What Must I Do To Be Saved?
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, January 11, 1998
Many years have passed, but the memories are still vivid. The visiting evangelist would finally approach the end of his sermon, which I knew was coming because he would segue into the "invitation." The invitation was to come forward to the front of the church and be "saved." The choir and congregation would sing a hymn--usually it was the one titled Just As I Am (which, by the way, is also the title of Billy Graham's recently released autobiography). It wasn't unusual to sing the song's four verses through several times as long as the evangelist and the regular minister, who were standing at the front of the church, were convinced that there were still people who needed to come forward to the altar--which is why to this day I can still recite all four verses from memory. (I will spare you that). These revival meetings generally lasted for a week in the spring, and sometimes it was the spring and fall, every year.
Being "saved" in this setting meant that you stood before the church, once the hymn singing had finally ceased, acknowledged that God--through Jesus' life and death--had redeemed you from you sins, that you would henceforth live as good and clean a life as you could, that you were ready to become a member of the congregation, and that you would be baptized the next time the ceremony was held. Sometimes, not always but sometimes, it got pretty emotional; people crying about their lost state and about how joyful they were to be redeemed from it. Then after the service nearly everyone else present came up to offer their greetings and welcoming words; and that could get pretty emotional too with hugging and tears and the like.
As I kid in my early-to-mid teens I watched all this with a mixture of awe and fascination, along with a slight edge of discomfort, wondering just how many more rounds of Just As I Am we were going to do. My own "route to salvation", as it were, had been a comparatively sedate one at age 11. I had a few talks about what it meant to "follow Jesus" with our rather calm and mild-mannered minister who, at the close of a regular Sunday service shortly thereafter, introduced me to the congregation saying I was a "candidate for baptism" and a new member of the church. That was pretty much it; which was fine with me. Even at age 11 my innate reserve was already taking root, so that I shyly shied away from some of the more emotional outpourings I witnessed at our revivals. I certainly wanted to be saved, but preferred to have it done with as little fanfare as possible. In truth my hometown minister possessed a similar kind of reserve, which is probably why he invited an out-of-town evangelist with a more fiery personality than his to come in once or twice a year and do the real heavy lifting when it came to saving souls.
These scenes are from the late 1950s. Cut now to the mid 1970s, which was a very "in-between" time for me. I was somewhere between liberal Christianity and religious humanism; between the American Baptist ministry and the Unitarian Universalist ministry; and, as things later turned out, between marriages. I was also rather taken at that time with the humanistic psychology movement--Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and all that--and spent the better part of a couple of summers in the San Francisco area learning and participating in Gestalt therapy, as fashioned by Dr. Perls.
This also yielded some vivid memories: Fifteen people or so sitting on the floor of a thickly carpeted room with a lot of pillows scattered around. Somebody takes the "hot seat"--actually just a position in the center of the circle. He or she talk about things in their life they want to change, and what it is they see about themselves that is blocking them from their real, true, expressive selves. Painful events may be recalled, desires for greater self-acceptance and personal peace are voiced. Sometimes its gets very emotional, as the facilitator draws the "hot seat" occupant further and further out--or into--his or her self. After some measure of catharsis has been worked through the other group members move in to offer emotional support and affirmation by way of "group hugs" and the like. Even while caught up in the midst of this scene I'm also thinking, "Haven't I been here before?" Not here here; but here in the sense that I've seen this same dynamic at work--with, to be sure, radically different language and faith assumptions--but the same dynamic of people facing the broken parts of their lives and also reaching for some deeper means of personal reconciliation and levels of meaning. Its revival time again.
I remember, after one such session, taking a solitary walk late one night up and down San Francisco's hilly streets and thinking to myself, "I guess humanists, in their own way, want to be saved as much as anybody else." I also realized that the ol' Edington reserve was still well in place. My participation in those workshops during those Bay Area summers was very valuable to me personally and professionally. It caused me to look at some personal issues I'd long ignored and to make some telling career decisions as well. But those sessions and workshops also demonstrated to me that I had no more need or desire to sob my guts out in a room full of humanists than I did in a church full of evangelical Christians. But that's just me.
Last week I spoke on the rather unlikely topic--for a religious liberal--of hell and damnation. This is Part II of that sermon. The title I've chosen is from a Biblical passage I heard quoted during those revival times about as often I heard Just As I Am sung. Its a story or legend recounted in the Gospel of John where a rather erudite and learned gentleman named Nichodemus pays a call on Jesus, in the manner of a seeker approaching a guru, and asks, "Good Master, must I do to be saved?" Jesus, in the manner of a guru replying to a seeker, gives a rather cryptic answer, "You must be born again." From there the evangelist would take off on his own interpretation of what "born again" meant. More often than not he'd do it in such a narrow and damnation-threatening way that only a few short years later--during my college days--I dismissed the whole passage along with everything I'd ever been told about hell.
Ironically enough, it wasn't until I began taking a decidedly humanistic perspective on life and religion and spirituality, beginning with my introduction to humanistic psychology, that I decided that Nichodemus, whoever he was, was asking the fundamental human question; and that Jesus, whoever he may have been, was offering a fundamentally correct answer.
