Love is the Doctrine Of This Church
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
February 15, 2004

	Some of you may wonder why every year around Valentine’s I end up preaching on some aspect of love.  No I am not in the pay of the Hallmark card company.  Many people don’t realize it, but St. Valentine’s Day started out as a religious holiday, and it is still such in the Roman Catholic church.  Those of you who grew up Catholic may know the story, but it bears repeating at this particular time for it is peculiarly poignant this year.
	The story is shrouded in the mists of legend, and there may have been a priest and a Bishop named Valentine, but the way the story goes, in the Second Century of the Common Era, a cruel Roman Emperor named Claudius was concerned because he was running out of soldiers.  Claudius was making war on almost everyone around, but he couldn’t raise a big enough army.  He realized that the young men of Rome would rather make love than war.  So he decreed that no marriages could take place in this time of emergency.  But Valentine circumvented this decree and went on marrying couples in secret.  For this he was arrested, tried and put to death.  Since his martyrdom, he has become canonized and is the patron saint of lovers.
	Does this strike anyone else as a huge irony?  Today we again have the government decreeing that as to a certain class of citizens, no marriages shall take place.  We have a small band of ministers in this and a few other denominations willing o perform the ceremonies.  And we have the Roman Catholic Church heroically taking the side of - the Emperor!  St. Valentine, if you want to change your canonical affiliation, I’m sure we UUs are ready to welcome you!
	Love is what we’re at today.  This is my second sermon that looks at the words of this affirmation we say at the beginning of service every Sunday.1 Some of you may remember that right after New Years, I preached a sermon examining the phrase at the end of the affirmation, “into Harmony With The Divine,” and I went into the harmony of the spheres and Pythagorean ratios and Kepler and many of you are still wondering what that was all about.  Maybe I will be on more familiar ground this week as I examine the phrase which opens our affirmation, “Love is the Doctrine of this church.”
	Now I want to note that it is a little curious to use the word doctrine.  Doctrine usually means a fairly definite set of ideas or rules.  In international relations, it means a particular political stance towards the world, such as the Monroe Doctrine, which held that the United States was opposed to further expansion of European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, or the Truman Doctrine, which held that the United States would aid any country it felt was threatened by Communism.  In religion, doctrine is a body of belief, that which is taught within a particular religious tradition, often in the form of a creed said at regular worship services, but also as a catechism taught to youngsters.  The distinguishing feature of Universalism, and now Unitarian Universalism is that it is a church without a creed.  So how do we have doctrine at all?
	Well, let’s go to the text.  This affirmation that we say every Sunday is printed in your hymnal at # 471.  They list it there as arranged by L. Griswold Williams.  Since I preached my New Years’ sermon, I’ve done a little more research, and I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of the book put together by Griswold Williams and published in 1933, called Antiphonal Readings for Free Worship.  It’s a great collection; it has 100 pages of poetry and prose by authors such as Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, Kahlil Gibran, Guiseppe Mazzini, each arranged to be spoken responsively in a worship service.  The covenant we say is at the end of this book, and it is the only one which is not attributed to an author.  However, the sentiments in it are very consistent with a couple of the other selections for which Griswold Williams claims authorship, so I have come to the view that he probably wrote these words himself.
	Since he is the author, it’s worth noting a few facts about him.  Griswold Williams was a Universalist minister who lived from 1893 to 1942 and served churches in Pennsylvania, Vermont and New York.  He was apparently a Social Gospel kind of Universalist, for he sponsored resolutions at General Conventions in the 20's supporting birth control and the rights of conscientious objectors.  He was also musically knowledgeable, because he was the chairman of the Universalist wing of the joint committee which produced Hymns of the Spirit in 1937.
	This covenant we say seems a little combative, and I like to imagine the setting in which he might have written it.  I see Griswold Williams having sherry with one of his orthodox colleagues, say a Presbyterian or Methodist, one fine evening and after knocking back a couple of glasses, the Presbyterian says, “you know the trouble with you Universalists?  You’re not really a religion.  Look at you, you’ve got no doctrine, you’ve got no sacraments, you’ve really got no prayers.”  Like most of us, Williams probably didn’t get the best rejoinder to this in the heat of the moment; he might have said something about we don’t need any of those things to be called a religion, thank you.  But I imagine that in the middle of the night, after his guest had long gone, it finally occurred to Griswold Williams what he should have said, and he sat down and wrote, Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest of truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer.”  Take that, you Presbyterians.  
