The core theology of the Universalist side of our history is that God’s primary character is love, not justice.  So are there no consequences, then, for evil acts?  Whenever we seek to balance the opposing values of compassion and accountability we face the same theological problem.

Universalism, like Unitarianism, is a Christian doctrine.  And specifically, Universalism is a doctrine of the after life.  So to speak of Universalism, and what Universalism says about life after death, we first must speak about Christianity, and what Christianity says about life after death.

Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that nobody really knows anything with certainty about life after death.  Despite the occasional best-seller that claims to be the story of a seven-year old who died for a few minutes, went to Heaven, shook hands with Jesus and then came back, our evidence for where we go and who we meet and what we experience after this life is pretty thin. Perhaps we wander through a Bardo and come out of the journey reincarnated, or perhaps nothing at all happens because consciousness ends when life ends, or perhaps we merge with being, or perhaps there’s a Heaven, or perhaps even, there’s a Hell.  Who can say?

But we can imagine. And as I listen for what people have imagined about what might happen to us after we die, I tend to hear that the after death world is always imagined as a place where some unsolvable problem here on earth finally finds its solution.  We invent an afterlife that solves a persistent problem we were never ever to solve while alive.  Our theologies of the afterlife aren’t really about the next life, they are about this life.  Our theologies of the after life soothe and satisfy a trouble we feel while we live.  We’re lonely in this life, so we invent an afterlife where we will forever be connected with our loved ones.  This life is filled with unanswered questions, so we invent an afterlife where the universal truths will be revealed to us.  

Or, this life isn’t fair, so we invent an after life where justice will be assigned.  The good will be rewarded.  The hateful will be punished.

Early Christians noticed that life isn’t fair.  They weren’t the first people to notice this.  That life isn’t fair is one of the first lessons that anyone learns.  “Why did you buy the ice cream that my sister wanted instead of the kind that I like?” “It’s not fair!”  The harried mother patiently explains about late nights at work, and grocery-store stocking policies, and why it matters which brand of ice cream is on sale, and the storage space of parental memory that would be required to keep track of which child got which treat last week and for how many weeks in a row.  And the child, furious at the injustice insists, “But, it’s not fair.”  And the mother answers more sharply than before, “Well, you know, life isn’t fair.  Get used to it.”

Life isn’t fair.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who do the most good in the world were rewarded with the most pleasure?  Wouldn’t it be nice if the mean people actually got punished?  Instead, selfish people seem to get along pretty well.  And taking advantage of subcontractors is a pretty good way to get your casino built for cheap.  Sometimes there are consequences for the way you abused and exploited people earlier in life, and sometimes the abusers and exploiters seem to get away with no consequences at all.  “And when you’re a star, they let you do it.  You can do anything,” said somebody, once, on tape.  Some horrible people die happy at a ripe old age.  While some good people live in poverty, or get struck with injury or illness, or treated badly by others.

Sometimes life works out the way justice would have it, but there’s no guarantee.  Life’s a lottery, not a system of justice.  Life isn’t fair.  Get used to it.

But the early Christians, and not for the first time in human history, decided that mother’s answer just wasn’t good enough.  It just doesn’t satisfy.  Maybe life isn’t fair.  But maybe then, there’s another life that is fair.  Maybe this world isn’t fair.  And maybe I could even, “Get used to it.” If I knew that there was a great reckoning coming after death.  Maybe I could get used to the good people suffering in this life, while the exploiters and abusers sit in their palaces, if, in the next life, I and the other good people get the palace, and the mean people get the suffering.

And so early Christian believers imagined an after life of Heaven and Hell.

After death, the problem of injustice will be solved.  The good person who suffered will be made happy and whole and sit with the angels.  The bad person who violated every ethical norm of common decency:  self-serving, petty, vindictive, hateful to strangers and cruel to the vulnerable, yet lived in luxury, married to models, and golfing every weekend, will after death, finally feel the suffering that he made us all feel while he lived.

And so in the Christian vision of the after life the good people get the good stuff and the bad people get the bad stuff.  It’s an after life much like this life, actually, except better sorted.

Christianity, noticing that life isn’t fair, and yet believing in a God of justice, reasoned that there must be more to life than this.  There must be another life.  An after life.

And so, after we die, there is a judgment.

Christianity is a little confused about when the judgment takes place.  Some Christians seem to believe that the judgment occurs immediately upon death.  According to the gospel of Luke, Jesus himself, as he was dying on the cross, tells one of the men being crucified beside him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

But elsewhere in the Bible and a major feature of Christian doctrine is an end times called the Last Judgment.  Under this interpretation the dead do not go immediately to Heaven or Hell.  The dead wait in their graves.  At the end of history, Jesus returns to earth, the graves release the dead, and Jesus does a grand judging of all persons all at once.  The sheep are separated from the goats.  The sinners are sent to Hell.  The saints are lifted to Heaven.

Here’s how the scene is described in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 25:31-46):

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

They also will answer, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?”

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

Sounds fair.

The scheme might make you squirm a little.  It sounds a little harsh, right?  I mean we want the bad folks to suffer, but “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” sounds a little baroque.  And “did not do for the least of these” in every instance seems like a pretty high bar.  But whatever, this after life scenario does have exactly that justice feature we’re looking for:  a judgment where the good are sorted out from the bad and everybody gets what they deserve.

