SERVING HUMANITY IN FRIENDSHIP

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 10, 2004

It occurred to me this past week, as I was thinking about what I was going to say here this morning, that after today there are only three more Sundays until the election. We’ve got one more debate to go, the polls are tightening, in a lot of states voter registration has already closed (although I think here in Massachusetts you still have until Friday to sign up -- does anyone know for certain?) Interestingly enough, I find myself feeling a lot more calm and relaxed than I did even a few weeks ago now that election day is just around the corner. It’s not that I don’t think the election will be close, or that I’ve stopped caring about who will win. It’s just that I feel like I’ve already done my bit, and I’m ready for it to be over. I know who I’m going to vote for (and at this point I can’t really think of anything that would get me to change my mind), I’ve contributed all the money that I’m going to contribute, I may still sign up to help people get to the polls on election day or something like that, but I don’t really think that the outcome is in any doubt here in Massachusetts, and I’m not really sure that I want to vote absentee just so that I can travel to someplace like Florida or Pennsylvania (like so many of my colleagues are) simply to watch other people cast votes that might actually count if they’re actually counted. I feel a little like my son Jacob did back in 1988, when he was only 15 and Michael Dukakis was running against the President’s father. I think we might have been watching the World Series [that was the year that the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Oakland A’s, and Kirk Gibson hit that dramatic 9th inning home run to win Game One], or maybe it was just some meaningless football game...but whatever it was, at one point Jake looked up from a particularly vicious attack ad and announced to no one in particular “I’ll be so glad when this election is over, and we can go back to watching beer commercials again.”

Of course, it’s not just the Presidency that’s up for grabs on November 2nd. There’s a complete slate of State and Local issues and candidates on the ballot, plus (technically at least) the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate. Between gerrymandering and the absence of effective campaign finance reform, the power of incumbency is so great these days that there are really very few Congressional races that are actually that competitive...but even so, House Majority leader Tom Delay made certain that before the Congress recessed for the election there were a series of essentially meaningless procedural votes on issues like same-sex marriage and the assault weapons ban, just so that he could get Democratic Representatives from more conservative southern and western states on the record as having voted in favor of gun control, and against traditional marriage.

But think about it for a moment. If you had a choice, where would you rather live: in a place where assault weapons were banned, and it was OK for people to marry whoever they loved; or someplace where everyone had an assault rifle, and it was illegal to be gay? Denmark, or Afghanistan? Canada, or Iraq? Or what about Carlisle, Massachusetts or Midland, Texas? I don’t have any trouble knowing how I would answer these questions, and I don’t imagine that many of you do either. But we live in a diverse nation, where people are free to have different opinions. And while I may like to believe that it’s simply because they don’t know any better, or that they’ve never really BEEN to Midland Texas...it may well be that they’ve just never been anywhere else.

In any event, it occurred to me that with all the flash polling trying to track likely voters in the so-called “battleground states,” and the media pundits talking about NASCAR Dads and ”Security” Moms, and which candidate appeared most “Presidential” at the most recent debate, that we’ve kinda lost track of what good ol’ “Joe Six-Pack” really thinks. And so I thought I’d sponsor an informal poll of my own. [take out the beer cartons] Just bring your empties and put them in the appropriate place, and who knows? -- maybe in another few weeks or so we’ll all be able to put up our feet and breath a little easier, crack open a cold one, and just enjoy the game.

OK, I suppose it’s time now to turn to my real topic for the day.

We say it together out loud every week, but how often do we take just a moment or two to reflect upon what it really means? “Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest for truth is our sacrament, and service is our prayer.” These are basically our dogmas (although technically, Unitarian-Universalists aren’t supposed to have any dogmas) -- they represent our most profound opinions, the things we believe are ultimately true. And then we follow them with a series of three parallel duties or responsibilities: “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship” all working toward our ultimate goal of “the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine.” It’s an agreement, a mutual promise or Covenant, that we make “with each other, and with God.”

