Over the past two weeks, I've been sitting with some wonderful and inspiring vows that a Unitarian Universalist couple made to one another and to their children in a ceremony of recommitment. Together, they said:
We, Oliver and Jennifer
Welcome you, Olivianna and Magnus
Into the circle of this covenant
We vow to love you without condition
To guide you as you start your journeys
To give you strong and solid roots and powerful wings
To nurture your hearts and spirits
To cultivate within you a love of knowledge, a thirst for truth, and a passion for justice
To be faithful to our charge as stewards of your childhood.
These were the words spoken by Oliver Bernsdorff and Jennifer Davis, members of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Clearwater, Florida - and their vows express all that I hope to offer as a parent - They speak to all that so many of us hope to offer both our children and this larger world of children - unconditional love, strong and solid roots and powerful wings, a love of knowledge, a thirst for truth and a passion for justice, and faithful guidance and protection through the tender years of childhood. We and I are so much like these parents - sharing similar hopes and values, calling our children beloved, sharing dreams and visions of the future, sharing even membership in our small but mighty religious community of Unitarian Universalists.
And so it is with great sadness that I share the rest of Jennifer and Oliver's story. On December 14th, just over two weeks ago, Oliver Bernsdorff shot and killed not only his recently ex-wife, Jennifer, her partner, Andrea, and his two children, Olivia and Magnus - but himself as well. Active members of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Clearwater, Florida - the family attended worship each Sunday and as recently as this past Father's Day Oliver was in the pulpit delivering the sermon. While the community knew that the family struggled with the end of Oliver and Jennifer's marriage - no one could have imagined the tragedy that would come next.
Was it an overwhelming constellation of challenges that made him do it, people are asking? Was it homophobia and anger over his wife's happiness in a new relationship? Was it the end of a long cycle of abuse? A desire to have his family look a certain way, was it mental illness, or was it simply evil that drove Oliver to this action? The questions keep coming as folks from all over try to make sense of this tragedy.
And I'll tell you, if you make your way to the news coverage of this tragedy on the web, the comments left there by so many individuals suggest only one response to this devastating act of violence. Any man who could kill his ex-wife and his own children is pure evil those comments say, and Oliver Bernsdorff is now burning in hell. Now I can see how that might be a comforting idea to believe - heck I must admit that the idea gave me some pleasure when I first read the story - but when you get right down to it - things are so much more complicated than that. Much as I hate to say it, I truly believe that given the right set of circumstances, Oliver could have been any one of us - and when we place ourselves apart from those who succumb to such overwhelming urges we deny the complexity of not only our own feelings and potentials, but of our world as well.
We humans are a mixed bag, I believe. Each one of us carries within the leanings toward both evil and goodness - and only one part of how we turn out comes from our own willpower. And I want to be clear this morning that I am in no way, shape or form condoning the actions that Oliver took - and I in no way, shape or form am suggesting that he is deserving of more sympathy than those he killed - what I am saying is that he is the one that challenges our hearts and minds in this story, and if we are honest with ourselves - at least if I am honest with myself, I've got to admit there are so many factors that come into play when a person makes a terrible decision like this - and much as I'd like to believe in the idea of pure evil or some system of karmic justice or indefinite damnation for a man who would kill his own 2 and 4 year old children - I just cannot do it for long. And neither could our Universalist ancestors.
Way back during the Great Awakening - a religious movement that first swept the nation in the mid 1700s - preachers cris-crossed the country giving sermons like Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God." In this famous sermon Edwards described God as an entity dangling his children over the burning pit of hell, holding on to us as long as his whim held out, then dropping us like a rock through the strands of a spider web, to meet our ultimate fate. "There is nothing that keeps wicked men (which, by the way, we all would qualify as in Edwards' logic) at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." -- By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will." No good works can save you, no pure heart exists, Edwards reminds us. And God won't help you, either. Edwards' God does nothing to stop the wickedness of men, choosing instead to prepare a hell hot enough to consume us all - based solely on his capricious whim. This kind of angry God can feel good when we're faced with the atrocities of what people can do to one another - when our emotions call for justice and revenge - but this kind of God of anger and retribution simply cannot and does not have the power to comfort the wounded or change the world.
