By our First Principle, the congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. By our Third Principle, we covenant to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Today I want to reflect on what these two principles mean to us in our everyday lives, both within and without this church.

Acceptance is one of those warm, easy words. It comes particularly easy to us when we are faced with a situation of blatant intolerance. In Oregon a couple of years ago a neo-Nazi defaced the local synagogue with swastikas, and the local UU church responded by putting up a big sign over the church that said "Hate-Free Zone." It was a great advertisement for the Third and First Principles, and it got the church so much notice that the membership doubled in a year. That is the sort of situation in which it is easy for UUs to pat ourselves on the back for doing the right thing.

However, it doesn’t take too much imagination to envision something that would challenge this easy facade. Suppose that a Religious Right group decided to send 40 people over here to join this church in order to "bring it back to Jesus." Would we open our gates to this Trojan Horse? Suppose a person appears at our church with an interest in joining and we find out that he’s a convicted sex offender. Are we comfortable with such a person among us? On this day could we accept some one who supports the New York Yankees – would you let this sort of person marry your daughter?

This is the acceptance which is not easy, which requires some confrontation with our own sense of boundaries. I suggest to you that we all have limits to our acceptance of others whether we acknowledge them to ourselves or not. The point of this sermon is not to draw a line for this church or to show you where the boundaries are for each one of you individually. Rather, I’m going to try to understand some of the reasons we have difficulty accepting.

I want to restrict myself this morning to three basic points: first, acceptance is not the same as tolerance; second, the biggest barrier to acceptance of others who are different from us is fear and third, behind that fear of accepting others is the difficulty we have accepting ourselves. Now these are large generalities and you might well ask at this point what arena I’m talking about. Are we discussing the formal limits to church membership, who we will invite home to dinner, who we will admit to our social clubs, who we will be best friends with, who can comfortably marry into our family? Obviously our sense of limits and acceptance is going to be different with the degree of intimacy which the social relationship implies. But I’m going to feel free to bounce back and forth among these levels of intimacy because I think what we’re talking about here is one thing, which takes on different coloration in different contexts.

Acceptance is different from tolerance. I learned this lesson in a story I recently heard about a UU church which had adopted a new vision statement. At the suggestion of the minister, the drafting committee had inserted the word "anti-racist" as one of the adjectives describing the church, and at a board meeting the token conservative objected, saying he was all for tolerance but didn’t think this specific word needed to be in there. At that, the one black member of the board, who is normally very reticent on racial politics, came off the wall. Referring to her three biracial children in the church school, she said, "No, Dave; you’re not going to tolerate my children in Sunday school. They don’t need to be tolerated. You’re going to accept them, or I’m outta here." It was a defining moment in the life of that church, and it teaches an important spiritual point.

Martin Buber says that we can have two kinds of relationships with people or objects outside ourselves: I-it and I-thou. Tolerance implies an I-it relationship. We tolerate people as we tolerate the traffic, the heat, the cold, the pavement. Tolerating someone says "you can be that way and I won’t interfere. I wouldn’t break my general attitude of indifference if you want to be that way." Its opposite is intolerance, which means that we will take active steps to oppose something or someone. We can’t take active steps to oppose very many things or people, because the world is just too full of things and people. So when we say to someone, "I will tolerate you," all we’re really saying is, "I’ll treat you just the way I treat 99% of the people and things I deal with in my life."

My college chaplain William Sloane Coffin was fond of saying that the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is indifference. Tolerance is an expression of indifference: I’ll let you alone, you let me alone. We can each be alone. Won’t that be great?

Acceptance, on the other hand, is an I-thou relationship, in Buber’s words. It is saying to the other, "I affirm you in who you are." And part of who you are is the very thing that makes you different from me, and I affirm that part of you too. I once heard Cornel West talk about a future he envisioned when racism would be overcome. At the question period, I asked him if I encountered him in such a post-racist society would I still see a black man or would I see a colorless one. He replied, "You’ll still see a black man because that’s a part of who I am. But the implications of that for you will be different than they are for you today." We carry with us the things that make us different from one another, our skin color, or sex or sexual orientation or particular history or disability. Those things are part of who we are.

Acceptance is seeing in the other some reflection of yourself while at the same time seeing the things that make you different. Fr. Thomas Berry, a sort of modern nature mystic, prays that we will come to view the universe not as a collection of objects but as a community of subjects. Acceptance is the deep recognition that the other is someone "like me" and that the ways in which she is different from me are not as important as the ways she is like me.

