Sunday, August 14, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.

Across the Divide

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life

Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19
Luke 12:49–59

Our scripture reading today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. In Luke, Jesus is very much about peace.

Luke 1 says Jesus will be like the dawn breaking from on high “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

When he healed people Jesus said to them, “Your faith has saved you. Your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

He taught his disciples to bring peace. When he sent them out he said, “Whenever you enter a house, first say, ‘May peace be on this house.’”

And after his resurrection, when he appeared suddenly in the presence of the disciples, he said to them, “Peace be with you!”

We’re used to thinking of Jesus in this way, as the Prince of Peace. So when we get to today’s reading, we can be a bit baffled by what Jesus says here. He’s already been baptized in the river by John, but he refers here to another baptism that still awaits him.

He speaks of bringing fire, so we have to ask, is this the fire of judgment? Is it the refiner’s fire, making gold purer by burning out the impurities? Is this the fire of the Holy Spirit, enlivening people as the Spirit did later at Pentecost? Will Jesus be baptized by this fire?

• • •

There’s a cartoon in a book I’m reading. It shows a living room with a couch and an easy chair. A man is sitting in the easy chair at one end of the room, and a woman, his wife, is sitting on the couch at the other end of the room, as far away from the man as possible.

In front of the man stands a boy, their son, about nine years old, maybe. And the father says to the son, “Your mother and I are separating because I want what’s good for the country and your mother doesn’t.”

It’s funny because it’s both true and not true. From the perspective of the husband, he thinks his perspective is best for the country. He can’t imagine why the wife would hold opinions that differ from his.

But of course, she also wants what’s best for the country. She just thinks that she knows what’s best and her husband does not. They are divided over what is right and wrong.

The problem is not that they have different perspectives. The problem is they think there is only one right perspective, so one of them must be wrong. And they both think, “Clearly, it’s not me.”

The book I’m reading, where I saw this cartoon, I’ve mentioned in other sermons, and I continue to study it because it’s very dense, but I think it’s very important. I’m planning to teach it in a three-session book group in the fall here at the church, probably in October. It’s called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

I thought October would be a good time to think about that, since November is election month and we are experiencing a great deal of impassioned division in our country right now, largely over politics, but also over how our religious ideals shape our moral judgments.

In our scripture from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says that from now on, five individuals in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. Since we know from other verses in the same Gospel that Jesus did indeed bring peace and intend to bring peace, commentators have struggled with these verses.

Some have suggested that Jesus is being descriptive here, describing how people divide in the face of his ministry; they suggest that he’s not being prescriptive, that he’s not prescribing what he wants people to do.

He’s describing, not prescribing. Faced with ethical, social, political, moral problems, people tend to divide. Faced with Jesus shaking things up, questioning the status quo, calling for justice, people did indeed begin to be divided, even down to the level of division within families.

So “why are good people divided by politics and religion”?

A basic premise of the book, The Righteous Mind, with that subtitle is that human beings are predisposed to have a righteous mind—that we make judgments about good and bad, right and wrong—and that the way we make these judgments involves both our gut feelings, which the author calls our intuitions, and our rational brains, which he calls reasoning.

If you’re like me, and if you’re like the couple in the cartoon, you might think that your judgments are based on reason. This is the idea that first we reason things out, and then we make our judgments based on what’s rational and reasonable.

But the author of this book, Jonathan Haidt shows through lots of social scientific studies that the gut feelings come first—that our moral judgments are instantaneous and emotional—and the reasons come later to explain why we believe our intuitions are “right.”

To test this theory, researchers did an experiment involving apple juice and cockroaches. First they offered a fresh cup of apple juice to the college students who were participating in the study. Each subject was willing to take a sip.

But then they brought out a white plastic box containing a sterilized cockroach. They explained how they sterilized the cockroach and how no germs could have survived. Then they dipped the cockroach in the apple juice with a tea strainer and asked, “Now would you take a sip?”

My answer would be “No, never, not in a million years.” My answer is not based on rationality; it’s based on a sense of disgust. Of the test subjects, 63 percent said the same thing, although they were able to talk an additional 10 percent into sipping the cockroach juice—because they told them rationally, and in their mind there’s no germs in there; there’s nothing wrong with that.

The purpose of this test was to distinguish between gut reactions and reasons and to show that our gut reactions are often stronger than our rationality.

For more than half the people in the study, it didn’t matter that the cockroach was clean and sterile. Rationally we might know that the apple juice is completely uncontaminated. But the intuition that it’s not OK to drink cockroach juice was stronger than intellectual reasoning about germs and cleanliness.

That’s the first big point of this book. Intuitions come first; reasons come later to explain or justify why we felt what we felt. So to change moral judgment, we have to change that intuition. It can be done, but usually not through reasoning or giving better reasons.

The second big point in the book is that there are many different kinds of moral questions.

There are questions about care and harm: Is it ever OK to harm a person? How about if harming one person will save the lives of five people?

There are questions about fairness and cheating: How should we treat people who cheat? What would be fair?

There are questions about loyalty and betrayal: Is there ever a time when it’s right for someone to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group—to be loyal to the group even before their concerns for their personal freedom?

There are questions about authority and subversion: How important is it to follow someone’s authority in a group and to honor the authority of tradition?

There are questions about sanctity and degradation. An example of this is the idea that the body is a temple and it can be made impure by immoral actions, even if no one is harmed by the actions. It’s just gross. Like drinking cockroach juice.

And finally there are questions about liberty and oppression. These lead us to make commitments to join together to resist and fight against bullies and oppressors. (www.moralfoundations.org)

These are six moral foundations, but some of them are sometimes in tension with each other, and that is where it gets difficult and complicated. For example, when does authority and tradition become oppressive and obstruct liberty? What’s more important: liberty of the individual or survival of the group?

People who study this kind of thing find really interesting results when they compare people who say they are liberal to people who say they are conservative.

People who say they are liberal tend to emphasize liberty-oppression issues and concerns about harm and fairness. They tend to say it’s most important to take care of people and to resist oppression. For example, loyalty is not as important if someone is harmed by the loyalty.

People who identify as conservative care about those things, too. Yes, we need to care about the well-being of individuals, but we have to care about the well-being of the whole group, too. So people who define themselves as conservative tend to put a higher value, in general, on issues of sanctity and loyalty and authority.

One way to talk about these group tendencies is to say we develop moral tribes. Often our families are our first moral tribe. That’s where we learn what “people like us” believe. But sometimes that breaks down and we start to be divided within our families, too, as today’s scripture points out.

There’s actually an online test, at a website called yourmorals.org. If you go there and take the test you can become part of this big study.

I took the test. It was very interesting to see how I compare to people who said they were liberal or conservative. It’s not an exact match—it never is—but if I didn’t tell you what my political leanings were, you could definitely tell by looking at the results of this test, because I tend to line up with a particular moral tribe.

Jesus raised so many moral questions and challenges. Remember the woman about to be stoned? He said, “Let the one who has not sinned throw the first stone,” and no one threw a stone. Jesus challenged the self-righteous mind with a question about care vs. harm and about fairness. Was it fair to stone her if they themselves were sinners? Was it OK to harm her?

Jesus challenged people quite regularly on the fairness-cheating continuum when he questioned their lack of concern and their financial practices toward widows who were impoverished and suffering.

And why, Jesus asked, do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but don’t see the log in your own eye?

One of the core claims of Jonathan Haidt’s work is that “morality binds and blinds” us. Morality binds us together in a group with people who think like us, but it also blinds us from clearly seeing people who differ from us.

We develop something called confirmation bias, in which we notice all the things that confirm what we already believe, and we trust those things. But we don’t notice, or if we do notice we don’t trust, evidence we see that undermines our current perspective. That’s called confirmation bias. Humans tend to have this.

In today’s scripture Jesus describes a division that was happening within families in his time. I think he also invites us to reach across that division. He says, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?. . . When you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case.”

But how can we do that? How do we reach across the divide that the self-righteous mind sometimes erects between us?

Based on his research, Jonathan Haidt suggests this:

If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the “other” group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. (Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, pp. 364–365)

In other words, we don’t need to come up with better arguments to justify our side, and we don’t even need to understand the arguments for the other side, not primarily. But we do need to get in touch with the intuitions, the gut reactions, both our own and of the people who differ from us.

Throughout the Gospel accounts, Jesus tells us again and again, “Look into your heart and see what you find there.” But he also says, “See your neighbor clearly. Love them as you love yourself.”If you want to open your mind, if you want to reach across a divide, open your heart first.

So to go back to our cartoon, if this husband-wife pair are going to reach across the divide, they’ll have to believe that the other one does indeed care about the future of their country. Then they’ll have to try to find out what the other cares about—which of the six moral foundations are they caring about? They’ll have to speak to that intuitive part of each other, and listen to that part. They’ll have to listen to the heart and listen with their own heart.

This kind of activity might help us find out that we are more connected than we thought. We might find that our family, our tribe, is much bigger than the family we thought we were part of. God’s family is actually very big.

Jesus has a tendency to break down the barriers between us and teach us to expand our horizons. Can we follow where he leads us? Can we reach across the divide and gain a new understanding, make a new friend, develop a new and larger family?

I pray that with God’s help we can. May it be so. Amen.