Is God's Love For All Socialism?

© 2009, Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway

Listen Now!

It was time to turn in the titles for this month’s sermons and I knew I wanted to talk with you about the religious grounding for the reform of health care in the United States of America. I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle when my eye caught the line by Don Asmussen, the Bad Reporter.

It asked: Is God’s Love for All Socialism?

I was surprised by how deeply that question touched me.

In this time when some try to stifle the public cry for health care reform as “socialized medicine,” not only are we called to stand up for our rights, we are called to ground them in our best and clearest thinking.

You see, this question implies another: Is Unitarian Universalism Socialism?

Deep in the core of our religious movement, back in the earliest days of  the Christian Church there was a great controversy. Was the nature of the God that Jesus proclaimed limited or universal? Was the salvation this God offered open to all, or only to those who met certain criteria? The Universalist part of our name refers to those who affirmed that God is a loving God, and therefore, it is inconsistent with God’s character to believe salvation is limited.

God’s love is for all.

We’ve come a long way since then, and most who hold a universalistic belief refer less to salvation and more to the capacity of each person to choose the good. This is what we mean when, in our statement of principles, we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. 1

The metaphor is the same: God’s love is for all; each has inherent worth and dignity.

Socialism has been given a bad name in this capitalistic society that shapes us into self-centered consumers. We are encouraged to believe that balancing a competitive market with a little compassion for the less fortunate is some kind of aberrant thought.

It’s as though collective caring for those in need would pull the rug out from under our entire way of living,

So, Is God’s Love for All Socialism?

We each are formed by the stories we are told, and our spiritual journey is testing those stories with the yearning for truth deep inside us. We call

it conscience, and it rubs on us when we experience something that is contrary to our knowing what is true and right and honorable.

Here’s part of my story:

My great grandfather, a Unitarian minister, almost one hundred years ago, was a candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Colorado on the Socialist Party ticket. I never met Milton Kerr, but I admire much of what I know about him. His brand of Unitarianism embraced the notion of “progress onward and upward forever,” though in his teaching of evolution he pointed out "we cannot know this [is true]; evolution may have already started on its downward path." But for him this was no cause for worry; it was only one of nature’s inscrutable mysteries and we can only go on working on the upward path as we see it. 2 For him this meant helping the poor. It meant universal public education.

Socialism didn’t sound so radical to me.

And, in the next generation, I remember my grandfather telling me he was a socialist if what we meant by the term was the political philosophy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a “Roosevelt Democrat,” he would say, and I understood that to mean he believed in a democracy that listened to all perspectives and that honored the minority as much as it followed the majority. Government, I understood, exists to serve the people, and to provide a safety net so that no one suffers.

It was in 1939 when Franklin Roosevelt said, “My fellow Americans, progress is not measured by how much we add to the abundance of those who already have a great deal, but rather by how much we do for those who have too little.”

Socialism didn’t sound so radical to me.

Isn’t this truth what we mean by two other of our Unitarian Universalist principles? We affirm justice, equity, and compassion for all people within the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

When we begin with interdependence, instead of independence, when we understand ourselves as inherently part of this whole, instead of isolated individuals, we come to know a depth of compassion and caring unknown to cutthroat competition.

When we begin with community we understand what holds us together and we look upon one another with kindness, consideration, and care.

We ask, “What can we do better together than alone?”

Is asking kids to be responsible and stay in school socialism?

Are public schools and public libraries socialism?

What about public universities?

Call it socialism if you want. I think of it as the heart of what makes America great.

Do you remember Clara Barton on the battlefields of the Civil War? She provided care to all soldiers, union and confederate.

Is loving your neighbor as yourself socialism?

Is the sun's shining on rich and poor, the just and unjust socialism?

Or is it the cosmic lesson that we are all in this life together.

We belong to one another.

We are called to meet our common needs for common benefit.

We have seen fit as a nation to guarantee that every person in need is provided a lawyer. What about a doctor?

In 1965, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is

the most shocking and the most inhumane."

Is providing health care for all socialism?

America's promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all implies a deep responsibility for one another, for those left out, for those

left behind. Even if we are satisfied with our own health care, we are responsible to do what we can to provide a system that works for all in our society.

Dr. King reminded us of what our conscience knows: it is not enough to feel for the poor, we are called to confront the systems that cause poverty. It is a fact that “uninsured individuals have less access to medical care, and as a result have poorer health status, lost productivity, and increased medical debt.”

In this great nation, we should not hear stories of people losing medical coverage when they lose a job. We should not hear stories of people being refused coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship.

In this great country families should not have to choose between eating a nutritious meal and paying health insurance premiums. In this most wealthy of nations, people should not be driven into bankruptcy because of medical bills.

Our tradition tells us that universal love means love for all. It doesn’t come with conditions. It doesn’t wait for “triggers.” It reminds us that a  civilization's worth is based on its care for the least.

Remember the words of Jesus:

“I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,  I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. [Then the people answered]…When did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee? [And Jesus said] Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” [Matthew 25: 42-45]

We are a web of interconnection with no insiders, no outsiders.

No one of us is healthy unless all are healthy.

When Dr. King received the Nobel Prize, he said, “In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers' keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

In this nation, with so much potential, we are called to make real again the ideals and values that have made us great, with liberty and justice for all.

And so, my friends call it what you will, but in my book, the Universalist affirmation of salvation for all leads directly to the affirmation of universal health care. Our best selves know, our conscience calls us to create, a health care system that includes: Coverage everyone can afford Comprehensive benefits you can count on Choice of a private or public health insurance plan, and equal access to quality care.

I hope you will make your voice heard on this deeply moral and profound issue.

If you want to know how to do so, go to our Health Care Reform table in the Atrium, following this service. We have so many wonderful people in this congregation who are actively working on this issue. They will be glad to speak with you and help you to tell your story.

* * * * * * *

The great folksinger Peter Yarrow was asked what song he suggests we sing as we participate in this reform of health care. He said, “Sing songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

“These songs of gratitude to our country and democracy proclaim us to be  joyous our nation's choices support the common good, as opposed to the "good" of the haves over the good of the powerless and those in need. Conversely, singing these songs affirms our commitment to justice and equity, and to our belief that it is our patriotic duty to challenge the policies of our country and rightness of our national path when they do not reflect justice, fairness and equity.”

According to City Of Sound Website, Woodie Guthrie posted this copyright notice for the song: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of

Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

This song was made for you and me!

A little later in this service, let your voice be heard!

Standing firmly in our religious tradition that affirms the inherent worth of all people, let us call America back to its highest ideals.

1 The Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association appear, following the Preface, in Singing the Living Tradition, UUA: Boston, 1993.

2 Hope Holway, The Holway-Kerr Family Book, self-published 1956, pp 43-44.

3 Quoted in William Sloane Coffin, Credo, Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 44.

4 B. Furnas & P. Harbage, The Cost Shift from the Uninsured, Center for American Progress, March 24, 2009, quoted in www.health-access.org.

5 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-lecture.html

6 For more information go to: http://healthcareforamericanow.org

7 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-yarrow/the-role-of-song-in-advan_b_275426.html

8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Land_Is_Your_Land#cite_note-6