Our forbearers, the Universalists, understood this truth, and they made it a habit during the second Great Awakening in the early 1800s to follow the Edwards-like troops across the country, showing up in towns where hundreds and thousands had been recently converted to this kind of Christianity that heralded hatred and hell with their own saving message of a different kind of God. God, the Universalists proclaimed, plays no favorites and leaves no one out. The wicked and the good are held tight in the God of the Universalists care, surrounded by unconditional love that mirrors the best that a parent could have to offer. This God of Universalism has no use for hell, no use for the concept of human beings being dangled over a fiery pit to be dropped at some angry God's cue. Needless to say, the Universalists offered a welcome message after the Sinners in the hands of an angry god pitch, and Universalism soon grew to be the largest denomination in the country.
The early Universalists had an important message back in the 1800s, and they have an equally important message for us now. Their God was a god of love, a god of kindness and care who welcomed all of us into the circle of hope and possibility - and this is our legacy as Unitarian Universalists. No one was excluded for the Universalists - not even those who chose a different religious path, not even those who succumbed to the human tendency toward evil or collapsed under the constellation of challenges that can sometimes overwhelm us and lead us to make choices that any rational person would regret. The God of Universalism embodies unconditional love - and it is love, I would argue, that has the power to comfort the wounded and transform us toward the good in ways we cannot transform ourselves.
Unitarian Process theologian Henry Nelson Wieman described God in what I think is a similar way to those early Universalists - not as an entity in the sky dangling us over a fiery pit but as a force that has the power to transform us as we cannot transform ourselves - and I believe that as we face this world full of complexity and challenge - it is love that has the power to turn our hearts away from the lure of evil - it is love that has the power to help us turn away from the temptations of revenge and retribution - and it is love that can offer us the healing experiences we need that we might lean into the good that is equally present within all of us.
As we embrace the challenge that this month's worship theme - Children of God - offers us we must, I believe, take the message of our Universalist ancestors to heart as we wrestle with the question of who can claim the title of Children of God. For thousands of years and still today, different religious communities and ethnic groups have claimed this title for themselves - announcing to the rest of us that they are the saved and we are the damned - that they are under God's care and protection while we are simply left to the wolves and any of our own devices that we can muster. Whole peoples have taken on the title of children of god to justify war and violence - to justify attempts at the conversion of entire groups to their way of understanding the world. This title, children of god, has done and continues to do much damage - but even with all of that said, claiming the title of Child of God has not always been such a bad thing - and we owe it to ourselves to explore the flip side of the story as well.
As recently as the civil rights movement and the advent of liberation theology, as recently as this past week's assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, leaders for social change have claimed the title of Child of God for themselves. It has not been an exclusionary title that they claim only for themselves - but rather it describes their understanding of themselves as protected in both this life time and the next - it describes their role, as they see it, in a larger picture - in the unfolding of justice over a longer period than their individual lifetimes, and it describes their membership in a larger family than any one ancestral group or religious tradition - in the family of the whole human race. This understanding of what it means to be a child of god offers a sense of power and purpose, and it allows those working for justice at times to do and say things that would have scared another into silence.
This particular understanding of the phrase, child of God, though - is just one positive way to understand the title that so many claim for themselves. There is another powerful understanding, too. Let me tell you about it through a story.
This story starts out hard, too. It involves a Maine Game Warden named Frank who found a young girl drowned and frozen in a local lake. "She was just under the ice, Frank said. I took her out like this.I took her out just like this, Frank said, making a cradling gesture with his arms."
"Where is God in this?" That is the question that Unitarian Universalist minister Kate Braestrup, chaplain to the Maine Game Wardens, understood her colleague, Frank, to be asking when he told this story. Now he wasn't asking directly, of course. "Not in those words," she tells us, but that is what he was asking all the same.
