A Community of Love and Justice Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray Feb. 5, 2017 Reading. The reading this morning is a translation of a poem from one of the most well known Persian, Iranian poets, Hafiz, from the 14 th century. We have not come here to take prisoners But to surrender ever more deeply To freedom and joy. We have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love. Run my dear, From anything That may not strengthen Your precious budding wings For we have not come here to take prisoners, Or to confine our wondrous spirits But to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and Light! Sermon. Welcome to our month long exploration into Love and Justice and what it means to be a people of love and justice. These two words, Love and Justice, are values, principles and ideals that get lifted up a great deal. They are words I speak nearly every Sunday. They are pillars of our religious tradition as Unitarian Universalists. But they are also words that can mean many things to different people. I can tell it is February because the diamond industry is flooding the radio with advertisements about how diamonds mean love. So I guess that is one definition. A better one is Lin-Manuel Miranda s, the Hamilton composer, who has said simply and powerfully Love is love is love it love is love is love is love. 1
There are also narrow definitions of love that confine it only to the emotional ties between lovers and spouses and partners, or the familial and caring ties of family, tribe, community. These definitions and experiences of love are real. They are needed. They form the basis of care and nurture of our children and practices of mutual aid that are and have been essential for human survival. But these understandings can also limit the scope, power and reach of what love means. When love is defined as something only personal and private it creates a circle of concern where love and loyalty are pre-eminent, but beyond the bounds of that circle, other values may take priority. And then there is justice, a concept that can mean radically different things to different people. For some justice is fundamentally about fairness and equity. Justice describes a condition in which no one goes without the basic necessities of shelter, food, safety, and where people are treated equally regardless of differences in identity, ability or financial resources. But justice can also be understood as an eye for an eye, punishment, retribution. After all, we call our systems of courts and jails, the criminal justice system, even as many within it and beyond will testify that it is not just in the sense of being fair, not impartial, not equal. So it is possible for two people to speak of justice and come to very different conclusions about what action is needed. So many people (including some of you!) flooded into airports last weekend to protest the injustice of banning people from coming to the US simply because of where they were born. At the same time, other people praised the effort as just, and justified. This difference at least in part may come down to how we understand what justice is and what it means. And so this is why this month, we are exploring the intersection of love and justice. For when it come to theology and what these word mean religiously, morally, Unitarian Universalist are a part of a long line of tradition that recognizes these two principles Love and Justice cannot be separated. They must be understood together. It s one of the reasons my heart was taken by the Hafiz poem, for the comparison the poet draws between imprisonment and conditions or even metaphorical walls that hold us hostage against love. He writes: 2
We have not come here to take prisoners But to surrender ever more deeply To freedom and joy. We have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love. Hafiz suggests that the walls, metaphorical or real, that we build to imprison others, to keep others out, actually come to cut our own hearts off from love, from freedom, from joy. In other words, to understand justice primarily as punishment (to be focused on domination and taking prisoners) is to hold ourselves hostage away from love and expansive experience of love. This is the danger of separating love and justice. If the poetic, mystical take feels too ephemeral let s look to theologians and prophets. Paul Tillich was one of the most influential American Christian theologians of the 20 th century. In his book, Love, Power and Justice, Tillich described the necessity of love, justice and power being interrelated and not seen as separate. Tillich understood that without power or justice, love would be mere sentiment and emotion, unable to change structures of power. And without love, justice runs the risk of being merciless and abusive. In our American society, we see these effects in the way love is relegated so narrowly to the interpersonal relationships of family and romance. Meanwhile, our criminal justice system favors overly punitive measures, including those that violate international human rights law. How have we come so far down this path? Is it because we have disempowered love as a powerful moral force for justice, and have created a justice system devoid of notions of love? Fundamentally, Tillich would argue that an overly sentimental view of love and the criminalizing view of justice create separation and isolation among and between people. And this is the opposite of what love, in its broadest moral sense, seeks. In Tillich s view, love at its root, ontologically (which is a big word meaning at its core being), is a moving power of life (p. 25). It is not stagnant, nor just a feeling. Love moves life; it draws creation and beings together and seeks to overcome separation. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, was a student of Paul Tillich s and he summarized Tillich s teachings when he famously said, Power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. In his words, we hear the call to practice and 3
articulate a powerful form of love that can change structures of injustice, a powerful form of love that rejects any use of power that is devoid of love, and an understanding of justice that serves to bring about connection, compassion and fairness not separation, isolation or vengeance. Even more simply, Dr. Cornell West says, Justice is what love looks like in public. Is it possible our understanding of both love and justice has become too separated not only in our vocabulary, but in our society? Has this helped lead us to this present moment? A place where love has been so relegated to individual, private, even commercialized experience that it has lost the power (for the moment not forever) to offer a compelling moral vision for how we might live as a society. And at the same time our public conversations about justice have been shaped too much by war, fear, terrorism, retribution, domination and control, forgetting the meaning of compassion and fairness essential to justice. How can we reclaim and recover and nurture the power and importance of love as a motive force in our world, a force that seeks to, as King says, implement justice? It begins with listening closely to how we hear the words love and justice and even power used. Be critical, listen closely when you hear people speak of justice, or speak of love are they separate, or can you hear the echo of the other in the message? Then in our own activism, resistance and struggle, we must place at the foundation of our speech and action a powerful form of love, a moral and religious understanding of love that seeks to overcome separation and isolation. Even before Tillich or King, even before Hafiz, the great wisdom teachers of Confucianism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and more, placed compassion and justice as a sense of fairness and common concern, at the center of their teachings. And in all of these teachings, love is not emotion or sentiment, it is a way of living in the world, it is a call to expand our circle of care and connection to all of humanity. Love your neighbor, and your enemy, said Jesus. Compassion is the path to enlightenment says the Buddha. And perhaps one of my favorites is the story from the Talmudic tradition in Judaism. The story is told that a young man challenges Rabbi Hillel, saying if you can recite the whole of the Torah (the sacred scripture) standing on one leg, I will convert. And Hillel agrees, standing on one leg and says What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the whole Torah: all the rest is commentary. Meaning, the religious law is not about emotion or sentiment, but about how one treats a fellow person and the foundation of the treatment is fairness and compassion, in other words to live and act at the intersection of love and justice. 4
And so what does all this mean as we seek to be a people of Love and Justice? Interestingly, I recently heard a very short clip of an interview with the religious historian Karen Armstrong, author Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. In her book, she traces the primary message of compassion found in every religious tradition. In the radio interview, though, she says this compassion ethos did not emerge in meditation groves. They emerged in times of great conflict. She said they emerged in times when violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo. And many of them, the Chinese sages in particular, said unless, now, we treat each other as we would wish to be treated, human beings will destroy one another (TED Radio hour, Guy Raz, 12.2014 rebroadcast January 2017) Not unlike our own times. And so the work of practicing and articulating a moral pathway forged at the intersection of love and justice is critical. In our own community, it means practicing principles of love and justice among each other and in the wider community. For we are here, as Hafiz says, to strengthen our budding wings for nurturing that experience of freedom and joy, of love and courage that we might make this a foundation to guide our words and our deeds. When we take time to nurture the spiritual practices of worship, music, singing, meditation, and caring for one another, these help stretch our hearts to know a more powerful and disciplined capacity for love. To help us all develop a greater capacity for being. A greater capacity to experience this exquisite world. As Hafiz writes Run my dear, From anything That may not strengthen Your precious budding wings [Run from all that imprisons and separates] For we have not come here to take prisoners, Or to confine our wondrous spirits But to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and Light! May this be a foundation for our words and our deeds. 5