Sermon given by intern minister Tori Rosati, May 14, 2023

My first real understanding of a notion of paradise didn’t come to me from the years of Sunday School I attended in the Catholic Church. It didn’t come to me from the Bible or any sacred text. It came to me from my musician father, and his rendition of the song Paradise by the late folk musician, John Prine that that he used to sing to my sister and me as kids. Are there any John Prine fans here today? 

The song is sung from the perspective of an adult Prine reflecting back on his childhood in Western Kentucky in a land he calls paradise – a land where his parents came from, where the Green River flowed, and he and his friends roamed and played - all this before a local coal mining company would come, and as Prine sings, “haul it away.” 

In the end, this song about a paradise is a scathing indictment of the coal industry’s environmental and economic decimation of the land. 

Now Paradise, in the song is the town of Paradise Kentucky – but my young ears didn’t know that. I just imagined Prine was talking about a kind of heaven on earth – a place where green rivers flowed, friends roamed carefree and wild, and a place where the land and its people were forsaken by injustice and greed. Paradise was all of those things. 

As we reflect on Universalism this month, the idea of paradise, of heaven and salvation will come up again and again and their message that all people, ALL people, are deserving of God’s love and will be called to paradise in the afterlife, was a radical notion for their day. 

But over time, for the Universalists, this notion would expand – salvation wasn’t just in the hereafter – it was immanent – it was right around the river’s bend, it was all around us, waiting - and it was our charge as people of faith to nurture and grow it in our midst – to ensure that injustice and power did not have the last word. 

This was certainly the message I received growing up with that song about paradise in my ears – a message that would expand in my own faith life as I found my way to UUism and particularly the Universalist side our tradition. 

So today, we are going to reflect some on this legacy – the ways our Universalist forbears strove to live out a social gospel of heaven on earth, the places they failed, and what this message might look like for us as we carry it into the future. 

The reading Marie and I just shared comes from the book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire, by UU Theologian Rebecca Ann Parker and Protestant Theologian, Rita Nakashima Brock. Their book explores the early Christian origins of this notion of paradise. In their research, they would uncover how early Christians filled their sanctuaries with images that depicted the world as paradise. This world.  

They tell us about how the early Christians believed in communities grounded in love, justice, nonviolence, wisdom and freedom that sought to live together as humanity in the garden of God. These early community created systems of restitution, rehabilitation and restoration, acknowledged human failure, and took responsibility for how their use power. 

“They saw life,” Brock and Parker go on, “as an arena of struggle to gain wisdom and live ethically and responsibly toward others, so that love might flourish in their communities and so that they might live now in the paradise together.”

Now of course over time, this early notion of paradise on earth would change and Christians would use their theology to build empire, to subjugate and exploit, and “haul away” the potential for freedom and prosperity for the world’s people across time. 

But, before all that paradise wasn’t destined to some afterlife – it was here on the earth – every place where, they say “the Spirit was present and love was possible.”

This notion of heaven on earth as we know was a central part of the early Universalist message as well. 

Hosea Ballou (who we learned last week preached to the Haverhill Universalists) proclaimed a human right to be happy and that a loving God would not banish any of their children to eternal torment. He believed that this theology of an angry and wrathful God only provided justification for people to imitate tyranny, power and control. 

Furthermore, the right of all humankind to be happy, he believed, did not mean happiness for oneself only – but the collective happiness for all - a charge for each of us to promote the common good, work for justice, and ease suffering on this good earth. 

To this end – many Universalists participated large social movements of their day. 

Adin Ballou (a cousin of Hosea’s) was a fierce abolitionist and founded a utopian community on the principles of what he called Practical Christian Socialism – a socialism that he understood as a state whereby individuals could only realize higher good when they were in right relationship with each other and that this harmonic order of society was possible on earth. Ballou’s community would harbor enslaved people fleeing the south and his views on non-violence influenced Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. 

Universalist women were central and tireless figures in the suffrage movement. Rev. Olympia Brown was one of the first women to be ordained in the country and once delivered 205 addresses on behalf of women’s suffrage in 5 months. Mary Livermore spoke in Universalist congregations throughout the country and despite urgings to avoid controversial issues – spoke on some of the most divisive gender issues of her day, even establishing a periodical called the Agitator. 

These efforts seeded a kind of social gospel movement within Universalism that came to a point in the early 20th Century, when Universalist theologian Clarence Skinner, published the 1917 Declaration of Social Principles a radical for its time treatise that advocated for an economic system that gave everyone their share, a social order that assured equal rights for all, and a spiritual mandate to live justly and ethically. 

These figures all became thorns in the side of the status quo in their own ways. They pushed Universalism beyond its singular focus on personal salvation toward a collective responsibility we have to fight again oppressive forces in our society. 

As Brock and Parker said in our reading, “entering paradise in this life is no an individual achievement but it the gift of communities that train perception and teach ethical grace.” Paradise is the gift of community that calls us to live ethically, to struggle against injustice and develop responsible uses of power. 

