It takes courage to keep up with the international news. So many of the photographs we see on television, in newspapers and on web sites are just sickening. There are images of violence and suffering everywhere. After a while we just want to avert our eyes. In fact, we typically don’t see the worst of it. There were no news photographs of the Nazi death camps while the killing was going on. It wasn’t until after the war that we saw the photos. And so it was for the “ethnic cleansing” atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, the killings of nearly a million people in Rwanda, the mass killings in Cambodia, and the murder of 200,000 Mayans in Guatemala in the early 1980s. The perpetrators of the worst evils don’t want anyone to see what is really happening, and we often don’t see until it is too late. Yet what we do see of human suffering is bad enough. Today, there are a few pictures emerging from Darfur. They would make a stone weep. The steady stream of after-explosion photos from Iraq is now depressingly routine.
Try to relive for a moment how you feel when you see a photo of a diseased and dying child. Can you recall how you felt when you first saw those unreal and horrific black and white photographs of piles of bodies at the Nazi death camps? Last summer I was part of a Unitarian Universalist Service Committee delegation to Guatemala from our church. In April we are sending another delegation. No one who went on our trip will ever forget seeing human remains that had been excavated from mass graves. We visited a small nonprofit organization in Guatemala City where a handful of forensic anthropologists attempt to find evidence that will help identify remains in order to give closure to family members. We saw piles of small caskets used to transport the remains of the massacred back to rural communities for a traditional Mayan burial. It is just sickening, just sickening. One doesn’t know whether to cry or to scream or to just stand there, simply stunned and aghast.
Other feelings typically follow when we look upon atrocities and human suffering. One feeling I get is the frustration of utter powerlessness. This is part of the reason we turn away and go into denial about what we see. Yes, the mass killings in Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia were horrible. But what could I do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Or so it seemed.
When we see a picture of human suffering, one natural reaction is to turn our head and look away. It hurts to look. I would be the last person to suggest that we force ourselves to dwell on pictures of terrible suffering. That is just morbid. Yet we should never look away too soon. We need to let ourselves feel compassion and even revulsion—for our feelings of empathy, compassion and revulsion contain the seeds of a new future.
I believe that our ability to create justice and peace is based on our capacity to respond emotionally when we see suffering. Compassion, which means to suffer with, is the foundation of true justice. When we talk about justice, it can sound so cold. Justice so often seems like just a nice word for taking revenge. Seeking justice can so easily descend into petty partisan politics or endless public policy rants. Or the idea of justice can appear just legalistic. Too many of the people I have known who said they were committed to justice making have been angry, bitter people who were prone to justify violence. As Martin Luther King once said, justice that takes the form of requiring an eye for an eye ends up leaving everyone blind.
No, justice must not be cold. It must not be motivated by hatred or revenge. Justice that can endure has to have the warmth of human kindness. Justice must not be about vengeance; it must be about healing. Justice should be about creating conditions where exploitation and oppression cannot take root.
If you and I feel that the suffering of another human being is somehow different from the suffering of our selves or our immediate family, if you and I feel like another human being matters less than you or I do, then we become capable of terrible violence and oppression. This is why we must nurture our children’s capacity for empathy. This is why we must teach them respect for all people and to celebrate diversity. At its root, every atrocity, every genocide, is founded on the conviction that some group of people—Jews, blacks, Indians, Muslims—is somehow less human than you or I. Genocide is the logical, inevitable result of a lack of compassion.
Real justice is founded on pain. Real justice is founded on the pain we feel when we see a starving child or a mutilated body. Real justice is based on you or I saying, “That is horrible. That is wrong! That must be stopped!”
“That must be stopped.” But how? How? What can I do to stop the killing? It is at this moment that we realize that we are virtually powerless. That is, alone we are powerless. Together, together—now that is something entirely different. Together, and only together, we can help stop atrocities. Together, and only by acting together, we can help create justice and peace. Your compassion and my compassion in isolation are impotent. Our compassion acting in unison can change the world.
Today is Justice Sunday. Today we come together to recognize and celebrate what our united compassion has done. And we come together to rededicate ourselves to the work that lies before us. In particular, we come to celebrate and support the work of our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
Our Service Committee, our UUSC, was born during the Holocaust in Europe. It began with the heroic work of Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who went to Europe to help save scores of adults and children. Waitstill was a Unitarian minister and his wife Martha was a social worker. Last fall at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C., I met a woman who was one of the children they helped to escape certain death.
