Justice, Not Justifications

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
April 15, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Why do good people sometimes do really bad things, or allow such things to happen in our name? How do we try to parent this in ourselves or reengage if we need to do so?

Call to Worship

Blessed Imperfection
Chris Jimmerson

Come, though we know we will fail one another and make mistakes.

So too, will we forgive. So too, will we support and uphold one another.

Come, though we know we will sometimes be unable to reach our highest aspirations.

So too, will we reach mightily together toward those aspirations. So too, will we sometimes surprise ourselves by exceeding our wildest expectations together.

Come, as together we hold up our values and ethical principles, knowing we will make mistakes but also knowing we will return again and again to those values and principles.

Come into this beloved religious community.

Come, let us worship together.

Reading

Valarie Kour on Revolutionary Love

Revolutionary love is a well-spring of care, an awakening to the inherent dignity and beauty of others and the earth, a quieting of the ego, a way of moving through the world in relationship, asking: ‘What is your story? What is at stake? What is my part in your flourishing?’ Loving others, even our opponents, in this way has the power to sustain political, social and moral transformation. This is how love changes the world.”

Love calls us to look upon the faces of those different from us as brothers and sisters. Love calls us to weep when their bodies are outcast, broken or destroyed. Love calls us to speak even when our voice trembles, stand even when hate spins out of control, and stay even when the blood is fresh on the ground. Love makes us brave. The world needs your love: the only social, political and moral force that can dismantle injustice to remake the world around us – and within us.

To pursue a life of revolutionary love is to walk boldly into the hot winds of the world with a saint’s eyes and a warrior’s heart – and pour our body, breath, and blood into others.

Sermon

The book, “Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves” addresses really fascinating and important subject matter in just about the most the most pedantic and tedious of ways possible.

Now in all fairness, my dog Benjamin seems to disagree and in fact found it quite tasty.

Anyway, this morning, I have tried to engage in an act of loving kindness for you all by reading some of it and closely skimming the rest so that you don’t have to do so.

I’ll try to share with you the top level overview.

Each of us develop a set of moral principles, ethical values, in life that among other things most often involves the avoidance of doing harm to others. Our ethics are handed down to us through the societies in which we live, our families, admired figures and the like, as well as through our own life experiences, cognitive analysis and emotional responses to the effects of our own behavior.

These ethics are then enforced and reinforced by legal and societal sanctions and rewards.

However, we also have moral agency. We self-monitor our behavior for consistency with our morals. Unless we are sociopathic, we feel bad when we harm someone else.

How is it then, that good people sometimes do really terrible things or allow them to be done in our name, using our tax dollars?

Well, social cognitive research has discovered a number of ways in which we as individuals, and, in fact, entire groups or societies give up our moral agency – disengage from our ethical values – allow our selves to do harm to others without losing our sense of moral integrity.

We human beings are infinitely creative, so bear with me now as I walk you through the amazing number of ways we have come up with to violate our own moral standards and not feel the least bit bad about it.

– Moral Justification: We justify conduct that is harmful to others by convincing ourselves it has a larger moral, societal or economic purpose.

Going to war in Iraq gets justified by the threat of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism (both of which, of course, at least in regards to Iraq, turned out to be untrue).

Excusing advertising cigarettes to children as upholding freedom of speech.

– Euphemistic Labelling: Using language that sanitizes the consequences of our actions or even disguises them as something else.

Children killed in a bombing raid get called, “Collateral Damage”. Terrorists assume the label of “freedom fighters”. The gun industry repackages assault weapons as “modern tactical sporting rifles”.

– Advantageous Comparison: Justifying inhumanities through either comparison to even greater moral atrocities or by conflating them with higher principles and/or revered persons who have exhibited moral courage.

Pesticide companies once justified the negative public health consequences of their products by comparing with greater numbers of people dying in automobile accidents.

One former president of the NRA gave a speech in which she compared advocating for the ability to carry assault weapons to Susan B. Anthony’s fight for women’s voting rights and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King’s struggles for civil rights.

– Displacement of responsibility: Excusing one’s detrimental actions by claiming a lack of agency for them – that one is subject to the dictates of some greater authority – soldiers just carrying out a superior’s orders without questioning them for example.

– Similarly, Diffusion of responsibility: Diffusing individual responsibility for immoral behavior into that of a group with whom one participates in such behavior together. When the death penalty is administered by lethal injection for instance, the placement of the IV s, the strapping down of different areas of the inmate’s body, the attachment of monitoring equipment, the pushing of the plunger to deliver each of the different drugs, each of these tasks are sub-divided between different people so that no one participating has to feel individually responsible for the death.

– Misrepresentation of Injurious Consequences: Minimizing, disregarding or even disputing the harmful effects of one’s actions. Denying global warming or that it is caused by human activity, for example.

– Attribution of blame: Perceiving the victim of injurious conduct as somehow being responsible for their own mistreatment. Blaming the African American teenagers shot by police for their own deaths because of some minor offense they had committed or because they had simply not been respectful enough.

– And finally, the really big one

– Dehumanization: stripping others of human qualities, viewing them as less than human, disengages our feeling of moral responsibility to act in just ways toward them.

This is exactly what allowed for the great evil of slavery in our country. At least in part, it is what still underlies racism and all of the other isms that continue to thrive in America today.

So, these are the ways that we justify acting unjustly.

Now, whether or not we can see ourselves in the specific examples I used too illustrate them, I do think we can easily fall prey to one or more of these mechanisms of moral disengagement from our own ethical standards.

And because these mechanisms are not always operating within our consciousness, they can far too easily allow us to turn away from, to block from our awareness, systems in our societal and governmental structures that oppress and do great harm. We can too easily allow injustices to be done in our names and with our tax dollars.

