Not Such a Bad Species

READING: LORD OF THE FLIES SUMMARY

In William Golding’s 1954 novel, The Lord of the Flies, a plane goes down near a deserted island in the Pacific. “The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. It’s as if they’ve just crash-landed in one of their adventure books. Nothing but beach, shells, and water for miles. And better yet: no grown-ups. On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts.

One boy – Ralph – is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic, and handsome, he’s the golden boy of the bunch. Ralph’s game plan is simple:
1). Have fun.
2). Survive.
3). Make smoke signals for passing ships.

Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. Most of the boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Jack, the redhead, develops a passion for hunting pigs and as time progresses, he and his friends grow increasingly reckless. When a ship does finally pass in the distance, they’ve abandoned their post at the fire.

‘You’re breaking the rules!’ Ralph accuses angrily.
Jack shrugs. ‘Who cares?’
‘The rules are the only thing we’ve got!’

When night falls, the boys are gripped by terror, fearful of the beast they believe is lurking on the island. In reality, the only beast is inside them.

Before long, they’ve begun painting their faces and casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

Of all the boys, only one manages to keep a cool head. Piggy, as the others call him because he’s pudgier than the rest, has asthma, wears glasses, and can’t swim. Piggy is the voice of reason, to which nobody listens. ‘What are we?’ he wonders mournfully....‘Savages?’

Weeks pass. Then, one day, a British naval officer comes ashore. The island is now a smoldering wasteland. Three of the children, including Piggy, are dead. ‘I should have thought,’ the officer reproaches them, ‘that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.’

Ralph, the leader of the once proper and well-behaved band of boys, bursts into tears.” Golding writes: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

SERMON

William Golding lied to you. He did. He lied to us. It may seem strange to say that a work of fiction is a lie, but just as truth may be conveyed in the guise of fiction, so may falsehood. Golding’s 1954 novel, The Lord of the Flies, purveyed a lie.

The Lord of the Flies has sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into more than thirty languages and hailed as one of the classics of the twentieth century. Every year more high schoolers are assigned to read the book. The story is meant to illustrate, as Golding wrote in his letter to his publisher, that “even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it....Man produces evil as a bee produces honey” (qtd in Bregman, p. 23).

That’s the lie. We aren’t such a bad species. The book was written for a readership reeling from the atrocities of World War II and asking themselves how Auschwitz could have happened. The idea that’s there’s a Nazi hiding in each of us just waiting for the chance to come out was grim, but at least it seemed to make sense of the events that had happened. William Golding was an unhappy man: an alcoholic, prone to depression – a man unable to take the trouble to spell acquaintances’ names correctly. Biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal said, “there is no shred of evidence that this is what children left to their own devices will do.” And Frans de Waal had not then heard about the real case of shipwrecked boys on a deserted island.

It turns out there is such a story. And while millions have read William Golding’s fable, almost no one knew about the true story until more than 50 years after it happened when Rutger Bregman, researching his book that came out in Dutch in 2019, dug it up and tracked down the now-elderly survivors.

In June 1965, Luke, Sione, Fatai, Kolo, Tevita, and Mano -- six boys, ages 13 to 16, all pupils at St. Andrew’s, a strict Anglican boarding school on the South Pacific island of Tonga -- were bored. They longed for adventure instead of school assignments. They came up with a plan to escape to Fiji, some 800 kilometers away. Or maybe all the way to New Zealand. The boys stole a 7.3-meter boat from a fisherman they all disliked. They brought two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner – and that was pretty much it. No map. No compass.

The first night a bit of weather came up. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Then the rudder broke. For eight days they drifted – without water other than what rainwater they could collect in the coconut shells – which they shared equally, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

On the eighth day: a miracle. They spotted a small island – a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than 300 meters out of the ocean. The boys had stumbled upon Ata, an uninhabited island 450 acres in size. A New York Times article reported in 2021 that Ata

“had once been home to about 350 people, but in 1863 a British slave trader kidnapped about 150 of them, and the Tongan king relocated the rest to another island, where they would be protected.” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)

By the time our lads from Tonga landed there, the island had been deserted for over 100 years – and today it is considered uninhabitable.

“At first the boys lived off raw fish, coconuts, and birds’ eggs. After about three months, they found the ruins of a village, and their fortunes improved — amid the rubble they discovered a machete, domesticated taro plants and a flock of chickens descended from the ones left behind by the previous inhabitants.” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)

For 15 months the boys were on that island – a year and a quarter – before they caught the attention of a passing fishing trawler.

The captain that rescued them wrote that,

“By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” (qtd in Bregman, p. 32)

Fatai,

“after countless failed attempts, managed to produce a spark using two sticks. While the boys in the make-believe Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in the real-life Lord of the Flies tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year. The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarreled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, and ‘after four hours or so,’ Mano later remembered, ‘we’d bring them back together. Then we’d say, “OK, now apologize." That’s how we stayed friends.' Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat, and played it to help lift their spirits.” (Bregman, p. 33)

One day, Fatai slipped and fell off a cliff

“and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves." (Bregman, p. 33)

The leg healed perfectly. Says Rutger Bregman: “The real Lord of the Flies is a story about friendship, and cooperation, and human resilience.”

In the delayed discovery of this story, the New York Times wrote:

“The six boys flourished in their spontaneous community, suggesting that cooperation, not conflict, is an integral feature of human nature” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)

William Golding lied to us. So why has his novel seemed to so many to be realistic? Let's take a look at why we are so ready to believe the worst about ourselves.

In World War II, German planes dropped 80,000 bombs on London alone. Forty thousand people in the UK killed -- a million buildings damaged or destroyed. Germany’s war planners were sure this would break the British will to resist – that there would be general social collapse. The British famously kept calm and carried on.

As the tide of war turned, the Allies, refusing to learn from the British experience planned a similar civilian bombing campaign against Germany. They, too, fell into the delusion that this would break their enemy’s will to resist. Terrible idea. Crisis brings out not the worst in people but the best. Analyses after the war indicated that Allied bombing

“strengthened the German wartime economy, thereby prolonging the war. Between 1940 and 1944, they found that German tank production had multiplied by a factor of nine, and of fighter jets by a factor of fourteen." (Bregman, p. xvii

The bombs boosted solidarity -- and thereby efficiency.

Humans are made to pull together and help each other out. The movie, "Titanic," shows people blinded by panic – except for the string quartet. But the movie was not accurate about that. “In fact, the evacuation was quite orderly” (Bregman).

“Or take the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As the Twin Towers burned, thousands of people descended the stairs calmly, even though they knew their lives were in danger. They stepped aside for firefighters and the injured.” (Bregman)

Most people, most of the time, are basically decent. Maybe the worst thing about us is what a hard time we have believing that. So why do we have such a hard time believing the truth that we are basically decent, that we care for others, and are, when circumstances require, ready to do enact our caring with considerable courage.

One factor for why it’s hard for us to believe in one-another’s basic virtue is this: The way we got to be such a cooperative species was by carefully monitoring noncooperation when it pops up. Cooperative, pro-social behavior doesn’t grab our attention much. Our brains are wired to focus on anti-social behavior – so that we can bring social forces to bear to bring the offender back in line.

It’s like our attraction to sugar, which was functional when sugar was scarce and we needed a preference for the riper fruit. Now that we can mass produce sugar, our sweet toothes are killing us. Focus on anti-social behavior was a brilliant adaptation when it was a rare thing to see anti-social behavior. But now that we have mass media inundating us with stories of people doing bad things – which the media does because people doing normal, ordinary, everyday good things isn’t very interesting. It doesn't sell newspapers or attract eyeballs or grab the attention of brains wired to attend to misbehavior. Functional, normally cooperative people are boring to watch – which is rule number one of any producer of a reality TV show. (Hence my prayer and blessing for you all is: may your life be one that, if it were a reality TV show, it would have terrible ratings.)

We got to be highly cooperative, hyper-social animals by paying attention to rare uncooperative actions. But then we developed media that overloads us with stories that we’re wired to pay attention to. Thus, we end up with the misimpression that people are usually only out for their own narrow self-interests – that people are no darn good. As Rutger Bregman says:

“Even after the researchers presented their subjects with hard data about strangers returning lost wallets, or the fact that the vast majority of the population doesn’t cheat or steal, most subjects did not view humanity in a more positive light.” (11)

In particular, Bregman notes,

“Catastrophes bring out the best in people. I know of no other sociological finding that’s backed by so much solid evidence that’s so blithely ignored. The picture we’re fed by the media is consistently the opposite of what happens when disaster strikes.”

