“Every night and every morn, some to misery are born; every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight.” These are the words by William Blake that we just sang. They describe so crisply one of the problems in ethics that people have wrestled with throughout the ages: what is the right ethical response to the fact that we humans start out in such radically different places? Some in misery and some, if not always in sweet delight, at least in possession of great advantages. What’s the ethical response to this especially in terms of charitable giving? What responsibilities do those with greater resources have to those with much, much less? We’re faced with this question every time we pass a homeless person on the street and every time we hear a story of famine and devastation far away.

 

This is the question that Lake Wise, our sermon auction winner (and, by the way, our congregation’s treasurer), asked me to address in my sermon today. He asked me to look at the issue of charity especially through the lens of the Princeton ethicist Peter Singer who takes provocative positions on virtually everything. His work is quite controversial, mainly because he comes to conclusions that are both very harsh and very hard to argue with. So people end up despising him and despising anyone who stands up and promotes his views. (Thanks a lot, Lake.)

 

Here’s a famous Peter Singer scenario: Imagine you’re on your way to work one morning, and you pass by a shallow fountain, the same one you pass by every day. But this day, you notice a small child in the water who seems to be drowning. You see the terror in the child’s eyes. You look around for a parent or caregiver to alert them but there’s no one around. You realize that you could easily wade into the fountain and pull the child out. Your nice work clothes would get all muddy and wet and you’d have to go home and change and be very late for work. But you would save the child’s life.

 

Pretty much everyone would agree that you would have a moral obligation to save the child. Right? Can we agree on that? And not only that, but most of us in this room would not even experience that situation as a moral decision to be made. We’d just instinctively, unthinkingly, immediately wade into the water and save the child. It would come from our heart, not our head. And we’d probably think that anyone who didn’t have that impulse – anyone who felt that their nice clothes were more important than the life of that child – would be a monster. To put it in the language of ethics, if we can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing something of comparable moral significance, we ought to do it. In this case, our clothing is not of comparable moral significance to a person’s life, so we’re obliged to save the child.

 

In his book, Practical Ethics, Singer points out that this is in fact the real life scenario we are faced with every single day. Across the world there are millions of children right now who are essentially drowning and we, for the sake of things like our clothes, walk right by. We could save them, at least some of them, but we let them drown. He’s talking, of course, about the 1.4 billion people in this world who live in extreme poverty. As the World Bank defines it, extreme poverty is where you eat one meal a day at best, sometimes having to choose between feeding your children and feeding yourselves. You live in an unstable house made of mud or thatch that you constantly have to rebuild when there’s severe weather, which is more and more often these days. You’re unable to save any money and have no backup if someone in your family needs to see a doctor or needs medicine. You have no safe drinking water nearby – you have to walk a long way for water and even then, it will make you sick unless you boil it.

 

Extreme poverty like this is equivalent to being in the process of drowning. Millions of children die every year because of it.

I love computer programmer Derek Sivers’ idea for hacking the consumer system. He writes, “I'd like to get 100 parrots and teach them to say, “It won't make you happy!” - then let them loose in shopping malls, big electronics stores, and car lots. Then...

At the Republican debate in Detroit last month the candidates were discussing Flint – specifically, what to make of the coincidence that the thousands of children and adults whose drinking water was contaminated with lead were mostly black. Senator Marco Rubio was saying that it’s unfair to politicize the issue. He said, “I don’t think someone woke up one morning and said let's figure out how to poison the water system to hurt someone.”

 

He’s absolutely right about that. Nobody did just wake up one morning and decide to hurt someone. Instead, someone, to save money, decided to unhook the city of Flint from its fresh water source, Lake Huron, and hook them up to the polluted Flint River. Someone else, to save money, decided to not treat the water with a chemical that would keep lead out of it. When the crisis began to come to light, someone ignored it, someone hid evidence, and someone tampered with lead tests, to save their own jobs. When people complained about the yellow, foul-tasting water someone advised them to boil it, which of course does nothing about lead. When General Motors complained that the water was corroding the car engines in their Flint plant, someone decided to switch them, and only them, back to Lake Huron water. Someone thought it was okay to let children drink water that corrodes engines.

 

No one woke up one morning and set out to hurt anyone. And yet hurt people they did. In phrasing it, “No one woke up one morning and…,” Senator Rubio (or anyone else who uses that kind of language) is diverting attention from the big picture. It suggests that if it wasn’t malice then the only other option is that it was just a series of innocent mistakes – garden-variety bureaucratic ineptitude. Sure, you have to fire them, but it didn’t mean anything. It could have happened anywhere. We know that that’s not true either. We all know that this simply would not have happened in a wealthy white community. And if it had begun to happen, it would have been fixed in a nanosecond. There is another explanation besides individual malicious intent and individual innocent incompetence. It’s called a systems explanation. In this case, systemic racism. Systemic classism. A systemic hyper-valuing of the financial bottom line and a devaluing of human lives. A systemic failure of moral courage. A systemic failure of compassion. It’s the system.