I’ll have more to say about the actual “covenant” part of our Covenant next week, but today I want to focus in on the idea of service, and especially these twin notions that helping our fellow human beings is both an act of friendship, and a form of prayer. I hope by now it is abundantly clear that the order in which each of these items appears in our covenant isn’t exactly random. There’s an obvious, dynamic logic to it it all: our commitment to love and to dwelling together in peace makes us naturally curious about one another’s lives, and discovering the commonalities which link us together in community despite our many differences. As our wisdom and knowledge of one another grow over time, we likewise come to recognize our obligation to help one another out in times of trouble or need...and this vocation, this call to be useful, to be of service, is both the culmination and the fulfillment of our free religious quest. It’s more than merely an act of friendship, or “neighborliness.” It’s more than just the tangible satisfaction of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands a little dirty doing God’s work in the world. It’s also an act of worship, of faith and faithfulness -- a form of prayer by which we communicate our feelings of devotion and gratitude to our Creator....

The idea of prayer is sometimes a little problematic for Unitarian Universalists. If you’re not really certain whether you even believe in God, what’s the point in trying to talk to her? You might as well be talking to yourself, or to the Universe, or to thin air. If you look the word up in a good etymological dictionary you’ll discover that prayer comes from the Latin verb precari which means “to beg.” And this is certainly one very popular understanding of prayer: begging God for something we really don’t deserve. For a trial lawyer, the “prayer” is a plaintiff’s pre-trail request for the legal relief or monetary damages that they would hope to be awarded if the jury finds in their favor on every issue. This is one of the reasons why the current administration hates trial lawyers so much: it’s because they realize that sometimes the prayers of deserving people are indeed answered, and they can’t quite get it through their heads that litigation is NOT just another form of begging. Or maybe it’s because they believe that some people are simply more deserving than others, and forget that it’s only a frivolous lawsuit if your weren’t the one who was injured in the accident.

But for more sophisticated people of faith, there is another dimension of prayer which reflects the reality that God really does help those who help themselves. Prayer in this sense is an appeal to the values and the principles which we hold most deeply, and the attempt to shape our lives in conformity to those same values and principles. It’s not a matter of telling God what WE want, it’s a process of discerning what God wants for US, and then asking for (and receiving) the strength, the wisdom, and the persistence to become the kind of person God wants us to be. And this process of discernment generally requires a lot more listening than it does begging. It asks us to look long and hard at who we really are, and what we truly believe. It asks us to question and challenge everything we have been told by others about who we “ought” to be, and what we “should” be doing, and demands instead that we search our souls for that small spiritual part of ourselves created in the image of God, and that we endeavor to make it larger, while at the same time learning to recognize and evoke that same spirit in those around us as well.

Now this isn’t to say that there isn’t potentially a lot of truth in what others tell us about who we ought to be, or what we should be doing. But if we simply take these pronouncements at face value, without doing the kind of prayerful reflection and contemplation I’ve just described, our faith will always be a little superficial -- it will be something we imitate, rather than something we live. And likewise, without the element of friendship, of service to others or some great purpose larger than ourselves, our faith potentially becomes too isolated and introspective, perhaps ultimately even narcissistic. Yet even here we must also be careful. There are people in this world who adamantly believe that God wants them to fly airliners into skyscrapers, or to cut off the heads of the infidels who occupy their country. There are people who believe that because they are self-proclaimed servants of God, on a mission from God -- a crusade, a jihad (call it what you will) -- that they are free to kill the evil-doers wherever they may find them, or to take them into custody without due process, maybe even torture them a little, because the nobility and the urgency of the Cause Itself does away with the need for any kind of “test:” of legitimacy, of credibility, or even subsequent accountability for the wisdom and appropriateness of their decisions. Yet this is simply wrong. When evil is answered with evil, evil wins...even if it is all done in the name of God, and with the best of intentions, or for the most noble purposes.

But when the obligation is simply “to serve humanity in friendship,” the potential for inadvertently doing evil is dramatically diminished. Not that it becomes completely impossible: we human beings are incredibly creative when it comes to rationalizing our bad behavior, and sometimes equally incredibly shortsighted about the true consequences of our choices. Thoreau wrote in Walden that “there is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted,” and that if he “knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” But to serve humanity in FRIENDSHIP, to do good for another human being knowing who they really are, and giving authentically out of the best part of ourselves, is an entirely different matter. “We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease...” Thoreau continued. “I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind.”

