Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 17, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As most of you know, I used to be a lawyer. One of the classes you have to take in law school is an introduction to criminal law, even if you have no intention of ever practicing criminal law. The course that I took as a first year law student at the University of Oregon School of Law so many years ago now was taught by a professor we all knew to be a Fundamentalist Christian. He left Oregon after that year to teach at the Oral Roberts University School of Law. Enough said. In that first year criminal law class that I took from him he, very appropriately, was teaching us some of the basic assumptions and understandings that undergird the Anglo-American system of criminal law. One of those assumptions is that, as a general rule, each individual person bears responsibility for her or his own acts and does not bear responsibility for anyone else’s actions, except in a few exceptional cases. This professor talked about how that understanding of individual moral and legal responsibility developed historically. In doing so he quoted the passage we just heard from Jeremiah and quite correctly pointed to the Judeo-Christian tradition as the historical source of that understanding of individual responsibility. And all of the secular liberals at the University of Oregon School of Law—and that of course was almost everyone—went nuts. They ran to the Dean complaining that this professor was trying to force his religion onto them. He wasn’t of course. Everything he said in that class was perfectly appropriate, but never mind. Those secular liberals couldn’t stand the idea that any belief that they agreed with could have come from religion, never mind that the entire secular humanist ethic is grounded in Christianity, just with its religious foundation removed.

Now, I don’t really want to talk about irrational reactions by secular humanists this morning. What I want to talk about is the implication in what I just said that there is a way of looking at moral responsibility that does not focus on the individual, and indeed there is. Jeremiah has to say “they shall no longer say ‘the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’’ or as one paraphrase I recently heard puts it “the parents have eaten green apples and the children have gotten the stomach ache,” because up until the time of Jeremiah in the sixth century BCE the Hebrew people thought that indeed sinful acts had consequences for more than the person who commits them. They had a collective understanding of moral responsibility, not an individualistic one.

We see that notion of collective responsibility in the passage we heard from Exodus. We heard the Second Commandment from the famous and much ballyhooed Ten Commandments. It says you shall not make and worship any idol. And it says why you shouldn’t: “For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me….” (Are you really sure you want that hanging in the courthouse? But I digress.) That was the really ancient Hebrew understanding of moral responsibility, i.e., collective responsibility applying to generations of a family rather than only to the individual sinner.

The Hebrew prophets up to and including Jeremiah also had a collective understanding of moral responsibility, albeit a somewhat different one than the one we saw in the Second Commandment. They thought that the conquest and destruction of the Hebrew kingdoms by foreign empires was God’s punishment for the faithlessness of those kingdoms’ rulers, especially the failure of those rulers to treat the poor and the vulnerable justly. It seems not to have bothered them that the punishment of conquest and captivity was imposed on the poor and the vulnerable of those states as well as on the rulers who were the ones whose acts were supposedly being punished. Why didn’t that bother them? Because their understanding of moral responsibility was collective rather than individualistic.

The notion that arose in the time of Jeremiah almost 2,600 years ago that only the individual bears moral responsibility for the individual’s actions is so thoroughly ingrained in us that these ancient notions of collective moral responsibility for the acts of individuals strike us as primitive and profoundly unjust. The notion of individual moral responsibility arose in the ancient Jewish tradition, but it really took off during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. It does indeed undergird our legal system, as that professor of mine contended. Indeed it is a foundational assumption of our whole understanding of right and wrong. We take it for granted. Individual moral responsibility is the ethos of the American individualism that we so cherish and of which we so boast. Individual moral responsibility may have its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it has become the American way, one we just take for granted.

So it may strike you as odd that this morning I’m going to suggest that we may need to modify that individualistic view some, or at least consider doing so. This morning I want us to consider the possibility that in order truly to do justice today we may need to recapture something of that ancient conception of collective moral responsibility.

The notion of individual responsibility for actions, especially for wrongful acts, assumes that wrongful acts by individuals are the only kind of wrongful acts that people must deal with. Certainly the wrongful acts to which we assign criminal responsibility tend to be individual acts—robbery, assault, homicide, fraud, and so on. Even when we assign criminal responsibility to acts of a group of people, in conspiracy cases for example, each individual’s criminal responsibility depends upon that individual having personally participated in the conspiracy in some way. But in recent times there has been a growing awareness that not all wrongful acts are done only by individuals. Today we recognize what we can call institutionalized wrong. Institutionalized wrong is wrong that is built into the structures and attitudes of a society, of a culture. The best way to explain institutionalized wrong is to give an example of it, and the best example for us Americans is institutionalized racism.

Euro-American culture was from the very beginning permeated with racism. The most obvious institutional expression of American racism was slavery, an institutionalized sin in which the whole nation participated, not just the South. White Americans just took the superiority of white people to Black, Indian, and Asian people for granted for centuries. That racism resulted not only in slavery and American legal apartheid in the South but in ghettos, bad schools, high un- and under-employment, unfair, unequal treatment in the courts, and a host of other injustices that we as a nation perpetrated on minority races. Yes, individuals committed individual acts of discrimination (and worse), but the problem was, and is, much deeper than that. Racism was, and is, an institution among us, and all of us white people have benefited from it whether we are personally racist, whether we have ever personally discriminated on the basis of race or not.

American racism cries out for a remedy, and a merely individual notion of moral responsibility is inadequate to provide that remedy, to give justice. The sin is institutional, and so must the atonement be. That’s why affirmative action is just even when it appears to disadvantage individual white people. That’s why a national apology for slavery and Jim Crow is required even though none of us ever owned a slave and Jim Crow is no longer the legal reality in our country.

The move from collective to individual moral responsibility that we see in our passage from Jeremiah represented a great step forward in the human understanding of morality and moral responsibility. But like so many great advancements in human consciousness it has its limitations. What is required today is a kind of synthesis of the old notions of collective responsibility and the new notion of individual responsibility. Not that we need to go back to the Ten Commandments’ visiting the sins of the parents on the children to the third and fourth generation. Certainly not. But we do, I am convinced, need to consider how some understanding of collective responsibility is necessary in cases of institutionalized sin, cases where individual responsibility alone is inadequate to bring the required justice, the required atonement, the required reparations for institutionalized sin. Jeremiah’s still right as a general rule: “No longer shall they say the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But I am convinced that those of us who have benefitted from institutionalized sin, from institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of systemic discrimination, cannot retreat behind a claim that only individual responsibility is appropriate. Sometimes we need to feel our teeth being set on edge even though we didn’t personally eat the sour grapes. This morning I invite you to consider that possibility as well. Amen.