Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
1
Justice, Equity and Compassion. There is no creed in Unitarian
Universalism – no prescribed statement of belief that all members must
believe in or agree to. Rather, congregations covenant together to affirm and
promote Principles and Purposes that describe our highest aspirations about
how we will live in the world, and how we will live together. The second
principle lifts up “justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”
Today’s is the third in a series of sermons that consider how we are called to
reflect – and reflect upon – these principles, in living our lives, and in living
together.
Reading:
“I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to
know what you will do about it. I do not what to know what you hope. I
want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy for the
needs of humanity. I want your muscle.” [Robert Fulghum. It Was on Fire When I
Lay Down On It.]
Sermon:
Real life is… real. For some people – really, realistically, for the vast
majority of people in this world – real life is far removed from ideals, from
hoping, even from understanding about the world and how to live in it. For
350,000 refugees from Syria Afghanistan, Eritrea – projected to swell to
many more than a million before the end of this year – real life is leaving all
your things behind, risking your life and the lives of your children for
nothing more than a chance to make a life, nothing more than the possibility
of growing up, or growing old. For nothing more than hope. In the face of
this reality, religion must offer us more than ideals, more than promises,
more than a vision of a heaven where, someday, we may be happy. Religion
must offer us a way to live in this world, in the real world, with integrity,
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
2
with humanity, with spirit. Robert Fulghum is a Unitarian Universalist
minister. He speaks for himself, not necessarily for all Unitarian
Universalists. In my estimation, his words point us towards a religion for
the real world. “I do not want to talk about what you understand about this
world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not what to know
what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your
sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle.”
The Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
once wrote, “I want to make a …radical point. The point is that religious
belief is actually the enemy of religion. Every major religious tradition
seeks to impart a sense of wonder, mystery, awe and humility. … True
religion is about what we love, not about what we think. … When we focus
on what we truly love, we ask life’s essential questions. We ask questions
like, ‘How shall I live?’ When we ask the question together in community,
it becomes, ‘How shall we live together? What shall we do together?’”
[Peter Morales, “Religion Beyond Belief,” in Quest, the magazine of the Church of the
Larger Fellowship, October 2010].
The Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association speak
to these, life’s essential questions. Rather than statements of belief, they are
statements about how we aspire to live, to live together, to act in the world
together. They express the things that Unitarian Universalist congregations,
working together, are willing to commit time, money, energy, resources to
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
3
affirm and promote. “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian
Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote…justice, equity
and compassion in human relations.” Harking back to Robert Fulghum’s
words, we, the member congregations, pledge not just sympathy, but also
muscle; not just talk, but also action; not just hope, but also the work of our
hands.
It is worth remembering that this current statement of principles and
purposes, the specific wording and the particular order of the principles, is
deliberately NOT hierarchical. The task forces and working groups that
drafted this wording in 1984 and 1985, intentionally DID NOT begin with
the most important principle and move to the least important – or vice versa.
Instead, reading through the list you can see a progression, a gradual
widening and opening from a concern for the individual (the inherent worth
and dignity of every person) to a focus on the quality of interactions between
individuals (justice, equity, and compassion in human relations), to a vision
of ever-larger networks of relationships – congregations, society at large,
world community, the interdependent web of all existence.
The justice, equity, and compassion of the second principle are grounded in
– and they translate into action – the first principle’s affirmation of inherent
worth. And all three – justice and equity and compassion – are translations,
are embodiments, are working definitions, of love.
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
4
“Justice is what love looks like in public,” says Cornel West, worldrenowned academic, theologian, and activist. Justice is the logical and
moral and ethical response to the recognition that every person has inherent
worth and dignity. Justice is fairness, rightness, balance in the distribution
of resources, of opportunity, of reward and punishment, of the means to live
and grow into one’s inherent potential. Justice asks, in these words from
Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell, “If all people do have worth
and dignity, can we allow some of them to live with no hope? To allow
people to go hungry and without shelter? To turn our eyes away from
discrimination?” [Marilyn Sewell, p. 24 in With Purpose and Principle: Essays About
the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, ed. Edward A. Frost.]. Justice
answers that where there is not now fairness, rightness, balance, opportunity,
resources – there we must work to create them.
