HomeGood Morning!
This sermon topic is the one selected by Diggitt McLaughlin for the sermon she purchased at last spring’s service auction. I want to thank her for allowing me to have this time to throw myself into--even to wallow in--sin. It’s been fun.
I am going to begin with an all too brief and incomplete historic view of Universalist and Unitarian views of sin by looking at four leaders of those movements in the early eighteen hundreds. Then I will give some thoughts about how we Unitarian Universalists view sin today.
First, let me begin by defining sin in the Biblical sense.
Selections from Harper’s Bible Dictionary:
Sin, that which is in opposition to God’s benevolent purposes for his creation.
…all sin is ultimately against God, God‘s laws, God’s creation, God’s covenant and God’s purposes. It is the basic corrupting agent in the universe.
…revolt, transgression…
All sin is an act of idolatry, the attempt to replace the Creator with someone or something else…
There is sin that is characterized by falling short of God’s requirements or “missing the mark”…
There are cultic sins…political and social sins, and “spiritual sins”…
…in the failure to do right, especially toward one’s fellow human beings…
and there are others.
Theologians have debated about how sin entered the world. A common assumption is that it came from Adam’s rebellion in Eden, the so-called Original Sin, but other sources have been proposed as well.
In the Christian tradition, especially in the Lutheran and Calvinist branches of Christianity, it became common to describe humanity as depraved, degraded, and broken by sin. By the late seventeen hundreds, in the extreme, the role of the Pastor was to make people aware of how depraved they were, to have them in fear and trembling before the awful majesty and terrible judgment of God.
Both Unitarians and Universalists rejected this approach.
Hosea Ballou was a great Universalist leader who lived from 1771 to 1852.
Ballou and other Universalists claimed that God was a god of pure and eternal and ever-present love, that forgiveness was guaranteed to all, that reconciliation with God was inevitable, and they used Biblical passages to prove it.
The Universalists did argue about whether we had to pay for the sins we committed here on earth or whether as soon as we died God accepted and our sins were forgiven. Those who felt that the soul needs discipline or education after death in order to be properly prepared for eternal holiness (that is we have to pay for our sins) were called Restorationists. Those led by Ballou argued that human beings are rewarded for good behavior, or punished for their misdeeds, in this life. At death they are transformed by the power of God's love as they enter eternity. That is, my words now, we are already forgiven and the job of the church is to spread the Good News of that Forgiveness. Those in this faction were called Ultra-Universalists.
The Universalist movement was so riven by this debate that in 1831 it actually split. In the long run, Ballou lost this debate and most Universalists were Restorationists.
William Ellery Channing was a Unitarian, and became the moral leader of the Unitarian movement. His view of sin included not only punishment after death, but exclusion from heaven. He specifically rejected the ideas of Ballou and of the Universalists.
Quotations:
“In a sermon titled The Evil of Sin (1832) he stated that it was obvious that sin was not always punished here on earth, and, therefore, retribution occurs in a future life. He condemned "some among us"-obviously referring to Ballou and his followers-who claim "punishment is confined to the present state" and that "in changing worlds we shall change our characters; that moral evil is to be buried with the body in the grave." The consequence of such belief was that it "tends to diminish the dread of sin."
Of Ballou's Ultra-Universalism he said, he had never seen a "more irrational doctrine." [See William Ellery Channing, Works (1886 edition), 350.]
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), in his essay On Compensation, wrote of his views of sin and punishment. Like Ballou, Emerson believed that we are recompensed here and now for our sins. He stated that the sinner receives the punishment of the sin in the act of the sin. So, if we depersonalize people and distance ourselves from that, we are in that act distancing ourselves from connection with the human race.
Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was a Unitarian minister, a transcendentalist, a friend and student of both Channing and Emerson.
