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Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster

Our Covenant for Justice
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
March 25, 2007

Too often, our liberal religious groups have become somewhat like what happened to Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, when they were on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine they lay down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his friend. "Watson," he said, "look up and tell me what you see." Watson replied, "I see millions and millions of stars." "What does that tell you?" Holmes asked. Watson pondered for a minute. "Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow." Watson paused for a moment, and then asked, "Holmes, what does it tell you?" Holmes was silent for a minute and then said, "Something elementary, my dear Watson. Someone has stolen our tent."

Too often, when I ask people what they see in our liberal religious context, the answer goes something like this: ".a community of caring and welcoming persons; a community seeking to learn about and understand itself, and a community that gathers for creative and inclusive worship and the celebration of life." And, since all too many stop at this point, what this tells me is that someone has stolen a good bit of our activist dimension. Either that or we have let the guy wires of relevance, that are meant to secure our canopy of common commitment, loosen and our common commitment is just flapping around pretty much out of sight. All too often it seems that something has stolen away our ethical and activist commitment - a commitment that, if the truth be known, both relates us to the rest of the world and protects us from ourselves by relating us to more than just ourselves.

Nowadays, when we Unitarian Universalists come together, we tend to focus on the "nice-nice stuff" that comes from talking together, feeling together, and learning together. But the canopy of commitment which ties this "nice stuff" into one powerful package and gives it serious, realistic focus often is underrated if not missing altogether. Since the heydays of the civil rights and racial equality movement, the counter culture movement, and the Vietnam War protests, many of us seem to have found it increasingly hard to confront the negative dimensions of human life. Perhaps living in a society that has come to use both legal and political coercion to perpetuate unequal and unfair economic practices and social structures has desensitized us. Perhaps life today has become so demanding and demeaning that it has been easier to avoid dealing with the structures of injustice and suffering than continually to confront them - which, ultimately, is the only way we can keep such things from running over us. Somehow, the "you can't fight city hall" mentality has taken hold of large numbers in our country -- even in our liberal religious movement. As a nation, we keep re-electing city hall. This may help us avoid dealing with the realities of the outside world, but it makes it difficult to confront those realities and to appraise the effect that avoiding them has on our psyches.

But, here, I have to acknowledge that this congregation is unusual in this regard. There are many people here who not only think and talk about ethical and socially responsible things but they also do something about these things. And, more and more, people within our national Unitarian Universalilst community do seem to be getting more involved in helping others and promoting a more just world. A new ethical awareness has begun arising during the past six years in reaction to certain national policies that apparently condone the use of torture and see nothing wrong in standing aside as genocides occur.

In large measure, I find that where this country has gotten is disheartening. In my own life I have had to work through most of the issues facing the country today. My history as a Unitarian Universalist has been a prolonged effort to understand what our society is and why it does what it tends to do. Like many of you, I have struggled to confront humanity's inhumanity to itself. As a young man in the military, I was in Korea for the year of 1952 where I experienced how my own survival instincts and political ideology at the time could twist me into attitudes and actions that, ultimately, I suspect, did as much damage to me as to the enemy. Later, when I was the Unitarian Universalist minister in Wichita, Kansas, confronting such things in myself led me to become a conscientious objector counselor and to volunteer as a Unitarian Universalist chaplain at both the military prison and the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Incidentally, at the federal prison, I found out first hand that even supposedly ethical Unitarian Universalists can lose touch with their ethics. In the federal prison I conducted monthly services for the Michael Servetus Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, an affiliate of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It was made up of Unitarian Universalists who seem to have had some gaps in their own ethical behavior.

But that's not my main point this morning. My point is that I fear that we, like many other liberals, can be at least somewhat ambivalent if not downright neglectful about our true responsibilities to the rest of humanity. I'm afraid that, in recent years, as we have become preoccupied with inner personal growth and outward organizational growth, there has been a decline in our collective personal ethical commitment and social responsibility. Missing all too often these days in our corporate religious life is that awareness which the prophet Amos preached in ancient Israel and which inspired the great social and religious reformers of our own heritage. To his listeners, Amos proclaimed that celebration alone is not enough; good intentions alone are not enough; even private acts of charity alone are not enough. Only "enough" is to "let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a perennial stream." Only "enough" is to do that which will make life more bearable for the weak, the suffering, and the oppressed. Only "enough" is to do that which will make economic and social standards of measurement fair and equitable and that which will keep us so immersed in a sense of the right that we never rest from pursuing it. Only "enough" is not just to talk, believe, celebrate, and share with our friends. What Amos preached was that life (and in his terms, "the Lord") requires us to live up to a prophetic imperative that is fundamentally implied in taking life seriously.

This kind of message is not intended for individual persons only. Converting a person here and there to deal with the actual ills of the world was not what Amos intended. Nor is it what any person seriously concerned with living humanely in this world intends.

Since the Reformation, we have been aware of the principle of "the priesthood of all believers". James Luther Adams, a Unitarian Universalist and one of the most prominent religious ethicists of the 20th century, in his essay "Taking Time Seriously", added to that principle the principle of "the prophethood of all believers". By that he meant: ".all members of the liberal church share the common responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional) with the intention of making history in place of being pushed around by it."

