JUSTICE, EQUITY AND COMPASSION: SECOND PRINCIPLE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

November 5, 2006

SERMON

I must admit to you that, while I am employed in its service and by my ordination I am committed to its flourishing, there are days when I wonder about whether religion is a worthwhile endeavor. Yes, churches are pleasant places for people to gather to ponder the cosmic questions of life, to seek comfort in a sometimes hostile or indifferent world, to confront interesting, even challenging ideas and to learn personal practices and ways of thinking that help us feel centered and grounded.

And yet, religion and the churches that espouse it also often rightly catch flak in our society as distant, exclusive, even elitist institutions that claim great privilege and yet deliver little benefit. One of the most famous images of people devoting great industry to a pointless task, after all, comes from religion: the picture of Medieval clerics debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And remember Karl Marx’s critique of religion as an opiate that serves to quell dissatisfaction with the social order.

For all the good works that can be claimed for religion in history the truth is that more often than not, even in times of great moral crisis, churches have stood on the sidelines unwilling to get involved or simply turned their backs. This was true in this country during the 19th century debates over slavery and the 20th century debates over civil rights as well as in Nazi Germany during the height of the Holocaust.

Churches are famous for preaching personal salvation in the great by and by while neglecting the difficult work that would help make this world a better place. For a church like ours which offers no certainty of glory beyond the grave, no one-way ticket to heaven the question is even more pressing. In the most concrete ways, what are we here for? What end do we serve?

For me, that question is answered most persuasively by our second Unitarian Universalist principle: We covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.

This week as I was preparing this sermon, the second in a series I am offering this year on our seven Unitarian Universalist principles, I was telling our pastoral care consultant, the Rev. Sarah York, of how hard I was finding it to get a handle on this principle when it suddenly occurred to me: What distinguishes our second principle is that it is for our religion where the rubber meets the road.

We may be good, right-thinking people affirming freedom, reason and tolerance, but if that is all we are about, we are become, in the words of Paul of Tarsus, “a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” What we claim to be our faith must find some outlet in our lives. Some years ago the Rev. Harry Meserve framed the challenge this way, “If you were arrested for being a Unitarian Universalist, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

In fact, this question has been a matter of concern for our movement from its earliest days. In the 1820s as ministers in Boston were organizing to create the American Unitarian Association they expended a significant amount of their energies outside the pulpit on social reform.

While their conservative brethren were dedicating their time to the evangelical winning of souls, the Unitarians saw it as their duty to argue and work for better conditions for the growing urban poor. Boston at the time was seeing a huge influx of rural poor and poor immigrants, many of whom were forced to live in squalid conditions. Most churches weren’t especially sympathetic to those people whose poverty they considered to be the result merely of sin, dissipation and other vice.

The Unitarians, though, held to a doctrine of what they called “perfectibility.” Every person, they felt, had worth. No matter how desperate their circumstances, each had the potential for improved life, and it was the duty of those of greater privilege to assist them in accomplishing it. One of their first acts of the ministers who came to form the American Unitarian Association was to hire the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman to undertake what they described as mission work among Boston’s poor.

In this position as what he called a “minister at large,” Tuckerman went out into the streets of Boston introducing himself to the poor, offering assistance in the way of groceries, wood, or some money and getting to know them. He organized Sunday schools for the children that eventually enrolled hundreds of Boston’s children and became an advocate for the creation of vocational schools and for prison reform. As the result of his urging, the ministers broadened their efforts by creating a philanthropic organization, the Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, in Boston to respond to the growing need.

Today we recognize a certain condescension in Tuckerman’s appeal to the wealthy Unitarian churches to assist the benighted classes. Still, in many ways Tuckerman was an innovator who pioneered new ways of understanding and working with the poor. His work became a model for other cities, and it also give birth to a reformist mentality that accompanied many young Unitarian ministers heading for new churches in the west who saw working for social improvement as part of their role.

In our religious movement, Tuckerman’s story is beginning to be told more
widely as increasing numbers of people entering our seminaries are expressing an interest in developing community ministries in many settings – social service agencies, hospitals, prisons and more.

The complex work of promoting justice, equity and compassion that we as religious people are called to, they argue, calls for ministries that are located in many places: some outside our churches, others in partnership with them. This trend is still relatively new, but it holds the promise for some interesting synergies in the years ahead.

Of course the work of justice, equity and compassion belongs to more than people who become ministers. It is woven into how each of us lives our lives every day. Scientists have suggested recently that each of us is born with what they call an internal “moral grammar” that guides us in determining right and wrong from our earliest days. If so, it seems to me an impulse to justice and equity must be a central part of it.

Anyone who has watched children at play knows the power of the claim to justice. We know in our gut without having to be told what fair means. And usually we pair it with equity: each getting an equal share, an equal chance. As we grow older, though, life gets more complicated. We observe and experience inequities and injustices, patterns woven into the life around us that it seems there is little we can do about. Indeed, at times we are the beneficiaries of those inequities. They provide us privileges that, while at one level we may recognize as unjust, on another level we are loath to give up. And so, something that in some ways seems so simple – justice, equity – becomes a tangled mess that we can see no way to unravel.

