Just three weeks ago we gathered in this sanctuary on Christmas Eve. As we do every Christmas, we ended our evening services by lighting a candle with the flame from our chalice and passing that light from candle to candle. We dimmed the electric lights and let the light from our candles spread throughout the congregation and fill this sanctuary with a beautiful soft glow. As we passed the light from candle to candle, we sang “Silent Night.” It is a beautiful closing to our Christmas Eve services. I look forward to it every year. I wouldn’t change this tradition for anything.
Every year at Christmas we, along with untold millions of others, reaffirm our hope for peace on earth. Our final Christmas Eve service is an interfaith affirmation of peace. It features readings on the theme of peace from humanity’s great religious traditions. Human beings everywhere long for peace. We long for peace the way we long for love.
And yet the dream of peace on earth is still just a dream. We pray for peace at Christmas, and then immediately get back to the business of killing each other in wars. Among the countries that call themselves Christian, there is the wartime tradition of a cease fire on Christmas Day, only to return to having soldiers kill each other the following day. We may long for peace, but we wage war.
Just four days ago our president announced that he is going to send a “surge” of 21,000 soldiers to Iraq. They will go to the most violent parts of that country. They go to kill and be killed. There is certain to be a surge in the killing. Already more than 3,000 American soldiers have died in this war. And that is only a tiny part of the killing. We don’t know how many Iraqis have died. Low estimates are in the range of 50,000; high estimates are in the hundreds of thousands. We do know that the overwhelming majority of people who have died in Iraq were noncombatants. And this does not count the soldiers and civilians who have been injured.
More soldiers will soon go to Iraq despite the fact that the clear majority of our citizens oppose this escalation. Many in the president’s own party oppose this new strategy. Our soldiers, too many of whom are drawn from the least privileged parts of American society, go to fight a war that has been driven by the delusional fantasies of ideologues. So it is in wars. Wars are often propelled by delusion and fantasy. Ideas are dangerous things. We sacrifice young men and, in modern warfare, innocent bystanders, on the altar of our fantasies. We still practice human sacrifice.
Why are we so much better at waging war than waging peace? Now, many people would argue that peace is the normal human condition and that war is the exception. After all, most of the time we are not at war. However, a peace that is a preparation for war, a peace that does nothing to change the conditions that lead to war, is really no peace at all. It is just a lull in the fighting. Peace must be more than a time to recover and reload. Peace, true peace, must eliminate the conditions that make it so easy for leaders to start wars.
Peace, like war, needs to be waged. Peace needs to be waged the way war is waged—with courage, determination, cunning, and passion. Peace, like war, requires focusing vast human and material resources. Waging peace is like waging a war against war.
How shall we wage peace? What is required of us if we are to create a strong, resilient, lasting peace on earth? What must we do to make our Christmas wishes for peace a living reality?
If we are to wage peace, we must begin with basic training. We require spiritual and moral basic training. We begin with our spiritual practices that connect us with a love of life. We experience beauty. We celebrate in community. We reach out in love and compassion. We practice seeing and feeling the pain of others. We allow ourselves to feel a holy outrage at the destruction of life upon life. We let ourselves experience a healthy anger that people are suffering and dying by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. Our love of life, our love of our fellow humans is the foundation for waging peace. That love will sustain us during dark times. And so will our dismay at what we see in the world. We must not allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering around us. When the pain of others no longer moves us to tears and to righteous anger, we have already begun to lose. Our spiritual lives must make us compassionate and sensitive. Nor can we allow our anger and dismay to grow into bitterness. Bitterness and hatred are poisonous. Ultimately they sap our strength. A wise person once said that hating someone is like drinking poison in the hope that someone else will die. Only the love of life will sustain us in this long struggle.
A spiritual discipline that renews our love of life and our compassion for all people is our foundation and our preparation.
With this preparation, we move out into our community. Peace is not something that we can possess in isolation. Peace is an ongoing relationship. In order to create peace we must move beyond introspection. And we must move beyond the safe confines of our congregation.
There are many ways to wage peace.
One way is to bear witness. This morning’s chalice lighting by Women in Black is a moving, poignant example of bearing witness. Thank you; you are an inspiration to us all.
Beyond bearing witness, we practice what we preach in practical ways. I am touched and encouraged by the dedication I see among the members of this congregation. This week we once again welcome homeless families who will be our guests for a week as part of the Interfaith Hospitality Network. And what a difference a warm welcome means in this time of bitter cold. Our Peace, Liberty and Justice task force works tirelessly. Today they are hosting our Explorations session in the Chapel. This congregation also bears witness as a key player in the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado. We lend a hand in our community. We partner with others to support the Jeffco Action Center, Family Tree and Habitat for Humanity.
Our first steps are to bear witness and to work in our community. But this is not enough. We must be smart and cunning. We need to think nationally and internationally. Just the way disease breaks out when there is a lack of basic sanitation, war breaks out because conditions are ripe for war. We must be critics of those conditions that lead to conflict and steady advocates for creating conditions where peace can flower.