But maybe the New Testament doesn't resonate all that well with you. If that's the case, then try approaching this idea of salvation and being saved by way of a more contemporary passage. In The Road Less Traveled by the psychiatrist, Dr. M. Scott Peck, he writes: "We all have a sick self and a healthy self. No matter how neurotic or (even) psychotic we may be, even if we seem to be totally fearful and completely rigid, there is still a part of us, however small, that wants to grow,...(that) is attracted to the new and the unknown, and that is willing to do the work and take the risks involved in spiritual evolution. And no matter how seemingly healthy and evolved we are there is still a part of us, however small, that clings to the familiar, (is) fearful of any change or effort (and) desires comfort at any cost and the absence of pain at any price. In some of us our healthy self seems small, wholly dominated by our fearfulness...Others of us may be rapidly growing, our dominant healthy self reaching eagerly upward." Peck continues, "In this one respect we human beings are all equal. Within each and every one of us there are two selves, one sick and one healthy--the life urge and the death urge, if you will. Each of us represents the whole of the human race..."
When Peck writes her of moving from the sick self to the healthy self he is referring to a contemporary, psychologically based version of salvation, of being saved. Stripped of a lot of its cumbersome baggage the term salvation essentially means deliverance from one state or condition into another--from a less-than-healthy or broken state to a more healthy and wholistic one. In traditional terms salvation is the deliverance from a sinful or fallen state into a redeemed or "saved" one. Most religions, including the Judaic and Christian ones, have as part of their story or mythology, an account of human beings living in a perfect or unblemished state; that is, in a state of complete oneness with themselves, with Life, with Creation, with God--however understood. Then something happens to rupture or pollute the relationship. The goal of the religion, then, is to restore that broken relationship to wholeness again--if not in this life then in the next, or in some other realm of existence or being. How sucha goal is attained depends upon the particularities of the religion itself: Accept Jesus Christ as your "Savior"; follow the Buddhist path to "Enlightenment"; work through the Twelve Steps to recovery; observe certain laws, practices, or rituals--or whatever else the means may be.
Carl Jung--and I seem to be on some kind of a Jungian kick here of late--maintained that all these myths about a fall from grace or oneness, and the subsequent desire for some kind of restoration, ultimately originate in a universal human longing to return to the womb. The various Edens we tell stories about are actually reflections of the collective memory of the human race. They ultimately derive from the pre-birth condition when we lived in an unbroken state of immediacy with our entire universe (which at the time was the body of our mother). The fall from grace was birth, or the breaking of that perfect relationship. What is called salvation, or the quest to be "saved," is really the quest to recover that seeming state of perfection or grace. That's the Jungian take on sin and salvation anyway, and on how the various religious and cultural stories of fall and redemption came about. You may make of it what you will.
What this Jungian "take" tells me is that feeling some degree of alienation from our selves and some degree of dissonance with our larger world and the larger life we see and sense around us is nothing more than a consequence of our being born. From this perspective, as a matter of fact, the term "original sin" can actually make some kind of sense. Stripped of all its guilt inducing overlays the term "sin" actually means separation; and this is a state of being that I daresay we've all experienced to greater or lesser degrees. We do not always feel, maybe we don't even usually feel, completely congruent with ourselves. We, each and all, I am sure, on various occasions feel a sense of alienation from ourselves, our fellow human beings and even the world and universe which enfolds us. We know there are unhealed parts of our lives and that we live in a terribly broken world that is always in need of greater health.
I say the term "original sin" could make sense if seen in this light. The reason it doesn't make sense, however--to me anyway--is because certain theologians and certain Church teachings over the centuries took the term and, well, went bonkers with it. John Calvin, one of the principal leaders and theorists of the Protestant Reformation wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Faith: "Original sin appears to be a heredity depravity, diffused through all parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to divine wrath...infants themselves, as they bring their condemnation into the world are rendered obnoxious to punishment by their own sinfulness..." and on like that. Calvin took the universal condition of our human sense of incompleteness and occasional self-alienation and made it something for which we all deserved nothing less than the eternal punishment of God. Furthermore, there was nothing anyone could do to save or redeem themselves from such a state. The only route to salvation was to throw yourself on the mercy of God, who by His sovereign power, might "elect" to save you.
Now, enter the Unitarians. Last Sunday the Universalists got center stage when the topic was hell; today I'll give the Unitarians get some play. They countered Calvinist depravity with the idea of "salvation by character." This phrase meant the Unitarians believed we have the resources within ourselves, we have the strength of character, to deliver ourselves--at least to some extent in this life--from alienation and brokenness. The 19th century Unitarians, to be sure, kept this idea of salvation by character within a liberal Christian framework. They held up Jesus as the model, as someone sent by God, and recalled in the New Testament, who showed what it meant to live out one's life on the strength of one's character. I honor and value the presence of the UU Christians in our wider UU community today, even though liberal Christianity is no longer central to our movement. But I think the idea of salvation by character is still one worthy of regard for us today. Its a very positive expression of human potential and human possibility. Its an affirmation that we carry within ourselves the wellsprings of courage and hope that allow us to be re-born any number of times during our time of earth. Let me quickly pass onto you, then, three things that I think "being saved" can mean for religious liberals, whether we choose to use the term or not.