Affirming and promoting justice and equity in human relations, you see, is no walk in the park. It is hard work, both because the picture is complex and because we are part of the picture. It is the kind of work that many people find so global, so daunting that they check out: Go ahead, they say. Work on it if you want to, but count me out!

Yet, this simple principle asks us as religious people who affirm the worth and dignity of every person, who see the potential of each person to grow, who trust in our able minds and our loving hearts and the power of community not to check out. It asks us to risk uncertainty and discomfort because that tug in the gut that we felt in our earliest years was right all along.

How we accomplish all that, how we bring about the justice and equity that so many, including us, ultimately, long for is hard to say, but we begin with the third word of this principle. We begin with compassion. There is a figure in the Buddhist tradition that is said to exemplify compassion called the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is one who has nearly achieved enlightenment, but rather than taking the final step and enter nirvana works to bring about the enlightenment of others, believing that doing so will ultimately bring about their her or his own enlightenment.

The bodhisattva’s path is one not of theory and talk but of action, and it is targeted not at humankind in general but at people in particular. Remember that the word “compassion” derives from the Latin meaning “to suffer with.” To have compassion for another is to be present for another in their pain and confusion.

Again, this is hard work. It means stepping outside our own perspective, letting go of our prejudgments and imagining the world from another’s point of view, taking into account how others think and how they feel.

This past week I attended a special event at our church held by the End-of-Life Care Coalition to honor those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic illness and their caregivers. As part of that event several members of Asheville Playback Theatre, including our own Nels Arnold, offered to act out stories that members of the audience offered about some of the struggles and epiphanies that arose in coming to terms with the illness and caring for their loved ones.

The actors had no advance notice of what people would say. They would merely listen to the story, often no more than a sentence or two, and, using their improvisational skills, reflect back different pieces of what they had heard.

Members of the audience, as you can imagine, were shy about giving voice to their struggles. None of us is especially anxious to lay our troubles down before others. We’d rather have them believe that we’re doing all right, we’re in control. And yet with few diseases are we, as patients or caregivers, less in control than with Alzheimer’s. One by one people began raising their hands. Their stories were sometimes funny, sometimes sad, yet as each was captured by the actors before us it took on a depth and universality that amazed me. One person’s struggles were no longer that person’s struggles; they were our struggles, human struggles. It occurred to me that we were watching compassion at work. Like bodhisattvas we were entering into each other’s stories with sympathy and respect, not for the purpose of fixing anything, simply as witnesses: not feeling for but feeling with each other.

Compassion is a place to begin because it erases the boundaries among us. It reduces each of us to a common level of humanity where our joys and woes are all of common concern. In that sense it is also the ground of both equity and justice. True equity, after all, begins with more than the intellectual acceptance that each deserves equal treatment. It is also an equal feeling for all. In the bodhisattva’s path it is the heartfelt wish for all beings to be well, free of suffering, craving and fear, as one in a joy beyond sorrow. In the Christian tradition it is phrased as loving your neighbor as yourself, recognizing no divisions between us.

Love at this level, consistently, unerringly, of course, is beyond us. That isn’t to say it isn’t possible, but it doesn’t come easily. It’s something we work at. We learn with each encounter how to be present without judgment, how to look past difference and find common humanity beneath. In the shifting landscape of our lives as the earth shivers and we are left to struggle with pain and loss, the tensile strands of love hold us in a web of life that may be torn, but is always healing.

And so you see that as Unitarian Universalists our second principle gives voice to the first. We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person by promoting justice, equity and compassion in human relations. The two are bound up with one another. We must do more than proclaim the words that free us to abolish the divisions of humanity created by arrogance and fear, that affirm every person’s worthiness of love. We must also act on that principle by pursuing justice, promoting equity and living compassionately.

I began today with some wary words about religion. For its true that religion, arising from a human impulse to seek depth and meaning in life, can lose its way. It can grow puffed up and drunk with power. It can be insular, exclusive, even oppressive, but it need not be. Religion that is true to its etymological root ties us back to the deepest truths of the world and our humanity. And one of those central truths is that we are bound up in ways deeper than we know with each other and all that is.

That alone is a marvel: to know that we are not drifting alone in a hostile universe but woven into a vast fabric of being where we each have a place. Religion is one way we can touch and give expression to the wonder of that truth. And so it might be, as Vincent Silliman urges that we make it, life and joy: a voice of renewing challenge for us to live the best that is in us and a dissatisfaction with anything that bids us do less, a compassion that makes room for humanity’s suffering and urges us to service, an ever-present curiosity and wonder before the world’s unfolding, a source of purpose and hope, holding before our eyes the prospect of a better life that each of us may help make actual.

So may it be.