We see God as love, or Love itself as the all-powerful force. We do not enter into the paradise of love by worshiping it; we enter by living in love. We do not praise the noun love; we live the verb love. Love is an action, a difference we try to make in the world.

Buckminster Fuller, who compared love to another force that holds the universe together, said: “Gravity is unit and undifferentiable. Gravity is comprehensive inclusively embracing and permeative is non-focusable and shadow less, and is Omni-integrative; all of which characteristics of gravity are also the characteristics of love. Love is metaphysical gravity.” (Critical Path, 1981)

I think this is an interesting parallel to make. Gravity is a force of nature, a force once attributed to God, as in the song “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” or in the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

O Lord My God, When I in Awesome Wonder,

Consider all the worlds thy hands have made;

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

God was thought to arbitrarily suspend the laws of nature, stopping the sun in the sky, causing birds angels to fly, people ascending into heaven. But eventually humanity came to understand gravity as a universal force.

So it is with love. Tribal gods love partially, destroying enemies and sustaining friends. But what if love was indeed universal? What if we were called to love even our enemies? It would change how we understand love. It would change the very concept of God. Love becomes more than our day-to-day infatuations. It becomes what attaches us to ultimate meaning.

Charles Hartshorne, a UU process theologian, argues that love is the way we participate with the holy. “What the ultimate ideal means is that one should love people, ourselves included, as one person among many. One should love oneself for the sake of others as truly as others for our own sakes.” (Hartshorne, “A New World and a New World View," The Life of Choice, 1978.)

James Luther Adams concurs: “We love our enemy when we love his or her ultimate meaning. We may have to struggle against what the enemy stands for; we may not feel a personal affinity of passion for him. Yet we are commanded for this person’s sake and for our own and for the sake of the destiny of creation, to love that which should unite us.” (Adams, “God Is Love,” An Examined Faith, 1991)

To love that which should unite us requires us to search. What is the ultimate meaning of

Osama bin Laden, George Bush, Bill Clinton, the Palestinians, the Israelis, your family, your friends, that annoying co-worker, the person ahead of you in traffic, the homeless person you pass on the street, your doctor, the grocery clerk? To love is to believe there is something that connects us all, to know that at some level all of us love and want to be loved.

Love is an act of will. It is a determination that whatever others may do, we choose not to exclude. We may not agree with the choices a person has made. People often try defend against being hated by pretending that they do not need love. Needing love is seen as vulnerability. Some try to appear invincible, but somehow we must peer above the ramparts of our fortresses and look beyond their defense mechanism and seek to find a reason to love. This is an act of faith. We cannot wait for others to become lovable. If we have the strength to be loving, we make them lovable.

Loving the universal connection between people is hard work. It is easier to be indifferent, but indifference is a surrendering of our power. Instead of acting with love, we react to how the world treats us. We do unto others as we have been done to. We surrender or free will and let others determine how our lives will be. Loving the universal connection between people is hard work. It is easier to hate. Hate is an attempt to exercise power, to take control of others, to do unto others before one is done unto.

For those who are distressed by an uncertain world, hate is the pathway to certainty. If you hate others, you are almost guaranteed that they will hate or fear you. You presume they will reject you, and your behavior assures it.

Selfishness leads to self-annihilation. The people you try to annihilate will try to annihilate you.

The last person standing will not be able to reproduce, thus will also die.

I prefer the uncertainty of love. Loving others will not guarantee that we are loved in return, but it connects us to a power greater than ourselves. Love is the creative energy of love. Biologically this is true, but people do not make love only to make children. We create love in an infinite number of ways in order to connect with infinity. Love is not selflessness but the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: “In what then to place one’s trust as a worthy object for creative energy? Place it in nothing at all outside one’s own best self. Nor place it within one’s self either, unless there is something beyond selfishness there. Selfishness is selfhood degenerate . . . Selfhood is whole-minded and noble.” (Wright, “What Shall We Work For?” 1934)

I believe love leads us to universal selfhood. Love is not selfishness. Love is not a strategy to obtain love for oneself, or loving God to get a reward in heaven. Love is not selflessness. It is not saying I have no value and I deserve damnation. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all.

If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain.