Recent Sermon

Title

Crossed Wires:

When Values Collide

by Rev. Ken Langer

First Church of Barre, Universalist

Date

Sunday, July 26, 2026

Sermon

(This is a follow-up to a previous sermon entitled "Who Holds The Moral Compass.")

What would you do if you found yourself walking through a parking lot and suddenly saw a wallet lying on the asphalt? Would you pick it up or would you just keep walking? Let’s say you pick it up and find $200 in cash, a driver’s license, some wrinkled receipts, and a few family photos inside. Do you return it with the cash still inside, or do you take the money and run?

Your answer to that question will depend on your economic status and your ethical viewpoint. If you are economically stable (and not greedy), you might choose to return the wallet to its owner with the cash intact because you feel it would be the right thing to do. You might consider that if you had lost your wallet, you would hope that someone would do the same for you. Imagine, however, that you are someone who is starving and struggling. You might choose a different response and take that cash because it could help alleviate your own very real suffering.

This is a sermon about ethics—about the principles we all either accept or formulate to help us make decisions about how we should act in the world. Most such sermons provide a set of principles and then tell you to go out and just do good, but the actual application of ethics is messy. This is because every situation we encounter is unique and complex, and sometimes our principles overlap like crossed wires, or perhaps a more modern analogy would be like trying to listen to all the voices at once on a Zoom call.

When my daughter was born, I wanted to give her some simple ethical ideals to remember as she grew up and began to make her own decisions. I researched the moral codes of several religious traditions from around the world and distilled them down to three words I believe they all share. I made a poster with the words on it and placed it on the back of her bedroom door. I then wrote a small book that explained my process, my reasoning, and my detailed explanation of each, entitled Three Guidelines for Ethical Living: What My Daughter Taught Me. The three words I chose were kindness, consideration, and authenticity.

Kindness means striving to avoid causing harm. Consideration means being respectful of others and understanding what is important to them. Authenticity means being as genuine and sincere as you can be. All of these principles should apply not only to others but also to yourself and to the earth you inhabit.

Kindness, consideration, and authenticity: these three words are simple enough for a child to memorize, but when explored fully, they can be complex enough to aid anyone in leading a meaningful and moral life. None of these ideals need to be handed down on golden tablets or delivered by some ancient prophet. They are freely available to all.

The challenge with these or any other set of principles is that sometimes they overlap, and we may be faced with a difficult choice. Real life presents us with situations where being kind to one person may mean being unkind to another, where telling the truth may cause pain, and where staying quiet might mean allowing a lie to stand. The guidelines were never meant to be read in isolation; they were intended to be understood in relation to each other. I purposefully placed those three ideals in a specific order to suggest that consideration should come before authenticity, and that kindness should reign above all.

Imagine you have told a friend an outright lie. You are taking her to dinner—just the two of you—when, in reality, you are driving her to a surprise birthday party. You have completely violated guideline three. You have deceived your friend, but you are acting in the service of guideline one: kindness. You are bringing joy into her life. When kindness and truth collide on the way to someone’s birthday, kindness wins, and hardly anyone even notices a trade was made.

Imagine a family with an empty refrigerator and a grocery store with a tray of fruit sitting unattended by the door. Guideline two says to respect the property of others. We know that stealing is wrong, yet we might have a hard time condemning a parent who takes the fruit so that her child doesn't go to bed hungry. Kindness, or the prevention of harm, can be more important than property. That's the whole purpose of having an order—not to make hard choices easy, because nothing makes them easy, but to keep you from being unable to make any decision at all.

The world's great religions have also considered this dilemma. In Jewish law, there's a principle that states the preservation of life overrides nearly every other commandment in the Torah. Buddhism incorporates a concept called upaya, or “skillful means,” which is the idea that a compassionate teacher may alter a precept if it can relieve suffering. Even the just war tradition within Christian ethics, for all its complications, exists because someone recognized that “do not kill” and “protect the innocent” can end up on opposite sides of the same battlefield.

That is what a moral predicament can feel like: a battlefield, and sometimes people feel it is more important to win rather than to be ethical. Like anything else, moral principles can be abused or used as an excuse to act in a person’s own interest. People talk themselves into committing all sorts of harm by disguising it as kindness. Some examples include: a person who cheats on their spouse and calls it self-care; a person who ghosts a friend in crisis and calls it protecting their own peace; or a person who withholds a truth someone genuinely needs to hear, not to spare them pain, but to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.

In those and many other situations, the guidelines need not be ignored. They might not promise you a clean answer, but they do require that you choose with as much kindness, as much respect, and as much honesty as the moment allows, and then live with the choice made. That, too, is part of authenticity: not just being true to who you are when the choice is easy, but staying honest with yourself about the choice you actually made when it wasn't.

Here’s what I would like you to take with you: not a rule book, because none exists for every life situation, but a set of questions to ask yourself in the midst of a dilemma. First: which choice prevents the most harm? Second, if harm is roughly equal on both sides, which choice shows the most respect for what belongs to someone else or their right to their own choices? Third, if kindness and consideration have been taken into account, which choice keeps you most true to who you actually are, rather than to how you wish to appear?

In closing, let us return to that parking lot, wallet in hand. What do you do? I still cannot provide an easy answer, and I wouldn’t trust a minister who claimed they could. Most of us, most days, will never stand in a burning building and decide who to carry out first. Our challenges are often smaller, like money found in a lost wallet, a white lie to spare someone's feelings, a boundary we bend because someone we love is struggling, or a truth we soften because the whole truth would wound more than it would heal. But whether small or large, the same questions apply every time.

When good collides with good, let kindness break the tie. And when you're not sure whether it's truly kindness or merely convenience, ask again. That question, asked honestly and frequently, is the real work of living an ethical life.

Notes

NOTES

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