My elevator speech for Unitarian Universalism is that “UUs believe that human beings are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we share.” It is my faith that while we aren’t everything, we are enough.

            We’re spending this church year in worship, looking at some of the basic issues of faith.

            These are the foundational issues.  The ground upon which everything else in your faith life is constructed.  The cornerstone of your personal cathedral.

            It’s important that you get your answer on these issues, not “right” because there isn’t really right and wrong in questions of faith, but secure, because everything else builds on top of them.  If you’re wishy-washy about these issues, then other parts of your spirituality will also be unsteady.  And if the whole tower is shaky, then your spirituality is liable to fail just at the moments of sorrow, suffering, and challenge, when you most need a healthy spirituality holding you up.

            We started looking at the relationship of individuals and community.  Community is one of those foundational issues for my spiritual life.  I believe our journey towards health and joy in life comes, more than anything else, from our learning how to join, build, and maintain, community.  And particularly those communities pointed toward the transcendentals of the good, the true, and the beautiful, that Josiah Royce called, “Communities of Grace.”

            Today I want to look at two foundational issues.  One is whether there is a supernatural element to existence, which I don’t believe, so I’ll dismiss that quickly.  The other is, in the absence of supernatural assistance, do human beings alone have what it takes to win the world we seek?  In a question, “Is it possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance?”

            Now there’s a lot to unpack in that question, so let’s start with the word, “salvation”.

What I mean by that word is, if you examine the troubles of life we currently suffer, salvation is the way of being where those troubles are solved.

            So to describe our salvation, first we have to name the trouble of life.

            It’s a helpful practice when exploring different religions to begin by asking, what problem are they trying to solve?  What’s the problem, to which the doctrine and practice of the religion is the answer?  It’s a good question for yourself, too, for your personal spiritual practice.  What problem are you trying to solve?  What’s your trouble?

            Salvation, then, is the place you arrive, or the state you achieve, when you’ve solved the problem.

            For me, the spiritual problem is human lives of anxiety, fear, pain, sadness.  I see the spiritual problems of isolation, cruelty, mean-ness, want.  So salvation, for me, the goal I seek, in the way that other religious persons might seek nirvana, or heaven, or enlightenment, or eternal life, or sitting at the right hand of God, or where some less spiritual folks might seek salvation in wealth, or fame, or power.  I seek spiritual health and joy.

            For me, salvation is a life of health and joy.  Health meaning, not necessarily physical health, but health in the sense of ease, satisfaction, comfort, equanimity.  Health meaning peaceful in one’s own being, and being peaceful in the world as well, even in the face of physical hardship or pain.  And joy means, not just a neutral passing through one’s life, but deep engagement with life leading to enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, fun.  Spiritual joy, to me, is more than a momentary reaction to something pleasurable, but is an inner quality that flavors all of life’s experiences, even the sad ones.  Joy sees the delight, the humor, the beauty, in every moment.  Life in its fullness is good, experienced with spiritual health and joy.  That is salvation.

            So, “Is it possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance?”

            In your personal spirituality, salvation might mean something different.  So before I answer that question for my own conception of salvation, let’s consider that question from the point of view of other conceptions of what salvation looks like, looking to see what they say about whether there is a supernatural force we can call on for help, and if there isn’t, what they say about the human capacity to help ourselves.

            In the Christian sense, salvation means eternal life, after death, in another world.  (I think by the way, that’s actually a mis-reading of Jesus’ message, but that is what Christianity became.)  For traditional Christianity, the problem is death.  The trouble is that people die.

When the Christian religion was being formulated two thousand years ago, when human lives were short, hardship was common, human-caused violence and injustice, and natural diseases and disasters struck suddenly and seemingly arbitrarily, I can understand that a feeling might have developed that there must be something more than this.  The years we get are too few and too filled with suffering for this life to be the plan of a loving God.  This can’t be all there is.

So if death is the problem, salvation is eternal life.  Christianity offers the salvation that you, personally, as yourself, will not die, but will live forever.  As the song Amazing Grace says:

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we’ve first begun.”

            Or, as it says in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer during the graveside service at a funeral:  “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God, our brother…” and so on.

            So for someone who holds that “salvation” means a “sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life,” then the answer to the question of whether it’s possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance, the answer is definitely no.

            No.  You can’t do that.  Mortal bodies do not last eternally.  Resurrection lies beyond the power of human beings to do for themselves.  Something supernatural would have to help.

            Some folks who see death as the problem and hope for a salvation of eternal life, don’t believe in a physical resurrection, but believe in some kind of eternal existence of a spiritual nature.  Some spiritual essence, like a soul, floating upward, and joining with other souls, maybe with God, maybe in a place like heaven.

            So, still the problem is death.  And still salvation is eternal life.  So still the question, “Is it possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance?”

            Well to say yes to that question, you’d have to imagine that something like a soul is a natural part of human existence, along with our physical bodies.  You’d have to imagine that a soul can exist separate from the body to which it was formerly attached and in a natural not supernatural way.  And to make an afterlife meaningful to you personally, you’d have to imagine that an immaterial soul, separated from the body, would continue to retain all the personal characteristic that make you, you:  your personality, your opinions, your loves and desires, your memories, and so on.  And finally, you’d have to imagine that there exists a non-supernatural realm, where all of these disembodied souls can hang out together eternally.

If all of those suppositions about souls could be maintained in a natural way, then our souls could simply naturally depart from our bodies at death, and naturally find their own way, to a natural realm called Heaven.  But most people who believe in that sort of solution to the problem of death, also believe that there’s some kind of supernatural assistance going on that makes that possible.

