We talk about love a lot in this church. We want to be compassionate and care about people. It seems to lie at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist. But loving isn’t always easy. A few years ago my wife and I took a sabbatical leave. It was a break from work for both of us – a chance to go somewhere where she wasn’t identified as a teacher and I wasn’t thought as a minister – an environment in which no one knew who or what we were, other than just people with, as our first principle puts it, an “inherent worth and dignity” that should be respected.
Seeing everyone else that way can be difficult, even if it is something we “covenant to affirm and promote,” as our Statement of Principles and Purposes says we should. So Jan decided to adopt the discipline of living out not only our First Principle, but all the others, one each week, and to ask me to do the same. In brief, our principles say we should:
RESPECT the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
OFFER equity, justice and compassion to everyone.
YEARN to help one another in our spiritual growth.
GROW by engaging in a responsible search for truth and meaning.
BELIEVE in the right of conscience and the democratic process.
INSIST on peace, liberty and justice for all.
VALUE the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part….
The whole spectrum: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet: good ‘ole ROY G. BIV!
Each week while we were away Jan concentrated on trying to live out one of these principles – and to hold me to them, too. With some, like searching for truth and meaning, it wasn’t difficult. But there were others, such as respecting the worth and dignity of every person, that were harder to live out. In fact, Bill Schulz, who was once President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, believes it’s impossible to fully live out this principle because, he says, not everyone behaves in a way that shows they are worthy of respect.
When he said this, Schulz had moved on to be the Executive Director of Amnesty International, an organization committed to helping victims of political oppression, many of whom had been tortured. In an article in our denominational magazine, UU World, Schulz said: “doctrines about human nature, such as the Unitarian Universalist Association’s affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, rest uneasily in a world of torturers. In what sense can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of inherent worth and dignity?”
While I was teaching at our Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, Davidson Loehr, who was then the minister of our UU church in Austin, Texas, wrote an article in which he made a similar comment and challenged my students to prove him wrong. Loehr, like Schulz, believes there are people in this world who behave in ways that show they have no dignity or worth. There is evil in this world, says Loehr, because there are people who are evil. So Jesus’ dictum of, “love thy neighbor” and “turn the other cheek,” don’t apply to them. They deserve scorn rather than respect. Discovering how hard it is to not feel this way in the face of the behavior of some people, my wife challenged me this morning to defend our first principle.
Most of the behaviors of people who don’t show a respect for our worth and dignity are things of which it’s not all that hard to let pass. It’s not that hard to ignore nasty looks, demeaning words, or other casual acts of disrespect. “It’s their problem, not ours,” we say. And that’s often true. It helps to remember, though, that most of us, at times, have behaved this way ourselves. We sometimes get mad at people, for instance, even when what their doing doesn’t deserve getting mad about. I’ve done that and it took me years and getting some professional help to understand that I had buried within me anger that could break out when I least expected it and do enormous harm not only to others, but to myself.
Many of the negative behaviors that people exhibit come from things like this. They are based on their genetic inheritances, the quirks of their bodily chemistry, or the conditioning they’ve acquired from the environments in which they’ve lived. My early views about sexuality, for instance, had a lot less to do with the notion of being “a good boy” I acquired from my family than it did from my encounters with the boys down the block: the Sweeney brothers. The Sweenys taught all the boys on my block what to do with “that stuff down there.” Luckily, I outgrew most of what the Sweeny brothers taught me, and hope they outgrew it, too.
I think most of us learn how to deal constructively with things from our pasts. We understand that people can behave in ways they wouldn’t if the circumstances of their lives had been different. In war, for instance, those who fight are usually taught to think of those they are being sent to kill as having no dignity or worth – as being evil, or at least less than human. This allows them to do things that are offensive to their own sense of what’s right and wrong.
An example of this is the story of a German soldier contained in a book called The Sunflower, written ago by Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish activist best known for hunting down Nazis war criminals. The book is comprised of answers to a question about what the responders would do in a situation like this:
A young Jew is taken from a death-camp to a makeshift army hospital. He is led to the bedside of a Nazi soldier whose head is completely swathed in bandages. The dying solider extends his had toward the Jew, and in a cracked whisper begins to speak. The Jew listens silently while the solider confesses to having participated in the burning alive of an entire village of Jews. The solider, terrified of dying with this burden of guilt, begs absolution from the Jew. Having listened to the Nazi’s story for several hours – torn between horror and compassion for the dying man – the Jew finally walks out of the room without speaking.
The question Wiesenthal asked of his respondents is did the man who left do what he should have done? – and, if you were in his place, what would you do? I found out about the book when a congregant in a church I once served invited my wife and I to his house to have a conversation about the book with Martin Marty, a member of the faculty at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, who was one of the people who wrote a response in the book.
Among the things Marty said that night was we shouldn’t expect everyone to give the same answer. Marty said that in spite of having a set of Principles, like we have as Unitarian Universalists: “To say that all people … must act in a specific way is to routinze them.” It is: “to program them” and “deprive them of elements of their humanity.” Not only this, said Marty, how could anyone, in as secure an environment as the upscale communities in which most of us live, put ourselves in the place of someone called from a death camp to offer forgiveness to a soldier who was complicit in a system that had imprisoned and would eventually kill him. Marty said he believed that no one, even a person with his education and experience, should be able to pass judgment on the prisoner’s behavior. He went on to say: “Cheap instant advice” from a person like him, “would trivialize the lives and deaths of millions.”
For him, as an ethicist, Marty said the question he wanted to ask: “Is there any kind of situation in which the offense is so gross and enormous that I should withhold forgiveness in the face of what appears to be true penitence” – the attempt of someone to demonstrate their inherent dignity and worth? Marty’s answer – a reflection of his own Christian values – is that in spite of what Schulz and Loehr have said, there is no situation he could imagine in which “more value would not grow out of forgiveness than out of its withholding.”
