All Souls
Bethlehem
Church

Today we begin a series exploring seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I know you’ve all heard them before at one time or another, but there’s no harm in taking a second to refresh our collective memory. Let’s do that David Letterman style, working from the bottom up:

7. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part;

6. The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;

5. The right of conscience and the use of democratic process without our church and in

society at large;

4. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

3. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth;

2. Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

And number one, …drum roll please, which is the topic of today’s sermon:

1. The inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Now it’s hard to find fault with those principles. The trouble, of course, is that human beings can talk a good game, but when it comes to putting our ideals into practice, we often fall short. If we’re gonna talk honestly about dignity we need to admit that it’s a rare and elusive thing. This is beautifully expressed in the Bob Dylan song, "Dignity:"

A glance at today’s headlines is enough to have us all wondering what it’s gonna take to find dignity. I don’t know of you all saw the story in the New York Times about the gay couple from the Bronx who went to Canada for a commitment ceremony and when they got back their parish priest told them they were no longer welcome to sing in the choir that they had been singing in for twenty years.

In international news the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Iranian human rights attorney, Shirin Ebadi has turned a spotlight on the plight of women and children in Iran. Ms. Ebadi has raised awareness about the plight of women and children, especially girls, in Iran. She’s also reminding us that Islam is not incompatible with human rights. You’ve probably seen that in Iran girls as young as 13 are forced into marriages with older men—it used to be permissible at age eight. She’s fighting to raise the legal age from thirteen to eighteen.

Now it’s tempting to get on our high horse and critique other cultures, while turning a blind eye to our own barbarity. People joke that America is a history free zone, sort of like schools have their drug free zones, the idea being we so easily forget our own barbaric past. Our genocidal cruelty against Native Americans has been whitewashed and romanticized to the point we’ve lost all touch with the horror of what actually took place here. The only way to wrap our brains around this is to admit that we humans are a primitive species struggling to get control over our violence. We’d like to say we believe in the inherent worth of all people, but our actions send a different message.

This is nowhere more evident than during our tolerance of slavery in this country. From the abduction of Africans in their homeland to the unimaginably horrific middle passage, dignity was nowhere to be found. Estimates concerning the numbers of people killed begin around the 6 million of the Holocaust and balloon up to a high end of 50 million. That’s just the middle passage. We get a feeling for the kind of lives Africans faced once they arrived here in the post-genocidal new world, through the autobiographies of Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist.

Douglas’ uses the repeated whipping of his aunt as a gateway into the horrors of slavery. He says of the first time he witnessed a whipping, "I was quite a child, but I well

While writing about "Captain" Anthony’s regular whipping of his aunt, Douglas notes that Captain Anthony was more restrained than [the] overseer. This is worth bearing in mind, since the scene that unfolds depicts the master as taking "great pleasure" in inflicting pain. Douglas writes, "He would at times seem to take great pleasure in

When we open up to the truth of our own culpability in the injustices of the world, we find ourselves knocked off balance. It’s so much easier to believe that evil is somewhere out there, it’s in Iran or Iraq or North Korea. We don’t have anything to be ashamed of. It’s at this point that the two hand-rails of tradition we talked about last week come in handy.

Remember? We’ve got the UU tradition which gives us a spiritual freedom to explore other faiths and ask the hard questions. But we’ve also got our Christian tradition which takes seriously the compromised state of humanity. In today’s Gospel text we read the story in which Peter denies Jesus, which serves as a window into the powerful forces at work in the world. Here is Peter, the forerunner of our modern day popes, the rock upon which the church is to be built, and even he can’t break free from the gravitational pull of evil in the world. "No way, man," he basically says, "I don’t know this guy Jesus." Christians in the time of the Nazis did the same thing when they abandoned the Jews, and we are doing the same thing today in the midst of a modern day witch-hunt directed against Arabs in general and Muslims in particular.

No matter how hard we want to try to do the right thing, there’s an incredibly powerful pull toward colluding with the enemy. Who wants to speak out against the 660 Muslims being held in Guantanamo? It’s not easy.

When you’re in the midst of the storm it’s hard to see the scapegoating and bigotry raging all around you. That’s why I used the film clip depicting the struggle of the young Jesuit priest and the established SS officer during the time of the Nazi rise to power, because these times are beginning to feel equally ominous. Some of you no doubt saw the article in the New York Times about Donald Rumsfeld coming to the defense of US general, William Boykin ("Rumsfeld Praises Army General Who Ridicules Islam as ‘Satan,’" Friday, October 17, 2003, A-7). This general is apparently making the rounds of right wing evangelical Christian groups and saying some pretty bizarre things. "In one speech, the general recalled a Muslim fighter in Somalia who said American forces would never get him because Allah would give him protection." The general said to his evangelical audience:

‘Well, you know what I knew that my God was bigger than his. knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

If this were simply an evangelical preacher spouting off this kind of nonsense it would actually be funny. But this is a US general! Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said about Boykin’s remarks, "At first blush, it doesn’t look like any rules were broken." That brings to mind the remark by Thomas Merton that the end of the world will be a legal process; it’s trying to save it that will land you in jail.

When we do manage to get a hold of both handrails so that we can begin to make our way up the stairs toward greater understanding, toward a place where we can see some of these justice issues more clearly, it helps to have an image of resistance. So that we, too, can muster a similar courage.

One such image comes out of the film we saw a portion of this morning, Amen. The young Jesuit was actually able to get access to the Pope on more than one occasion.

At one point the young priest, who has begun to see that his Church has failed him, steps back from his final attempt to intervene on behalf of the Jews, and he reaches inside his cassock. For a moment you get the feeling he might pull out a gun out of sheer desperation. But he pulls out a yellow star, and in the presence of the Pope affixes it to his priestly garments. The pope, the young priest’s father and the Cardinals in attendance are shocked into disbelief. That priest found dignity.

Dignity is most tangible when the deck is stacked against it. It strikes me as a powerful spiritual principle that it is often when the world attempts to put you down and say you’re worthless that dignity really shines. This is because the world assertion that you are worthless is a lie. You see, we don’t believe that anyone has to give us dignity. We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And so it is that when the world tries to take it away, it rises up.

Maya Angelou tells a story in her autobiography about an experience she had at her graduation at her all Black high school when the power of the white world came crashing down on the school. Some idiot politician addressed the crowd and blathered on about how some of the graduates of the school had gone on to be good athletes. It was the sort of stupid thing a white person might say who has no self-awareness of his own racism. Maya Angelou describes how the celebratory mood of graduation was crushed and she describes it like only she can.

I’d like to read her description to you, but instead I’m going to read you what happened after the politician spoke. A young Black student named Henry Reed got stood up and taught everybody there a little something about dignity. This is how Maya Angelou describes it:

I began by invoking the lyrics of Bob Dylan to make the point that if we’re going to get real here, we need to admit that dignity is hard to find. But that’s not to say that it’s non-existent. I’d like to close with Dylan, adding a little twist that I’d like to think he’d approve of: