TO DWELL TOGETHER IN PEACE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Neighborhood Sunday September 26, 2004


[extemperaneous introduction: in a year we’ve gone from strangers to familiar friends; when the honeymoon is finally over, the real work of living together in community begins]

Last weekend I was out in Seattle attending my 30th High School reunion. I had really mixed feelings about attending this event. On the one hand it really couldn’t have come at a much more inconvenient time of year -- which was reflected in the absence of a lot of my former classmates who, like me, also live at a distance, and whose lives basically follow an academic calendar. Plus, between the airfare, the rental car, the hotel room, the dogsitter, and all of the other incidental expenses, it turned out to be a pretty expensive trip -- (I’m a little embarrassed to say just how much). On the other hand, it is only once every decade, and I felt kinda obligated to go, since I was after all a student body officer, and had also served on the committee that initially organized our 10th. And then at the 20th I had the dubious distinction of being honored as one of the twenty most Distinguished Alumni of my graduating class of 540 (96% of whom are apparently even bigger slackers than I am) but which also happens to include the graphic artist who designed Microsoft’s “Clippy the Paper-Clip.” (He sometimes calls himself “the most annoying man in America). But the real reason I felt like I had to go is that I have a friend from High School whom none of us had seen or heard from in 28 years, despite having searched high and low for him prior to both of our previous two reunions. But last spring he Googled me, and got a hit on our FRS website; so to make a long story short I got him to agree that he would go if I would go, and so...I was going, whether it was convenient or not. And when I got back to Carlisle Tuesday morning (having flown overnight on the red-eye), there was an e-mail from Tom waiting for me, which I’d like to share with you now. It goes:

Tim: It was great to see you last night. It's really nice to be connecting with you again. It feels completely natural; it isn't like we're trying to escape into the past. The reunion in general felt like that to me, like I was reconnecting with people in the present, talking to them in terms of who they are now. It wasn't a nostalgia fest, which was nice. You mentioned that you had a nice talk with Dwight and Mary [I’ll say a little bit more about them in a minute}. I talked with them too, and had the same sense of being able to connect with them in a meaningful way. Mainly, I just want to thank you for helping me feel at ease. To me it felt like you were the host of the party, doing your best to make sure that I had a good time. Anyway, thanks,and stay in touch. And I don't believe a word of what you were saying about the presidential campaign, so there.

Dwight and Mary, by the way, were my High School’s poster-perfect Born-Again Christian couple. They’ve been together for as long as I’ve known them -- since before we were Freshmen, over 35 years now. And when we were in school together it was basically their mission in life to try to “save” me (and everyone else they met), while mine in turn (in my role as my High School’s chief gadfly, infidel and heretic) was to resist salvation at any cost, while at the same time challenging everything they believed. After graduation Dwight went to work as a contractor (a job he still does today), while Mary became a housewife and a stay-at-home mom...until the last of their children had at last fled the nest, at which point she decided that it was her turn to attend the University of Washington. She now works as an administrator for Habitat for Humanity, doing church relations, and in that capacity she and Dwight have traveled all over the world, doing their small part to help put an end to poverty housing. (And yes, they’ve both actually met Jimmy and Roslyn Carter).

Of course, the most interesting thing about our respective lives now is how closely our faith journeys have converged over the past three decades. I no longer feel so obsessed about always having to be right, or even trying to be the smartest guy in the room. I have a lot more respect and appreciation now for the “softer” side of spirituality -- I can sometimes actually even sing “Kum Ba Yah” without feeling ridiculously self-conscious. Mary, on the other hand, still feels nostalgic for the “feel-good” Christianity of her youth, but she’s also developed the capacity to look critically at her church, and to be displeased about some of the things she sees going on there. And she’s developed a lot more respect for Unitarian-Universalists too, now that she’s discovered that we’re not just all talk and hot air, but that some of us at least can also actually swing a hammer and use a saw.

My topic for today, if you haven’t figured out already, is Community -- what does it really mean to “dwell together in peace.” It’s the first of a series of four sermons I have planned for this Fall about the language of our covenant. And the reason I have gone on here at such great length about my High School reunion is that, for a lot of us I suspect, High School was the first truly complex community that we participated in. Prior to High School most people tend to live their lives on a lot smaller scale. Our world consists of our family and our immediate neighborhood, plus a teacher and maybe a couple of dozen kids we share a classroom with each day...perhaps only a few hundred souls at most, including our cousins and grandparents and the kids we met at summer camp.

But when we arrive at High School, at the age of thirteen or so, our whole world suddenly becomes a whole lot larger in a big hurry. There were over two thousand students, for example, at my High School, plus several hundred more teachers and administrators (and in my case every one of them was a stranger to me, since my family had just moved during the summer back to Seattle from California). But even for kids who have lived in the same neighborhood their entire lives, the first big challenge that confronts us all in High School -- bigger even than finding our way to our classes, or remembering our locker combinations, or determining whether it’s really safe to go into that particular restroom -- is figuring out where we fit in. Am I smart enough to be one of the Honor Society kids? Am I a good enough athlete to hang out with the Jocks? Am I going to try to be popular, and wear all the right clothes and go to the parties and make lots of friends; or am I going to pretty much try to keep to myself, maybe just hanging out with the handful of friends I’ve known since kindergarten? And what will I do if they decide to do something different than I do?