Having said this, though, Marty worries about what I would worry about: what he calls “cheap grace” – the kind of grace W.H. Auden alludes to when he writes about the boy who says he likes to sin because “God likes to forgive, and who would want to rob God of that privilege?” Taking this attitude would be to say we should let people off the hook for doing whatever they want to do, no matter how horrible. The prisoner from the death camp wasn’t willing to do that for the soldier, no matter what he thought about the man’s inherent worth and dignity. In fact, I can imagine him believing that to forgive the man would be to reject the worth and dignity of those he helped kill.
Marty understand this, but he doesn’t see believing in the dignity and worth of someone who has done something bad as relieving them of their guilt. Guilt is a valid human response to doing something that violates our values. The solider in the bed should – and did – feel guilty for contributing did what he had done under orders. He should have known he was participating in a system of oppression in which people were treated as though they had no humanity. It’s why I feel guilt for participating in a socio-political-economic system that has oppressed millions of people in this country and still does, even though I’ve never thought of myself as killing anyone. Feeling this guilt prompted me to not only become a social and political activist but to do doctoral work trying to develop ways for business people to include an ethical perspective in their decision-making. My guilt drove me to engage with people I believed were doing things that were wrong, rather than just condemning them.
I have a similar attitude about the guilt I feel for the hurt I’ve caused some of the people in my life, including people I love. There have been times when I’ve treated people as though they didn’t have the inherent dignity and worth talked about in our Principles, especially when I would interfere with something I wanted. I don’t want the guilt I feel about things like this wiped away. I want to be accepted as someone who, though capable of making mistakes, is able to learn from them – and do something about them. Without what in Christian terms this is called repentance and restitution, not only would I not be doing anything to restore others’ sense of worth and dignity, I’d be doing nothing to restore my own.
But respecting the worth and dignity of persons doesn’t just mean avoiding disrespectful behaviors – or trying do something about them – it also means caring about people we haven’t harmed. Marilyn Sewell, until recently the minister of our Unitarian Universalist church in Portland, Oregon, says that our First Principle “calls us: “to leave the safety and sameness of our suburbs and stand against hunger and hopelessness in our urban streets.” It says that rather than thinking the poor will always be with us and their plight isn’t our fault, we must care, as Jesus put it: “for the least among us.” We must remember, that Jesus said it was the rich not the poor who were going to have a hard time getting into heaven.
All this is complicated. Life isn’t simple, nor is our journey through it easy. Not only is it tempting to ignore the plight of others, there are people around us who are encouraging disrespect for the worth and dignity of others. This was made abundantly clear in the debated over the reform of our health care system. The so-called Tea Partiers were who are constantly being goaded by people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to demonize those with whom the disagreed – to call them Nazis and vandalize their property. Our Principles call us to a different kind of response. As a colleague of mine, Sean Parker Dennison, puts it: “Even when we are enraged and seek to address a horrible wrong,” we must guide our response “by the standards of dignity, honor and justice,” to which our Principles call us. “Even in the face of tragedy,” says Dennison, “we must not forget that every life is precious.”
If we are to covenant to affirm and promote our UU Statement of Principles and Purposes, we must not, as Rabbi Harold Kusher, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, let the basis of our religious faith be switched away from “teaching us whom we’re required to love,” to “teaching us whom we’re entitled to hate.” If we’re to be true to our Principles, we must acknowledge that even though there is a tricky side of love, there is inside every human being, no matter how deeply buried, repressed or twisted, a worth and dignity that needs to be respected. And we need to call everyone to that respect, even – and, perhaps, most importantly – when they are not showing it toward us. After all, as the last of our Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles and Purposes puts it, all of us are part of the same “interdependent web of existence and are called on to do what we can to join with it and others with it in the furtherance of creation.
WITH PURPOSE AND PRINCIPLE
Reading Adapted from Edward Frost
It is often said that Unitarian Universalists have no creed. The Reverend Paul Carnes, former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, once stated that within Unitarian Universalism is “a fear of creedalism that is irrational to the point of being dogmatic.” When asked what Unitarian Universalism is, a common – and unfortunate – response is something like: “We can believe whatever we want to believe.” A television host, who had picked up a popular definition of Unitarian Universalism somewhere, once define our faith for us, on camera, as one whose adherents: “believe a little bit of what all the other religions believe.”
Without question, the emphasis in Unitarian Universalism is on diversity, individual freedom of belief and the autonomy of the local congregation. But can a religious association without a common faith have any significant claim on its members, let alone any significant influence in the world? Professor of religion, Henry Nelson Wieman stated unequivocally that it could not. Without a common faith, Wieman insisted, there can be no “power of assembly.” Without a common faith, he said, congregations are likely to be little more than “talking clubs of individualists.”
So, what we say we believe, should mean something to us – should mean something to the way to live our lives.
Invocation
Inspired by the words of Paul l’Herrou
We gather this morning
to nurture our souls
and be inspired
to be the kind of people we want to be.
We gather this morning
to explore the issues of the world
and the struggles of our lives
knowing not everything is the way it should be.
We gather this morning
to be inspired
to find ways
that will give meaning to our lives.
We gather this morning
knowing how much it means in doing this
to be able to be
with each other.
Benediction
Inspired by the words of Vernon Marshall
May we take our leave this morning:
Better able to face the challenges of our lives,
Reassured by the support we offer each other.
Reminded of the guidance provided by the Principles of our faith.
And resolved to be at our bests in the days that lie ahead.
Amen and Shalom!