Sermon: Justice, Equity, and Compassion in Human Relations

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as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston, March 10, 2019

Last week Carol got us started on our spring sermon series on the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. She focused on the first principle of our religious communion–respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person–and how it related to our seventh principle–respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Today we are going to consider the second principle: justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. The primary claim I am going to make in response to this principle is: If we take our religious tradition seriously we will find ourselves compelled to disrupt the great disorder of things. Or, put differently, if we fully commit to Unitarian Universalism we will engage in the often frustrating, sometimes fruitful, Sisyphean struggle of attempting to transform our human society. Alternatively stated, authentic religious practice ain’t easy. It requires that we work to change ourselves and the world around us.

As we move toward our main message, I want to offer you a smidge of history, a small personal confession, and a bit of critique to help frame our sermon series. Let us start with the history.

The seven principles are a recent creation. They are the heirs to numerous statements about the nature of Unitarianism and Universalism that stretch back to the seventeenth century. But they, themselves, only date to 1985. Their immediate successors were the six principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. These were approved in 1961 when the Unitarians and the Universalists merged to form our present association. The six principles included gendered and theocentric statements such as “love to God and love to man,” “the dignity of man,” “brotherhood,” and “men of good will.”

Between 1961 and 1985 something important happened in American culture–second wave feminism. Betty Friedan published her best-selling text The Feminine Mystique challenging the idea that the proper role for middle-income, educated, white women was housewife and mother. The National Organization for Women formed to advocate for women’s rights throughout the country. Feminist activists launched, and won, numerous legislative struggles that greatly expanded women’s legal rights. In the same years, some women of color came to be critical of the predominately white feminist movement. One well remembered group was the Combahee River Collective. They issued a statement challenging the feminist movement to be accountable to people of color and non-heteronormative people. Maybe you lived through this history. Maybe you did not. Either way, I hope that you get the point: there was a profound social shift.

Unitarian Universalist women were active in many of these struggles. And they did not just set their attention on reforming society. Many devoted themselves to transforming our congregations. In 1977 a group of women prompted the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association to pass a resolution on “Women and Religion.” Included in the resolution was a commitment that the association would “avoid sexist assumptions and language in the future.”

This soon inspired women throughout the association to examine the 1960 principles. They found them wanting. At a pivotal conference, one group held a workshop organized around the question: “The UUA Principles: Do They Affirm Us as Women?” Their resounding answer: “No!”

Over the next few years the presidents of the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation, Natalie Gulbrandsen and Denny Davidoff, led the effort to rewrite the principles. The men of Gulbranden’s home congregation told her, “Mankind doesn’t leave you out.” She replied, “we are human beings but not men, and that there are many other terms you could use–humankind, human beings–that include women.” After their terms as presidents of the Women’s Federation, both Gulbrandsen and Davidoff served as moderators of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It was during Gulbrandsen’s tenure that Davidoff led a collaborative process that resulted in the seven principles being adopted by the association with only one (male) vote in opposition.

The history of the seven principles is in some sense the history of attempting to live out the second principle: justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. This principle has been implicit within our liberal religious tradition for hundreds of years. Manifesting it within our association required not just a transformation of language. It necessitated the transformation of our ministry. In 1977 when the “Women and Religion” resolution was passed only about 5% of Unitarian Universalist ministers were women. Today, more than 50%–including the president of our association–are. As I stated at the opening of my sermon, taking our religious tradition seriously requires that we work to transform ourselves and our society.

And now, a personal confession: I have ambivalent feelings about the seven principles. Do any of you feel the same way? These feelings started years ago before I entered seminary. Back then I was spending my time doing solidarity and human rights work with indigenous movements in Southern Mexico. One of my mentors in this work was a well-known Mexican human rights activist and Jesuit priest. I visited my Jesuit friend whenever I passed through Mexico City. Usually we shared a meal together in a diner–me ordering enchiladas verdes stuffed with cheese and he… actually I forget what he used to order.

During these meals my friend would share with me his admiration for the great figures of Latin American liberation theology, some of whom he knew personally. He spoke of Gustavo Gutiérrez, who taught that to be Christian was to work for the fundamental transformation of society. Gutiérrez understood that God was present among the oppressed and marginalized, not the powerful and privileged. “The point is not to survive, but to serve,” he wrote. And my Jesuit friend spoke of Oscar Romero, who was assassinated while serving as the Archbishop of El Salvador. Romero spoke out against his country’s right-wing regime and its supporters killed him. He urged us to recognize, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”

My Jesuit friend also encouraged me to listen to what are called the base communities. In Southern Mexico, these are small groups of indigenous peasants that gather for Bible study, worship, and political action. Listening to them, I learned the work of collective liberation includes the centering the voices of the marginalized. When someone like the indigenous leader Comandanta Ester said, “We are oppressed three times over, because we are poor, because we are indigenous and because we are women,” she was offering us all a formula for social transformation. Eliminate poverty, eliminate violence against people of color, eliminate patriarchal and heteronormative structures of oppression and a better world will be born.

