March 15, 2025

Luke 1:26-38

Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

When you heard this reading this morning, perhaps you thought to yourselves, why exactly are we listening to a Christmas reading? Mary hearing about her pending and unexpected pregnancy. But there is a reason. We are in the month of April. Count nine months from now and where do you land in the calendar? December. This reading is in memory of the Annunciation, the day when the announcement of Jesus’ pending arrival was first made.

Mary asks, quite understandably, how can this be? How can the impossible happen? How can this unbelievable event occur? How can it be? And if you are now patiently awaiting my careful and convincing explanation of the virgin birth, I am afraid you will have to wait a little long–nine months at the very least.

No, instead I want to talk about how important things sometimes change. They can change slowly or out of nowhere. It can change inconsistent with what we have experienced up until the revealing moment or change long telegraphed over the years. In Mary’s case, it was welcomed change, after a certain adjustment period for her and especially Joseph. But change is not always that accommodating.

There was an alternate reading for this Sunday from the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews which began with the line: “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” This was a reference to the practice of making animal sacrifices in the Temple. This was the common practice in the time of Jesus.

People were expected to offer sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem. Again, these were not metaphorical sacrifices, but literal offerings. Animals were offered up and killed on altars–sheep and goats, bulls and cows, doves and the like. This was the case throughout the history of the Ancient Israelites up through the time of Jesus and for a few decades afterwards until the Temple was no more.

These offerings were made for many occasions, and one notable reason was for the forgiveness of sins. You sinned, or were declared sinful, and then you made an offering at the Temple. That was a basic expectation in the life of a religious person.

And then it changed. That basic expectation in religious life disappeared, though not overnight. It petered out over time. One early inkling of a coming change came in the Book of Micah. The prophet explains that God is not seeking burnt offerings, or animal sacrifices, but acts of loving kindness. He further said, [W]hat doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? What is being asked of the people is no longer to focus on offering literal gifts to God but to make the days of our lives a type of sacrifice, a form of worship.

Again, this was not a small matter. It was not deciding to start worship at 11:00 am versus 10:30. The Temple was a place in which offerings were made, it’s very purpose for being. In Jesus’ lifetime, hundreds of years after the prophet Micah’s estimated existence, the Temple was still a place of sacrifice. Sacrifice was a primary feature of Roman religion and other traditions, so this was by no means a unique practice. When Jesus was first presented as a baby at the Temple, his parents offered a pair of doves for the occasion. This was the least expensive offering that could be made, reflecting their likely state of poverty.

The offering of animal sacrifices fell into disuse, even though it had been a crucial aspect of religious life. As a result, sacrifice has become metaphorical in our understanding of the religious use of the term. It is often equated to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, referred to as substitutionary atonement.  Meaning that Jesus died for our sins.

There are different ways of understanding the idea of sacrifice in this sense. In the Universalist tradition, which merged with the Unitarians back in 1961, it was also believed that Jesus died to save the world from sin. The Universalists were traditional Christians in most ways. They believed in the Trinity, they believed in original sin. They believed in predestination, that the course of our lives had been set before the beginning of time itself.

What they did not believe, however, was that anyone would be condemned to hell for all eternity, but rather they preached universal salvation. The logic goes as follows: God, being all good and all loving, could not be expected to damn any soul to infinite punishment because of finite sin. Even a century long life of dedicated sinning would be too short to warrant endless torment as is often described as the state of being in hell.

Now the Universalists argued over what that might mean. Some thought that hell was a temporary state of punishment, of purification, and that in time all would be reconciled with God. Others, called the Ultra-Universalists, believed that all those who died immediately went to heaven. The explanation for this broad form of universal salvation was not surprisingly that Jesus had died for our sins.

And having done that, all had been already saved. One footnote in that description of salvation was that the world in which we live has served as the purgatory through which we all passed through to warrant going to heaven. Basically, we are living through hell.

Christians have run the gamut of ideas about heaven and hell. Some early Christians believed in reincarnation, the idea that we return to the world again and again through various lives. This theory lost out to the more black and white notion of sinners and saved, heaven and hell, sheep and goats. You do bad things, you go to hell. You live a good life, you go to heaven.  Simple.