That’s one factor in why William Golding’s novel seemed to so many to be realistic. A second factor is this. Power tends to corrupt. Lord Acton was right about that one. We are basically decent, but power does tend to corrupt us.

It starts in little ways, mild yet telling. In one study, subjects were put in teams of three and given a task to do together. The researchers would randomly pick one of the three and say, “you be the leader.” As the team of three went about their task, the researchers brought them a snack – a plate of 5 cookies. Five cookies for 3 people. One of the cookies would typically be left on the plate, as per etiquette that inhibits taking the last one. That leaves 4 cookies for 3 people. They all get one – and then one of them takes a second. What the study found is that it was almost always the person randomly selected the designated leader who took that second cookie.

In another study, subjects were assigned a car and told to drive it around the block. Some subjects were randomly assigned a beat-up Mitsubishi or Ford Pinto – while others were assigned to drive a high-end late-model BMW or Mercedes. As they approached a crosswalk, a pedestrian would step off the curb. All the drivers of the clunker cars stopped and let the pedestrian go by. The drivers of the fancy cars, however, 45 percent of the time failed to stop for the pedestrian.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner calls it Acquired Sociopathy. Even a tiny bit of power, and we feel like taking that extra cookie. Why are we like that? At heart, we’re such team players that we adapt to the role we find ourselves in – even adopting some traits unconsciously. If you’re assigned the role of an Important Person, you’ll act like an Important Person -- and Important People don’t have time to wait for pedestrians. We’re funny that way. We are not such a bad species – but we are funny.

People often rise to power by being very friendly, attentive, warm, caring, and helpful. Then they get into power, and it’s like brain damage.

"It transpires that people in power display the same tendencies. They literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant and rude, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives. They’re also more shameless, often failing to manifest that one facial phenomenon that makes human beings unique among primates. They don’t blush.” (Bregman, p. 227

Neurological brain scans find that

“a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy. Ordinarily, we mirror all the time. Someone else laughs, you laugh, too; someone yawns, so do you. But powerful individuals mirror much less. It is almost as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings. As if they’ve come unplugged.” (Bregman, p. 227)

If we are conscious of this tendency, we can counteract it. Many of us have had experience with that boss who was the exception to this tendency – who remained thoughtful and considerate of others even after ascending to power. So it can be counteracted. When it isn’t counteracted, those suffering from acquired sociopathy assume that others are as self-centered and uncooperative as they have become. Having come unplugged, they forget how cooperative and decent most people are.

“The dynamic during disasters is almost always the same: adversity strikes and there’s a wave of spontaneous cooperation in response – then the authorities panic and unleash a second disaster.” (Bregman, p. 6)

Emergency responders don’t respond, believing there’s too much chaos to go in – or armed authorities open fire on peaceful people.

Rebecca Solnit wrote about the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She wrote:

“My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image" (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2009, p. 131.)

Bregman adds:

“Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.” (p. 7)

People in power tend to purvey the idea that The Lord of the Flies is realistic. Between our sweet tooth for bad news and the projected acquired sociopathy of the powerful, we’re apt to be convinced we’re a terrible species. As filmmaker Richard Curtis observed:

“If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in history – it’s called searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like 'Love Actually,' which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.”

Sentimental? I suppose you could say so. But unrealistic? Not at all.

So I will leave you, then, with Hugh Grant’s voiceover words at the opening of Curtis’ film, 'Love Actually':

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”

Not such a bad species.

Amen.

Justice v. Mercy

Justice is our theme of the month for October. So what is it? What is justice?

We are a hodge-podge of concepts bouncing off each other in patterns that grow into habits of thought. We are also bodies, and bodily needs, and emotions, and emotional triggers, and reactivity, and ego defense mechanisms elaborate and complex. We are all of that. But if your body is, for a moment, reasonably well taken care of – it is fed and rested, reasonably healthy and pain free – and if conditions are such as to be conducive to being calm and reflective, not consumed by any particular desire, safe, without threat to your well-being or reputation, THEN what’s left of you is a hodge podge of concepts bouncing off each other in patterns that have formed into habits of thought.

And those concepts that we carry around – those concepts that constitute us when we we’re healthy, safe, and calmly reflective – those concepts aren’t always all that consistent, and when this is exposed, we experience cognitive dissonance. Still, we might spend a lifetime happily bouncing around among our concepts along greased grooves oblivious to tensions between them unless some moral dilemma arises. We might not notice, for instance, that mercy is unjust.

Mercy seems so benevolent, so kind – and justice seems like a good thing, too. Could two good things be at odds with each other? These concepts that we carry around – that make up our thought patterns – become part of us bringing with them a history, and those associations are still with them. Justice, going back to classical times, has to do with people getting what they are due. On the one hand, you are a just person if you give to others what they are due. On the other hand, you have a basis to ask for justice from others if you don’t believe you are getting what you are due.

How do we determine what is due? There’s been a lot of variability in that through history, from culture to culture, and even from one individual to another within the same time and culture, or, for that matter within the same individual from one day to the next. The guideline we have, also going back to classical times, is “treat like cases alike.” Nothing can happen among people that doesn’t have some similarities to something previous that happened. If you can describe an incident with words, those words have meaning because of prior experience with them. Those meanings come with feelings, however vague, and the feelings are either good or bad, however slightly – and that is the ground from which our moral reasoning begins and our moral attitudes take shape.

We look for the principles that were followed in other cases, and we try to apply those principles to the case at hand. Treat like cases alike. In fact, this basic principle of fairness is common to humans through every culture and time. We find this sense of fairness not only in homo sapiens, but in hominids – which includes humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and not only hominids, but simians, which includes all of the above plus gibbons and monkeys. (Good to know our place in the family of things.)

Simians have been around 60 million years, while the particular simian, homo sapiens, has been on this planet less than 300,000 years. In one study, two capuchin monkeys were in adjacent plexiglass containers. They could see each other. They’d been trained to perform a simple task for which they get a bit of food as reward. They reach through a hole, hand the human a rock – that’s the task -- and the human will take it, and hand them back a bit of food. At first, the food is a piece of cucumber. Cucumber is OK. The monkeys will take the cucumber and eat it. Monkeys will keep performing the task and happily enjoying their cucumber 30 or more times -- it’s hard to get full on cucumber.

But remember, the monkeys can see each other. If, after a couple rounds of doing the task, and getting cucumber, monkey A sees monkey B get a grape in exchange for performing the task, monkey A notices. Monkey A apparently thinks, “Great, now we’re getting grapes.” For a capuchin monkey, a bit of cucumber is OK, but a grape is delicioso. So if monkey A hands the human a rock and gets back only another bit of cucumber, there’s going to be some protest about that. They don't speak English, but it's clear what the content of the protest is: "That’s not fair! He got a grape! Where’s my grape?" The slighted monkey will become agitated and howl. You can watch this on Youtube.



You’ll see that the monkey takes that bit of cucumber and throws it back at the human. The cucumber which a minute before had been perfectly acceptable is now despised. Similar experiments have been tried with dogs and some bird species, and they found similar results.

Treat like cases alike – a very deep principle. If I do the same task as someone else, and there’s payment for it, I want the same payment. The need to be treated fairly is a deep need. We can calmly accept deprivation if others are, too.

So: justice. Giving people what they are due and treating like cases alike. “What is due” might be a better shake. When we talk about justice to racial groups, or women, or to workers, or to the poor, we’re talking about treating them better. But “what is due” might be punishment. If someone has done wrong, we want them punished.

I’ve noticed some shift in recent years toward avoiding the word punishment. When people object to police abuse, for instance, they rarely say, “Abusive officers should be punished.” The preferred language seems to be, “Abusive officers should be held accountable.” Accountability could take the form of punishment – and that’s the form that usually seems to be implied -- but I do appreciate leaving the door open for a nonpunitive form of accountability. The movement for restorative justice is all about accountability and restoring relationships but without jail or prison or heavy fines.

Still, some cases arise that reveal that a felt need to punish goes deep in, at least, us humans. The case of George Tyndall was a reminder of that this week. George Tyndall was a former gynecologist at USC, accused of sexual misconduct toward a generation of women students at USC. The University paid a $1.1 billion dollar settlement – the largest in higher education history, and Tyndall was set to stand trial “on sex crimes stemming from his treatment of 16 former patients, a subset of hundreds of women who had accused him of inappropriate touching, harassment and other misconduct during a tenure at the campus health clinic that stretched from the late 1980s to 2016.” Then George Tyndall – out on bail – died in his home of natural causes on Oct 4, a little more than a week ago.