Today, the Service Committee continues to work for human rights. The need has never been greater. I am deeply grateful that our Service Committee exists. Here is an organization that is a living expression of our bedrock religious values of human worth and dignity, of compassion, of equality, of justice. And the UUSC puts these values into practice in the ways I could never do alone nor could we do as a congregation. The UUSC creates a practical and effective outlet for our compassion. It gives me a chance to align myself with a group I can trust. I am so glad to support a group that has a philosophy of working with local and indigenous groups all over the world. I am proud to serve on the UUSC’s ministerial advisory group. I am absolutely delighted to see how the partnership between our congregation and our Service Committee has grown in the last few years. I am proud of our delegations to Guatemala and our support for education of impoverished Mayan children. I am excited about the opportunity to help lead a UUSC sponsored group of ministers and seminarians to Chiapas and Oaxaca next summer. And I am very pleased today to honor the work of Wyley Eaton, who did so much to keep the Service Committee flame alive here for a generation. And now that flame is a veritable bonfire. We have an enthusiastic JUC UUSC committee now. They are joined by an active Peace, Liberty and Justice task force. I urge you to visit their tables in the commons area after the service. Get information. Learn about things you can do. It makes a difference.
I said that the need has never been greater. Today much of the attention of our Service Committee is focused on the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Unfortunately our world provides a steady stream of atrocities. The situation in Darfur is today’s great challenge.
More than 300,000 people have been killed. And the killing continues. Two and a half million people have been forced to leave their homes. They live in unspeakable conditions. Shrinking resources brought on by environmental disaster led to violence between Africans and Arabs. The Sudanese government took sides, arming nomadic Arabs, the Janjaweed. The Janjaweed are on a murderous rampage. They burn villages, destroy crops, kill livestock, murder men and children, and rape women. The Sudanese army provides cover.
Our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s “Drumbeat for Darfur” campaign is working on a number of levels. At the level of public witness, the UUSC is pressuring the White House to make Darfur a higher priority. To its credit, this administration has spoken out. However, it has also failed to use its diplomatic and economic resources to apply effective pressure. The UUSC has also called for an end to rape of women and girls, has advocated that all sides respect human rights of civilians, and has called for a United Nations force to provide protection.
The UUSC is also in Darfur. The UUSC has an admirable record of concentrating its help on the most vulnerable. In the case of Darfur, the focus is on women. The Service Committee is supporting protection for displaced women, helping rape victims get health care and counseling, and helping women get access to firewood. Access to firewood is essential, for when women leave the camp boundaries in search of firewood they are often attacked and raped.
What can you and I do? There is additional information in the commons. Briefly, we can donate to the Drumbeat for Darfur campaign. We can can let our elected leaders know of our concern. We can participate in public events that draw attention to this ongoing genocide.
In the last few years this congregation has offered generous support to help our Service Committee respond to the disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami. We have a growing commitment to help heal the wounds of the massacres in Guatemala. And now it is Darfur.
After Darfur there will be some other atrocity. I have hope that humanity can get beyond this, that we can learn to live together in peace. But I also know that we are not there yet, nor will we be for a long time. In time humanity may create a world where war and genocide are remembered only in history. I believe it is possible.
If and when we do create such a world, it will be because people like you and me joined together. It will be because people like you and me committed themselves to take action. It won’t happen right away. But it will never happen if people like us do not take concrete steps.
This is why we must band together to create and to support organizations like our Service Committee. The fact that we need to be in this for the long haul is why we need institutions.
It all starts with the tiny seed of a compassionate response. It starts deep in our souls. It starts with that pang we feel when we hear a cry, when we see a starving child and her bereft mother. It begins when we want to do something to stop the pain.
That feeling spreads. We form a congregation. In our congregation, our compassion takes the form of caring for each other. Within our congregation, compassion takes the form of pastoral care—of caring for the needs of our own members.
But compassion can not stop there. Compassion responds to needs in the community. Compassion demands that we take the part of the helpless, that we speak up for tolerance and understanding. Compassion expresses itself in everything from housing the homeless to advocating for the rights of gay, lesbians, immigrants, and other marginalized people. Compassion extended to our community takes the form of social action.
And yet compassion must not stop there. Having witnessed what compassion can do in our congregation and our community, we are emboldened to extend it further still. We know that we are all connected, all of us, all around the world. The compassion of thousands and then millions joins together. When compassion extends far and wide, beyond our borders, it becomes justice. It becomes justice rolling down like waters, relentless and unstoppable. Eventually, compassion becomes justice. It becomes justice when we unite with common purpose and build a new world.
It all starts as a feeling. Nurture that feeling in your heart. In it is the seed of a new life. Let us feel the pain of others. Let us combine our feelings and channel them into a powerful force. May compassion live in our hearts. May justice roll.
Amen.
.