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When I entered Divinity School, I took an introductory class on theology, covering all the major theological themes. I easily understood sessions on God, and those on sin, but I was entirely unprepared for the session on grace. We discussed two parts of grace, justification and sanctification (what Dorothee Solle spoke of this morning), justification, the forgiveness of sins by Christ's death on the cross, and sanctification, entrance into the beloved community of a healing, unifying God.

Growing up Presbyterian, I knew Part I of this grace theory quite well. Presbyterians are heavily influenced by Calvinism, the same theology shared by the Puritan settlers in America. According to Calvinists, we are born sinners through original sin via Adam and Eve. I knew enough about my Presbyterian heritage to know that historically Presbyterians also believed in predestination, the sign of election to salvation supposedly imprinted on each of our faces at the time of birth.

It was almost an out of body experience when I realized that many of my fellow students knew all about sanctification, and I had never heard of, or experienced it. I went home to ask my husband, who grew up Catholic, if he knew about sanctification. And he did, he knew as much about it as he did about justification and forgiveness. He looked at me like "Sharon, where have you been?" And I thought, "I don't know, the Presbyterian church?" For me, just learning about sanctification, the potential for a beloved healing community of God, was a moment of grace.

Theology is power; it has the power to hurt and the power to heal. I do not want to issue a blanket condemnation of Presbyterians. My story probably says more about my family and individual church of birth than anything else. Some of my most liberal, progressive, accepting colleagues have been Presbyterians. I have no idea. Maybe I grew up in the most conservative Presbyterian Church in Ohio. What I do know is that I learned much about sin and little about grace. My great frustration with religion was that, I thought, humans could only suffer with their own sin and failings.

The lightening bolt I received that day in class was this: if the sanctification of grace (Part II) is not realized, then each of us can only wallow in our own sin forever. If the sanctification of grace is not emphasized, we will wallow in our own sin forever. We will believe we are unforgivable. If we are unforgivable we never need to challenge ourselves to do the work of being good people because we are failures and just can't be good people.

The double-edged sword is this, or should I say, the double-edged Styrofoam bat is this; we are sinners so we are too bad to actively work for the beloved community, but since we are justified by faith alone (belief in Jesus Christ) we will ultimately be saved. We don't need to do good works, perhaps we cannot. We will be saved. Salvation is not here on earth; it is in the hereafter. There is a great disconnect between behavior and positive reward.

Dorothee Solle explains about this type of grace:

Grace is halved, it reaches only the innermost heart of sinners who feel guilty, but not the reality of their lives, their bank accounts and their relationship to others. Grace is robbed of its power really to change us, to unite those who are separated . . . This half grace is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Nazi period called 'cheap grace'; he used this expression to criticize his church, which was afraid of conflict, and took advantage of the Reformation heritage, the 'sola gratia', to shut its ears to the call of God, and to keep quiet when it was time to speak.

If our sole emphasis is on justification by faith, as noble, difficult, and as heartfelt as it is to truly know oneself as a sinner, we can still separate ourselves, close ourselves to the realities of life that live with us, whether that be anti-Semitism, poverty, or the sacred work of being respectful of those who are different from us.

The word "salvation" takes its root from the Latin word salve, which refers to a healthy kind of wholeness. Can wholeness be achieved solely through faith, or does it also take works? This is the age-old Catholic-Protestant debate, and I come down on the Catholic side of this one. Wholeness takes works and faith, faith and works. Justification by faith, salvation by faith is a worthy individual enterprise. But as humans we exist as individuals and as a community. Wholeness (or the lack of it) is found in our homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, and congregations, as well as in the silence of our own hearts. At our core, we are social beings. Our wholeness, our salvation in this sense, comes in community as much as in our individual humanity.

Grace and salvation are at the center of Christianity. They have brought, and continue to bring, comfort, strength, and meaning to millions of believers. I was reminded of this earlier in the week when I attended a meeting with several, devout evangelical Christian clergy members. Our Unitarian Universalist ideas of salvation, and my personal idea of salvation, are quite different from those of my dedicated colleagues. So how did we get to what we believe today?

It is difficult to imagine this now, after 2000 years of stunning Christian conquest (religious, military, and public relations), but the first five hundred years of Christianity were full of theological chaos. There was no "Christian" faith, as we know it today. The early Catholic (or universal) church took hundreds of years to fully organize. There were great arguments about the meaning of Jesus' life and death, all of which were settled in special Church Councils.