This was profoundly unsatisfying for some of his victims. Many of his accusers felt that his death allowed him to avoid justice. They didn’t want Tyndall dead, they wanted him punished. Even if some of them might have wanted the death penalty for him – and I don’t know that any of them did, but if they had – what they would be wanting would be death as punishment, not death from natural causes, which is what the coroner reported, and which felt like cheating his way out of the punishment that would have represented justice. The felt need for punishment runs deep.

What makes punishment punishment and not simply a mishap, or natural causes, is that it’s deliberately inflicted by the agents of social order for the sake of social order. In the family, those agents are the parents, who might punish a child for the sake of family social order and mores. In the state, those agents are called our justice system. In practice, of course, our penal system today does more damage to social order than it does good, but the ideal, that wrongdoing should be punished – that is, that the perpetrator should endure unpleasant consequences inflicted by an authority. The authority, whether human or divine, must be seen as having responsibility for protecting our collective well-being. That idea of punishment from an authority is deeply a part of us.

Determining what punishment is due involves an evolving system trying to treat like cases alike. Relevantly similar crimes, we feel, should get relevantly similar punishment. Of course, there’s slippage around the notion of “relevantly similar” – if two men, in two separate incidents, have each stolen a loaf of bread, and one of them is starving and trying to feed a family that is starving, while the other is reasonably well-fed and had the money to buy the bread, but just didn’t want to, many of us would call that a morally relevant difference. Javert, in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, didn’t think it was morally relevant, and Javert pursues Jean Valjean accordingly.

So that’s a sketch of some of the ways our concept of justice bounces around in our thought patterns. What, then, about mercy? Do we say that Jean Valjean should get mercy, even though he did steal that bread? Or do we say, forget mercy, our principles of justice themselves should be adjusted? We should understand that justice itself takes into account extenuating circumstances. Do we need a concept of mercy at all?

Justice may call for punishment, but mercy would let you off the hook. That’s the situation that Shakespeare presents to us in “The Merchant of Venice.” Antonio borrows money from Shylock, and offers a pound of his flesh closest his heart as guarantee of a loan. OK, that's very weird, and probably wouldn't be found legally binding even in a renaissance court, but let us allow Shakespeare his conceit. When the loan is not repaid, Shylock claims his pound of flesh. Portia then tells Shylock he must be merciful. Shylock retorts, “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.” Portia famously replies:

“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.”

Portia says the quality of mercy is “not strained” -- meaning that it is “not constrained,” that is, we cannot be constrained to be merciful. Mercy can’t be compelled. If it’s compelled, it isn’t mercy. Shylock's question was, “On what compulsion must I be merciful?” Portia's answer is that there's no compulsion. It's not about compulsion. Justice is about compulsion: there are principles of fairness that rightfully do constrain our behavior, but mercy doesn’t work that way. Mercy just happens, the way gentle rain falls on the ground. And when it does, it blesses both giver and receiver.

So: Mercy is what we call it when we are spared from what we deserve. A few lines later, Portia makes the point: “in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.” Wait. What? None? OK, I think I see our problem here.

If justice is understood as that which, strictly adhered to, condemns us all, then we need a new idea of justice. Alas, the idea that we all deserve damnation is our Western heritage. Theologians and priests for centuries emphasized what sinners we are. They gave us a picture of ourselves as fundamentally corrupt at our core. Every one of us is so profoundly, inherently sinful, that if we got what we deserved, we’d all be thrown to the worst punishment we can imagine. So mercy enters the picture. No one is good enough to deserve going to heaven on their own merits, but some people get in just because of God’s benevolent mercy.

The Church has generally avoided stating precisely how many would receive this grace. (The Jehovah’s Witnesses are an exception. They teach that exactly 144,000 faithful Christians will go to heaven to rule with Christ in the Kingdom of God.) Mostly, only a rough sense of the proportions was indicated. In John Calvin’s theology, for instance, it seems like very few. I get the impression from Calvin that he imagines maybe something around 2 percent of all Christian believers (and no one who isn't a Christian believer) will get to heaven. Our forebears, the Universalists, taught that God’s benevolent mercy extends to all -- every person will go to heaven. We get our name, Universalists, from this doctrine of universal salvation. But even the Universalists, for the most part, didn’t think people deserved it, or had earned it. Justice would condemn, but God’s mercy saves. On that point, the Calvinists and the Universalists agreed -- they merely disagreed on how many of us God’s mercy saves.

Through the 20th century, Unitarians and Universalists slowly shed the sense that sin – inner corruption – was humanity’s essential and most salient feature. Instead, we began to see human suffering in terms of disconnection: the deprivation (in the lower classes) and alienation (in any class) that accompanies uprootedness from healthy community of care, respect, meaning, and opportunity.

We stand, as ever, in need of justice – but not justice in the course of which none of us should see salvation, but justice as the construction of fairness in the face of oppressions that undermine community, justice as healing the wounds of separation, justice as the restoration of belonging. If we have real justice in this way – then we could do without mercy.

Mercy, like justice, has historically had a variety of meanings. Sometimes mercy is used to mean compassion and kindness – and we can certainly use that. Our hearts long for compassion, kindness, caring – but to give it and receive it. But Mercy, taken as a decision to deviate from the requirements of justice, perhaps we could do without.

Justice is principled: it follows principles. If there are rules governing the case at hand, justice follows the rules, and if there are no clear rules, justice weighs the principles. Mercy, however, flouts all rules and principles. Mercy is necessarily unprincipled. Principles define justice, and mercy is deviation from justice and its principles.

We might, indeed, think that our principles of justice need to be more compassionate, less draconian, but as long as they are principles – that is, they apply to all like cases – then they are matters of deciding what justice is, not matters of deciding when to forego justice for the sake of something called mercy. If a judge is merciful to one convicted defendant but not others, that’s not fair. And if the judge is “merciful” to all of them, then that’s not mercy – it’s just that judge’s rules of procedure.

Too much mercy and there’s no enforcement of justice at all. If contracts are never enforced, no one will enter into contracts – including ultimately, the social contract – and society falls apart. If our children – or we ourselves -- were always spared any unpleasant consequences of their actions, they won’t learn – or we won’t maintain -- the skills and habits of responsibility.

In a lesser known Shakespeare play, Timon of Athens, a character makes a direct rebuttal of Portia. “Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy,” the character says.

Mercy is utterly capricious – and we should be suspicious of it not just because it is abstractly unjust but because caprice tends to favor the already privileged. In our schools, for instance, black students are more likely than white students to be referred for disciplinary action for subjective infractions such as disruption or defiance. Across the board, black students tend to experience harsher disciplinary measures at higher rates than their peers in public schools in the United States. Black students are 4 times more likely to experience suspension than their White peers.As mercy overrides the principles that would apply to everyone, what determines when mercy is extended? When the principles which constitute justice are overthrown, what’s left are our implicit, unspoken biases, including implicit racial biases.

Now, before I conclude that we ought to just dispense with the very idea of mercy, that what we need is greater clarity on principles of justice, and that we should then simply live by those principles, I want to acknowledge what I find to be a fairly compelling case for sometimes, indeed, tossing out rules and principles and reasons. Back in 1985, California writer Anne Herbert, wrote an article for The Whole Earth Review titled, “Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty.” The phrase caught on. You have probably heard it. Herbert's phrase cleverly turned on its head a phrase we had all heard too much in the news: random violence and senseless acts of brutality. What a lovely thing to instead practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty! Herbert writes in her original 1985 article:

“Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly. Don’t await a reason. It will make itself be more, senselessly. Scrawl it on the wall: RANDOM KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY. I used to have fantasies of positive vandalism. Breaking into the school and painting a dirty room bright colors overnight. Fixing broken glass in people’s houses while they’re gone. Leaving full meals on tables in the struggling part of town.”

That really does sound lovely. What makes that kind of random kindness different from mercy’s capriciousness is that mercy is something bestowed by someone in a position of power – whether divine or human: school authorities deciding whether to suspend a student; the criminal court judge pronouncing sentence upon the convicted; a soldier victorious in battle might or might not show mercy to the vanquished; a person of wealth who controls resources that can make or break another’s livelihood may choose to be merciful.

Another way of saying that mercy is uncompelled and unconstrained is to say the option of mercy arises from being in a position of power over someone else. Take away the power relation and instead of mercy, it’s a random kindness – and possibly also a senseless act of beauty.

So that’s the conclusion I leave you with today. My argument is that compassion and kindness – caring and love – are the greatest forces and the highest achievements humanity can strive for. But if we get justice right, then we will have no need for a concept of mercy that is in any way distinct from compassion and kindness.

