“More Important Than Anything Else”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

October 26, 2005

            I want to talk about forgiveness this morning, as I do every year at about this time, and let me begin this morning with a story about my family.

            Every summer, my in-laws visit Hiromi and me from Tokyo, and one of the things that they enjoy doing while there here is working in our yard.

            You see, in Tokyo, my in-laws live in a small one-bedroom condominium apartment in a tall building in the center of Tokyo. It’s a great place for them to live, but they don’t get to do much gardening or yardwork. For my mother-in-law, who grew up in the Japanese countryside, this is something she misses.

            The fact that they enjoy doing gardening and yard work works out very well, because I really don’t enjoy those kinds of things that much. I know some people really get into working in the yard, but it’s just not my thing.

            Sitting in the yard is much more my thing, and during the summer, I try to do as much of that as possible. We have several tall Douglas firs in our backyard, and there is nothing I enjoy more than sitting out in a lawnchair and reading a book under the shade of those trees.   When the grass gets so high it makes it difficult to turn a page, then I’ll mow.

            I think one of the reasons that Hiromi and I fell in love with the house was those towering trees. Not only did they provide lots of shade, but one of the things we noticed the first time we walked through the house was that the tree’s low-hanging branches block our view of our neighbors’ houses, making our backyard seem like it was in the middle of a forest and not the middle of a suburb. They turned our backyard into a kind of sanctuary.

            Of course, every year, when it gets windy, we usually get a few fallen branches in our yard from the trees. I usually just pile them in a corner of the yard, but one day this past summer, my in-laws decided to cut up these branches so they could be put out with the rest of the yard waste, something I probably should have done a long time ago.

            “Where are you going?” I asked as they were getting ready to leave.

            “To Home Depot to buy a power saw to cut up the small branches in the backyard.”

            “Oh,” I said. “That’s a good idea.”

            Now I want to stop right here and say, if you take home no other lesson from this morning’s service, let it be this one: “Houseguests and power saws are never a good combination.”

            The next morning, I was fiddling around upstairs and I heard my in-laws working in the backyard and I heard the sound of the power saw. “They must be cutting up those fallen branches,” I thought and kept on doing whatever it was I was doing.

            A while later, I still heard the power saw and thought to myself, there must have been more fallen branches than I thought.

            A while later, I still heard the power saw. I decided I better go check to see what was happening.

            When I walked out in the backyard, I saw my father-in-law up on a ladder with the power saw and my mother-in-law below giving him directions. Then I looked to the ground, and saw that they not only cut up all the fallen branches, they had also cut off all the low-hanging branches on most of the trees in our backyard, giving us an overly open view of the rest of the neighborhood.

            “Nani yatte-iru no!” I yelled. (“What are you doing?”)

            “Trimming the trees,” they said.

            “But why?” I asked.

            “We thought it was something that needed to be done.”

            “No!” I said. “No. No. No. No. No. No.”

            But it was too late. They were nearly done, and a half-dozen branches lay in our backyard.

            Until that time, I had always found people who got overly emotional about trees kind of silly, but at that time, I didn’t know whether to scream or cry, so I just stood there, taking deep, strained breaths.

            “You should have asked first,” I said to my in-laws. “You should have asked first,” I said. “You should have asked,” I said.

            Of course, I hadn’t told them they needed to ask me about anything else. I hadn’t told them they needed to ask me about the flower beds they planted, or the shrubbery they trimmed, or about the paving stones they put down. I had told them they could do whatever they wanted. But I didn’t know they were going to do this!

            I went back in to the house and sat down the living room, feeling deeply conflicted.

            You see, my in-laws are wonderful people. They’re very generous with Hiromi and me, and I know they would do almost anything for us. When they come to visit, they always try to help us out however they can. And they really do there best to get along with me, which isn’t always easy, because I’m no saintly son-in-law.

            (Hiromi says one of the challenges of being married to a minister is that a lot of people think your husband is this loving, caring, calm person but you know he can be as obstinate, insensitive, impatient, forgetful, and lazy as anybody else)

            And so I knew that they were trying to help out that morning, and doing so out of the best of intentions, but they had cut down branches off almost all the trees in my backyard.

            “Okay,” I said to myself. “You should forgive them. They were trying to help.  They didn’t know you’d be upset. Maybe they should have asked, but you hadn’t told them they should ask about other things. So you should forgive them. After all, you’re a minister.”