After each council, the "losing" side became the heretics. In 544 C. E., a Council condemned the idea of universal salvation, the belief that everyone was saved. The late date of this Council leads me to believe that for 500 years it was acceptable to be Christian and believe that everyone was saved. Although universal salvation became a heretical idea, it did not die. Belief in universal salvation continued to quietly move through the Roman Empire, into Europe, and eventually took hold in America during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Jonathan Murray founded the first Universalist church in America in Gloucester, MA in 1779. Murray was influenced by the English Universalist, James Relly, who believed that the death of Jesus atoned for the sins of all people, whether Jewish, Muslim, or atheists. This was a radically loving and accepting theology. In his book, The Unitarians and the Universalists, James Robinson explains:

Universalist teaching tended to evoke violent opposition from evangelical and Calvinist groups who saw the abandonment of doctrines of eternal punishment as an invitation to moral degeneracy and possible damnation. Murray himself told the humorous story of his own attempt, before his conversion to Universalism, to save a young lady who had been "ensnared" by the "pernicious errors" of the English Universalist James Relly ("this detestable babbler"), who was later to convert [Murray] through his writings. Embarrassed by his inability to answer the young woman's arguments, [Murray] retreated in confusion. "From that period, I myself carefully avoided every Universalist, and most cordially did I hate them.

As much as Murray hated Universalists, he chose to study Relly's works, and by 1760 was himself a Universalist. I quote his words at every membership signing ceremony here at First Church.

Go out into the highways and by-ways.

Give the people something of your new vision

You may possess a small light, but uncover it, let it shine,

Use it in order to bring more light and understanding

to the hearts and minds of men and women.

Give them not hell, but hope and courage;

[Preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.]

This was very different from the typical early American religious diet of fire and brimstone, and dire warnings of damnation and a wrathful God.

A generation after Murray, another American Universalist minister, Hosea Ballou, rocked the American theological scene even further. Ballou maintained that God was too loving to sentence humans to eternal damnation. Rather than upholding popular notions of the moral depravity of humans, he emphasized the benevolence and love of God. Ballou believed that the consequences of sin would be experienced in life, not death.

Early Universalists in America struggled for both theological tolerance and their political rights. [Explain Universalist controversy in America]

Our Universalist ancestors endowed us with an extraordinary legacy of acceptance and love. I hear their legacy today when we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, the acceptance of one another, and when we say that "God is love".

In my own way, I still believe in the Universalist theology of salvation. Unlike Murray and Ballou, I do not believe that we pay for our sins here on earth. I do not believe that we will all be reunited in heaven or that Jesus died for our sins. However, I do believe that God is love, so loving that God would not kill God's own son, so loving, that I do not need to have just one faith to be loved by God in return. I do believe in the grace of God and the ultimate redemption of all. I do believe in a hereafter I can not now know, but that leads to better things. At their core Universalists were human and religious optimists, and most of us today, whether humanist, atheist, or theist, share some part of this optimistic spirit.

[Explain one concern with this optimism]

There is also a Unitarian contribution to our modern understanding of salvation. Early in the 19th century Unitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson began to doubt the divinity of Jesus and the truth of Biblical miracle stories. Yet, at the same time that the Unitarians doubted the divinity of Jesus, they upheld respect for the moral character of Jesus, Jesus as prophet, teacher, symbolic healer, the ultimate moral human. This emphasis on human character, with Jesus as a role model, became know as salvation by character. The emphasis of this salvation is how one behaves here and now, on earth, where other humans can hold us accountable. I do not know the hereafter, but I do know the here and now.

In a paper published just last year, Unitarian Universalist minister, the Reverend Davidson Loehr, explains salvation by character:

Noble people in all times and places have admired and eulogized: salvation by character. Not "self-esteem" or empty pride, but developing the type of character of which we rightly can be proud. Not "feeling good" but the far harder and longer task of being good people.

This is a legacy of our Unitarian heritage, and a message that our children receive every Sunday in religious education. More important than believing what is "right" is the far harder task of being good people. Our children learn that ultimately, how you act is more significant than what you believe.

We have spent a fair amount of time on salvation, now I want to return to the first step, grace. Grace is defined as the unmerited favor of God, yet grace is so much more. When we broaden the traditional theology of grace, we can live lives filled with small moments of transcendence and blessing, ironically, often experienced at the most embarrassing and painful moments (i.e. when we need it the most).

