by Rev. Bob Schaibly, Summer Minister

A sermon given July 1, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Most of you know that the annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association was held here two weeks ago.  Ministers gather two days early, and while socializing, sometimes share stories that can be told from the pulpit:

It seems God recently telephoned the Pope.  Needless to say the Pope was delighted.  “Oh, Most Holy, I am here to do your bidding.”  “Yes, well,” said God, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.  I’ve been thinking about the whole problem of religion on Planet Earth and I’ve decided it is time for complete uniformity in religion; no more deadly divisions!  I want one set of leaders, one church, and one way.” 

The Pope: “Oh, Dear God, I am so excited and I am so humbled at the honor.”

God: “Well, wait a minute.  There is something you need to know: I’m calling from Salt Lake City.” 

Now of course at our meetings there were also some intellectually redeeming things said, too.  For one thing there were about 20 programs on such subjects as peacemaking, conflict resolution in Palestine and Darfur, conscientious objection to war, and they were popularly attended.  Last year we Unitarians decided to discuss the subject of peacemaking for four years.  The specific issue is presented in these words: “Should the UUA reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes … and adopt a principle [—possibly an eighth principle--] of seeking a just peace through nonviolent means?”  The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism are printed on the back cover of your order of service, in the middle of the second column.  When the first seven principles were debated a generation ago, it was argued that a non-creedal church ought not to adopt principles that would be perceived as a creed; that argument is sure to arise again.  There is also an idea to expand the first principle by changing “every person” to include “all beings,” and this is attributed to Buddhist influence within our movement.  This is not just because we are engaged in an epic disaster of a war right now.  We are surely influenced by Martin Luther King’s non-violence, based on the work done by Mohandas Gandhi—King said “For civilization to advance it must come to terms with Gandhi.”

Peace, war, and social justice have always been religious issues.  What every religion shares, what every religion has in common, is some phrasing of what Christians call The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or, just as often, put this way, Do nothing to others you would not have done to you.  That clarifies the question of torture: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or the question of mere interrogation, an ominous word: Do nothing to others that you would not have done to you.

From Moses come the Ten Commandments, among them Thou shalt not kill; and from the Old Testament prophets comes the sensitivity that social justice is what brings peace; peace is not the absence of war—peace is the presence of justice.  “Treat the stranger kindly [--some translations say the foreigner--] for remember you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.” 

For over 300 years the early Christians were pacifists and following the teachings of Jesus, they did even more.  From Jesus comes the example of caring for my neighbor, and who is my neighbor?  Anyone I come upon in need, even my traditional enemy, as illustrated by the parable of The Good Samaritan.  From Buddha comes the first of the Five Precepts which begins, “Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life,” and which ends, “I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world….” 

According to legend the Buddha told the story about some boys who walked to the beach one day.  They began to play, building castles in the sand, roads, bridges, forts.  Suddenly the tone changed; it got competitive and angry.  One boy said, “This is my place,” and marked it off.  Another said, “Don’t step over this line!”  One said, “I’ll kill the guy who touches my fort.”  When the sun began to go down; it was time to go home; the boys gathered their things and went home to supper.  The Buddha ends the story this way: “And the tide came in.”  Yep, the tide came in and the playing field was leveled.  What was that all about anyway?!

I like reading bumper stickers, and if you do, too, you can have fun just walking around this church before everyone drives off!  There’s one that says, “I’m already against the next war.”  I don’t know if that is a reference to our nation’s plans to go war against Iran—or if it’s a pacifist statement that means “I’ll always be against war.”  That’s what it would mean if I had it.  

Some of the messages are bitter: “Be nice to America or we’ll bring democracy to your country.”  And some are Christian and pithy: “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”  Indeed, who would Jesus bomb!  We know what Jesus would think of cluster bombs, the kind that attracts children because they look like toys.  If you have read the Bible you know that Jesus is repeatedly shown eating and drinking, with everyone and even those held in disrepute by the proper folks.  Right there we have the beginning of a Christian foreign policy!  When a candidate for public office says Jesus is the man he or she admires most, the follow-up question must be, “And how will that affect your votes on legislative issues?”