This is the ultimate test of prayerful service: do our lives and our works truly represent a blessing to humanity, to mankind? Are we, through our service, God’s answer to our prayers? Do our endeavors lead to reconciliation rather than conflict; are we servants of peace, justice, wisdom, mercy, healing and redemption, rather than merely instruments of hatred and revenge? And yes, it IS a complicated business, and yes, we do the best we can. But by simply serving our fellow human beings in friendship, we become better people ourselves. Not just superficially, but deep within ourselves, in our hearts and spirits. We become indeed the people God intends for us to be.

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A COVENANT OF ALL SOULS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 17, 2004

I realized that there was probably something seriously wrong with the priorities in my life when it dawned on me this past week that, although I was conversant with the latest head-to-head flash polling numbers from the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin, I had somehow failed to notice that “the Glove,” #20 Gary Payton, Oregon State University class of 1990, two-time Olympic Gold medalist, nine-time All Star, and for over a decade the leader and go-to guy for my hometown basketball team the Seattle Supersonics, is now playing point-guard for the Celtics here in Boston. Admittedly, he’s 36 years old now and probably nearing the end of his career, so no doubt he’s lost a step or two...but he’s still one of my favorite players ever, and it’s going to be great watching him play on the parquet. There are rumors that he didn’t really want to leave the West Coast -- that he failed to show up on time for his team physical, and also that he was arrested for DUI in Los Angeles the night after the trade was announced. But he’s here now, and playing pretty good pre-season ball, and I’m just hoping that he’ll continue to bring his style of aggressive, tenacious, up-tempo, in-your-face basketball to the Fleet Center night after night, and maybe even that a little of it might rub off on some of these other guys as well. You don’t really need to do it all yourself in order to be an effective team leader. You just need to show your teammates how it’s done, and convince them that they too are capable of doing it themselves.

But before I get too far away from the poll numbers, I just want to know: how many of you heard yesterday morning on NPR about John Zogby’s unusual polling question? Three days before the 2000 Presidential election, Zogby’s pollsters asked the question: “If you were a resident of Oz, would you pick the Scarecrow or the Tin Man for mayor?” Given the choice between a candidate with no brains but a heart, and a candidate with no heart but brains, the sample in 2000 split exactly down the middle: 46.2% to 46.2%. (And we all know how THAT election turned out!). This year, however, the Tin Man is leading the Scarecrow by ten points, and among those identified as “persuadable swing voters” the margin is even higher: 48.7% for the Tin Man, and only 13.3% for the Scarecrow....while outraged conservative Bloggers want to know why the Cowardly Lion isn’t also listed on the ballot.

Here are some other interesting things that Zogby discovered about these all-important undecided voters. 27.4% of them have seen “The Passion of the Christ,” but only 13.1% have seen “Fahrenheit 9/11.” (for Kerry supporters those numbers are 15.5% and 65.5% respectively; for Bush supporters 43.4% and 2.7%). 56.2% of these 2.6 million undecideds feel that the country is going in the wrong direction; 55.2% want a President who keeps his religious values out of public business; and 48.4% consider themselves pro-environment. But 57.3% of them say they would rather have a beer with President Bush than with Senator Kerry, while only 9.3% would rather have a beer with Kerry than with Bush...apparently notwithstanding the fact that the President no longer drinks.

Meanwhile, I’m a little disappointed that my own “Joe Six-Pack” poll last week didn’t get a little bit bigger response. Zogby’s scientific poll determined that persuadable undecided voters are both slightly opposed to more rigid gun control (49.8% to 32.4%) and slightly in favor of either same-sex marriages or civil unions (54.8% to 38%), but I personally felt like my own humorous little survey fell a little flat...and there’s really nothing worse than a flat beer gag, unless of course it’s a flat beer that makes you gag, which I think might pretty well describe this Molson’s Canadian. There are plenty of good beers that come from Canada (including Molson’s Golden Ale), but this bi-lingual lager isn’t really one of them, although it does possess the interesting feature of coming with pre-printed snappy rejoinders to lame pick-up lines. (This one says “Yes. But not with you”). And I don’t mean to sound elitist about this, although I do come from the Pacific Northwest, where we feel like we invented both microbreweries and the espresso cart, and so can often seem a little snobbish about our beverages. And believe it or not, there is actually a point to all this, which I’ll get to in just a second.

