The notion that “rights imply responsibilities” has become a familiar mantra.  As John Gardner, former Secretary of the Department of Health Education and Welfare, and founder of Common Cause put it: “Freedom and responsibility, liberty and duty.  That’s the deal.”  And this need to balance rights and freedom on the one hand, with duty and responsibility on the other, applies at every level of daily life.

     In personal relationships, in families, in organizations, in communities, even in nations, an orderly and equitable existence requires such balance.  If I focus solely on guarding and protecting my rights, and you focus solely on guarding and protecting yours, the outcome may be more or less equitable.  But it will not be pleasant.  One of the primary responsibilities involved is to take into account the rights and freedoms of others.

     In fact, what we take to be our rights, are meaningless unless they are recognized by those in a position to grant or deny them.  And who might that be?  Some would say that rights are granted by God.  We have a God-given right to this or that.  But even if that is the case, those rights may often be restricted or denied by our fellow humans.

     The granting and denying of rights often occurs in the context of the state, of those who govern.  In the founding of our nation, the protection of rights and freedom were core values.  The Bill of Rights, adopted as amendments to the Constitution in 1791 guaranteed the right of free speech and press, the right of people to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to due process of law, and more.  And according to the preamble to the Constitution, it wasn’t God, or some benevolent dictator who ordained and established these rights.  No, it was “we the people.”

     Whatever the ultimate source of rights and freedoms, it is up to “we the people” to recognize and protect them, both for ourselves and for our fellow inhabitants of the earth.  And our democratic principles place the responsibility for that on all of us.  If we don’t take the responsibility of preserving our rights seriously, we risk losing them.

     As I said earlier, the balancing act between rights and responsibilities occurs at every level of life.  One place where I find it operating almost continuously is within the family.  As a parent, I try to ensure my children’s rights of adequate food, shelter, education, safety and security.  That’s part of my responsibility.

     But another part of my responsibility is to assure that it’s not a completely one-sided situation.  I need to teach my children the importance of their contribution to the success of the family.  After all, if they don’t learn responsibility now, how will they be ready to assume responsibility for a family of their own someday?  And so they help with the chores that keep the household functioning.

     The challenge is to help them to understand the situation not as a dictatorial authority figure ruining their fun, but rather as a family working together toward a common purpose, through give and take.  This is the balance between rights and responsibility; between the good of the individual and the good of the group.  Ideally it’s not so much a matter of sacrificing your own rights and freedoms for the good of the group, as it is cooperating to optimize the good of everyone in the group, and thus of the group as a whole.

     Moving beyond the family level to that of community, we find the same kind of conversation about balancing rights and responsibilities, individual and community, within the context of the “communitarian” movement mentioned in our reading earlier.  This is a large and complex movement with many varied nuances, and I can’t do it justice within one sermon.  Perhaps a longer-term reading and discussion group would be worthwhile.

     For our purposes this morning, I would like to give you a flavor of the movement by quoting from The Spirit of Community by Amitai Etzioni.
 

    We hold that a moral revival in these United States is possible without Puritanism; that is, without busybodies meddling into our personal affairs, without thought police controlling our intellectual life. We can attain a recommitment to moral values – without puritanical excesses.

    We hold that law and order can be restored without turning this country of the free into a police state, as long as we grant public authorities some carefully crafted and circumscribed new powers.

    We hold that the family – without which no society has ever survived, let alone flourished – can be saved, without forcing women to stay at home or otherwise violating their rights.

    We hold that schools can provide essential moral education – without indoctrinating young people.

    We hold that people can live in communities without turning to vigilantes or becoming hostile to one another.

    We hold that our call for increased social responsibilities… is not a call for curbing rights. On the contrary, strong rights presume strong responsibilities.

    We hold that the pursuit of self-interest can be balanced by a commitment to the community, without requiring us to lead a life of austerity, altruism, or self-sacrifice….

    We hold that powerful special-interest groups in the nation’s capital, and in so many statehouses and city halls, can be curbed without limiting the constitutional right of the people to lobby and petition those who govern….

    We hold these truths as Communitarians, as people committed to creating a new moral, social, and public order based on restored communities, without puritanism or oppression.

     In our reading earlier, Kelley Ross accused the communitarians of taking the view that the community is “more real” than the individual.  And that may be true of some communitarians.  However, in a version of communitarianism that I can embrace, the view is that the community is “as real” as the individual, not more.  A community is made up of its individual members, of course.  But it is more than simply the sum of its parts.  A community takes on a life and a personality of its own, just as the collection of cells and organs that makes up my body takes on a life and personality that make me an individual human being.