There are three points to this sermon.  First, peace is better than war.  Not everyone thinks so, as you may have realized in the past few years as politicians determined to do something about 9/11 ran off to bomb people.  I think they thought they had to do something.  The Buddhist advice is: Don’t just do something; sit there!  That of course is a minority point of view! 

Some say war toughens our young men; for without it they become effeminate –and now we’ve named the real enemy, effeminacy—and war will make men of them.  Sam Keen, a great liberal social thinker on men’s issues says, “The pillars of male identity are warfare, work and sex.”  Lord Tennyson penned the lines for young men off to war, “Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die.”  War is our way of policing the world, which as the world’s only superpower, we must take responsibility for. 

Always follow the money.  It may be that the people who manufacture armaments, weapons, are glad for the economic boost to their bottom line.  The great American playwright Arthur Miller in his play, All My Sons, explores the human costs of cost-cutting in war manufacturing.  During the current war we have tolerated giving out contracts to one of Halliburton’s companies without ever receiving bids; the whistleblower in the Pentagon said, “We never do this,” and she was let go.  Defrauding the government, that is to say the taxpayers, which is to say us, has always been a wartime issue.  Some thought there should be no profits for any company selling war material to the government; any profits made on war should be confiscated.  President Harry S. Truman may have had this in mind when he said, “There is one word for war-profiteering, and that word is treason!” 

I have been further influenced against war and armies and militarism by reading Martin Luther King: “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for humanity to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.”  I was influenced by making pastoral calls at the Houston VA Hospital; it is new, it is massive and full.  Parking there is like the long-term parking at Portland International Airport.  Men who are not admitted to the hospital sometimes live in their cars awaiting their next treatment or appointment; they live too far to commute.  When the federal budgets are made politicians fail to budget adequately for the tremendous number of injured; the war always costs far more than anticipated because our expenses go on for decades.  I was a young man when the last widow of a Civil War veteran died and her pitiful pension ended.  We pay a great deal to the veterans of WW II.  The number of Vietnam veterans swelled the ranks of the homeless after the war ended.  Though it is more subtle to calculate, society takes on an additional expense in the increase of alcoholism, drug use, unemployment and domestic violence.  Peace is better than war.

Point 2 – War should be outlawed, banned, and abolished because we dare not go to war anymore.  Everyone opposed to pacifism says, “What about World War II?”  We are not going to fight WW II again.  It ended when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki.  Today we have nuclear bombs.  A nuclear bomb is to an atomic bomb as Mt. Hood is to the West Hills. 

A Unitarian dad argues for the use of nuclear bombs.  “We paid for these weapons, we developed them, and if we are going to put my son and a whole lot of other American boys in harm’s way, that is real war, and in a real war we have got to use every single thing we have to win it!  It’s a betrayal of our soldiers to hold back; it’s wrong not to try to win quickly.”  The other men in the group talk about the danger of radiation all over the world.  He is emotional, he loves his son, and he is adamant, saying, “We paid $10,000 for that kid’s orthodontist, and I don’t know how much for his dermatologist.”  It is expensive to raise kids, and there is a tremendous emotional investment.  This boy needs purpose and drama and beauty and he has enlisted.  My heart aches.  And for tens of thousands of civilians, people who wanted to live in peace and live their lives, go to work, have family gatherings, talk and play games, go to temple-church-mosque, people in the World Trade Center, in Baghdad and Afghanistan.

The Op-ed page of yesterday’s New York Times featured a story about Senator Gordon Smith, who many of us know.  He said he phoned the parents of the 103 Oregon soldiers killed and he wished he could tell them confidently that their children have not died in vain.  On the floor of the Senate he has been against the current war, describing it as “absurd.”  Yesterday he said he would add the word “insane.”

