by Bruce Davis, Intern Minister

A sermon given Feb. 15, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Most of us remember where we were on that day when we learned that tragedy had struck the Kennedy clan and the American people in the city of Dallas. I was in eleventh grade English, sitting in the second seat in the row by the windows. The public address system stopped the classroom conversation dead in its tracks. “The President of the United States has been shot.” Caught between denial and the shock of realization I looked out the window seeking solace in the gray sky. The classroom remained silent for a long time. It wasn’t until later that I wept, when he was pronounced dead in the hospital.

I and my idealistic classmates held JFK in high esteem. It was not just that he was a young, popular president, living out a romantic tale of Camelot. He seemed to engage our vision and invite our enthusiasm for the very principles upon which our nation was founded. What he represented to me was a challenge not only to follow a path of personal opportunity and achievement but to stretch myself toward service to the people of our nation and our brothers and sisters the world over.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world…ask what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Kennedy hearkened to the themes of another great American President, Thomas Jefferson. When we as a nation declared independence from the British crown in 1776, it is Jefferson’s words that announced the position of our commonwealth:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….

Like Kennedy, Jefferson does not suggest that government alone should secure the rights of individual citizens because “We the people of the United States of America” are that government. In a 1792 letter Jefferson wrote,

A nation… forms a moral person, and every member of [that nation] is personally responsible for his society.

To my way of thinking, President’s Day is not about the sometimes great, sometimes middling, leaders who have taken the helm of our ship of state. By the virtue of our founding documents, the president is a representative leader, not an autocrat. The U.S. President is called to stand for and advocate for the American people—all of them. The power of the president comes directly from the power of the people—all of us.

This national tradition of honoring President’s day began with two important February birthdays: President Washington and President Lincoln. Few would doubt the greatness of these guides for the American nation. Each in his own way walked the fine line between liberty and commonwealth. Both lived out of the tension between revolution on the one hand and constitution on the other, attempting to bring individual freedom in harmony with compassionate community.

George Washington’s masterful guidance of the American War of Independence was followed quickly by a complex process of constituting a new civil order—a new government by and for the revolutionaries. That this process of constitution unfolded quickly is certainly part of its success, because revolution can devolve into anarchy and be raised up once again in autocracy. The French Revolution, of course, did just that. A critical part of Washington’s leadership was his refusal to be a monarch and his insistence on a national polity that ensured full expression of the conscience of each citizen. The zeitgeist of the revolutionary era was filled with images of Rome and Greece, and Washington might well have accepted the invitation to become a Caesar. Washington’s choice allowed Jeffersonian democracy to emerge.

Abraham Lincoln also balanced an advocacy for freedom with the necessity of a strongly constituted government. Freedom, even in the face of deeply established economic forces that favored slavery, was balanced against his commitment to a single commonwealth, not divided against itself. Our founding documents declared that human liberty was to be honored for all persons, according to Lincoln, and we may note that abolition was supported by Unitarians like Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet, as Unitarian Universalists we should also remember that powerful New England industrialists depended on an economic system that was fueled by slavery, and many of these were also Unitarians.

What I especially remember when President’s Day comes around each year are the core principles and values that constitute who we are as a national community. We stand for freedom, but this freedom is modified by our commitment to commonwealth. The central theme here is “covenant,” meaning a spiritual promise made at the level of the human heart. In the founding documents of our nation we find words like “Creator, Being, and Providence” to refer to a moral force or law that lives in each person while it holds all together in a loving whole. In a covenanted community people find relational connections that supercede individual desires. In covenant we must learn to balance the absolute freedom of the individual to achieve his or her dream with the needs of other persons to follow their own dreams. In covenant, the needs of the community as a whole must harmonize with the needs of individuals. In a covenanted community, bringing the greatest good to the greatest number of people is of paramount importance.

Using the word covenant in this way is familiar because as Unitarian Universalists the very essence of our church is a covenant. Our nation and our church have similar intentions of constitution, similar polity. This should not surprise us, because both were forming and both were being articulated at the same time, in the latter part of the 18^th century. Unitarian ideals were brought directly into the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution by such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. And Universalist values, asserting the goodness of God in the salvation of all persons, were promoted by Dr. Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence. It was Jefferson who said that Unitarianism would be the national religion of the United States by the year 1900, so deeply did he read Unitarian values into the directions and purposes of our nation.

The same tension present in the nation-state leadership of Washington and Lincoln, the tension hardwired in our founding documents between individual liberty and community responsibility, is integral to the essence of Unitarianism and Universalism. When the Unitarian Universalist Association was founded in 1961, that tension was powerfully included in the Principles and Values statement that became our foundation for covenant.

The bottom line here is this. No single principle or value can adequately contain what it is that we must do in our congregational or national covenants. Individualism must always be balanced with community responsibility. Our UU Principles and Values statement begins with this language: “We covenant to affirm…” the following values—not as creed or dogma but as guiding principles. These seven statements form a promise that we make to each other to uphold the rights and responsibilities of people in a covenanted church community.