Fear is the biggest barrier to acceptance. When we look at any situation where people don’t accept one another, we usually find some fear is at the base of it. Now fear has many dimensions, but the types of fear I want to talk about here is fear for our safety.

Safety is a good word, and a good value. Most of us here in this middle-class community probably go through most of our lives with a basic sense of being safe. This basic everyday sense of safety can be shattered if we experience a traumatic event. I recently heard a sermon by Ed Lynn, minister in Danvers, describing how a tree fell on the car he was driving, missing by inches inflicting serious or fatal injury, and how that experience changed his outlook on life. People who have been victims of or witnesses to serious assaults take months or years of therapy before their basic sense of personal safety can be restored.

Beyond such obvious trauma, however, there are many factors which threaten our sense of safety in more subtle ways. One of them is just other people. I made the mistake the other day of describing this congregation as a collection of shy people. The mistake was that that description can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For shyness is not a fixed characteristic, or at least it isn’t with me. I am shy in some social situations and quite voluble in others. And I think most people are. I’m shy in situations where I don’t know quite how to act, where there is no script, and where I’m among people that are new to me or whose judgment I fear for one reason or another. The behavior censors sitting in the doorway between my brain and my mouth get particularly active, and I find myself with nothing I can say that will seem acceptable to them. Incidentally, we’re going to be dealing with some of these social lubrication issues at a workshop after service next Sunday, so if you can relate to what I’ve just said, maybe you want to attend.

I recently had a dream in which I was three or four years old, playing with a toy truck on the rug of a living room I recognized as my aunts. Anachronistically, my two children Luke and Sally were the same age and were also playing with toys on the same rug. We had the easy camaraderie that you sometimes see in children that age. But suddenly Luke and Sally left me and I got very angry and scared, and went running to find my mama. As I went back over this dream later, I realized that it took the sense of loss I feel from the fissioning of my family and located that at a very primal level, in that age before we acquire the emotional structures that buffer traumas like this. I think we spend our lives building one citadel inside another; life at its best administers many hurts to us. For some of us, it administers a lot more hurt than to others. But as we get hurt, something deep inside of us says, "OK, that’s the last time I let that hurt get to me, I’m building a castle to keep that hurt out." So we build inside ourselves ramparts and fortifications with thick stone walls and its only later that we realize that in doing so we have walled ourselves in as surely as we have walled out whatever it was that was threatening us.

Safety is a good thing, but spiritual growth, love in the deepest sense, requires risk and vulnerability. We’ll never learn what glorious things are out there as long as we stay inside behind our walls. Three years ago, when my high-school sweetheart and wife of 27 years left me for another man, every instinct in my psyche told me to close up like a clam because the pain was unbelievable. I was fortunate that I was in training for ministry at the time and knew enough to know that I wouldn’t make a very good minister if I allowed myself to emotionally shut out the world. It took resolve and a lot of help from colleagues, a good therapist and my new partner, but I think I have been able to keep open despite the injury.

One of the spiritual values I want to reside here in these walls is a sense that this is a place where its safe for all of us to bring our brokenness, our vulnerabilities, our humanness. I know that the threshold of safety is different for every person and different for every level of intimacy but I hope that we can create a place where our deeper burdens and joys are shared in some measure.

This requires a level of trust, and its hard to trust someone who is very different from ourselves. We can’t legislate trust and we can’t tell people to feel safe. But trust and safety and the acceptance that result from them, are things that we can cultivate as we cultivate our gardens. It requires commitment and a bit of work. It’s not enough to sow the seeds of trust, but we must weed out the creepers of distrust, water regularly from the deep wells of our own spirits, and wait patiently for trust to bloom.

Contrast our way of doing business with the two religious communities described in the readings today. Both deal with the question not of who is going to be admitted to our religious group, but of what we do when someone in that group is acting wrongfully. In Leviticus, the Hebrews are told, "you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourselves." This is a very stringent rule of social responsibility. If your neighbor goes astray and you don’t reproach him, you are guilty yourself. The Hebrew here uses a grammatical construction which actually reiterates the word translated reproach, so that the effect of the passage is reproach, reproach. This ethic is quite foreign to our contemporary culture of individualism, but maybe this culture of individualism needs to be modified so that we all take more responsibility for each other.

Jesus builds on this Leviticus passage when he advises what church members are to do when one sins against the other. You must first confront the member individually when the two of you are alone and point out the fault. If he listens to you, you have regained him. If not, bring two witnesses. If the offender still won’t listen, bring it to the church. If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let him be as a Gentile or tax collector.