What are those conditions that lead to violence? We all know what they are: exploitation, ignorance, hatred, injustice, inequality, poverty, fear, racism, greed. We cannot pretend to be advocates for peace while we support economic relations based on exploitation of helpless people. We cannot honestly say we are for peace if we support an economic system which increasingly concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. We cannot pretend to wage peace if we are indifferent to the denial of basic human rights to the powerless. I have been thrilled to see the expanding work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the increasing involvement of members of this congregation. The UUSC focusses its work on human rights. I was honored to be part of a delegation to Guatemala last summer. We plan another delegation this spring. The UUSC continues relief efforts in the Gulf coast, relief to tsunami victims in Asia, and is involved in work to stop the genocide in Darfur. It is good to be part of this struggle to wage peace.
Peace is not a static thing. Peace is not the absence of violence. Peace is a relationship that is built on compassion, on respect, on interdependence, on understanding and on economic prosperity.
Look, for example, at western Europe. A century ago Europe was about to plunge into a long and horrible war. The First World War ended in 1918 with much of Europe devastated and Russia in the hands of communists. The truce that ended the war, however, did little to change the underlying conditions that led to war. What followed was a false peace. It was truly a time of reloading. A generation later the children born during the First World War were now old enough to fight and die in a second great war. The Second World War was even worse than the first. New technology made killing more efficient. Twenty million people died. The Holocaust exterminated six million Jews.
Yet look at Europe today. Today there is real peace. Europe is not an earthly paradise, but we have witnessed a nearly miraculous transformation. The major countries of the continent, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium now share a common currency. Workers can easily cross national boundaries to take jobs. People flow across borders almost as easily as you or I cross state borders. Germany and France are not much more likely to go to war with one another today than Colorado is likely to go to war against Kansas. After centuries of bloody wars, topped off by World War II, the bloodiest of them all, peace has been created in Europe.
What happened? Interdependence happened. The European Common Market helped to create the conditions for economic interdependence. Prosperity happened. Interdependence and the absence of conflict allowed unprecedented economic growth. The wisdom of the Marshall Plan was that it focused on building the European economy rather than on punishment of the defeated and demands for reparations. This economic prosperity was shared throughout the population. Common people had access health care and protection from economic dislocations. With stability and prosperity came more travel and communication. With more human contact came more understanding.
Today western Europe stands as an inspiration. It proves that centuries of war can yield to decades of a peace that nurtures life.
If you and I are to wage peace, we must work to influence our nation’s foreign policy. We need a new definition of our national interest. I do not believe that it is in my interest to finance the pollution of the developing world in order to make products I buy a little cheaper. I do not believe it is my interest or in our interest to exploit workers in Latin America and Asia so that we can buy things a little more cheaply at Wal-Mart. When we exploit the powerless we sow seeds of war.
I do not believe that my interests are furthered by supporting corrupt and authoritarian regimes. It is simply wrong. And in the long run it works against our real interests. My real interest and your real interest is in a lasting peace that is based on a foundation of universal human rights.
And, obviously, if we are to create a lasting peace our own nation has to be much, much less willing to resort to the use of force. You and I need to join hands with millions of other people in our country to make military force truly a last resort.
Now, I am not a pacifist. I do not believe that pacifism is the most ethical position in today’s world. For example, I believe the “free world” acted shamefully when we stood by and let hundreds of thousands of people be slaughtered in Rwanda. I believe we are acting shamefully as we wring our hands while hundreds of thousands die in Darfur. And I believe we waited far too long to act to stop genocide in the former Yugoslavia. And I believe that the insane attacks of al Quaeda need a military response. Military intervention is better than genocide. And we have an obligation to defend our selves.
Once in a while, sadly, force is the best choice among terrible options. That said, I believe our nation and most nations are far too quick to use military force. It is so easy to become enamored of having devastating firepower. The present disaster in Iraq is a tragic example of our being far too quick to use force.
Moreover, even in those rare times when we are forced to use force, we need to ask ourselves how we allowed things to get to that point. For example, the conditions of the armistice at the end of the First World War did much to set conditions that led to the Second World War. How have our policies toward Latin America helped to set the stage for violence there? Have our policies in the Muslim world helped to produce the militant Islam we must now resist?
The sad fact is that we human beings are a violent species. Throughout history we have murdered one another. We kill each other as individuals. We kill each other as tribes and gangs. As nations we wage war with terrible weapons. The option to use violence, to wage war, is always there as a temptation.
Peace does not just happen by accident or luck. Peace must be created. Peace, a resilient and lasting peace, is like a strong fabric that can contain the impulse to go to war. Think of peace as a kind of bullet proof Kevlar cloth that is strong enough to enclose human society and prevent our violent tendencies from breaking out. We weave this cloth of peace from many individual threads. We help to weave this cloth when we witness for peace. We help weave this cloth when we advocate for human rights for everyone. We help weave this cloth of peace when we create interdependence and understanding. We weave peace when we insist that every one have the economic resources necessary to a life with dignity and freedom from the desperation of extreme poverty.
It is not enough to wish for peace. It is not enough to pray for peace. It is not nearly enough to have good intentions. These are just the very beginning.
No, our call today, our responsibility as religious people, is to wage peace. It is going to be a long struggle. Victory is not guaranteed. Yet peace is possible.
War is so horrible. War is getting more violent all the time. We must end war. It is a matter of life and death, for us and for our children and grandchildren.
Come, let us wage peace.
We begin by touching the wellsprings of joy and compassion that live deep in our souls. We then take these into the world. Together we can do this. We really can.
Come, let us wage peace together.
Amen.