I heard a story some years ago. It was a story about a preacher who was invited to preach at a well-known, visible church that stood in the deep history of the American Black Church tradition. The minister who was invited to preach was a white woman. In preparing her sermon, she labored and labored to be sure that every word was right. She really wanted to do well and to be sure to deliver a message that was uplifting and transformative.

And then the day came. She was seated on the chancel in front of the congregation with the famous beloved minister who invited her to preach sitting beside her. And then during the service, while the offertory music began and the congregation was managing baskets and paying attention to the choir, the famous beloved minister looked over at her. He said, “You look a little nervous.” And she was, you see.

She confessed that she was so hoping that her message would reach someone, would touch someone. And her fine colleague smiled at her, warm, deeply loving, and serene. He placed a hand of assurance on her shoulder and said, “I know you will be fine.” And right in the moment, she felt a lot better. Her face relaxed, she breathed deeply, and she smiled back appreciatively. And then just before rising to introduce her to the congregation, almost pushing off on the shoulder he was clasping, he leaned in closely and added, “As long as you’re preaching about what’s saving your life today, I know you’ll be fine.”

And in that instant her skillfully prepared words for the day seemed to dry up like thousand year old desert texts and crumble in the hands of her mind to the sands of time. She could not, even an hour after she was finished preaching, recall exactly what she had said.

But she did tell them what was saving her life.

I should tell you that this story comes from a very tiny, little genre of stories. A genre not often shared or disclosed to the general public. It’s one you’ve probably never heard of, and that’s not your fault. This is, you see, from the genre of: sermon horror stories. In this little genre are stories about arriving to the church an hour late because of daylight savings time. Computer glitches and printers eating manuscripts are common, too. There are even some stories about wily senior ministers snatching a page or two from a junior colleague’s manuscript only “to keep things interesting.” All these are standard fare.

But the most important piece of all of them is being up in front of a group of people, usually a group whose opinion of you matters, and then somehow losing what it was you planned to say. And ministers aren’t alone, right? This is one of the deepest fears humans have. People despise public speaking because of stories like this. As a matter of fact, the fear of public speaking and all that surrounds it is regularly measured by psychologists as being a greater fear for humans…than death itself.[1] Really think about that. You’re not mishearing me. I’m not saying that people would rather die than speak in public. The research says that people are more afraid of speaking in public than of dying.

So when you put those together, you realize the full weight that our minister in our story was carrying. Because really, what could be more terrifying than talking in public about what is saving your life?

What would you say if someone asked you to speak to a crowd about what is saving your life today? Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you all to do it.

See answering that question requires that we know something else. I can spend a fair amount of time thinking about what is saving my life today. The mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the air, that is saving my life today. The food and water I ingest daily, that is saving my life today. The endless supply of British murder mysteries on Netflix…well, maybe that’s not saving my life. But we can all come up with these kinds of practical examples. I’m sure.

But if we are willing, we can get closer to the heart of what is saving our lives perhaps by asking this question: What is killing us?

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of the most prominent figures in preaching and theology in the United States says this about what is killing us. “Although we might use different words to describe it, most of us know what is killing us. For some it is the deadly rush of our lives; for others it is the inability to move. For some it is the prison of our possessions; for others the crushing poverty that dooms our children to more of the same.” [2]

And her list is not exhaustive. We all might have our own experiences. But it points to those things that are weighing on us. Those things that are sapping our energy. Those things, that that taking our lives. And in the way that we diagnose what is hurting us before finding a cure, it is only when we identify what is taking so much of our lives, that we can determine what it is, that is saving our lives.

Taylor goes on to explain that, “To be saved is not only to recognize an alternative to the deadliness pressing down upon us but also to be able to act upon it. Even those who have no choice but to be carried toward safety on stretchers will eventually be given the chance to take up their mats and walk, and even those whose legs still will not work can discover how agile a healed spirit can be.”[3] And as far as I’m concerned, and as far as so many of our Universalist ancestors are concerned, this is the only saving that matters. To recognize what is pressing down upon us, and to act upon it.