"I pulled her out just like this," Frank says again, making the cradling gesture with his wet arms. "'God, she must have been so cold. She must have been so scared...but - Hey, it's all part of God's plan, right?' Frank said it with a snort of angry laughter." The reverend waited. "He said it again, this time as an urgent, angry question: 'How the hell is this part of God's plan?'"
There, in the face of such pain and anger, in the face of real world suffering - Kate dared to answer her friend. "The death of the little girl with the red mittens is not God's will or plan. It is physics and biology, the bearing capacity of frozen water, the point at which hypothermia causes a small body's systems to fail. Don't look for God in the breaking ice or the dark water," she says. "Nowhere in scripture does it say, 'God is car accident' or 'God is death." God is justice and kindness, mercy and always - always - love. So if you want to know where God is in this or in anything, look for love." (quotes from Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup, 185-8)
In situations where evil and violence and even seemingly simple mistakes wreak havoc on the innocent, it is tempting to see God as someone who can and will right all wrongs, someone who will smite the evildoers and grant peace and prosperity to the righteous, someone who maybe, just maybe made a mistake this time and took the wrong person. But honestly, after my own life experiences and through my short time in the ministry, I simply cannot believe in this kind of God. I cannot believe in the god of Jonathan Edwards or the God of most of my neighbors, quite frankly. Rather, I believe in the god of the process theologians - that power that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves - the gift of love undeserved, unearned, and sometimes even unasked for that can help us lean back in toward our better selves - rising to meet the expectations and the longings of those around us who dare to bathe us in the healing ether of unconditional love.
This is an understanding of God that I can embrace - God as love - the God of our Universalist ancestors - and it is an understanding that genuinely helps me as I attempt to help myself and others make sense of this world and all that happens in it. If God is love, and if being a child of God means being a person who is bathed in the unconditional love that mirrors the best of what a parent has to offer, and if no one, and I mean no one, is excluded from that love - then I believe that understanding ourselves and this whole world as Children of God can offer us much as we work to build the beloved community here on earth. With this understanding we are called to treat each and every person with kindness and care, with this understanding everyone has a place in the family of things, as Mary Oliver would say, with this understanding we all can call our selves beloved and know the deep peace and inspiration that that love can bring.
Did you get what you wanted from this life, the poet Raymond Carver asked himself in his poem, Late Fragment? I did, he responds. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
It is only love, I believe, that can heal our wounded hearts, only love that can help us to bind up the broken in the aftermath of tragedy, only love that enables to envision a world community that holds each and every person and animal and this very earth as dear. It is only love that makes a life worthwhile, and it is love that will show up in the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Clearwater, Florida - offering comfort to the friends and family of a community torn apart by violence.
This past Father's Day, Oliver Bernsdorf gave the sermon at his Unitarian Universalist congregation. In those moments Oliver told the congregation that he had finally come to embrace his name - which he understood to mean bringer of peace. He closed his sermon by saying - "May I do this not only in the world around me, but in my family and in my own heart and mind. May I always live up to this name, may my life reflect it, and I implore each of you, my brothers and sisters, to help me do just that."
I implore each of you, my brothers and sisters, to help me do just that, Oliver said.
We are his brothers and sisters, friends. We are his brothers and sisters. There is no way around it.
We cannot be our best selves alone. Oliver Bernsdorff knew that, and I believe that each of us knows that truth as well. And so it is up to us - to widen our circle of love to continue to include Oliver and his family and all those affected by this tragedy, allowing his closing words to echo in our minds, reverberating with the call to put out our hands - even and especially to those among us who are struggling -that we might be the embodiment of love here on earth - that we might aspire to bring peace to our own hearts and minds, to our families and to this world - offering the unconditional love that can transform us all in ways we cannot transform ourselves - that together we can help one another not only turn away from evil but be true bringers of peace in this bruised and broken and beautiful world.
May it be so, and Amen.
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