Sermon, June 5, 2005

“The God of Love”

In our affirmation of faith we speak of “all souls growing into harmony with the divine.” I have jokingly said before that that phrase means more than just “all dogs go to heaven.” At the same time, the idea that all humans eventually find their way into the presence of God, that all ultimately enter a state of eternal bliss, is a very important idea in the history of Unitarian-Universalist thought. It is also an idea that carries some profound theological and practical implications, implications I would like to explore a little today.

The term, “Universalism” originally expressed a very specific idea, the belief that the sacrifice of Jesus was sufficient to guarantee the ultimate acceptance of every human being by God. This is an idea with a very ancient history, going back to the earliest days of Christianity. It rejected the belief that God condemns some to an eternity of torment and considered the very idea of hell a contradiction to the image of the loving God proclaimed by Judaism’s prophets and that was the foundation of the life and teaching of Jesus.

It was also an idea that threatened the religious status quo so much that it was condemned as a heresy in 544 A.D. It’s easy to imagine why the opponents of universalism were uneasy with the doctrine. They might ask, “If there is no fear of punishment, what will make people behave?” Or, “How can God be holy or just, and not hold people accountable for their actions?” Then, of course, there is the standard questions all modern universalists get asked one time or another, “What about Adolph Hitler? Does he get to go into heaven?” I’m sure the early universalists were asked the same thing about the evil emperors of their time.

But the critics of the doctrine of universal salvation misunderstood its premises. The belief that all humans are ultimately joined to God meant more than that the sacrifice of Jesus was so valued by God, that no matter how bad we are, our sins are already paid for. They did not think of the death of Jesus as providing humanity with a sort of credit card to sin, a credit card with no spending limit.

No, the Universalist belief that all humans go to heaven was a statement about the power of God. It was a belief that God’s power was greater than the power of sin; it was a belief that however much we might be twisted by life in this world, by our choices or experiences in life, that however distorted we may be because of the wounds we suffer or because of the wounds we inflict; God’s power is able to change us into beings that reflect divine love.

In contrast to some popular religion, Universalism did not stress that God’s power over the forces of nature or over political realities; those were things that belonged to the earthly realm, things to be endured. Rather, Universalism focused on the ability of God’s power to shape the human heart; to shape willing and open hearts now, in this life; but ultimately to shape every heart in the life to come.

More importantly, the belief in universal salvation was a statement about the nature of love.

We tend to think of love as a feeling, and we think of the love of God as the feeling God has toward us. But the early Universalists believe that love is more than a feeling. They believed that love is an active force, a spiritual power that transforms whatever it touches. They believed that anyone who is touched by this love, cannot remain as they are.

The answer to the question about Adolph Hitler is not that God is so loving that he overlooked Hitler’s monstrous deeds. The answer is that God’s love is so powerful that even an individual like Hitler is changed by that love; that the fear and hatred that drove him are gone, his insanity is cured, his true humanity is restored.

So the Universalist belief that all souls eventually come to union with God was not based on the idea that God has such strong feelings of love for us that it doesn’t matter how bad we are. The Universalist faith is based instead on the belief that just as human love is a powerful instrument of change, so too, God’s love is powerfully transformative, that it is a dynamic force that alters everything it touches.

The Universalist belief is also a radical statement about human nature. It asserts that we are fundamentally good, that we have value and worth because of who we are. It asserts that we both deserve love and need it to thrive and become what we are supposed to be. It sees our failures as the result of living in a world where love is too often absent.

It also asserts that God’s love transforms us because it is the antidote to what ails us, to what distorts and limits us.

When I think about the negative emotions that sometimes rule us or the self-destructive tendencies that drive us, it seems to me that a lot of the problems we have grow out of our need for love or our failure to experience that love.

After all, what is our anger but a reaction to not being treated with the love we desire? And what is rage but the accumulation of our unresolved anger and repressed memories of the times people have failed to love us as we feel they ought to, as we deserved to be loved?

What is our ambition and endless quest for attention, but our need to be lavished with the kind of notice that someone who truly loved us would naturally give?

And what is our mistrust of others but the fruit of disappointments suffered at the hands of those who should have done better by us?

Perhaps bitterness is no more than our response to the times we expected and needed care; and maybe greed is nothing but a reaction to a world that did not care enough about us to meet our needs. And don’t insecurity and fear grow out of soil that lacks love?

Finally, what is our quest for justice, and our anger at injustice, but a cry to be treated as a person of value, as someone worth caring for, not as an object to be used?

It just seems to me that much of what plagues us, much of what creates rancor and division, much of what makes us less than our true selves can be traced to an absence of love in our lives.

We look for love, but the sad truth is that there is not enough love in this world to erase the scars etched upon our souls or fill the great void in our hearts. After all, human love is limited, sporadic, and imperfect. We wound others without even trying to, and are wounded in turn by the fallibility of those around us. Who has loved perfectly? Who has the strength to be everything that everyone around them needs them to be, all of the time? Who hasn’t betrayed and been betrayed? Who hasn’t failed those they love and been failed in return?

