Sermon

Situation Ethics

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

June 11, 2006

First Reading: Mark 2:23-28

²³One Sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. ²⁴The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?’ ²⁵And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? ²⁶He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ ²⁷Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath; ²⁸so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.’

Second Reading: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher, fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes men’s noblest impulses…. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the scale and the meaning of events.

Third Reading: Joseph Fletcher. Situation Ethics. Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1966. Page 166.

I found him in the solarium, looking very down and out. He thought we ought to go back to his room to talk, and when we got there he gold me: “They say I have about three years, maybe less, that only a miracle can save me. They can only give me some stuff that will keep me alive a while. I can leave here tomorrow but can’t do any work, just rest and take pills.” After a pause he added: “The pills cost $40 about every three days. Who can afford that? They say if I stop them, then six months and I’ve had it.”

We discussed it a bit and then he blurted out: “You know what is really bugging me? The company has me insured for $100,000, double indemnity. That’s all the insurance I have. It’s all I can leave Betts and the kids. If I take the pills and live past next October, then the policy will undoubtedly be canceled when it comes up for renewal. If I don’t take them, at least my family will have some security. If I kill myself, they get even more. If I take the pills, borrow the money for them, and then the policy lapses, that will mean that they are going to be left penniless and in debt so that even the house goes. Over the hill, the poor house, and the kids farmed out. If I don’t take the pills, I’m killing myself same as if I commit suicide with a razor or gas, seems to me.” He closed his eyes.

“What would you do? How does it look to you? I want to do the right thing.” We talked it over.

Sermon

In 1994 when I realized I had a call to ministry and would be attending seminary I sought counsel from a very wise Unitarian minister. He gave me a lot of good advice that day and I often reflect on it. But there is one thing in particular that I think of almost every day. He said that henceforth everything I read - everything, be it a book of theology or instructions on putting together a child’s toy - would be relevant to ministry. I found that to be true this last week while thinking about this sermon. I was looking for some inspiration and not finding any so I decided to take a break. I looked at a stack of books hoping to find something that would divert me for a few minutes until I could approach the problem from a fresh direction. I happened to pick up a book called, To Engineer is Human. I don’t remember when or where I got it or how it happened to be in that particular stack of books, but it’s the kind of odd duck of a book that I enjoy from time to time. It was written by Henry Petroski, an engineering professor at Duke. It is about engineering disasters - and a few engineering triumphs. But it’s not so much about engineering as it the relationship between engineering and society. In the introduction he describes how engineers, driven by the demands of society, are always pushing the envelope, always trying something new, often working on problems without clear cut answers. Even if they are working from well known formulas the conditions of use can never be fully predicted leading to an always present uncertainty that leads them to over design in an effort to create a safety margin. As I read his opening words it occurred to me that he could have been talking about ethics instead of engineering.

Technology doesn’t just give us bigger and better bridges and buildings. The assembly line, a technological innovation, also changed the relationship between the worker and work, between the worker and employer. And the biological wonders of recent years have also changed relationships. Yesterday I marched in Tulsa’s Gay Pride Parade. The emergence of the GLBT community out of the closet and the change in patterns of marriages and child rearing and sexual behavior in general are all traceable, to one degree or another, to those biological advances. Just consider how technological change has challenged us ethically. We do our best to make sense of how to use technology to better our lives and to use technology in a way we can call ethical. But even if we know what is right and wrong, it doesn’t follow that we can always get it right. That’s because just like the engineer designing a bridge or a building we can never be entirely sure how technology will be used or what the consequences of our actions will be. We live in a world of unintended consequences. And that leads us to try to be conservative, to try to create ethical rules and guidelines that have a margin of safety written into them. And we follow such rules. We should follow such rules, because it is a part of doing the best we can. The problem, however, is much like the engineer designing the bridge. Sometimes we just get it wrong and our best efforts to do the good end up yielding the wrong.

Today we can perform what would have passed for miracles in any other age, but it’s at a cost. Our society spends between 22 and 26% of all health care monies on people during the last year of their lives. That money prolongs life, precious life. But the life that is gained is not without cost. The emphasis on end of life care is one of the reasons we spend less on prenatal care with the result that the United States has the second worst infant mortality rate in the developed world. Overall we have designed and engineered a healthcare system that is wonderful at times, but also costs more and provides less care per dollar than any other developed country in the world. But we have done so with the best of intentions, creating rules for care we deem good.

One of the good rules from the time of the bible said don’t pick grain on the Sabbath. I believe the intent was to legislate good treatment for workers. Even in those harsh times the working man was to have at least one day off. But what if someone was starving? The Jewish tradition of that time recognized a logical and humane exception. It is that exception that Jesus claims in our first reading. There was nothing unusual about what he said. His contemporaries would have understood his meaning at once. The suggestion, of course, is that those listening didn’t understand the exception and were willing to apply the rules with a rigidity that would lead people to go hungry, even starve. But the problem wasn’t the rule - it was the idea that some people would apply it rigidly and without thinking about its purpose.