And: if you’re not in a position of exercising power over, then some randomness, some caprice, just following the whims of impulses to kindness, can also be a beautiful thing – blessing indeed the one that gives and the one receives.

Justice

Our national Unitarian Universalist Association is considering a new articulation of Unitarian Universalist values – as some of you have heard. The new version is graphically represented as a six-petaled flower, with love at the center surrounded by six petals: justice, interdependence, transformation, pluralism, equity and generosity. Our theme for this month is justice. In subsequent months, our themes will explore the other petals, and finally, love, at the center of it all, holding it all together.

The fact that Justice and Equity are both among our values means that we see them as different. When we say justice is one of our Unitarian Universalist shared values, we mean:

“We work to be diverse multicultural Beloved Communities where all thrive. We covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression. We support the use of inclusive democratic processes to make decisions.”

And when we say Equity is one of our shared values, we mean:

“We declare that every person has the right to flourish with inherent dignity and worthiness. We covenant to use our time, wisdom, attention, and money to build and sustain fully accessible and inclusive communities.”

So there’s some overlap there. Both justice and equity are about inclusive community. Justice calls for a community where all thrive, while equity calls for a right to flourish – basically the same thing.

Dismantling racism and all forms of systemic oppression, as the Justice petal calls for, and every person flourishing with inherent dignity and worthiness, as the Equity petal calls for, are pretty much the necessary and sufficient conditions for each other. Still: we might not notice that each implies the other, so it’s good to be explicit about both dismantling racism and providing for everyone to flourish with inherent dignity and worthiness.

What Justice emphasizes, however, that equity doesn’t, is the idea of Beloved Community, and the explicit attention to systemic oppression. So let’s look at that.

Beloved Community

What is this idea of Beloved Community?

Our story begins with Josiah Royce (1855-1916). Royce coined the phrase, “Beloved Community,” and what he meant by it is not quite what you might initially think of when you hear “Beloved Community.” Royce was among the first to bring sustained philosophical attention to what community is and how it functions.

Royce argued communities are logically prior to individuals. That is: the usual idea is that individuals are prior, that individuals come first, and then they get together and form a community. But Royce said that gets it backward. Community relationships create individuals. We are formed as the individuals we are by being nurtured by a community into a place within that community, and our identity comes from that place. Individuals don’t make a community; communities make individuals.

Our Unitarian Universalist congregations are sometimes described as being, or aiming to be, communities of memory and hope. It is from Josiah Royce that we get these ideas of communities of memory and hope. A community of memory is one in which the members have a shared story about their past, and a community of hope is one in which the members share an aspiration going forward.

Royce wrote, “There is only one way to be an ethical individual.” Only one. He said:

“That is to choose your cause, and then to serve it, as the Samurai his feudal chief, as the ideal knight of romantic story his lady.”

But the cause we serve is itself a product of some community or other. The community is logically prior to the individual, remember, so it is communities who bring individuals into existence and, in the process, lay before them causes to which these individuals the community has created may choose to be loyal. So Royce said:

“My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community.”

To go further and be an ethical individual entails choosing a cause your community defines and places before you, and being loyal to that.

Royce then said that beyond all actual communities there is an ideal community – a community not realized but imaginable. This imaginary ideal community may nevertheless powerfully guide us. The ideal that Royce asks us to imagine is a community of those who are loyal to truth and reality and loyalty itself. It is this imaginary ideal community that Royce called, “Beloved Community.”

As I was reading about Josiah Royce’s philosophy this week, I was reminded of the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s words in his 1978 book, The Road Less Travelled. “Mental health,” Peck said, “is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Following Peck, I think of spiritual development, spiritual maturation, in those terms: an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs. In other words, the project of growing spiritually -- or of mental health -- is a matter of vigilant attention to all the ways we fool ourselves, all the myriad tricks of our egos. It is to be constantly searching ourselves for the arising of self-deception, continuously questioning whether we are perceiving reality through the distorting lens of mere self-interest.

We can never rid ourselves entirely of a proclivity to self-deception, but we can get better at catching such delusions sooner and releasing them once we spot them. That’s the “ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Scott Peck calls that mental health. We might call it spiritual growth. We might also call it love – because to see through the ego’s defense mechanisms to a reality of flowing interconnection where everything is everything else – to see that there are no permanent distinct things but only things temporarily appearing distinguishable – this is to participate in the Universal love that holds us always, that has never broken faith with us and never will.

When there is a community of people all together dedicated to reality, to truth, at all costs – no matter how inconvenient, no matter our self-interests – then you have a community participating in that Universal Love. So Royce called it Beloved Community. This imaginary ideal is, as I said, not quite what you might initially think of when you hear “Beloved Community.”

MLK

Martin Luther King, Jr’s theology studies – at Morehouse, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and at Boston University, where he earned his PhD – included substantial philosophy study, including of Josiah Royce. King appropriated Royce’s “Beloved Community” and specifically tied it to his campaign for nonviolent social change. King wrote in 1957:

“The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

He added:

“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that. Yes, love — which means understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one’s enemies — is the solution to the race problem.”

Throughout his career, King emphasized not winning, not ending segregation by defeating segregationists. He emphasized, instead, reconciling with segregationists, and he identified beloved community with this condition of reconciliation. For King, Beloved Community was the name of the end goal of all positive social change. In his “Sermon on Gandhi,” he wrote:

“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor....The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

What Does All This Mean for What Justice Requires of Us Today?

So here we are, in the Fall of 2023, here today to reflect on what justice is, what justice requires of us. And what we’re seeing is that what justice requires of us is love. The language in our national association’s new bylaws, as proposed, puts beloved community at the center of its conception of justice.

Beloved community is conceived with some different emphases by Josiah Royce, who originated the term, and by Martin Luther King, who brought it to his social justice activism. For Royce, it’s more about participating in universal love as manifested and realized in and through participation in an imaginary ideal community committed to truth, to reality at all costs. For King, it’s more about directly living by the injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to Love your Enemies.

Justice is about beloved community and beloved community is about love. Cornel West says that justice is what love looks like in public. Or we might say love is what justice looks like – or simply, as Zen master and African American woman Angel Kyodo Williams writes in Radical Dharma: “Love and Justice are not two.”

We live in polarized times – in some ways even more polarized now than in the Civil Rights Era of the 50s and 60s. And what justice requires of us in these times, just as in any time, is love. In these times – when almost half of our country consists of people who deny women autonomy of their bodies, who glorify guns and facilitate the ongoing carnage of 30,000 gun deaths a year, who are persecuting LGBTQ folk, whose embrace of white supremacy is all but explicit, who deny climate change and obstruct any efforts to reduce carbon emissions, who are undermining democracy on every front, embracing authoritarianism, and taking to cruelty not as an unfortunate means but delighting in it as a sufficient end in itself – in the face of all this, what must we do for justice? What we must do is love.

Since Martin Luther King, Jr. did so much to advance the concept of beloved community, and since beloved community is so central to our Unitarian Universalist conception of justice, let’s look more closely at how King explained Jesus’ injunction to love your enemies.

In a 1957 sermon called “Loving Your Enemies,” King speaks the passage that has become one of the best-known King quotations. I will quote more than is usually quoted, to give you a little more context:

“Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why. Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

Only love can drive out hate. Only love. King goes on to speak of the damage that hating does to the one who hates. He says:

“Another reason we must love our enemies is that hate scars the soul and distorts the personality. It certainly harms the hated – and is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity....Psychiatrists report that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of our inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. They say, ‘Love or perish.’ Modern psychology recognizes what Jesus taught centuries ago: hate divides the personality -- and love, in an amazing and inexorable way, unites it.”

King then adds:

“A third reason we should love our enemies is that love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate. We get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.”

So far, what King has said seems anodyne. We have heard it many times. For most of us, grasping King’s point so far does not seem a difficult challenge. But when he says it means loving even the white racists and violent segregationists, it gets a bit more challenging.

King cites the example of Abraham Lincoln, who appointed some of even his bitterest critics and enemies to his cabinet. King then says:

“It was this same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln said, ‘Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’ This is the power of redemptive love.”

For King, what it comes down to most fundamentally is:

“We are called to this difficult task in order to realize a unique relationship with God....We must love our enemies, because only by loving them can we know God and experience the beauty of his holiness.”

We might prefer to say that only by loving them can we be whole.

Anytime you hate, any time you reject, any time you simply cannot accept another person, that person represents a part of you that you are seeking to excise. Our own wholeness requires that we accept all parts of our ourselves, accept all of who we are.