Living and dying. Life and death. These are at the center of our existence. They are our existence. And they have been a deep part of the work of religious people for, well, forever. Forrest Church, the past minister of All Souls in New York City, my home congregation, was fond of saying often that religion is the human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. The human response.

But what about another response? What about a response from something else to our death? Something other than human? Something super-human?

Asking these questions and trying to answer them is when so much of what Unitarian Universalists have rejected comes into focus. Who is saved and who is not? Who’s in and who’s out? And if someone’s not in, if someone’s not “saved,” then where does their soul or their essence reside when they die?

Now, there are a lot of very religious questions bound up in that one question. But our ancestors in Unitarian Universalism, each in their own way, came to a conclusion that eternal damnation or hell was simply not a part of the universal plan. And that’s all fine and well.

But folks, stalking behind a lot of beliefs that are still in our world, and maybe even some beliefs in our own community, is the view that our souls will be judged, and sent to the according location, be it paradise, purgatory, or perdition. That some divine force will pass judgment and then mete out justice. And I’ve got a theory about that, friends.

See, humans have been asking where we go when we die and what happens when we get there for a lot longer than any of the current philosophies on this subject have been around. Longer than there was a Christian faith, longer even than there was a Jewish faith, just in recorded history, we have records from ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and the ancient traditions of Central Asia, like Hinduism that talk about what hell might be like. The first recorded explanations of the great painful beyond were record in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates in modern day Iraq, on clay tablets, more than four thousand years ago. [4] For ancient Mesopotamians, the idea of the land of the dead was more like a dulled down, dingy version of life. And a lot of the funeral rights associated with dying in that culture were attempts to lessen the pain of the land of the dead. And the world holds many, many conceptions of what hell might be that are quite intriguing.

In her book The History of Hell, Alice Turner explains that in Hinduism there is not just one hell. Some adherents count several million different kinds of hells, for just one instance.[5] But whatever your persuasion or your place in history, today, in America, the belief in some concept of hell, a belief in eternal justice resting in a power outside of human control, is alive and well.

The Pew Research Center on religion tells us that 58% of Americans do believe in hell.[6] Okay. But so, so interesting is that Alice Turner found in her research for her book that only 4% of people believe they might be going there.[7] 58% think there is a hell. 4% think they might go there. So more than half of America feels that hell is for other people.

And I feel I am safe in saying that this feeling, this feeling that hell is for other people, is actually a feeling that predates even our Mesopotamian tablet tappers. Someone, somewhere, long ago, must have experienced something, or maybe even lived an entire life, that told them, there is no justice in this world. So, there must be some in the next.

Anyone ever feel like that?

In fact, what a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of hell really believe is that it is the human impulse for justice, the impulse that arises when we witness terrible trauma, whether to ourselves or to others, it is that very deeply human impulse, that brought the concept of hell, the concept of justice somewhere in the universe, the concept of justice somewhere, anywhere, in a time and space we can’t yet glimpse, the concept of divine justice, into being.

Someone’s gotta get the bad guys in the end, right? That’s how justice works in the stories we tell. And I’m not only talking about the ones in weighty tomes somewhere, or passed down from ancient writings. I’m talking about the stories we tell each other now. Whether it’s subtle detection by a team of British law enforcement officers, or the more bluntly assembled Justice League from comic books and now from movies, our very culture, stretching from time before knowing, to the movies we flock to today, are filled with stories of the bad, the evildoers, getting what’s coming to them. They are filled with the need to see justice done.

Now we in Unitarian Universalist circles, we’re very evolved, right. You won’t find a lot of Unitarian Universalist educators teaching classes about hell in our classrooms. We’ve probably talked more in these moments about hell than is customary in a Unitarian Universalist church for an entire year. In fact, the existence of some kind of eternal punishment is a concept or an article of faith that I personally reject and will not believe exists. There are a great many beliefs that arise from this vast, tremendous bounty of a world of faith that we as Unitarian Universalists consider and hold somewhere along the range from impossible to plausible, but sorry folks, hell just is not one of them for me.