 

This is not to say that individuals are not responsible. Of course individuals in this situation acted stunningly unethically and they should be held accountable. But did this behavior spring spontaneously from some inherent defect in their hearts? Did they just “wake up one morning” like this? No. In our individualistic culture, we tend to focus on the “bad apples.” But we keep trying to throw out the bad apples and we find more and more and more. And it’s not because people are bad, or white people are bad or rich people are bad. But that the systems in which we all live are far more powerful than we know. They have a life of their own. They form us from the start in ways that we can’t even begin to fathom. And the most insidious thing about systems – the thing that has slowed our progress in so many dimensions of human life – is that they tend to be invisible to whoever is inside them.

 

The psychiatrist Dr. Murray Bowen back in the 1950’s came up with a way to think about this phenomenon to help his patients. He found that when a patient came to him with a problem – the kind that Freud might have called an individual “neurosis –” it was more often an expression of something in the patient’s family system – current family, family of origin or, often, both. He coined the term “family systems theory.” Dysfunction doesn’t belong to individuals but to the system as a whole. Someone feels burdened by doing all the work in the family, while someone else is feeling infantilized by not being given any responsibilities. Or someone is stuck in the role of the family “clown,

By Ana Levy-LyonsDuring a concert that has gone down in history, the great violinist Itzhak Perlman broke a string. Instead of stopping to replace it, he kept playing, finding the melodies on the three remaining strings. When the piece was finished, the astounded audience gave him a standing ovation and clamored for him to speak. He approached the microphone and said, “It is our task to make music with what remains.” On the most literal level, he meant what remained of his violin. He may also have been referring to what remained of his health since he contracted polio at age 4 and walks with crutches and leg braces. He plays violin sitting down. Metaphorically he may have meant, make a life of beauty with what remains to each of us after our storms leave us drenched, battered, and diminished. His performance might have seemed freakishly brilliant, and it was, but actually constraints can be so helpful to the creative process that some artists go out of their way to create artificial constraints within which to do their work. The French author George Perec wrote a 300-page novel, La Disparition, without the use of the letter “e.” And there’s an English translation that also doesn’t use the letter “e.” Just for reference, I’ve already used 209 e’s in this sermon. And frankly, I plan to continue using them liberally. Former NYU professor Louis Bury wrote a constraint-based dissertation about constraint-based writing. He also writes poetry while riding the New York subway system. The rules are: Each stop you have to write one line, each transfer is a new stanza. No rewrites. Here’s one of his poems: What genre / of pulchritude/ what fable/ of conviction/ fires your/ puttering engine? (Don’t worry, I didn’t know what pulchritude meant either – I had to look it up. It means beauty.) This is not to say that all constraints are productive like this. Poverty, hunger, lack of health care are not productive constraints. Billions of people in this world suffer crushing constraints that make survival the only possible goal. Self-actualization, creativity – these don’t even enter the picture. But spiritual teachers, like artists, have found that voluntary constraints can create great inner freedom. Fasting, the discipline of daily prayer or meditation, going on a silent retreat, keeping dietary laws, giving something up for Lent. In the story about the Buddha that Meagan told, Siddhartha gave up all his wealth and his material possessions, gave up his fine clothes in exchange for a monk’s robe, and ate only one meal a day. The teaching was clear – he could never have had the spiritual breakthroughs he had if he’d stayed living in luxury at the royal palace. Sabbath is another constraint-based spiritual practice. It has rules. Depending on your religion, you might not work or buy things or turn on a light or drive a car during the Sabbath. The work and errands that you would otherwise do in seven days has to get squeezed into six. After the service today, as part of our Sabbath Sunday, we’re going to have a panel discussion with three Sabbath-keeping people from three different religious traditions: one Jewish, one 7th Day Church of God, and one former Mormon UU. Each of them will talk about how the voluntary practice of limiting their freedom in certain ways actually leads to an abundance of spiritual goodness in their lives. The Sabbath constraints are productive constraints. They can allow you to bask in the pulchritude of the present. This is a hard sell for Unitarian Universalists. Not the basking in the pulchritude of the present part, but the rules part. Most of us in this room do not voluntarily constrain ourselves at all. In fact we try to eliminate constraints from our lives as much as possible. For some, our attraction to Unitarian Universalism is part of that quest. Collectively, we’ve some bad experiences with the constraints imposed by religion. Especially when it comes to sexuality, family, and gender.