Actually, not so simple.

Remember the sacrifices at the Temple. Those were to wash away sin in the religion of the Second Temple, which is significantly different from what we might recognize as Judaism. Under that system, bad fortune would come to the sinful in this life, so you needed to atone for sin in this worldly way.

In the early years of Christianity, atonement for sin was said to be mediated by priests who would absolve sins after repentance and the performance of certain tasks or payment of certain amounts of money. Think about the many Crusades during the Middle Ages. Those who fought in the Crusades often did so with the hope of attaining a better place in the afterlife. And yes, some of them liked to fight and to get rich. How often can you get all three in one package?

Finding salvation in this way was admittedly mercenary. It was about money and power more than acts of loving kindness. This concern about the motivations behind religious behavior was one of the rallying cries for the Protestant Reformation against the medieval Catholic church. Instead, salvation could only be found through faith alone, not good works in the world, not acts or amounts. That was a big another change.

In one sense this was a great relief. One need not worry about divine accountants in the sky tallying up good deeds against sins. And without this ledger sheet, people could stop worrying about where they would be going after this life. Well, actually, they still got to worry, now about different things.

Many, perhaps most, Protestants held for centuries that only God knew who was to be saved and who was to be damned. And there was no method in this world for telling by behaviors or signs as to who would make the cut. This was one way of relieving people of the anxiety related to getting into heaven. See, no one knows.

Wait a minute – no one knows? Which means I do not know, which means I could be going to heaven or hell regardless of what I do? Which means for many people there was to be a whole lot of new worrying about heaven and hell. This was one reason that Unitarians eventually split from their Puritan cousins, the concept of predestination, as Unitarians came to believe that moral education and action were the better path.

Compare that to the Universalists and their traditional Christian outlook punctuated by a radical notion of salvation. The Universalists held that all of us would be saved; each and every one of us would return to God. And that idea was attractive. At one point, Universalism was the seventh largest religious denomination in the United States. But that changed over time. Universalism fell out of favor. Why?

I would guess that many people just want to believe in hell. The Bible suggests that some of us will be punished. The Universalists got around that idea by claiming it would be temporary punishment, like the Catholic notion of purgatory, which has clear connections to the Universalist way of thinking. But most Christians rejected, and still reject, the notion of universal salvation. The idea that everyone would be saved was unacceptable.

I suppose it is the same logic one sees against participation trophies in children’s sports. Why should everyone get a shiny prize? And so why shouldn’t the bad people be punished? Why should I have to spend eternity next to a sinner? That concern about the moral condition of the neighbors requires a perhaps unwarranted assumption as to where one might be going under this eternal arrangement.

If you believe that good people should go to heaven and bad people should go to hell, I am not going to argue with you. I will note in passing that that is not generally a Protestant understanding of salvation but is in fact textbook Catholicism. The idea of predestination assumes that what you do in this life has nothing to do with what will happen in the next life, which honestly, has always confused me.

When I was young, we were Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday. I attended twelve years of parochial school, never setting foot in a Sunday school. As a parochial school student, we had religion classes several times per week. We often left school to go to Mass next door at the local church. We were very time religious.

When I was older, my grandparents moved next door. My grandmother started coming to Mass with us every Sunday. My grandfather did not come.

One thing you have to realize about a parochial school education is that it includes all the ways you need to act in order to get into heaven. And one of those requirements was that you go to Mass every week and on every Holy Day of Obligation.  Currently, there are eight such days, including New Year’s Day, Epiphany, and the Feast of the Assumption. When I was in school, it seemed more like fifty days.

Anyway, my grandfather did not go to church. He did not ever go to church. I do not even remember him coming with us on Christmas or Easter. And so, years ago, when I was a teenager, I recall thinking that I did not know if my grandfather was going to heaven.

If we followed the rules I was taught, he could not get in. Maybe he could sit out a few centuries in purgatory, but I did not know that to be true. People around me talked as if he were going to heaven, but again that was not what I had learned. And yet he was my grandfather. I did not want to imagine him suffering for all eternity. Suffering because of eighty plus years of life, some of which was spent not going to Mass on Sundays. This seemed like an inadequate reason to go to hell.