A Samuel Adams, of course, is always an excellent choice; but if you really want to enjoy a truly excellent local beer, for my money there’s none better than this Harpoon IPA, which tastes almost as good as the IPAs we brew out in Oregon, and which I’m now pleased to say I can legitimately claim as a professional expense. (Why should millionaires get all the tax breaks?). But the two beers I really want to talk about are these. As a lot of you already know, my first full-time settled ministry was at the Unitarian Church in Midland Texas (coincidentally, at precisely the same time that George W. Bush was deciding to put down the bottle and pick up the Bible, and also when the events depicted in therecently released movie “Friday Night Lights” actually took place). And then, some years later as a doctoral student, I spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark. So I’ve actually had ample opportunities to enjoy both of these beers in their natural environments, and therefore feel well qualified to compare them. This Carlsberg, you’ll notice, comes in a green bottle, and if you read the small print here on the label you’ll see that it is brewed “by appointment to the Royal Danish Court.” This Lone Star, on the other hand, proudly bills itself as “Texas born and brewed,” “Pure Texan Beer,” and “the National Beer of Texas.” In Denmark you can buy a Carlsberg (in a green plastic bottle) from a sidewalk vending machine, while in Texas you have to get in your car and drive to the drive-up window at the local liquor store, where the smallest quantity you can buy is an entire six-pack...for approximately the same price you might pay for a single beer in Copenhagen. A bottle of Carlsberg also comes with a one-and-a-half kroner deposit (which when I was living over there was approximately 18 cents...I think it’s even a little more now), and there are actually professional bottle scavengers in Denmark who apparently make their living collecting and returning other people’s empties. This bottle of Lone Star, on the other hand, has a little slogan printed on it which says “Don’t Mess With Texas,” and periodically the county sends out convicted DUIs in orange jumpsuits to pick up the empties from the side of the highway. Also, even though this beer is labeled as a “long neck,” you’ll notice that both these bottles are basically the same size. And my theory is that this is the result of globalization, which demands a certain level of standardization when it comes to packaging. An authentic long neck is actually about an inch and a half longer that this, and used to be available only at licensed establishments within the Lone Star State itself. But the point I want to make is that if you were to pour each of these beers, ice cold, into a tall, frosted glass on a sweltering summer afternoon, I suspect that most folks would probably have a pretty difficult time telling them apart by taste alone. Two very different cultures enjoying a nearly identical beverage in almost exactly the same way. There is something universal about the experience; the social nuances may differ, but the beer remains the same.

There’s a contemporary school of historical scholarship which argues that this delicious fermented beverage may very well be the reason that the human beings living on the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers approximately ten thousand years ago gave up their hunter-gatherer ways, and decided to build and live in cities instead. Large scale grain agriculture made civilization both possible and necessary...more diversified and specialized forms of labor, a more sophisticated seasonal calendar, greater degrees of social organization and centralized planning, the development of systematic techniques for soil cultivation, irrigation, harvesting and crop storage, the creation of an effective military force to defend the fruits of one’s harvest from those who would take it for themselves. Religion, government, taxes and the rule of law: all this flowed from the accidental discovery that sprouted barley contains natural enzymes which convert starch to sugar, which when in turn is exposed to more water and airborne yeast is converted to alcohol. Or so the theory goes. From Gilgamesh to George W. Bush -- nearly five thousand years of Western Civilization, all basically because human beings occasionally like to tie one on, and they wanted to make certain of a reliable supply of brewsky.

