"Do We Have to Be Good?"

One of the distinctive aspects of our faith tradition is the trust we place in people. Our community and our covenant, the bond we share - rest on this trust, which we practice instinctively, with mutual respect and acceptance. We operate on the assumption that we are all good people, coming together in good faith, with good intentions towards each other. Because this is part of our tradition, we don't think about it very much, or talk about it, or ask ourselves where this trust comes from. It is simply who we are as a people of faith. We have faith in people.

Our faith in people has a history, however. Religious liberals came alive in the 18th century, explicitly rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of original sin, the idea that people were born flawed and headed for doom, without the freedom or the capacity to choose their behavior, let alone their fate. What is in our hearts, liberals argued, is not sin. What is in our hearts is moral law and what is in our heads is the ability to understand it. Morality need not be imposed by an authority outside the human conscience. The human conscience is our moral authority. We can trust each other.

None of this sounds very radical to us, but it was in the 18th century and from some religious perspectives, it still is today. Two cases that came before the United States Supreme Court this week entertained the question of whether the Ten Commandments - the law handed down by God to Moses for the Hebrew people - should be on display in front of government buildings. What is at stake here is not simply the separation of church and state, as important as that issue is. What is at stake is the source of moral authority.

In court this Wednesday, the "Los Angeles Times" reported, Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky argued that the Ten Commandments are "a sacred and solemn text. . . . God's words to God's followers," he said. "To which Justice Antonin Scalia replied, in effect, what's wrong with that? 'It's a symbol that the government derives its authority from God,' he said. 'That's what this is about. Our laws are derived from God.'"

The Judeo-Christian tradition, as some interpret it, teaches that moral authority begins and ends with God. What people do or the law requires must always be held accountable to this authority. God may have given people the ability for moral reasoning, but this ability is imperfect and incomplete. People need God to be good.

Unitarian Universalism still has deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But we depart from it over the issue of moral authority. We believe that people have the capacity to determine what is good - and act on it - for ourselves, whether we believe in God or not.

William Ellery Channing delivered his speech "Self-Culture" in 1838. He picked his audience well: a gathering of manual laborers. That was a meaningful choice. Unlike typical Channing followers these people were not the well-educated elite, who never questioned themselves about their inherent goodness and worth or place on the earth. These were people with low self-esteem and low expectations to match.

Channing's speech was one of those defining moments in the long struggle over moral authority that Unitarian Universalists have waged over the centuries. He was still arguing with Calvinism over the concept of original sin, as had his liberal predecessors. But Channing and the liberals of his time were also proclaiming a distinctive, new and positive message rooted in the inherent goodness and worth of each individual.

There is a "principle in human nature," he said, "we sometimes call reason, sometimes conscience, sometimes the moral sense or faculty. But, be its name what it may, it is a real principle in each of us, and it is the supreme power within us, to be cultivated above all others."

Just imagine what it must have felt like to be a Boston manual laborer, listening to these words. Whoever you are, whatever your education or your social status, you possess moral authority. It is your birthright. Cultivate it and you will be a force for good in the world.

Such radical affirmations are still the foundation of our faith today. This is where our trust - that unspoken but sturdy bond that unites us as a community - was forged. We trust in our own goodness. We trust in others' goodness. The purpose of religion, as Channing and others of his day saw it, was to draw out that goodness and nurture it. Yes, there are temptations to lead us away from our self-improvement, but they lack the staying power of our virtues.

People who do bad things are more like Harriet, the child in the story I read earlier. Harriet drives her mother wild, with one naughty escapade after another. But Harriet is no bad seed. Her mother loses her temper, but love restores everyone with forgiveness, laughter and a hug.

Such a trusting view of human nature sustained our faith well, right up to the Second World War. Badly shaken by the holocaust, people questioned God's moral authority in such an atrocity. Many concluded that the holocaust was proof that God did not exist at all. Religious liberals had to ask themselves whether they had underestimated the human capacity for evil.

A. Powell Davies delivered his sermon, "The Temptation to be Good," a few years after the end of the war. In it, he questioned the liberal religious view of human goodness. "We imagine virtue as the normal state of things from which we are tempted to depart," he said. "Life is good, the world is good, people are good, everything is good - until temptation brings its interferences. Then, because we give in, good replaced is evil. But," Davies asked, "is it really as simple as that?"

Not anymore, he answers. People are "almost good" - afraid to take risks to do what is right, to hold themselves to high moral standards - and "almost good" is a weak and unstable state. Davies must have been thinking of all those people who were afraid to stand up to Nazi power, who failed to intervene until it was too late to save so many.

Davies' conclusion remains positive, but sober. We yearn to be good, so much so that even when we do something bad, we try to justify it as good. The purpose of our faith is to nurture that yearning to be good, not "almost good," and turn away from the bad.

Davies' image of the struggle within us is similar to that of a Native American story I came across recently. "A grandfather was talking to his grandson about his feelings. He tells the boy: 'I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.' The grandson asks, 'Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?' The grandfather answered, 'The one I feed.'"

There is a discipline involved in nurturing the goodness within us. Yearning to be good isn't enough; it takes focus and will. We make choices every day that require moral judgment. Our faith tradition teaches that we have the capacity not only to choose, but to choose what is good, if we have cultivated our goodness well.

We have learned, however, as A. Powell Davies observed after the Second World War, that it takes strength and courage to be good. Any one of us can fail to live up to our moral potential. The news is full, each day, with stories of people who have failed; who seem to lack the capacity to be good at all, let alone choose.

But for most of us, there is a choice. We have more than one wolf inside - which one will we feed? And we have to know ourselves well enough to understand what it takes to make the right choice. But it's up to us. And when you think of it - even when you think of all the terrible, out of control, hurtful things people can do - it is still a powerful and hopeful message. The moral power we possess, if we understand it, nurture it, and respect it, is still all we need to be good. Just imagine what we could do if we fully realized it.

Our faith today is more circumspect, and perhaps less innocent, than in Channing's day. We may be more aware of the damage people do when they settle for being "almost good." And yet, we still hold ourselves accountable, answering to that "moral law" within, never really giving up on anyone's capacity to grow, to heal, or to redeem themselves. And I doubt we ever will. This is our faith, this is our hope, and this is the history we live as Unitarian Universalists, together.

References used to prepare this sermon include "Self-Culture," by William Ellery Channing, which can be found in any anthology of Channing's work; "The Temptation to Be Good," by A. Powell Davies (Washington, D.C.: All Souls Church Unitarian, 1952); "Display of Scripture May Split Justices," by David G. Savage, in the "Los Angeles Times," March 3, 2005; and "Americans United Files Brief in Commandments Case at Supreme Court," in "Church & State," Vol. 58, No. 2., February 2005.