If you are leading a group, circle, or activity that is affiliated with the church or if you are meeting in the church building (even if the activity has met at the same time in the same place for years), please notify Sandra Topp, the calendar coordinator. You can send your information (name of group, time and place the group is meeting, and contact information) to stopp1@cox.net, call 897-2352, or leave a note in the calendar coordinator mailbox located across from the church office. PLease send your information. Thank you for your cooperation.

Now in its tenth year, the series combines commentaries by guest speakers on classical music with related CD selections. A map is available on website www.uufec.com. All sessions are free and open to the public. No reservations are required. Direct questions to Lou Johnson at musicstudy@uufec.com.

Story for All Ages  “The Hardest Teaching: Love Your Enemies” 

This morning I want to ask you about enemies. 

- Are there people whom you sometimes feel are your enemies? 

- Who are some of the people you feel are your enemies?

- What have they done that makes you feel that they are your enemies?

- Do you ever want to yell at them or hit them? 

- What happens when you hurt your enemies?  Do they get mad and do worse things to you? 

         Do you get into trouble with your parents or teachers?  … with their friends? 

- Then what happens? 

They call this the “cycle of violence.”  Things get worse and worse when you do something hurtful to your enemies and then someone they know does something hurtful back to you—and on and on.

Tomorrow in Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday.  There will be a parade in Fort Walton Beach tomorrow for anyone who wishes to honor Dr. King.  You can walk with us in the parade and even help carry our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship banner. The reason we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King is because he showed us a better way to treat our enemies—with kindness and without hurting them.

Dr. Martin Luther King was a follower of Jesus.  Dr. King tried to treat his enemies the way Jesus treated his enemies, the way Jesus taught how to treat enemies.  Jesus said:  “Love your enemies.”  Treat your enemies with loving-kindness.  If they do bad things to you, Jesus taught, “Do not return evil for evil.”  Don’t do bad things back to them.  Be kind to your enemies.  What do you think?

I think this is Jesus’ hardest teaching:  Loving-kindness toward your enemies.  It might not work every time.  People might still be mean to you even if you are always kind to them.  But sometimes, when your enemies realize that you will be kind no matter what they do, sometimes they will stop hurting you because they realize that you are a friend. 

Loving kindness might not work every time.  But we do know, if you hurt your enemies, you can be sure that your enemies or their friends will try to get revenge on you.  Hurting enemies doesn’t make friends of them. 

Maybe we shouldn’t even call them “enemies” or “bad guys.”  Maybe we should call them people like us who sometimes do bad things.  They might actually be friends if we act like friends to them.

Message  This morning I wish to share words by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with only a few comments of my own.  Dr. King:  “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral.  It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.  It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.  Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.  It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.  It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.  Violence ends by defeating itself.  It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.” 

“I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many White Citizens Councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear.  Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.  We will meet your physical force with soul force.  Do to us what you will and we will still love you…. Throw us in jail and we will still love you.  Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you.  Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you.  Send your propaganda agents around the country and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, but we’ll still love you.  But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.  We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’” 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. uses specific words to contrast the spirit of relationships we have with people we sometimes call “enemies” rather than “friends.”  He speaks of “love” and “hatred.”   Of “violence” and “compassion.” 

I grew up with what I feel is Jesus’ hardest teaching:  “Love your enemies.”  I didn’t have a real understanding of love.  Heck, I didn’t even like a lot of people, and I was angry with those who did what I felt were bad things.  I tried to feel loving toward everyone, but it was unreal, artificial, dishonest.  Only later in life have I come to think of love and hatred as conscious choices, intentions as opposed to feelings/emotions.  

There is a Native American story about two wolves within us: one, kind, and the other, cruel.  The youth asks grandfather which one is stronger, and grandfather says, “The one you feed.” 

Feeling angry or appreciative toward people seems to be one thing, but intentionally nurturing love or hatred, longing to kindness or to hurt on another, seem to be something different: feelings versus intention and action.  I learned from Buddhists to speak of intention and action in one word, loving-kindness.  

No matter how I feel toward someone who I think is hateful and hurtful, it is possible to rise above the animal response of hating-hurtfulness.  We humans can choose to be kind and loving—even when we’re angry.  It takes practice calming ourselves.  Consider how African-Americans survived in white-supremist America, how Vietnamese Buddhists survived in a war-zone.  Calming one’s anger was necessary for survival.  

