Upcoming Sunday Worship Services
Principle #6
The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty and Justice For All
"Taming the Lone Ranger:
The Challenge of the Sixth Principle"
Just last night a junior youth group meeting about their coming of age process spent some time discussing the seven principles. The Sixth principle, which covenants to affirm and promote the goal of "world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all" was the principle these teens cited as most important to them. I was surprised. When I asked what it meant to them no one gave a clear answer. "World community" was just a good idea. "Getting along" was important was about all they said. I was tempted to press them for the sake of this sermon but I let the matter rest. But I'm quite sure that when I was a teen back in the 60's almost any of the other principles would have drawn my peers more strongly. "Justice, equity and compassion" or the "right of conscience" or "the inherent worth and dignity of the individual" seem to be more glamorous ideas, ones you can go out and fight for. This group of kids would apparently rather "get along" than fight. I think they yearn for a feeling of community. Community, I think, was a given in the America of my childhood, but it isn't in theirs. Perhaps that's why they entertain different daydreams.
I grew up in the America of the 50's and I am a product of it. I can remember as a child occasionally walking outside and being aware that the only sound I could hear was the crunching of my own footsteps, and I liked it. The sound was familiar from television- it was the sound of the hero's footsteps walking between desert rocks as he snuck up on the bad guy. The Lone Ranger, perhaps or Annie Oakley. The sound would send me into reverie, into imagining myself as the strong hero, ready for trouble and able to deal with it when it comes. I would fight for justice. Oh, and did I say this hero was also independent? He could think for himself like no one else. And this hero helped everyone and needed no one. You know the type. Superman was the same kind of guy - good at fighting for justice - but not really part of the community. The community were the folks that had to be rescued.
We tuned in to those programs because they depicted an ideal we aspired to. I wanted to walk in the shoes of those independent heroes. Culturally, like most everyone else, I have an "inner Lone Ranger" as one of the personas I embrace.
This ideal existed long before television popularized it. We can see it in the heroes of the revolution, Davey Crocket and even in Abraham Lincoln. We can see it in transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau and the American poet Emily Dickenson. They could all be called Lone Rangers. If we yearn to be like these folks, to some degree we yearn to be outside "the system."
We can also see Lone Ranger characteristics in the heroes of Unitarian Universalism, a most American of religions. For example, two of the most famous early Unitarians, William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson were both religious "Lone Rangers." It was Channing who first accepted and defended the name "Unitarian" in one of the most controversial sermons in the history of liberal religion.1 His sermon on Unitarian Christianity broke us away from the Christian pack. He was a free thinker. And take Ralph Waldo Emerson, the one time Unitarian minister who became the leading spirit of transcendentalism. He left the denomination to preach his gospel that God did not reside in formal religion but in nature. Both Channing and Emerson stood apart from the mainstream. They exercised their spiritual freedom and thought others should be allowed to do the same. Ours is a religion dedicated to religious liberty and because of that it has been a haven for religious Lone Rangers. Our Statue of spiritual Liberty could read not "Come you huddled masses" but "Come, you dissenting, outspoken freethinkers, yearning to break free." Among our principles, the covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the right of conscience and the use of democratic principle all serve as protections for our individual spiritual expression. And we should be proud of that.
But there can be a "down" side to individualism. And we do suffer from it. William Ellery Channing expressed concern about the founding of the American Unitarian Association as a denomination. Organizing, he thought, might lead to corruption. His interest was more in asserting a certain truth to the world than in forming a people, a community that could gather round that truth and give it meaning. Emerson's idea of religion was so individualistic and privatized that scholar Conrad Wright said his view could yield no rationale for religious fellowship in general or church in particular.2 For Channing, Emerson and others in our tradition religion is a means to bring oneself into communion with God or the with Truth but not necessarily with fellow human beings. Emerson actually said once, "Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?" It's possible that William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson would have voted against the inclusion of our sixth principle if given the chance.
I would like to argue here for the sixth principle. All of our principles need to be taken together as a package. The sixth principle, our endorsement of community, serves not only as a balance to the individualism which is protected in our principles, but as the logical result of living out the principles in their fullness. Let me explain.
Each of the principles which we Unitarian Universalists covenant to affirm and promote we tend to understand as "rights" but if we sit with them a bit and look deeper we can see that each "right" inherently infers obligations. Community actually develops - it emerges - as members of a group accept and live out these obligations to their group. In a true community that obligation is not dictated; it is embraced because individual members believe that the group together is more than the sum of its parts. Let me use the first principle which affirms and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person as an example. A group which unites under that principle agrees that no one in the group should be cast aside due to sexual orientation, gender or the color of their skin or for any reason because we all have inherent worth. If we use the language of "rights" we can say that people in the group have a right to be who they are, with regard to race, gender and sexual orientation. Said conversely, people in the group assume they have no right to discriminate on the basis of those attributes. Rights create an environment in which group members agree to "live and let live." All well and good. But that's as far as the language of rights goes. The question that comes next, which sinks us deeper into the meaning of the first principle, is who's going to enforce those rights? We are timid about that. We need to dare to speak our values to each other once again. Our communities will re-emerge to the extent that we do.