Discovering our affinities -- where we fit in -- is a key element in the process of exploring and discovering who we are as individuals. And yet there’s a second, even bigger challenge that confronts us for the first time in High School, and that’s figuring out how we’re going to get along with the folks with whom we DON’T fit in. How are we going to relate to people (and more pointedly, to groups of people) who are different from us, who are not part of our group, our “in” crowd, our little clique? Are we going to focus on the differences, the things that keep us separate? Or are we going to look for things that we have in common, that potentially bring us together? And let’s be honest -- there’s a power dynamic at work here also. Because if you are part of that supposedly “popular” group, it can sometimes seem to your advantage to keep others out, or to put them down in order to bolster your own status and sense of superiority; while if you’re NOT a member of that group, you have to decide at some point whether you are even going to play that game, or instead going to make up new and different rules of your own. But either way, it still comes down to a question of Empathy or Antipathy. Do we concentrate on our commonalities, the qualities we share? Or do we emphasize the distinctions, real or imagined, which we hope will distinguish us one from the other?
And then we all graduated (or at least most of us did) and went our separate ways. Some of us went to college, some of us went to work, or into the military, some of us even went to prison (at least in my graduating class they did). And at some subsequent point in time (probably a lot sooner than most of us realized) all of the little distinctions that meant so much in High School gradually became meaningless, because the subsequent distinctions had become so much greater. And yet no matter how great those differences may become, you will always have two things in common with the people you went to High School with. First, no matter how old you get, you will always be the same age. Your age. And the second, of course, is the accident of shared history -- that because you all happened to be the same age, and your parents all happened to live in the same community, you spent four critically formative years of your life (more or less) with this basically random group of people. And there’s nothing you can do to change that, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do is to choose to ignore it, to try to put it all behind you.

But if you have properly learned your lessons of empathy and affinity, you can also choose to embrace that community in a new way. And you can likewise use those same lessons to embrace new communities -- to discover new affinities that you might not have otherwise explored, and to grow as an individual in the process. I don’t remember anything about High School Algebra (in fact, I sometimes have trouble doing simple elementary school fractions)...but I do remember this: if you listen carefully enough, you can eventually find something you have in common with just about everyone you may happen to meet. It may be something so simple as neither one of you has ever met anyone else so different from yourself in your life, but it’s a start. That common denominator is enough to begin a dialog, a relationship, and from that interaction other commonalities (and differences) will begin to emerge. But so long as neither party desires to harm or exploit or dominate the other, the differences don’t really matter. While the commonalities potentially form the basis of a larger and more inclusive community.

I’m pretty sure that everyone here has heard of the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” And there’s also a more apologetic variation of this rule, which basically says “do NOT do unto others that which you find hateful to yourself.” And then there’s the so-called “strong” version of the rule, which says “do unto others as THEY would have you do unto them” -- in other words, empathetically substituting the other person’s personal or cultural sensibilities for one’s own. But the point is, we don’t necessarily have to have a LOT in common with another human being in order to empathize with them, or to treat them fairly. We can learn how to “dwell together in peace,” without having to see eye to eye on every little thing.

Of course, there is also a cynical version of the rule, which goes something like: “Do unto others BEFORE they get a chance to do it unto you, because at the end of the day, it’s a dog eat dog world out there, and whoever has the most Gold makes the rules....” It’s clever, and maybe even a little funny (and to my mind disgustingly “American”); but it’s also dead wrong, even though at times it may not always seem like it. At the end of the day, there’s not enough gold in all the world to keep in place rules that are fundamentally mean or unfair; every dog has its day, truth is stronger than falsehood, and our common humanity is far more powerful than the differences and disagreements that divide us.

It’s true that often times we end up defining who we are by differenciating ourselves from who and what we are not. All Communities have boundaries of some sort. But healthy, loving, dymanic communities define themselves positively rather than negatively -- by lifting up who they are and what they stand for, in both words and deeds. And they are not so much things that we discover and join as they are entities that we help to create through our presence and participation in them. And likewise, “dwelling together in peace” is not generally something that we can do through domination: by imposing our will on others. Rather, lasting peace comes from learning to listen to one another, and then building on our commonalities in order to create a larger and more inclusive community.

Communities built on love -- or at the very least mutual respect and tolerance and perhaps even some grudging admiration -- are communities that endure. Communities built on hate are eventually consumed by their own hatred, no matter how righteous or justified it may seem. “To Dwell Together in Peace” is not just goal, it is also a discipline, a process which creates its own success. And it begins with a decision to listen, and to discover some common ground on which to build a home that we can share.


Reading: Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies.” A Sermon preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomary, Alabama on November 17, 1957.

There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.