This past Sunday I said some pretty damning things to my own congregation about its activities. Time in a sermon is always severely limited, and this topic deserves a full treatment, and this is it. Before I begin, a big thank you to everyone who has reached out to me this week. The outpouring of support and positive feedback has been nothing short of amazing.

The usual disclaimer applies: these are my own views, and they haven’t been endorsed by my church or any of its representatives.

To start, here’s what I said:

“At this moment, the most aggressive volunteer recruitment effort at Emerson is for the service auction. Members and friends are being asked to put on events so we can sell tickets to those events to raise money for the church.

“Now, I understand that the nature of these events is different and it’s not equivalent to running programs for a church, but I submit to you, that earlier this week I was faced with two different groups of people who told me, for completely opposing reasons but with totally straight faces that their voucher program wouldn’t take money away from public schools.

“I was not born yesterday. I can see when a public system has been privatized, and much of the volunteer effort of this church has been privatized. We’re not building a better world. We’re engaging our hobbies. We’re throwing fancy parties for rich people.”

Abstraction is leaky.
Abstraction is expensive.
Abstraction is inescapable.

This is the water in which we swim.

Make a list of everyone with whom you’ve had contact, in the last 2 weeks, where you spent more than an hour together and anyone present wasn’t wearing a mask. The reported infection rate in the US, based on tests, is 1.1%. The actual infection rate is somewhere between 6-24 times higher. So, being optimistic, let’s say 6.6% (though it varies by region quite a lot.) Is your list longer than 15 people?

Now consider the lists of all the people on your list. Are any of them social butterflies? Have they been traveling? Have they been working? Are any of them working with COVID-19 patients? Do any of them work at restaurants? How intimate is their level of contact? Are any of them carrying COVID-19? Do you know, or could you even find out?

The first principle of Unitarian Universalism is recognizing the inherent dignity and worth of all people. Events of the last year (ish) have challenged that idea for me. I think your dignity comes from how you live your life. How you carry yourself, represent yourself. Your observable integrity is the source of your dignity. Something like that anyway.

And your worth is what you bring to the world, whatever size your world is. It may well just be you. What value do you bring yourself?

These are not inherent qualities. They’re derived, consequences of beliefs held and actions taken. This can’t be what UU means. This is my crisis of faith, and here is my first attempt at a partial solution. (It’s after midnight and I’m having terrible insomnia. Stream of consciousness follows.)

If you have in your inventory a Narcan spray, and you find someone who has had too much heroin, you do not consider how valuable the person is, for any definition of “value,” before giving them the Narcan and calling emergency services. There are no conditions attached; someone will die if you don’t intervene, so you intervene, and that’s that.

What is it about that person’s life that makes the choice for you? Whatever it is, that must be their “inherent worth”, or at least one part of it.

If someone is facing charges, no matter the crime, no matter the evidence, we give them a fair trial. (Well, we pretend to, anyway.) What is it about them that guarantees the right to a trial? Even if they enter the courtroom and there’s no question what they’ve done, all the procedure is still followed. Whatever it is, I’m calling it their “inherent dignity” (or at least one aspect of it). No disgrace takes it away. But what is it?

I believe the answer is diversity. There is no other human like that one, and for that reason alone, they’re worth saving. That’s the part of their worth and dignity that is inherent.

Everybody’s different. Every body‘s different. Every mind is unique and special. We humans are all the same in the most important ways, and different in the most interesting ways. Some we celebrate. Some we oppose. Some we just don’t talk about. We say, at most, that there’s a stigma around such-and-such difference. How sad that there’s a stigma around it. And then the conversation ends, because what “stigma” really means is just “I recognize that this taboo hurts people, but I’m not willing to stand up for them.” Be honest about it. What have you done to dismantle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, other than maybe talk about it when someone who isn’t like you makes the cover of Time magazine?

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