Let's use a simple example of how it works. A family is a small community. Now, picture, if you will, some siblings arguing in the living room with one brother nastily calling the other, "Shorty," wanting to hurt his feelings. That kind of thing was pretty common in my house, I don't know about yours. Disparaging someone based on height clearly violates the spirit of our first principle. Would you speak out? Even extended members of my family would put a stop to such name-calling rather than walk by. For example, if my two sons were fighting and either of my brothers walked by, they'd say, "Cut it out." Our little extended family works fairly well as a community. A community for our purposes can be described as a group that protects your interests and to which you feel obligated. Living out those obligations often requires a certain courage.
We all actually belong to many communities each nested inside another. Family, neighborhood, church, town, country, denomination and the world are all potentially communities which protect our interests and to which we are obligated. You may also have many voluntary communities in your life - clubs, teams and organizations. There are untold numbers of communities. The real truth is that community is a good idea because we just can't escape it . In fact, in thinking about communities in this way I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw once: "Gravity isn't just another good idea: it's the law." Community, like gravity, is not just another good idea, it is the law. Our choice is whether we will do it well or poorly. It's no longer possible to go off into the wilderness and commune with with God alone if it ever were. By recognizing a goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice, we are giving a nod to our very real interrelatedness and saying we'd like to do it right.
But world community is a tall order to consider as our first challenge. If ever the injunction to "think globally, act locally" pertains, it does here. Let's get local again. What if you observed name-calling by two children downstairs here? Would you say a word, or would you walk by? Don't be shy. It takes a little bit of fortitude, but I hope most of you would kindly and gently say something because you know the values of this church and you understand that the greater good of this community depends on each one of us acting in the best interests of the whole. We want our children to know that name-calling isn't acceptable. Silence, as we all know, is a kind of complicity.
Now let's take it another step further. What if you saw children name-calling and hurting another in your neighborhood? Would you say anything - ever so gently? Does that feel uncomfortable? Do you think your neighborhood really wants to own and act on a set of understood community values, or are they content to "live and let live? " Do you feel the area where you live is really a group of homes all in a row with no real community there - no ties that bind? If so, then there's real work to do. Say hello to your neighbors when you walk by them. Even that small act begins a basis for trust.
Think for a moment about your downtown. If you saw youngsters fistfighting there, would you step in? Maybe not, huh? Taking responsibility is hard because so often we don't know what to do. The problem of not knowing how to respond is a big one.
. One group here locally, the Middleboro/Lakeville Coalition Against Relationship Violence is an active citizen's group that is trying to improve the quality of our community life head on. There are many civic and church organizations that work toward improving the quality of our community life. You may or may not be at a time in your life where you can consider membership in any kind of organization. But if you cannot join a group, there is still something that you can do. Think of the various communities that you are a part of, family, church, town, country....Then ask yourself whether you live out any obligation to those communities at all. The questions are simple ones: am I a good neighbor? am I a conscientious citizen of my town? what have I done for my country? If you have children here - what have I done for my church school?
The unavoidable truth, the reality is, that working for the good of others, and for the whole (the whole community, the whole nation, the whole world) is working for our own good. The Lone Ranger idea of being separate and superior is an illusion. As Americans and as Unitarian Universalists we need to make peace with the truth that there is no hapless them to be rescued. I am one who believes that, deep down, we all know in our hearts that each belongs to all. An important step in learning to live the sixth principle is learning to accept ourselves as members of all of the communities in which we dwell. Denying our communion does us no good; it does us harm. By accepting that we are in community at every level of life and by meeting those responsibilities, we learn to love and serve others as ourselves. It will be a glorious day when we feel that reality in our bones, that the greater good and the good of the individual are one and the same.
I want to mention again the teens in our church youth group who cited the sixth principle as their favorite. They said they would like to see a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. We live in a time when our children want community more than they want to fight for rights. Let's take advantage of that. Let's not be timid. It is increasingly apparent that the well-being of each is the responsibility of all. We have a daunting amount of work to do, but don't say it's a fool's errand. The challenge isn't one for us to either succeed or fail at in this generation; it's a goal toward which we can aim our best efforts, and more importantly, it's a vision which we hand over to our children when it is their turn. Let the goal of world community be a north star which we share in common with our ancestors and with our children.
1 Robinson, David,The Unitarians and the Universalists, Greenwood Press: Westport, Conn, 1985. p. 155
2 ibid p. 156