INHERENT WORTH & DIGNITY: OUR FIRST PRINCIPLE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

October 8, 2006

READINGS

Genesis 18: 1-8

As Abraham sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day he looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring you a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant. So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

Luke 9: 46-48

An argument arose among Jesus’ followers as to which one of them was the greatest. But Jesus, aware of their inner thoughts, took a little child and put it by his side, and said to them. “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me, for the lest among you is the greatest.”

SERMON

If you check in our hymnal, you will find the words we recited as our affirmation, the words of the principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association, placed in a section entitled: “Words and Deeds of Prophetic Women and Men.” It was, I think, an astute choice by the committee that compiled that hymnal. Finding those words in the company of words of Old Testament prophets as well as such figures as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day and Desmond Tutu helps remind us that we as a religious movement regard them not as static doctrine but as a guide to our life together, as a call to action. There may not be much justice, equity, compassion, acceptance, respect, or peace in the world, but we promise to affirm those values and to work to advance them. We will stay engaged in the search for truth, employ our consciences and ground our work in the conviction that every person has worth and dignity and that we as humans are linked in the deepest ways to all that is.

For more than 20 years these words have stood at the center of our movement. Our congregations have “covenanted,” or promised, to affirm and promote them, and we regularly use them in worship, religious education and in framing our social justice work. Now, a process has begun in our association to look them over. The Commission on Appraisal, an elected body of lay people and clergy, has announced it will spend the next several years studying whether those words still reflect who we are and want to be and how we understand our work as religious people.

For those who know and love these words – and there are many – this process raises some fears about losing something they treasure. Those who don’t care for these words – and there is a number of them as well – welcome this conversation with hope and expectation. In the way of full disclosure, let me say that I place myself generally among the supporters of the present language of our purposes and principles. I might tweak the wording here or there, but by and large I think they are a useful guide to our work as a church.

At the same time, though, I do welcome this discussion. It is worth remembering that while we represent a strain of religious thought that arguably stretches back a couple of millennia, we as an association of congregations have been in existence for only 45 years. We are in many respects still learning who we are and what we need to do to be the agents of healing and hope that we long for in the world.

So, this year I will give a series of sermons on each of our seven principles as a way of beginning this discussion among us. I invite your own reflection and any feedback you’d like to pass on to me, and I hope there will be opportunities for us to reflect together on this important question. For now, let’s start, as Oscar Hammerstein, a faithful Unitarian, put it, at the very beginning: a very good place to start.

Our first principle calls us to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. An interesting curiosity is that it was not until late in the process when the principles were being written back in the mid 1980s that this principle was moved to the front spot. In earlier iterations what we now know as the 4th principle, the free and principled search for meaning, was first. This was similar to the order of principles approved in 1961 when the American Unitarian Association and Universalist Church of America joined.

The first principle in that document called for support of “the free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of religious fellowship.” The third principle called for the association to “affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth and dignity of every human personality.” The committee writing the new principles rearranged them, though, deciding in the end that beginning the principles with individuals and ending with concern for the earth gave a sense of the full sweep of our concern.

Historically, we can probably credit our Universalist heritage for this foundational principle. The language of the third principle in the 1961 document, after all, closely follows language in a Universalist avowal of faith adopted in 1935. Among other things that statement professes faith in “the supreme worth of every personality.” No language anything like this appears in prior Unitarian affirmations. The closest statement to echo such a sentiment is a phrase in Unitarian principles crafted during World War II that affirms “universal brotherhood, undivided by nation, race, or creed:” a similar sentiment, but different.

I’m sad to say I don’t know much about how the specific language “the supreme worth of every personality” entered the Universalist avowal of faith. Earlier consensus statements in the Universalist church spoke only to conventional theological points: the nature of God, Jesus, sin and such. But I do know that the statement appeared at a time when the Universalist church was undergoing a radical transformation.

Having lost hundreds of small, rural churches in the past couple of decades as people moved into the cities from the countryside, Universalists at the time were struggling to take stock of their identity. Leaders of the church found themselves moving outside of the Christian orbit as they sought the path to what they called a more universalized Universalism, and a strong social justice focus had taken root in the denomination.

In important ways, the new Universalist avowal of faith in “the supreme worth of every human personality” represented a broadening in the focus of faith. Gone was the concern over life after death, or who would be admitted to heaven and under what terms, all of which had so occupied Universalists in their early days. What arose instead was a Universalism centered in the here and now that sought a role in the betterment of humankind, a salvation on earth, not in heaven. This was reflected, too, in the statement’s theology.

The Universalist position had shifted from a statement in 1899 that had affirmed “the universal fatherhood of God” and “the certainty of just retribution for sin” and “the final harmony of all souls with God” to a statement in 1935 that avowed faith in God as “eternal and all-conquering love” and avowed “the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the kingdom of God.”

Do you see what a radical shift that was? Universalists had moved from a theological position that essentially relied on a divine figure who would see to making all things right to a position that affirmed the power of people “of good will and sacrificial spirit” to establish a world governed by “all-conquering love.”

Such an understanding had no use for the divisions that prejudice or pride imposed on humankind. As with Jesus in the passage from Luke that you heard earlier there was to be no distinction among people as greater or lesser. All are worthy of our love. Like Abraham in the passage from Genesis, each person is to be regarded as an honored guest. All are deserving of dignity.

