A Joyful Faith in the Postmodern World
A lay sermon preached by Perry King 15 Feb 2004
I feel very privileged to be standing before you in this beautiful sanctuary. Just look around and think about the hope and forward expectation with which it was built by our Universalist spiritual ancestors. On behalf of all of us here, I would like to say thank you to those who planned, financed, and built this building, this labor of love and gave it as a gift to us, an unknown future generation. So thanks to them and also a special thanks to our Universalist preachers and theologians whose vision made it possible. I owe a tremendous personal debt to them as I‘ll tell you in a minute. My topic this morning is “a joyful faith in the postmodern world.” I use the term postmodern to describe the world we live in today and show how it’s different from the world of thirty years ago. I’d like to talk about the joyful faith of our Universalist ancestors and pose the question of whether and how we can find this faith in our world today.
As I said before, I owe a tremendous personal debt to the Universalists and I was one even before I had heard of the denomination. For those of you who are new to this idea, we are united in our past history by a belief in universal salvation, that is belief that God will eventually save everyone, whether in this life or the afterlife. In the United States we developed in reaction to the harsh Calvinistic preaching of ministers such as Jonathan Edwards whose famous sermon: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” told about eternal torment of the damned before a wrathful God. To be fair to him, he was trying to get the attention of his congregation and wake them out of their slumber, during a very religious period known to historians as the “Great Awakening.” Most of Hosea Ballou’s message such as the reading you just heard was a positive corrective to this kind of preaching. I know very well how this kind of preaching can get your attention. When I was a young boy of around twelve years old growing up in rural North Carolina I went to the local Baptist Sunday school every Sunday. I still remember one lesson as if it happened only yesterday. Our teacher said something like this: “Hell’s an awful place boys. God let a man speak out of this place once. And do you know what he wanted? He wanted a drop of water for the end of his tongue.” Now that got the attention of all the junior high boys for sure. They were sitting on the edge of their chairs. Although I can laugh about it now, it was traumatic. One night my mother came into my bedroom because she heard me crying. When she asked what was the matter, at first I was embarrassed to say. But then I told her that I was crying because I was afraid of going to Hell. She immediately reassured me that if I died tomorrow, she was sure I would go to Heaven. Although her words were comforting, I still had my doubts.
I grew up in a thoroughly religious environment. At extended family gatherings, especially at Christmastime, I would often listen to my relatives discuss theology. They were divided between the Primitive Baptist Doctrine, which was Calvinistic in flavor, versus the Free Will Baptist. The Primitive Baptists believed in the doctrine of predestination, and that humans could do little to affect their salvation, except to hope that they were among the elect. The Primitive Baptists would laugh at the notion that humans could choose God, as it was God who did the saving. On the other hand, the Free Will Baptists believed that human choice determined one’s salvation and where one would spend eternity.
These debates were often fierce and some people refused to take sides, not wanting to offend their spouses or relatives. It was during these debates that I first discovered my grandfather’s joyful faith. Although a Primitive Baptist and a Calvinist, he believed that God was going to save all humankind in the end. I can still hear him talking about the love and goodness of God, and even remember him weeping with joy when talking about the grace of God which he understood to mean God’s gift of love and salvation to all humankind even though they were often wicked and without love. He was often outnumbered and once I remember him inviting three Primitive Baptist preachers to our Christmas gathering, probably hoping they would even things up for the inevitable theological discussion. For me, the implications of his faith were obvious. If God was going to save all people, than I too could be assured of salvation. What a wonderful alternative to the fire and brimstone preaching that had been drummed into me at Sunday school. What a joyful faith! My mother always thought that he worked this concept out himself for his church fellowship remained Calvinistic in doctrine. But in talking to our former pastor, Reverend Wells, I discovered that there was a Universalist sect among the Primitive Baptists known as Primitive Baptist Universalism. He loaned me a book called In the Hands of a Happy God, the “No Hellers of Central Appalachia” by Howard Dorgan, which was an historical and theological study of this faith. The author proposes that this faith developed by the spread of 19th century Universalism to Appalachia. and its intersection with the established Primitive Baptist faith of the time. One very interesting historical anecdote about Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross is recounted in this book. Clara Barton was a Universalist and part of our congregation in the 19th century. In part of the oral history of one of these churches she performed some of her work as an “angel of the battlefield” during the Civil War at a Primitive Baptist Universalist Church in southwestern Virginia. Today this church memorializes that history with a picture of Clara Barton on the church wall behind the preaching stand. Clara Barton knew the joyful faith when she wrote to a friend: “Your belief that I am a Universalist is correct as your greater belief that you are one yourself, a belief in which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice.” In this book I was able to rediscover the joyful faith of my grandfather. In this region of Appalachia, these Primitive Baptists are known as “no hellers,” because they reject the doctrine of eternal hell. Listen to an Elder Wiggins summarize this idea. “We follow God because it is joyous to do so, not because we fear some eternal punishment in the afterlife“. I thank Pastor Wells for being a good historian and helping me to connect with my grandfather’s joyful faith and I thank those Universalists preachers whose influenced some Primitive Baptists to become Universalists. For whatever else they did, they helped a frighten junior high boy to become assured that he would not be spiritually disinherited.