That first UU principle, in my experience, is the one that we most often quote: “Inherent worth and dignity of each person.” On the philosophical front, it was the enlightenment ideas of John Locke and others that most influenced Jefferson’s thinking. And Locke’s views similarly influenced the great forebears of Unitarianism, like William Ellery Channing, and Universalism, like Hosea Ballou. The first UU principle is augmented by the fifth, asserting the right of each individual to express his or her conscience. By the fact of my inherent worth, I must be free to follow my own heart. Each person is equally valuable. By the fact that each individual conscience deserves to be heard, I insist that you listen to what I have to say. Each person has the right to follow his or her interests.

But here’s the rub. Unbridled liberty breeds infighting and hoarding in a field of scarce resources. One person’s achievement might threaten another person’s opportunity. One person’s excess might preclude another person from meeting their basic needs. It is not enough to advocate the full expression of my self-interest without attending to the impact of my behavior on others.

So it is that our UU principles balance the worth and freedom of each person with our need to care for others with whom we are in covenanted community. Our second principle attests to the importance that justice, equity and compassion have in the balancing our self-interest. The third principle challenges us to accept and encourage each other. The fourth principle charges us to balance our own personal search for truth and meaning with responsibility for the impact of our journey on others. The sixth principle indicates that that health of community at a global level must balance the rights of the individual. And the seventh principle suggests that each person must be sensitive to how her choices have repercussions throughout life’s web of interdependence.

Whether we are talking about our church or our nation or our world, these core principles require us to modify self-interest for the good of the commonwealth.

The sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, suggests that our nation’s founding principles have successfully withstood two times of trial. The first was “our struggle for independence and the institution of liberty,” and George Washington was the first president to address this struggle, leading us finally from revolution to constitution. The second test was the Civil War, when our trial was “the very preservation of our union and the extension of equal protection of the laws to all members of the society.” President Lincoln was our guide here.

As challenging as these first two tests were, Bellah indicates that a third time of trial is upon us now. In Bellah’s words:

It is a test of whether our inherited institutions can be creatively adapted to meet the twentieth-century crisis of justice and order at home and in the world. It is a test of whether republican liberty established in a remote agrarian backwater of the world in the 18^th century shall prove able or willing to confront successfully the age of mass society and international revolution. It is a test of whether we can control the very economic and technical forces which are our greatest achievement, before they destroy us.

It is interesting to note that Franklin, Jefferson, and others of the founding fellowship favored the development of technology, seeing in science only its benefit of the human condition. For a long time they were right. But the reality two hundred years later is very different. Early in our nation’s history, North American land, water, and air seemed infinite and pure, beyond our capacity to despoil them. We now know that this is not so. The supply of natural resources both in our land and abroad appeared to be endless, and the frontier was wilderness to be conquered. We now know that natural gifts are not endless, as we strain forests, plains, and seas beyond their capacity to reproduce. If we were to try to bring the standard of living world-wide to the average level of first world nations, it would require the biosphere of three planet earths to feed and supply their needs. When the nation’s founders were fathering their children, more family meant more workers and more income. Two centuries later making more family just adds to an exploding population, competing for ever fewer resources. Earth as we know it, and the human family, cannot bear the growing demands that “we the people” are making.

This is the core of the trial for our nation and our values that Bellah describes. Do we have within us what it will take to sustain life on earth?

It is all too easy to say that greed, born of unbridled self-interest, is the problem here. But let’s look where else that finger is pointing. I am not a greedy man. I don’t hoard wealth and I don’t take candy from children.  Yet, like most of us, I am a person who likes my comforts, and my safety, and my self-interest undoubtedly takes from others, in our nation and abroad, of what they need simply to subsist. Massive human systems, depending on profit and growth, seem to have expanded beyond the intentions and the control of individual people who lead them. As a physician I would cite the medical-industrial complex as being so bound to market forces that basic healthcare for all seems but a dream. The military industrial system, international agribusiness, and trans-national manufacturing likewise appear to have lives of their own.

Bellah would say that we have fallen out of the covenant of our beginnings. Nor does he provide an easy answer. If we had an easy answer it would not be the profound trial that it is. Myself, I do not look for a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Kennedy to solve this one. I believe that we the people must make this happen.

As UUs we have a powerful tool for building covenant in our core principles and values. Jefferson had thought that these principles, woven into the fabric of our founding documents as a nation, would ultimately bring all America to Unitarianism. Not as a religious tradition or a creed but as the marker of covenanted people committed to the balance of self-interest and community compassion. Although Universalists evangelized their faith of universal salvation, Unitarians rarely did. We still don’t. We keep the light of our values under the proverbial bushel basket. Although for many it will sound like a contradiction in terms, I believe that this is the time in our national and world history for Unitarian Universalist evangelism. I think that my job and yours is to share these values wherever we can get a hearing.

That means, consciously embracing the seven principles. That means, living the principles in our daily work and relationships. That means, wherever possible, advocating covenantal thinking that modifies the outcomes of self-interest with the needs of all persons, nationally and internationally. That means, entering the public realm of commerce and politics, armed with these seven arrows of our faith.

The third time of trial is upon us. Let us not fail, for the stakes are high. Let it be that “we the people” will be strong in declaring our faith and the faith of our forbears. Let us be guided by the Spirit of Life to uphold the lives of our human family and the life of our planet.

May it be so.  Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Bruce Davis. All rights reserved.