In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott includes a chapter entitled "Grace." The chapter is a story about a lecture series that Lamott participated in with the short story writer, Grace Paley. Lamott explains that Paley was an extraordinary role model for Lamott when she was growing up. Now as an adult, she finds herself with the exciting and rewarding opportunity to work with Paley.

As the lecture series begins, Lamott convinces everyone that she and Grace should have an improvised conversation on stage. They do and it is a bust. More specifically, Paley was fine, but Lamott was a disaster. She crashed and burned in front of her hero. How many times have we wanted to make good impressions, and the stress has just made us fall flat on our faces?

In her hotel room later that night, struggling with her mortification and tears, Lamott suddenly experiences grace. She writes:

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace-only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us . . . One of the things I've been most afraid of had finally happened, with a whole lot of people watching, and it had indeed been a nightmare. But sitting with all that vulnerability, I discovered I could ride it . . . I don't know why life isn't constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things . . . But I was reminded of the lines of D. H. Lawrence that are taped to the wall of my office: What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm. No, no it is the three strange angles. Admit them, admit them. And by the time I arrived in the second city where Grace and I would perform, I understood that failure is surely one of these strange angels.

What I love about this story is that it contains a humiliating human failure, forgiveness, and grace, but not how we would expect. There is no miracle. Lamott does not get what she wants. It does not seem like much unmerited favor. And yet it is grace, it is unmerited favor; the opportunity to crash and to learn and to try again, the opportunity to forgive oneself for being such an embarrassment, the opportunity to experience the rarest love of all, self love, the opportunity to exist with strange angels.

Perhaps I have a lower threshold of grace, but to me this story is the epitome of grace. It sums up all those moments when I was lost and a stranger found me, or I was able to find myself. In my theology, this is God's presence here on earth. That day in college when I was crying in the restroom and ten people ignored me until a college administrator saw me and sat down to ask why. The day I was rejected for my first ministerial internship because I was too brittle, and then rejected from my second because I was not diverse enough. I did not get a job that year, but I learned a lot. The day my best friend left town, and later, driving in my car I turned my head at the same time the woman in the car next to me turned, and for no reason she gave me the most beatific smile, and then I knew it was going to be all right.

Life does not always go as we want or need. Life is not fair. But there are moments when the sun shines upon us. This is grace and it calls us to share the wealth, to pass it on. Surely, someone else needs an ear, someone else needs a smile, someone else needs our concern. We must learn and try again. And in this way, we are part of the sanctification; we create the beloved community here on earth. We embrace salvation because we co-create wholeness.

This is the anti-thesis of cheap grace. We see ourselves fail. We know our error. We share kindness. We forgive ourselves, and then we pass this on. We enable grace to change us and we are reunited with ourselves, others, and God. Grace reaches our innermost hearts and the reality of our lives, our bank accounts, and our relationships with others. We are neither passive recipients nor unworthy sinners. We are co-creators who accept responsibility for changing the reality of our lives, and the lives of those we meet.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace-only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. Our challenge is to do good works here and now, to practice love and tolerance, and when the sun shines, no matter how strange the angels, admit them, admit them. May our hearts and minds remain open so that we may know when the grace of the world falls softly upon us.

God has the possibility of letting grace prevail, and this is expressed in two forms: forgiveness and participation in divine life. It is important to hold on to these two aspects of grace-justification and sanctification. The real difficulty in a systematic reflection on grace lies in this twofold development of what grace brings about. The Protestant tradition insisted very one-sidedly that grace must justify sinners before it sanctifies them . . . The doctrine of justification is known to many Christians as a legacy of Luther, but the other side of grace which goes with it, its healing power, hardly plays any part . . . "By grace alone" is then cut down to the pronouncements of a God who is still just conceived of as judge in the last judgment. All the other qualities of the Godhead, that it heals, makes the blind see and comforts the anxious, that it seeks what is lost as the woman in the Gospel seeks her coin, are blotted out. Grace is halved, it reaches only the innermost heart of sinners who feel guilty, but not the reality of their lives, their bank accounts and their relationship to others. Grace is robbed of its power really to change us, to unite those who are separated . . . This half grace is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Nazi period called 'cheap grace'; he used this expression to criticize his church, which was afraid of conflict, and took advantage of the Reformation heritage, the 'sola gratia', to shut its ears to the call of God, and to keep quiet when it was time to speak.

Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God . . . God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.

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