The First Principle:

The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person

September 29, 2002

The Rev. Gretchen Woods

READING: from Walt Whitman (#659 in Singing the Living Tradition)

The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;

Those who govern are there for you, it is not you who are there for them;

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments;

The sun and stars that float in the open air;

the apple-shaped earth and we upon it;

The endless pride and outstretching of people; unspeakable joys and sorrows;

The wonder everyone sees in everyone else they see,

and the wonders that fill each minute of time forever;

It is for you whoever you are—it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you; it is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest.

We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still;

It is not they who give the life—it is you who give them life.

Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, in things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best—

Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but in this place—not for another hour, but this hour.

SERMON: "The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person"

One week in 1994, while I was serving a congregation in Reston, VA, I rose early, rode the Metro into D.C., and helped put shoes on the Mall in front of the Capitol, one pair of shoes for each person killed by a hand gun in the United States in 1992. This was the Silent March for Hand Gun Control. The first morning, things went remarkably well. We set the shoes out by state around the Reflecting pond in front of the Capitol building. A real spirit of camaraderie arose in the group. It was invigorating! I was inspired. I felt we were honoring the inherent worth and dignity of each person who had died and calling attention to the need for gun control.

The second morning I was tired and cranky and later than I wanted to be. Then we were told that we should place the shoes in straight lines in a square on the grass in front of the Capitol. We were chastised when the lines were not straight enough. Now, mind you, we were supposed to set out 38,000 pairs of shoes, never mind in straight lines on very wet grass with puddles abounding. I felt like I was in kindergarten again and wasn't cutting the paper along the required lines. I got testy! I allowed as how the folks who were shot were probably NOT standing in straight lines and that the shoes WERE getting on the ground, instead of remaining in their plastic bags. I also invited the organizers intent on straight lines to come to the Mall again on October 1 to see how the Native Americans did things, knowing full well the Indian penchant for circles.

Then I forced myself to stop and do some internal work, reminding myself that some of the organizers had lost someone through gun fire and were trying to get control of something in their lives after they had lost control of the lives of their loved ones. I also thought about the many different ways of being human that exist. Some of us like straight lines, some don't. I tried to remind myself of the inherent worth and dignity of these organizers who were doing work I believe in but don't feel the drive to do anymore: i.e., organizing large events with lots of details to be handled. Perhaps as restitution for my testiness, perhaps out of sheer stubbornness, I continued to work long after most people had quit, and I did not take breaks, despite aching in my back from carrying many bags of shoes through the wet grass. I did not give my self respect after I had reacted with disrespect to others. I wonder how many of you have ever found yourself doing that. . .

Today we begin to explore the Seven Affirmations that are the basis of our Unitarian Universalist faith. These affirmations are the heart of "what we do believe" and the values around which we gather. We follow many different paths to come together, but these values provide the compass for our travel through life.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a long and rich heritage of emphasizing "the inherent worth and dignity of each person" in the face of tyranny. We began as Universalists when we could not accept the notion that some people were elected to grace and others not. We consistently worked for individual rights, whether suffrage for women and African-Americans, prison reform, child education and welfare rights, abolition of slavery, assisting Jewish children to leave Germany before the Holocaust closed it down, and, currently, the rights of those with different sexual predispositions. We have joined with Baptists in asserting the right of the individual to her or his own interpretation of scripture and in separation of church and state. We deeply believe that each person has the right to base their religion on their own experience in this world. Our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of each person underpins all of this.

Some of us would suggest (especially the Commission on Appraisal the published the 1997 report, Interdependence, of which we spoke last week) that we may have gone too far with emphasis upon the individual—that we may be facing a tyranny of the individual which discounts the value of the community as a body of individuals. Still, a healthy community must be made up of healthy individuals who share "power-with" to co-create a larger community of value to and for all. Certainly, each has strengths and weaknesses that can best be balanced in community, rather than forcing an unnatural balance in ourselves. So we find ourselves hungering for connections that only community can provide.

As I was contemplating this paradox of our First Principle, it struck me that the problem is not affirming and promoting "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." The problem is idolatry of the individual. We cannot place the value of any one individual over the values of others or of the community. It is not an either/or proposition. It is a both/and situation.

Also, as I was contemplating our First Principle, I was impressed that respect is key to this. But it is not the only key. Responsibility and relish are also key. For those of you who are new to us, let me quickly say that I offer an alternative trinity of respect, responsibility, and relish as Unitarian Universalist focus for our faith journey. I'd like to play this out a little more now.

When I say that respect is key to affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person, it seems self evident. Yet, I find this a challenging principle to live in my daily behavior. So often I see the worst in the persons I encounter—and I do not respond with respect. Witness my experience on the Mall. I know this is a function, at least in part, of the lack of respect I have encountered in life. It is especially easy to be disrespectful, when it is what we have experienced.

Alternatively, consider the story of "Bubbles," as Anthony Slater prefers to be called. Bubbles is a 16-year-old gay transvestite—a minority within a minority within a minority—who has been trying to live his truth in the heart of the District of Columbia. He is 6 feet 2, about 240 pounds, and says, "People are going to accept you or they're going to reject you. You have to be your own person." (The Washington Post, Wednesday, September 7, 1994, p. C1.) Bubbles has learned to respect himself.