Nowadays we don’t like to use the word “enemies.” I don’t know if I’ve ever in my life identified someone as an enemy, except maybe in a facetious reference to my opponent in some game we were playing. Even our military now prefers to say, “hostiles.” And, yeah, maybe you can’t, or wouldn’t, identify anyone as an enemy, but you can think of times when someone was hostile toward you. You may have been hostile back.

There are people who you find difficult. And I’m suggesting to you that what you don’t like about them is a reflection of a part of yourself that you don’t like. Accept them, welcome them, love them. For only then can you accept, welcome, and love all of who you are. Even a certain former president is manifesting parts that are in all of us, and any part of ourselves that we try to excise and exile simply goes subterranean and becomes more powerful. But what we accept, welcome, and love can play its useful role and stay in its place. Only when an inner voice is heard and respectfully acknowledged will it, in turn, acknowledge and be willing to bow to your other and countervailing voices. Only love -- inward and outward not distinguished -- brings us into our wholeness.

Accepting, welcoming, and loving does not mean complacency or quiescence in the face of harm. It does not mean complicity with injustice. Dr. King’s “Loving Your Enemies” sermon made this point -- a point he reiterated many times in his career. He said:

“This does not mean that we abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community. To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you....One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.'"

The victory to which King refers is not a once-and-done conquest, but an unfolding victory the earning of which is never completed. Under his leadership, the victory unfolded some. May we, with our lives, unfold further the double victory in which our opponents will be as victorious as we ourselves. For love and justice are not two.

What Is Growing Ethically?

I.

How do we grow ethically? “With a bit of muddle and some hard testing,” as Louise said.

Our mission here in this church is not a “mission accomplished” kind of mission. The job is never completed. For the second and third ones – serving justly and loving radically – it’s conceivable that we might reach a plateau. I rather suspect that we haven’t, but it’s conceivable that we could. And then our job would be just to keep on serving justly and loving radically. When it comes to growing, though, there’s no plateau. If your growth plateaus, you’re not growing anymore.

Our mission directs us to, no matter what level of ethical or spiritual development we might have reached, keep on growing still further. Forever. When it comes to ethical and spiritual development, our mission does not allow any status to stay quo.

I’ll talk about spiritual growth on other Sundays. Today, let’s reflect on ethical growth. Philosopher Iris Murdoch has written: “Nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” It just so happens that before going into ministry, I was a philosophy professor and taught our department’s ethics course every year. So you might think I’d have something to say on the subject of ethics. And you’d be right.

First, I want to congratulate you for recognizing the importance of the ethical and enshrining it in your mission. Too often we have seen religious bodies imagine that spiritual growth was all they needed. As vital as it is to develop the resources for making meaning of this life and this world, and to experience regularly awe and wonder and the oneness of all things, this is not sufficient.

People who show up at a Zen practice group – even more than your average Unitarian Universalist – are likely to be looking for a particular wow spiritual experience. A newcomer is likely to show up wanting to become “enlightened.” If they stick around and keep coming back, they will sooner or later hear me tell them, “You are already enlightened.” And, “whatever conception of enlightenment you may have, it’s not like that....Nor is it otherwise.” And, “The practice IS the enlightenment.” From time to time I’ll even say, “enlightenment is delusion.”

Sometimes in my talks to Zen groups the topic of the ethical transgressions of certain famous Zen masters comes up. Certain Zen masters have been abusive. Some committed sexual misconduct or other abuses of power, or skimmed from the financial resources of the temple or zen center they served, or were alcoholics. How could enlightened masters act that way? One answer might be to say, “they just weren’t very enlightened after all.” I don’t think that’s it.

Look, spiritual enlightenment doesn’t guarantee ethical awareness. Satori isn’t going to make you able to play the oboe if you don’t already have that skill. If you are a skilled musician, you might be able to more readily slip into “the zone” when performing, but, no, spiritual development won’t impart the basic skills if you don’t have them. Nirvana doesn’t improve your math skills. And: awakening to the vast oneness and emptiness of all things isn’t by itself going to clue you in to just how much devastation your peccadilloes can wreak upon a community that trusted you.

If you want to master the oboe, you have to learn and train at the oboe. Meditating is good for a number of things – that’s not one of them. To learn calculus, you need a calculus teacher – or appropriate book or series of internet videos. Spiritual teachers or books or internet videos will not improve your ability to solve calculus problems.

Ethical growth requires cognitive learning that is distinct from spiritual maturity. It’s not just a matter of being good, or kindhearted -- or even enlightened. It takes study to find out what the effects of actions and words are likely to be.

Some of you may remember the 1960s – though the saying goes that if you remember the 60s you weren’t really a part of them. In the 60s, a number of Unitarian Universalists – including some of our ministers, were what was then thought of as “freewheeling” when it came to sexual conduct. Our movement learned some hard empirical lessons about just how harmful that can be. All we knew then was that the sexual ethic of the puritans didn’t work for us, so we were experimenting with alternatives – and some of those experiments were disastrous. Looking back at that time we are now in the position to say that behavior was unethical even though the perpetrators might not have had any way to know any better.

We know better now: we have evolved some standards of what is inappropriate, when back in the 1960s even to invoke the word “appropriate” -- or its cognates, “propriety” and “proper” – was commonly scorned as unliberated. Of course, inappropriate conduct still happens sometimes – but we have better tools for at least naming it when it does.

When I think about what I knew when I was 25 – and what American culture understood in the 1960s – if I’d been a young minister at that time, oh, man, I hate to think what I might have done – what neither I nor our churches at that time had the brakes to put on to prevent what we hadn’t even learned yet to call abuse. I am so glad that by the time I started seminary in the last year of the 20th century they were teaching us about power dynamics, and what constitutes abuse of that power.

My point is that that was something I had to learn – cognitively learn. There were teachers and I was taught – rather like grammar. Ethics and grammar are alike in that we pick up the basics -- usually -- in the process of being socialized and learning how to talk, but the finer points have to be more formally and intentionally taught. Interestingly, the way both grammar and ethics are taught is by identifying mistakes. Grammar mistakes generally don’t hurt anyone, so, outside of classroom contexts, it’s rude to point them out – but with ethical mistakes the stakes are higher.

We’ve done a lot of learning about boundaries in the last few decades – how to respect autonomy while also making space for joyful connection. Just to learn this vocabulary – to be able to converse and think with concepts like boundary, and autonomy represents ethical growth.

We’ve done a lot of learning about privilege – and about the way White Supremacy culture infects so many ways of thinking. That’s ethical growth – and we certainly have further to go. Our words and actions have effects on other people that can be entirely independent of what we thought they meant, what we wanted them to mean, what we intended them to mean. Finding out what our words and actions might be conveying to others – what impact we might be having – takes some study -- some reading, some conversations, some listening. It’s a matter of learning. Finding out what environmental damage our consumer choices might be doing is a matter of learning.

II.

Understanding all the effects of our actions can be a daunting task. This was illustrated in the TV sitcom “The Good Place” – a comedy about moral philosophy. The premise is that throughout life, people get points for doing good things, and lose points for doing bad things. Celestial beings in another dimension are keeping track of every human being’s point total. When you die, if you have enough points you go to the Good Place. If you don’t, you go to the bad place.

One of those celestial beings – Michael, played by Ted Danson -- has taken a particular interest in the four main character humans of the show, and is trying to get them into the Good Place – but no matter how many times he manages to get them sent back to Earth to try to be better, they can’t seem to get enough points.

In season 3, episode 10, which first aired in fall 2018, Michael makes the discovery that, in fact, no one has gotten into the good place for 521 years. For more than five centuries every single person has, upon dying, been sent to the bad place. At first, Michael thinks the demons who run the bad place have been tampering with the system, denying people their points to keep them from getting into the Good Place. But then he realizes that the ethical challenges people face in the modern world have gotten more complicated.

In a key scene, he’s looking through past records of human actions and the points that were garnered. He reads out two examples for comparison:

“In 1534, Douglas Wynegarr of Hawkhurst, England gave his grandmother roses for her birthday. He picked them himself, walked them over to her. She was happy. Boom. 145 points. Now . . . yeah, here we go. In 2009, Doug Ewing of Scaggsville, Maryland, also gave his grandmother a dozen roses, but he lost four points. Why? Because he ordered roses using a cell phone that was made in a sweatshop. The flowers were grown with toxic pesticides, picked by exploited migrant workers, delivered from thousands of miles away, which created a massive carbon footprint, and his money went to a billionaire racist CEO, who sends his female employees pictures of his genitals. Whoo!