First, it means coming to know self-acceptance or self-validation. I don't mean that in a smug or self-satisfied way; but rather I mean having the wherewithal to look at, to use Scott Peck's language again, both the healthy and the unhealthy parts of ourselves and say "yes" to the whole thing. There is a certain kind of freedom, and a certain kind of deliverance, to be found in not demanding or even wanting perfection in oneself, of being able to say, "Yeah, there are some parts of me that aren't altogether complete or whole or healed and that's OK." This does not mean that you want to, or will, stay stuck in your brokenness or alienation. It means we move in the direction of our healthy selves by first confronting and acknowledging where we are, and giving ourselves permission to be there. To make that move, and take that journey, is to know a certain kind of human salvation; and each time that journey is made it is a journey of rebirth. It not always an easy journey. I have to agree with the first three words of Peck's Road Less Traveled: "Life is difficult."
I will say that the self-affirmation or salvation of which I speak has its best chance of being realized with a supportive and redeeming community; within a community that is committed to affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person within it. One of the reasons we are here is so we can be that community within which our members and friends can find the strength of character that will enhance and nurture their healthy self. Sometimes its hard to believe you even have that strength on your own, but a healing community can allow and enable you to find it.
A second component of the humanistic salvation, as I'm calling it, it to live with a sense of being a part of something greater than yourself. I know this is a continuing theme of mine, so I won't belabor it here. Personally I'm not terribly interested in the sort of theist/humanist debate that seems crop up from time to time amongst us UUs. I think its largely academic. I do sense--correctly or not--that there does seems to be something of a consensus among us that above and beyond any debates about the existence or non-existence of a Supreme Being, lies a common affirmation of the presence of a Life Force or Spirit of Life all around and within us, and within which we live and move and have our being. To put it in more personal terms, I feel no need to be in a relationship with a Supreme Being, but I feel the need for relationship nonetheless. Part of my own sense of my personal health and wholeness is bound up in my feeling of relationship with a larger Whole, the Whole of Life itself, which contains me within it. So a sense of relationship with the Whole of Life is another component of what I call "being saved" from the perspective of a religious humanist. And every time that relationship is renewed and reaffirmed is also a time of rebirth.
The third and final component of such salvation--somewhat related to the one just described--is the ability to see within even the smallest of efforts to improve, or to bring some measure of love and compassion to the human condition, the working out of a greater purpose or a greater good that will outlive your own time on earth. I don't know if Fred Small intended it or not, but when he wrote the words we heard a little while earlier--"the only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you're gone"--he was indeed making a contemporary restatement of the old Unitarian principle of salvation by character. We personally may not see everything that's possible; and we will not, on our own, cause every positive thing possible to happen; but there is a certain kind of "saving grace" in knowing and believing that our words and our deeds will leave something of our measure in our wake.
I attended a Sunday service at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Berkeley, California last spring while on sabbatical, and their music director sang that song--along with their choir--as a conversation with the children before they went to their R.E. classes. He prefaced it by saying that he wished someone had sung it to him when he was the age of some of the kids there. What better saving message can we offer to both our children and to ourselves than the belief that our words and deeds over the course of our lives do matter and will count, and that some measure of the love and compassion and caring we show for one another and for our wider human community and world will indeed outlive us?
I began last Sunday's sermon by using an item that went out over the UU ministers' chat line via the Internet. I'm going to close today by picking up on another message from this past week. We were informed that one of our colleagues, a man named Dan O'Neal, had passed away following a bout with cancer. I didn't know DAn O'Neal well. We may have met once or twice. He was serving the UU congregation in Santa Rosa, California at the time of his death. A couple of days after the news of his death was sent out a friend and colleague of his posted a little meditation Rev. O'Neal had written back in November, just before Thanksgiving--which by then he most likely knew would be his last. Here's a part of it:
"Thanks for this day, a day in my life. Thanks for the stars, the earth. Thanks for the illness...Thanks for death which makes life so precious and so vibrantly alive. Thanks for it all, No exceptions..."
Knowing what little I did of Dan O'Neal I am aware that he was not one to romanticize or sentimentalize death. He would not want any of his colleagues to do so either--and I won't. His passing was a painful one I am sure to his friends, family, and congregation; and it demonstrated how nature can treat us, not only in benign ways, but also in cruelly indifferent ways when it comes to the workings of a disease like cancer. What Dan offers in this little meditation is an affirmation in the face of the cruelty of indifference. To be able to say of one's life, "Thanks for it all; no exceptions.." is the mark of a saved life, and of a life that has no doubt known many moments of rebirth.
May ours then be a "saving community" for all who come seeking a greater measure on wholeness in their lives; and may our words and our deeds be a true measure of the love we share with one another and that we leave for all who come after us.
Copyright © 1998 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