Of course, even if this theory contains a grain of truth, it would still be a mistake to conclude, in the words of botanist Paul Manglesdorf, that “the foundations of western civilization were laid by an ill-fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication.” There are certainly many other plausible interpretations of the historical record. A Marxist historian, for example, might argue that the increasingly complex forms of human social organization made possible by the Neolithic agricultural revolution facilitated the concentration of ever-increasing amounts of wealth and power in the hands of an elite, privileged class of warriors and priests, who then exploited the surplus resources of the entire society in order to consolidate their authority over the class of people who actually performed the hard, physical labor, while at the same time extending their hegemony over neighboring societies. But we all know that Marxist historians are basically just a bunch of crackpots. A more interesting line of inquiry involves the complex ways in which civil and religious authority were intertwined in Ancient Mesopotamia. The Kings of Bronze Age cities like Uruk, Sumer, Nineveh and Babylon were understood to be semi-divine entities, whose political legitimacy was derived from their faithful relationship to the local deities, who granted them the authority to impose equitable laws upon the population, and to demand and enforce obedience to those laws. The King was responsible both for maintaining order within the Society, and for protecting the members of that society from external threats; and to the extent that he was capable of performing those responsibilities, the people of the society owed him both loyalty and respect. The king’s word was law, but the legitimacy of that law was not the product of the King’s will alone, but flowed from the Gods, and was grounded in a covenant of mutual security and social order. And this Covenant replaced an earlier form of vendetta justice in which families basically exacted their own revenge against their perceived enemies for offenses real or imagined. Hammurabi’s famous dictum “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” may sound a lot like the codification of the principle of vendetta, but in reality it mandates proportionality -- JUST an eye for an eye, ONLY a tooth for a tooth. (Although I should point out, just as an aside, that the Code of Hammurabi also calls for death by drowning for beer parlor proprietors who over-charge their customers, or who “fail to notify authorities of the presence of [known] criminals in their establishments.”)

The ancient Hebrews appropriated this same idea of covenant to their own social organization. Except that their God was understood to be more than just a small, local deity whose jurisdiction merely extended over a single city. The God of Israel was the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, whose jurisdiction knew no limits, and whose power and authority dwarfed that of Gods fashioned by human hands. And the Covenant which this God entered into with Moses at Sinai held those “chosen” people to a higher ethical standard than their neighbors -- concerns about security and social order were subject to the additional commandment that justice be extended not merely to the members of the tribe itself, but also to outsiders...to strangers and foreigners; and to those who were powerless to protect themselves, like widows and orphans. This God of the Israelites was not merely the protector of the powerful, the pious, and the well-connected. This God cared about the weak, the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten...and insisted that they too be treated with fairness and compassion.

This tradition of ethical monotheism -- a tradition shared by the three great “western” religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, essentially affirms both that God is sovereign and that all souls belong to God -- that all people are God’s children and therefore members of one family. This Covenant of All Souls declares that there are NOT two standards of justice: one for “us” and another for “them” -- rather, we are all accountable to the same ethical principles of mercy and even-handedness. And what makes this covenant possible is our own capacity for empathy: the recognition of a common humanity which transcends our various social and cultural differences, and unites us as a single people who are much more alike than we might at first think.

Here in the United States, the architects of our Constitution - our own so-called “founding fathers” -- created a secular form of Government with a strong separation of Church and State because the sophisticated political philosophies of the Enlightenment which they embraced allowed them to understand that even though we may be “One Nation under God,” it is “out of many” that we become one -- E Pluribus Unum as well as “In God We Trust.” And over the course of the last two centuries so-called “activist judges” (along with legislators, religious leaders, social activists and various other progressive reformers) have continued to encourage our society to expand its vision and become even more inclusive than even our most enlightened founders might have imagined. Because when we are all encouraged to bring our diverse gifts to the table, no one really knows for sure what kind of feast we will create. But we can at least feel confident that it will probably be delicious, because despite our different tastes and backgrounds, we all have much more in common than we know.

Good leadership is a process of bringing out the best in others. Ineffective leadership fails to do this, while bad leadership often succeeds only in bringing out the worst. And it isn’t easy, because even when good leaders do their best, they can always control the behavior of those who follow. But if our church, for example, desires to exert spiritual and ethical leadership in a pluralistic society, the first thing we need to do is demonstrate among ourselves how it is done. Tolerance, compassion, civility, fairness, and dialog...these are the qualities which make us moral leaders in te world. These are to foundations of a Covenant through which “all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine.”