Another character, Tahani, observes, “That Is a very odd thing to cheer.” But Michael explains:

“Don’t you understand? The Bad Place isn’t tampering with points. They don’t have to. Because every day the world gets a little more complicated, and being a good person gets a little harder. Gather the others. We have a lot to do.”

And off they go.

So. Yes, we today need to think about the ethics of buying products manufactured in sweatshops. We need to think about whether our consumer choices are facilitating toxic pesticide use, migrant worker exploitation – and more: resource depletion, habitat destruction, species extinction, pollutants of air, of water, of soil. We need to think about our carbon footprint – and whether we’re tacitly condoning billionaire, racist, sexual-harassing CEOs.

Douglas Wynnegarr of Hawkhurst, England in 1534 didn’t have to think about any of those things. But is it really any harder to be a good 21st-century person than it was to be a good 16th-century person? Look, forget about the points – the whole concept of getting points is a silly TV conceit, and it’s funny, but it has nothing to do with trying to live a life being the best person you can. On the one hand, sure, we do have a lot to pay attention to that people in the Medieval and Renaissance periods didn’t. But they didn’t have any way to think about those things. The facts of life were different, and the knowledge about those facts was different. Yet then, as now, ethical behavior demands taking into account the effects of our actions – which entails the due diligence to find out what we can about what those effects may be.

If we, today, are called upon to consider our effects on the environment and on systems of oppression, we also have the resources to do so – sources of knowledge and understanding unavailable in previous centuries. The challenge Maya Angelou articulated was the same then as it is now: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

Ted Danson’s character Michael humorously recapped some of the new ethical challenges in our age – but every age has had the task to work as best they could on how to be a good person. We have chronicles of how past ages did that work, going back to Greeks of ancient Athens and the Israelites of ancient Jerusalem.

Importantly, we need each other to do that. We have to cultivate the institutions that teach us to think about and reasonably pursue a good life – "good" both in the sense of virtuous and in the sense of truly fulfilling and joyous.

In this regard, there has been a shift. The relevant shift is not in the last 500 years, but in the last 20 – and that’s what I want to talk about in the last part.

III.

David Brooks recently pondered:

“Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years.” ("How America Got Mean," Atlantic, 2023 Sep)

Gun sales are up. Social trust is way down.

“In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.”

The factors that are making us mean are, of course, also making us sad. Deaths of despair – that is, deaths from suicide or substance addiction – are rising. In 1990, according to the General Social Survey, 8 percent of Americans rated their happiness at the lowest level. Thirty-two years later, in 2022, Americans rating their happiness at the lowest level was up from 8 percent to 20 percent.

What are these factors making us mean and sad? There are a number of inter-relating factors. Social media is making us crazy. We’re more isolated -- participate less in community organizations -- and that makes us crazy. We’re becoming a more racially diverse country, and the challenge to come to grips with that has millions of white Americans in a panic. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, economic inequality has been growing and growing, leaving people increasingly afraid, alienated, and pessimistic. There are a lot of inter-relating factors.

To address them, we need each other, and to cultivate the institutions that teach us to think about and reasonably pursue a good life – how to be moral. Brooks writes:

“In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation. . . . A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. . . . If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.”

It’s not that we don’t yearn for moral purpose and meaning. It’s just that too many of us don’t know how.

The yearning is reflected in the popularity of some TV shows. “The Good Place” was about what we owe to each other, and how we can learn to be good. And when it finished its run, there was "Ted Lasso" – the most watched show on Apple TV+. Jason Sudeikis’ character, Ted Lasso, an American coaching soccer in England, articulated a two-sentence description of moral formation. He said:

“For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”

Ted Lasso is

“an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely.” (Brooks)

So, that’s great – and it is the lesson that we long for – but a couple TV shows are not enough. We need our schools and our leaders to put questions of how to be a good person, how to live a good life – not just a materialistic, consumerist life – at the center. And there are areas of ethical growth aside from TV shows: the growth I was mentioning earlier, growth in our understanding of how power dynamics can be abused, how to recognize where white supremacy culture is manifesting, where patriarchy is manifesting, why carbon footprints matter. All that represents real ethical growth.

To pull through this period – to more widely share the ethical growth now available -- there will need to be more places like this one: congregations that, week in and week out, affirm that we – individually and collectively – are called to grow ethically, to become better than we were: more kind, less arrogant; more respectful, less entitled; more curious, less judgmental. That’s what ethical growth is, and may it be our path.

Amen.

Being a People of Covenant

I.

Imagine a religion where people of different beliefs worship as one faith. Back in the aughts, a Unitarian Universalist ad campaign promoted this slogan. "Imagine a religion where people of different beliefs worship as one faith." How could that be? One faith – one religion – many beliefs?

That’s possible because religion isn’t really about belief. So when I’m asked, "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?" I usually answer: What Unitarian Universalists believe is that your religion isn’t about what you believe.

So what is religion about? I’m so glad you asked. Three things. One, it’s about how you live – that is, the ethics and values that guide your life. Two, it’s about community – the people you come together with to share in rituals that affirm your community bond. Three, it’s about a certain kind of experience – the experiences we call religious experience, or spiritual experience: moments of transcendence and awe, of apprehending the beauty, wonder, and oneness of all things.

Those are three rather different things. Yet a faith institution exists to weave them together so that each one supports and reinforces the other two. The ethics and values that guide your life facilitate your community belonging, and prepare you to be open to transcendent experience. Your faith community helps reinforce certain ethics and values, and also helps lay the ground for you to have transcendent experiences. Transcendent experiences expose you to a oneness that awakens compassion, which becomes part of your ethics and values, and also draws you closer to your community. In faith community, each strand of the braid is shaped and directed so that it can reinforce the other two.

The idea that religion is about believing goes back to St. Paul. When Paul invented the religion known as Christianity, his big innovation was to make believing central. When Islam came along 6 centuries later, it followed Paul’s model, so Islam is also belief-centric. But the other world religions are not belief-centric. The Asian religions have teachings, but if you happen to not accept a few of them, that’s fine. What makes a person Jewish isn’t what they believe, but what they practice and that they have a shared history and understanding of themselves as under the laws.

From our roots in Christianity, Unitarian Universalism has traveled a long road back from belief-centric religion, and it was a road of understanding ourselves more and more as being people of covenant – not creed, which is to say, not belief.

A key step on that road was the Cambridge Platform. I’d like you to know about the Cambridge Platform if you don’t. The Puritans who founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, proceeded to adopt in 1648, the Cambridge Platform. These Puritans didn’t have a strong political tradition other than the sense of being bound in covenant. At first, they felt need for neither a creed nor a specific structure of church governance – after all, they were God’s people bound together by covenant, and that was enough.

We today don’t agree with those Puritans on much. But we are their descendants. Two hundred years after the Plymouth landing – or, invasion – the Unitarian denomination formed consisting of New England congregations that split from their Congregationalist Puritan past. We’ve left behind the focus on sin, the doctrine of total depravity, and of predestination. We’ve sought – and still seek – to correct the way covenant was used to dismiss, disrespect, and oppress people, such as indigenous peoples, deemed not to be in the covenant.

One thing that we’ve kept from our Puritan forebears is this sense of being a people of Covenant. We are not bound together by creed. Unitarians today aren’t even bound together, as the Puritans were, by a common scripture: the 66 canonical books of the Protestant Bible. We are noncreedal and noncanonical. We are bound by covenant – by our promise to each other to walk together on this long, strange journey called life, to have each other’s backs – to care for one another. Covenant.

By 1648, a generation after the Plymouth colony began, the Puritans, facing criticism from Presbyterians for not having a polity, decided that, after all, they did would adopt a polity. They didn’t want Episcopal Polity – rule by the bishops – which is what the Church of England had. They didn’t want Presbyterian Polity – governance by groups of elders called Presbyters – which is what, back in England, the dissenting churches (dissenting, that is, from the Church of England). The Puritans would also have been aware of the Catholic church’s structure of governance, and that was definitely out of the question for them.

They decided, in 1648, to create a polity that was none of the above. It would be a new polity, one based on covenant. They called it Congregational polity, and The Cambridge Platform of 1648 spelled out what this “Congregational Polity” meant. The Platform laid out a basic form for congregations to have: a role for pastors, for teachers, and for ruling elders who oversaw church administration. As the name "Congregational Polity" implies, the Cambridge Platform gave each congregation the fundamental authority for their own operations. A congregation did have some responsibilities to other congregations; the Cambridge Platform identified six:

• take thought for each other's welfare;
• consult and advise each other;
• admonish congregations that erred;
• allow members of one church to receive communion in other churches;
• send letters of recommendation when a member goes to a new church; and
• financially assist poor churches.

