Judge With Equity

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

May 17, 2009

Another tale from the “Treasury of Islamic Wisdom” from which our children's story was taken, this one set in Spain, known in Islamic tradition as Andalusia:

Over a thousand years ago, King Hakim, rich beyond the dreams of many, ruled the country of Andalusia. One day, setting out on horseback, the king spied a forested hill overlooking the countryside just perfect for a new palace and garden.

The king sent his manservant to inquire about its owner, and discovered that an old woman lived there in a small cottage. He sent his servant back with a handsome offer for the land's purchase. The old woman refused: she wanted to live out her last days in her home. The king doubled the offer, but she wanted no part of it.

Impatient to build his palace, the king commanded his soldiers to oust the old woman and set her up with a new home elsewhere. Soon, carpenters, stone masons and gardeners arrived at the site and in a few years time, King Hakim had a new palace and a blossoming courtyard garden.

But the old woman had not forgotten the king's unjust possession of her property.She went to the Qadi, the chief justice of the land, with her complaint. The Qadi, knowing that justice often follows in the footsteps of patience, decided to wait for a solution to present itself.

Not long after, the king happened to invite the Qadi to the new palace. Gladly accepting the invitation, the Qadi piled a number of large, empty cloth sacks on a donkey's back, and arrived at the appointed time.

"What have we here?" asked the king when he saw the amusing spectacle of the Qadi leading a donkey into the garden courtyard.

"I would like to ask Your Majesty if I may take some sacks of earth with me from the renowned royal garden;” replied the Qadi.

The king found no reason to deny the Qadi this unusual request."Go ahead and be my guest," said King Hakim."There's no shortage of dirt here!" and he watched the Qadi fill the sacks with rich soil.

Finally, the Qadi finished. He turned to King Hakim and asked for his help loading the full sacks upon the donkey. The king sprung to the task: he grasped two corners, the Qadi the other two. Together, they succeeded in raising the heavy sack only ankle high. Setting it down, readjusting their grip, they attempted again. And again. Try as they might, King and Qadi were unable to lift a single sack upon the donkey.

When the king looked entirely frustrated, the Qadi spoke up: "Sir, if you cannot lift even one sack of dirt now, on the Day of Judgment how will you transfer back the entire garden to the old woman from whom you unjustly took it?"

King Hakim blushed in shame. Realizing his great error, he sent for the old woman. When she was brought before him, he apologized: "I have wronged you terribly, mother. Please let me make amends. I beg you to take this palace and garden for your own."

The old woman stood silent for some moments."Your Majesty," she said at last,"I do not want a palace. I would be grateful and happy if I could move back into my cottage and tend to my own garden again. Inshaa Allah, God willing, I still have some seasons left to appreciate it."

The King nodded in agreement. "Inshaa Allah,” he said, "may you have many years left to enjoy it!" And indeed she did.[1]

Our second Unitarian Universalist principle commits us to affirm and promote “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”  The king of Andalusia came to learn the wisdom of justice, equity and compassion, but only after he had sought to use his power to get what he wanted for himself regardless of consquences.  The obligation on each of us to behave justly toward others comes to us from ancient sources in our Judeo-Christian tradition.  Our reading from Leviticus this morning lays down a law which obligates the people of Israel to rebalance the distribution of land by returning any property lost by those who fell behind by reason of drought or crop disease or debt or illness or any other cause back to the original owners or their families every fifty years, the year of Jubilee.  Imagine that!  Forclosures for failure to pay debts could happen, but at the end of each cycle the property would be returned to the original owner.  Debts would be forgiven and anyone who had fallen into slavery would be released.  In the Jubilee year, the captives would go free; a great occasion, as the inscription from this text on the Liberty Bell puts it, to “Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.” 

In our own times, one of the the most common reasons people fall into debt or even homelessness is because of an uninsured or underinsured medical emergency.  You may recall that the Roman Catholic church among others declared the year 2000 to be a year of Jubilee and called for the forgiveness of debts for developing countries whose indebtedness had become so onerous that payment of interest was making it impossible for them to care for their own people.

