You each have essential worth and dignity. This worth and dignity is essential – it is part of your essence. It is sacred, because its source is nothing less than God, our Holy Creator, the Creator of the universe. This means that no one can take this away, no power on this earth. This means that if someone or some power does violate this essential worth and dignity, that is wrong, it should not happen, it should be prevented from happening, and it still does not have the power to take away that essential worth and dignity.

This sacred and essential worth and dignity is the source of your rights. You are endowed by our Creator with certain rights that no power can take away. That’s what “unalienable” means: no power can take them away. These rights are not given by human authorities, and no human power can take them away. They are endowed by our Creator.

Our Creator is the Creator of everyone, therefore everyone has the same essential worth and dignity, and the same essential rights, with no distinction or discrimination. What is true for you – and you, and you – is just as true for me and just as true for everyone else: we each and all have the same essential rights, worth and dignity, deriving from the sacred source of all life. We are each and all children of the living God.  

In fact, it is true for you because it is true for everyone. There is nothing special about any of us that gives us more rights or worth or dignity than anyone else. Nothing.

This is why Christian teachings and practice are at the same time both uplifting and humbling. God uplifts the lowly and humbles the proud, as Mary said. This can be true within the same person, bringing unconditional love to the parts of ourselves that feel ashamed, and brining correction to the parts of ourselves that are haughty and inflated.  

As I’ve shared before, I love how this was put once by a gentleman who was staying at a winter warming shelter we hosted at a previous church I served. This guy got a kick out of going around telling everyone, “Remember kids, you’re special … just like everyone else.”

When it comes to striving for a just society, it’s this “just like everyone else” part that is critically important. Because of human sinfulness, there is a strong tendency for people to slip into double standards: doing to others what we would not tolerate others doing to us; or turning a blind eye to other people’s rights being violated, as long as our rights are being respected. If we say these double-standards are okay, we undercut the very justification for our own rights: either our rights are universal and unalienable, or they can just disappear when someone in power wants them too. Our rights are endowed by our Creator, not by human powers which can take them away at will.

For example, if I have the right to not be arrested and detained by the authorities without valid charges and due process – which is a right I do have, thank God – guess who also has that right and should have that right respected? Everyone else, regardless of whether they share my same status as a citizen. If their rights are violated, it should be very distressing to me, for their sake – because as a Christian I should care about them – but also for my own sake – I cannot be sure my rights won’t be violated either.

This is why it is so important to be clear that human rights are derived from a source beyond human authorities. To secure our rights, we can organize societies to be ruled by just laws. Just laws recognize and protect rights – and they should – but they do not grant rights – God grants rights.

This is a Christian argument for human rights – universal human rights endowed by the Creator of all humanity. At its best, Christian witness to the nature of God and of God’s love for humanity has been very important historically for the moral evolutions that have brought about the most enlightened understanding of human rights. At its worst, folks professing Christianity have done the opposite and have used our religion to justify the violation of people’s essential worth and dignity, and have sought to block moral evolution in our understanding of human rights.

The struggle within Christianity continues to this day. This is a struggle we inherit from ancestors of faith stretching back to the great Hebrew prophets and teachers, who struggled against the injustice of their communities and authorities:

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,” in the words of Proverbes, “for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” (Proverbs 31:8-9)

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land,” said Moses, “you shall not do them wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34) 

Or the prophet Zechariah who said “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another.” (Zechariah 7:9)

I could go on and one.

In the view of the Christians who realize that “God is still speaking,” as we like to say in the United Church of Christ, moral evolution is possible. It’s not inevitable, in this fallen world; it is always incomplete this side of the coming of the Realm of Heaven on earth, but moral evolution is possible. Through God’s sacred activity through history, we can come to realize that more people have more rights than perhaps earlier generations realized or cared to admit. So, for example, there have been Christians who joined the struggle for the right of everyone to be free from enslavement; and there have been Christians who have joined the struggle for worker’s rights and the equal rights of woman and people of color and immigrants and the spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities – even when those views were or are unpopular and even when most other Christians don’t agree.

To realize that everyone has essential worth and dignity is an incredibly powerful realization that invites and challenges us to grow into what the Spirit of Christ calls us. The realization, the invitation, the challenge calls us to grow in our capacity to love. As followers of Jesus, we are called to receive the unconditional love God has for us, to share that love with others, to help them receive it too, and to try to love others with that love as well. Being flawed creatures in a fallen world, we can only do this incompletely, of course, it’s not easy or comfortable, because we all have huge blind spot due to sin, but love is our call.  

With that love can come great joy; with that love can come great pain. But that pain can be a sacred pain, when we know that Christ shares it, and with Christ we can trust that God’s love can lead us to resurrection.

For each of us, when our essential worth and dignity is violated, we feel a terrible, existential level pain. That pain is a sacred pain, because it signals to us the depth of the wrongness goes all the way to the source of our very souls, our sacred Creator, from whom our essential worth and dignity is derived. Through the revelation of Christ, we can know that God suffers that pain – it is not ours alone – and embraces us with a love that can bring us through to renewed life.

This also means that if we feel pain when some else’s rights are violated, the harm done to someone else’s essential worth and dignity, (if we commit the dreaded so-called “sin” of empathy), that pain is also sacred pain. For it connects us with the great body of Christ, who, again, takes on the agony of humanity’s violent contradictions. Our pain on another’s behalf is doubly sacred, you could say, because it is the pain of a broken golden rule:

We are closer to a soul-level of things when we realize when something is done to others that would be profoundly distressing if it were done to us, because it would violate our essential worth and dignity, just as it is violating theirs. We are seeing more clearly the essential worth and dignity of another person, who may be close to us, who may be a stranger. We thus get a heart-glimpse of what God sees and knows and how God loves.

In the words of the Christian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev: “Unjust suffering is divine suffering. And unjust divine suffering brings about the expiation of all human suffering.” (Quoted in Jürgen Moltmann, “The Trinity and the Kingdom,” pg. 47)

So, if you feel that kind of pain at times, due to your unjust suffering or that of others, may you let that pain be sanctified. Don’t run from it, though it is uncomfortable. But also, don’t bear it alone. Share it with community, and share it with Christ. We must let Christ embrace us and uplift us and humble us with the power of God’s universal Love which endows and redeems everyone’s essential worth and dignity. Let that Love strengthen us for the work it calls us to join, and calls us into deeper community, for the sake of what is most alive within you and within all others.

With this love there is not only pain – sacred pain – but also great joy – sacred joy. For nothing is more beautiful than saying “yes” to what is most alive and essential in each of us, from which we all have this essential worth and dignity to enjoy as children of the Living God. With open hearts we can take joy in witnessing the beauty of others coming alive in good ways as well, as children of the Living God. That is truly my hope for each of us and for all of us and all of humanity. This is a hope worth being guided by.

For all this, I give thanks to God.

Delivered Sunday, May 18, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.