Unitarian Universalist minister Richard S. Gilbert writes, “Justice, properly
understood, is systemic, aiming at the underlying causes of social problems,
not at their symptoms. Treating symptoms alone…is like putting Band-Aids
on a cancer. Thus, food kitchens, however laudable, merely feed the victims
of a fundamentally unjust social order instead of rooting out causes of
hunger.” [pp. 38-39 in With Purpose and Principle: Essays About the Seven Principles
of Unitarian Universalism, ed. Edward A. Frost.]. Justice goes beyond pulling
babies out of the river, and goes upstream to find and to stop whoever is
throwing them in. “Justice”, writes Unitarian Universalist minister Ken
Collier, “…is…not something that ordinary people can achieve in any final
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
5
and finished way. It is a …goal that moves us forward in the struggle to
become deeper and more fully human. We are not just; we are becoming
just.”[italics mine] [p. 29 in Our Seven Principles in Story and Verse.]
Justice is about building a world where we bind up the broken – and work to
create ways to heal brokenness before it can begin. Where the captives go
free – and freedom is woven into the fabric of society. Where we bring the
good tidings to all the afflicted and all those who mourn. Where muscle,
and action and the work of our hands, guided and fueled by a sense of
wonder, mystery, awe and humility, give birth and give life to a religion that
goes beyond belief. A religion for real life.
Equity is justice that is rooted in an affirmation of the inherent worth and
dignity of every person. Equity is not the blind justice of mythology and
sculpture and the legal system. Equity is justice with its eyes open, justice
that sees and honors and weighs and measures the needs and the resources of
each person, and then acts not to provide exactly the same to each one, but
rather to level the playing field. “Equity ought to be distinguished from
equality with its presumption of sameness,” writes Richard Gilbert. “Equity
carries the sense of fairness, not identity…” [p. 36 in With Purpose and Principle:
Essays About the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, ed. Edward A. Frost.].
Equity is the goal of justice – a state of fairness that is not static but rather
ever-changing, as circumstances change, and people change with them.
Equity is a bridge between the systemic and the personal, resting on
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
6
relationship close enough, genuine enough – real enough – to see the other
as a person whole and worthy and gifted and also in need – as all of us are,
all the time. Such a relationship, grounded in clear seeing, committed to
fairness, growing toward justice – this is what love looks like in community.
“Compassion” means to suffer with. To feel compassion, to practice
compassion, is to open your heart, open yourself wide enough, deep enough,
to feel another person’s pain. Ken Collier cautions us that compassion
“does not mean ‘to take away the suffering of another,’ or ‘to make it
all better.’ Sometimes we can do that and sometimes we cannot.
But we can suffer together. We can share pain with another. We can
identify with each other so strongly that when another person suffers,
we can share that suffering. …
Compassion is about going beyond the sometimes defeatist
and selfish thinking that says we are so isolated from each other that
no one can touch, appreciate, or commune with another. When we
think that we stop at our skin, compassion really does become
impossible. But when we begin to understand – in an existential
sense- that through love we can extend ourselves beyond the
boundary of the skin, then compassion becomes not just possible, but
the first expression of both equity and justice.” [pp. 33-34 in Our Seven
Principles in Story and Verse.]
Compassion is what love looks like when we see that the other is us.
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
7
In 2008 Karen Armstrong, scholar of religion, proposed the creation and
broad adoption of a worldwide Charter for Compassion. The movement that
has grown up around that proposal offers this perspective:
The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious,
ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as
we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work
tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to
dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another
there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human
being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice,
equity and respect.
[http://www.charterforcompassion.org/index.php/charter].
The Charter for Compassion calls upon all men and women to restore
compassion to the center of morality and religion. It highlights justice,
equity and respect. Unitarian Universalists are already there. Since 1985
our member congregations have covenanted to affirm and promote justice,
equity and compassion in human relations. This is our statement about how
we aspire to live, to live together, to act in the world together.
And – in the real world, statements are not enough. Robert Fulghum’s
words haunt us, challenge us. “I do not want to talk about what you
understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do
Justice, Equity and Compassion
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
October 11, 2015
8
not what to know what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. I
do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle.”
Justice is what love looks like in public. Equity is what love looks like in
community. Compassion is what love looks like when we see that the other
is us.
The religious question, the real question for me, over and over again, is the
question of how I will live in love, live from love, live out love – in this
encounter, in this interaction, in this day. I offer the question to you: how
will you live in love, live from love, live out love – in any given encounter,
in any given interaction, in any given day? I offer the question to us. How
will we live in love, live from love, live out love – in every encounter, in
every interaction, in every day?
Love knocks and waits for us to hear. Take a moment now, in stillness, in
silence, to listen.
The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.
Bell
Silence
Music
Amen.