Reading: Reverence & Respect (Parker) – Read by Jenny Over

“Reverence and respect for human nature is at the core of Unitarian Universalist faith. We believe that all the dimensions of our being carry the potential to do good.
We celebrate the gifts of being human:
our intelligence and capacity for observation and reason,
our senses and ability to appreciate beauty,
our creativity, our feelings and emotions.
We cherish our bodies as well as our souls.
We can use our gifts to offer love, to work for justice, to heal injury,
to create pleasure for ourselves and others.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy,’ the great twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote.
Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of each person
as a given of faith—
an unshakeable conviction calling us to self-respect and respect for others.”

Sermon: The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person? – Rev. Eric Banner

I always feel like I should warn people in advance when I’m about to go off the theological deep end. Some of you just came to church to get the free coffee. And, if you need to leave part way through to message to get some coffee, know I’ll understand.

But I want to start at the zero depth entry side of the pool this morning, which for many of us, came when we first showed up in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and this isn’t true for everyone, but for many of us, we saw on the wall a list of the seven principles, much like the one you can still see in our conference room to this day. As those of you who have been coming the last few weeks know, this spring we’re taking time to explore with our adults what our kids explore in their classrooms, and this is the last in the messages about the throughlines that are part of teaching out kids UU values and principles, not because we will have covered everything, but because we’re also running up against the clock on the spring, and it seems important to engage with the questions we teach about being a good religious neighbor.

So, if you went into that conference room or opened up the bound hymnals found throughout this room, you’d find the principles and sources that offered a shorthand of what UUism was for a long time, and the first thing you’d find there, the beginning, if you will, was this statement about the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It was a statement so foundational to the way many of us have talked about what it means to be U U that you used to hear people talk about having memorized the first and seventh principles, inherent worth and the interdependent web, and then people would admit to sort of generally thinking the other five were nice, too.

We teach our kids, all of them, that they have worth and are deserving of dignity regardless of who they are, or who their parents are, or how much money they might have, or how well they fit in with the cool kids, and we teach it because we want them equipped to know that who they are is important and valuable in a world that celebrates uniqueness only in theory, but far less often in practice.

But unless you have been a part of this tradition for a very long time, my guess is that you have no idea how we got to that statement. And it’s worth noting that it wasn’t the Unitarians who gave it to us. No, it was the Universalists. With all the disagreement the last few years over recent changes to the way that the UUA Bylaws talk about what we are as a faith tradition, I want you all to know that our core commitments reach back a long way, and one of the ways that’s true is the idea that you, yes, you, each and every one of you, has worth and dignity regardless of what the wider world is saying in this moment.

Back in 1935 the Universalists got together in Washington, and they set about to update a statement of faith that had grown a bit stale with time. They were looking, amongst other things, to try and answer the question of whether Universalism was a particular Christian tradition, or something wider than that, and so they kept much of the language that had been present for more than a century, but they added something new. A statement about what they believed about people.

This is what they said –

“To that end, we avow our faith in God as Eternal and All-conquering Love, in the spiritual leadership of Jesus, in the supreme worth of every human personality, in the authority of truth known or to be known, and in the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.”

It marked a remarkable shift. Though this will astonish more than a few of you, the Universalists came out of an old Calvanistic framework that knew that people fell short, and so, while the faith had long spoken of the importance of good works to good living, “The supreme worth of every human personality” which, I’ll note in passing, is the most gender neutral language you could imagine, was new.

And we kept it, for almost a century now, we’ve kept it. We kept it in 1961 when we created Unitarian Universalism from the foundations laid by our ancestors, and we said we unite in seeking –

3. To affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships;

We kept it when we revised things in the 1980s, and we said we covenant to affirm and promote –

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

And we kept it in our most recent revisions, adopted last year, in which:

We declare that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion. It was Universalism that brought us thus far. It was rooted in the very thing Rebecca Parker pointed to in our reading this morning.

“Reverence and respect for human nature is at the core of Unitarian Universalist faith. We believe that all the dimensions of our being carry the potential to do good. We celebrate the gifts of being human: our intelligence and capacity for observation and reason, our senses and ability to appreciate beauty, our creativity, our feelings and emotions. We cherish our bodies as well as our souls. We can use our gifts to offer love, to work for justice, to heal injury, to create pleasure for ourselves and others.

“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy,’ the great twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote. Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of each person as a given of faith—an unshakeable conviction calling us to self-respect and respect for others.”

And we teach this to our kids, and to our adults, because we know that there is too much in this world that casts questions at everyone, of every age, about whether you are worthy of reverence and respect, or that tells you that you can have respect for who you are and what your life is if you do something to earn it. It is a radical statement of the value of being. Of being human, in all the glory and the pitfalls of that experience. It is not just a statement of faith, or belief, but also an inoculation against the virus of hatred that says that some people aren’t people at all, or that some people aren’t worthy, and can be cast aside or pushed down.

