What It Means To Be UNIVERSALIST.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: A few years back on a late Sunday afternoon, I was scanning the TV and stopped to view NBC’s national television show, Dateline. They were interviewing the Rev. Carlton Pearson, whom I knew when he was at student at Oral Roberts University.

After graduation and graduate school, Carlton went on to found and build a congregation of more than 5,000 members in Tulsa. He was so prominent in some religious circles that he was invited to the White House, had his own weekly television show, and was a highly sought after special speaker across America. His annual Azusa Conferences for ministers were oversubscribed every year. And he was a bishop in the Church of God in Christ, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world.

Then something happened. He literally experienced before believing – not believed, but experienced – a theological truth that transformed his life. In fact, he began to believe much like some of us do. Which is okay for us, but it won’t get you far when you’re a bishop…in a predominantly African American denomination…and a Pentecostal, too boot. Here’s how it happened:

Bishop Pearson came home from a day at the Church, and sat down to read the newspaper and to watch television while his wife prepared dinner. Nothing unusual there, right wives?

He was relaxing…reading…nothing heavy…skimming the headlines…while occasionally looking up at the TV.

Then a picture on the screen grabbed his attention and sucked him in like a magnet. He put the paper aside and began to watch spellbound. It was a story about starving mothers in Africa and their starving children. It was a graphic report on the rape…abuse…and malnutrition they were undergoing.

Unaware, unchecked tears began coursing down his cheeks –  this bishop in the Church of God in Christ, the religious television star, the pastor of a 5,000 member church – all while watching the news on TV.

What made it especially poignant for Carlton was that his church had just recently had a Missions Conference in which they had raised six-figure sums to send missionaries to save the lost souls of Africa. Now here those “lost souls” were – in living color – and starving to boot.

As he looked at those poor emaciated mothers, with their clinging little ones – bony, big-eyed, big heads, and big stomachs – he felt sudden remorse and even guilt.

He had raised money to send missionaries to Africa so God wouldn’t send poor, starving souls like these to hell. He thought to himself, “How could any hell be worse than what they are going through?” For the first time, he began to realize what his theology really meant. He had preached and raised money to send missionaries who would preach to women like this, so that their sinful souls would not suffer eternity in hell. But what did sin mean when you had not eaten in days, or had clean water, or medicine, or a decent place to sleep? What did hell mean when their homes had been burned, their crops destroyed, their husbands killed, and their bodies raped and ravished? For certain, they were living hell.

And Rev. Carlton thought to himself, “Surely a loving God would not send these emaciated creatures to endure more hell.”

His tears began to cascade. He couldn’t stop crying. It bothered Carlton so much that he preached on it that next Sunday…to his mega congregation and his television audience. He kept repeating the question, “How could a loving God send those poor people to hell when they are living hell?” To Carlton, God wouldn’t. And he said so, in public and in church.

Guess what? Before long, he had lost his 5,000 member church, his television show was cancelled, hardly anyone came to his Azusa conferences, and efforts were underway to remove him from the bishopric of the Church of God in Christ. It got so bad that his church couldn’t make the mortgage payments. And all because Carlton didn’t believe those African women and children deserved or would be sent to hell by a loving God – and he said so in public and in his sermons.

Though it’s hard for us to fathom, there have been those who do believe in eternal punishment in some far off nether land, where unbelievers will roast and toast for ever and ever, but never get well done.

In America, one of the first to challenge that belief historically and to bring a message of the universal love of God to these shores was the Rev. Jonathan Murray, more than 225 years ago. His message, which others adopted, adapted, and spread, was so successful that it resulted in a separate denomination, called the Universalist Convention.

Eventually, that belief seeped into other denominations, until today very few do more than mouth an occasional creed about it or give lip service to such a horrid myth.

Plus, there’s only the flimsiest biblical basis for believing in Hell. It also requires a Herculean stretch of the imagination to posit a torture pit with all the millions and billions who’ve died without any awareness of Christianity. And, it requires belief in Satan, devils, and a mythological world-view that long since has been genuinely discredited.

But these kind of doctrines are mytho-poetic. Universalism, which historically was a rejection of eternal punishment in hell is a mytho-peoetic way to talk about something which is much more significant for Unitarians and Universalists, namely, it’s a way of talking about the Universe.

In fact, last week, I closed by quoting Einstein’s famous question: “Is the Universe a friendly place?” That’s another way of asking what our religious forbearers phrased as, “Will everyone in the Universe ultimately be saved?”

I’m sure that most of us are a little put-off by the religious phrasing of the question: Many would ask, “Saved from what?” The answer really is that it’s a matter of “presuppositions.”

