Living W Jutice Compassion

Rev Bob Klein
First UU Church Stockton
May 31, 2015
LIVING WITH JUSTICE & COMPASSION 2015!

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our
congregations;
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our
congregations and in society at large;
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Our Unitarian Universalist Principles are really all about Justice and
Compassion. They include respect and acceptance for the individual and for the
individuals beliefs, as well as for the connections between all things,
emphasizing peace, liberty and the freedom to search for truth and meaning.
The Principles will someday be replaced by a statement better fitted to its
future time, but for now the UU Principles state pretty well what we Unitarian
Universalists strive to do and be.
When I studied with Matthew Fox at the Institute for Culture and Creation
Spirituality, we talked frequently about how Justice and Compassion were at
the core of that community as well as coming from each of the major living
world religions. Justice and Compassion are core beliefs for human beings,
even if the first evidence of human murder has recently moved back to some
430,000 years ago. When Justice and Compassion are not practiced well
enough, violence too often has arisen in human communities. The recent spate
of violence in our own community attributed to gangs can also surely be
correlated with injustice and a shortage of compassion.
Our society has the highest incarceration rate for the first world,
disproportionately involving black men. We also have the greatest disparity
between rich and poor, and the least effective social safety net. For those with
wealth it is the best of times, for those without, these times are terrible.
Recent efforts to dismantle the affordable care act, social security, welfare, and
other safety net programs continue to exacerbate the disparity between the
haves and the have-nots, and that is just within these United States. Corporate
persons continue to exert their power over elections, governments, and
individuals. Not that greed and disparities of wealth and power are new, but the
chasm continues to grow wider faster between the wealth and power of workers
and that of owners and bosses.
Several centuries before the time of Jesus, the prophet to Israel, Micah,
summed up the expectations of religion in a famous passage 6:8:
He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of
you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
The gospel of Matthew remembers Jesus as answering the question of the
greatest commandment in 22:37-40:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second
is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two
commandments depend all the law and the prophets.
Our Judeo-Christian roots are all about justice and compassion. The Beatitudes
in Matthew 5:3-12 also balance love and justice as taught by Jesus:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all
kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for
your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who
were before you.
2
In some Eastern religions, Karma accrues to balance the scales when

compassion and justice are or are not practiced. Some teachers might talk about
civic duty or responsibility, morals or ethics to encourage the practice of
compassion and justice. Compassion and Justice are old concepts in human
community, for anywhere even a few human families shared space there must
have quickly developed a code of expectations for treating others. The sins of
individuals and groups are essentially the absence of or failures in compassion
and justice. It is compassion and justice that must at root be the norm for any
collaboration of humans.
So then the question for today is why expectations of compassion and justice
within our own society and around the world are not being met? What is it
about our time that has allowed so much injustice and so many failures of love
to infect our world?
Obviously corporations are benefiting in disputes that result in war. The
military-industrial complex continues to reap windfall profits from wars and
rumors of war and preparations for war, but so do foodservice companies, oil
companies, mining companies, companies that fabricate steel, other metals,
fiberglass and plastics, carmakers, transportation companies and various others.
Though many economic models have promoted the beliefs that wars are good
for the economy, recent studies have shown that peacetimes are actually better
and more prosperous on many scales. Those who are richest just keep getting
richer, in wartime as well as in peacetime. Peacetime likely brings more
opportunities for those who are not already wealthy.
In wartime and in peacetime, injustices abound in our society. Trickle-down
economics never spilled much beyond the top one percent, and current efforts
to keep minimum wages from rising based on threats of job losses similarly
benefit the top one percent. It is time for a broader base of employment either
through private sector employment or the public sector. This is the way of
justice and compassion, and will sooner fix the failing infrastructure of our
nation than will the tax-cuts promoted by too many millionaires in Congress.
There was a time, in fact there have been many times when people in our
nation joined together in common cause to make things better for everyone.
3
Today, the top one-percenters join in common cause to make themselves

