“Justice and the Moral Compass”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
March 25, 2007
READINGS
The first reading is from the Book of Matthew, Chapter 25:
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
The second reading is from the song, “Easy To Be Hard” from the 1960’s Rock Musical, Hair:
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard, easy to be cold
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud, easy to say no
Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Do you only care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend, we all need a friend
SERMON
Each year in March, our friends at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee encourage congregations to conduct a worship service under the theme of Justice Sunday. This year the particular topic they are promoting is putting an end to the genocide in Darfur. This is a hugely important issue and it’s one that we’ve talked about and done things about, a number of times, over the last couple of years. Until that horrendous genocide is stopped, we’ll need to remain vigilant and engaged in doing what we can to help end it. If you want to know more about specific things you can do, please visit the very informative uusc.org website. I don’t want to spend our time together this morning telling you more about what’s going on in Darfur, though. There are many ways we can know about what’s going on there.
Being informed about what’s going on in Darfur just isn’t enough. We live in this colossal Information Age and yet the world’s woes are as challenging and pernicious as ever. We know, the world knows, about the genocide in Darfur. We’re literate people and we know about many injustices that are currently occurring locally, nationally and globally. We know about the inadequate education offered to inner city, marginalized students. We know about racial and ethnic imbalances in the criminal justice system; about the underbelly of poverty in New Orleans and every other major city in the country. We know about issues of gender injustice, about gender orientation injustice and about gender identity injustice. Many of us know, or at least feel that we know, that our nation is engaged in an unjust war, waged solely for the purpose of establishing hegemony over oil fields in the Middle East – and not even for the benefit of our entire country but instead for a few of its preeminent mega-corporations!
We already know of these incredible, ongoing instances of injustice and so many more. We’re not even talking about the injustices that are waged against the United States, of which there are surely many. What we’re talking about are the things we ought to be able to do something about, the injustices that are created by the guys who are supposed to be on our side. How can that be? How can the American people know all the things that we know, and still allow those things to continue?
The sometimes honored, sometimes scorned, 20th Century “Sage of Baltimore,” H.L. Menken once quipped, “War (and justice we might infer) will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.” Menken sometimes got things right, but I think he missed the mark in this case. Perhaps smaller adrenal glands would be helpful, but I don’t think that our cerebral capacity to absorb knowledge, no matter how much information we might be able to acquire, is going to lead us down any road to justice. We don’t seem to be doing much – certainly not enough – with the information we already have. Being able to retain more information is not the answer.
If there were to be a body organ that might offer hope on our passage towards justice, I suspect it might be the heart; I mean that figuratively. And besides the heart, what we need far more than knowledge, is a greater access to wisdom – I’m not sure what body part that might be most closely associated with, but it’s not about the brain as much as it is the mind or maybe the soul. If we’re going to stop the genocide in Darfur and other places, end the racial, ethnic, class and sexually-based oppressions, if we are going to get out of this immoral war and keep from engaging in new ones, there is going to need to be another Great Awakening in America. For justice to be achieved, our hearts and minds need to be aroused, awakened, and converted.
We’re not talking about conversion to any kind of creed, but conversion to an ideal, and a very Unitarian Universalist ideal at that – the ideal of unity, which is at the very core of Unitarian Universalism. This isn’t about the idea of unity, but the ideal, the realization that we each, that we all are a part of an interdependent web of existence that binds us and everything in this universe into a single whole, a single oneness, that is at once both physical and spiritual.
We are one, but it’s not enough to simply know that we are. We need to find ourselves in that oneness, to feel it, experience it. We need to wake up, to be awakened, be converted, in order to experience the larger truth – that our physical and spiritual wellbeing is merged into the physical and spiritual wellbeing of all that is. It is not and can never be an individual pursuit. We have individual and personal responsibilities within those pursuits for justice to be sure. But as Universalists, we need to find our way, to experience the depth of connection in which our own physical and spiritual wellbeing are intricately connected to one another’s and to the planet’s. No amount of knowing can provide us that experience; it’s about our hearts, about our orientation to life.
This afternoon in this very same space, I’ll be conducting the memorial service for a very longtime church member, Werner Freundlich, who died just a couple of weeks ago. Werner was not one who spent a lot of time at church. He spent his time out in the community, living the very kind of life I’ve been talking about. Werner Freundlich was the preeminent champion of the ideal of justice for all. He literally dedicated his life to it.
I remember, not too many years ago, going to a Town Council meeting, having been asked to speak on the topic of an anti-death penalty proclamation for the township. I was prepared to begin my remarks with a short poem by Fredrick Niemöller, that some of you may know. Werner Freundlich was also at the meeting. In fact, I don’t remember ever having been to a town meeting when he wasn’t there. Anyway, he was in line to speak, a few persons ahead of me. Sure enough, when it came his turn to speak, he used the same poem by Niemöller that I’d planned on using. The words speak as to us here today, as well:
“First They Came for the Jews…”
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Indeed, we are all in it together. None of us is safe, unless we are all safe. None of us is saved unless we are all saved. There is no over there; it’s all here.