For example, what if we were to be asked the question, if we sail too far South, will we fall off the edge of the Earth. We would be stunned by the presupposition – namely a presumption that the Earth is flat and that you can “fall off it.”

But there was a time when that supposition had great currency…before Copernicus…before Columbus…before Newton, and many of the modern advances made in understanding our planet and Universe.

Equally irrelevant is the notion of being “saved.” To be sure, there are plenty of times in our lives when we’ve fallen short of what we could have done or should have done. As Alcoholics Anonymous teaches us, we may need to confess that to people that matter and then take steps to repair the damage done. But that’s much different than believing that there is some awful fate awaiting those who don’t partake in certain soul-saving rituals or litanies.

Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save us from our sins. Nor do we need to offer any animal sacrifices to atone for our sins. Our own individual awareness and decision to do differently is what is needed.

Nor can anyone in today’s world believe there is a place of eternal punishment, filled with devils and eternally burning fire, plus a God of supposed love, but also justice, punishing those who believe a certain way and saving those who don’t. Our forbearers in faith, known as Universalists, rejected that notion as unworthy of the idea of God.

Now, having said all of that, please let me segue out of it. The notions and the presuppositions it contains relate only to those with Christian roots or heritage. It is a distinctly Christian doctrine, as is the doctrine of original sin, and the notion of atonement by blood for one’s sin or sins.

However, the phrase, “Universalism,” has a much more significant meaning for most of the religions of the world. It has much more to do with beliefs universally held by most, rather than a unique theological belief about a make-believe punishment after death.

It also has to do with something that’s very much a part of who we are and that is namely, we are a pluralist congregation with people of all sorts of beliefs, and where no effort is made to change or unify everyone into the same belief.

Which is somewhat unique among religions of the world: For some reason, in many parts of the world, we can believe differently about many different things, but when it comes to religion, we want everyone to profess to believing the same way we believe or else. Incredibly, “or else” can be downright mean and even deadly.

In response to that belief, John Saxe wrote the classic poem, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” which wonderfully illustrates the fact that all paths lead to truth, in the same way that various mountain climbers taking different paths up the same mountain can all still get to the same top. I know you've heard it before, but it’s worth hearing again occasionally:

It was six men of Hindostan,
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant,
(Though all of them were blind):
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The first approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to brawl:
"Bless me, it seems the Elephant,
Is very like a wall."

The second, feeling of his tusk,
Cried, "Ho! What have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear."

The third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Then boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake."

And so these men of Hindostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong.

As I mentioned, historic Universalism is really mytho-poetic. In other words, it’s an attempt to tell a profound truth by appealing to stories whose origins are above facticity. Their authenticity is in the power with which they speak to the human condition.

1.      So first and foremost, be clear: There is no hell, no angry God just waiting to send us to the fiery regions beyond. Neither are we a sinner in need of salvation. We are human beings, who sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes need to atone for them. But there is no cosmic lamb slain from the foundation of the world that we need to invoke. As Jews do during the high holy days, each of us need when necessary to go to whomever we’ve wronged, confess and ask forgiveness. And if possible make amends. But if it’s more than a personal matter, then how we address that is a spiritual issue responsive to our understanding of life in this world.

2.      Secondly, it’s never a matter of which religion is right; rather, it’s which is right for us…which way of understanding who we are and what our lives should be about.

As I’ve said before, imagine that we all are positioned around a great circle staring in at the center, which is reality. One person who was born in Saudi Arabia sees reality one way; another person born in Alabama to Baptist parents sees it another way; and someone born in China sees it another way; etc., etc. The point is that no one is all wrong, nor all right. There’s some truth in every perspective. Rather than being wrong, the key is to recognize that really, we’re simply different: different in heritage, in education, and experience.

3.      What Universalism does pose for us is whether we feel that the Universe is a friendly place…most of the time. The fact that we believe life is meaningful…which we all do…is also a testament to our confidence in the created order of the Universe…which some of us will witness to as God.

CONCLUSION.        

You probably would never believe where the Rev. Pearson is today. The UU World had a recent article on him and his new congregation. They are meeting right after lunch on Sundays in the All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa. Carlton is no longer a minister in the Church of God in Christ, nor a bishop. He’s a full-fledged minister of the United Church of Christ, or what we refer to most times as UCC (which as I’ve said before is short for “Unitarians Considering Christianity.”) And he’s been preaching classic Universalism all over America.

Shalom, Salaam Aleikum, Amen, and Blessed Be.