by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 6, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We ask that we be in the presence of love this day—

The love that heals all wounds,

That puts to flight all fears,

That reconciles all who are separated.

Come now, and let us worship together.

Did you know that this church has a motto? On every piece of stationery that goes out of the office of First Unitarian Church, on our Sunday order of service, on our ad in the Saturday Oregonian, you will find that motto, a kind of a synopsis of our mission statement. Just four words long, it reads "Living Our Liberal Faith." Living Our Liberal Faith.

So we call ourselves liberals. Just what does that mean? The word liberal has taken a hit during the last 30 years or so, and in some circles it is definitely a dirty word, as in "bleeding heart liberal." This expression is a favorite of people who believe that poor people are poor because they are lazy—whereas liberals tend to think that poor people are poor because they don’t have money—poor because of an economic system that doesn’t share resources fairly. Poverty, then, for a liberal becomes an economic problem, not a moral problem—or if it is a moral problem, it is the problem of the privileged.

Bleeding heart liberal? Maybe it’s a good thing to have a heart that bleeds—a heart that bleeds for those who are hungry, for people forced to live on the streets, for victims of war. And it should be remembered that our nation was founded on liberal principles: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, unqualified freedom of conscience. These qualities were grounded in the religious convictions of our first settlers, who rebelled against religious hierarchy and talked instead of the priesthood of all believers, lifting up the individual conscience, thereby paving the ground for democracy.

As Forrest Church points out in one of his books, God is the most famous liberal of all—God "has a bleeding heart that never stops." Liberal religious people bring the good news, the news of God’s love and salvation, not the bad news of hell and damnation. Liberals are the ones who tend to believe that people are basically good, and that redemption, though it may not be chosen, is possible for all. The word liberal carries connotations like generous, open, ready to consider new ideas, reform-minded, tolerant. Personally, I am proud to be a liberal.

However, every good quality can be ruined by an excess of that very quality. This morning, in particular, I want to take a look at the principle of tolerance and examine the problems that come with an excess of tolerance—really, a misunderstanding of what genuine tolerance really is.

Genuine tolerance is a deep internalizing of the truth that others, who may be different from ourselves, are free to be who they are. It is understanding that a person who has dark skin is a human being every bit as worthy as those of us with white skin. It is understanding that gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transgendered people can love just as deeply, just as purely, as straight people. It is understanding that people who are devout Catholics and who believe that abortion is wrong hold that belief in good faith. When I speak of tolerance, I’m not talking about being politically correct—because being politically correct is just a public relations gesture. No, tolerance is an internal conviction, a spiritual knowing, that informs one’s behavior, that demands of us that we respect others as equals, as children of God.

Now how can we get in trouble, with a noble attitude such as this one? We do so by mistaking tolerance for permissiveness; by thinking that, oh, well, one idea is as good as any other; by allowing evils to exist and not standing against them, because after all, who are we to judge? I wouldn’t call this behavior "bleeding heart liberalism," but "brain dead liberalism." I am reminded of one of Ogden Nash’s clever quips—he wrote: "Sometimes with secret pride I sigh/ To think how tolerant am I;/ Then wonder which is really mine:/ Tolerance, or a rubber spine?"

A culture can be judged to some extent by what it tolerates and what it refuses to tolerate. In this country we do not tolerate someone stealing a loaf of bread from a grocery store—well, I can understand that, especially if I owned the grocery story. But we have a remarkable tolerance for rising numbers of hungry people in a land of so much plenty. We do not tolerate a person’s having a packet of marijuana in his jacket pocket—essentially a victimless crime—but we tolerate white collar crime and don’t think of those who rip off millions of investors, some of whom lose all their retirement money, as real "criminals," because after all, they do wear suits and ties. How many of these corporate crooks will ever see the inside of a prison? I sometimes fantasize what Martha Stewart’s cell would look like. She would have the guards cutting out paper doilies to use for place mats on her food tray. Maybe her next magazine will be called Cell Beautiful.