	As to this first sentence, about love, Griswold Williams was standing on firm ground, in the mainstream of Universalist tradition.  The central tenet of Universalism from the time of John Murray in 1770 forward was that all persons are saved, and that tenet was based on a view of God as too loving to let any of his creatures suffer in Hell.  As Quillen Shinn said, “The force behind all forces and all worlds is love.”  Love is the power that rules the universe.
	So yes there is doctrine in Universalism, and this affirmation states it as broadly as possible.  Not universal salvation, not even God, but love. 
	The root of the Universalist notion that God is love is of course in Christianity.  In the tenth chapter of Luke, Jesus is tested by a lawyer, who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus turns the question back on him, what is written in the law.  The lawyer gives the traditional answer from the Torah, you shall love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your should and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus tells him, you have answered correctly, do this and you will live.  The lawyer then asked what we in the trade regard as the mortal sin, one question too many.  He said who is my neighbor?  Jesus responded with the story fo the Good Samaritan.  Notice that the lawyer did not ask who is God.
	In orthodox Christianity, as the Gospel of John puts it, God so loves the world that he gave his only-begotten son Jesus to the end that all who believe in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.  While we may have trouble accepting this tenet of orthodox doctrine, we should understand the love that it symbolizes.  The love of a parent for a child is one of the strongest forces known.  We know now that it arises from an instinct which has been bred into all living creatures for generations, because those creatures who didn’t have this instinct didn’t survive to pass on their genes to a new generation.  So the idea that God would willingly send his only son to die for the salvation of humanity is a powerful testament to love.
	Universalists of the Nineteenth Century were accustomed to thinking of themselves as the true heirs of the early Christian church, the ones who got it right when all the orthodox had got it wrong.  Clearly love was a central theme of the early Christians; St. Paul writes of love feasts, which were weekly gatherings in someone’s home, and in which the last supper of Jesus was commemorated.  These were the forerunners of the pot-luck supper, and everyone was welcome whether they could contribute food or not.  Paul, of course, was concerned with the discipline and practice in the communities of faith he had set up, and it was in the course of writing to the group at Corinth that he penned some of the greatest words ever written about love, words which speak today as vibrantly as they did two millennia ago, speak to the preacher and to the politician and to the painter and farmer and everyone in between: if I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Love trumps all, says Paul, it trumps eloquence, it trumps skill, it trumps wisdom, it trumps power.  
	But Christianity is not the only source;  by the 1920's, when Griswold Williams, wrote, the Universalists did not consider themselves restricted to Christianity.  Another inspiration for the phrase may have been Buddhism, for one of the ethical precepts of that religion is what they call metta, compassion for all living beings.  Then too, in the 1920's Mohandas Gandhi was preaching much the same thing within Hinduism.
	In short, there is plenty in our common religious heritage to justify the statement that love is doctrine of this church.  But we have a problem; if love is the doctrine of the church, how does that furnish any guide for behavior?
	Our neighbors in this town have very different doctrines.  They will say that they adhere to the ethic of Jesus, also, but they will view that ethic as bound rather tightly to the Bible and to years of church teachings.  For any questions which may arise – same sex marriage, abortion, stem-cell research – they will have books to go to.  What do we have?  The book of love?  (Who wrote the book of love?  I wonder)
	But the books are not self explanatory.  As we discovered in our New Testament class last week, when you get into the actual words of Jesus quoted in the gospels, the Hallmark sweetened-up Disneyfied image of the Prince of Peace goes rather quickly out the window.  He warns, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have come not to bring peace but a sword.  For I have come to set a mon against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (Mt 10:34)
	Our doctrinal liberalism would allow us to just disregard passages like this, and to say we don’t find these words helpful or instructive.  But when we do, I think we run the risk of missing some of the deep truth in them.  Jesus is not saying that he doesn’t stand for love, he’s saying that love often isn’t peaceful.  And you know, he’s right.
