And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops
That make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight,
And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree
To shelter all the children
And I saw that it was holy.
One mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children.
Sheltered. Together. In our diversity.
Whole. Healed. Reconciled.
Each of us. All of us.
At one.
Is such a world an Eden that we have lost? Did we sacrifice such a world of innocence and purity in our quest for dominion and in our greed? Is that Eden a place to which we can return?
Do we need to make good our wrong turns, somehow pay back, atone…make restitution for all the harms our living has caused and the many more harms our living has allowed?
Or is the world at one, our hearts at one…is atonement not some lost Eden to reclaim, not something in our past, but our destination and our inspiration to keep on keepin’ on until Beloved Community is more than a distant and ever-receding dream?
Is the world at one…a celebration of the beauty in all our differences…
Is repair and restoration the path we seek and the practice we set our hearts upon to move toward a hopeful future?
Atonement is our spiritual theme this month.
The word literally means “at one.” It is one of the very few Christian theological terms that is of English origin. You do remember that the Bible was not written in English, neither the New Testament nor the Jewish scriptures?
Atonement, the English term, was coined by William Tyndale in 1525 in his translation of the Bible into English, the translation on which the King James version was later based.
The Greek word being translated was more often given as “reconciliation”…to be reconciled…to be made one, made whole again.
Tyndale called it atonement. At-one-ment.
And atonement is deep in our liberal religious DNA. When Hosea Ballou and the early Universalists began proclaiming their truth that God was a God of love, it was the theological concept of atonement that they needed to address.
Ballou’s magnum opus, his statement of faith, was entitled A Treatise on Atonement.
“Without atonement, God’s glorious design, in the everlasting welfare of his offspring, {humankind…you and me]…Without atonement, God’s glorious design could never be effected; the ordination [the truth] of an infinitely merciful God could never be carried into effect.”
Without atonement, that truth [that God is love] could never be known.
For the Universalists, the punishing God who devised tortures in hell for those who offended him…that notion of a punishing God was the fundamental apostasy…the fundamental wrong turn in Christian thinking that they were determined to correct.
The radical Universalists proclaimed that there was, in fact, no hell…that no one would burn. No one.
Because God’s love is stronger even than death and god’s grace, amazing grace, forgives all our shortcomings, heals all of the harms we inflict and all of the harms we suffer, and mends each and every one of our broken hearts.
Amen. Amen.
I am so sorry that we can only read Ballou’s words, rather than hear him. The hope and the Good News he preached…well, there was a reason that Universalism became one of the most widely held faiths in 19th century America.
The Universalists got to clarity about God’s love.
Jesus did not die to atone…to pay for our sins. They came to preach that Jesus’s death was simple state violence in response to his radical messages of justice and love.
Ballou kept revising and clarifying his theology…The Treatise on Atonement went through 4 editions…each somewhat different.
I am certain that Ballou would have come to agree with Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock who argue in our time that seeing Jesus’s death as a sacrifice to pay for our sins amounts to celebrating divine child abuse. “We cannot say what would have happened if Jesus had not been murdered, but we can say that unjust, violent death is traumatizing. Christianity bears the marks of unresolved trauma…”
The spirit of love, known by the Universalists and glimpsed by us today moves by hugging children… like the grandfather and the young child in the story of Tikkun Olam that Cassandra told…The spirit of love moves by hugging children not harming them.
That story of the divine sparks was created in the 16th century, at about the same time that Tyndale was doing his translation in England. Tikkun Olam…although that language goes far back in the Jewish tradition… it was redefined in the Jewish mystical tradition, called Kaballah, articulated by Rabbi Isaac Luria.
In the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring this world into being, he had to make room for creation. So God drew in his breath, contracting himself. From that contraction, darkness was created. Darkness was created first. The holy darkness, Ein Sof.
“And then, in the course of history, at a certain point in time, this world of a thousand, thousand things emerged from the heart of that darkness as a great ray of light.”
I’m quoting from a version of this story as told by Rachel Naomi Remen.
”And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story,” Remen says, “there was an accident. And the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. The light of the world, the wholeness of the world was scattered into a thousand, thousand fragments of light and they fell into all events and all people where they remain hidden until this very day.”
“According to my grandfather,” Remen goes on, “the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light within all people. To lift it up and make it visible again and thereby restore the innate wholeness of the world. This task is called Tikkun Olam in Hebrew.”
Tikkun Olam. The healing of the world.
It should not be a surprise that the atonement described and translated from scripture by Tyndale in an England that was consolidating royal power…it should be no surprise that the atonement Tyndale described was about power and punishment and required that death on the cross to make it good.
And it should not be a surprise that the atonement the Jewish mystics sought was re-gathering and repair. The Jews had just been expelled from Spain or forced to convert. They were a community in diaspora. A community of refugees. A community of immigrants. They needed to be re-gathered.
The concept of atonement calls us to ask the most fundamental religious questions. Who are we? What is this human nature of which we speak so casually?