It’s not because it’s scary. It’s not because it’s supernatural. And it’s not because it comes from a tradition that isn’t my own. Nope. It’s because it makes people lazy. Yes, it makes people scared and fearful. But what gets my goat is that it makes people lazy.

It makes people lazy in considering what they really believe. Because if I believe that the justice that’s coming and how it’s applied is completely unknowable, if I believe that the entity giving out that justice and its will for we humans is also completely unknowable, then why should I bother thinking about any religious belief or concept at all? Love, forgiveness…any one at all? It’s unknowable. But that’s not all.

It makes people lazy in taking action to address institutional wrongs now. Because if I believe that justice only really comes in the next life, I will be less inclined to fight for it in this one.

And folks, it makes people lazy in saving their lives, in living their lives. Because if just avoiding hell is all I’m doing with my life, then I’m not living.

All of the concepts of divine justice that span the ages of human thought find root in a shared impulse for making something right that is wrong. But the need for justice, the impulse that tells us it’s necessary, that we need justice at all, arises from something even deeper in our shared human story.

It arises when we learn of the kind of suffering that has no response.

It arises when we experience the kind of torment that has no relief.

It arises from the heart that breaks for another’s breaking heart.

The bedrock upon which so much of our fear, our pain, our needing, our yearning, in a word, our humanity, rests, is our concern for one another, is our compassion for one another, is our love for one another. So it is even more offensive to my conscience that our natural human impulse for justice that arises out of concern, compassion, and love, plays out for so many as a threat of torment of epic, even universal proportions.

And something has to change. Not just for Unitarian Universalists, but for everyone.

Something has to change. Because the laziness that comes from justice being something that someone else does…is killing people. Injustice in our streets is causing the untimely deaths of many members of our human family.

Something has to change. Injustice in our hearts is causing the slow and painful death of our very spirits on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis.

Something has to change. And it can. Because if we know what is killing us, we know what can save our lives, too.

The dance between our human impulse for justice and the creation of hell as some kind of perverse divine justice teaches us something: What begins as a deep human impulse, has the power to change the world and what it believes forever. But just as the concept of hell evolved over thousands of years into the monstrous breeding ground for fear and fiction it has become, changing the world forever will not happen overnight. But in can happen. And it can start now.

The personal, deep, and sometimes dividing work it takes to become justice-seeking and justice-practicing individuals every single day…saves lives.

The turn we take to our neighbor from out of our internal work in order to join together to make justice something that might actually come to pass…saves lives.

And when we as a church, swing wide our doors, to people like we did on Wednesday, right here in this sanctuary, people trying to stop the perpetuation of the industry of incarceration, the human-created purgatory of persons on the sacred soil of this island, we are saving our lives together.

For it is when we come together, embracing one another, hands clasping shoulders clasping hands clasping shoulders, that we can ever really tell the world more than what is killing us. That is when we show the world what we hold in our hands. That is when we show the world what is really saving our lives. Because that is when we hold on to one another and answer the call to speak out for justice in this life, to speak out publicly again, and again, and again, louder than any fear we have in our hearts, to begin a new generation of caring, that might start as a trickle, but will one day rise up, breaching the banks of fear and ignorance, until justice in our hearts, justice in our relationships, and justice in our world, truly Divine Justice, flows out upon the world like an endless stream of love.

And I tell you truly, that vision, that hope, is what is saving my life today.

And may it ever be so. Amen.

 

[1] See Glenn Croston, Ph.D., “The Thing We Fear More Than Death,” Psychology Today online, posted November 29, 2012. See also Kaya Burgess, “Speaking in public is worse than death for most,” The Times UK online, posted October 30, 2013. There are many more.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church, e-book chapter 17.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Alice K. Turner, The History of Hell, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Company (1993), 5.

[5] Turner, 3.

[6] See Caryle Murphy, “Most Americans Believe in Heaven…and Hell,” PewResearch.Org, November 10, 2015.

[7] Turner, 4.