Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

October 25, 1998

It was the first sermon I ever preached. I was 16 or 17 years old, and our local Luther League chapter in the church where I was raised in Wisconsin was putting on a worship service. I was the designated speaker, and I remember the theme I was eager to preach on: self-righteousness.

I chose the scripture from the book of Matthew:

"Why do you see the splinter that is in your neighbor’s eye, but don’t notice the log that is in your own eye? First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye. "

"Whatever you want others to do to you, do to them. This is the essence of the law

of the prophets."

I don’t remember exactly what it was I said to the people that Sunday morning, but I do vividly remember the feeling and motivation I brought to the event. I had the forum and I was going to take the time to give them more than a little piece of my mind.

The Lutheran church I attended had just over 100 members and the town’s population was just over 250 people, and I saw hypocrisy all around me. And on this Sunday, I was determined to hold that up for all to see. The minister wasn’t assertive enough. People gossiped too much. Nobody wanted to try anything new. I saw plenty of splinters around me and didn’t want to waste any time in starting the extraction process.

As for the log in my own eye, I was pretty oblivious. I was a righteous teen not ideally suited for small town life. It is a place where in some ways I’ve never quite fit in. More often then not I felt like the proverbial round peg in the square hole. People were very settled in their ways in my town and change was not something people were lining up to do. Things didn’t move awfully fast in town. People kept tract of the comings and goings of their neighbors and the rumor mill was always turning. Doing anything too out of the ordinary could easily break some unspoken rule.

Yes, there were lots of things that weren’t the greatest around me, but I didn’t take much time to think about how my frustration was entering the picture. Nor did I spend much time thinking about how I might make things better other than to point my finger.

All in all, I was a fine living symbol for the message, whether I intended it or not. I don’t think at that point that I had quite understood the lesson that if you have one finger pointing at others, three fingers are pointing at yourself. That, of course, was the real lesson of the day.

I look back at that time with a smile now. I’ve come to learn that this is one of those lessons I’m destined to learn over and over again. Mark Twain said: "There ain’t no way to find out why a snorer can’t hear himself snore." It is simply the way it is.

When faced with a such a situation in life, at any given time we all are inclined to look for the specks in other people’s eyes. That is human nature. And likewise, we may be more or less disinclined to see the log in our own eyes. That, too, seems to be human nature.

We all walk around with our own views of the world. How they line up with the rest of the world is anybody’s guess. If we’re lucky we are provided with some feedback along the way. Most of the time we learn to sense these things ourselves.

Over time we might come to either see ourselves and our issues having a basic commonality with others or we might come to see ourselves as being different and opposed to others.

The latter, seeing differences may be easier. We don’t have to do as much work. We can see the differences, decide the other guy needs to change and that’s that. It doesn’t necessarily call us to look at ourselves as much as simply see how we aren’t like someone else.

Often in our society, issues are framed with distinctly opposite sides. There is a right side and a wrong side. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. Too often we have issues presently in stark right and wrong terms. Someone is on the good side and someone is on the bad side.

In this context issues quickly become personalized. We see someone as the other and it is easy to demonize them. If they are not with us they must be against us. The rise of the Religious Right in this country exemplifies this trend. Someone becomes the evil one in the debate and the rhetoric escalates. God takes sides and the stakes are raised.

There must be someone to rally against. Sometimes this can have deadly consequences. Matthew Shepherd, the young gay man who was killed in Wyoming a couple weeks ago was such an example. If he and other gays are portrayed as less than human, it really isn’t much of a leap for someone to come along and feel they have some right to kill him. If you have a designated other, all can be projected onto them. It then becomes ok to dehumanize them, to make them the scape goat. Just last Friday we saw the consequences of the abortion debate coming up again. A doctor who performed abortions in New York was apparently standing in his kitchen when he was gunned down by a high powered rifle outside his house. He is the latest in a series of such incidents in recent years.

These are the times when righteousness takes on deadly consequences. It is when it is the most hideous. It is when we are so convinced we are right that we take it upon ourselves to license the killing of someone or at least the threatening of them, all in the name of what we believe is the good.

These are the extremes of this behavior. But it is not limited to people on the fringes. We can all be self righteous in our behavior. It can take many shapes and forms.

As religious liberals, we sometimes assume that we don’t have anything to worry about. We are open and tolerant, so we don’t have to watch ourselves. But when we say I know the answer and it is right, we may be just as self righteous as the people we’re pointing the fingers at.

