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Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster

Freedom's Imperatives
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
November 12, 2006

Emblazoned on the walls of a governmental installation are these words: "There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and Love of the Fatherland." This exhortation was attributed to Adolph Hitler and, according to a Life magazine issue of 1939; it was as a message painted on the walls of a Nazi concentration camp.

This quote from Hitler exemplifies how the road to freedom, which can start off extolling high virtues (to the point of sounding like the Boy Scout's oath), sometimes winds up no more than official graffiti on concentration camp walls. This is a glaring contradiction between words and context. But this often happens. It happens to nations; it happens to businesses; it happens to churches; it happens to persons. The pursuit of freedom can, unknowingly, lead to tyrannies. It can lead to the suppression of human rights, which, supposedly, must be relinquished for the larger "freedom" of the "Fatherland" or the "welfare state" or the "secure state", this latter being the expressed aim of many in our country today. It can lead to tyrannies over environmental experts, quality control engineers, and theoretical economists who must be kept in line in order to keep profit margins high. It can lead to tyrannies over personal behavior, controlling who can marry, who can have children (and how many). It can lead to tyrannies over beliefs in order to keep simple, gullible minds under control. We can even inflict tyrannies of ourselves over ourselves because, although we may deeply desire freedom, we may more deeply fear to test our supposed "certainties" against possible truths that would disrupt the comfort of our lives. One of the real dangers of a democracy is the ease with which liars and demagogues can take over and change the rules. Never forget that Adolph Hitler was legitimately elected to office.

We UUs are not exempt from this tendency of the pursuit of freedom to loop back on itself and become its own opposite. In fact, this is one of the things that most often goes wrong with the way most people do religion. Actually, we should expect the pursuit of freedom to go wrong. Freedom is a primary principle, and, primary principles, when poorly or incompletely pursued, just naturally result in distortion if not self-cancellation. It is useful, therefore, to remind ourselves of what we must do to make freedom an actual power in our lives. Just glibly saying we are free doesn't make us free.

The notion of freedom is key to understanding Unitarian Universalism because Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion. And liberal is a cognate of liberate, which means, "to release from bondage, to free." Of course, liberal also refers to open-mindedness, toleration, generosity, and the like. But, historically, we have meant it primarily in the sense of the maximum individual freedom possible both with respect to the civil liberties of the citizen under our democratic form of government and with respect to matters of personal belief and expression. Freedom to pursue that which persuades us rather than compulsion to submit our minds to what others demand of us -- this is of the essence of the spirit of Unitarian Universalism and the free approach to religion anywhere. Ours is a liberal religion, a liberating religion, a religion that frees us to pursue truth and conscience wherever they lead without regard to how our pursuit squares with someone else's preconceived plan or standards of doctrine. This, at least, is our UU ideal. And we do live up to it, by and large, or else our religion would long ago have become just one more slogan scrawled across some religious summer camp's wall.

How we define freedom is of utmost importance, for it is here that we may first go astray. We hear the often made distinction between freedom from and freedom to; that is, freedom defined alternatively as the absence of limitations or controls and as the presence of the possibility of unrestricted action. Achieving freedom from occurs when a slave is freed from the master. When freed, the slave is released from bondage and is no longer controlled. Achieving freedom to occurs when that former slave has the opportunity to move to whatever country, state, or city he or she desires. Most religious liberals, especially the 85% to 90% come-outers who comprise our ranks, have experienced these two modes of religious freedom. They were freed from the external controls that the dogmas of their former religion imposed and they found themselves free to discover their true religion for themselves.

But it is not enough to make these from and to distinctions and assume ourselves in unfettered liberty to do whatever we wish, go wherever we wish, and believe whatever we wish. Freedom is not to be found merely in the conditions around us (although conditions can be such as to prevent freedom.) Rather, freedom is more a state of mind. It is a perception and an attitude within us. To put it in a phrase, it is our power to choose. It is an awareness within ourselves that we can make choices, that we can influence the conditions around us by, of our own volition, doing this or not doing that. It is our choosing that changes the alternatives remaining before us, even as it may shift the alternatives open to others who have yet to make their choice. If we choose one job over another, someone else doesn't get that job -- likewise, when we choose a parking place. We can mold the world somewhat more to our liking but never can cancel out the world as that arena which provides the alternatives among which all must choose.

This should be a sobering reminder that the proper exercise of freedom requires, also, a proper exercise of responsibility. After all, we cannot expect to act irresponsibly toward other people and the natural world and maintain our own right to choice for very long. The cumulative effect of our wrong choices finally narrows down the alternatives open to us until we are prisoners of our own mismanagement. This happened to many Germans in the 1930s who thought themselves civilized, loving Christians but irresponsibly chose for their own comfort and a flag-waving (in this instance a swastika waving) social order. It has been happening to this country in these early years of the 21st century and, it is devoutly to be hoped, has been aborted by last Tuesday's election.

On a lesser scale this happens to us whenever the choices we make, which involve other people, systematically serve our own ends at the expense of theirs. It is only a matter of time before they choose alternatives that do not include us or that injure us.

In our reading today, Howard Thurman, the longtime chaplain of Boston University, where I took the final hours of my theological degree, makes the point very clearly. We depend on other people for our sense of who we are. We cannot systematically exclude others from our lives without narrowing the character of our own humanity. Nor can we disparage others without disparaging ourselves. We are all caught up in a tapestry of existence that simply cannot sustain the warp of ourselves without the woof of others. In further words of Howard Thurman, " ... to be alive is to be under active obligation to many other units of life" ... (and, therefore,) "the measure of my freedom is the measure of my responsibility."