The theological problem, though, is who are the good, and who are the bad?

Did you notice a couple of details in that passage from Matthew?

The King says, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”

It seems as though the ones who go to Heaven are the ones “blessed by the father”.  But when did the blessing take place?  Are they blessed because they did all the good things they did?  Or did they do the good things because they were blessed?

And what about the line, “the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world?”  Did God prepare the kingdom and wait to see who would show up?  Or did God prepare the kingdom “for you” already knowing who would eventually live there?

Now a plain reading of that text, and a logical reading, would say that God creates a Heavenly kingdom and then people earn a place in Heaven by good actions.  But you could read this passage as saying that God knows beforehand who will end up in Heaven, and it isn’t the people’s own actions that get them entrance to Heaven; it’s God’s “blessing.”

That probably seems frankly wrong to you.  But that theology is actually a better fit with the theology that God’s nature is eternal and all-knowing.  If God exists outside of the flow of time, seeing all of history at once, then of course God would know from the very beginning who was going to end up in Heaven, and who would be in Hell.  You’re already there, in God’s eyes.  Yes, the good people will still do good things, but only because they have to.  They were created that way.  They were pre-destined to do good things, because they had been blessed by God before they were born.  And the folks going to Hell, equally, had to follow the path in life laid out for them, because they, too, had been pre-destined, cursed by God, before they were born.

Yuck.

But the doctrine of predestination became orthodox Protestant Christian theology.  Most completely, and horrifically worked out by John Calvin during the reformation, but also present in Luther’s theology, and even as far back as Augustine.  It just makes sense.  If God is the “omni-God”:  omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal, then God must have written the script of your life before you stepped on stage.  And part of that script, if you were assigned a sinful life, is that the final act will see you punished.

Pre-Destination is a pretty horrible religious doctrine.  And it is in opposition to that doctrine that both the Unitarian and Universalist churches are born.

The Unitarians took a logical approach.  If pre-destination makes “sense” following the logic of the “omni-God” then something must be wrong with that theology of God.  The Unitarians affirm that human beings have free will.  And yes, that means God is not all-powerful.  And yes, that means God does not see the future in advance.  Human beings have real power to shape our own lives, make our own decisions.  Our actions create our future.  By our choices we save, or damn, ourselves.

The Universalists took a different approach.  Logically the doctrine of pre-destination makes sense, I suppose, but it sure doesn’t feel right.

It doesn’t feel right, not only because of what it says about human beings, but also because of what it says about God.  Is God really that cold and calculating?  Could God be so cruel?  Isn’t God a god of mercy as well as justice?  But pre-destination forces God to go along with the pre-destined plan, mechanically, maniacally, just as much as we are forced to suffer from that plan.

Isn’t God a god of love as well as justice?  How could it be that a god of love would create a human being knowing in advance that the human being after a few years on earth would spend eternity in torture?  A loving god would never do that.  

Yet we are told in the scriptures that God loves us.  We are told in the Gospel of John that God is love.  The mystics tell us when they are in the presence of God they feel overwhelmed by love.  When I feel the ecstatic feeling it feels like the universe is filled with love, not judgment.  We are told that God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

In fact, we are told in Christian theology that when Jesus died on the cross he paid the price for our sins, all of our sins.  It was the most generous, expansive, inclusive, loving act in the history of the world.  So how, with the debt of sin paid in full to infinite God, by the sacrifice of infinite God, could it be that there is any debt left over that deserves eternal punishment?

It feels as though, if God can really see to the end of time, and orders all existence, that a god of love, would only create a person, if that god had a plan to eventually bring that person, every person to salvation, universal salvation:  Universalism.

Universalism is still a Christian theology.  There is still a powerful God, and a sinful humanity, and the supernatural salvation bought for us by Jesus dying on the cross.  The difference from orthodox theology is that Jesus’s death buys salvation for everyone, not just the blessed few.  Universalism preserves Christian doctrine but shifts the emphasis from God’s judgment to God’s mercy, from a God of justice to a God of love.

That feels better, right?

And yet, eventually, it may not entirely satisfy.  Because bad people should suffer, right?  Actions should have consequences.  And why, anyway, should I struggle to be good, and go out of my way to help, “the least of these” if we’re all going to end up in the same place in eternity anyway?

The Calvinist doctrine tells me that I might end up in Hell regardless of how I live my life.  That doesn’t seem fair.  But the Universalist doctrine tells me that the worst of people are going to end up right beside me in Heaven.  That doesn’t seem fair either.  And even if you don’t believe in an after life at all, you’re still left with that annoying truth where I began this sermon, in this life:  good behavior and bad behavior don’t seem to have any direct relationship to happy lives and lives of suffering.

Maybe the solution is to listen to your mother.  Your mother was right all those years ago in the supermarket.  “Life isn’t fair.”

And neither is the after life.

So instead of trying to make life “just” and “fair” maybe we should try to make life loving.  We have chosen as Unitarian Universalists to side with love.

Does the least of those, standing in front of you deserve your help?  Does the bad man deserve to be cast into the eternal fire?  Are you really so good that you deserve blessing?  Do you secretly hope that those times in your life when you weren’t your best would be forgotten or forgiven?  

Those are the questions of justice.  But maybe instead we should be asking the questions of love.  What does love ask of me?  What does love tell me?  Where does love guide me?

Let’s go there.