By John Lenker

When I was only 5 years old, tragedy struck—at least from the perspective of my Aunt Barb, who, at age 10, was more like an older sister.

You see, Barb had been working meticulously on a coloring book for days. And she was careful to make sure that each picture was neat and perfect and she only had a few pages to go until it was finished.

And then one afternoon I saw it lying on the table, unattended, and decided to "help her" finish it.

When she went to pick up where she’d left off and saw what I had done, she was so upset!

To make matters worse, not only had I colored outside the lines a little, but apparently I’d chosen “inappropriate” colors, which set her off enough that she literally tried to drown me in the community swimming pool later that day.

This is a true story. I still remember thinking I was going to die as she held me under the water.

Now, those of you who know me know that I really love to socialize. And as I’ve gotten to know some of you who are relatively new—not only new to this church, but also new to the idea of even being involved with a church at all, I realize that this fellowship has triggered some of the same transformations in thinking and behavior that I, myself, have experienced.

For whatever reason—call it serendipity, fate, God’s will—we’ve arrived here at this key intersection in our life’s journey where we find ourselves—not accidentally, but deliberately coloring outside the lines that have historically given shape to our identities and definition to our respective concepts of reality.

And we find ourselves surprised and maybe a bit scared because we realize that there are inherent risks to venturing outside of the familiar, pre-printed pictures to which we’ve long-since resigned ourselves. And, for many of us, our senses of consciousness have become so activated that we’ve come to the profound moment when we stop asking ourselves: “How do I define myself?”, and have begun asking the more catalytic question: “How should I define myself?”

“How should I define myself?”

This is a tougher question to answer because it’s so open ended.

When we think about it, the model many of us’ve been given throughout our lives—especially those of us over 30—doesn’t support this type of question at all. It decidedly doesn’t ask …

“Johnny, how do you think you should you define yourself? Here’s a blank sheet of paper; take your time and create any picture you’d like.”

Instead, we’ve been given more of a “multiple choice” model:

“From the coloring book you’ve been handed, please select from one of the five, pre-defined themes, and begin coloring. Please be sure to color within the clearly-marked lines.”

But as simple as that sounds—growing up, it did-n’t end up being that simple for many of us.

“What’s that Johnny? You’ve selected the picture an astronaut? Johnny, do you realize that you’ve got to be really, really smart to be an astronaut? You don’t want to chose that picture, Johnny. Why don’t you choose this really nice picture of a lawyer instead. You only need to be “kinda smart” to be a lawyer, and besides, you’re great at talking yourself out of trouble!”

Man, how did some of us even cope growing up when the authority figures we looked up to the most discouraged us from truly exploring our identities and potentialities?

Besides resorting to some version of self-medication, many of us adapted by simply taking on the philosophy that “It’s okay to color outside the lines,” and that “rules are made to be broken.”

We’ve come to the conclusion that many of the boundaries that parents, schools, religions, and governments have laid down are so ill-fitting that they simply can be ignored.

And, believe me, I spent quite a number of years earlier in my adulthood living by that philosophy.

The problem was that the picture that my life manifested was not artistic, expressive, or fulfilling. Like the pages I had ruined in my Aunt’s coloring book,

If each of us gets fifteen minutes of fame, Jesus got his on Palm Sunday. You could say that he’s had two thousand years of fame; that, contrary to what John Lennon said, he’s bigger than the Beatles. But really, as far as his own experience, it’s the day he rides a donkey into Jerusalem that he really gets the Beatles’-caliber welcome. It’s always described as his “triumphant” entry into Jerusalem. Adoring fans crowding around him, trying to catch a glimpse, trying to maybe, possibly, touch the edge of his clothing. They lay their cloaks down in the road in front of him and wave palm fronds as they would for a king. He must have been pretty pumped, right?

 

Actually, I’m thinking no. I’m thinking he knows that things are not going to go so well for him in Jerusalem. Days earlier in the story, the Matthew text says, “Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” So when he is riding his donkey toward Jerusalem, he is knowingly walking directly into suffering and death. And the crowds around him, although they might not know that he’s going to die, they at least know that he’s not positioned well to take on the Roman army. He is the leader of a poorly armed Jewish insurrection. The crowd has seen what the Romans do to leaders of insurrections and it’s not pretty. And despite this, or maybe because of it, they lay their cloaks down in the road in front of him and wave their palm fronds for victory.

 

As with most Scripture, this is myth – we don’t know how much of it is historically true. The triumphant entry into Jerusalem probably happened in some form because it shows up in all four gospels. But we certainly don’t know what Jesus may have said in private to his disciples earlier – whether he really predicted he was going to be tortured and die at the hands of the Romans, whether he really told them he would rise from the dead three days later. We’ll never know. But the fact that this is the Palm Sunday story we’ve received two thousand years later suggests that this tension between Jesus knowing that he’s walking into suffering and his going there anyway is the point. There’s a truth in there that has resonated with people through the generations.