Are we fundamentally flawed, destined to harm ourselves and others, destined to despoil our world. Mean spirited? Greedy? Acquisitive? Are we so fundamentally flawed, so sinful in our spirit, that only a blood sacrifice can redeem us?
Are humans greedy and mean spirited? Are we capable of incredible cruelty? Does anyone want to argue with me on that score. All that is true. And we deny it at our peril.
But is that who are … at heart. Or perhaps the question is whether that is all that we are…or all that we can be. Is that our only possible future? Our destiny?
Or is there in us that spark…that spark of divinity that our tradition speaks of…that spark of the holy that Rabbi Isaac Luria made the heart of his story…
In the words from our reading by a young man sitting in a prison in Kentucky: “…I believe that in every human heart, from the bitterest to the softest, there is a capacity for genuine kindness and compassion. Somehow, somewhere, something has buried that innate ability in too many people.”
If he can know that, can trust that…can’t we know that in our own living?
Can we not trust that spark within us…in each and every one of us…that spark that Tikkun Olam asserts is part of god’s body…in our flesh.
Are we…do we have within…buried deep perhaps…that spark that is waiting to be gathered, waiting to be recognized, waiting to be seen.
Rev. Vanessa Southern writes of visiting an aunt, with whom from the age of 9 she had spent every summer. A woman who had become a mother for her. “She was an aunt by marriage,” Vanessa writes, “but made room for me as if I were her own. …” The aunt had eventually divorced Vanessa’s uncle and their relationship had become harder to sustain, but when the aunt’s cancer was about to end her life, Vanessa went to see her.
On her last night, Vanessa was able to thank her for loving a young girl she did not have to love. “I let her know that who she was and how she loved me shaped who I have become.”
This aunt was not given to shows of emotion. “She hated good-byes and she and I knew without saying so that this was one. I knew she did not want to have this conversation but she listened. When I finished she said, as if she were confused by the whole exchange: ‘How could I not love you? I loved you the moment I first saw you.’”
How could I not love you?
That is the heart of the Universalist promise in just 6 words. How could I not love you. You who have the spark of divinity within you, just waiting for that spark to be revealed, waiting for that spark to burst into saving light.
How could I not love you? You who were born lovable. You who hold the hope for healing in your heart.
How could I not love you?
Atonement asks fundamental questions about who we are and the nature of what is holy.
But atonement also asks fundamental questions about our relationship to creation and our role in this broken world.
Even our Universalist religious ancestors, who did not get social justice…their racism was real and it was punishing…not for today, but I promise I will tell some of those stories…even our Universalist ancestors finally came to understand that it was fine to talk about everybody going to heaven…but we are here now and we better start figuring out how to get along.
What are we called to do?
Do we stand on some border, looking across a wall we have built to preserve a fantasy of freedom and control…
Do we stand on that border…hearing the cries of children and families who beg for asylum…and shout “We are full. There is no room for you here. Turn back. Go back. We have no room for your kind among us.”
Do we imprison those children on a cold floor with mylar blankets and steel bars for comfort?
Or do we welcome those children into our arms.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
What are we called to do and how are we called to live?
Atonement takes us deep into the heart of our religious understanding. But it does not take theological training to ask or to answer its questions.
When I asked our Board members to name a time when they felt whole, when they felt healed…at one…they had no trouble finding and naming those places.
The stories were different. Varied. Stories of coming out. Stories of reconnecting after estrangement. Stories of singing, especially in choirs.
The stories were different because there is beauty in our diversity…beauty in the many and varied stories sheltered under that one giant flowering tree that is our spiritual home.
Some Board members spoke of moments of confession, of telling important people in our lives that we love them. Stories of telling a parent how much it meant as a young child to have been held in loving arms, just after waking, still smelling of sleep.
To have been held.
From Vanessa Southern:
“To be loved without reason, without argument or hard work; to have someone powerless NOT to love you is almost miraculous. What a gift to imagine that … people are bound to love each other, no matter what, irrevocably, like a body pulled and held to the ground by Earth’s gravity. A life can stand forever on the knowledge it was loved like that, even just once.”
At one.
Amen.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life. Energy of healing. Source of wholeness and of hope.
We know there is no guarantee that love wins
But we also know that love will surely lose if we do not do our part
We know that violence and punishment are real
But we also know that they are not the only way.
We know, because we feel it, that yearning to be whole
To be reconciled
To be at one.
Spirit of Life. Great mystery. Help us and hold us
As we hold those in our circle of care
And push the borders of our circle to hold
All of the children of the spirit and to hold
Creation of which we are only one part.
May we uncover the spark within us.
May we see the spark within each of us and all of us.
May we live as those who reveal the sparks
Those who restore light…
May we live as those who allow life to be lived
Restored, Reconciled, At one.
Amen
Our vision of the Beloved Community points toward a world in which difference is a source of strength and beauty. There is power and potential in our vision for a world in which the human family lives whole and reconciled.
Topics: Atonement