And the Universalist Bell Rang: "No Hell, No Hell"

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

September 21, 2008

READING

Adapted from Clarence Russell Skinner, A Religion for Greatness, 1945

Beneath all curious customs and beliefs, deeper than ecclesiastical creeds, more vital and basic than priestly rites, stands out one impressive fact – namely, humankind touches infinity; our home is in immensity; we live, move and have our being in an eternity. This magnificent assertion is humankind’s greatest affirmation. Nothing else surpasses it in sweep of imagination or depth of understanding. . . .

It is humankind’s effective protest against all that lessens and divides. It is our emphatic denial of any attempt to separate us from our home and heritage. It expresses our uncompromising unwillingness to be reduced to insignificance and utter isolation. This radical interpretation would rescue religion from its fringes and accretions. . . . So many superficial impedimenta have been heaped upon religion by its devotees that it is frequently impossible to recognize the genuine from the spurious. . . . The radical interpretation refuses to be led aside by the extraneous. It insists upon returning to what is the essential core of religious experience; namely, the seeking after and finding humanity’s relation to the unities and universals.

SERMON

 Shortly after visiting the UU church in Knoxville after the shootings in July, Bill Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was asked for his response to the tragedy. Did he think that assailant would be going to hell? Bill responded that from what he heard it appeared that the man had been living his own private hell for some time.

With those words Bill hearkened back to one of the oldest theological threads in our movement. It goes back to the dawn of the 19th century amid the religious turmoil of this nation’s earliest days in the hill country of New Hampshire when a preacher arose who carried the emergent Universalist church in a new direction.

 The religious debate at the time was centered on some crucial points in Christian theology. The predominant Calvinist view was that each person was born with the stain of Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience against God, destined for a fate in hell without intervention by the church. Churches differed over who was eligible and how one might go about returning to God’s good graces and thereby get to heaven after death, but all agreed that hell was a real, and frightening, possibility.

Hosea Ballou, the 11th son of a farmer and part-time Baptist minister, had been drawn to religion at an early age, but he was troubled by the notion at the center of the prevailing theology that an all-loving God would send some of his children to eternal torment in hell. How could that be? It made no sense to him.

Eventually, Ballou aligned himself with the preaching of some of his neighbors who insisted that God had no such intention, specifically that Jesus’ life and death had atoned for that original sin, and that everyone had a place in heaven awaiting them at their death. This Universalism had been spreading, especially after the arrival from England in 1770 of John Murray, whose preaching up the Eastern seaboard established some of the earliest churches.

Among many of these early Universalists, though, there was some disagreement about one’s fate after death. Some felt that surely those who had committed wrong deeds during their lifetime didn’t get a direct pass to heaven after death. They wouldn’t go to hell, but they might have to spend time in perdition of some sort where they might work off or otherwise atone for their actions before moving upstairs.

This caveat came largely in response to the concern of some that the church needed some caution to encourage potential sinners to stay on the straight and narrow. The assurance that ultimately all would get passage through the pearly gates was the carrot, while the warning of a period of perdition for misbehavior was a stout stick.

Ballou in his preaching made room for this “time of testing” after death in his preaching at first, but eventually he gave it up entirely. He decided that all variations on Calvinist theology and even the thinking of some Universalists were based on a faulty premise. God, he felt, was not some wrathful deity seeking justice for sin, but a source of abundant, in fact infinite love, and that what God sought from us was not our abasement but reconciliation. For, in the end, Ballou believed, our misbehavior, our sin brought us not pleasure but grief, and what we truly sought was to find a way back into love’s good graces, or as we might say today, to be brought back into right relationship with each other and all things.

And so, the evil that we do, Ballou believed, is not evil against God, but evil against ourselves, against our own good nature. For Ballou, hell was not a place with fire and brimstone and demons with pitchforks but the state of separation from that source of love. Hell was to be found here on Earth in the misery we endure when we know we have erred, when we are separated from the path of love.

Ballou strongly influenced the Universalist circuit riders who fanned across the countryside in the early 19th century, settling often at small, country churches whose bells, in the words of the poet George Bungay, rang out, “No hell. No hell.”

I have been reflecting on Hosea Ballou’s gift to our movement in light of the events in Knoxville this past summer. We no longer frame our theology in the kind of terms Ballou did. He famously insisted that as the source of eternal love God had it as his purpose to “happify” humankind, that it was not God who needed to be appeased or reconciled but we who needed give ourselves over to love.

It was a dramatic shift that viewed humans not as born damaged and in need of improvement but as fundamentally worthy. It was a perspective arguing that all-embracing love was not a quality to be found in a heaven distant from a depraved earth but a possibility present to each of us, and not only present but also tugging at our sleeves, if we would give ourselves to it.

It is a perspective that we find embodied today in our first Unitarian Universalist principle affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We know about all the ways that we are divided from one another and from our best selves, and we know about the pain that this separation gives us. Like Clarence Russell Skinner, we sense there is something greater to which we aspire, and we struggle to name it: we “touch infinity, our home is in immensity, we live, move and have our being in an eternity.” In the end, this aspiration is, as Skinner put it, a “protest against all that lessens and divides,” our “emphatic denial of any attempt to separate us from our home and heritage.”

Gordon McKeeman, ordained a Universalist and former president of Starr King School for the Ministry, put it this way some years ago: “Running through life is the urgency to wholeness, to integration, to putting together the scattered pieces of life.” The truth of this observation can be seen in what he said can be “the dire and demonic consequences” of separation.

“When we see people seeking to live out parochial, partial and insular assumptions,” he said, “we discover people who create or perpetuate the tragic divisions of life, the costs of which in human misery, pain and suffering we continue to pay.”