            “I hate being a minister,” I said back to myself. “I don’t want to be a minister. I just want to be sad and angry and upset right now.”

            “Yeah,” I said to myself. “It’s okay to be sad and angry and upset, but you should still forgive them,” I said to myself.

            “Why?” I asked myself. “Why should I be so forgiving? I loved those trees just the way they were. Every year, I look forward to sitting under those trees in the summer. I was even thinking about putting up a swing or a hammock, but now I can’t.”

            “But people are more important than trees,” I said to myself. “People are more important than anything else.”

            “Yes,” I answered myself begrudgingly. (I hated it when I was right.) “People are more important than trees. People are more important than anything else.”

            I went to find Hiromi’s parents. “Where are you’re parents?” I asked Hiromi.

“They feel so terrible about what they’ve done they’re packing to go home early.”

They weren’t scheduled to leave for another few weeks.

            I went to talk with them. “I know you were only trying to help us,” I said. “So please don’t go. Stay and enjoy the rest of your visit,” I said.

            “Really?” they said.

            “Yes,” I said.

            “We’re sorry,” they said.

            “I know,” I said. “And it’s okay,” I said. “Hitobito wa ki yori daizi desu,” I said. (“People are more important than trees.”)  They looked at me strangely. It’s kind of a strange thing to say in any language. But I think they understood.

            Every year I choose one Sunday morning to talk with you about the topic of forgiveness, and this year, this is the Sunday morning I’ve chosen to talk about this topic.      The fall of the year seems to be an appropriate time to talk about forgiveness because as the leaves change their colors and the weather turns cool, the end of another year is in sight, and I think it’s a good time to begin to look back over everything that has happened during the past year or so and to ask ourselves if there is anybody of whom we need to ask forgiveness or to forgive.

            I sometimes wonder whether I should give yet another sermon on forgiveness, but my experience as your minister tells me that forgiveness is something with which many of us, and I include myself, continue to struggle every year.

            And I wanted to share this story from this past summer this morning because reflecting on it myself has helped me remember some important things - - things that I probably knew already but had at least temporarily forgotten, like I do with so many of life’s most important things, and I want to share with you and suggest for your consideration three things that this reflecting helped me remember.

            Reflecting on my own experience, the first thing I want to suggest for your consideration is, very simply, that forgiveness is a part of all our relationships.

            And the second thing I want to suggest for your consideration - - and for me this is even more important - - is that sometimes forgiveness is necessary even when everybody involved is acting out of the very best of intentions. Even when everybody involved is acting out of love, we will sometimes hurt one another and sometimes need to forgive another.

            Why?

            I think it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable, not because we are inherently bad or sinful, as some religious traditions say, but because though most of us are mostly good, all of us are also imperfect.

            We communicate imperfectly with one another. We imagine imperfectly what other people need or want or what’s important to them. And we sometimes just make mistakes.

            Sometimes they’re “careless” mistakes and sometimes they’re “honest” mistakes, and a lot of times it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. But whatever kind of mistakes they may be, as a result of the mistakes, we sometimes hurt other people and sometimes other people hurt us, even when this isn’t our intention, even when it’s the last thing in the world we would want to happen.

            I know that my in-laws didn’t intend to make me so upset because I know how much they love and care for both Hiromi and me. And yet they did, just as I - - too many times - - have ended up making upset or even hurting people whom I love.

            It’s hard for us to remember, or at least it is for me, but I think one of the truths about human relationships is that if we dance with one another, we are sometimes going to step on each other’s toes. It just can’t be helped.

            I want to suggest that one of the things that makes it harder to forgive, both ourselves and others, is believing that if we only try hard enough to be good, and if other people only try hard enough to be good, that nobody will ever get hurt, and that if somebody does get hurt, it’s always because somebody wasn’t trying hard enough to be good.

            I think this happens in our families. I think that this happens especially in religious communities. I think that sometimes we come to church and we think, “Oh, it’s a church. And in a church, people are always loving of each other, and people are always nice to each other, and so nobody will ever get hurt by anything anybody else ever says or does, and it will never be necessary to forgive one another around here.”