When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima a writer named John Hersey went there and subsequently wrote a short book called Hiroshima.  If you have never read it I recommend it.  It was first published in its entirety in The New Yorker magazine; the editors thought it so important they deleted everything else from that issue of the magazine and published only that!  This is the only time that has ever happened.  It tells how human beings sitting near rocks became annihilated into a shadow form.  Burned people went to the river and jumped in to stop the burning.  When men in a boat went to rescue a burned man they reached for his hands and his crisped skin came off his body like a body glove.  Dear people, war is unthinkable and impossible for what can happen to God’s creation and all God’s children.  If nuclear bombs fall the living will envy the dead.  The future of war and the future of the human race are at cross purposes.

In the 20^th and 21^st centuries the means of warfare changed exponentially with napalm, more powerful bombs, cluster bombs, and landmines.  The president seeks continued funding for a war in space that has already cost billions without success, and for powerful new nuclear bombs to freshen our stockpile of weapons which we dare not use.  To use them is make the world radioactive, including our food and our children.

More trenchant are the words of General Douglas Macarthur: “I know war as few others living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting.  I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”

Albert Einstein was asked, “What weapons do you predict will be used to fight World War III?”  “I can’t predict that,” he said, “but I can tell you this: World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”  To be a pacifist today is to be a pragmatist.  War must be abolished. 

My third point you have anticipated: I think we UUs ought to put ourselves on the side of sanity and join with pacifist churches.  We have been engaged in a great scientific experiment for thousands of years, testing whether war is a good way of resolving conflict.  As of today the results indicate that it is not a good way of resolving conflict!  Wars leave bitterness in the defeated people that plant the seed for the next war.  We now know that friends become enemies and may become friends again, as the United States did with Germany and Japan after WW II, not that that can resurrect the millions who died.  “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”  [Jeanette Rankin]

But don’t we need an army?  Aren’t some conflicts with tyrants impossible to resolve peaceably?  Let’s look at our personal history of conflict!

On a long car trip in the back seat of the car two kids fight.  Dad says stop it.  One kid says the other one started it.  Dad says, “So tell us—if you can’t peaceably settle it yourself, tell us.”  There will always be a need for parents.

I once stopped a fight between two boys perhaps 8 years old.  Their bikes were on the ground and they were slugging each other.  I told them to stop it and stepped between them.  Their bodies were trembling and they tried to hold back tears.  There will always be a role for adults to play in this world. 

One kid is being obnoxious on the school yard.   There will always be unhappy children who bully other children.  If the bully’s bad behavior cannot unite the good kids they must tell the playground supervisor or the teacher.  We go to school to learn, and one thing we must learn is that bullying cannot prevail.  There will always be a need for teachers, counselors, mediators and judges.

Conflict is a part of life, and so is the resolution of conflict and its prevention.  We will always need police.  We will always need trained and supported United Nations peacekeepers, an International Court of Law, and inspectors who have unlimited access.

We Americans are building a new fighter plane that costs $225 million each.   $225 million for one plane!  Yet we profess to have no money for Head Start, no money for colleges, no money for health care.  [Fingers to brain] Is anybody home?!

Speak.  Vote.  Write.  March.  Keep alive the values so that in the future civilians might live in safety.  The veterans fought and died to put an end to war.

Peace saves lives.  Peace saves money.  I say it is for pacifism as it is for Christianity.  As George Bernard Shaw once put it, “They say Christianity has failed!  Why Christianity hasn’t failed!  Christianity hasn’t been tried!”

I close with three brief prayers.  Will you pray with me: O Mars, Great God of War, you have held us in a cultural trance and we have given you our wealth, our first born children, and our hopes for peace.  We are disillusioned—and now we thank you, we thank you! For being without illusions is our best hope.

O Sophia, Great Goddess of Wisdom, We enter your Temple Library to read of the human adventure called civilization.  May you encourage us to risk peace as we drink tea with you.

Great God, grant us peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly. All rights reserved.