What is the heart of religion?
Is it sitting quietly in meditation, seeking insight into the nature of being?
Is it reaching out to help people in need, as near as next door and as far as half a world away?
Is it preaching and teaching our best understanding of the divine and the universe?
Is it doing the ancient work of feeding the hungry and healing the sick?

In a word, yes. The heart of religion is all those things. The journey of wisdom and transformation within cannot be separated from the journey of service, transforming the world. We need both.

But we have come to believe as a faith community that the best test of authentic religion is how you live in the world. If your actions in this world - the way you are with your family, your friends, your coworkers, the way you share your gifts in service to the community - if all this brings more peace into the world, more love, more justice, more beauty, we say, that is the heart of religion.

"Deeds, not creeds," is an easy and also a profound way of summing it up. What you believe and what you give your heart to shows through in what you do.

This seems so natural to us today. But our emphasis on "deeds, not creeds" didn't just happen. It's a direct inheritance from a movement that swept through American religion 100 years ago called the Social Gospel movement.

Christianity in America had always taught that it was important to do good and help other people. In the 19th century, churches and individual Christians got more and more involved in social reform. But it wasn't until the dawn of the 20th century that progressive Christians started to preach a new and radical message. They said, the priorities within their faith have gotten out of whack. For too long, they said, Christianity has focused on controversies about the person of Jesus: Was he a man? Was he a god? And they said, those questions which seemed so important to older generations are not what Christianity is really about.

They said, it matters not who Jesus was. We are no longer interested in a religion about Jesus, because the heart of Christianity is the religion of Jesus - the lessons he actually taught during his life: feeding the poor, caring for the vulnerable, lifting up the oppressed, encouraging the fearful, being a good Samaritan, building "the kingdom of God on earth." This is the heart of religion, these new folks said, and they called it the Social Gospel - a Gospel calling them to reform their world here and now, to create a more just society, a more compassionate society here and now, not in the afterlife, but for living people on this earth.

And it was sorely needed. Throughout the early 20th century, income inequality was at truly scary levels. The top 1% of American wage-earners made about 18% of total national income. In 1928, just before the Great Depression, they made 21%. Compare this with the 1960s and `70s, when the top 1% of earners made less than 10% of all national income. (1) In the reading we heard earlier from 1917, when Clarence Skinner spoke of the two extremes of "the squalor and filth of the slums" and "unearned luxury," (2) he was not exaggerating.

I chose this reading to give you a small taste of Clarence Skinner's work. He was a Universalist minister and also a professor at the Universalist divinity school at Tufts University; he was by no means the only one preaching the Social Gospel in our Unitarian Universalist tradition, but he was absolutely one of the most important, probably the most influential Universalist of the entire 20th century.

In 1915, Skinner was serving a Universalist church in Lowell, Massachusetts, otherwise known as Ground Zero for the industrial revolution in the United States. Skinner looked around and saw poor people struggling to get by. He saw children having to grow up far too quickly, parents weighed down with worry and despair. He watched as countries around the world were sucked into a horrific, devastating war that made no sense. Meanwhile, too many of the churches he knew were more interested in passing down stale doctrines and preserving the status quo than liberating human beings from the poverty and oppression that was crushing them.

And so, along with many others of his generation, Clarence Skinner asked: What is at the heart of religion? What is the point of having a church at all? He began his 1915 book (2) The Social Implications of Universalism with a warning:

There is no danger that religion should pass out of life. There is danger that the Church may cease to be the voice of religion. (3)

Skinner believed the mission of the church had to be to transform society - any other goal was too small. He was committed to the original Universalist principle of salvation for all people, that core idea that God loved everyone> so much that everyone would be saved and no one would be punished forever. This is what the Universalists had been preaching for 150 years before him. But Skinner expanded that teaching to say salvation isn't just about what happens after we die, it's about giving everybody the chance to live a decent life in this world. Skinner was calling us to social salvation. And he believed Universalism was the faith that could make it happen. He tells us:

The Universalist idea of God is that of a universal, impartial, immanent spirit whose nature is love. (4)

Universal: God is the God of everybody and every thing that is.
Impartial: God doesn't play favorites, but loves everyone the same;
Immanent: God is in all things; there is no place where God is not.