Now it is striking that Jesus should use this last simile, because elsewhere in Matthew and in the other gospels, Jesus is seen sharing table-fellowship with tax collectors and sinners and Gentiles . One of our most basic models of inclusivity, of acceptance, was Jesus’s deliberate violation of the rules of his then community as to who was acceptable at one’s table. So a person who didn’t listen even after the church spoke might get excluded from the church, but not from humanity, not from the set of all those people with whom we must be concerned.

I think Jesus is saying in this passage that a church can have limits on behavior, and that a member who persists in disregarding those limits can be put out, but that the person thus put out does not cease to be a child of God.

Similarly, we can recognize limits of acceptable behavior in this church as we have already done for the Sunday school. As a social unit, we have an inherent right to establish boundaries for behavior and to provide that those who cannot over time live within those boundaries can’t be members of the social whole. One form these boundaries can take is a written set of rules, but that is not always the best form for a small social unit like this. You would think that as a lawyer I would have ultimate faith in rules, but I know how inadequate rules are to anticipate the variety of human behavior. For dealing with those instances of behavior that threaten the social fabric, I put my trust a lot more in direct personal interaction, in reproach, reproach, than in an impersonal set of rules.

For part of a community of trust, part of a safe place, is being able to tell one another when they are crossing our personal boundaries. If you know your dance partner well, you can tell him when he’s stepping on your toes. If you are afraid to tell him, you will end up with sore feet and a reservoir of resentment.

I have said then that acceptance is not the same as tolerance, and that fear is the obstacle to acceptance. But when we look behind this fear, I think that we see problems we have accepting ourselves.

The root of our problem with accepting others is usually a problem accepting ourselves. We know that people who join hate groups were often unloved as children. Teenaged boys who go on shooting sprees at schools are often those who fell outcast from any of the social groups at school. When we feel rejected, we reject others. When I cannot be happy with the way I am, I can’t be open to the way you are.

How much of our lives do we spend wishing we were someone else? Oh, if I only was as rich as he is, as good-looking as she is; if I only were born with your advantages. I can’t like myself now, I can’t like myself until I lose 20 pounds, or get my degree, or find the right person to marry, or quit smoking. I’m just not secure enough in who I am to relate to someone really different.

This point is illustrated in the following story, which my mother first told me. A certain man who was fairly shy to begin with was in an accident and lost his right eye. He tried wearing a patch over it, but didn’t like the way the patch called attention to himself. So he went to the prosthetics store and asked if they could sell him an artificial eye. "Oh yes," said the salesman, "we have the latest in fiberglass eyes, computer matched with your other eye so that even your wife can’t tell the difference." "I’m single,"said the man. "How much is that?" "Six thousand dollars," said the salesman. "I don’t have anywhere near that kind of money," said the man, "don’t you have anything cheaper?" "Well, we have the older glass eyes, comes in 40 colors, can’t tell the difference except in really strong light. That would be $600." "I can’t even afford that. Don’t you have anything cheaper?" "Well, upstairs we have these old enameled wooden eyes from the 20's. Four colors. In a dim light, maybe it wouldn’t be noticeable." So the upshot is that the man buys the enameled wooden eye for $50, and decides to celebrate by going out to a night club, where the lights are real dim.

He orders a drink at the club and looks around and notices an attractive woman about his age sitting by herself at a table. He sidles closer to get a good look at her and suddenly notices that she has a prominent wart on the end of her nose. He goes back to his table disappointed, but then he has a little chat with his conscience: "Who am I Mr. High-and-Mighty to be rejecting this woman just because she has a blemish on her skin. None of us is perfect. I, indeed am wearing a wooden eye. How can I expect other people to accept me with my imperfections if I won’t accept others. I’ll go ask this woman to dance. She might be just the person who is right for me."

This resolution conquered his fear and shyness and, feeling full of his new-found acceptance and broad-mindedness, he sweeps across the room and in what he hopes is his most grand manner says to her, "Excuse me, Miss, but would you care to dance?"

The woman looked up with shining eyes and said "Would I, would I?"

The man said "Wart Nose, wart nose!"

This is one of the funniest stories I know, and it is funny in part for cruel reasons because the humor depends on the disabilities of the characters, but I think it is redeemed by the fact that it expresses a poignant human truth: when our acceptance of ourselves is shaky, our acceptance of others is going to be shaky.

Work first on accepting the person you see in the mirror every morning. If you can learn to accept that person, accepting others will be a piece of cake.