	Love is about the hardest work there is.  Love doesn’t happen without a lot of effort and a lot of pain.  Around this time we are all bombarded with stories of romantic bliss.  I got one just this week, when I went to visit Gordon and Amy Morrison in the hospital where Amy had just delivered their first child, Ian.  Ian was about the tiniest, most delicate, reddest most beautiful child I had ever seen.  Incredible miracle that every baby is and add to that the fact that he was about six weeks early and yet seems in fine shape and was due to go home on Saturday.  They told me that his birth date, February 11, 2004, is one day past the tenth anniversary of their first kiss.  Now that’s a valentine’s story.
	But we know that for every happy story of love like that there is at least one story of heartbreak, of love gone awry, unrequited love, hopeless love, love of the wrong person.  Love is about the most important thing there is, but it is also about the most complicated.  It will tear you up and spit you out in little pieces and at the same time it can be the only thing that makes life worth living.
	It seems that our covenant states it about as broadly as it’s possible to state it.  Love is the doctrine of this church.  Not Jesus, not even God, but Love.  But while it states it broadly, it doesn’t state it deeply.  It is for us to add the depth to that statement in how we live and move and have our being in the world.
	I gave an interview to the Wakefield Observer this week in which I said that I though the two sides in the same-sex marriage debate were talking past each other.  And I feel instinctively that this is wrong, but I don’t really know what to do about it.  I think it is not loving to question the ethics, morals, or lovingness of those who take the opposite side of the issue than I do, particularly the local clergy with whom I work every day.  How does the ethic of love work here?
	I speak my truth, that love and the respect for the inherent worth and dignity of all people leads me to believe that justice consists in extending full marriage rights to same-sex couples.  My colleagues speak their truth, that God condemns homosexual relations, that the basis of law ought to be what God ordains, and that therefore society ought not recognize same-sex marriages.  Can I disagree with their premises in love?  Jesus say to love our enemies.  These folks are not my enemies, but they are certainly my opponents; can I hold them in love even while I try to talk them out of their positions?
	The love command, properly understood, is not something that is weak or trivial or banal.  It is something that calls out every ounce of humanity in us.  I have quoted before from Martin Luther King’s great 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” in which he calls for a rearrangement of loyalties wherein every notion shall develop a loyalty to humankind as a whole.  He continues:
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft-misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.”
	And I’m inclined to agree with St. Paul that this love trumps almost every other value.  It is here at the core of religion.  From this perspective, our Principles and Purposes are seriously deficient.  I invite you to look at them inside the front cover of your hymnal.  You will not find the word love there in the Principles.  The popular press misquoted Bill Sinkford a year ago and started a tempest in a teapot about whether we were going to put the word God in the Principles and Purposes.  
	I don’t think we need God there.  But I think we ought to seriously consider putting love there.  We have the word compassion in the second principle, which is fine from the perspective of Buddhist ethics, but it doesn’t have the punch of love.  And it is good that in the sources section we speak of the transforming power of love.  But I think it needs to be more central, as it is in our affirmation, Love is the doctrine of this church.  Not virgin birth, not vicarious atonement, not transubstantiation, not the Holy Trinity, not the Second Coming or the Resurrection of the Flesh or the Covenant with Abraham or even the idea that revelation is not sealed.  Love is it.
	And we make our doctrine true by doing the work of love.  Universalists have always done this.  We were one of the first religious groups in America to oppose slavery and capital punishment.  We campaigned mightily in the Nineteenth Century for prison reform, and in the Twentieth against compulsory military service and birth control.  Our present efforts against war and homophobia stand squarely in this tradition.  We are making love happen.  I will close with a quote you’ve heard me use before, from Quillen Shinn:
So we sing the glad song of victory. All the resources of the universe are pledged to the great consummation, God's character, and his infinite love. I love to think of the agencies we see now at work. Every exertion you put forth to make this world better is so much done to make our doctrine true. God works through instrumentalities. We are all to be agents. A Universalist who is idle, doing nothing to make his doctrine true, is a counterfeit.
Amen