So, how do we guard against these forms of moral disengagement? How do we recognize and confront systems that do great harm when we are a part of those very same systems?

This congregation is beginning to live into a new version of our mission, and within that new mission I believe lies at least part of the answers to these questions.

The new mission is really more of an extension, a logical next step to the mission we read together earlier. It goes like this: “Together, we nourish souls, transform lives and do justice to build the Beloved Community.”

Together, we nourish souls, transform lives and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

I believe that doing these things together, living our lives in this way, working to help build the Beloved Community IS how we stay morally engaged.

It is how we proactively call ourselves back to our highest ethical values and reengage when inevitably we will sometimes fall short of them. Now the term, Beloved Community, as we use it in our new mission statement and as I am using it today, has a specific meaning and context handed down to us by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the vision he left to us, as described by the King Center for Non- Violent Social Change.

That description is on the top of page three of your order of service, and I invite you to read it with me now.

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homeless-ness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

So the love in this meaning of Beloved Community is not an easy, shallow, Hallmark moment sort of a love.

Valarie Kour, activist, filmmaker and founding director of the Revolutionary Love Project says that we must engage in a radical kind of love, indeed a revolutionary love to build the beloved community.

Bringing feminist and womanist perspectives to the concept of Beloved Community, she says that revolutionary love “is not just a feeling but a form of sweet labor – fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life giving.”

It is love as an action – love that we engage in even knowing it will be difficult and challenging sometimes, and that we will make mistakes, and yet we must recommit to it and keep reengaging in acts of sweet labor over and over and over again. It is a revolutionary love that call us to mobilize, that calls us to action, that call us to our highest ethical values.

Valerie Kour describes three key practices for living out revolutionary love.

1. Love for others. We must see no strangers. We must adopt a fundamental vision of our interconnectedness. I must view your as a part of me that I have not yet met. We must develop curiosity when encountering difference.

This can be harder than it seems. Neuroscience has found that we may be hardwired in the more ancient parts of our brains to have an initial reaction of fear or even revulsion when we encounter someone who looks and acts differently than us.

But we do not have to let that initial reaction dictate our behavior. If we can then engage our frontal cortex by getting curious about this other person, we can change this emotional dynamic. “I wonder whom she loves? What pain has he suffered? What do they do for fun?”

Asking ourselves these and other curious questions can help us humanize the “other”. It can help us reach out and find common ground. Perhaps more importantly, it can help us begin to value difference.

We can do more together, grow more as human beings, not despite our differences but by embracing them.

Like the players in a jazz band or the individual ingredients in a Cajun gumbo, we each have a distinctiveness to add that combined together, do not melt away, but instead help create a greater whole.

And in our current social climate, this ability to love the other becomes even more important. We must willing to exercise this love on behalf of folks who have far less privilege than we do and are often in harm’s way these days.

2. Tend the wound. We must practice loving even those with whom we disagree, who would harm us. We must see the wound – see them as human and fragile. As Kour says it, “They hurt us because they do not know how else to deal with their wound.”

This is really, really hard labor, and the subject of another upcoming sermon. But isn’t just moral. It is tactical. We have more success when we go after unjust systems instead of individuals who are also caught up within those systems themselves.

3. Breathe and push. Kour says our sweet must include loving ourselves and that this is the love that we so often tend to the least. To sustain our engagement in the work of living our moral values, to love others with a revolutionary love, we must tend to ourselves.

This is not just individualistic self care. It must be the loving care we find within community. We need connection and belonging, such as that to be found within this religious community, to experience beauty and joy, to have others who will tend to us and pick up the burden for a while when we are the one who has been injured. We need beloved community for ourselves.

So these are how we practice a revolutionary love – how together we nourish souls, transform lives and do justice to build the beloved community.

Revolutionary love can move us to dismantle systems of oppression that do harm in our names and build the Beloved Community in their place. and we need it more than ever.

We need revolutionary love to transform a global economic system that benefits the very few over the great many and is endangering the very life on our planet.

We need a revolutionary love that creates a system that prioritizes people and lifeá itself over profits and wealth accumulation and by doing so builds the Beloved Community.

We need a revolutionary love that addresses the root cause of the devaluation and dehumanization that make the MeToo and TimesUp movements necessary – that still results in women receiving less pay than men for doing the very same job.

We need revolutionary love to bust up the patriarchy and build the Beloved Community in its place.

We need a revolutionary love to stand up to an executive branch that is not only systematically reversing rules and procedures that had been into place to protect the rights, of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer people, but within some branches, is putting into place rules and procedures making it legal to discriminate against us.

We need revolutionary love to bring LGBTQ folks fully into the Beloved Community.

We need revolutionary love to dismantle a private for-profit prison system, including our immigration detention system, that treats black and brown bodies as commodities, often forcing them into labor for little or no pay, in effect recreating indentured servitude and slavery.

We need revolutionary love to replace that system and build the Beloved Community.

And even more my friends, we must have a revolutionary love that dismantles a culture of white supremacy and Christian hegemony that leads to the abuse of people of other faiths and continues to drive extremely harmful disparities in eduction, health care, voting rights, incarceration rates, housing, income, police brutality, arrest rates and on and on and on for people of color.

We must, we MUST engage in a revolutionary love that will not rest, will not stop, will not give up until it dismantles these systems that are draining us all of our very humanity and replaces them once and for all with the Beloved Community. Revolutionary love is where we may find the strength to remain morally engaged against these and other forms of systemic harm.

Revolutionary love is how we instead create systems that make it possible for each and every one of us to live out our full human potential, and these systems of health not harm are the foundations upon we build the Beloved Community about which which we dream.

I hold a revolutionary love for this faith and for this church and the people who bring it into being.

I have no doubt, no doubt, that we can, together, nourish souls, transform lives and do justice to build the beloved community.

Amen

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