My Jesuit friend was curious about what I believed. There are not many Unitarian Universalists in Mexico. He knew nothing about our liberal religious tradition. So, one day when we were lunching together I shared with him a folding card that I kept in my wallet. On it were printed the seven principles. Maybe you have a card like the one I am talking about?

My Jesuit friend looked at the card. And then he said, “Hmm… there is not a single thing on here that I do not agree with, reminds me the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

I was shocked by his response. You see, my friend is not a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it. He is a deeply devote Catholic who has dedicated his life to his church. His tradition and ours… well, let’s just say that there is supposed to be a lot of daylight between them. Catholics believe in certain creedal statements about the nature of God and the primacy of their church. Unitarian Universalists reject creeds and hold that there are many paths to religious truth. Catholics think that only men can be priests. Unitarian Universalists ordain people of all genders. Catholics believe that God has intervened in human history and will do so again. Humanistically inclined Unitarian Universalists like myself tend to think… umm… good luck with that.

And yet, our two distinct religious traditions had caused us to make similar commitments. My Jesuit friend sought personal transformation–which he would call salvation–through his belief in the saving power of Jesus, his devotion to the spiritual practices of Ignatius of Loyola, and his commitment to his church. I sought after my version–the development of my human potential–through a spiritual discipline of walking, journal writing, and contemplative reading. Gazing through the limited lenses of our particular theological traditions we found ourselves working together to transform society and root out injustice. I called my commitment to justice, equity, and compassion in human relations the second principle. My Jesuit friend called it God’s preferential option for the poor.

Since that conversation, when I am asked to describe Unitarian Universalism, I do not refer to the principles. Instead, I usually say something like: Unitarian Universalism is a religious tradition that celebrates the possibility of goodness within each human heart, the transformative power of love, and the clarifying force of reason. We believe that we need not think alike to love alike. Our communities include atheists and believers in the divine. We offer a religious home for all wish to join us: welcoming the GLBT community, declaring that love has no borders, proclaiming that black lives matter, toiling to address climate change, and struggling for democracy.

This list of theological positions and prophetic actions contains things that my Jesuit friend would not agree with. My list makes the space between our traditions more visible. It also hints at something I believe: religious truth comes at cost and takes effort to seek. The world’s horrors challenge a belief that there is a seed of goodness in every human heart. The constant emergence and re-emergence of human hatred call into question the power of love. Raw human folly weighs heavily against the force of reason. And yet, looking within my religious tradition, gazing at all of you, cultivating my own spiritual practice, I am willing to make the faithful Unitarian Universalist wager that humans are not innately wicked, that love is the most powerful force on earth, and that rationality is a great gift.

My previous confession leads to a further critique, or, perhaps, observation. I am not alone in finding the seven principles to be insufficient. Many ministers and Unitarian Universalist theologians also find them unsatisfying. A few take such dissatisfaction to the extreme calling the principles the “Seven Banalities or the Seven Dwarves” or claiming that they do not reflect religious values. One (male) minister even went so far as to argue that by adopting the principles “‘God’ became ‘Our Political Liberal, Who Art Us, Writ Large.’”

Most of us, however, take a less brutal approach. If I were invite you up to my office and suggest you read through the several shelves of Unitarian Universalist and liberal religious theology that I keep up there you would find this: None of us ground our theologies in the seven principles. Instead, we debate. We argue. We seek to find a way to articulate a collective center for a tradition that claims that personal experience is the starting point for theological reflection. Some suggest that a deep feeling of connection to something larger than ourselves–which we might call the infinite mysterious universe or God or goddess or otherwise name–is the root of liberal religion. Others claim we are defined by our commitment to the use of reason in religion, our openness to science, and our understanding that revelation is not sealed. Still others claim that the core of liberal religion is found in a recognition that the most powerful force on Earth is love.

Reading, wrestling with, and preaching on these debates over the years I have come to two conclusions. First, the seven principles are not statements about the core of liberal religion. They do not definitively state who we are as Unitarian Universalists or the ultimate nature of liberal religion. Instead, they are observations based on empirical evidence of what the ethical values of Unitarian Universalists have been, when we are at our best, over time. Ethics rest upon foundational principles. They are the actions we are called to take from the religious truths we have found, not the truths themselves. Second, religious wisdom, religious truth, is something that comes through great effort. It is something that we earn, uncover, discover, as we struggle, collectively, to make sense of the rich mess of our lives. When we find religious wisdom, we learn that it calls us to challenge the powers and principalities, the social disorder, of the world.