The story reminds me of another story, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable. The lead character, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread as a child. He steals it because he is starving. But the law is inflexible. It does not recognize - as Judaism did - an exception that allowed gleaning of the fields when it is a question of hunger. He is thrown into prison for life and in prison becomes a hardened criminal. But by chance he escapes, finds redemption and leads a just and moral life. But throughout his life he is pursued by Javert, a man of the law, who knows no exceptions to the law. At the end he confronts Jean Valjean and learns of his transformation. Unable to reconcile the requirements of the law with the reality of Jean Valjean’s salvation he does the only thing he can: he commits suicide.

It is such inflexibility that leads some men and women to follow rules - good rules - slavishly and mechanically. The good becomes not the result, but the rule. It is a form of idolatry. You know the old Buddhist saying, the finger that points at the moon is not the moon? We sometimes believe it is the rules that are good in and of themselves, that it is the action the rules call for that is good in and of itself. But the rules are good only insofar as they produce a result that is good. I suspect that’s what led Mark Twain to say of one of his contemporaries, “He was a good man in the worst sense of the word.” The rules are important, they exist for a reason and most of the time they tell us what to do, they allow us to ethically engineer a wise course of action. But I believe we also need to remember what Isaac Asimov said: "Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.” The purpose of moral or ethical rules is not blind obedience. The purpose is a just world, a world that can only be achieved if we are willing to look beyond the letter of the law, beyond the letter of ethical and moral rules to their purpose.

One of the things I like about Joseph Fletcher’s book, Situation Ethics, is how relevant his examples continue to be. Today we are in the midst of another debate about war and peace. Some argue with great passion for a pacifism that knows no exception. But listen to what Fletcher had to say.

Absolute negatives and absolute affirmatives alike have this neurotic character of falsifying complex realities. Albert Schweitzer is quite right to say that “the good conscience is an invention of the devil.” Classical pacifism is an example; it holds the use of violence to be always wrong regardless of the situation. This is a legalism, even though many pacifists would be unhappy to think of it as such. The subtlety here is this: the pacifist knows that if, as in the “just war” doctrine, it is possible that some wars are just and some are not, the pacifist with his absolute prohibition is bound to be ethically right some of the time, whereas the situationist could be wrong every time, failing to recognize when a war is just and trying to justify one when it is not justifiable. (Situation Ethics, 84)

Fletcher’s reference to a “situationist” is about those who will look beyond the letter of the law to its purpose. But there is also a problem with doing so. The risk is that we look too quickly beyond the rules. Our reaching beyond the rules becomes not a struggle with deep moral issues, but a convenient war of justifying whatever we want. We transform morality into convenience, we transform morality into a justification for what we want, for what is easy, for what is pleasurable devoid of concern for anything beyond ourselves. We create a bizarre kind of legalism that always gives us what we want. If it feels good do it, because - we argue - no one’s getting hurt. But that is the same kind of blindness to consequences, the blindness to the larger world that characterizes the more traditional forms of moral legalisms. One says there must never be an abortion, the other says there must never be an abortion denied.

The real world is to be found in the solarium where we meet dying men, where we face the certainty of life and death amidst the uncertainty of right and wrong. There is the certainty of a man’s death. There is the certainty that his family will live and have to face the problems of life. But would you extend life six months or three years and leave your family without financial resources? Consider this: Would a child or spouse rather have money and financial security or a few more years of a father’s love? Fathers are supposed to ensure the financial security of their families. In this time when many talk of “traditional” marriage it is good to remember that the heart of traditional marriage was always about contractually assumed financial obligations. If the principle of traditional marriage is to be applied, then shouldn’t the man commit suicide? How would you decide? Is it a decision only for the man? But what about his wife and family? What would his child say? As Hebbel said, “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

Where then is the answer to be found? Joseph Fletcher argued that we must appeal to love, not the saccharine love of Valentines Day that kisses everything and makes it feel better, but the love that can be tough and demanding as well as gentle and healing. It is the love that encompasses both sides of every debate, but is willing at the end to say this is what must be done. It is not a love that makes the decision easy. It is the kind of love that makes it apparent how difficult the decision really is. I think it is the kind of love that is behind one of the classic stories from the Jewish tradition.

One of the important people in the history of Judaism was a man named Hillel. He lived about the same time as Jesus and was known as a great teacher. Many people came to study with him. One day a gentile came to him and asked him if it was possible to teach the whole of the Torah while standing on one leg. The Torah, of course, is the sum total of all the laws of Judaism. It has long been a symbol for many of a rigid and legalistic approach to moral decision making. Those standing around Hillel are said to have been angered by the request, thinking they were being mocked. But Hillel is said to have smiled, lifted one leg off the ground and said, “Love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else is commentary. Go and study the commentary.” The man was so impressed that he did as Hillel said and became a Jew.

The problem, of course, is that the commentary about that simple commandment could fill the libraries of the world. If you take it seriously it is not an easy way out. It is a challenge to take life and morality seriously. It is a challenge to take life and morality humanely. It is a challenge to confront the conflicts between two rights. And perhaps most importantly, it is a challenge to confront moral and ethical decision making with humility. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.” - not to be proud, but to be humble.

Amen.