An American Faith
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, July 4, 2010


Reading: Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes

Reading: From A Treatise on Atonement by Hosea Ballou

Message: An American Faith

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

I want to tell a few stories this morning –
these are really true stories,
not mostly true, but actually true.

Caleb was born in rural New England, the eight of 13 children,
in 1750, and brought up the standing order churches of the time,
the congregational church.
He worked the family farm,
studied a little – though there was no real school for him to go to.
When Caleb was a teenager,
his father converted to the new revolutionary faith – he became a Baptist.

Caleb and his brothers and sisters went to both their mother’s congregational church
and their father’s Baptist church,
and Caleb set out to discover which was right.
Sharing this project with a friend –
I imagine them walking down a country lane,
kicking rocks and getting thirsty in the heat,
the friend turned to Caleb and asked,
“how do you know that either of them are right?”

This question was a kind of revelation to our young man:
it opened the possibility of other answers,
and inaugurated a life-long search for truth.

Later, as a young man, Caleb had a set of visions –
one set in his early twenties made him a bit of a renegade Baptist –
and another set, when he was 28, changed him completely –
let me tell you about these visions,
because they are important.

In the first of this second set of visions,
Caleb saw that there were two natures to each human being –
one, the sinful part, was simply destroyed at death,
vanished into nothing.
The other part, the holy and spiritual part,
immediately joined God in bliss.

And in the second vision, Jesus stood before Caleb,
holding out an ear of corn –
yes, corn –
and said to Caleb –
feed my sheep and my lambs.

And thus, Caleb Rich became converted to Universalism.
This new religion was spreading across rural New England,
a religion that proclaimed that God was love,
that all people would be reconciled,
that hell was real – it was the suffering you inflicted on your own soul
in this lifetime through your sins and misdeeds –
but that since our sins were finite,
and God’s love was infinite,
we would not be punished forever.

Caleb had never attended a school, let alone Harvard,
like those fancy-pants Unitarians,
but he had authentic faith.
He wasn’t that great of a preacher –
he was better with a small group of farmers sitting around a woodblock table,
some bread and some corn before them,
just talking about what made sense.

Caleb preached in New Hampshire, and Vermont and Upstate New York,
spreading the gospel of love and reconciliation.

One of the folks he converted to Universalism
was a young man, Hosea Ballou,
who went on to be the preeminent theologian and leader
of the new Universalist Church –
Ballou was better read, and a better writer,
but those were Caleb Rich’s ideas we heard in our reading this morning –

that the best part of ourselves
wishes the best for others,
and since it is the best part of ourselves
that reflects the character of God,
then God, too, wishes the best for others,
God, too, shows mercy and forgives.
Like the best part of ourselves,
God does not hold a grudge forever.

Universalism is the quintessentially American faith.
It has some precursors in Europe,
and it has popped up in other places,
but its birth is in these flinty New England farmers,
who picked up the bible and read it for themselves,
who read in their passages like the one from the gospel of John:
In my father’s house there are many mansions,
and who could not abide the old doctrines of Calvinism,
which they saw as hopelessly European and feudal –
the idea that God pre-destined some for glory and some for torment.

Caleb and the rest said, no,
that is not a God worthy of our love and admiration.
We believe that everyone has a chance to live well,
or live badly,
and that is not set by God,
but in our own hands.

It was a faith in possibility, in opportunity,
it was the same faith that animated the new country,
that drew immigrants from so many lands,
and still does,
the sense that whatever destiny might have awaited you before,
now you make your own destiny.

They might have just missed each other, but imagine Caleb Rich,
in the early 1820’s, and old man for his time –
he will die in 1826, at the age of 76,
still preaching Universalism,

I imagine him standing up in a small chapel in the woods,
speaking about God’s love and humanities freedom,
about how God wishes for all people to live their best life,
and how we should wish for that too,
and I imagine that a small boy – maybe 10 years old or so,
fidgets in the pew a few rows back,
fidgets but takes it in, believes in Universal Salvation.
Asa Brown sees the old man speak,
hears the spirit in his voice, and commits himself to this religion.
Asa grows up, marries another Universalist,
Lephia, and they do that quintessentially American thing,
they go west.
Help found a new town, Prairie Ronde, Michigan,
and have a daughter, Olympia.
She is brought up in the Universalist faith.
She has no childhood Calvinism to reject,
at least not early on.