Some years ago the sociologist Robert Bellah spoke to our General Assembly. The co-author of the book Habits of the Heart, a book that warned of the effects of encroaching individualism in all facets of American life, Bellah pegged us as a movement preoccupied with the individual. And for evidence of this claim he pointed to our first principle. It is an affirmation, he said, that places us in the center of American culture, whose most fundamental tenet, he said, “is the sacredness of the individual conscience, the individual person.”

While there is much that is good about affirming individual autonomy, Bellah said, it has a downside as well. For it leads to the notion that our role, in fact our duty in life, is to pursue that which suits our own interests. If that is so, what suits the interests of others, or even of society at large, is of at best secondary importance to the interests of number one. I don’t think I have to walk you far to see where that way of thinking goes. In fact, we see it all around us in a culture geared to serving consumer interests and a tattered social fabric that leaves many in misery.

Though as caring people we may decry all that, Bellah said, the individual autonomy that we as Unitarian Universalists celebrate only serves it further. What our movement lacks, he said, is an understanding that we are fundamentally social beings and that “the sacredness of the individual depends ultimately on our solidarity with all being.” There must be something that holds us together other than our shared respect for our sacredness as individuals.

I want to argue that there is something that holds us together, and it derives directly from that first principle that Bellah holds up for criticism. When I say I affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, I am not saying, “Yes, I’m pretty special, and everyone else, well they’re special too, of course, but not quite as special as me.” Instead, I’m making precisely the claim of solidarity that Bellah is looking for. I’m saying that each of us has a claim, an equal claim to care and consideration and that the right to that claim is not earned or conferred by anyone but is inherent to us.

If I take that claim seriously, I have no justification for claiming special status above others. I would even go so far as to restore the original language from the Universalists and the 1961 principles and refer to our worth as “supreme” to make clear that no one’s claim trumps another’s. Each of us has undeniable, incalculable worth.

That understanding provides a basis for the social principle that Bellah seeks. It is a little like the being born to humanity that D. H. Lawrence describes in the meditation we heard earlier, the awareness that, in Lawrence’s words, “all the laughing and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers and sisters” matters to us ultimately.

In a recent book, the author Tracy Kidder writes about Paul Farmer, a physician who has brought the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to some of the most impoverished places on Earth. Farmer had started a clinic in Haiti but retained connections to major hospitals in the U.S. where despite a health care system stacked against them his patients sometimes found help.

Kidder tells the story of a Haitian boy, John, who comes to Farmer with swellings in his neck diagnosed as a rare form of cancer that if caught early is frequently cured. There are no facilities for such treatment in Haiti, so Farmer wheedles and pleads and eventually convinces Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to take the case for free. First, though, his staff must obtain a passport for the boy, then travel the muddy, rutted road to the boy’s town, where he must be retrieved and brought to Port au Prince for transport. Paperwork and arrangements delay the transport by months, but finally when they arrive to pick the boy up they find that he is skeletal and so debilitated that his throat must be suctioned constantly as he is driven in a rickety private ambulance that breaks down several times and gets tied up in traffic jams on the trip of many hours back to town.

Improbably, though, the boy makes it to the plane and survives the trip to Boston. A team of doctors gets to work on him, but before long the diagnosis comes back: It is too late. The cancer has spread everywhere in his body. There is no hope. But Farmer’s team is undaunted. John is moved to an apartment belonging to one of the staffers that is set up as a hospice, and his mother is flown to Boston from Haiti. Doctors from the treatment team visit him with toys, the only toys he’s ever known. Days after his mother arrives, though, John sinks into a coma and dies shortly afterward.

Back in Haiti, some staffers at the clinic are worried about what will happen when word gets out about John’s trip. Will they be flooded with mothers demanding their sick children be flown to Boston? No, it turns out. Talking with the clinic’s chief handyman, Kidder learns that the response in the countryside is simple, “They say, ‘Look how much they care about us,’” the handyman reports.

How might we measure the power of people “of good will and sacrificial spirit” who work to establish a world governed by “all-conquering love”? Sometimes it is an enterprise as foolish or perhaps as inspired as a beachcomber hurling starfish that are washed onto the shore back into the surf.

To say that we each have inherent, even supreme worth, is not to say that each of us is due all that we desire or even all that we need. But it is to say that we matter, each of us. It does not mean that we never make mistakes or do wrong, stupid, or even hateful things. We do, and deciding how we will hold each other accountable for those things is some of the most difficult work that awaits us. But we are not, any of us, disposable, or irrelevant.

I have heard some complain that our principles are lacking in deep, theological language, but I don’t agree. In fact, I think our first principle embodies one of the most profound truths of our movement, a place where I think it is appropriate for us to ground our religious search: that we all matter, not because of any special attribute or accident of birth, but by virtue of our very humanness. It is a truth transcendent of circumstance, greater than any one of us, yet encompassing us all.

None of us is perfect, yet each is deserving of profound respect. We understand ourselves not as self-interested atoms making our way in a hostile world, but as free thinking and acting beings linked indissolubly with each other and all life. Here, it seems to me, is a place where healing can happen, where hope can begin.

So be it.