Sermon: To Honor and Respect

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To Honor and Respect

By Charles Rush

September 17, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 7.1 Mb) ]

e world in which we live, sometimes you gotta wonder. A friend of mine was filling out some paperwork on the Maternity ward when a woman walked up to him. She was overdue, stood there with her swollen belly, as her physician wanted her to come in so that he could induce her labor. She was a little tired, confused, or both, so she said to my friend, "Sir, I'm here to be seduced!" At that he looked up from his paper work, wandered over to her, put his hand on her belly and said, "Ma'am you already have been."

But this cuts both ways, I heard about another woman that checked into the Maternity ward, and started filling out an information form entitled "Some Questions for our Pregnant Patients". The third question, 'what is your gender?'

This morning I wanted to say something about the importance of developing respect and a sense of honor in our children and in our world. And it is a challenge in our every day world, not just because of boneheadedness.

Perhaps you read the paper on Friday. There was an article on former Governor Jim McGreevy that describes our daily grind around the erosion of respect. Mr. McGreevy has a book coming out on Tuesday with a big interview on Oprah the same day that has already been taped. His publishers and he were hoping to pitch a book with an inspirational view of how he came to grips finally with his sexual identity and dealt with that.

Of course, certain newspapers were more interested in the salacious nature of his affair when he was in office. One paper obtained an illegally released advanced copy of the book and used it to be the first paper to detail as much lurid material as possible.

The article quoted one publisher saying, ' in this business, you just don't know who to trust, who to believe, what is really going on.' It is a race to the bottom. Mr. McGreevy's actions aside, our actual world is inundated with compromised narratives, intrigues, duplicity, one-upsmanship that is willing to break rules, and the exploitation of others weakness whenever possible.

It reminds me of a conversation I used to have with my daughter Annie when she was just starting soccer at 6. Before the game, I would say, 'Okay honey, remember the rules, 1) It's not how you play the game but whether you win or lose. 2) Never pass the ball when you can shoot. 3) If the ref can't see you kick your opponent to the ground.' She would look back at me and say, "Dad, you're a Minister, remember?"

And this exchange would be just light hearted but we are living in a world of such instant information exchange that the issue of respect is becoming a much more vital social virtue. As you probably know, the Pope was giving an academic lecture in Germany this week. In his first life the Pope was a professor at the University of Tubingen. In his lecture about the danger of violence and religion, he quoted an emperor from the 14th century. His remarks were almost instantly broadcast around the world, mostly out of context. What was interesting to see is how they were intentionally distorted, how various intentions were read into them, and how often people were willing to use this opportunity to advance their opinion completely independent of the lecture itself. Carelessness and inattention are typical and symptomatic of a culture of disrespect.

Our concept of respect, at root, is indicated by the Latin word respicere which means to "look back at" or "to look again". It contains within it an understanding "to examine carefully" or "to pay attention to".[1]

This is so fundamental in our families, in our relationships with our spouses. Have you ever gotten to an impasse with your spouse or your children where you said, 'Are you even listening to me?' That anger that you feel inside comes from a sense that you are not being valued, that your needs are not seen as important. It is the sense that you are not being respected as a person. It is basic to human dignity that we are listened to, that someone pays attention to us.

That is why it becomes a moral issue for us when our words are willfully distorted. Any of our community leaders, any of our politicians have had that awful experience of reading your comments inadvertently or overtly misquoted in the papers with the realization that thousands of people are going to read this and think you are here when you are really there. The public nature of that makes it maddening.

And some of us have had the experience of being involved in a public dispute in our corporations, only to discover that people who disagree with us, have willfully and intentionally misused our words in order to make us look bad and manipulate the situation to their advantage. That too is maddening.

Probably all of us at the moment experience some sense of this when we try to understand what is going on in Iraq or in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. So much of what is reported is done so with an editorial view in mind that it is just transparently prejudiced. You just cannot find a single source that even appears to be trying to objectively describe what is actually happening on the ground in all of its complexity. We have to read 8 different clearly prejudicial sources and surmise, trying to refract the writers' fears, desires, and interpretations.

Finally, this is the profound longing of the teeming masses of impoverished around the world. They feel transparent and in an existential sense, they do not exist, because at a fundamental level, they do not feel heard. I was listening to someone on our trip to Nicaragua with Leanne Wells. They were explaining how they came to be drug addicted and prostituted themselves and that got into a personal story about child abuse, running away. It took them a while to tell it. At one point they were holding my arm, and tears were streaming down their face… Towards the end, they said, with deep emotion, 'thank you for listening to me.' Like somehow because we are Americans and care, their concern had been officially registered. We are both thinking, we are only being human, but we don't have that experience that a couple billion people live with every day that they aren't important enough for anyone to care. This is deeper than politics, it cuts to our very identity spiritually, our very subjectivity.

Paying attention and being careful are fundamental to respect. Every one of us says "You don't have to agree with me, but please understand me". That to me is the power of the spiritual teaching of Jesus when he says that God knows all of the hairs of our head, what we need, what we are anxious about. God does pay attention to us. God is careful. God cares. God has compassion. This what the Gospel of John means when it says that God is love.

In our Western tradition, this fundamental spiritual concept was rationalized by Immanuel Kant, the first philosopher to respect for people at the very center of his moral theory. Kant emphasized over and over again that people are ends in themselves.[2] They have intrinsic worth that is absolute and objective. Each and every person is thus accorded dignity. That is the theme that Jefferson enunciated when he said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all of us were created with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or the higher reasons for which we live). This is the foundation of our humanist tradition. It is the foundation of our political democratic society. It is the basis for the international declaration of human rights.