     I find that image helpful.  I, as an individual living organism composed of many smaller parts, have qualities and features that transcend those of any of those component parts.  In turn, I as an individual participate with other individuals in numerous versions of community.  And each of those communities has qualities and features not necessarily evident in its individual members.  But my actions as an individual do affect the functioning and well-being of the whole.

     In particular, if I focus solely on my own interests (rights), at the expense of the interests of the whole, or of other members of the community, the whole atmosphere of life will be adversarial rather than cooperative.  As a member of a community, I acknowledge my responsibility to take account of the good of the whole.  That does not mean that my individual rights are automatically trumped.  It just means that there are larger considerations to be taken into account.  If I am not willing to be responsible for the costs of community, I am not entitled to its benefits.

     In the healthiest communities, the checks and balances of rights and responsibilities are recognized and accepted consciously, and addressed democratically.  This doesn’t mean that everyone will agree about everything.  If that ever happened, you wouldn’t have community; you’d have a miracle.  Mark K. Smith, a specialist in informal education, commenting on the communitarian agenda, writes:
 

[D]ifference is good for democratic life provided that we cultivate a sense of reciprocity, and ways of working that encourage deliberation.  The search is not for the sort of common good that many communitarians seek, but rather for ways in which people may share in a common life.  Moral disagreement will persist – the key is whether we can learn to respect and engage with each other’s ideas, behaviors and beliefs.

     “Reciprocity” is a good word here, and is one of the ideas I’ve really been trying to get at.  Reciprocity can be defined as “a mutual or cooperative interchange of favors or privileges.”  That’s the give and take I’ve been talking about.  I’ll take responsibility for looking out for your rights, and I’ll expect you to take responsibility for looking out for mine.  And together we will seek ways of looking out for all of our rights.

     Now I’d like to bring all this down to right here, in this community that we call “The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.”  Here, as in any community, we are each faced with the challenge of finding the balance between individual and group; between our rights and our responsibilities.

     One place I often look for wisdom and insight is our Unitarian Universalist principles.  In this case, they don’t disappoint.  When we covenant to affirm and promote “the inherent worth and dignity of every person”, we are recognizing the value of the individual and the basic human rights that that entails.  When we covenant to affirm and promote “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all,” we are acknowledging our part in something larger, and the responsibility that that entails.  And those two levels – individual and community – are tied together by our seventh principle, which recognizes “the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”

     Yes, we are each individuals.  But at the same time we are each part of an interconnected web of existence, in which each part affects all others.  It is that understanding that grounds the need for our taking responsibility as individuals for the needs and health of the whole.  When the Rev. Fred Muir was here a couple of weeks ago working with our leadership, he suggested a helpful image for the way a community works as an interdependent system.  Think about a mobile, with all of its connected parts hanging in delicate equilibrium.  What happens when you tug on one component of the mobile?  The whole thing goes into motion, until it finally settles into a new equilibrium.

     That’s how our community, like any community, works.  There’s a song in our hymnal that says, “Our world is one world; what touches one affects us all.”  Well our community is one community; how we touch one another affects us all.

     One way that many religious communities try to be intentional about finding a balance between rights and responsibilities is through a process of covenanting – of making explicit promises to one another about how we may best share in a common life together.  An example is our current Congregational Covenant, adopted three years ago, in which we commit ourselves to shape a mutually supportive community with caring, compassion, and understanding through open, honest communication.  Open, honest communication (of the assertive variety that I spoke of a few weeks ago) allows for articulating and expressing our individual wants and needs. To the extent that we show caring, compassion, and understanding, we fulfill our responsibility to consider the wants and needs of others.

     Those who participated in the Congregational Workshop a week ago yesterday began a process of revisiting the idea of covenant.  Conventional wisdom has it that covenants should be revisited every few years.  At that workshop, we began by considering, as individuals, the two questions: “What do I want or expect from this Fellowship?” and “What will I bring to the community?”  That is, “what will I give, and what will I take.”  We then combined into groups of two, then four, and then eight.  And building on our individual responses to those two questions we developed, as groups, statements of the promises we were all willing to make to one another.  The result: four versions of a potential new covenant or promise statement.

     That process will continue in the coming months, and those who weren’t able to participate last week will get your opportunity to be a part of it.  I hope we all embrace that responsibility joyfully and enthusiastically.  The health of our community, and the wonderful potential it has to serve each of us and the larger world, depend on it.