            And that’s a stretch too far for me.  I don’t believe souls like that exist, or that they could exist in a non-supernatural way.  Achieving a salvation of that kind of personal, eternal existence would have to involve some kind of supernatural assistance that I can’t believe in.

For me the natural world is all we have.  The natural world is complex, and there is much going on we don’t fully understand, which is why scientists still have work to do.  But I don’t believe that any of life’s mysteries require supernatural answers.

            But for Christians, the supernatural is real.  And for salvation, supernatural assistance is required to compensate for the limitations of human nature. 

            In orthodox Christianity (and I mean orthodox with a small “o” meaning right thinking, not the big “O” Orthodox meaning the Eastern church), human beings are so polluted with sin, that our just recompense is death.  We die, deservedly, because we’re sinners.  As Paul said to the Romans, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).  Because we sin, we get paid with death.

            You can’t plead that you’re not a sinner, because even the best human beings are the inheritors of original sin.  Human nature is sinful nature, traced all the way back to our fall at the very first creation.  Martin Luther held that our fall was so complete, that our human natures are so twisted, that our choices are inevitably for evil.  He called this, “The Bondage of the Will.”  Whatever we “will” ourselves to do, will always be sinful, because our natures are captured by sin.

            With that conception of human nature, there is nothing we can do to save ourselves.

            And so, the Christian salvation story saves sinful humans through the supernatural assistance of God, incarnating God’s-self as Jesus, Jesus dying on the cross, as payment for sin.  And then, Jesus supernaturally transferring that payment to the rest of us to pay the debt we owe for our sins, and thereby winning our salvation for us.

            In this scheme, God does what we cannot do for ourselves.  All you can do is live your sinful life, and hope that you’re one of the persons God has chosen to save.

            It’s a very neat little system.  It’s also very depressing.  It also seems to me, very wrong.

            When I look at human lives, I don’t see unremitting sin and evil.  I see kindness, sometimes, and generosity, and heroic sacrifice.  Yes, human sin and evil exist, you needn’t look far for examples.  But sin for me, exists in specific actions, not threaded through everything we ever do or think or say.  

            Nor do I see that human beings are powerless to affect our future or that our choices are always for evil.  History is a story of human beings asserting themselves.  And individuals in their personal lives make real choices with real consequences.  

            I try, as one of my spiritual principles, to be reality-based.  I look first, to what actually is, as much as I can know it.  And what I see of human nature is that we are a mix of good and bad impulses, somewhat bound by circumstance but essentially free to make choices for ourselves about our own lives and what we choose to do together.

            If the problem is that life is too short and too filled with pain and suffering, the solution isn’t an afterlife, but with advances in medicine, technology, and increasing human rights, and education and so on, the problems of human life could be solved while we live, not merely tolerated while we live in the hope of some better life after this one.

            If salvation doesn’t mean eternal life, but rather means lives of health and joy while we live, is it possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance?”

            With a conception of human nature that acknowledges our power, and our capacity for making good decisions, while also admitting that we are sometimes weak, and sometimes stupid, and sometimes deliberately cruel, is it possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance?

            Can we do it on our own?

            Can we, under our own power, using just our human smarts, and our human understanding of what is truly good, create lives for ourselves that are spiritually healthy and full of joy, and create for each other and the world we share a similar existence of health and joy?

            Or will we fail, on our own?  Will we always fall short?  Will we always suffer beneath the weight of injustice and fear, greed and cruelty and so on that is the worst of humanity?  Might we at last need some supernatural help?

            But if there is no supernatural element in the universe, as I don’t believe there is, then does that mean our salvation will never come?

            The question is:  are we enough?

            I became a Unitarian Universalist because I was attracted to the Unitarian Universalist faith in the power of human persons to solve our own problems, which is balanced with the clear-eyed diagnosis that human beings are also to blame for most of our problems.  And I was attracted to a Unitarian Universalist approach to metaphysics that, while extending an invitation for people to believe whatever they feel, does not depend on supernatural realms or entities to make sense of our world or find comfort in it.  I appreciated the focus on this world, and this-worldly problems.  And I appreciated the optimism that our problems could be solved by human effort, and the call of our faith that we step up and do our part.

            That brand of religion spoke to my own intuitions about the world and human nature, and it felt good to belong to a community that shared that worldview.

            Eventually, I summarized what I felt was the core of the Unitarian Universalist faith in my elevator speech, which is this:  Unitarian Universalists believe that human beings are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough, to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, and for each other, and for the world we share.”

            The Unitarian Universalist answer to the question, “Is it possible for human beings to achieve salvation without supernatural assistance?” is “Yes”.

            I confess, that there have been times in my life, when I’ve lost my faith in that creed.  Sometimes it feels that the problems of the world are too big, and the power and smarts and goodness of human beings is too limited.  I’ve felt, maybe we won’t find our way out of this mess.  Maybe we can’t.

            And there being no supernatural power I can call upon to save us, for us, that has led me on occasion to the despairing conclusion that salvation isn’t possible.

            But those dark nights of the soul for me have been few and short-lived.

            I am comforted by the testimonies of the ancestors of our faith, like Edward Everett Hale who said in our Call to Worship, “I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.”

            I am comforted by the lyrics of a hymn like the one we sang for our Opening Hymn:

“We are building a new way.  Feeling stronger every day.  We are working to be free.  We can feed our every need.  Start with love, that is the seed.”

I am comforted when we light a chalice and say again our promise to each other to seek the truth, to dwell in peace, to serve humanity. 

I am comforted by the power, the creativity, the goodness of our UU communities.

I am comforted by this Unitarian Universalist faith.  

Yes we can, I feel again.

We are enough.