Her father, Asa, in the great Universalist fashion,
builds a school house on his farm,
raises money from the neighbors, and hires a teacher.
Even for the girls.
Olympia graduated from High School and persuaded her father
to send her to college.
She spend a year at Mount Holyoke,
which was strictly Calvanist, and hated it.
She transferred to Antioch College in Ohio,
where the Unitarian Horace Mann was president.
She decided to become a preacher,
and applied to seminary.
The seminary president said by reply,
“I don’t approve of woman preachers,
but I suppose that’s between you and the Head of the Church” (meaning God).
He thought the letter would keep her away,
she took it as an invitation and showed up for the first day of classes.

She graduated in due course,
and was the first woman to be ordained in the United States and recognized
by a denomination – the Universalist Church in America.

She served churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut,
but was not fully welcomed.
When she went on maternity leave in Connecticut,
the neighboring (male) pastors launched a campaign to drive her out,
and finally she did what her parents had done –
she went west,
and took on the ministry in Racine, Wisconsin.
“However sweet these laid up stores—
however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here . . .
Onward!”
Olympia had been involved in suffrage work all her life,
had worked pro-suffrage campaigns in Kansas,
worked with Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the rest.

In her fifties, she semi-retired from parish ministry
and devoted herself full time to suffrage –
there she was, giving speeches in front of the white house
in her eighties,
marching in the rain,
hoping trains all over the country,
leading the church for the right to vote for women.
She was one of the few original suffragists to live to see the day,
and she cast her first vote in a presidential election
when she was eight-five years old.

Promptly after winning that fight, Olympia said,
OK, now I’ll work on World Peace,
and she founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom –
and worked on that until she died, at the age of 91.

Olympia Brown took her Universalism seriously –
and this is way that Universalism works –
you say, ah, God is a God of love,
and all people will be included in the kingdom of God,
and all people are worthy and have possibility,
then you look up,
and you look around –
and what do you see?
You see that, in fact, not all people have been included.
Some are excluded –
excluded from the franchise,
excluded from the levers of power.
Sometimes you yourself –
but, remember, it doesn’t really matter
if its you or someone else –
because, as Ballou put it,
when you are a Universalist, then
“if any of the human race be endlessly miserable,
the whole must be.”

And this, too, is a strand in America’s self-identity.
Note please, just a strand –
we are all too well aware of those who continue to exclude,
who seem to still hold to the old feudal notions
that some are blessed and some are cursed,
and that’s just the way it is supposed to be.
But over the long scope of history,

America is about ever striving to live up to its promise,
that it might actually be America,
the land of the free,
where, as Langston Hughes put it,
never kinds connive nor tyrants scheme
that any man be crushed by one above.

Jefferson, that Unitarian, said all men are created equal –
and he held slaves,
so there has always been space,
oh, too much space,
between our aspirations and our actual lives –
but the aspirations pull us,
pull us onward to a more inclusive commonweal,
those aspirations pull us –
from Ireland’s shore and Poland’s plain,
and they pull still, from the barrios and the decimated farms,
pull those who dream of freedom and opportunity
a chance to escape one destiny for their own.

One side – the slave-holding side,
the side that excludes and fears,
it says, “no tresspassin’”.
the other side, it don’t say nothing.
that side was made for Universalism.

That space,
between the America we dream of,
and America as it is,
that space has narrowed,
though the chasm is still wide,
much too wide.

We are still working to make this land
and land for everyone.

That journey continues,
and it is no surprise that people are still coming to Universalism.
They are still having visions,
just like Caleb Rich did,
visions of inclusion.

Maybe some of you know this story –
but some of you don’t, I’m sure . . .

Carlton was born two hundred years after Caleb was,
about thirty years after Olympia died.
His family was religious,
and he went to Oral Roberts University,
where he met the namesake,
became is mentee,
indeed Oral Roberts called Carlton “my black son” –
they were so close –
and Carlton, oh, he could preach.
And he started Higher Dimensions Church there in Tulsa –
what folks in Tulsa call a “Bapti-costal” church,
and it grew –
5,000 members.

