CAN CHARACTER SAVE US?
A Sermon by Rev. Wayne Arnason
West Shore UU Church, Rocky River OH February 10, 2008
Introduction to the Service and Reading from
“Likeness to God” by William Ellery Channing
We’re into a series of services this month on the theme of salvation, and if you were
here last week you heard Neal Anderson offer an excellent overview of the Unitarian
Universalist struggle with the question: “ Are You Saved?” Neal responded as many of
us would – with another question – saved from what? Certainly not from a hell he doesn’t
believe in . Neal was willing to accept the idea that we need to be saved from sin, but he
offered us his own definition of sin: “Sin for me (he said) is not a matter of a
transgression against God. For me sin is a “missing of the mark”. It is not living up to
my ethical and moral understandings of myself. It is not living up to who I am as a
higher self. “ That’s not how our spiritual ancestors in 19th century new England would
have defined sin or salvation. So Neal’s sermon was a great example of how our
ministers’ and our members’ answers over the past two centuries have changed, have
evolved, in ever deepening ways to answer the question of what it means to be saved.
Whether you agree or not with the direction of this evolution, our answers have
continually been a powerful contrast to the orthodox Christian mainstream.
Over the
next three Sundays, we want to go into greater depth on the three most important answers
that our free religious faith has offered in response to what salvation means, and what we
have to do to be saved. Next week at our intergenerational service Rev. Kathleen Rolenz
and Kathy Strawser will engage with Salvation by Good Works, and on the last Sunday
of the month we’ll explore Salvation through our relationship with Nature. But today,
we’re going to be trying to understand the most creative and critical evolutionary change
in the way that the early American religious liberals understood what salvation meant,
and that was the idea that that salvation lies in the evolution of the soul, that the soul does
evolves, and that the spiritual life is involved in growing the soul. One of our most
famous spiritual ancestors believed that the best evidence of growth of the soul is found
in qualities of character that reflect the divine.
Our reading today sets the historical context for this sermon, and comes from one of the
great milestones in our history of developing this alternative Christian theology of
salvation, salvation by character, instead of salvation by Jesus’ atoning death on the
cross. These readings from our Unitarian Christian ancestors are best heard trying to
imagine yourself how what I’m going to say would sound to you in the year 1828, as you
sat in your pew in Providence Rhode Island at the ordination service for your new
minister, William Farley. Only recently, over the last dozen years of your life here in
Providence, have the churches in New England begun to divide up between those who
believe that Jesus is truly one part of the Trinitarian God , and those who believe as you
do that Jesus is God’s messenger, who calls himself God’s Son as a way of helping us to
understand what it means for all us to call God our Father and be children of God. This is
still the minority faith. Most people in your community still think that God is the “wholly
other” Creator of heaven and earth who judges a human race fallen into sin, and who
came to earth in the form of Jesus to sacrifice himself to save us from eternal hell fire.
Into your pulpit today comes the famous Dr. Channing from Boston, preaching a sermon
provocatively titled “Likeness to God”. Whatever can he be talking about?
“In Christianity particularly, I meet perpetual testimonies to the divinity of human
nature. This whole religion expresses an infinite concern of God for the human soul, and
teaches that he deems no methods too expensive for its recovery and exaltation.
Christianity, with one voice, calls me to turn my regards and care to the spirit within me,
as of more worth than the whole outward world. It calls us to "be perfect as our Father in
heaven is perfect… Lofty views of the nature of man are bound up and interwoven with
the whole Christian system. Say not, that these are at war with humility; for who was ever
humbler than Jesus, and yet who ever possessed such a consciousness of greatness and
divinity? Say not that man's business is to think of his sin, and not of his dignity; for great
sin implies a great capacity; it is the abuse of a noble nature; and no man can be deeply
and rationally contrite, but he who feels, that in wrong-doing he has resisted a divine
voice, and warred against a divine principle, in his own soul…
Christianity is said, with special propriety, to reveal God as the Father, because it reveals
him as sending his Son to cleanse the mind from every stain, and to replenish it for ever
with the spirit and moral attributes of its Author. Separate from God this idea of his
creating and training up beings after his own likeness, and you rob him of the paternal
character. This relation vanishes, and with it vanishes the glory of the Gospel, and the
dearest hopes of the human soul.