Now, such a practice of returning property to its original owners and forgiving all debts would obviously breed chaos in our contemporary real estate and financial transactions, but just imagine for a moment how it might affect  people if there were a regular practice of rebalancing inequalities that have grown up over a period of time.  Of course, Eech of us as individuals live our lives between birth and death on an inevitable path between the nakedness and lack of possessions with which we enter the world and our return to the same state when we leave.  Psalm 90:12 tells us [^NRS Psalm 90:12] “So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.”  By this we are given to understand that, in counting our days, we are to make our days count, rather than scrambling endlessly for more and more, for some kind of total security which can never be achieved in this life anyway.  Our task is rather to join in praise as we give thanks for the life we have been given and to assume our small place in creation.

We covenant to affirm and promote Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

Our other reading this morning, Psalm 98, ends with these words: [NRSV] “⁸ Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy ⁹ at the presence of the LORD, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.”  In our class at Linden Ponds on The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, we've been talking about some Fundamentalists' beliefs about the end times, and this passage from the Psalms might make us think about doomsayers who not only expect but hope for the return of Jesus or, in the Muslim tradition, the Hidden Imam or, in the Jewish tradition, the Messianic era.  For some believers, that occasion is eagerly anticipated as an opportunity for vengeance against those who have prospered unjustly or who have caused slights or who have believed differently.  There are those who believe that, such is the wickedness of the people of earth that only divine intervention and a time of terrible destruction will be sufficient to set things right again.  Believers in the Rapture hold that they themselves will be taken up to heaven to view the destruction of all of their enemies (with pleasure, presumably) while they themselves remain unharmed.  The novel Left Behind and its successors and imitators have sold in the tens of millions of copies, providing a rich store of images of the violence and destruction which true believers will be spared.  The downside of this cluster of beliefs is that it exempts the believer from the responsibility to pursue justice or indeed any betterment here on earth, since after all everything is in God's hands, not in our own.  If, for example, carbon emissions are causing  significant changes in the climate and thus in the water levels of the ocean, the destruction of natural habitats and so on, this is merely one further sign that the end is near, not a reason to change our own behavior.  We Unitarian Universalists come from a more optimistic tradition, and one which obligates us to act in this world on the basis of our beliefs and our commitments.

We covenant to affirm and promote Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

William Ellery Channing, in his sermon “Likeness to God,” reminds us that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said, “[^NRS Matthew 5:48] Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  Now the notion that any of us are or could be perfect is a somewhat daunting idea, but the word translated as “perfect” in Greek is “tel' i os,” and it means “brought to its end, finished, wanting nothing necessary for completeness.”  In other words, we are to keep in our minds and our spirits the commitment to be whole, balanced, in the same way our reading from Leviticus calls for a balance in the economic life of the people of Israel, no one too rich, no one too poor.

Sometimes our tradition has become overly optimistic.  You may recall the Unitarian Creed of the 19^th Century as laid out by James Freeman Clarke; one version is engraved on the wall of our church in San Francisco:

1.     Fatherhood of God

2.     Brotherhood of man

3.     Leadership of Jesus,

4.     Salvation by Character and

5.     The continuity of human development in all worlds, or, the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.

The century and a half since that time have dashed many too-rosy dreams from that optimistic era.  The First World War revealed to the world  the utter devastation that could come from the clash of nations, and the cold-blooded murder of millions in the genocide in Armenia, in the death camps of Nazi German, in the Soviet Union and in China, and the more recent genocides in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia and even now in Darfur lead us to caution in assessing the probability of endless and uninterrupted progress.  A more constrained version of our optimism was expressed by the great Unitarian Theodore Parker, whose words were later adopted by Martin Luther King, Jr.:  “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Above all, setbacks and evil in the world are not an excuse for inaction, waiting for divine intervention, but rather an obligation upon us to count our days so as to make them count.   Some of these are, of course, grand issues which don't impinge on our daily living.  In our faith tradition, though, we understand that it is the action of each of us as individuals that brings about the kind of living on this earth that we want to participate in.  If, as the Psalm says, “[The Lord] is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity,” then we understand that we must ourselves judge with equity, that we must strive to become whole, to live in blance, to become “perfect,” as Jesus put it.

We covenant to affirm and promote Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

For each of us, the question becomes how we are seeking for balance, how we are ensuring that we give due weight to the need to stand back from striving to take a sabbath, how we remove ourselves from daily strife to cultivate our spiritual growth, how we count our days to ensure that they count.

 

Amen.

 

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