Wild experience preaching a funeral sermon that hinted at universalism

I preached a sermon 2 weeks ago that barely touched on Universalist themes. I brought up the general resurrection of the dead and how each person we will ever meet will be there, for judgement or reward. But how we can hope even our enemies will be there, hopefully in repentance or for our forgiveness.

One church member is having a crisis of faith over this. She spent an hour this morning telling me “what about ISIS, what about Hamas!” Just really ingrained need for infernalism to be real, and how it hurt to think of our late church member being in such company.

The thing that really gets me is: that late member was a Vietnam vet. It’s frankly possible he has a higher body count than any member of currently existing terrorist groups.

Not something I brought up with this church member, but it really says something about who we want to assume gets forgiveness and who we build up a need to dehumanize into hell.