The 20th Century, University of Chicago Divinity School professor and populist theologian, Joseph Sittler, once wrote that, “Justice is love operating at a distance.” I’ve always loved that expression. It’s been immortalized in one of the Wayside Pulpit messages that project our values out into the neighborhood from the lawn at the northwest corner of the Annex building. “Justice is love operating at a distance.”
The theological implications and imperatives of this little expression are profound. Justice and love are held up together as theological values and aspirations. Love is understood to be at least a, if not the preeminent and deepest of human experiences. Justice is not love’s surrogate in the world; it is love’s manifestation. “Justice is love operating at a distance.” In the few short years since Joseph Sittler’s death, through the evolution of the worldwide web and globalization, the kind of distance he was talking about has largely evaporated. There is no over there; it is all right here. We might simply say – justice is love operating.
The pursuit of justice is a spiritual quest. In our own time we have heard this message articulated by Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Tich Nhat Hahn, the Dali Llama and many others. In past times we’ve heard this same message from the leaders of all world religions. One of my favorite articulations of justice as a spiritual quest, is found in the words spoken by Jesus in the verse we read earlier, from Mathew 25.
The virtuous ones asked – when did we see you in need and respond to your need? And the answer was – whatever you did for the least of my brothers, you did it for me. Jesus was speaking metaphorically here as the son of man, and so we might interpret his words to mean – when you reach out in mercy to promote justice for any of creation, you reach out to all creation, you reach out to and embrace the Spirit of Life that is in all Life.
Justice is a spiritual quest for each of us as individuals. As a combined quest, a religious quest for us all though, it is a communal venture in the fulfillment of our spiritual lives. My colleague in Toronto, Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Morrison-Reed wrote these words that you have heard me quote many times from this pulpit:
“The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind us all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice. It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.”
The theme of Justice Sunday asks us, first of all, to recognize the injustices in our world, particularly those injustices with which we are in close relationship. Second it asks us to realize that injustice occurs whenever there is a lack of recognition of the relationships within the interconnected web of existence, relationships that make us a part of the oneness of all things; that injustice occurs whenever the illusion of insulation or isolation promote an orientation of arrogance and superiority. Further, Justice Sunday asks us to recognize that our own well being in the largest sense is intimately and ultimately connected to and dependent on the well being of all that is. It also asks us to appreciate that we can best respond to injustice through our associations with others – like minded and like spirited persons – who similarly seek transformation in their lives and in the world. Finally, it asks us to respond, to act for justice, so that it might more fully exist in the world, and more, so that we might grow our own souls in the process.
I want to go back for a moment to what I mentioned earlier about knowledge not being enough to adequately promote justice. I do believe that this endeavor requires a serious conversion of the heart. But it still needs something else, something that might be like knowledge, but that I’ll call wisdom.
As I was thinking about this sermon through the week, I recalled some reading I’d done a few years back for a sermon I did on liberal education. I don’t remember all for the statistics I’d read, but the gist of it was that our educational system in this country has stopped educating and has become a conglomerate of institutions for the purpose of job training. From primary through secondary schools, from colleges through universities and graduate schools, students are equipped for jobs and not necessarily to be good citizens and certainly not critical thinkers.
In a discussion on Public Education that I recently heard, one participant talked about how a hundred years ago, uneducated but very wise farmers could easily be found plowing their fields with copies of Henry David Thoreau’s essays tucked in their back pocket. And as a result they were quite conversant in the arts of responsible citizenship.
The capacity to read, to think about and to discuss humanitarian ideas and ideals are essential to the foundation of justice. Narrow minded, task oriented, wheel spinning, self-serving technical or professional training are not the foundation blocks of justice building. In order to promote justice we need to once again claim the wisdom of the ages that has been obscured by the buying and the selling of a consumer oriented educational systems and economy that really serve very few people well and the world not at all. If we are going to serve the causes of justice, if we are going to act for justice, we are going to have to once again learn to open our minds and our hearts to others and to the connections that hold us in communion with them.
The final point I wanted to address on this theme is the one I find hidden between the lines of the verses from, “Easy to Be Hard,” from the 1960’s rock musical, Hair. How can people be so heartless? How can they have no feelings? Especially people who care about strangers, who care about evil and social injustice. How about a needing friend? We all need a friend.”
The point is that sometimes, doing the work of justice seems easier than doing the work of being in right relationship with those we are closest to. In such times, we deny our everyday responsibilities and make ourselves feel good by doing what seems to be good for others further away. I know lots of very self-righteous do-gooders, who know just how things should be righted for everyone else in the world, while they don’t have a clue of how to make things right in their own lives. I suspect there is some element of this in most of us.
The truth is – the best way to learn how to promote justice in the world, is by learning to do it our own lives, with those closest to us and with those whom we walk among. When we can do that, I suspect we’ll be better able to experience the fabric of the web that holds us in relationship with all that is. When we can do that, I suspect we will become the champions of justice this world so desperately needs.
Justice is love operating at a distance and right up close. The people of Darfur and Iraq, the people of Newark and even here in Montclair, and so many other places, people are waiting for us to get it right. So many of them cannot wait much longer; there isn’t enough for them to hold on to. There is a need for a Great Awakening here and throughout our nation. The time to be awake is now. Together, our vision is widened and our strength shall be renewed.
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