And it was the traditional doctrine –
if you accept Jesus into your heart,
you’ll be saved.
And if not, well, then you’ll burn.
Forever.
And ever.

In some ways, this doctrine was an improvement over the old Calvinism of the feudal system –
at least, in this new system, you had some control over your fate,
where in Calvinism,
the question of whether or not you would burn in hell forever
was decided before the beginning of the earth,
and nothing you could do would ever change it.

But this was the message Carlton was preaching,
and then, one night, he had a vision.
God spoke to him.

It wasn’t a dream – it was a vision –
and God said – I’m paraphrasing here –
God said, “Carlton, why are you telling my gay and lesbian children
that they are going to hell?
Don’t you know I am a God of love?”

Well, Carlton believed in visions,
and he believed this one,
and started preaching a new message.
Of course, all his people, most of them left.
Gone, out the door.
They didn’t want to hear about brotherhood
from sea to shining sea
they didn’t want to hear about universal reconciliation.
They wanted to hear that they were the blessed,
and others were not.
They wanted to hear about how they were special.

Higher Dimensions dropped to less than a 1,000 folks,
and kept dropping.
Carlton Pearson was officially declared a heretic,
and Oral Roberts disowned him and his church.
They couldn’t pay the mortgage,
and they lost the building.

They moved into a local Episcopal Church and worshiped in the afternoon.
And Pearson got a telephone call from another minister in town,
Marlin, the minister of All Souls Unitarian Church,
who said, let me take you out to lunch and tell you about Universalism.
Because you are not alone. You are not alone.

You stand in a line – Caleb and Olympia and millions of others,
who risked condemnation and exclusion
to preach that God is love,
that all are brothers and sisters,
that all are worthy,
that heaven and hell are both here on earth,
in how we live and treat each other.

Carlton eventually moved to Chicago,
he need a fresh start,
but his old congregation – which changed its name from Higher Dimensions
to New Dimensions –
that old congregation disbanded and the remaining members –
a few hundred of them,
in masse, joined the Unitarian church.

How about that.

Universalism keeps springing up.
As long as some folks out there are preaching a message that only some are blessed,
that only some are worthy,
that the holy is about judgment and punishment –
as long as folks are saying that,
well, then someone is going to say,
no, I don’t think that’s right.

I think God is love.
And I think that everyone is worthy.
And I think that everyone has blessings and gifts and potential,
and that we shouldn’t write anyone off,
or throw anyone away,
that humanity and divinity belong to each person.
Universalism keeps springing up.

America keeps springing up.
I mean a particular version of America –
the America of Woodie Guthrie and Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman,
the America of the suffragists and the abolitionists
the America of the Freedom Riders and the stonewall Drag Queens,
the America that says “Destiny? Nonsense. There is no destiny!
We believe freedom, and we will not rest,
we will not rest,
until freedom means freedom for everyone,
we will not rest,
until America means America,
until this land is for everyone.

I love this country –
its possibility, its restlessness, its potential.
We have not always lived up to it,
but we keep trying,
and that counts for something.
It counts for a lot.

I love this place,
but I’m not a nationalist –
nationalism, I believe, is a kind of idolatry,
making a country into an object of ultimate concern –

I think there is a good reason that Olympia Brown
turned to peace at the end of her life,
for if you hold, as Universalists must and always have,
that we are kin, all the people of the world,
if you hold that no one religion is the only path,
if you believe that our future is one future,
then you must work for peace,
you must see all we have in common,
and all we can be when we put down our swords,
and walk hand in hand
into the world we long to build.

This is my prayer for us,
we who are the institutional home of the great Universalist tradition,
that we might keep Universalism alive,
that we might renew it for new times,
just as we renew our country for new times,
just as we work for peace in all countries,
that we might,
when we are weak and dismayed,
remember that the holy, whatever you call it,
it a loving power, a merciful power,
that when we are complacent and distracted,
that the holy, whatever you call it,
urges each human being to recollect their best self
and work for welfare of others,
especially the least powerful and most oppressed;
and that when we are joyful and purpose-filled,
that we remember that the holy, whatever you call it,
celebrates with us and hopes for the day
when every person, in every land, will live with joy and hope.