The Rev. Dr. Kenneth Reeves

Readings:

The history of equality includes many voices, one from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…”

As you can see, by referring to men, this statement lacks something in its assertion of equality. Another voice comes from Sojourner Truth. An observer recalls her addressing the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron. She points to a minister present at the meeting and asks:

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me any best place. And ain't I a woman?"

Another statement comes from the psychologist Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud’s, who stated:

“Inequality makes loving relationships or mutual cooperation impossible.”

The converse may also be true:

“Equality makes loving relationships and mutual cooperation possible.”

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Sermon:

Today some 1,584 religious groups, from Anglicans to Zoroastrians, hold services across America. This pluralism began in 1568, when the Unitarian king of Transylvania passed the world’s first edict of religious tolerance, allowing the people of the four denominations in that country -- Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Unitarian -- to coexist free of stake-burnings and inquisitions.

Today in most mainstream Christian churches, preachers do not terrify their congregations with threats of flaming brimstone pouring down their throats for an eternal afterlife. This peace of mind has its origins in the American Universalist pulpits of the 18 th and 19 th centuries, which offered the message that God is so loving as to bring all to eternal wholeness and salvation.

Today also most mainstream churches do not force blind faith on their people, but, to some extent, allow them to think. This recognition of the value of thought is brought to us all by the early Unitarians, who championed reason in religion.

So, thanks in good part to our Universalist and Unitarian forebears, we, in this society, enjoy religious tolerance, freedom from the fear of eternal suffering, and the opportunity, when we come to church, to bring along our minds.

Now I see Unitarian Universalism supporting another humane development in history, this time promoting the equal valuing of all. Our support for equality seems so tightly woven into the fabric of who we are, we might not be fully aware of it, nor fully aware of how valuable this principle is to ourselves and to the world. Today I speak for equality in hopes that with increased awareness of its value, we can champion it with confidence and joy.

Our value for equality is obvious when we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of each person, or when we value justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Our value for equality is less obvious when we affirm the interdependent web of all existence. In contrast to a cosmic pyramid, with a superior God on top, angels next, Seraphim, Cherubim, then Caucasian Christian heterosexual adult men, then Caucasian Christian heterosexual adult women, then children and people of color, then non-Christians, then homosexual people and those we don’t like and label evil, then those we kill in wars, and people on death row, and somewhere near the bottom: nature and animals, and at the very bottom: mosquitoes; instead of this hierarchy, we, Unitarian Universalists, champion an interdependent web of equals.

Our value for equality underlies our support for underpowered groups, including children, women, gays and lesbians, and African Americans. Regarding children, in the early 1800’s William Ellery Channing, unusually for his time, viewed religious education as an opportunity not to fill a child with knowledge, but, respecting their value, to look at the world through their eyes. Unitarians made history in 1863 by being the first denomination to ordain a woman, Olympia Brown. Unitarian Universalists made history in 1984 by voting at General Assembly to support ministers performing same-sex unions. Although our success with racism can be debated, we have struggled, and continue to struggle, with this problem. You may share with me a support for the rights of all, seeing something healthy in valuing everyone equally.

Equality gained support from the founders of our country, who wrote it into the Declaration of Independence; from oppressed people, such as Sojourner Truth, who stopped silently accommodating to inequality; and from psychologists like Alfred Adler, who observed that as equals people can cooperate and love each other.

This movement toward equality occurs on other fronts. During the past century the armed services has increasingly valued its soldiers. In WWI the hierarchy allowed generals to discard their men, forcing them out of trenches to butcher each other over a few shifting yards of turf. In a less hierarchical WWII generals sent men into battle with some hope of success. After Vietnam, every American casualty was worth being named in one national memorial. I hope that this trend continues to the point at which young people are valued enough no longer to be sent to kill and destroy in any war, especially wars based on false pretenses and dubious ethicality.

A shift toward cosmic equality occurred with 20 th Century theologians, such as Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, who described God not as a superior being, but as a spirit, or a source of meaning and love. Buber viewed God as a uniting spirit, present any time anyone contacts another person. Tillich viewed God as the ground of being, the existential base on which everything rests. These and other theologians removed God from the top of a cosmic pyramid, and wove God into the fabric of meaning.

As women demanded greater equality, their children looked on and began to expect similar treatment for themselves. At the same time laws began to protect children from abuse. The first report of child abuse was made to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Children lacked the value required for a protective agency. Now child abuse is illegal.

Of course, not everyone values equality and welcomes this trend. Equality vs. hierarchy met head-on over the issue of marriage rights for gays and lesbians. This issue seems particularly galling to those who value the hierarchical world-view. You can no longer beat your child into submission. Women have more power. Black people have spoken up. And now if society views homosexual love as just as valid as heterosexual love, who’s left to put down?

This equality vs. hierarchy battle stirred passion in the recent presidential election. Our president seemed more hierarchical than his challenger, and some of the president’s support seemed to come from those who value hierarchy and who seemed to want to maintain hierarchies against the encroachment of equality. Our president holds resolute against equality by advocating for four hierarchies: a hierarchy of wealth, a hierarchy of military power, humanity superior to nature, and a piety and prudishness hierarchy. So, among his other policies, his tax cuts support sending more wealth up the hierarchy, helping the have-mores have more. His military policy champions the U.S., with 5% of the world’s population, as The Superpower, free to scorn the other 95% of the world. His environmental policies seem premised on the view that nature, inferior to human beings, exists to be exploited. And the president’s Christianity seems allied not with a gentle Jesus of the Gospels who preaches love for all, but an apocalyptic second-coming Jesus who loves conservative Christians, but, from a position of “moral” and, sexually chaste, superiority, slaughters everyone else. Our hierarchical president presents himself as one-up, and many people seem to want to affiliate with the one-up person to enhance their own one-up position. So they cheer his swagger of superiority.

