A sermon preached by Khleber M. Van Zandt at the First Unitarian Church of Alton on October 30, 2005

I knew it would happen sooner or later. I would send a title and a blurb to Becky for publication in the newsletter, I’d start to think about the sermon to go with it, and then I’d find myself in a completely different place – emotionally, intellectually, geographically, when it came time to write.

What I wanted to do for this sermon was to find the similarities and differences in the holidays that come together this time of year – the Christian All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day, the Celtic Samhain (pronounced sow’-en), the now-secular Halloween. I wanted to link all these holidays together historically, comparing and contrasting their beginnings and their evolutions and their meanings…

I wanted to say that salvation comes in many guises in many ways in many cultures and is available to all people regardless of their language or their religion or their context – that’s a good Universalist notion that we’ve explored in both the "Our American Roots" series at 9:30 on Sundays and the UU&You! orientation class we completed earlier this month. I wanted to say that it is just that – the openness to the worth and dignity of all persons and many traditions that may be salvific in some way; it is that openness which calls into existence the circle of love that some call God.

I wanted to say all this but to do so I needed to do more research into those holidays. I needed to be in my study. I needed my books. I needed my internet connection – how on earth do you do research these days without an internet search engine? I don’t know, but I guess I’d better learn before Armageddon is brought on by the next big al Qaeda computer virus attack.

Anyway, I wanted to have the time and the tools and the quiet to do all this. Instead, I found myself down in Dallas, Texas, in a large hospital, at the bedside of my father who’d just been told he had a large tumor on his pancreas, stomach, and intestines, among other things. I left home here the first of this last week to see him and the rest of my family and to help with the hospital rotation of having a family member sit with him during the long days of waiting for him to get strong enough to undergo surgery. I returned just yesterday afternoon from that trip.

So I had no books, no study, no internet, and instead of All Saint’s Day, All Soul’s Day, Samhain, and Halloween, I found myself ruminating on a couple of questions I’d heard in the hours before I left for Dallas. The first question was contained in the note Jim Elliott e-mailed me after reading the title and blurb about this week’s sermon, "The Salvation of All Souls." Here’s his note:

"RE: next weeks sermon.  I hope you address the question of what is meant by salvation. I just downloaded [a Catholic document that says that] Catholicism recognizes other religions as long as they teach the ‘truth,’ but it goes on to say that salvation only comes through the rites of the Roman Catholic Church." So, "What is salvation?’ - that’s question number one.

Question number two comes out of a longer story told by one of our religious leaders, a member of the church, at the Leadership Retreat two weeks ago. It seems one of our member’s co-workers had said our member was obviously ‘saved’ because of how she acted at work. The member didn’t argue with the coworker, and simply let the statement stand because it wasn’t really necessary to challenge the co-worker’s opinion. So out of that comes our second question: what is this ‘saved,’ and what can it mean to us in our context?

So, herewith, a sermon entitled "The Salvation of All Souls," sans the usual quality or quantity of research, not emphasizing the Universalist aspects of these holidays, but rather the salvation that all of us souls might begin to recognize, name, and claim as our own so that we can see it and say it and share it with others who may be in need of it.

The term ‘salvation’ is derived from the Latin salvare, to save. The dictionary I was allowed to borrow at the hospital said the number-one definition is a conservatively religious-sounding one, ‘a deliverance from the effects of sin.’ And so it might most often be heard, in the mouths of certain of our brethren and sistren, referring to the theory of vicarious atonement, where Jesus’ death is understood as a payment to God for all the sins of humankind, even the individual sins of each individual person. Most Unitarian Universalist theologians, to say nothing of us individual UUs, have long ago rejected this theory on the grounds that a loving God would not have had to kill anyone, much less one said to be his son. God is kinder than that, we may say. God is more loving than that, we may say. God is smarter than that, we may say.

But the second definition in the hospital dictionary is more our style: it says that salvation is ‘liberation from ignorance or illusion.’ Liberation – we’re liberals. Let’s go with that one, ‘liberation from ignorance.’ Surely we are in favor of that to some degree.

Salvare, the root of the word ‘salvation,’ means to save, so let’s look that up, too. ‘Save’ comes from the Latin salvus, or ‘safe.’ And once again, the first definition listed is this conservatively religious one – this makes me worry about the dictionary I was loaned by the hospital – again, this suspect dictionary first says ‘save’ means ‘to deliver from sin.’ And, again, the second definition is more in line with our language of choice, "to rescue from danger or harm, to guard from destruction or loss."