But… we did not always train our perceptions well, we did not always struggle ethically. 

Adin Ballou’s utopian society did not last long and his focus on achieving personal morality rather than overturning unjust social systems left out this vital part of the abolition movement. In fact, with the exception of a few, Universalists in particular, would fail again in again in showing up in any significant way in the abolition movement and later in the struggle for Civil Rights. Additionally, central Black Universalist figures such as Joseph Jordan, Gloster Dalton, and Amy Scott would experience racism within the denomination and their own work and ministries, with many historians, until recently, leaving them out of the history of the faith altogether. 

Clarence Skinner would go on to center Universalism as a kind of religion for the whole world that represented and perpetuated harmful and oppressive colonizer thinking and of course, his advocacy for eugenics was deplorable to say the least and something that gives me pause in lifting him up at all. 

However, these contributions to shifting the larger Universalist tradition away from a purely individualistic focus on personal salvation toward a faith that puts the incarnation of heaven on in our hands by the actions we take in this life cannot be overlooked for its legacy. 

What I think these Universalists got wrong was a failure to really investigate what paradise even was. Their call to transform the earth into heaven was founded on a presumption of a heaven that was centered on their perspectives as individual white, mostly men of means, in their time.  

But, paradise isn’t about any one person or thing. As Brock and Parker remind us again and again, paradise is community. A community that struggles together, that ensures the worth and freedom of all its members, a community that holds us holds us accountable to living out our deepest values. 

If we aren’t in community with, and responsive to, those most impacted by social injustice – our views of what paradise is will be limited and any prescription for its incarnation will fail. 

In fact, we as individuals, don’t need to transform the earth into heaven at all – God already did that - paradise is simply waiting for us, in community, to live into its promise. 

In a lot of ways, Universalism is having a bit of revival these days in our denomination.  Notions of universal salvation – the inherent worth of all creatures and their right to be free of suffering and oppression – is infusing denominational conversation of how we dismantle white supremacy culture and create a more responsive and inclusive faith. 

Universalists believed that we are all bound up in God’s love – interdependent and responsible to each other in that love – a belief that today is expanding the notion of universal salvation toward one of collective and universal liberation. 

And in this way, today, our call as people of faith, in all our varied experiences, social locations, and perspectives is to be present and responsive to the needs of those most impacted by the struggle – people’s and communities where the forces of greed and injustice threaten to haul away freedom. And in this work to still love this world – the rivers that flow and the joy of roaming and exploring. To still love this world - or, as Rev. Joanne Fontaine Crawford, famously said, “to love the hell out of it.”

But, how do we do this? The world can be a painful place full of heartache, grief and loss – full of injustice and defeat. Paradise often feels like it really is just beyond our grasp. But, this is where Universalism really opens for me. 

It tells us that we don’t do this alone.  

The gift of this world that was bestowed upon us was a grace-filled blessing to draw sustenance from. These Universalists figures I’ve lifted up here this morning all grounded their prophetic work in their faith in God, or what we more expansively understand as that something greater than ourselves. The Love of God, they believed was an essential part of the struggle in this life. It never left their side. 

And in order to feel that love, we must be in the struggle too. To love this world as God loved it, love the hell out of it, love it powerfully, fiercely, and radically. This love that compels us to voting booths, marches with us in the streets against police violence and white supremacy, this love that calls out gender discrimination and fights back against anti-trans legislation, that pickets business who exploit their workers, and…a love that writes songs about environmental devastation and capitalist greed – songs that a father will one day sing to his child to instill the next generation with an ethic of justice. 

And alongside all this…a love that is our refuge at the end of the day, the reminder that we are part of something that never lets us go, a force that we can rest in when we tire. 

Paradise is all those things and it is here…waiting for us. 

At the end of John Prine’s song, he sings these lines…“when I die let my ashes flow down the Green River, let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam, I’ll be halfway to heaven with Paradise waiting, just 5 miles away from wherever I am. “

just 5 miles away from wherever I am…

For Prine, - Paradise is the place we come from and return back to – a place closer, I would say, than even 5 miles. It is the earth that holds us, in both the beauty and the pain, the people we love, and the struggles and movements for justice that we fight for in our own time. 

It is every place that calls us back from lament and despair, every place where love is possible, and we are reminded we are not alone. It is each other, a community right around the river’s bend, where the Spirit is present, and love waits for us – right here – right now - wherever we are. 

Sources:

Brock, R. N., & Parker, R. A. (2008). Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire. Beacon Press.

Ballou, A., Practical Christianity: An Epitome of Practical Christian Socialism.

Greenwood, A., & Harris, M. W. (2011). An Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions, Cambridge University Press

Morrison-Reed, M. D. (2018). Revisiting the Empowerment Controversy: Black Power and Unitarian Universalism, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

 Harris, Mark, Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History.