In the New England Puritan world of Jonathan Edwards, and in rural North Carolina during my childhood, Christianity was the only show in town. You were defined by your relationship to it. Today, there are many shows and many different ways to be spiritual. Some define postmodernism as the rejection of all universals. Some see the world we live in as unraveling and without foundation. Some postmodern thinkers challenge us to abandon the modernist notion that we can control or even understand the world we live in. No longer can we make claims that are the truth for everyone and for all times. Some claim we can no longer even speak of the truth. We can speak of a truth or truth as we see it. For our purpose today, this is what I mean by postmodernism. Instead of the truth, we have to speak of Christianity now as a truth, or we simply will not be heard. But all is not bleak. If we can’t know the world as an object we can find a new way of relating to it. We can still see the world as intensely beautiful and find our way in our relationship to it. Can we find the joyful faith of our ancestors in this era? I don’t know to be honest.
As I can’t give any firm answers I’ll at least suggest some guidelines:
Firstly, we can try to get over our past spiritual trauma or negativity. Many reject or even cut off their spiritual self due to the need to reject some past experience. What faith did you practice in your childhood? Try to come to terms with it. If you need to talk to someone by all means do so. For me I’ve found some wholeness in coming to terms with some of my negative ideas about Christianity, and reframing the concepts. As my childhood faith was full of fire and brimstone interpretations, I like to try to read the New Testament freshly being open to new interpretations.
Can we find the joyful faith? We can try to get past the worn and modernist categories of atheism or theism. Both of these categories claim a truth that must be true for all. We’re not going to be heard by the younger generation if we try to make too many claims that sound like “the truth” rather than proclaiming a truth that is meaningful and beautiful to us and challenging our listener to find a truth or a meaning on their own terms. One of the great things about Christianity is that we can always take Jesus any way he fits for us whether as a hero of a myth, great ethical teacher, or Son of God. Whatever fits take him, or don’t take him. Take something else, take a name, take a more modern idea, anything that fits. But I rejoice myself that this wonderful man lived in history, in real time, real flesh and blood. How can we relate to him as a contemporary? Find your way but don’t cut yourself off because of some past negative experience or idea.
How can we find the joyful faith in the world today? Well, we can get over our trauma, reframe it with a fresh interpretation of the scripture and let’s find some other people we can get with that share an affinity with us. As Pastor Wells used to say, don’t be afraid to put some form on your spirituality. We’d love for all of you to come to our church and find your space within it. We respect individual beliefs and respect each other as we grow together in faith. Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian challenged us to go beyond theism to faith. He believed that faith comes from despair, from coming to terms with the world and not sugar coating reality, saying something like Jesus said on the cross, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Then faith can be real for us.
Let’s stay close to the poor. I had a wonderful experience at my clinic where I work as a social worker. I met a man I was going to help with getting entitlements and help him add $60.00 extra per month to his social security. But he said, don’t bother. I said why not? You live in a rooming house and get food stamps. He said, “I don’t care about money. I’d just give it all away anyway. Then he looked me in the eyes and said: “God has blessed me so richly.” I could see it in his eyes and he made me feel good for the day. The next time he came to our clinic I asked him to come to my office, just to be with me. These people are out there and they have an amazing joyful presence, very contagious. Often they are poor people. We can find faith by being close to the poor. Our church has the Leland Place ministry where every other Saturday we go and share a meal with people just coming out of prison. It great because these people are about newness of life and change in life. They have a positive spirit because they are starting something new and are getting off of drugs and alcohol. In our intersection with them we can often strengthen our faith and find joy. We’re also starting a new ministry in our church. We’re going to be starting a music ministry where we’re going to be going to senior centers, hospices, children’s programs, and make a joyful noise as the scripture says. We’d like you to join us.
One thing we can do in the postmodern world, and I’m not going to assume that you are a postmodernist, but I am going to speak about this philosophy, as it is the dominant philosophy of our age, since we can’t know the world as objective, we can know the world inside ourselves and see it as even more intensely beautiful and relate to the world and share its beauty with others. Give art and beauty to others. And whatever name you give to the Great Spirit, to your spirituality, to God, whether you are a theist, non-theist, or like a lot of us here if you want to be honest, we just don’t know, whatever you give to your pearl of great price, follow it with all your heart and passion. That is truly where the answer will be. I’d like to end by reading the parable again that was read earlier. Jesus spoke in parables because he was a master in communication. He wasn’t trying to tell you the answer but was giving you the parable and letting you find your own answer. As you go out the door today, try to find the pearl of great price, and the treasure hidden in the field.
“Again the Kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it." (Matthew 13: 44-46 King James Version)
May you find the joyful faith! Amen.