What do you need to be saved from? From what danger do you need to be rescued? Now I can’t tell you about you - only you can do that - so I’ll start with my list. I don’t want to be ignorant, I don’t want to be greedy, I don’t want to be lazy, I don’t want to be boastful or lustful or gluttonous or angry or envious…

Sounds almost like the seven deadly sins, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll confess that I’m not prone to all of them – at least not all at the same time, but over time what I may most need to be saved from is myself, the part of me prone to those destructive behaviors. Again, that’s my list - your list might be quite different, but if you’re alive I bet there’s something you wish you could do differently, something you wish you could be rescued from.

Besides those seven deadly sins are a few others I can think of pretty easily. I don’t want to be totally alone. I don’t want to be without my community. I don’t want to be without the circle of love I’ve experienced in my life. I think that’s what drives a lot of people to do what they do, trying to keep that circle of love around them; we often behave in interesting ways, seeking salvation through our behavior:

-- trying to do the right thing so the right thing will happen to us, as if that’s the way the world works;

-- trying to make people like us enough that they won’t leave us, as if that’s the way relationship works;

-- trying to find enough pleasure in life that we will end up liking ourselves, as if pleasure has anything to do with how we feel about ourselves.

I would suggest to you that, from all of these beliefs and attitudes, we need to be saved. We need to be rescued. We need salvation, because:

-- Doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily lead to good things happening to us – bad things do happen to good people.

-- Making people like us doesn’t necessarily lead them to stay with us forever – if they leave, it’s far more often about them than about us.

-- Finding enough pleasure in life doesn’t necessarily lead to liking ourselves more – in fact, it often has the opposite effect, leading us to addictions of alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, relationships, even shopping.

So, as Jim Elliott asked, what is salvation? It’s somehow being rescued from danger, guarded from loss, liberated from ignorance.

Second question: what is this "saved" business, and what can it mean for us?

To talk more about this, I looked up two other words in the dictionary: poetry and limit.

One of the definitions of poetry is "words that formulate an imaginative awareness." So if we let our awareness become imaginative, if we think about things poetically, then it becomes easier to understand ‘saved’ not as ‘delivered from sin’ in a narrow sense, but rather in a broader sense as in "rescued from danger, guarded from loss, liberated from ignorance."

And limit: a couple of the definitions of limit are "something that confines" and "something that is exasperating or intolerable."

In the narrow meaning of some of our conservatively religious sisters and brothers, being saved means you’ve been "delivered from sin." If we use scripture narrowly or use the dictionary narrowly or use words narrowly, we allow limits to be placed narrowly on our understandings. But when we use the dictionary poetically, when we use scripture poetically, when we use words poetically, letting them formulate an imaginative awareness, then we move away from a narrow, confined awareness that lacks imagination. When we loosen up and use our language poetically, we liberate ourselves from limits that can be exasperating and intolerable.

It is time we understand things for ourselves. It is time we understand things anew for ourselves. It is time we do the work of renaming and reclaiming, re-imagining and redefining these words. It is time we save these words from the narrow meanings ascribed to them by narrow minds.

As long as we have narrow limits, we will think of this church as operating only within these walls. As long as we have narrow limits, we will not recognize this church’s true calling to be a beacon of liberal religion offering a saving grace; it’s calling to reach out to those in need in the wider community; it’s call to us to truly minister to the world, not just to be religious for one hour on Sunday mornings but to live our faith all week long with all whom we encounter.

In this broader sense, we ARE saved. We DO achieve salvation. But not by the narrow way: we are saved by being open to new ways of understanding, by being liberated from ignorance, and by bringing ourselves firmly back into the circle of love.

As I sat meditating and praying at my father’s bedside there in a hospital in Dallas, those two questions kept coming to me: What is salvation? What can ‘being saved’ mean to us?

And I asked those questions in the particular: Was my father saved? Would he find salvation? I’m not sure I can ever know finally whether he will or not. But what I can say is that salvation was available there at that bedside, there in that hospital. It was available in the circle of love that was formed there, with a family surrounding him in his sickbed, in much the same way that salvation is available in this circle of love we call our church. And I can say that I felt saved by that presence of love after I was able to open myself to it and to be present to the power that only love can provide.

I pray that you feel saved in ways you can articulate by the presence of this church community in your life. I pray that you can begin to articulate that in whatever language you choose to your friends, your neighbors, the folks you meet on the street. I pray that each of us can step into, open ourselves up to, and be present within the circle of love we form here.

It’s not magic. Or maybe it is. Depends on how poetic you are with the language.

But regardless of language, what we can be sure of is that it isn’t only for all the saints, but for the rest of us, all us souls, as well.

So may it be.

A postscript: My father still awaits surgery for a large pancreatic tumor. He is not strong enough today to survive the surgery, but perhaps in the days to come he will find healing if not a cure. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.