            But as caring and loving as I believe this community is, it’s still a community full of people who are 100 percent human beings, and people who are 100 percent human beings aren’t always loving and compassionate with one another, no matter where they are, even at church.

            It’s not like churches can put something in the coffee to make people more loving and caring. (I’ve looked into it, and it’s just not possible.)

            And as I’ve said, even if people were always loving and compassionate with one another, even if people always acted out of the best possible intentions, forgiveness would still be necessary simply because we are imperfect.

            And this is why we forgiveness will always be necessary because no matter how wise any of us ever become, we will never, ever be perfect.

            In fact, this is why I believe one of the paradoxes of life is that we sometimes hurt or are hurt most by those we love - - our families, our friends, and even our fellow church members.  

            This is, by the way, why I believe that instead of thinking of religious communities as places where we never have to forgive each other, we should think of them as places where we practice forgiveness - - and here I mean “practice” like practicing a musical instrument so you can get better at it - - so we can more easily practice forgiveness in the rest of our lives.

            So, again, the first thing I want to suggest for your consideration this morning is that forgiveness is a necessary part of all our relationships, and the second thing is that it’s necessary even when everybody is acting out of the best of intentions.

            So what’s the third thing I want to suggest?

            In years past, when I’ve talked about forgiveness, some of you have asked me later, “I want to forgive, but I don’t know how.” I’ve sometimes struggled to know how to answer this question.

            The Unitarian minister Robert Raible was the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Dallas for many years.  (This was not Peter Raible, who was the minister of the University Unitarian Church in Seatttle, but Peter’s father.) And Bob Raible used to say something all the time that was at the heart of his ministry. He used to say, “People are precious.”

            Bruce Pringle, who used to attend the Dallas church, told me a story a few years ago about this. There was a gathering of ministers, and two ministers were so upset with one another, they were on the verge of throwing punches. Bob Raible was about to intervene when one of the ministers said to him, “Don’t give us any of that ‘People are precious’ crap, Bob.”

            And yet, I think a lot of time what happens when we have trouble forgiving or reconciling, it is because we’ve forgotten that “people are precious,” and we’ve put the value of “something” over “someone.”

            Sometimes that something is money. Sometimes it’s something else. A lot of time, I think, it’s our own pride, our own egos, or some idea we have about ourselves.

            With me, it was those trees branches, which even seems silly to say now. Were they important to me? Yes. Were they as important to me as my relationship with my in-laws? No.

            It’s always a dangerous situation when people put the value of things over the value of other people.

            I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of our brothers and sisters in more traditional religious traditions who are fighting over the inclusion of gays and lesbians in their churches. Some folks have seem to put the value of the bible over the value of their fellow church members.

            Of course, we as Unitarian Universalists are not immune to putting things above people either. 

            We Unitarian Universalists like nothing more than a good discussion. Sometimes we even like a good argument, which occasionally makes Unitarian Universalist churches - - including this church - - seeming more like a debating society than a religious community.

            Unlike our more religiously traditional brothers and sisters, we don’t put the bible above our relationships with other people, but sometimes - - sometimes - - we do put our own ideas, our own notions about right and wrong, our own ideas about the way the world should be, our own rigidities about political correctness, above our relationships with other people.

            Sometimes in our yearning for a good argument, I fear, we forget about our relationship with the person with whom we are arguing.

            For the most part, as I’ve said many times before, I think we are a very loving, caring community, but one of my hopes for us as a religious community is that we would more often remember the words of William James when he said, “It is more important to be kind, than to be right.”

            And when it comes to forgiveness…well, forgiveness is never easy. I truly believe that in many ways, forgiveness is an unnatural act.

            But I believe that it’s easier when we remember the importance of the relationship we have with the person we’re trying to forgive. I think it’s easier when we remember that the relationships we have with other people in life may be the source of our greatest frustrations, but that they are also the source of our greatest joy and fulfillment.

            Three things to remember:

            First, forgiveness is a part of every relationship. Second, forgiveness is sometimes necessary even when everybody involved acts out of the best of intentions. Third, it helps us to forgive when we remember that the people in our lives and our relationships with them are the most important things in our lives, perhaps more important than anything else.

            My hopes for us all: May each us discover within ourselves the courage to ask for forgiveness and the grace to forgive, both ourselves and one another and all in this world whom we love.

            So may it be.

            Amen.