It’s Who You Don’t Know
the Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

September 9, 2007

As we gather here as a full community after the months of Summer, “we might feel as if we are returning to a place of sanctuary, a safe harbor for nurturing the spirit; a place to go apart from the raucous noise of our everyday lives where we might hear the voice of the inner spirit calling us to a larger communion.” People need people. We can’t help it. There is something intrinsic to human nature which compels us to form communities. Wanting to be part of a community is one of the main reasons people come to church. Northern Hills Fellowship is a free church, a place to liberate the spirit and to create a beloved community.

Harvard idealist philosopher Josiah Royce coined the term “Beloved Community” in the 1880s. Today, the term Beloved Community is often used to symbolize how we hope people will treat each other; it is held up as an ideal for life within a church community. However, Royce’s vision included more than just life within a local church. He thought it was the church’s role to create a loving community which could in turn transform all the rest of society. This vision has deep roots in our culture. The Puritans wanted to build a “City on the Hill,” creating a utopian society which would usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used Beloved Community as a central theme of his teachings. He said of the civil rights struggle, “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community.” He envisioned community wherein “our loyalties transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.”

We have not yet established King’s vision of Beloved Community. Six years after 9/11, far from being united, our country is very much divided along class, race and religious lines. There is much work still to be done in creating a more open and inclusive society. Even with the best efforts of well meaning people over the centuries, the human race hasn’t been very successful at building Beloved Community on a large scale.

Why do you think this is so? We have all heard lots of calls for peace on earth, good will toward men – and women and children. Unitarian Universalists yearn for just such a community, one that would respect and nurture every human being. I live in hope people all over the whole world will come to share this beautiful notion. UUs are captivated by the notion of respect for the interdependent web of all creation. All religions encourage altruistic behavior and promote community building but, still there seems to be something missing, something that prevents the notion of Beloved Community from spreading.

The Puritans, Royce’s and King’s concepts of community each come out of Christian Scripture. I looked there to see what that missing element might be, and I found some insight on building community in Jesus’ Parable of the Feast. I quote briefly, from the Christian Testament, the book of Matthew, chapter 22 “ 2 The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come.” [After another attempt to solicit guests] “ 8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet."

According to liberal theologian, John Dominic Crossan, the “everyone you find” phrase challenged the commonly held understandings of propriety because the king didn’t make the appropriate social status discriminations of whom to invite into his home. “It is the random and open [hospitality] of the parable’s meal that was its most startling element.” Jesus invited ‘anyone’ to his table – a radical inclusivity. Jesus advocated eliminating barriers between poor and rich, male and female, Gentile and Jew. Crossan believes Jesus asked us to treat all people as equal in dignity to show respect for those who didn’t receive it from their class-bound society. Jesus spoke from the perspective of the lower classes conveying their sense of what dignity for all human beings would look like.
John Dominic Crossan provided me with several of those “A-Ha” moments. According to Crossan, Jesus didn’t advocate that everyone hold the same religious beliefs; he never had a goal of making everyone a Jew or a Christian. He did call for us to honor diversity within the human community. He wanted the opposite of a closed community, and he invited us to interact with those who are different from us.
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This story invites us to be with others, but it doesn’t say what would happen if we actually sat at the table with someone who is different from us in class or ethnicity. Actually getting to know someone who seems different can require us to get past some deep seated fears.

The recent Clint Eastwood movie, Million Dollar Baby, illustrates this point. It re-tells the classic boxing saga of a down-trodden person, who through a tremendous force of will power finds glory in the ring. In this version of the story, there is, what the blurbs on the covers of DVDs in rental stores call a “Twist.” The “Twist” in this movie, is that the boxer, the one who will someday fight for a million dollar purse, is a woman - named Maggie. Before I saw this movie, I don’t think I knew that female boxers existed.

The Eastwood character, Frankie, is an old school trainer who has been at it for decades. He is a traditionalist who disapproves of women in boxing. Maggie, a waitress trying to escape her life of poverty, begins working out in Frankie’s gym. He wishes Maggie would just go away and leave him alone. He has his own demons to battle, and he has been battling them in the same way for a long time. The real reason for Frankie’s reluctance to train Maggie is his need to protect himself from becoming emotionally involved with anyone. He has been deeply hurt when relationships didn’t work out in the past. Maggie’s determination to train in his gym is unshakable, she knows she needs Frankie’s help to learn how to box at the professional level. But what Maggie needs most of all is for someone to believe in her. The movie builds its story around boxing, but it’s really about relationships.
Through her persistence, Maggie eventually convinces Frankie to become her trainer. They form an alliance which in turns irritates and inspires each of them. Her technique improves rapidly under his tutelage, and she wins fight after fight. Because of their relationship she finds success in the ring and receives admiration from fans, something she couldn’t have imagined in her life before boxing. Because of their relationship his need to over-control every situation is slowly reduced. Both Maggie and Frankie experience a rebirth of trust that transcends their pasts and allows them to move with greater spiritual resources into the trials that follow. These positive changes in their lives came about because they overcame their fears and reached out to someone who was very different from them.

Maggie and Frankie helped each other go beyond where either could have gone alone. In their relationship they were able to transcend the limits of their isolated selves. By risking intimacy, by allowing themselves to take part in each other’s lives, eventually they were able to see each other’s true, inner spirit. They opened themselves to learning what was actual and true about the other person, and in so doing, learned some things about themselves. Later in the movie a huge difficulty arose. Because they had gained a profound knowledge of each other, they were able to deal with the problem in a way that was in harmony with each of their authentic selves. They were able to go beyond their fears, let go of their defenses, and act I their own true interests. Their relationship had enabled them to become more fully human.

Miraculous changes do occur in our lives when we risk being in intimate relationships with other people. To fulfill this human capacity for self transcendence requires us to enter community with people who we don’t know – people who are different from us. Jesus’ knew that the poor as well as the rich would have to really stretch their boundaries in order to sit together at the table. It takes courage to reach out to people whose view of the world is different from ours, but there is much to be gained by moving out of our comfort zones. Every person has worth and dignity, and every person has wisdom. Rev. Bruce Clear says, “In every person’s actions, in every person’s perspective, in every person’s story there is something deeper than what is seen or heard on the surface…We can guess or analyze or psychoanalyze, but we can depend that the answer is usually deeper than we thought, which is why Unitarian Universalism honors the search for truth as a religious principle.” On a given day it is hard to tell who might give us what we need; maybe that person who you don’t know, standing there all alone at coffee hour, might be able to help you – if you take the time to talk with her.

Through my Unitarian Universalist lens I see the prophetic words of Jesus pointing toward Beloved Community that is both inclusive and expansive, one that values diversity both within our congregations and in our 21st century multi-cultural global village. Within the Beloved Community which is our congregation I would like to see several supportive family-sized groups, where members explore their own individual depths. I also envision a wider Beloved Community composed of many interconnecting Beloved Communities. I see a global village in which we appreciate the spice of life which comes to us when we interact with many diverse cultures, where we grow by moving outside our comfort zones to have relationships with those who we don’t know. Unitarian Universalists who naturally draw wisdom from many sources should be particularly well suited to creating a dialog with folks from other cultures and religions. Our Beloved Community would be a radically inclusive one.

Realizing this ideal will not be easy, but there has never been a time when the vision of a universal Beloved Community was needed more than now.

James, Gary. Minister’s Muse, The Beacon of the North Shore Unitarian Church (Deerfield: August 25, 2003).
Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins (San Francisco: 1991) 261-263.
Clear, Bruce. What We Don’t Know, All Souls Unitarian Church (Indianapolis: Dec. 2, 2001).