Thus we all carry wounds. Some are large and debilitating, some are small and pestiferous. But to become the persons we need to become, to be shaped into the image of the divine; we require the healing touch of a love that is greater than any human can give us. We need divine love to enter in and touch our wounded nature and make us whole.

Of course, we say it all the time, “God is love. God loves us.” Maybe the problem is that we hear this too much. It is easy to endlessly repeat that God is love, to confess that we are all loved, but still not know it deep within our hearts.

For love to be effective; it must be experienced. It must be felt and known deeply within our souls. But the knowledge that God loves you is spiritual knowledge. It is knowledge arrived at over time; through prayer and reflection; through meditation and the discipline of meditation; by opening our hearts time and again to the ministrations of the Spirit.

The Sufi mystic Rumi says; “ God has told us he loves us, but has sealed our heart so we cannot understand this except slowly and indirectly. This knowledge depends on a journey, sharpness of mind alone could never win it.”

Still, God’s love has been discovered and felt by people of every faith and religion. Rumi found and felt it. The Jewish Zaddakim, the Hasidic masters, found and felt it. Christian mystics found and felt it.

But they all acknowledge that finding and feeling God’s love is a long journey. One early Christian mystic prays that we may understand the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love, a love that surpasses all human knowledge, so that we can be filled with God. He prays that we might come to understand that love because he knows that this is not something known naturally, it is not a knowledge that comes easily.

Yet such an experience is possible. It is found in the writings of the mystics of many religions. It even peaks through in places in the Bible. One of the writers of the Psalms calls God “a father to the fatherless” and says that even if his mother and father abandon him, God will take him in. Another writer describes God as a mother who loves us like a nursing mother loves her child. Still another describes God as our lover, as longing for us the way a lover does. These statements are more than words, they are the statements of people who have experienced a lover that they know cares for them, a lover who passionately longs for them, and a lover who nurtures them like a mother nurtures her child.

And the testimony of the mystics, of those who sought to feel and know this love; the testimony of those who found it; is that when they found and felt God’s love, it changed them.

They tell us that God’s love exposes the secrets of our heart. It strips away the layers of self-protection, the barriers we erect to keep ourselves from being wounded again. It shows us the self-made obstacles we place between ourselves and our dreams. It shows us the times we gave up on our dreams when we didn’t have to. It reveals to us how vain and unnecessary are our attempts to win love, by helping us see that we already are loved. It reveals to us who we are, beneath our scars and defenses. And it shows us that who we are is good.

The experience of God’s love also shows us that we are not loved despite ourselves, but because of who we are. This is a far cry from Martin Luther’s formula, “simul iustus, simul peccator,” which roughly translated means that were are accepted by God even though we are still sinful. Most Christianity insists we are only justified sinners, people that God loves despite our sinful nature. No, the experience of the love of God shows us that we are loved because we are loveable. We are valued because we are valuable. We discover that God loves us because there is actually something there worth loving; in fact, there is a lot there worth loving.

And this truth becomes the foundation for our ethics. People deserve justice because they actually have value, not because we or God assign them a value they don’t deserve. People deserve to be loved because there is something good and worthy about them. Those qualities may be hidden beneath layers of defensiveness and anger and bitterness, but if they will learn to feel the love of God, this love will sweep through their soul. The layers of defensiveness and anger and bitterness will be shed, and the person they were truly meant to be will emerge. If they will allow God’s love to touch them deep within their soul, they will awaken to their true selves.

But this is a long road, this road from sleep to wakefulness, from just saying “God loves me” to knowing it and feeling it and being changed by it. The quote I read earlier from the Buddha expresses the difficulty of this journey well. “How happy is he who follows the path of wakefulness. With great perseverance he meditates, seeking freedom and happiness.” The Buddhist might not be seeking exactly the same goal as we might, to find and feel God’s love, but I suspect different religions really just end up discovering different sides of the same divine mystery. And the paths that all religions offer are just that, paths, paths that must be followed and followed with diligence and patience. They are paths of quiet meditation and prayer, of repeatedly opening yourself to the presence of the divine, of inviting the Spirit of love, again and again, to makes it self-known.

Not only is this spiritual path long, it is a path that stretches forever, a constant and unending discovery of love and constant and unending discovery of the self that finding love makes possible. It is an endless process of being nurtured toward new being, as love touches you again and again. It is an endless shedding of the old self, and constant taking up of the new.

The journey to find and feel God’s love is a road from one self to another self; from a wounded self to a self who is whole; from the false self that arises in response to the world, to the true self born in the arms of divine love; from the seeking self who hungers for what the world could never supply it, to the self that has drunk deeply of the waters of divine love.

It is a spiritual journey that demands out time, our prayer, our openness. But at the end of it we will find our true self, one that is ultimately changed into the very image and expression of the divine.

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