I have to say that I don’t see a lot of that in this church. I’m impressed with the spiritual maturity I see. People generally are good not to point fingers but take a measured approach to issues.

But there are times that it can rear its head, especially when we engage in injustices in the world. We touch into a pain that is real—in ourselves and in the larger culture. We don’t know what to do with that pain. One response that can be destructive to others is to project it outward. We don’t hold it ourselves but instead find fault with others around us. "If the church would do more about this, or if the ministers would do more about this (fill in the blank) then the problem wouldn’t be so bad."

When this happens, the pain is taken from us and put onto others. A blame game happens. We don’t take responsibility for how we might change things as much as accuse someone else of not doing what we think they should. In the process not much is accomplished. It is hard to stay grounded if the fingers are being pointed.

Holding up a mirror at a time like this is probably the best response. That is how we get back to our center. And sometimes, if I find myself wanting to judge others, the universe sends a lesson my way. No matter how hard I might hold up the differences, the commonalities may keep popping up.

A few months ago I had an appointment to get cable TV hooked up in my home. I wanted to see a special program and got cable for just a couple weeks. It was a rainy Saturday morning and a gentleman came to do just that. He was an average looking guy. Seemed to enjoy what he was doing. He went about his business as I worked on a sermon in my office.

I was rather preoccupied. I really wasn’t in the mood for a lot of conversation. I wanted him to do the job and leave.

He seemed pretty talkative. Mid-way through his work he asks me, "so, what do you do for a living?" Now, in my profession, this is a question I’ve come to be a little wary of—particularly on airplanes.

"I’m a minister," I tell him.

"Oh, really," he says, "That’s interesting, so am I."

At this point, I don’t want to conversation to go much further. I have a gut feeling that it is going to be some religion on an opposite end of the spectrum from my own and I’m going to get pulled into some theological discussion I really don’t want to have.

Sure enough, he tells me he’s a Jehovah’s Witness minister. All of a sudden it feels like I’m in the middle of strange comedy skit. "Next week with the Jehovah’s Witness Cable Guy."

But as we talk there is a shift for me. I realize that perhaps I’ve been a little quick to rush to judgment. I come to find out that he really is a nice guy. He didn’t know anything about Unitarian Universalism—which may have been good—but I was struck by how open he was to hearing about it.

And I was also struck by how committed he was to his faith and how that commitment came through as he talked.

I was taught something in the exchange. Once I got past the part of me that was poised to judge him, I came to see that perhaps he had something to teach me. The next time someone from his church comes to my door I don’t know that I’ll want to spend a lot of time talking with them but I will also make sure I’m courteous to them.

But what I was struck with was that however hard I was trying to see the differences, he was trying to bring out the similarities. The more I tried to see myself as somehow above him, he kept trying to find the connections we shared.

I don’t know how many we would have actually found, but I was impressed by his attempts to find them.

I share this story because I learned how in the situation I wanted to find what separated us as he sought out the things we shared. That was a good mirror to have held up.

When we see ourselves on the opposite side of an issue, when we see injustices around us, and we feel an instinctive call to respond. That impulse is a good one. It is one we must constantly stay in touch with.

But sometimes we miss a critical step of understanding where we fit into the picture.

The golden rule asks us to empathize with others. It asks us to get out of the boxes of our egos and image what a given situation is like for the another person. Depending upon where we are in life and what the issues are, that may be more or less difficult.

Holding up the golden rule is one thing, living it out is a whole other story.

And particularly when we struggle with a difficult issue, we tap into a whole bunch of stuff. There’s may be a history of injustice. As we learn we look around us and see the impact it has. We feel sorrow and anger and frustration and we need to do something with all that. We can look inward or we can reach out and seek to understand the issue by being with others. We can hear their stories and come to a better understanding of something with their help. This is the most constructive way to engage instead of placing premature blame with others. We can take that pain we have tapped into and channel it to work for good. This is more constructive than simply blaming others. We ask ourselves what are we going to do with the pain we have tapped into? How can we begin the process of healing and reconciliation? If we have the courage to move into the pain, it can help us find healing. If we can channel that pain in the constructive way, we can find our way. We are asked to take our share of responsibility if we are part of the problem, and in this we come to discern how we are part of the solution.

This is the place where we are called to look at ourselves, and also to have a safe place to do that.

We may not heal the world, but we can attempt to find healing in our own lives, and from that place we are able to help others heal.

If we have attempted to do this, we are better able to understand what is happening. From here we can speak out from a place of strength. And from this place we can challenge those people we need to challenge. We know where we are with an issue and stand on firm ground.

