Charlie Brown says, "I want to be a doctor when I grow up." Lucy replies, "You can't be a doctor, Charlie Brown. To be a doctor you have to love humanity." "I do love humanity," Charlie protests. "It's people I can't stand."

Who among us doesn’t have a part of us that agrees with Charlie Brown? It can be easy to love humanity in general, but sometimes hard to love our family, friends, neighbors who can be just so annoying, sometimes even hurtful or hateful. But that’s not what I want to talk about this morning. I want to talk about how I love people but it's humanity I can't stand. Perhaps you have walked some of the same roads I have.

Let me explain. I find that most of the people I meet seem basically descent, and even rather friendly if you’re willing to put in the effort of courtesy and a favorable disposition. I realize, as a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine would put it, that we each have our “secret sins” we wrestle with or don’t. But even so, there’s something to our crazy species that’s lovable, especially when we’ve begun to learn the wisdom of loving ourselves. But when we mostly lovable people joined together in the all-too-flawed systems of humanity, we often act in ways that are not so lovable.

The Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association begin, “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote … The inherent worth and dignity of every person….” That word, “covenant.” Ours is a covenantal relationship as Unitarian Universalists. Therefore, we agree to live together in community in certain ways. We may not agree on all points of theology or philosophy, in fact, we have a great deal of disagreement on these things. As our opening reading, from Ken Patton, says, our congregations offer “a platform for the free voice, for declaring, both in times of security and danger, the full and undivided conflict of opinion.” We are united despite our differences. The covenantal bands that join us can never be definitively put in words. Nevertheless, that doesn’t keep us from trying to name them. The most recent attempt are our Principles and Purposes, adopted in 1985 and added to in 1995. The first of these principles is my subject today: the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

What does “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” mean? A friend of mine once flippantly said it meant, “everyone is worth so much, and when they die, you inherit it. I know he had more sense than that. But don’t many around us act as though someone’s else’s worth, or their own worth, really was the figure in their bank account? Our society teaches us to regard with more respect those who we think have money. I say think, because many of us have gone into serious debt trying to convince others that we’re worth something. We are also taught to look down on those who seem less affluent than ourselves and blame them for their struggles or pity them while doing nothing to help. We elect the rich as more worthy to rule than the rest of us. We even commonly use the word “worth” in the phrase, “when he died, he was worth x number of dollars.” I once heard Eastern College Sociology Professor Tony Campolo respond to such sayings. “When you’re dead,” Campolo said, “you’re not worth anything!”

Well, that’s not technically true. According to a recent estimate, the human body, when broken down into its constituent elements and minerals, is worth about $4.50. 1

So, if human worth is not found in the stuff we own or in the stuff we’re made of, where is it?

Where I would look for it would be in our very experience of life. I can’t observe, feel pleasure and pain, think, communicate, love. Judging how other people act as if they shared all these attributes with me, I affirm that they’re in the same basic boat as me. If I’m worth nothing, then so are they, and vice-versa. On the other hand, if I’m worth something, so is everyone else. They family resemblance is too great with even those we think least like us. We share a basic biology, psychology, spirituality, in spite of remarkable differences.

Whether human beings were worth something, nothing, or even less than nothing, was one of the hottest topics at the founding of our Unitarian and Universalist denominations. Back in the early days of our American republic, John Calvin’s ideas about theology dominated much of the country. One of Calvin’s ideas was that human beings were born in a state of sinful “utter depravity” and were destined to lead a life of sin ending in eternal damnation, unless fortunate enough to be one of the few people God had chosen before they were born to be saved. There were those who held different views, however. Early Unitarians held that we each have a free will that allowed us to choose to do good or evil, rather than being destined to follow one path or another. Early Universalists held that God valued humanity too much to make souls spend forever in hell.

Neither group held the naïve view that everyone was good, just that we each had the freedom to choose to act with cruelty or kindness. William Ellery Channing, in our first reading, speaks of “the return of a human being to virtue as an event which increases the joy of heaven.” He did not make the mistake of assuming human beings were automatically virtuous.

Sin does creep in to the most virtuous of hearts. The Greek word for sin is hamartia , a term from archery which means, “missing the mark.” The mark is the bull’s-eye, the perfect shot. Which of us is always perfectly kind, perfectly generous, perfectly patient, perfectly accepting? What’s more, which of us can’t remember times that we’ve been quite the opposite of our ideals? Times we have forgotten our better natures altogether and given in to dishonesty, greed, abuse, irresponsibility?

Religions have developed elaborate systems to guard against sin. Often, though, these have had the effect not of making people better but of making them self-righteous, condemning others. Here’s an example of how someone’s worth was denied in the place it should have been most respected, until, that is, one person decided to make a difference. This is a favorite story of the Rev. Bruce Southworth, who spoke here at my installation. I think the story is well worth repeating. In Bruce’s words:

Fred Craddock, a teacher, minister, and preacher, was driving through [Tennessee] some years ago. He stopped at a restaurant for a meal, and he was intrigued as one man went from table to table greeting everyone sitting there.