What, then, is religion? I answer; it is not the adoration of a God with whom we have no
common properties; of a distinct, foreign, separate being; but (rather) of an allcommunicating Parent. “
Sermon:
Today I want to tell you a love story. It’s Valentine’s Day week after all, and so
it’s a good time of year to hear an old fashioned love story. Valentine’s Day reminds us
that the first thing we think of when we hear the word “love” is usually romantic love,
and romantic love is a wonderful thing, but it’s not the be-all and the end-all of what love
means. We experience love in the relationship between child and parents, among close
friends, within communities, and in a spiritual sense, we experience love for this world
and the life we have been given as the foundation that will bring meaning and purpose to
our living, a meaning and purpose that acts as a saving grace . Last week in his sermon,
Neal Anderson quoted Dr., Rebecca Parker writing about what this kind of foundational
love means to her: “Love is the active, creative force that repairs life’s injuries and brings
new possibilities into being. Love generates life, from the moment of conception to the
moment when we remember with gratitude and tenderness those who have died. And in
the darkest night, when our hearts are breaking, love embraces us even when we cannot
embrace ourselves. Love saves us and redirects us toward generosity.”
So my love story today is adapted from an old romantic love story, but its more
about that all encompassing love that Rebecca Parker talks about. It’s a story about the
old story of salvation that the traditional Christian churches tell and the new story of
salvation that came out of Universalism and that Unitarianism built upon. It’s a story you
might know, but not in the way I’m going to tell it. It’s called “Cindy goes to the Ball” ,
and I want to give credit and thanks to my delightful and erudite colleague Rev. Alice
Blair Wesley for coming up with this metaphor and inspiring this story. Alice is going to
be our theme speaker at the Ohio Meadville District’s Annual Assembly in Pittsburgh the
first week in April and she is well worth going to hear. But now to my story:
“Once upon a time there was a woman named Cindy who wondered why her life
had not turned out the way she hoped it would. She worked hard day after day for a
paycheck that didn’t feel like it matched all the effort she put out, and she was
uncomfortable with her relationship with her mother and her sisters and she had friends
and occasional lovers and some serious relationships but it all didn’t seem to go
anywhere, and she wasn’t sure whether her life had any meaning at all. When she went to
church, all she heard about was that she must be miserable because she was a sinner, and
that there would be only one way for her to make her life mean something, and that was
to get into the kingdom. The preacher in church kept telling her about the king and the
kingdom way up on the top of the hill, and that the king up there had a son, who was
called the Prince, the Prince of Peace, but she had to fall in love with the Prince to be able
to stay in the kingdom and be happy. Well, falling in love with the Prince wasn’t
supposed to be hard. She had heard about this Prince. His picture was all over the place,
and he seemed like a perfectly nice man, and she wanted to fall in love with him, but she
wasn’t sure how to make that happen.
The other problem with what the preacher in her church said was that lots of
people might fall in love with the Prince, but that Prince obviously couldn’t love all of
them back. In fact, there were only some people that the Prince would notice if they came
to the ball that was held at his kingdom, and the ones he noticed and loved back would be
the ones who would get to stay in the beautiful kingdom on top of the hill.
So Cindy felt stuck. She wasn’t sure she loved the Prince, or loved him enough,
she wasn’t sure how you got a ticket to the ball, and if you went to the ball, how could be
sure that the Prince would know you were even there, let alone fall in love with you?
Cindy got more and more depressed about the whole thing and too many nights she
would end the day with a strong nightcap and nod off in her sweats in front her electric
fireplace with the fake flames and ashes.
