Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
Virtue Ethics - Sermon by Hal Bertilson
January 15, 2006
The Martin Luther King observance each year can be an opportunity for each of us to reflect and evaluate our personal theology as a template for our actions. I titled this sermon "Virtue Ethics," because it seemed an apt way to encourage us to be mindful or our Unitarian Universalist Principles and intentional about applying those principles on a consistent basis. In this case especially the principles of "Justice. Equality, and compassion in human relations" and "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part," principles for which Dr. King was an exemplar.
Virtue ethics is an area of study in psychology about "a life lived well as a whole, with a coherent, integrated set of aims, the strength of character necessary to pursue those ends, and the social bonds that give place and purpose to our activities" (Fowers, 2005, p. 5).
"It is a common misconception to see virtues as individual attributes that may or may not have a social component" (p. 93). Virtue doesn't exist except within community. And the theme I have in mind today is about our communal responsibilities.
In the adult enrichment program on poverty during the next four Tuesdays we will reading Richard Gilbert's book, How Much Do We Deserve? An Inquiry into Distributive Justice. Gilbert is a parish minister with forty years experience at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York. He contends that "a society should be judged not by how much freedom it gives to the strong, but by how much care it gives to the most vulnerable. Certainly this is in keeping with the ethics and actions of Martin Luther King.
"Gilbert proceeds from the principle that all people share the same fundamental needs and are entitled to have these needs met as a simple human right.
"Our vision, our changing consciousness, will determine the shape of the world and even what we are able to see. Our passion for justice will rekindle the social imagination" (vi – vii).
In the reading this morning, Martin Luther King spoke of poverty, racism, destruction of the environment, and the connection of these with war. Reverend King's last sermon was offered on March 31, 1968 at the National Cathedral in Washington, D. C. In that sermon he described homes he had walked into in Newark and Harlem. Homes of welfare mothers with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. He described how poor people are forced to pay more for less--$125 for a room not worth $60. King helped us see that the poor are living in what he called a "domestic colony." Just as in his Riverside Church speech that Sue read this morning, he helped us see from the "other's" point of view. His National Cathedral sermon helped us understand that the poor are invisible because our expressways carry us away from the ghetto, we don't see the poor. (Washington, 1986, p. 273)
In the Ariel Dorfman play "Beyond the Dark" which was adapted into the PBS program "Speak Truth to Power," working with street children in Guatemala, Bruce Harris reports that a priest told him that "when I feed the poor, they call me a hero, but when I ask why people are hungry they call me a Communist." It is not enough to feed the poor, we must change the conditions that cause poverty (Speak Truth to Power, 2000).
For you and me, then, it is not enough to feed the poor. We need to ask what unique skills we possess that can change the conditions of poverty, environmental degradation, and violence. Those special skills might include grassroots organizing, financial management, knowledge of social agency processes, speech making, research, writing, web mastering, and many other special skills that members of this congregation possess.
In Walking with the Wind, Representative John Lewis described their preparation for lunch counter demonstrations in Nashville in 1958 when he was a student at Fisk. James Lawson, who had become consumed by the teachings of Mohandis Gandhi and Martin Luther King, led the Tuesday night workshops at a little church near the Fisk campus called Clark Memorial United Methodist. Lewis said that those Tuesday night's became the focus of his life, more important than his classes. "I'd finally found the setting and the subject that spoke to everything that had been stirring in my soul for so long," he said (p. 84).
There in Nashville they felt "completely together, totally solid, a unit bound by trust and devotion. We were our own Beloved Community," he said (p. 92). "We learned about Reinhold Niebuhr and his philosophy of nonviolent revolution. We read Thoreau. We studied ancient Chinese thinkers like Mo Ti and Lao-tzu. We discussed and debated every aspect of Gandhi's principles, from his concept of ahimsa—the Hindu idea of nonviolent passive resistance—to satyagraha—literally, "steadfastness in truth," a grounding foundation of nonviolent civil disobedience, of active pacifism" (85).
"And now we were preparing for action. As that semester went on, we began moving beyond theory and philosophy and started asking ourselves how we could apply these historic and universal principles to the situation we faced right then, right here in America, right here in Nashville. Now that we understood a concept like soul force, our question became how do you use soul force? How do you use ahimsa? How do you use satyagraha?
"With Jim Lawson's guidance, we began answering these questions. We started mostly with talk, then we began acting out the kinds of situations we might be confronted with during an actual protest. Lawson taught us specific tactics to protect our bodies during an attack. He showed us how to curl our bodies so that our internal organs would escape direct blows. He told us how important it was to try to maintain eye contact with our assailant even as the blows were raining down, because eye contact could be a viscerally disarming thing. He showed us how to help one another, how if one person is taking a beating, others could put their bodies in the way, diluting the force of the attack.
"We role-played, teaching ourselves how to respond to verbal and physical assaults. We staged little sociodramas, taking turns playing demonstrators and antagonists. Several of us would sit in a row of folding chairs, acting out a sit-in, while the others played waitresses or angry bystanders, calling us niggers, cursing in our faces, pushing and shoving us to the floor. . ." (p. 92-93).
Howard Zinn, in his 2002 Beacon Press book You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train, speaks of hope. "In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today.
"It is this change in consciousness that encourages me," said Zinn. Granted, racial hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war and violence still poison our culture, we have a large underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a hard core of the population content with the way things are, afraid of change.
"But if we see only that, we have lost historical perspective . . . It is the long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. . . Political power, however formidable, is more fragile than we think. Ordinary people can be intimidated for a time, can be fooled for a time, but they have a down-deep common sense, and sooner or later they find a way to challenge the power that oppresses them.
"Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment, but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zig-zag towards a more decent society.
We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world (pp. 206-208).
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, In her contribution to the most recent issue of Tikkun (2006), the liberal, social justice, Jewish magazine, says that she and others in the Center for Partnership Studies have been looking "at a database that includes not only the public sphere of politics and economics as conventionally defined, but also the private sphere of families and other intimate relations which we inhabit.
"We can see patterns. I call one of them the "partnership" model and the other one the "domination" model. My research," she said, "was intended to answer the question, what kind of system supports relations of mutual respect, mutual benefit, mutual accountability, and, yes, mutual caring? And that was how we came to the partnership model.
"In order to really build a partnership-oriented institutional and belief structure, protest just isn't enough. We have protested, but the kind of change we need hasn't happened. We can't just be against; we have to offer better alternatives to assess what has been missing and to formulate long-term strategies.
"If you look at modern history from this perspective, it can best be understood as the struggle between a powerful movement towards partnership that is met with resistance from the dominators every inch of the way. These people pushing us back paid particular attention to primary human relations. Whether it was Hitler in Germany, Khomeni in Iran, or the rightest fundamentalist would-be regime in this nation, these issues have been primary.
"The rightist-fundamentalist alliance first came together in this country around a "women's issue: the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U. S. Constitution in the 1970s. Ever since then, it has had a long-range strategy called "family values" and "morality." Of course it's been a very immoral agenda. Part of our job is to have the spiritual courage to point this out.
But in the intervening years, despite the success of the women's movement, conservatives have been so successful in advancing this regressive agenda, focusing on these primary human relations—and the cultural construction of these relations in terms of domination rather than partnership—that do you know what happened?" Still quoting from Riane Eisler, "In 1992, a survey asked Americans how many of them agreed with the proposition that the father of the family is the master of the house. Forty-two percent answered yes. By 2004, the percentage of Americans agreeing with this proposal had risen to 52 percent.
"We can't afford to cede this terrain to regressives any more. It is in our families and other intimate relations that people first learn what is normal and what is moral. It is in those relations that people first learn either to accept human rights violations as "just the way things are," or to respect human rights. They affect how people think, how people act, how they govern, and who they vote for—because people tend to replicate unconsciously their family structure in the kind of government and social structure they vote for (Eisler, 2006, pp. 44-45).
Rebecca Solnit is the author of ten books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Hope in the Dark. In her contribution to the Tikkun (2006, pp. 40-41), the liberal Jewish magazine, she argued for hope and action.
One of her principal tenets "is that the world changes in much more peculiar, unpredictable, lurching, side-long, sneaky ways than anyone anticipates. The day after the Soviet Union collapsed, it became, in retrospect, the most obvious thing in the world that it had been about to happen. But if I'd told you in advance that South Africa would become a post-apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela would become its president instead of being imprisoned for life, or that Latin America would become the most democratic part of the hemisphere, or that San Francisco would have 4,000 same-sex marriages in its city hall, you would have thought I was a wing-nut.
"Hope doesn't mean everything is fine, or everything will be fine—only that there are glimmers of possibility. Absolute uncertainty is really grounds for hope."
"Change doesn't come from the center, and change doesn't come from the limelight. It comes from the shadows, it comes from the edges, it comes from people who nobody's noticed yet. Those are the people who are going to change the world. To quote Gandhi, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.'
"To hope is to gamble, to bet on the future, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To live is to risk. I say all of this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, annihilation of the earth's treasures, and the grinding down of the poor. . . Hope calls for action.
Cynthia Kaufman, in her book Ideas for Action:Relevant Theory for Radical Change, said it this way: "Probably most of the people involved in the movements that have shaped our lives for better doubted their abilities to make a difference and were ridiculed or persecuted for thinking that they could make a difference. Yet ordinary people acting together for common goals have accomplished incredible amounts. There is nothing magical about making social change happen. What is required is a sense of hope that it is possible to make a difference, and some understanding of the world that helps orient our choices about what kinds of action to take" (Kaufman, 2003, p. 5).
Again from Rebecca Solnit's article Is there room for spirit on the Left? "Our civilization is close to destroying the world on which we depend: the oceans, the atmosphere, the uncounted species of plant and insect and bird. Wars will break out. The planet will heat up. Species will die out. But how many, and what survives, depends on whether we act" (p. 41)
Closing words
"We further proclaim a declaration of interdependence. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. we confess that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. . . We believe that Martin Luther King was right, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice (Williams, 2006, p. 47).
References
Eilser, R. (2006). Is there room for spirit in our families? Tikkun, 21-1, 44-45.
Fowers, B. J. (2005). Virtue and psychology: Pursuing excellence in ordinary practices. American Psychological Association.
Gilbert, R. S. (2001). How much do we deserve? An inquiry into distributive justice. Skinner House Books, 2nd Edition.
Kaufman, C. (2003). Ideas for action: Relevant theory of radical change. South End Press.
Lewis, J. (1998). Walking with the wind: A memoir of the movement. Simon & Schuster.
Solnit, R. (2006). Is there room for spirit on the left? Tikkun, 21-1, 40-41.
Speak Truth to Power. (2000). The Kennedy Center Presents Speak Truth to Power. PBS Home Video.
Washington, J. M. (1986). A testament of hope: The essential writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. HarperCollins.
Williams, B. (2006). Blessing. Tikkun, 21-1, 47.
Zinn, H. (2002). You can't be neutral on a moving train: A personal history of our times. Beacon Press.