Put in other words, "the prophethood of all believers" means that we all are under a "prophetic imperative" -in the sense of foreseeing the consequences of present social and personal behavior and then attempting to manage present behavior so that just, ethical, and humane consequences come to pass. Furthermore, the imperative upon us is not a command laid on us from outside ourselves by Fate or by God. Rather, it is the compulsion of our own conscience - an imperative arising within ourselves to live out, in community and as a community, the ethical implications of our beliefs and commitments. We may not realize it, but by declaring ourselves to be believers in our own consciences who gather with other persons of conscience to pursue the living of an ethical life, we have made a covenant. We have covenanted with one another to pursue a life of love and justice.

The stuff of "the priesthood of all believers", that is individual responsibility for belief in such things as justice and love, is fundamental, of course; but collective action on such belief is bedrock essential if human society is to improve. Of course, here and there, a congregation will take this seriously but the general collective attitude is more quietistic than activistic. The worry, usually, is that we might offend one another if definite collective action is encouraged.

In our highly individualistic context it is easy to overlook how impossible it is to act ethically unless individuals can find ways to act together as a group. In the face of the overwhelming sufferings and injustices in the world, there, simply, is little concrete action possible by individuals. Perhaps, if you are wealthy and can buy the services of others to go out and "do good" for you, then you, as an individual, may claim to be effective. Perhaps, if you are an uncommonly courageous and resourceful individual, you can gather a group around your leadership and be effective. The likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. did this. Or, alone, you may go Don Quixote one better and personally make a real difference in the struggle against this world's malignant tendencies. But, persons of this latter capability usually end up as forgotten martyrs unless they have gathered a group of dedicated persons to follow them.

This is where we, as a bunch of individualistic Unitarian Universalists, can be glad that we have the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. We can be especially glad for it when something as terrible as Darfur happens. The Darfur conflict is an unavoidable challenge to anyone who claims to be an ethical, caring person. There have always been religious and ethnic differences in the Sudan. For centuries Nile-oriented Arabs have ruled the rural land-tilling tribes to the west toward Chad. This has taken various forms over the years, moving from Moslem against Christian and animistic black African tribes to the present-day fighting between Arab Moslems and native Moslems.

Atrocities have been committed by both sides, but by far the greater number of atrocities have been committed by the coalition of Bedouin Moslems and the Sudanese government against the more vulnerable revolutionary forces of the countryside. Non-governmental organizations have estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 people have been killed. Upwards from 2.5 million are thought to have been displaced. Refugee camps have become overcrowded. There are individual rapes and murders on a massive scale. War and drought have prevented the tilling of land and the only food for the rural people is from outside sources. Medical services, likewise, have to come from outside Sudan by groups like the United Nations, Doctors without Borders, and our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. The Sudanese government seems bent not just on an ethnic cleansing which, basically, would remove people from the land but on genocide - actually killing them all so they can not come back.

This whole thing is complicated by oil. Western powers, including our own government, seem to have a finger in the pie in some way because of Chinese interest in Sudanese oil. How this contributes to fomenting more unrest is unclear but one oil field reality is that massive machinery and personnel have to be protected if drilling is to be done. [I grew up with enough oil derricks around me to have something of a feel for this.]

The point is that people are suffering and dying every hour of every day because of political, economic, and (probably) religious differences. Genocide is happening before the eyes of the world - before our eyes! Our liberal religious commitment to humane values calls on us to learn about what is going on, try to understand it, and find some way to enhance the value, if not the quality, of life.

In the ethical realm, most of us have a reverence for life that calls on us to serve life and to seek to expand the quality of life. We know that reverence for life calls for love in personal relations and justice in social relations - a love and a justice that amount to our trusteeship of one another and of the world. Deep down most of us know that, if we revere life, we automatically are life's prophets in the sense that we must act to enhance rather than diminish life.

Religiously and ethically this is our prophetic imperative and it gives us grounds, both individually and collectively, to act to bring about change in society for justice and equity and help to the suffering and suppressed. These are grounds that must be stood upon because beliefs and attitudes have no effect until they are implemented - until both individuals and institutions act on them. After all, there are no vacuums in human affairs. If free religious people do not act collectively, someone else will. If we do not speak to our world's conscience and take the lead in compassionate, equitable action, someone else will push to do otherwise.

To sum up: a prophetic imperative is implied in our free religion. In a symbolic sense, by joining together, we have made a covenant to work for justice and equity not just for ourselves but for the world. This is because we have embarked on a religious way that expects the same rights and privileges not just for us but for all people. This means we have a personal and a collective responsibility, both as local Unitarian Universalists and as members of our national association, to make a serious effort amongst ourselves to identify where we can agree strongly enough to take collective social action. If there is some way this congregation, as a congregation, can become directly involved in the Darfur situation - or any other compelling situation involving human suffering -- we have an obligation to ourselves and to one another to identify it and then to act. This means finding ways to move beyond the "niceness" of our own comfortable freedoms and actually challenge unjust social policies and inequities. This is not possible without mindfulness in our daily lives - a mindfulness that lifts us out of our complacent immersion in economic and social practices that encourage us to waste energy with gas-guzzling cars, support corporate practices that make profit but demean workers, and extract the resources of other countries for our own use without fair compensation.

Obviously, this calls for a lot more clarifying discussion than most of our churches and congregations tend to pursue, but to live up to the responsibilities of our own freedoms and privileges we need to pursue it. We can become so involved in "doing our own personal thing" that we don't see the larger, fundamental, more mindful implications of our situation. At some time we need to focus our discussions into agreements and our agreements into action. On the national scale, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee enables us to do that. The least we can do today is support the Service Committee. Let's at least quit just gazing at the stars long enough to put back in place that ethical canopy which gathers us together.