Content of Our Character
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
1/13 & 1/14/07

 

"I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." 
–Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963

 

Meditation 

“A Contribution to Statistics” by Wislawa Szymborska

 

Out of a hundred people

 

those who always know better
--fifty-two,

 

doubting every step

--nearly all the rest,

 

glad to lend a hand

if it doesn’t take too long

--high as forty-nine,

 

always good

because they can’t be otherwise

--four, well maybe five,

 

able to admire without envy

--eighteen,

 

suffering illusions

induced by fleeting youth

--sixty, give or take a few,

 

not to be taken lightly

--forty and four,

 

living in constant fear

of someone or something

--seventy-seven,

 

capable of happiness

--twenty-something tops,

 

harmless singly,

savage in crowds

--half at least,

 

cruel

when forced by circumstances

--better not to know

even ballpark figures,

 

wise after the fact

--just a couple more

than wise before it,

 

taking only things from life

--thirty

(I wish I were wrong),

 

hunched in pain,

no flashlight in the dark

--eighty-three

sooner or later,

 

righteous

--thirty-five, which is a lot,

 

righteous

and understanding

--three,

 

worthy of compassion

--ninety-nine,

 

mortal

--a hundred out of a hundred.

Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

 

Readings

 

Our first reading today is a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes in the form of a responsive reading #584 in your hymnal.

 

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 

There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.

 

Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.

 

We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.

 

The foundation of such a method is love.

 

Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war.

 

One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

 

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

 

We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

 

Our second reading is an excerpt from a 1945 sermon by noted Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies.

 

I become more and more certain, as the years go by, that wherever friendship is destroyed, or homes are broken, or precious ties are severed, there is a failure of imagination.  Someone is too intent on justifying himself, or herself, never venturing out to imagine the way things seem to the other person.  Imagination is shut off and sympathy dies.  If we know what it is that makes other people speak or act as they do, if we knew it vividly by carefully imagining all that may lie behind it, we might not quarrel.  We might understand.  Often we could heal the wounds.  But even where that is not possible—and of course, we have to admit that it is not always possible—even where fuller understanding only leaves us rather sad and helpless, it would still give us the power to be kind—to act, yes, but still to be kind—to go on being kind.  And in a harsh world, God knows that even that is something—to go on being kind.

 

 

Sermon

On this weekend before the day set aside to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., I have typically built the service around something he said, and today is no exception.  However, I’ll admit that this year I mis-remembered the quote around which I have chosen to focus.  I mistakenly thought that, in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, he spoke of dreaming of a nation where each of us would not be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.

 

But in going back to the actual text, I discovered that his dream was more specific than that.  He was dreaming on behalf of his “four little children.” 

 

This distinction struck me as important to mention because it reminded me that while King was many things to many people, he was also a parent—someone with responsibility to and for the lives of others in a very tangible way.   Each night that he returned from the work of his public life, he had little ones at home who looked to him for protection, for guidance and for love.  He had little ones at home who saw him not as a famous preacher, philosopher or prophet, but as someone who would hold them when they cried, or help them with their homework, or teach them how to brush their teeth, or explain why Christmas comes only once a year. He had little ones who saw him as Daddy…as one of the two most important people in their lives…and who looked to him to model what it means to be an adult…what it means to be human.

 

For him to think about the world of his dreams, he could not help but consider his children…to try to imagine what their lives would be like…and to acknowledge that they would inherit the world he was hoping for and helping to create.

 

Certainly, King’s dreams were not intended for his family alone.  Gifted orator that he was, he knew that by mentioning his children, he would be encouraging each of us to consider what kind of world we would want for our own children.  He was suggesting through his own example that we be thoughtful about the standards against which each of us should be judged…and to recognize that color of skin (and other surface level distinctions) should not be among of them.   Rather, the most important standards, he suggested, involve the content of a person’s character.

 

But what is character and how should it be judged?

 

Do a quick internet search and you’ll get lots of websites offering lists of qualities that are considered essential elements of character:  Trustworthiness, Respect, Fairness, Caring, Citizenship to name a few.

One website I found lists over sixty “Character Traits” from Adaptability to Creativity, from Punctuality to Thriftiness.  It is almost as if the keepers of this website just drew positive-sounding words out of a hat. 

 

If each of us were to list qualities that make up character, I’d expect that we’d come up with quite different lists, too. “Character” after all, is a rather fuzzy concept. It’s difficult to define, even as each of us has a feeling that we know it when we see it.  In this way, character is a concept like art…beauty...evil…patriotism…liberty…“the war on terror”…  Their meanings depend on who you ask and when you ask them.

 

What qualities can we assume that King was suggesting when he spoke of character?  I think just a quick glance at his life and his ministry reveals that, for King, the level of one’s character would be equivalent to the degree to which one can live in harmony with the ethical teachings of Jesus: the degree to which one can live compassionately, forgive, turn the other cheek, pursue peacemaking, both within oneself and in the world…or at least acknowledge when one has missed the mark and do one’s best to make amends.

 

I don’t want to overly simplify the teaching of Jesus or King, but it seems to me that at the foundation of character as they might have described it is a rather simple idea.  A simple idea expressed in the following story. 