It is because we want our kids to know as they grow up that the world needs people who see the humanity in another that we make sure we talk about it. It’s because we want our kids to know that they, too, deserve to treated with dignity and respect, and if anyone is mistreating them, they can carry in their hearts the sureness that there is a place that is filled with loving adults who know better, and do better. It’s a message that lifts up human living, human loving, human being, regardless of what you might think about the almighty or the eternal. It’s why we teach the importance of living well in the here in and now, and trust the rest of eternity to work itself out.

But much as we teach this to our kids, as adults, we also know it’s more complicated. We know that there are people who cause harm in the world. People who do not treat others as worthy. And, if I’m honest with you, there are a few people who have done such harm, caused such suffering, and loss of life, that I when I sit with the depth of this claim I find myself thinking back to an address former UUA President, the Rev. Bill Schulz, gave more than a decade after he left that job to take another position as the head of Amnesty International. He titled his message that day “What Torture’s Taught Me.”

This is the turn I warned you about, in case you need to get coffee just now.

But what Bill said that day matters, too. He described, in modestly graphic detail, which I will spare you for the morning, the kinds of torture used past and present around the world. And its prevalence. And then he said this –

“Similarly, our traditional doctrines of human nature rest uneasy in a world full of torturers. In what sense can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of “inherent worth and dignity?”

And that is why I put a question mark in the title this morning. In fact, for a long time the title I was going to run with was the question that comes up inevitably when someone says we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. The modern madman of death and destruction, the one who unleashed evil on a systemic scale upon the world, what of him? What about Hitler?

There are no easy answers to this my friends. There are unrepentant criminals at work in the world causing untold harm, and it does nothing to protect or preserve your worth and your dignity or my worth and my dignity to simply let them trample over others unimpeded. And I could stand here and tell you some twisting, convoluted post-hoc rationalization that tries to convince you that accountability structures are rooted in meeting free choice with boundaries, and there might even be something to it.

Even still, for most of us, most of the time, the questions we’re faced with are not so deep. Few of us have the chance to join the resistance and place a bomb under Hitler’s table. For most of us that question is not a deepening, but a distraction. Whether there was anything of worth or dignity left in the twisted soul of a murderous madman by the end of his days, and arguably there was none, what we are asked to see is much closer to home. In our own hearts, and in our own lives.

All of us have the chance to ask whether we want to live in a world in which we will be treated as if we have worth and dignity, or whether these human beings who we are surrounded by should be allowed to treat us as something less than holy, and whole.

As Schulz approached the end of his address he made clear that he could no longer believe that worth and dignity were inherent to humanity. Important, valuable, grounding, yes to all of that, but not inherent. Then he turned to those ministers those many years ago and he said this:

“But what it also means is that our job as ministers, as builders of the blessed community, is tougher and more important than ever for if we can’t rely upon the inherency of human worth and dignity, if we have to assign worth and teach dignity, then we cannot escape confrontation with the forces of idolatry who would reserve worth to only a few and save dignity for their immediate neighbors, people like those children and grandchildren of immigrants, for example, who would not be where they are today if their forebears had been treated the way they propose to treat a new American generation.”

You might agree with him or you might disagree, but what he was saying, and what I am saying is that some of the things we believe are aspirational. Some of them count on us to believe them into being, not in the far off distant future, but in the day to day lives we live in the here and now. To treat the people in our homes as worthy of respect and reverence, to treat them with dignity, and ask, sometimes even demand, that they do the same for us. We are called to practice the work of the world we hope will someday be, even if it isn’t yet, and may never be.

And this is honestly the faithful expression of that Universalist heritage that brought us to this way of being in the first place. They never said that everyone was good. No, in that same avowal of their faith in 1935 that gave us this framing, the supreme worth of every human personality, they also spoke of – “the certainty of just retribution for sin” before returning to the assurance of “the final harmony of all souls.” They long held that it was clear to them then, as it is clear to me today, that some people are going to need some help, guidance, and boundaries, to get on the right side of righteousness and love, because they clearly aren’t there now.
Sometimes we are deeply and truly divided. Sometimes power and powerful forces are at play, and we are called to pick sides. Sometimes the resolution to our differences lies in real and open conflict. We are not called to lie down and have our lives and livelihoods stolen away by those who do not see the humanity, the worthiness, the dignity in us.

But if we are not careful, if we do not root our response to such people in love and lovingkindness, then we can all to quickly become the people we fight against.

So, this is my message to you this morning, my friends, do not let yourself become the things you hate, but turn instead to the opportunities to live into being a new and different way than we have been handed. And be prepared for the day when the hostilities cease, to remember once again our shared history, and our shared destiny, and in so doing, be ready to build the world we dream about, one kindness, one consideration, one conversation at a time.