It’s all about the love

    I am really missing not being with the First Universalist community from before Thanksgiving to after Christmas. I have been thinking about you all a lot.  Christmas is such a great holiday for Universalists. Luckily I got to preach on three of the four Advent Sundays. The first Sunday I did “Hope” at Our Home Universalist Church in Ellisville, MS, followed by “Peace” in Auburn and “Joy” in Huntsville. Last Sunday, I missed doing “Love” anywhere, so I’ve decided to cheat a little and preach on the subject with y’all on Sunday in Camp Hill.

    Our religious tradition is saturated with the concept of “God Is Love.” In our last denominational confession as Universalists, “…we avow[ed] our faith in God as Eternal and All-Conquering Love…” . The front of the sanctuary at Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington has “God Is Love” literally carved in stone. Our ancestors came to the idea of universal salvation equally from scripture and from reason. What kind of god would decree eternal punishment? Certainly none worthy of worship! The foundational principle of our reasoning was “God Is Love.”

    Therefore, we have seen our great mission in the world to be putting Love into practice in our daily lives; that is, incarnating love. Our job is to understand that we (everybody, really) have direct access to an unlimited source of love, so that we can freely, even recklessly, give it away. What a deal.   

Barry