 

There are times in each of lives when we know that we’re walking into suffering. There are times when we can see, as crystal clearly as Jesus did, when we look down the road ahead that this is not going to go well. This is not going to be fun. This is going to hurt. And sometimes, as Jesus did in the story, we have a choice in the matter. We don’t have to do this painful thing. And the question we’re faced with in those moments is – should we do it anyway? Should we continue down that road or should we turn our donkey around and go home?

 

Maybe you’re in a relationship or marriage with someone you love deeply but you’re miserable together. You fight all the time, you want different things from life, you feel like they’re always trying to change you. You don’t feel good with them. You know that if you stay with them, you won’t be able to become fully yourself. And you also know that because of the very real love you share, leaving will blow a huge hole in your heart. It will be the most painful thing you’ve ever done. Should you walk into that storm?

 

Or say you’ve got a comfortable job as a nurse. It’s comfortable but it bores you and you don’t feel like you’re serving the communities that need the most help. You have a dream of working as a doctor in Haiti, where your family is from. You want to set up clinics in the poorest villages and help train others to provide medical care there. But first you’re going to have to go to medical school – sleepless nights of studying, more sleepless nights as a resident somewhere, relentless testing. Then, if you’re successful, you’ll leave all your friends and your Netflix,

Back in the day, church buildings like this one in the winter were cold. This was before central heating and before the benefits of global warming that we’re enjoying today. If a church had a furnace of some kind, the richer people paid for the right to sit closer to it. The rest of us just sat there and shivered and probably couldn’t wait for the service to be over. Here at First Unitarian, people used to keep warm by bringing “foot warmers” – little boxes full of burning coals. It was B.Y.O.H. – bring your own heat. Everyone lived in the neighborhood. And it wasn’t much trouble to scoop some coals from your home furnace into a foot warmer and bring it along with you to church. It wasn’t really any trouble at all.

 

And then technology evolved and central heating became available, and some folks started saying, “Hey, that sounds great! We should get that here!” They were invariably met with resistance. “Why would we do that? The foot warmers work perfectly well. That would be an irresponsible use of our operating budget.” What seems like excess and luxury to one generation can seem like a baseline index of civilization to the next. Imagine if we still had foot warmers here today. Maybe you’d get handed one along with your order of service when you walked into the sanctuary. It just wouldn’t fly today. (On the other hand, maybe it would be so retro and ironic that it would make us the hottest thing in New York.)

 

If you had been able to interview one of these people in the 19th century about their resistance to splurging on a heating system, I imagine they would have said something like, “What we are doing here is so important, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ…” (Unitarians were Christians back then) “…building character in our children, caring for the sick and the needy, it would be a sin to spend any of our resources on something that is merely for our own comfort.” Their motivation was absolutely noble. Although we can now look back with 20-20 hindsight and say that they were wrong about what was best for the church and its growth, their hearts were in the right place. Their hearts were exactly where you’d want them to be. They wanted the money they contributed to the church to produce only intangible spiritual benefits.

 

It turns out that on this point, they and the IRS agree. You’ll see on your 2016 tax statement from First U it will say something at the bottom to the effect that in return for your contribution here you’ve received no goods or services; you’ve received nothing other than “intangible spiritual benefits.” This is standard language used to convince the IRS that you shouldn’t be taxed on the money you gave because you haven’t been able to buy anything with it. You no longer have it, but you don’t really have anything else in exchange for it either – except for intangible spiritual benefits, which don’t count. From the IRS’s perspective, that money has evaporated.

 

There’s a built-in awkward relationship between the financial and material infrastructure that we need to keep this place running and what’s actually produced here. If you imagine this place like a giant machine, we put in very tangible things – money and material resources and people’s labor time, volunteer and paid – at one end and we all churn it up and process it and combine it in various ways. And what comes out the other end after all that? Intangible spiritual benefits. They don’t count to the IRS because you can’t count them. You can’t measure them. It’s hard to really even define them.

 

In our Moments of Witness here, some of our members have tried to define exactly what gets produced here… what are the benefits and why it means so much to them. Joy Gabriel talked about how, when she really needed it, the choir sang to her and we all held her without even knowing we were doing it. Danny DiGiacomo and Chris Singh spoke with joy about their upcoming wedding here and asked, “where else would a nice Guyanese,

When I became a parent in 2008, three months shy of my 40th birthday, two unexpected things happened to me: first, love opened up to me in a way I had never known before, and second, I suddenly became aware of my limited time on earth.

 

When I beca...