Beyond these, each congregation was autonomous.

The Cambridge Platform of 1648 is the foundational document of Congregational Polity – the polity we still follow today. Along with our free search for truth and meaning comes free self-governance. We make our own bylaws, elect our own board, hire our own staff, call our own minister, buy and own and maintain our own building and grounds. It is up to us alone to fund the maintenance of our home, the programs, the ministry, through which we nurture our spirits and help heal our world.

Critics of congregational polity call it a type of religious anarchism – and there’s some truth to that. Still, we share our congregational polity with a number of other denominations. The United Church of Christ – formerly known as the Congregationalist Church – also descends from those New England Puritan churches – namely, the ones that didn’t break away to become Unitarian -- so the UCC also has congregational polity. Baptists and various forms of nondominational Christianity have congregational polity, as do Quakers, Disciples of Christ, most Jewish synagogues, many Sikh Gurdwaras, and most Islamic mosques in the US.

Some of these are also officially creedless, though they all have a shared scripture. Unitarian Universalists are, to the best of my knowledge, alone in being held together neither by the authority of a creed, nor by the authority of a common scripture, nor under the authority of a bishop, synod, diocese, presbytery, or conciliarity.

Which raises the question: What does hold us together? Sometimes, sadly, the answer is: nothing, and we come apart. Congregations acrimoniously split, or dissolve. When we are held together, the name for our sticking by each other is covenant.

Another covenant that may be more familiar is the marriage covenant. That’s also a promise to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. The words of the vow can be highly variable, but at base it comes down to promising to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. It is a committing of our lives that is ultimately beyond what any set of words can capture, whether those words are the vows spoken at a marriage ceremony or the words of a congregation’s covenant.

Yes, you can make a promise without signing a piece of paper – whether that paper is a marriage certificate or our membership book. You don’t have to sign anything to make a promise. It’s just that signing makes the promise public, makes the relationship public. Signing that paper tells the world that you have entered into a sacred relationship – with a spouse, in one case -- with a congregation, in the other.

II.

Our greatest 20th century Unitarian theologian, James Luther Adams, understood “God” to be “community forming power.” That power which comes into existence when human beings gather in a group and which allows that group to form itself into a community – that’s what James Luther Adams called God. So Adams did a great deal of thinking and writing about Voluntary Associations – about the Covenants that are the community-forming power.

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal issues a report every four years, and their 2021 report was called, “Unlocking the Power of Covenant.” The Commission observes that: “We are the promises we make and the vows we break.” A Covenant, it says, “is a mutual sacred promise between individuals or groups, to stay in relationship, care about each other, and work together in good faith.” The Commission goes on to say:

“No single concept is more central to our faith understanding than being in covenant. It is at the core of our identity. It is how we try to build and sustain the Beloved Community. It is the foundation of our governance structures at all levels.”

Ultimately the covenant is beyond language, beyond what words can say. It is the embodied commitment to keep on being together in love. Married couples may have long forgotten the exact words of the vow they spoke on their wedding day, yet, as long as they remain married and together they are embodying their covenant in their way of being together.

The ultimate covenant is beyond words but is embodied in our way of being together, expressed in our patterns of interaction. Still, attempting to put the wordless into words can be helpful. Giving it some words, inevitably imperfect and needing regular revision, but still some words to express our commitment to each other – that can provide guidance about how we shall be together.

For congregations, covenants come in two main forms: aspirational covenants and behavioral covenants. Behavioral covenants delineate the behaviors we promise to follow or avoid. Because behavior is publicly observable, we can notice when someone has broken covenant, and encourage zir back in to the right relationship that our covenant says we promise to uphold.

It’s a reality of being a people of covenant that we sometimes do break covenant. And that reality means that being a people of covenant also entails being a people of forgiveness, recognizing that we stray and calling each back, over and over, every time we do. The life of covenant turns out to be less about staying and more about returning – over and over and over again.

Rev. David Pyle was with us this weekend for a startup workshop that some of you were here for. Rev. Pyle has had some Zen training, as have I, and he referenced the basic teaching for Zen meditation. Focus on your breath. We usually suggest first-timers count their breaths, 1 to 10, then start over at one. Or just bring all your attention to the breath coming in, and going out. Your mind will wander off. It will start thinking about one darn thing or another. That’s OK. That’s what minds do. The mind secretes thoughts the way the liver secretes bile. The practice is, as soon as you notice you’ve wandered off, bring your attention back to the breath.

The practice is the coming back. The point of a 25-minute meditation sit is not to be so concentrated that you stay focused on the breath the whole time. The point is to spend that time coming back over and over: noticing a thought, letting it go, returning to the breath. Returning to the breath is the practice.

And as Rev. Pyle pointed out, coming back is also the point of the practice of covenant: to return over and over to mindfulness of the promises that define who you are. Our aspirational covenant is our mission: to grow ethically and spiritually, serve justly, and love radically. This is not behaviorally defined. There’s no stipulation as to what behaviors constitute growing ethically and spiritually, serving justly, and loving radically. So we can’t judge whether someone else is out of covenant.

Certain behaviors might cause us to inquire gently whether you are keeping the aspiration in mind, but, ultimately, only you can decide if you are keeping the covenant to grow, serve, and love – and only you can assess how well or poorly you are growing, serving, and loving. You haven’t broken the covenant unless you’ve stopped trying, stopped aspiring to grow, to serve, and to love – stopped bringing your mind back to this covenant every time you notice you’ve drifted off from it.

Behavioral covenants do stipulate some behaviors. Because behaviors are observable, behavioral covenant allows us to go the further step of holding each other accountable. We have a team at work on developing a behavioral covenant for this congregation.

Covenants make us. They spell out who we are. When I don’t know who “us” is, then I don’t know who “me” is. By becoming more conscious of our covenants – spoken and unspoken – we can live into them more fully, and become who we are with greater awareness and greater intentionality.

Marcia Pally’s 2016 book, Commonwealth and Covenant, recognizes that we need both situatedness and separability. We need to be situated — embedded in functional and caring families, and thick communities that define our values and our selves: villages of ordinariness in which you can be your plain old ordinary self without the constant expectation to prove yourself.

We also need separability. We need to have the freedom and the support “to go off and create and explore and experiment with new ways of thinking and living.”

What creates situatedness, notes Pally, is covenant. A contract protects interests, she says, but a covenant protects relationships.

“A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love.”

Contracts stipulate an exchange of goods or services, but people in a covenant delight in offering their gifts.

We are here to offer each other what gifts we can – to hold open the space of grace. It’s about seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other.

I was once leading a Zen group that met weekly in the 2nd and 3rd grade classroom. Every week we Zen practitioners would gather in this room, and there on the wall, handwritten with marker on newsprint was the class covenant. It showed all the signs of a process in which grownups were drawing the language out of the out of 7- and 8-year-olds so that it would really be the kids’ own covenant. It said things like: “One: Listen and don’t speak when someone is holding the speaking stone.” There was: “Three: Pick up after each other and ourselves – don’t litter.” Notice: pick up after each other, not just after ourselves. The last one was: “11. Come together with a calm and open mind.” Nice. My favorite one, though, was number two: “Be kind to others even when they are not your friend.” Even our kids grasp the gist of the point that being a people of covenant means seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other.

It’s about giving of ourselves, and being called together into a different way of being in the world. I have been held and held together in covenant with Unitarian Universalists my whole life – and now I am held in covenant with you. It is such a wonder. Thank you so much.

Amen.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." It's a line from a song by The Who. Some of you may be thinking, “Just who does this new guy think he is?” – so I hasten to clarify: I’m not the boss. But let me also clarify: you aren’t either. So who’s the boss? Who or what is the ultimate authority around here?

In the traditional Christian churches, the answer to that question is God. Whether such an entity be imaginary or not, this has at least the salutary effect of directing the congregation’s allegiance to something worthier – or imagined as worthier -- than ego, whether individual ego or collective ego. It can be helpful to imagine.

For Unitarian Universalists, however, the ultimate authority – that to which our allegiance is directed – worthier even than the goodness of community and togetherness – is: our mission. At this church, that’s: "Grow ethically and spiritually; serve justly; love radically." That’s the boss. That’s the sheriff in these parts.