richer, while the other 99 percent too often seem satisfied to accept the status
quo presented on cable TV with occasional stories in between the commercials
and select corporate approved news. We may not quite live in a bubble of
blissful ignorance, but we certainly are not being encouraged to take any action
that would change the way things are in our country or the world. It takes an
effort to make oneself really aware of the injustices in South Stockton, let alone
the world.
Our religious forebears pushed against societal norms, struggling to support the
rights and dignity of many of the oppressed in society. We occasionally can
come together long enough to focus on one or two of the big issues, such as
immigration and equal rights for LGBTQ persons, but such common efforts
have become far too infrequent in recent years. Our Unitarian Universalist
Principles still challenge us to work for justice with compassion, but it takes a
lot of effort to get UUs organized to do anything! And of course, the injustices
in society are complex and better hidden than the outright racism and sexism of
previous eras.
The immigration battle is cast as if hordes of Mexicans were crossing the
border without even trying to enter the US legally, while the reality is that the
quotas of Mexicans and other central Americans are so small that millions of
fieldwork jobs would go wanting every year if workers did not cross the border
and the wealth disparity between the US and anywhere south of the Border
remains immense. There are many possible solutions, but none of them seem to
satisfy enough of the Tea Party and other Republicans to actually pass
Congress.
Racism is less visible today than in the Jim Crow era, but often simmers just
below the surface of modern life until it boils up as it has recently in Ferguson,
Brooklyn, and Baltimore. Why in todays world are there not near equivalent
numbers of persons of color to match the makeup of cities? Why are we not the
color-blind rainbow society that befits our founding documents? With all the
alleged genetic and intelligence differences long since debunked, what is left
other than the racism maintained differences in opportunities and wealth?
4
We should see this time as a crossroads from whence we will go forward to

build a society and world as inclusive as the hope within our Unitarian
Universalist Principles. It seems more likely that anti-Asian and anti-Russian
sentiments may come forward in response to a number of current events, but
racism and anti-immigration sentiments have not yet been excised either.
So instead of seeking to work together with other nations and all peoples to
solve problems of population, pollution, global climate change, and the
particular problems caused by oil and other carbon based fuels, we continue to
focus on the little threats to domestic tranquility even as we ignore the chronic
disasters already unfolding in changing patterns of drought and flood. The
racial and immigration battles distract us so easily from the bigger dangers that
threaten all life on earth. We, of course, need to solve all these problems, but
oh how easy it is to just tune it all out and ignore them.
We, the masses, remain tranquilized and distracted. Karl Marx is quoted calling
religion the opiate of the masses, but I wonder whether Television has become
an even more effective opium for the masses.
The full quote from Karl Marx (actually) translates as: "Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people". Wikipedia
This is a strange time in which we live, an era complicated beyond any reason
by complex sets of laws and regulations seemingly intended to protect
individuals but often more effective in protecting corporations from any
liability or responsibility for the negative consequences of any product or
service. Justice is elusive when judges have no freedom to make the
punishment fit the crime, and compassion is not allowed to interfere with the
hard and fast rule of the law.
There are so many problems to deal with in society today, it is discouraging,
disheartening, and easy to see why so many allow themselves to be distracted,
or rather that so many of us so often allow ourselves to be distracted! I believe
that most of us do our best to live by the Unitarian Universalist Principles, and
that we do accomplish many good things. I also believe that we could find
ways of better working together to make a difference.
5
I would love to see us pick out one issue to deal with and then really give it our
combined effort for a year or even 2 or 3. Our energy given to address any
problem would help and would give us a shared project, something that we
might become known for doing. We could take our rainbow flag and sponsor a
Pride Parade on the Miracle Mile. We could create an afterschool program for
children with no place to go. We could build on our commitment to the Boggs
Tract Garden. We could become the place to go for forums on Global Climate
Change, or Immigration, or so many other things. The opportunities are almost
endless. The thing we need to do is choose a project and move forward.
Our UU Principles call us to live and work for Justice and Compassion. I
challenge us to do more to make Justice and Compassion real in our
congregation and community!
So May it Be! Shalom, Salaam, Namaste, Blessed Be, and Amen!

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Rev Bob Klein

First UU Church Stockton

May 31, 2015

LIVING WITH JUSTICE & COMPASSION 2015!

In some Eastern religions, Karma accrues to balance the scales when

Today, the top one-percenters join in common cause to make themselves

We should see this time as a crossroads from whence we will go forward to

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