This is the Sunday following International Women’s Day. I thought I would close by offering you two examples of Unitarian Universalist women who devoted themselves to justice, equity, and compassion in human relations at great personal cost. Their lives suggest what Unitarian Universalist ethics look like when we strive to actualize them. And so, let me speak of Susan B. Anthony and Kay Jorgensen.

Susan B. Anthony is a household name. She was one of the central agitators for women’s rights and suffrage. And she was a member of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester New York. In an 1854 speech she demanded: “justice and equality… the removal of the many customs and laws that prevent the full exercise of all her God given powers, the entire freedom of thought, word & action, that man claims for himself…” She devoted her life to the realization of these propositions.

And when I say devoted her life, I mean spent over fifty years struggling for justice, equity, and compassion for women. She knocked on doors, collected petitions, and spoke to demand that women have the same rights as men when it came to property, employment, and access to the ballot. She founded the National Woman Suffrage Association which worked until 1920 to win the right to vote. She was arrested, tried, and convicted for voting illegally.

She made mistakes. When, following the Civil War, black male leaders like Frederick Douglass pushed for the enfranchisement of black men before white women, she said horribly racist things. (Douglass forgave her shortly before he died.)

She did her imperfect best to transform the world. Along the way, she took on roles–public speaker, political activist, ethical leader–which women were not supposed to hold in the nineteenth century United States. That is to say, she transformed herself. When we look to her life we see that the best of Unitarian Universalism is realized in the pursuit of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. And we are reminded that the pursuit of such values requires the work of personal and collective transformation.

Unlike Susan B. Anthony, Kay Jorgensen is not a household name. She was a Unitarian Universalist minister who died last year. She was one of my earliest mentors in the ministry. I met her when I was a young adult living in San Francisco. Around the time I moved to that city, Kay and her longtime collaborator Carmen Barsody were starting the Faithful Fools, their street ministry in the city’s Tenderloin District.

The Tenderloin has historically been one of the poorest and most crime ridden neighborhoods in San Francisco. In opposition to those who say that Unitarian Universalist is inherently a religion of the well-to-do, Kay and Carmen focused their ministerial work on accompanying the poor and marginalized in San Francisco. Theological core of their work was a belief in human “oneness” and an understanding that by getting “acquainted with that which divides us, our own suffering is revealed.” They believed, in a word, in the transformative power of universalism.

The core practice of the Faithful Fools ministry is something they call street retreats. These last somewhere between a few hours and several days. Participants spend their time on the street in the same spaces as homeless people: eating where the homeless eat and sleeping where they sleep.

The Fools use the street retreats to do two things. The first is to be present to and minister to the very poor and homeless without judging them. In other words, the Fools see the Tenderloin’s residents for what they are, human beings, and then treat them as human beings. Second, the retreats are opportunities to breakdown stereotypes that people with various kinds of economic privilege such as myself have about the very poor and homeless. By inviting participants into the same spaces as the residents of the Tenderloin we learn that despite whatever stereotypes we might carry in our heads, the people struggling on the streets are just as human as we are. We all need the same things: food, shelter, love, and a bit of work to call honest.

Kay had a playful sense humor. She had a clown for an alter ego named Oscard. When asked how she was doing she sometimes quoted the Elwood from the movie “The Blues Brothers:” “There’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” It is a good line, though I confess I am still not one hundred percent certain what she meant by it. Perhaps that we make the road by walking, discovering the path as we go?

Kay’s sense of play caused her tweak the noses of San Francisco Unitarian Universalists. Once, to emphasize the plight of the city’s homeless she spent about a week sleeping on the front door step of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco. She did this after the senior minister had posted a no trespassing sign to keep away the indigent.

Kay’s willingness to experience personal discomfort is another reminder that living into the values of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations is not easy. She cleaned houses the first several years of her ministry with the Faithful Fools in order to support the organization. Well into her seventies, she spent days at a time sleeping in the streets.

And, yet, is this not one of the reasons why we gather Sunday after Sunday? To find the hope, the power, the joy within ourselves to do the difficult work of transforming ourselves–to living into our full potential–and trying to change the world for the better. It is challenging work. I fail in it all the time–each day. And yet, looking within our tradition, looking around the world, I see that there have been many who–however, imperfectly–have devoted themselves to the proposition of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

Let us close in prayer,
Oh, spirit of life,
that some of us call love,
and others name God,
be with us,
as we struggle,
imperfectly,
to find the strength,
to pursue the narrow path
towards religious truth
and wisdom,
to find the power
to transform ourselves
and our world
so that someday,
however distant,
the lights of heaven,
might shine down
upon a world
in which justice,
equity, and compassion
have been realized in human relations.

That it may be so, let the congregation say Amen.

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