So when I say “new boss, same as the old boss,” it is literally the same. This mission is exactly the same as it was last year and the year before that. Not a word is changed. And when I say “meet this new boss” I mean that as our church year begins together, let us begin it by reintroducing, by reacquainting ourselves with this boss whom we are here to serve. Though the same as it has been, yet let it be for us new. Let it be freshly compelling. Let it be rejuvenated, sparkling and shining as washed by the waters of our coming together.

At the year’s beginning, let us take stock. How are we doing? It is our covenant, our promise, our mission, our vow: to grow ethically and spiritually, to serve justly, to love radically. Have we been? Have we been growing ethically? Growing spiritually? Serving justly? Loving radically?

However well or poorly you would say we have been fulfilling our mission, the question before us today, as it is every day, is how shall we fulfill it now? What shall we do with this day, this week, this year to grow ethically, grow spiritually, serve justly, and love radically? What is the work that your spirit longs to take up to grow, to serve, to love? What spiritual muscle toning exercises do you need?

This church is your spiritual gym for doing those exercises, strengthening the meaning, purpose, and wholeness of your life. My colleague Rev. Victoria Weinstein has written:

“If I go to the gym and people are sprawled out napping on the floor of the aerobics studio, I will think the gym management is not just remiss, but nuts. It’s no different in church. We’re all there for heart strengthening of a different kind. Leaders should be empowered to be able to say: 'Get off the aerobics floor, please. You can nap at home.' This isn’t about not loving people. It’s about being clear what congregational life is for. Napping on the floor of the aerobics studio is not part of our mission, so we won’t be addressing your complaints about the pillows.”

As we ingather for the 2023-24 year ahead, we come together to do the work of growing, serving, and loving. We are here to serve the mission, which includes serving others. You’re not here to serve me, and I’m not here to serve you – except insofar as doing so serves our mission. And I want to urge you to keep in mind that, actually, the staff is not here to serve you either, nor is your board. When it comes to our board, yes, your votes elected them, but you elected them to serve the mission, not you. When it comes to the staff, yes, your contributions provide their wages, but please understand that you’re paying them, too, to serve the mission, not you. So, as Rev. Weinstein put it, we won’t be addressing complaints about the pillows -- or anything else that isn’t about this church growing, serving, and loving. Eyes on the prize, good people. Eyes on the prize.

Tall order, but that is the mission we shoulder -- nothing less. To say that a church is a spiritual gym is not to forget that the church is also a spiritual infirmary. There are times in life when we come to church sick at heart, soul weary, broken-spirited. Before we can think about the exercises and disciplines which cultivate and strengthen our wisdom, compassion, and equanimity, we just need to be cared for. We need replenishing rest. We need salve for our woundedness, for indeed salve is the root of salvation, with which our religious forbears were particularly concerned. Yes, the church has that pastoral function in addition to its prophetic task to serve justice.

Thus the church’s role, as the saying goes, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This is not a matter of dividing people into two groups – as if the usher at the door of this auditorium sanctuary were to ask as you came in, “are you feeling more comfortable or more afflicted this morning? Comfortable on the right, afflicted on the left.” Our morning service could then direct toward the afflicted side what balm in Gilead we have – empathy and sympathy for your troubles, assurances of our help, our loving presence. Then when we talk about the injustices of the world -- the needs of the poor, the exploited, the downtrodden, the excluded – we’ll be looking at you, comfortable side. The gist of the message to one side would be “oh, you poor baby,” and to the other side it would be, “get off your butt.”

It doesn’t work like that. The truth is each of us is simultaneously afflicted with burdens while also comfortably complacent. And the messages for your comfortability are the same messages as for your affliction:

Number one, this too shall pass – grief and loss comes for all of us, and so does healing and wholeness. Whatever is comfortable in your life will pass – as will whatever afflicts.

Number two, service to others according to whatever capacity we have is the remedy either way. Compassionate service lifts us out of complacency and equally well lifts us out of despair.

A third message that Sunday services in this space will sometimes emphasize is: life and the world are beautiful, fundamentally mysterious, transcendent, and if we pay attention they will evoke deep wonder and awe. Awe is not comfortable. It pulls us from the narrowness of complacency while it also eases our grief and fills us with the vastness that makes our sadness small.

In all of these ways, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable turn out to be the same thing. So each one of us needs the gym and the infirmary at the same time. What would that be like? Well, it would be kind of like physical therapy, wouldn’t it? Physical therapy is equal parts hospital and gym -- equal parts care for your wound and pushing you to do the exercises anyway, because that’s how you strengthen and heal.

By analogy, we are in the spiritual therapy business – pushing your spirit to stretch and strengthen because that is how you heal from the wounds and the grief that your spirit bears – and how you help heal our world.

There are two things to notice, to simultaneously bear in mind, about our mission. One is that we are doing it. We are carrying out this mission – we do grow and are growing, we do serve and are serving, we do love and are loving. The mission is simply descriptive of what we do here.

Yet simultaneously we notice that we haven’t yet grown, served, and loved in all the ways that we are coming to be able to. The mission calls us forward to ever newer heights. It is not merely descriptive but also prescriptive. We celebrate what we are – and what we yet may be. We celebrate both our being and our becoming.

Let me say a little bit about each of these three. First: "Grow ethically and spiritually." Notice it says “and.” Not “or.” Our mission is both: to grow ethically and to grow spiritually.

Grow ethically. That is: develop clarity about the principles you live by, clarity in our understanding of what it means to be a good person. Growing ethically involves deepening integrity and cultivating virtues. The classic list of virtues is Aristotle’s 12: courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, patience, truthfulness, good humor, friendliness, shame, justice, and prudence. Each of those takes unpacking, and today I’m just giving you names. Cultivating virtues is growing ethically.

Grow spiritually. Here the emphasis is on meaning and belonging – big picture meaning: what does life, your life, mean? The fundamental spiritual malady is the condition of feeling that it’s all meaningless -- and that one doesn't belong. Whatever words you might come up with to answer that question, the crux of the matter is whether those words feel sufficient and satisfactory. The words I use as reminders to evoke my sense of meaning and belonging might not feel sufficient and satisfactory to anyone else – so the words are only tags for meaning and belonging of your life that is beyond all language.

While growing ethically entails cultivating all the virtues, growing spiritually entails two that Aristotle didn’t mention: equanimity, an inner peace even in the midst of turmoil – and compassion, a readiness for presence to suffering. Those are what we may call the spiritual virtues: equanimity and compassion.

This year, in the service of our mission to grow ethically and spiritually, we are launching Connection Circles. In a small group, you’ll have the chance to explore some of the key themes for growing our ethical and spiritual understanding -- significant issues on which religions at their best have always guided people to greater insight -- issues such as this year’s monthly themes:
Covenant
Justice
Interdependence
Transformation
Pluralism
Equity
Generosity
Love
Courage
and Hope.

Our Connection Circles are for exploring together, and spiritually growing and deepening, each in our own way. They meet once a month, Sep through Jun. You won't want to miss a single one. However, even if you miss most of your group’s meetings, you'll still find it valuable to attend occasionally. Signing up does not commit you to attend -- we just need to know which group you'll go to when you do have a chance to go.

I have been so impressed to experience the wisdom and the connection – the love, laughter, and insight – that Unitarian Universalists can offer each other when give ourselves permission and the structure for doing that. We have a whole lot more we can learn from each other than anything weekly sermons alone can convey. So I’m asking every member to sign up for a connection circle. You can sign up on line if you haven’t yet.

When you signed the membership book, you committed yourself to this church’s mission, you committed to growing ethically and spiritually and helping others grow. Our connection circles are vitals ways to do that. Friends, and visitors are also welcome to sign up.

The second prong of this church’s mission – our mission – is to serve justly. And here I draw your attention to our social justice work. We have a number of Faith in Action options. Freestore, the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund are the special focus this year. We also do Compassion and Choices, Green Sanctuary, Family Promise, Immigration Justice, Legislative Action, LGBTQ Justice.

Serve justly. That’s our commitment as the people of First Unitarian Church Des Moines. It’s what we’re here for – to serve justice through taking part of your church’s social justice work.

And the third part: love radically. Love. Radically – all the way to the root. To be radical requires being unconditional. Loving radically is unconditional solidarity with all people, with all animals, with all life – indeed, even with nonlife: rocks and rivers, air and sky, sun, moon, and stars.

For this one I don’t have particular church programs to point you to. Rather, radical love is the spirit to bring to everything you do through the church, and through your life.

The world needs our Unitarian Universalist voice at the table. It needs our caring hands reaching out in compassion. Let us be ingathered, for a new year stretches before us. Let us flow together, roll on together as a mighty river, and, in the words of the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”