So, freedom is that power to choose which allows us to strive for our own fulfillment but without subverting the integrity of that which lies outside ourselves. In this ecology-conscious age we are realizing that the freedom of our species to use or misuse the natural resources of the earth is not unconditional. There are limits. In the life of the human species many have learned that we can not truly advance ourselves psychologically or spiritually by irresponsible behavior toward others. Life and truth and freedom are more mutual than perhaps most people imagine. It is of fundamental importance that we keep this well in mind.

And this is where things go wrong: we too easily let our fears, our ignorance (or misperceptions) about freedom, our laziness or some combination of these to close us off from freedom's realities, and, thereby, from freedom's possibilities. Oftentimes, we let our fear of testing our supposed certain beliefs limit our freedom.

This can be a subtle thing. To most of us it is threatening to change or modify our habitual ways of looking at life. We are reluctant - and afraid - to look beyond where we already are. We want life and its opportunities to continue to be expressed in terms we already understand. But, oftentimes, new alternatives create new concepts; and to make new choices requires us to understand and accept new concepts. This is where, through fear, many of us fail in the use of our freedom. We limit our alternatives to those we already acknowledge and understand.

We not only let our fears stand in the way, but also our ignorance. For instance, we may not know what freedom really is. We may confuse it with independence, which, at best, has only limited amounts of freedom about it. Independence means to stand alone, to have no relation or connection or binding attachment. Independence is sometimes a need, but don't mistake it for the freedom of choosing, which requires us to stand in relation and connection. Choosing is the very act of making an attachment of some sort -- to an idea, to an act, or to a person. If you choose something, you embrace it; you do not stand away from it. For instance, if everyone in this congregation intends to be only independent from each other, their choices will tend to create separation and/or alienation. They have little possibility for attachment. But full exercise of freedom confronts all of the alternatives that are present and selects among them. Freedom, at root, is choosing. It is the process and the effect of choice. When we choose, we are connected to our choice.

Or we confuse freedom with normlessness -- the absence of rules, the absence of guideposts -- with the assumption that we create the conditions of our own lives from our own desires without regard to any outside constraints. This forfeits our own experience, if you think about it, because what is our experience but the response to that which lies outside our skins? And what are our interpretations of our experience but attempts to discover the order and the norms within both our response and that outside ourselves which make us respond? Or, another example of ignorance of what is freedom is confusing it with resistance to authority. A rejection of authority, blindly made as a knee-jerk reaction, only puts us under the authority of ignorance and not of truth. But, if we truly feel we have choices and exercise them, the strongest authority only becomes an impediment to question or to overcome and is not a tyrant over our spirits. It may try to tyrannize but we don't have to let it.

Perhaps the thing that most goes wrong in our exercise of freedom is laziness, which, if the truth be known, is not the lack of energy but the presence of the selfish preoccupation with whim and not responsibility, with comfort and not morality, in other words, self-indulgence. This is, probably, the hardest to overcome because it requires moving us out from the center of our own world and allowing the rest of the world in. Without being in open and active dialogue with the requirements of the world outside our skins, without accepting the responsibility that comes with freedom, there is no full understanding of alternatives. There, then, is no alternative beyond desire and there is no freedom if desire is king. Like ostriches burying their heads in the sand to shield themselves from trouble, it is easy for us to bury our heads in our own self-indulgence. But, I read somewhere on the Internet that, in a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single ostrich burying its head in the sand. I guess it's just humans who bury their heads in the sands of their own fantasies to escape reality.

All these things can derail us in our exercise of freedom: fear, ignorance, normlessness, resistance to authority, and laziness. What then can we do besides merely be aware of them? Or, more positively put, what must we do to pursue freedom rightly? If these are freedom's hamperings, what are the imperatives of freedom?

Actually, the imperatives are implicit both in our definition of freedom and in the way we go wrong in its pursuit. First of all, since freedom is essentially the exercise of choice, alternatives must be present. If there are no alternatives, freedom is not part of the situation. And, trying to invent alternatives where there are none buries your head in fantasy. And, just having alternatives present is not enough. We, also, must recognize them. We must be aware of alternatives, or, again, we have no choice. Being blind to alternatives is slavery by default. But, still more is required. We must be committed to choosing. Choosing must be important to us; otherwise, there is no freedom. We must be committed to act on the alternatives before us or give up the notion that we are free. And, follow- through is essential. By "follow-through", I simply mean maintaining our commitment to choosing once we have begun the process. For each decision, inevitably, is followed by new sets of alternatives and the value of old decisions may be lost if the direction in which they started us is not maintained. We simply have to be persistent or freedom, again, is forfeited. And, finally, we must always remember that the pursuit of our own rights and integrity is hollow unless it is done in the context of and in the protection of the rights and integrity of others. So, then, what are freedom's imperatives? What must we do in order to pursue freedom rightly? I have named five imperatives. They are the actual presence of alternatives, recognition of the alternatives, willingness to choose, persistence, and ever-present responsibility to others. Lose any one of these and the freedom you think you are pursuing becomes something else.

It is of the first importance that we, of the liberal religious tradition, remember all this. It is the very basis on which we set out to do what we say we are here to do. We venerate, we desire, we need freedom in religious belief in order to be fully human. This we are clear about. Let us be equally clear that freedom in religious belief is possible only for those who are committed to its continuous pursuit and that this is required if we are to be fully human and not "sub-servants" of those who would dominate us. We live in a country and a world deeply in need of people who understand what freedom is and how freedom works. Let us be such people.