 

A while back I was chatting with a friend about the break-up of her daughter’s marriage, which had only lasted a couple of years at the most.  My friend shared with me how bad she felt for the couple and how sad she was to see them both so upset. I asked her what, if anything, she had said to her daughter in response to her decision to end the marriage.  My friend said, “I told her to be kind.”

 

My friend wasn’t suggesting that her daughter to be kind to herself, however…kind as in get some revenge…as in “Treat yourself to the joys of bringing the hammer down on him and making him regret ever knowing you.”  No, she told her to be kind to her soon-to-be former husband.  Be kind to the young man with whom she couldn’t work things out.  The young man with whom she had invested so much of her hopes and dreams. The young man who no doubt had made some bad choices or mistakes.  The young man who may have betrayed her.   Be kind.  Be kind anyway.

 

I think my friend was suggesting to her daughter that she show some character.

 

I told my friend that I admired her wisdom, and that I hoped her daughter would be able to receive it.  While I have never had to deal with a marriage break-up, I have definitely gone through the end of significant relationships and other personal turmoil…and have had to deal with the results of moments when I was unkind…and I have always regretted those moments…if not in the moment itself, then later, when I’ve gotten some distance on my emotions, and I’ve seen how little my lack of kindness did for anyone…especially me.

 

Being kind does not mean being a doormat for someone else. 

Being kind does not mean there are not limits to what any of us should endure or tolerate.

Being kind does not mean that we should assume that people always have our best interests in mind, or that we should not hold people accountable for their actions.

 

The kindness my friend and I are talking about has to do with respect…with doing everything we can to see the world through the eyes of others…and trying to ground our actions not solely in our own experiences and emotions, but in the knowledge that there are other perceptions out there that may be equally valid for the people involved…and the circumstances that led to those perceptions may be beyond our comprehension.   And that, no matter how right we think we are at any given moment, chances are good that we will never have a complete view of reality.  Therefore, we would do well to not lead with our anger or our frustration or our insistence that we have the truth. Rather we would do better to lead with our compassion.  To lead with our kindness.  As my father-in-law used to say, “Sometimes it is better to be kind than to be right.”

 

I appreciate how A. Powell Davies described the breakdown of important relationships in our lives as representing a “failure of imagination.”  A failure of imagination to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.  A failure of imagination to realize that we are brothers and sisters to everyone else…that, in a sense, we are all parents…that we are all children.  A failure of imagination that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”  A failure of imagination to realize that the way to peace is not through insistence on our own inherently limited truth, but in openness to the possibility that there may be other truth yet to be found…if we only have the character to seek it.

 

I read a quote recently from one of my colleagues in town, the Rev. David Ruhe that speaks to this failure of imagination. He said,

"Lasting peace will never come until we can see the good in our enemies and the evil in ourselves."

 

Lasting peace will never come until we can see the good in our enemies and the evil in ourselves.

 

When I think about the people in my life to whom I would attribute the most admirable character, every one of them has had the ability to be reliably and humbly present to the perceptions of others.  Not that they would always agree with others, but that they could disagree with grace and with an appreciation and openness to new understandings… new possibilities. 

 

As I have thought this week about character and my sense of what King meant when he spoke of it, I have had to wonder about the character of our nation right now…a nation that has been at war for almost four years…a pre-emptive, war of choice that even the most staunch supporters have to admit was begun under false pretenses, has been fought without clear direction or purpose, and has left an already wounded nation in a world of hurt…

 

and Iraq isn’t so well off either.

 

I think about what King would be saying right now and I don’t think it is hard to imagine that he would be on the front lines of opposition…particularly to the so-called troop surge suggested by our president this week.  A so-called surge of about 20,000 troops, which represents maybe a 15% increase in our forces in Iraq, a total that Jon Stewart quipped isn’t a surge at all, but a “tip”…and a poor one, at that.

 

Many of those who support our president’s plan contend that to do anything but escalate our participation in Iraq would be to jeopardize our nation’s security or standing in the world…to somehow sacrifice the national character that I would suggest has already been compromised by this reckless, costly, and deadly war. 

 

The character this nation needs to show right now is not to sacrifice more troops for a new plan which, despite the way it is being sold, is really just a reiteration of an old plan.  The most needed acts of character for our nation would be repentance, contrition and a surge not of troops, but of thoughtful, nonviolent, humanitarian action…not just in Iraq, but elsewhere, too.

 

The kind of action I’m suggesting, and that I think King would be suggesting if he were here, is the same proposed way back, before the fateful events of 9/11, by Robert Bowman, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force who flew over 100 combat missions in Vietnam and then later became a Catholic bishop. 

 

Bowman wrote:

“Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs…we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children…In short, we should do good instead of evil.  Who would try to stop us?  Who would hate us?  Who would want to bomb us?  That is the truth the American people need to hear.”[1]

 

This whole Iraq fiasco is about failure of imagination.  About a lack of kindness that reaches beyond our nation’s self-obsessed fears and selfish interests.  About a lack of character.

 

And you can believe, if Martin Luther King were here today, he’d be talking about it, working to change the direction, and asking us to do the same.  Not just for ourselves.  But for our children, too.

 

Closing Words the words of Wendell Berry

 

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come.  Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal...Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of

preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”