Then one day, Cindy went to work a different way just for variety, and she passed
a church she had not noticed before. It was a Unitarian Universalist Church – now the
Unitarian part she had heard about from Prairie Home Companion, but she had no clue
what the Universalist part of that very long name meant. But she decided to check it out
next Sunday, and it was truly different. The sermon was a little heady, but it didn’t tell
her she was a miserable sinner, and although the people didn’t get as enthusiastic during
service as in her other church, they were very friendly. Cindy especially liked this one
guy she met in coffee hour, who seemed so happy and comfortable to be there. She
wondered if he might be gay, but didn’t want to ask, of course, especially because her
other church was pretty negative about gay people so she didn’t really have any gay
friends. But she really liked him even though he made jokes about being the church’s
fairy godfather .
One Sunday after church Cindy and her new friend got to talking about what she
has learned in this other church, and the fairy godfather was appalled at what she was
saying. “Oh no Cindy, you’ve got it all wrong. The king’s ball is an open invitation party.
Anyone can come. I used to hear the same things you have and never even tried to go to
the ball, but one day I finally got up the courage, and put on my best clothes, expecting
I’d have to storm the gates, but the door was wide open. I just went in.
“But what about the Prince?? “ asked Cindy. Was the Prince there? Did you fall in
love with the Prince once you were there, and didn’t the Prince have to fall in love with
you? “
“Oh the Prince is there all right, very much in the thick of things…But… don’t
get me wrong, but the Prince just isn’t my type. But he doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t
fall in love with him. He’s just glad I’m there and loves whoever I love. Why don’t you
come to the ball with me tonight if you want, Cindy? I’ll even drive! Your coach awaits.”
So Cindy and the fairy godfather did go to King’s Ball and Cindy did fall in love,
but not with the Prince, and not even just with the person she eventually did fall in love
with and make a life with, but she also fell in love with the whole scene at the ball, and
with the entire kingdom, which she soon realized was not just a place on top of the hill
but was also where she been living all along.”
There is a very simple way to summarize the moral of the story of Cindy,. and
Universalists in this country have been saying it for two and a half centuries – in just
three words : “God is Love”. What they meant was that all the preaching about the
sinful state in which you live that was directed at your conversion, which was supposed
to be your ticket to the ball in the kingdom of heaven, was misguided an d wrong. If God
is love and loves us as we are, and the way we know God is through love in our closest
relationships and in our communities, then there is no conversion, no born again
experience necessary in the spiritual life. Life is instead how Dr. Channing once describe
it: “the whole of my life..(.he said)..has been a process of conversion.” Notice how far
we have come from the Puritan Calvinists that started the oldest of our congregations
here in America. Conversion for them was a dramatic event that changed everything, like
falling starstruck into love. But what if, as Channing believed, conversion is a steady
process of growth and spiritual development. So when are we saved if we spend a whole
lifetime being converted towards likeness to God?
When you put together the Universalist belief that God is love with this other
revolutionary belief proclaimed in the 19th century by Channing’s Unitarians, the belief
that God not only loves us but that we are made in likeness to God and God wants our
souls to grow towards divine living, you have a very potent theological brew. How do we
grow in our likeness to God?? Well, if God is love, we grow towards God by developing
our capacity to love – to love our selves, to love others, to love the world. The human
soul is not then some depraved originally sinful reality that God sent Jesus to save. The
soul is instead a divine seed, and Jesus nourishes that seed by his example of divine
living and divine loving. That is the Christianity our 19th ancestors espoused.
So what do all these 19th century ideas have to do with us today? What if all this
God talk from 175 years ago leaves you cold? What if you have a distant interest in Jesus
as a great historical figure but that’s about it? What if you have no idea what “soul”
means and most of the meanings you have heard you reject as spooky and unverifiable?
Let me offer you a completely non-theological way of understanding how all this may be
valuable to you.
How do you think about yourself and the meaning of your life? What metaphors
come to mind to help you make sense of it? We all have our metaphors, whether we are
conscious of them are not, and the metaphors we choose to embrace can make a huge
difference in how we approach what we do? I used one of those metaphors already in the
story of “Cindy Goes to the Ball.” Are you waiting for a religious insight to sweep you
off your feet and carry you off to the ball in the kingdom of heaven where you will fall in
love with the Prince of Peace? Or are you a shipwrecked sailor, waking up on the strange
beach that is life without any knowledge of who you are and how or why you are here
and so your meaning and purpose is to survive and make the best of it?