When he came to Craddock and learned he was a minister, the man insisted on telling a story. He said that he had been born in the mountains not far from where they sat and that his mother was not married when he was born. In that time and in that culture, the mother was frowned upon and indeed scorned. The boy himself would feel as he grew up the love of his mother, but also the scorn of the townsfolk. At recess, his classmates would ostracize him, and he learned to keep to himself, then and also at lunch, in order to avoid the taunts that came his way. Even walking downtown was a hardship because of comments of passersby.

The boy at age 12 took up going to church on his own. A new minister had come to the church near his house. He would slip into the building just as the services began, into the back row and leave before it was over so that no one would challenge him by asking, “What’s a boy like you doing here.” [And if you think about it, what a church ought to be, namely summoning our better selves, is not what a church always is; we know how things so often are when prejudice reinforces prejudice.]

However, one Sunday he forgot to slip out, so taken was he with the service, the singing, whatever. Before he could quietly exit, he felt the big hand of the minister on his shoulder, light and gentle. The preacher looked at him and asked, “Who are you, son?” “Whose boy are you?”

Once again, the boy’s heart sank, and perhaps his pain showed on his face. But then the preacher answered, “Wait a minute. I know who you are. The family resemblance is unmistakable. You are a child of God.”

With those words, he patted him on the back and added, “That’s quite an inheritance. Go, and claim it.”

Craddock reports, “As the boy changed to manhood in that restaurant, the old man said, …’That one statement literally changed my whole life.’ He explained that his name was Ben Hooper and he had twice been elected governor of Tennessee.” 2

Our First Principle also stresses the dignity of every person. It struck me not long ago that many houses of worship treat certain people with less dignity than they receive at a typical cocktail party. How many people are too dark skinned, too gay, too skeptical, too pierced and tattooed, too politically unpopular to fit in with many faith communities? We do certainly have our share of inhospitality as Unitarian Universalists. We’re are human, after all. But I’d like to think that we do better than many at accepting difference and of seeing people for who they are.

For instance, I once saw a woman begin to attend one of our societies. She had been very disappointed in the faith she’d been raised in. She was also facing problems in her life that could be heard in the heavy tone of her voice. In just a few weeks, though, she had fallen in love with the people and the freedom that she found. She seemed like a completely different person.

I often close services with a quote from William Salter, “As the essence of courage is to stake one’s life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe a possibility exists.” Faith, to me, means a basic affirmation of the greater wisdom than my own. To me, life is of such value, that it strikes me as unlikely that it’s here to no purpose. There are times when I feel comfort in the great scheme of things, though I can’t adequately describe it. “People are precious!” proclaimed a minister of a previous generation. That resonates with me deeply. The dignity, grace, and heroism seemingly ordinary people can show, time and time again, in the midst of the most difficult circumstances, testify that we are more than products of our instincts and training.

At other times, the sheer enormity of human evil takes our breath away. A still-fresh example of both sides of human nature comes naturally to mind. The attacks on 9/11 showed us the utter callousness of murder and the self-sacrificing heroism of rescuers. Even when there was no hope, people reached out in comfort to one another. There was the man who stayed with his friend in a wheelchair rather than leaving him alone. There were the two people who, surrounded by flames, leapt hundreds of feet toward the sidewalk below hand in hand.

But this is no new story, in every age, people have died in horrible ways because the very simple principle of each person’s worth and dignity has not been respected. The class reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was confronted with the strikingly parallel account of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911. It took place not very far from where the World Trade Center was later built. Here’s how Zinn describes it:

On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that began in a rag bin swept through the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, too high for fire ladders to reach. The fire chief of New York had said that his ladders could reach only to the seventh floor. Nut half of New York’s 500,000 workers spent all day, perhaps twelve hours, above the seventh floor. The laws said factory doors had to open outward. But at the Triangle Company the doors opened in. The law said the doors could not be locked during working hours, but at the Triangle Company doors were usually locked so the company could keep track of the employees. And so, trapped, the young women were burned to death at their worktables, or jammed against the locked exit door, or leaped to their deaths down the elevator shafts. The New York World reported:

“…screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying….

From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death—girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.”

The Triangle factory was typical of the time. To save a few dollars, the management defied safety regulations and government did nothing. One-hundred forty-six workers, mostly women, died, martyrs to greed and the disregard of a social system that values wealth over human worth.

But that’s not the end of the story. One-hundred thousand people marched in a memorial procession. Unions were energized to demand an investigation, and the following years brought a number of reforms attempting to prevent such tragedies. And such struggles for the fair treatment of all people goes on today, as important as it ever was.

Ultimately, I believe that whether human life is affirmed in its worth and dignity depends on each of our attitudes and actions. We can choose to bless our fellow persons by developing our best selves, by trying our best to understand where other people are coming from, by returning ignorance with kindness. Or we can curse our fellow persons by allowing them to be oppressed without challenge, by retreating in our own selfishness, by secretly considering ourselves more worthy than others.

A number of years ago, I participated in an open ritual for the Wiccan Sabbat of Samhain, about this time of year. Each participant made his or her way through all the four directions, picking up mementos of the powers of each. And then came the moment to confront the supreme mystery, which was appropriate to the fall and winter as being times of turning inward. Each person, in turn was to behold at what lay hidden at the center of the circle. From this mystery proceeds all good and evil, all growth and change. When my turn came to look, I saw my own face looking back at me in a mirror….

Worth? Dignity? Building a kinder humanity?

If not here, where? If not now, when? If not us, who?