Hierarchy wins popularity because it gives security. I know I find some security on an intellect hierarchy. I have studied the college rankings. I know where my school falls in the admissions selectivity hierarchy. I drive around. I check out college stickers on car windows. When I see a more selective college than mine, one of the Ivies, for example, I think: smarter than me, and feel a little one-down. But when I see less a selective college, Slippery Rock State, for example, I think, I’m the smart one here. As a smart person, I feel entitled to being liked and admired. This ranking, and this sense of entitlement, give me a little security that assuages my personal inadequacy. I suspect everyone has some measure of inadequacy, eased by placing themselves on some hierarchy and seeing themselves as superior to someone, therefore entitled to benefits.

One thing I don’t have to do when I place myself on a hierarchy is examine either my inadequacy or my store of emotional pain or shame. I can present a grandiose façade to others, even to myself, admitting no mistakes and conquering the world, to prevent having to experience my pain and shame. People, often men, go to huge lengths -- drink alcohol, spend money, blame others, control discussions, bluster, etc. -- to support the superior façade that hides their emotional pain and shame.

And others around them, often women, collaborate, as if unconsciously guessing that these superior men can’t handle their vast inner pain. I heard of one tyrannical, blustery father who, in his only moment of insight, confessed to his daughters that he had made mistakes. As he began to cry in shame, his daughters silenced his pain by telling him he was a great father. They turned off his insight, quelled his shame, and placed him back in his superior position, where he could continue to tyrannize his way out of his pain.

The hierarchy not only blinds people to their inner pain, but it prevents love and cooperation. When I hold what I believe is a superior position, I don’t listen to someone I see as inferior; I don’t empathize; and, if we have a problem together, I don’t collaborate in solving it. Instead I assume a condescending stance and make the other squirm. Taken to an extreme, this same hierarchy underlies violence and war. If I am the morally superior one, and someone else the inferior, evil, worthless one, I can then be as sadistic against them as I want to be.

Indeed, the unwillingness to look inward creates the sadism. Being morally superior, I know I don’t want to see my meanness and capacity for violence, because I don’t want to face the shame that would entail. But I can clearly see meanness and violence in someone else -- the criminal, the terrorist -- as they mirror my own. Seeing their violence, I justify my violence against them. Amazingly, some people present themselves as heroic and noble for refusing to recognize their own violence, then projecting that violence onto others, then sanctioning violence against those others.

As I see it, placing oneself in a superior position in a hierarchy prevents insight and permits violence. Hierarchies are also popular as they support our country’s economic system. In this system, disparities of wealth drive people to want more wealth. So people work hard and spend hard -- good for profits, not so good for people’s spare time or for families or for the human spirit.

I see many people, including Unitarian Universalists, wanting insight and cooperation, and valuing life and love more than material gain, and bending the world away from hierarchies and toward equality.

The glacial trend toward equality threatens what for some is America’s purpose: a wealth-producing machine. Equality also threatens to some to pull people off their comfortable rungs on the hierarchy, and into an interdependent web where they would have to reckon with themselves and actually resolve their problems with other people. I think the possibility of looking inward or cooperating with others so terrifies some people that they intensify putting others down and themselves up, bullying people into their hierarchy game.

In the face of this resistance to change, we, Unitarian Universalists, do well to hold equality as a guiding principle. With that principle we can look at the world through our children’s eyes, value women as well as men, marry gay and lesbian couples, and oppose racism. We gain strength when we know the health that comes with feeling one’s pain, and affirming one’s worth, not because of one’s superiority, but because one is alive. We gain strength when we know the peace that comes from solving interpersonal problems.

What the world will look like when there is no one to put down, I do not exactly know. In 1568 the king who passed the edict of religious tolerance could not have predicted the extent to which tolerance could have grown in 400 years.

Roughly, though, I think humanity will respect for the worth of everyone. We will grow in knowing how related we are to each other. We can see it happening already. People will then solve problems, from marital tensions to international conflicts, through talk and agreements. If violence erupts, whether in a neighborhood or between nations, a police force will stop the bloodshed, a legal process will render judgment, and those who pose a danger will be secured and kept from causing harm. Through this lawful process the rights of the perpetrators will be as respected as the rights of the victims.

I imagine individuals increasingly treating themselves with gentleness, their grief and shame less a threat, more a painful mystery that comes with being alive. I imagine people having a humored love-me-love-my-dog acceptance of their foibles.

I imagine we will regard nature as our home, and as the source of our requirements for survival: air, water, and food. I imagine, so valuing nature, we will experience spiritual sustenance amid its beauty and find more ways to preserve it.

I imagine we will see America not as an economic engine, but as a home in which we can live with love and meaning.

I imagine concepts of God shifting from cosmic puppeteer, to a source of life and love, to that bedrock which we can most trust. I imagine this God symbolizing the ineffable mystery people experience as they form graceful arcs to meet each other, or their inner life, or nature, or that spirit that brings peace.

The story of Ebenezer Scrooge represents the evolution I see occurring. From an arrogant isolation in grandiose superiority, he reckons with the childhood pain he had been avoiding, and accepts his repressed desire to love. He then laughs at himself and lovingly sees those around him as equal value to himself. Offering a final benediction for his evolution, and a wish for the world, Tiny Tim prays, “God Bless us all, everyone.”