And pay, unfortunately, the Knoxville church did. What we know about that assailant was a portrait in separation: a man who had failed at successive relationships, who had failed at employment, who had given himself over to multiple addictions and surrounded himself with the bile of hateful words targeting liberals, and in the assailant’s mind the liberal church, as the source of the world’s woes.

All this we know, and still, though we along with many others have responded with solidarity to the Knoxville church, we are left to struggle with what we do now. Shortly after the Knoxville shootings I was contacted by Bob Smith of the Asheville Buncombe County Community Relations Council to ask if our church might be interested in helping gather together community and religious leaders in Asheville to talk about the factors that contribute to such violence and how as a community we might respond. I said yes, and after talking it over we agreed this past week that the council would convene a panel discussion on the subject at our church. The event will be from 7 to 9 p.m. on Monday, October 27. You’ll hear more about it as we get closer to it. I’m encouraged that simply having this conversation might help ease the kind of separation that leads people to prey on one another.

And my encouragement comes at least in part from the conviction I share with Gordon McKeeman, Clarence Skinner and Hosea Ballou that there is an “urgency for wholeness” running through our lives that is “a protest against all that lessens and divides,” that within us there is the possibility of an all-embracing love, tugging at our sleeves, if we would attend to it.

This perspective implies, of course, that we must do the work of turning toward it. Meg Barnhouse, minister of our church in Spartanburg, writes in the recent edition of the UU World that she is troubled by those who suggest that the Knoxville assailant, Jim David Adkisson, acted as he did because “he never had any love.”

Having bumped into Adkisson more than a decade ago as the spouse of a woman she knew who attended the Knoxville church, Meg writes that that wasn’t true of him. “I know one of the women who loved him,” she says, “and she loved him fiercely.”

Adkisson, Meg recalls, was an argumentative sort with many of the right-wing views that are reflective of the authors of books found in his apartment, and he had an unfortunate proclivity to drinking and drugs. Under the circumstances, the end of his relationship and job troubles were hardly a surprise.

The truth of the matter, Meg writes, is that Adkisson “had lots of choices and lots of chances. Maybe it was brain deterioration from the substance abuse, maybe it was the right-wing hate mongering, maybe it was poor impulse control resulting from a chemical imbalance he was born with. Whatever advantages and disadvantages he started with, he participated with his sovereign free will in making himself what he is today. I think this is more respectful of him and his inherent worth than to imply that he couldn’t help what he did.”

Hosea Ballou believed that the love of God is so powerful that no one can resist it, that in time you will give yourself over to it. I don’t think I can follow him there. Yes, whatever we call it – the love of God, or the urgency to wholeness – tugs at us mightily, but to follow it takes a deliberate decision on our part. Each of us must take the first step.

Unfortunately, we have come to know that there is some brokenness that love can’t fix. As a result, as Meg puts it, “love cannot always be sweet and outreaching. Sometimes it must be challenging.” Love must stand up against abuse and disrespect, against hate and oppression.

In a recent broadcast Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS discussed the phenomenon of radio talk show hosts, such as the authors Adkisson read, who describe liberals in hateful terms, as “traitors” or “the enemy.” Chris Buice, minister of the Knoxville church, told the interviewer that the situation reminded him of what the United Nations observed shortly before the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994.

 “Hutu radio disk jockeys,” he said, “would call the Tutsi cockroaches. . . . There was the sense that these weren’t human beings. . . . When you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language.”

From safety of a radio studio, such words are tossed off casually without a thought for what they may incite. But in Jim Adkisson we have now a pretty good idea of exactly what effect they can have. As Moyers remarked at the show’s closing, the situation is reminiscent of a folk story of a tribal elder telling his grandson about a battle he was waging in himself between two wolves. One wolf, he said, is the evil wolf: angry, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, lies, guilt, resentment, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked, "Which wolf will win?" His grandfather answered, "The one I feed."

In his homily in a service to rededicate the sanctuary at the Tennessee Valley UU Church that Adkisson violated with his attack, Chris Buice was clear on which wolf he chose to feed.

“A man tried to divide us,” he told the congregation, “divide us into liberals and conservatives, gay and straight; instead his actions united us, making us more willing to listen to each other, care for each other, respect each other, support each other. . . . He came into this space to inflict death, and he took away the lives of two precious people, wounded six others, traumatized the rest of us, traumatized our community and the world. But strangely, at the same time, reminding us of the preciousness of our children, the sacredness of life, and at this moment in time the true value of friendship and family, and how much we need good neighbors. . . . A man sought to isolate us, alienate us, but our community surrounded us with love. They said, ‘Don’t shut us out. Let us in.’ And we did, and we have been enriched by them.”

Our contemporary church buildings lack the bell towers of old whose chiming called the community to worship. Rather than gathering in tightly knit parishes, we are spread out many miles apart from one another, too distant for church bells to reach. Instead, our bells today are the buzzers on our alarm clocks, rousing us from sleep on this precious weekend day, up and out the door to this covenanted community of memory and hope.

We come, in Ken Patton’s words, to worship with our eyes and ears and fingertips, to love the world through heart and mind and body, feeding our eyes on the mystery and revelation in each other’s faces, learning to experience the truth that all life flows into a great common life, if only we will open our eyes to our companions.

“No Hell! No Hell!” That affirmation still resounds across a span of nearly two centuries. We will not be separated from each other. We will not be defeated by the voices of hate. We will not feed the wolf of despair. Traumatized by acts of terror, we will lift our eyes and see our neighbor’s hand reaching out. Surrounded by a desperate cacophony of bitter anger, we will turn off the radio and speak our truth. We will celebrate the bravery of those who run toward an attacker’s gun and wrestle him to the floor and the compassion of those who flock in afterwards with food and hugs and a caring word. And, like our friends at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, we will join the children’s voices when they sing, the sun will come out tomorrow.

May it be so.