Here’s one of the most important metaphors that gives meaning to my life, the
metaphor that I was taught in this faith as I grew up, and that has only become more
valuable to me as I have aged: I am a vessel that has within me a seed, a seed that you
might call a divine seed if you’re comfortable with that word, a seed that is certainly
good and that exists to grow. The fruits of that growth are what we call character.
Character is the qualities of our living through which we demonstrate our understanding
and practice of all the attributes that we admire most in others: a loving heart, a generous
nature, an alert and inquisitive mind, a courageous spirit, and a conviction that the life we
have been given is not ours alone, but everyone else’s too. I find meaning and purpose in
my life as I cultivate and grow the divine seed that is my character, that is (to use
Channing’s metaphor) my likeness to God. And if God, for us, is not a remote supreme
beings, or a distant creator, or an all-knowing judge, but is rather the spirit of love that
creates the world over and over again, each and every moment of our lives, then growing
that divine seed of character means growing in our capacity to love.
In his book, “Letting Go” our former interim minister Roy Phillips has explored
this theme of self-culture and character-building through imagining ourselves as a divine
seed, and he has done it with some reflections on early childhood education and the
evolution of the kindergarten. Did you know that Unitarian educators in America were
among the early promoters of the idea of “kindergarten” , a German word meaning “a
garden of children”. How obviously even the name of this new idea about how children
should be educated depended on seeing them as divine seeds whose potential had to be
cultivated and allowed to grow.
Over the last five months one of the classes that I have been involved in coteeaching here at our church has been a discussion group on Ken Wilber’s book “Integral
Spirituality” Wilber is a philosopher/theologian/psychologist who is profoundly
interested in all the various developmental theories in the many academic and scientific
disciplines that study human growth and human consciousness. In a very insightful and
creative way, he has created a matrix of understanding that shows how all these various
ideas of human development are connected and related. His ideas are more complex than
I can encompass at the end of a sermon like this one, and that is why we’ve been
devoting a couple of hours of discussion time every month to his work.
I bring up Ken Wilber’s work because I think he is the ultimate contemporary
religious writer who is carrying on the legacy of ideas that was begun by the Channing
and by the Universalists who preached God as love, and not judgment. Wilber is saying,
much as the same as the motto over the door of our church, that there is one reality that
we are all a part of it, but that there are many paths to understanding that reality. The
mistake so many people make when they find a metaphor, an understanding, a path that
makes sense to them and gives their life meaning and purpose, is that they think it’s the
only one that there is, or the only one that’s truly right. In a world of such amazing
biodiversity, with so many species of plants and animals, the seed is a perfect metaphor
for how much human beings have in common and how differently they can find ways to
grow to their full potential.
Here at West Shore Church we teach the great American liberal religious belief
that we are saved by character, and we try to embody that in the ways we practice a UU
religious life through the opportunities for spiritual development available here. If we are
saved by character, then what are we saved from? Not from death! Death is nothing to
fear. There are a lot scarier things to be saved from than death. We are saved from
meaninglessness and loneliness. We are saved from self-absorption and numbness. We
are saved from greed, anger, and ignorance. We are saved from irrelevance. These are the
powerful temptations that we should all want to be saved from. Our salvation comes
through developing the potential we were born with, to grow into loving, engaged,
connected, contributing, learning, and flourishing human beings. It’s a potential each of
us carries as a divine seed, no matter what the conditions were in the place that we were
first planted, no matter what the wind and weather of our lives has brought to us that may
have slowed or stunted our growth in the past. The seed still has room to grow, and
character is the fruit we seek. Roy Phillips has stated well our vision and our goal:
“Strengths and gifts (are) present in all..these gifts are sacred…and should be drawn forth
in a continuing cultivation and lifelong formation of the spirit”. May it be so.
(Quotes and references from Roy Phillips are in Letting Go, Alban Institute (1999) Chapter 3.)