Respect that begins with 'paying attention' elicits from us the response of reverence. At the most basic level, that means that we alter our behavior. We defer to others. We do not erase ourselves, but neither do we simply proceed with our own ego needs and our own egoistic desires as definitive. We alter our behavior to take others into consideration.[3]

Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". So, we teach our children not to violate each other. Hitting is not acceptable. Neither is it acceptable to insult one another or to Bully others to get your way.

As parents of young children know, this is becoming a bigger challenge than it was just a few years ago. Our youngest children are exposed to cartoons that routinely depict a combative acrimony among the characters, not surprisingly our youngest children model this right away.

And our children that are old enough to take in a steady diet of reality TV shows that feature groups of teenagers locked in houses with plots designed to bring out catty, puerile fights- are also exposed to the regular use of aggressive combative language so full of expletives that the on-screen dialogue is a near continuous beep.

This is the opposite of respect. It is contemptuous. It disdains others. It degrades. It discounts others. Verbal violence, like physical violence and other forms of intimidation are disrespectful and not acceptable.

We hope to teach our children to follow the rules, to obey figures in authority, unless there are exceptional circumstances in which they have forfeited their authority. Even if you disagree with your teachers or your coach or the President of the United States, you respect the office and the one who holds it.

It is important that our children see us involved in supporting our schools, together in church, and modeling for them a certain self-restraint for the rules both great and small.

At the same time that we want to teach this to our children, we also expose them week in and week out to the broader culture of the irate sports fan parents here in Northern New Jersey and I suspect all across the nation. I'm quite sure that my neighbors in Short Hills do not understand the degree to which they undermine their authority on the issue of respect when they whine and crab at the top of their lungs to the referees in every soccer match. It is clear that in the Garden State, we have too many parents that seem to think that ranting over an off-sides call is getting in touch with their inner-child.

Talk about awkward, one of my son's referring a game, had to toss one my neighbors out of the baseball game he was coaching for verbal violence that verged on physical violence. I said, 'tell me this wasn't someone from Christ Church?' My son said, "No, not Christ Church, dad." Whew… dodged a bullet. But talk about a tough conversation, explaining how the adult can behave like a child while the teenager has to behave like the adult. We need better leadership in these small things, for as Aristotle used to note, collectively they create the broad cultural ethos that forms the rising generation.

And that is also why we need a broad support for our teachers and our coaches, especially when they enforce rules, another issue that seems to run through all of our towns in Metropolitan New York. I ran into one of our coaches this year that coached my children. We were reminiscing and one incident came up when one of our kids was benched for too many detentions. I distinctly remembered that because it was a big game coming up and our child really cried. It may have been the first time that they got it that detentions were important. Coach says to me, "I want to thank you for the way you handled that." I was a little nonplussed and then coach said, "Nowadays, I get all these phone calls from parents questioning decisions like that and putting pressure on me to reverse judgment."

The implicit message that we model is that rules are important but your success is more important than the rules. If we model for them that they are the exception, we should not be surprised that they take longer to interiorize the virtue of obeying them or that they have a more substantially painful lesson to learn years from now as young adults when they aren't the exception in the big game. No, our teachers, our coaches, our administrators need our support to mitigate entitlement and encourage respect.

Ultimately, what we hope is for our children to interiorize a sense of honor, that they are doing what they are doing because it is inside them, not for exterior rewards or fear of punishments. Respect for others and respect of self are integrally related. They reinforce and strengthen one another.

Some of our colleges, Wake Forest among them, still have an honor code that you sign when you go to school that says that you will not cheat or plagiarize any material. No exceptions period. Students will tell me how difficult they find this, being given an exam, told that they are to take it for one hour and only one hour wherever they want to and that they are expected not to use any notes and turn it back in.

But they live in a world where they can buy their term papers on-line, where they can Google just about any phrase or question and down load a ream of material. And they live in a world where we stack an enormous amount of pressure on them for sheer success. The temptation to cheat for an edge is big and getting bigger all the time. And you can get away with it for a short while theoretically.

But ultimately, that is another matter. Ultimately, Google is going to require more honesty out of us also. When we post my sermons on the internet, if I leave a quote unattributed, within six months, someone writes our webmaster Paul Tukey to complain. If I tell a story that is not true but I read it in some book of illustrations and thought it was clever, within six months, someone writes our webmaster Paul Tukey to complain. Ultimately, you gotta do your own work, for better and worse, and Google is going to make us all more honest as Bob Dylan found out this week when some fan discovered that some of his lyrics on his latest album came from an obscure poet for the Confederacy in the 19th century.

Ultimately, we all want to develop an internal sense of honor that we do what we do because that is who we are and we do not require outside pressure or rewards to motivate us to do what is right.

As a virtue, respect is going to become more important in the next couple generations, not just for our families, not just for our communities, but in the wider social world that we must all develop. At root, this is one of the fundamental issues coming to the fore in our present impasse with terrorists and in the regional conflicts in the Middle East. In the midst of fear, contempt, xenophobia, a lack of understanding- we have to figure out how to create a climate that fosters the rudimentary development of respect. As communications technology increases, so the global issues will also be felt locally and with great urgency. Today in the second hour, Frank Bolden is going to talk to us about diversity. I gave him the working title, "The Spiritual Beauty of Diversity", probably more title than he needed. But that is, in fact, where we are headed, to the place where we can genuinely, authentically, respectfully appreciate the Spiritual beauty of diversity. Amen.

[1] These observations are drawn from a very fine article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Respect". You can find the article on line at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/respect/ . I should warn the casual reader that this sermon considerably condenses and dumbs down the ideas of the article to fit them into the format of a sermon.

[2] Ibid. the same article. See 2.2. I apologize that I must truncate "The Metaphysic of Morals" to such an extent.

[3] Ibid. see pp. 3 ff.