The author has granted his permission for this sermon to be shared. When you deliver it, you might remind the congregation that all of the “I” language belongs to Rev. David Schwartz.

In a nineteenth century world of dour, pessimistic Calvinists entirely convinced that you and everyone you know is going to hell—utterly irredeemable in a way that no good deed can ever make up for—our Universalist ancestors declared: no hell; hope.

In the nineteenth century, as Universalism spread across New England and the Midwest (which back then was just The West), Universalist preachers rode from town to town planting churches. And in every place they preached the gospel: the good news that God’s love will not condemn you eternally to hell.

But I’m doing a disservice by telling you the story of Universalism as if it were about a theological proposition. I’ve been telling you this story as if it were the history of an idea. I’ve been telling you about the theory of Universalism, but I don’t really care about the theory; I care about the practice of Universalism.

Here’s why:

My career as an alcoholic was brief but ambitious: short, maybe, but I brought a dedication and focus to it that nearly killed me. For all its unique and personal detail, my own story is, in its essence, the same story as most every other alcoholic: first, things were fun. Then: fun and problems. Then, at last: only problems. Until, stuck deep inside the disease—like being at the bottom of a well, drowning slowly—a friend said: “The way things are isn’t the way they have to be.”

There are plenty of ways to get sober. For me, it was a great deal of luck or grace, the help of AA, and supportive friends and family and partner.

In the years between then and now, I’ve grown into sobriety in different ways: in meetings and therapy, with mentors and teachers, from wise books, in church on my own—the same way all of us grow as people. Physical cravings and dreams stopped after five or six years, and I’m spending the rest of my life unlearning unhealthy patterns of thought and learning new ones—the same thing everyone does: figuring out how to be a person among people.

Addiction is cunning, and baffling, and powerful. I know this first hand, some of you know it well, too.

In those early years of sobriety, that cunning would come in funny ways:

In the first spring of sobriety, a year later, with the smell of spring air at night—that warm night where you smell earth again for the first time in months and months—I would think to myself: Oh, this is just the sort of night I used to love to drink on.

That summer, in the 9 p.m. twilight, with swallows darting overhead, the drone of cicadas, when everything starts to cool down after the day and the breeze blew the city clean, I would think to myself: Oh, this is just the sort of night I used to love to drink on.

In the fall, with faint woodsmoke, and the crunch of leaves underfoot, and the late afternoon light turning toward evening, I would think to myself: Oh, this is just the sort of afternoon I used to love to drink on.

In the winter months, when snow quiets everything down, and the world is still, and the cat just wants to sit on your bed all day long, I would think to myself, with long underwear for warmth under my jeans: Oh, this is just the sort of day I used to love to drink on.

It took me a full year to realize that my brain was supplying a reason to drink on every single day without exception, while pretending that every day was unique and different!

Rainy, sunny, cloudy, warm, cold, snowing, hot, blizzard, hurricane—some part of my brain was constructing that and presenting it as a reason. My brain didn’t just tell me: “Hey, you should drink!” It said: “There’s a reason you should pick up: you deserve it; this sort of day is the right sort of day; this is the right moment.”

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes that “reason is the servant of impulse before it is its master.” That is to say, our faculty of reason—our ability to think about cause and effect, about the relationship between different things, about whether evidence adds up—is deeply compromised by impulse.

In a less dramatic way, if you’ve ever done an intense workout and then justified having ice cream because you worked out, you know what I mean. You exercise and burn three hundred calories. Then you eat eight hundred calories of ice cream because you worked out. It makes sense in your head; it takes the shape of something reasonable-sounding, but it’s rationalizing the irrational: constructing a (false) reason why some behavior makes sense.

It’s not that reason is a bad thing, or that we’re hopelessly incapable of reasoning our way through difficult things. It’s just that I needed something deeper and stronger and more certain than reason to guide me through sobriety. I needed the lived experience of love and belovedness and genuine acceptance and belonging. I needed, that is, not just to think about the meaning of “Universalism,” but to actually have an experience that embodied it.

The message of Universalism is not that you have a cosmic “get out of jail free” card for an afterlife. To say that Universalism means God saves everyone misses the point—and the reason it’s still relevant even if you don’t believe in God at all. The message is not about what’s going to happen in the future, but why.

All of us are worthy of salvation because all of us are beloved. All of us are just as human as everyone else: just as wounded, hurting, and healing; just as capable of love and transformation and transcendence; just as able to be who we are and who we are called to be.

That’s not really about what happens after we die. It’s not about where you’re going; it’s about where you are. It’s about what we’re going to do while we’re here, and what we’re going to do with each other.

The Universalists weren’t just talking salvation; they were preaching and teaching and living that in God there is a gaze which sees each of us as real. Which sees in us all of who we are in possibility and purpose. They are speaking from their tradition to name something inseparable from being alive, regardless of your theology.

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber says we travel through life in a haze, treating other people like objects, not humans. But our work is to treat others as fully human and real as we know ourselves to be. That’s Universalism for this world.

Quakers say there is that of God in all of us; that inside each one of us is a spark of holiness, of divinity, of something so precious and holy and real that the only name that makes sense for them to call it inside their tradition is God.

The 20th century Unitarian Von Ogden Vogt says the task of church is to enable us to become a person among persons.

That’s what my experience was the first time walking into a Meeting. In a room full of people with radically different ages and backgrounds and life experiences from me, I was simply, merely, gloriously, belovedly, a person among persons. Whole in my brokenness. Just as worthy as anyone else. And because they saw me that way, it was easy to see them that way, too. None of us irredeemable. None of us perfect. All of us belonging to the family of humanity and invited into healing: loved back home to myself again.