While Bubbles is impressive, what impresses me even more is his foster mother who has cared for him since he was twelve. When she took Bubbles into her home, Marion Alston realized that he was different. But, she says, "I wasn't going to turn him out from my home because of that. He was a 12-year-old child who needed just as much love as any child." ( p. C10)

Perhaps Marion Alston's most wise statement is this: "You can't take a person's life and arrange it to your standards all the time. You can teach them, and you can guide them, but there is a part of them that makes them a complete individual and you cannot touch it, you cannot interfere with it, because it's a very, very private thing. You have to know when to back up. All parents should know when to back up." (Ibid.) From my perspective, Marion Alston is living a very difficult process of affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of a person.

She does have some rules that have to do with respecting his community. "I told him: There's a right and wrong. If you are going to be gay, I want you to always act in a positive, respectful manner. I do not want you out using profanity, I don't want you doing drugs. I don't want you stealing. I don't want those type of problems." (sic) (Ibid.) This is the second part of the equation: responsibility. She respects Bubbles enough to demand that he take responsibility for his behavior. She says, "I tell him to portray himself as a lady, not anything else. No loud perfume, no obnoxious lipstick—soft, nice colors. Not to be brazen."

Marion Alston avoids the idolatry that says anything he does is OK. She expects him to learn to be responsible for his choices and his behaviors. She is asking “Bubbles” to be the best “Bubbles” s/he can be. To me this is as much a part of affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person as is respect. We do not affirm another when we encourage them to be victims or nasty or unmannered. We affirm another—and ourselves—when we ask the best that is possible. When we set standards for behavior and expect those standards to be met, we are calling others to respect themselves and to acknowledge their responsibility for themselves.

Now I recognize that, by picking “Bubbles” as an example of a person to affirm, I am making it hard. I suspect some of us find our skin crawling as we try to picture this young man in our world. My own homophobia kicks in when I read about him, even as my admiration does. I admire anyone with the internal fortitude to express her/his truth so clearly, so young.

I suspect it is even harder for us to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of someone like Jeffrey Dahmer or Robert Sandifer. I have to keep reminding myself that these young men experienced nothing but dis-respect, living in abusive environments throughout their early years. Consider also Dylan Klebold’s experience in his school. The inherent worth and dignity of each of these young men was not affirmed and promoted, which is why they came to tragic ends. In like manner, they were not encouraged to see the best that they could be and expected to be responsible to that either. I have become convinced that, after a certain extended period of abuse has been endured by a person, it is almost impossible to salvage the wreckage. All we can do is isolate such persons from others because they have lost all self-respect and cannot comprehend respect and responsibility toward others.

Once, during an AIDS March, I chatted with Jackie Brown, a young black woman who works with youth at risk and the homeless. She was passionate with anger at the youth in her community because they do not take responsibility for their lives and do not show respect for their own personhood, never mind that of others. She apologized for her "politically incorrect stance." I pointed out that she might be on the right track in asking them to add responsibility and respect to their lives.

In response to requests from you, consider how we can translate this First Principle into our behavior toward newcomers to this congregation. We can affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of newcomers by facing the door, if we are in the foyer before services. We can affirm the worth and dignity of those less fortunate by keeping the baskets for the Tunnison Food Bank full. We can reach out to those who have lost their jobs and help them network for new ones in a very tight job market.

Which, of course, leads me to the last part of our trinity: relish. When we learn to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person by celebrating each presence among us, we truly come to live caring and inclusive religious community. We celebrate our selves and the spirit which connects us with others. This is why we gather over and over again, not only on Sunday mornings, but also on evenings and Saturdays: to express our relish for the whole community as a collection of precious souls who are called together by our shared religious search. It is in living with relish that the depth of religious life is experienced. As Ralph Waldo Emerson notes:

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.

The whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether.

How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth!

Yes! The heart knoweth: the heart knoweth to relish the eye-beams, the connections that draw us together as individuals of worth and dignity. We are called as Unitarian Universalist to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person with respect, responsibility, and relish for our own selves, for the selves of others who gather with us, for those whom we but meet in passing, and for those whose lives touch ours in distant ways. Our church is a house for this process, as Kenneth L. Patton charges us:

This house is for the ingathering of nature and human nature. It is a house of friendships, a haven in trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggle. It is a house of freedom, guarding the dignity and worth of every person. It offers a platform for the free voice, both in times of security and danger, the full and undivided conflict of opinion. It is a house of truth-seeking, where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest, where mystics can abide in a community of searchers. It is a house of art, adorning its celebrations with melodies and handiworks. It is a house of prophecy, outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress. This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor. (Singing the Living Tradition, #444.)

Our congregation is the religious community where we can be supported in the difficult process of learning to live our values, in affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person with respect, responsibility, and relish, knowing that we shall not always succeed and that our faith calls us to continue the work.

So Be It! Blessed Be!