We are called to address the injustices we see. If we do the internal work, they we are better able to see our path. Once the log is out of our eye, removing the splinter from our neighbor’s eye is easier.

If we attempt to empathize with someone, we can come to more fully understand an issue and also have a clearer sense of what to do. We may be able to see a bridge to resolution if we have this understanding.

We are called to discern what we believe is right and wrong and to act on those beliefs. If we can be in touch with our feelings—including our fears, we increase the odds of engaging on a deeper level.

Words of Wendell Berry:

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,

mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at last,

and I sing it. As we sing,

the day turns, the trees move.

Our focus needs to be not someplace else, but here. We start, not out there, but in

here. And from that grounding of strength, we are able to move into a larger circle.

And from that place we reach out to others and ask for support and guidance. We

see ourselves not as acting alone but as a community. We find a place to be with our

fears and from that place to grow.

If we are able to find such fertile ground, we are stronger than we would be alone.

In the process we are called to covenant together, to walk together, to support one

another on the path. We call people on things they need to be called on—but we do

it with an understanding of love.

When I preached my first sermon, perhaps the biggest thing I forgot was that I was

part of a community. When I look back, the awareness of what a community is was

the greatest gift I received from growing up in a small town. However challenging

people could be at times, I can now see what I have inherited from that place—for

good or ill. Whatever I have, I always will know where I’m from and that the people

there are part of me. I couldn’t see that some years ago, but I am able to see it now.

If we can come from this place with an open heart, it may be we can discover

something new.

Mary has a new roommate, Kathy, and Kathy’s parents are coming to visit one

Sunday. They are Mormons and invite Mary to lunch after church. She doesn’t

belong to a church and doesn’t particularly want to go to church with them, but also

feels like she probably should. May give them something to talk about over lunch.

At the church she experiences many things. She is new to Mormonism, and has a lot

of questions. The beliefs done quite fit for her. But what she is struck by surprises

her: It is the sense of connection and belonging between Kathy and her parents in

this context.

Mary realizes that the Mormon church was not the right one for her. But it did

kindle a desire in her to search for a religious community. That search has led her

here, to our church. Being open to another experience started her on a path that has

led her here.

As we search, we have to be open to where the path leads us and to the lessons

other might have for us.

And when we do this, we find our way. We have a place to wrestle with those

things that weigh heavy on our hearts. We have others who will help us along our

path.

Last Sunday evening I attended the memorial for Matthew Shepherd, the young gay

man killed in Wyoming. Hundreds gathered in Pioneer Square, including many

people from our church. There were speeches from politicians and religious leaders

and activists. Many of them were very moving.

I left with a mixture of feelings: anger, sadness, some, pride in community. Despite

all the people there, I somehow felt alone in my grief.

Walking up Broadway, on the way to the car, I saw a slight figure walking up the

hill with the help of a cane. The figure looked familiar, but I didn’t pay much

attention.

I soon realized that she was a member of the church. An elderly woman who lives

several blocks from the Pioneer Square.

Suddenly I a sense of hope stirred in me. I can’t exactly explain why. It had

something to do with the fact that she, an elderly woman, had made this trip out on a

chilly October evening alone to witness against this hatred. Her presence touched

me deeply.

Suddenly I knew that my own burden was a little lighter. Suddenly I was reminded

that I didn’t walk alone.

I was reminded that in community, there is hope. And in finding it, I discovered

again how precious it is it have.

May it be so. Amen.

Prayer: Let us pray: Spirit of life, we give thanks for this day and all the lessons life

holds for us. Help us to acknowledge and celebrate all the goodness and beauty in

our midst. Help us to pay attention, to notice those around us, to see them for who

they are. May we have the courage to walk in one another’s shoes. May we laugh at

ourselves, and may others always be there to walk with us. Help us to face injustice

without fear, grounded in who we are. We ask this in the name of all we hold

sacred. Amen.

Benediction: Let your light shine, and don’t be afraid to look in the mirror. Go in

love and go in peace.

Opening words by Anne Hillman:

We are all on a journey together…

To the center of the universe…

Look deep

into yourself, into another.

It is to a center which is everywhere

That is the holy journey…

First you need only look:

Notice and honor the radiance of

Everything about you…

Play in this universe. Tend

All these shining things around you:

The smallest plant, the creatures and

objects in your care.

Be gentle and nurture. Listen…

As we experience and accept

All that we really are…

We grow in care.

We begin to embrace others

As ourselves, and learn to live

As one among many.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.