Choosing to nurture love or hate is a choice all of us have in relating to those who are different from us, those we see as competitors or opponents.  In society, our choices determine whether we live in a virtual war-zone, or in communities of mutual trust.  Beyond our anger, what wolf will we feed?  What wolf will dominate? 

Loving and hateful intentions eventually become real when we act on them through kindness or hurtfulness.  No matter whether we feel hot or warm toward people, we can practice calming ourselves first.  Then we can practice acts of loving-kindness rather than hateful-hurting.  We will all make mistakes, but calming and redirecting our reactive emotions can be practiced and nurtured in others. 

In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose as its motto:  “To save the soul of America.”  They organized to resist the wolf of white-supremism and to nurture the wolf of loving-kindness in America.  Ten years later, Dr. King wrote these words:  “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” (Massey Lectures, Canadian Broadcasting Company, 1967, in The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by James M. Washington, 1986, p.636) 

“What do the (Vietnamese) peasants think, as we ally ourselves with the landlords…. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village.  We have destroyed their land and their crops.  We have cooperated in crushing one of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political forces, the United Buddhist church.  We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon.  We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men…. We must speak for them, and raise the questions they cannot raise.  These, too, are our brothers…. (p.637-8) 

“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when they help us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.  For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. (p.638) 

In preparing for this Martin Luther King, Jr. message, I was surprised how well Dr. King’s last speeches directly relate to our world, forty-five years later.  Dr. King said:    “I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.  The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.  In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.  I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast between poverty and wealth…, individual capitalists… investing huge sums of money… only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say:  `This is not just.’  The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.  A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: `This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.  A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom…. 

“These are revolutionary times; all over the globe (people) are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression…. people of the land are rising up as never before…. We must find new ways to speak for peace… and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors.  If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” (p. 639-40) 

I am reminded of the proverb:  “Be careful who your enemies are, for you can become just like them.”  It seems to me, we might be well advised to speak of all persons as friends, some of whom, like us, do terrible things sometimes.  

Over 750 years ago, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) said:  “We must love them both – those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject.  For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.”  We don’t have to like them, but for our own soul’s health, we must have loving intentions and act with kindness especially with those whose opinions we reject, even those who intend and act with hate and violence toward us. 

One of our own, Ralph Waldo Emerson articulates this Unitarian Universalist faith.  He wrote:  “Trust (people) and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” 

In closing, I offer the soul-saving teachings of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount, and those of Vietnamese Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh. From the Book of Matthew, we read:     

“Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors;
     only so can you be children of your heavenly Father,
     who makes his sun rise on good and bad alike,
     and sends the rain on the honest and the dishonest….
There must be no limit to your goodness,
     as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.”  (Matthew 5:44-45,48, NEV)

  Thich Nhat Hanh offers this soul-saving wisdom: 

 “Though we all have the fear
        and seeds of anger within us,
   we must learn not to water those seeds,
        and instead, nourish our positive qualities—
   those of compassion, understanding,
        and loving kindness.”     (Thich Nhat Hanh)

PreK-1^st Grade: Caring for the Earth

2^nd-5^th Grade:  Love is the Golden Rule      Taking It Home

Second Hour

PreK-5^th Grade: Fun In Action

Tween Class

7:00 PM Friday, January 13, 2012 Jim Scott will perform at UUFEC, honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and children with an intergenerational songfest.

Suggested donation, $7 to $20

Formerly a member of the Paul Winter Consort and co-composer of their Missa Gaia / Earth Mass, Jim has toured the world and recorded 7 CDs of original music including his latest CD, *Gather the Spirit.*

After helping to create the UU “Green Sanctuary” program, Jim compiled and arranged the “Earth and Spirit Songbook,” a collection of 110 songs of Earth by many contemporary composers.

Jim has a long UU history, and his song “Gather the Spirit” is a favorite in our UU hymnbook.

Learn more at www.JimScottMusic.com .

PreK-1^st Grade: Caring for the Earth

2^nd-5^th Grade: Love In Action      Taking It Home

Second Hour

PreK-5^th Grade: Fun In Action

Tween Class