Here's what Skinner says about this idea of God:

It is the largest thought the world has ever known; it is the most revolutionary doctrine ever proclaimed; it is the most expansive hope ever dreamed ... This is no tribal deity of ancient divisive civilization, this is no God of the nation or of a chosen people, but the democratic creator of the solid, indivisible world of rich and poor, black and white, good and bad, strong and weak, Jew and Gentile, bond and free. Such a faith is as much a victory for the common people as was the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It carries with it a guarantee of spiritual liberties which are precedent to outward forms of governmental action. (5)

"Spiritual liberties ... precedent to government action" basically he's saying, there is no way we will ever create a just society unless we believe that we are all equal in spirit, equally and fully loved by that power which has brought us into being. He's saying, we will never have a true political democracy, in which everyone's voice is truly equal - we will never have a truly just and compassionate society, which makes sure everyone has the basic essentials of life - unless we have a religion that preaches spiritual democracy - the spiritual equality of every person, without reservation, without regard for race, class, gender, or any of the divisions that have served to keep us apart and unequal.

Skinner tells us:

No social problem can ever be completely solved until it is spiritually solved ... (6)

By that, he means two things: First, people who are struggling have to believe in their worth, their right to equality and justice, for their struggle to succeed. But also, those who are living in privilege have to get on board; they have to have a spiritual change of heart, they have to be brought to realize the humanity of those who are struggling - they have to realize that they are brothers and sisters, members of one great family.

In Skinner's own Universalist faith, that comes directly from the simple belief that everybody is a child of God. If we all come from the same source, then indeed we are all literally sisters and brothers. It's not just a metaphor; it is literally true. Skinner put it this way:

[W]e ... turn from the old religion which depicted men divided into the saved and the lost.. We are all of one blood. Our fortunes and our destinies are so interlocked that we all move on together whether we will or no.. If God is our Father and we are all children of God, then we are all brothers. No denial will alter this indisputable fact. No inequalities, human or divine, will explain away or eradicate our common origin and our essential oneness. (7)

And so, in Skinner's faith, the new Social Gospel was simply a way of living out the responsibility we all have to all our brothers and sisters around the world. All the different ways we reach out to do justice in the world, from helping our next-door neighbor to organizing food drives, to lobbying politicians, all the vast networks of people trying to help one another - he said:

[they] are but varying manifestations of one vast and solemn faith in the innate spirituality of all men, and a recognition of their infinite worth as sons and daughters of the living God. Whoso interprets this movement as being not spiritual enough to be religious, is himself not religious enough to see the spiritual forces of the common life. (8)

Are we not still believers in this faith - a faith in the innate spirituality, the inherent worth and dignity of all people? Are we not practitioners of a faith in the reality of our connection to one another as sisters and brothers, a faith in the spiritual value - no, the spiritual necessity of working for justice and peace on this earth?

When you join in a protest or a vigil, when you call up your representatives or write them a letter, when you volunteer at a food bank or write a check to a charity you care about, I urge you to remember that what you are doing is profoundly religious. You are living out that Social Gospel our ancestors believed in with all their hearts. You are living out the ancient teachings of Jesus and all the other prophets of every faith who have taught us to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to comfort the prisoners, to overturn every structure of oppression, every principality and power which tries to set limits on who gets to be free, who gets to live a life of basic decency, who gets to flourish and develop their gifts for the world.

That is always needed in every generation, and especially now. In our own United States, since the 1970s, the inequality between the haves and the have-nots has been going up and up, until now it is just as harsh as it was in Clarence Skinner's day. (9) Now the economic crisis is hitting a lot of people hard. Even beyond our borders, we are far more attuned to the inequality between nations. We see our neighbors in other countries struggling to feed their families, in many places working for pennies a day so that we can buy stuff cheaper - we see this, and we know it is wrong - we know it has to change.

Our kind of hope is maybe a more cynical hope than what was possible for those early Social Gospel folks. In 1915, Clarence Skinner truly believed his world was on the verge of a total conversion. He believed that the ideals of brotherhood and peace were really going to sweep across the face of the earth and create a new world where justice was a reality for everyone.

Today we look back on the devastation of the 20th century - two World Wars, the Holocaust, so many dictators - Stalin, Pol Pot, the horrible regimes of Latin America in the `80s - genocides in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and continuing today in Darfur, despite all of our efforts and all of our tears. The kind of hope you could have in 1915, that innocence, is no longer available to us today.

But still we keep faith with that vision of the kingdom of God on earth. It will never die - that vision we still share of a world which is truly just, a world where everyone is free. Let us continue to witness to those unforgettable moments when justice does prevail. Let us believe in the power of our deeds to take us one step closer, and another, and another.

What is the heart of our religion?
To love,
to liberate beauty,
to do justice,
to keep doing justice in good times and in bad,
to carry forward the vision, sustained by hope and faith, the faith that rises up again and again, whispering to us that life is a blessing and what we do matters.

I leave you with words of the poet Sheenagh Pugh:

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you. (10)

[Delivered March 15, 2009. Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig is the minister for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton, just to the north of us.]