But back to what we tolerate. We tolerate drunk drivers, like the individual who had 32 convictions before killing someone while under the influence. We gladly allow almost anyone to purchase guns. We tolerate homelessness here in Portland, and say we cannot provide enough low-income housing, but according to a new city ordinance, we won’t tolerate a homeless teen slumping down to rest on the sidewalk. What’s wrong with this picture? Look at the things we tolerate and the things we don’t tolerate. What does this say about our values, about who we are as a people?

I don’t want to go back to the hell-fire and brimstone sermons of my youth in the Baptist church, and all the unnecessary guilt I experienced there, but I think that religious liberals get into trouble because we underestimate our fallenness. I’m here to say this morning that evil is a real and present force, and those who discount it will be vulnerable to its power, both in their own lives and in their allowing the destructive behavior of others. Everybody has the potential for good, and everybody has the potential for evil, and all of us dip into both of these pots from time to time. As part of my training to become a minister, I worked in a Federal prison for a while. We had a Mafia killer there, under the Witness Protection Program. This man murdered people—lots of them—for money. And yet every day, I saw him water the flowers in the chapel, tenderly, with great care. In the worst of us is love. In the best of us is evil.

We Unitarian Universalists tend to err on the side of believing that sin doesn’t exist, that people are basically good, and have simply been led astray by an unfortunate upbringing. I remember leading a small congregation in a Sunday service years ago—and I do mean small; there were only about 25 worshippers there that Sunday. For the closing hymn, I had chosen "Amazing Grace." When we got to the phrase "who saved a wretch like me," a woman interrupted the service and spoke out—not unusual in a small church—and she said, "I’m not a wretch! I’m not a sinner! I don’t see why we have to use that language." There was silence. Then a young man spoke up from the last row. I knew him well. He had AIDS, and he was schizophrenic. He said, "You know, we sing this song down at the Salvation Army where I sometimes go for food. I like that song. I know I’m a wretch." We religious liberals are not enough in touch with our wretchedness—and therefore lack humility and lack discernment around evil, both in ourselves and in others.

This attitude leaks through in institutional matters. Liberal churches too often tolerate destructive behavior by individuals, all in the name of being open-minded. I’ve seen this happen all too often in Unitarian Universalist settings, where we are loathe to actually condemn anyone’s behavior, because after all, aren’t we all good people here? Aren’t we all people of good will? Well, actually, no, we’re not. Churches—perhaps more so than other institutions—attract all kinds of people, and inevitably some of them will not be healthy people—they may be unhealthy emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. If the institution is strong and healthy, though, and if the leaders are willing to be discerning and to set boundaries, the church will be able to move forward, its mission intact. But when the leaders fall into a mushy relativism and are unwilling to take a stand, one destructive individual can sabotage a church.

We had an incident that occurred when I first came to the church, some ten years ago. Mark Slegers, our music director, came to me during the coffee hour, and he pointed out a man who was a known date rapist—in fact, this man had forced two women from our own congregation to have sex with him. He was huge—about 6’5", as I remember, and big built. I noted his behavior. He would look around the crowd for a possible victim and engage her in conversation. Mark would then go over to the woman, take her aside, and tell her the score. I was very angry that this man was preying upon our women. By the following Sunday I had talked to the police and found out what our rights were. The police said that the church was private property, and we could ask any person to leave, so that’s what we determined to do. The next Sunday there he was again, in the coffee hour, glancing over the crowd. I was about to go speak to him myself, but some of the larger men in the church determined that they should give him the message. About five of them surrounded him, and one of them, a Board member, simply said, "We know who you are and what you are doing. You are to leave this property and never come back." At first, he was blustery and defensive, but the Board member simply repeated the statement, adding, "And if you return, we’re going to call the police." He never returned.