As you might guess, I no longer go to Mass that often. I have also not offered a pair of doves at the Temple either. Or a ram or a goat. Should I be worried?

Conversely, if I take up the Protestant idea that it is all predetermined, I do not have to worry about what I do or not do. Instead, I get to worry about never knowing, but that is a different set of worries. And yet I still have to worry about whether myself or my grandfather has made the heavenly cut.

Even if I could turn my face to God by my own choice, to find and to feel the power of the spirit and know I am saved, it would still be troubling. Because it would then just be all about me, about a small group called “us” making it into heaven.

It would not explain what happens to good and loving people who never heard about the existence of Jesus or the habits of Christians, but who walked a different path of goodness marked by other ways of loving kindness. It would not explain why they are supposed to be in hell. To go to hell for all eternity because they were good people who did not agree with me, with us, with one unique way of understanding the universe.

The Universalist description of salvation for all has some appeal, but I also wonder about that. If living a bad life does not matter, that would also mean that living a good life does not matter. Why have we lived these lives at all? Why have we been here on earth if on the one hand murky and complicated rules could lead us to endless suffering or on the other predetermined judgments made before we were born could render our actions in this life meaningless?

All I can do is tell you what I think. What I have surmised over my time in the world and years of study. I cannot claim to be as wise as Solomon, as inspired as Paul, as faithful as Peter. And believe me, I am no Jesus. But this is what I think on this particular day.

We are born onto this earth and become a part of something ancient. From the first moment of life on this planet, a wild and complicated story has been unfolding. At one moment there was darkness, then there was light. One moment there was no life and in time there was life all around. The smallest organisms changing and shifting. Coalescing over millions of years into forms and shapes beyond our knowing. Branching and growing, living and dying, again and again and again.

That story began long ago and continues. It continues with us. With us joining in the chorus of life, the raucous shout, the quiet hum, the endless days and nights. We are related to each other through that story, related all the way back to the very first human beings.

Imagine this: not one of us came into being outside of this ongoing tale of humanity, this singular story of all that have lived. Not one of us asked to be born and not one of us deserves to live any more or less than another. Our lives are different, filled with blessings and sorrows, struggles and joys. Billions of us are woven together into an incredibly complex story, but still it is one story. One interconnected fate on an interconnected world.

We are born into conditions outside our control and into circumstances beyond our understanding. In this way, we are one small presence in the world and yet we are all critically necessary to this life. We are the result of all those who came before us and the only means by which any and all new generations might come after us. Along the way, we rise and we fall, we breathe and we eat, we run and we stumble. We are born, we live and love for a time, and then we die.

And what happens when we die? As if there needed to be more, more than having etched our being across the span of time, the rhythm of existence. But if there is more, if there is a next as I believe and as I would describe it, I think what happens is that we return. We return to God.

We return to God with our stories. With our lives as we have lived them and our actions as we understood them. The good and the bad, the heroic and the cowardly, the loving and the hateful. Our stories, our lives. We carry those to the feet of God as our one true offering when our time is done.

And in time, all those stories, the stories of everyone who has ever lived will be joined. The finite lengths of our lives stitched back together with all those we knew and loved. And we in turn will know their stories, we will know the lives of others as they lived them and their actions as they understood them. We will know what we meant to each other and what we did to one another, the good and the not so good.

And I would guess that knowing all of that will be heavenly for some and hellish for others. Probably both, blended together in the ancient song of life. A song that we sang and a song that we will always remember. And as time as we might experience it passes, we will understand that larger song and join in the singing.

I do not personally believe in endless suffering or, honestly, endless happiness. I believe in eternal memory. I believe that in time, we will all rejoin with God. And together, we will remember all that we were and all that we could have been: the triumphs and the disappointments, the acts of loving kindness and our many sins and transgressions.

I am not sure if that will seem like heaven or hell. But an all-loving God welcoming us back, each and every one of us, into God’s presence–broken or whole, joyous or sorrowful, saint or sinner–that image fits with my understanding of God.

Now I am left with one purpose, one task, one obligation: to write my little part of an endless story, my verses in that endless song. I am left with the lifelong task of writing a tale worthy of adding it to the eternal memory of God. Amen.