Henry Steele Commager wrote a biography of Parker in which he quotes Parker’s words at his installation:
A Christian Church should be the means of reforming the world, of forming after the pattern of Christian ideas. It should therefore bring up the sentiments of the times, the ideas of the times, and the actions of the times to judge them by the universal standard. We expect the sins of commerce to be winked at in the streets; the sins of the state to be applauded on election day and in a Congress, or on the fourth of July; we are used to hear them called the righteousness of the nation. You expect them to be tried by passion, which looks only to immediate results and partial ends. Here they are to be measured by Conscience and Reason, which look to permanent results and universal ends; to be looked at with reference to the Laws of God, the everlasting ideas on which alone is based the welfare of the world.
Parker looked at his world, his city, saw thievery and prostitution and judged these as problems. But he did not place blame on the individuals who were thieves or prostitutes. He pointed out that they were generally poor and illiterate, with no other means to support themselves. The problem, as he saw it, was not a personal problem; rather it was a system problem.
Of this, Commager says” Nor would Parker leave it all to the pleasantry of ‘society.’ Property was at fault, the State was at fault, the Church was at fault. Men who paid low wages and high dividends, men who collected exorbitant rentals for wretched slums or, worse still, for grog shops or houses of ill fame, men who were willing to pay taxes for war but not for schools, these were the real foes of society. Bankers who exacted usurious rates of interest, journalists who reveled in the most loathsome details of vice, lawyers who would defend, for a fee, the worse of causes, judges who thought it a crime for anyone to be poor, clergymen who argued the divine sanction of the gallows, statesmen who made war and called it honorable, these were the men who organized the sins of society.
Commager quotes Parker as saying, “The nation sets the poor an example of fraud by making them pay the highest on all local taxes; of theft by levying the national income on persons, not property. Our nave and army set them the lesson of violence; and to complete their schooling, at this very moment we are robbing another nation of cities and lands, stealing, burning, and murdering, for lust of power and gold. Everybody knows that the political action of a nation is the mightiest influence in that nation. But such is the doctrine the State preaches to them, a constant lesson of fraud, theft, violence and crime.”
This attitude of Parker that it was society that was primarily at fault is one that resonates for me today. And Parker appears to have held that belief even in areas that would cause me difficulty. For example, in A Letter to A Southern Slaveholder , Parker asserted:
I think they are doing a great wrong to themselves, to their slaves, and to mankind. I think slave holding is a wrong in itself, and therefore, a sin; but I cannot say that this or that particular slave-holder is a sinner because he holds slaves. I know what sin is-God only knows who is a sinner. I have never had that temptation; perhaps if born in Georgia, I should not have seen the evil and the sin of slavery. I may be blind to a thousand evils and sins at home which I commit myself. If so, I will thank you to point the out.
So, even on the issue of slavery, Parker blamed the system, not the individuals in the system, even the slave owners themselves.
So, I have reviewed some historical Universalist and Unitarian views on sin. What is our modern Unitarian Universalist view?
To show that, I begin again in the age of the four men I have already referred to. In 1849 a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, wrote a Christmas carol entitled “It Came Upon The Midnight Clear”.
I will read to you the first two lines of verse three from an old Unitarian hymnal:
But with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.
And now, those same lines from our newest hymnal, published in 1993:
But with the woes of WAR and strife the world has suffered long;
beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.
What is our modern Unitarian Universalist approach to “sin”—we have edited it out.
We generally do not like the concept of sin, seeing it as a destructive concept rather than a helpful one.
But I want to suggest that there is good reason for us to recapture the concept of sin.
There is such a thing as sin, in the sense of “falling short” or acting against the benevolent purpose of the universe, or, at least, against benevolence.
To say there is no sin is to say I need not look at myself, assess myself. I need not change or grow.
To say there is no sin is to say that society need not change or grow.
To say that there is no sin is to claim perfection—and is that not the ultimate sin for either a person or a nation?
I claim this paradox: I am fine as I am, but I can be better.
May I be honest and gentle with myself.
I will strive to better myself in this way: To be ever more compassionate, understanding and forgiving of individual sins, and to be ever more condemning of society’s sins, seeing those as that which produces sinners.
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