It’s important we act and not be passive, in the face of circumstances that are disturbing. My son Madison called me a few days ago with a dilemma. He is a law clerk working for a Federal judge in Kentucky, and the judge was sent a death penalty case to review. This was literally the court of last resort, for the man was to be executed a few days later, unless his appeal was upheld. The judge had asked Madison to do the research and come up with an opinion to inform the judge’s decision. Madison, who does not believe in capital punishment, was trying to decide whether or not to remove his name from the case and let another clerk take it. I could see he was struggling. He said, "Mom, I don’t want to be just a part of a cog in a legal machine that sends a person to die. On the other hand, maybe I could do something to help him, maybe I could find a way for him to win his appeal." Then he mused out loud. "That’s the way it always is, Mom. Nobody wants to take ownership. The politicians say, ‘It’s not my responsibility—this is what the people want.’ The judge says, ‘It’s not my responsibility—the jury decided.’ The jury says, ‘It’s not my responsibility, it’s the law.’ The executioner says, ‘It’s not my responsibility, I’m just paid to pull the switch.’"

I’m thinking a lot these days about a possible war in Iraq, which I believe may be inevitable. Let it be said that a huge number of our church members are actively speaking out against the war. Last Sunday after our services, over 750 of you signed petitions, and another 50 or so picked up printed materials telling you how to contact Congressmen—this means that over 90 per cent of the congregation took a step last Sunday to keep this war from happening.

I was at the peace demonstration yesterday down in the Park Blocks, and I saw many, many of you there. Thank you for being there. At no time since Vietnam have I been so disturbed by the warring actions of our country. There were many clever and innovative signs there, and among the ones that I liked best was one that read: "Silence is consent." We cannot afford to be silent. This war is about oil—and about blood vengeance, a war led by a President who showed his hand when he recently said of Saddam Hussein, "After all, this is the man who tried to kill my dad." This is the gunfight at OK Corral, writ large.

I have to say, though, that I’m afraid a lot of people are very ill-informed about what’s going on—too many are just blindly following the President. I was in a shop last week and began engaging the clerk, asking her if she had been following the news about the war. "Not really. You mean, that thing between Bush and Saddam Hussein?" she said. I shared with her a few of my observations, and she just said, "Well, maybe our President knows some things that we don’t know." How many times do we have to learn that we can’t leave the running of the country to the politicians? There are no experts with the big questions, like do we go to war. We are all citizens, and we all have to be responsible for these decisions.

Nineteen brave legislators—a bi-partisan group—are risking their political futures by coming out against the President’s resolution to go to war. I sincerely hope that Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith will join them, and I urge you to encourage them to do so. You know, here in Oregon, we have long had a powerful voice in the anti-war movement. Democrat Wayne Morse was one of two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, and Representative Mark Hatfield, an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War, cast one of the Senate’s two Republican votes in 1990 against the Desert Storm attack on Iraq.

True tolerance comes from an attitude of "I don’t know," accompanied by a thirst to know, and a willingness to listen and to learn. Tolerance comes from being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes and to try to feel what it’s like when those shoes pinch. Tolerance is saying, "You are a human being, worthy of respect, needful of love, just like me." But tolerance is not living in a land of moral ambiguity, so that one idea is no better than any other; tolerance is not being mushy, so that there is no firmness to you, and therefore anything goes; tolerance is not sitting on the sidelines, apathetically waiting out the struggle, saying, "Let somebody else figure this out—I’m just going to have another beer."

These are not easy times to live through—much is required of us. Let us show the backbone that we need to show, to protect our family’s integrity; to protect and support institutions like our church that hold up our ideals before us, like our church; to sanitize the political process as much as we can, so that big money will not call all the shots; and when all else fails, let us say "no" over and over again, to those who would usurp our authority as citizens of this great nation, and let us fill the streets with our cries until we, the people, are heard and heeded.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Loving God, God of Peace, help us to hold peace in our hearts this day; we pray for the time when weapons of war will be turned into ploughshares, and furrows will be plowed, and seeds planted, and people fed. May we so value life that we would protect ourselves, our children, and the larger world against all that is not-life. May we, in all humility, know that we do not know, but learn what we can, and act upon what we learn. Give us clarity of vision and firmness of spine. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Seek, the truth, and as you find it to be, act upon it. Go in love, and go in peace.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.