Meditation

Words from His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama: Please pacify the uninterrupted miseries and unbearable fears, such as famines and sicknesses, that torment powerless beings completely oppressed by inexhaustible and violent evils, and henceforth lead us from suffering states and place us in an ocean of happiness and joy. Those who, maddened by the demons of delusion, commit violent negative actions that destroy both themselves and others should be the object of our compassion. May the hosts of undisciplined beings fully gain the eye that knows what to abandon and what to practice, and be granted a wealth of loving kindness and friendliness. Through the force of dependent-arising, which by nature is profound and empty of appearances, through the force of the Words of Truth, the power of kindness and the true power of non-deceptive actions may my prayer of truth be accomplished quickly and without hindrance. For as long as space endures and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the misery in the world.

Sermon

Last month I attended Thich Nhat Hanh’s lecture in downtown Denver. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has worked for world peace and fought oppression all his life. He knew The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was introduced in Denver by Iliff professor Vincent Harding, who also knew King as well as Thich Nhat Hanh during the civil rights movement. If my life depended upon it, I could not recite a word Thich Nhat Hanh said that night. I know he talked of peace, finding internal peace, giving and bringing peace to yourself and to those around you. He talked about beginning with yourself to find peace, finding the peace and calm within, making and working on right relationships, knowing that we all have many internal possibilities and sides to our personalities and that we must make many internal decisions about who we will be, how we will act, whether we will be able to listen and to hear whether we will be able to be kind whether we will be able to change or to be better for ourselves and for those around us.
His words and sentences, his logical reasoning, were lost in my mind—his message, for me, was carried in his voice—the sound of his voice, a voice that ran like a river of peace, flowing through every crevice of my mind, every sinew of muscle in my body, every movement of my eyes and hands, until a sense of peace had entered every part of my being. I sat breathless and quiet, hanging, meditating, not remembering specifics. This was a personal peace, the place where Thich Nhat Hanh believes we must begin if we are ever to achieve real or lasting peace in the world. From a place of deep, personal peace, we can make the very best decisions that will lead to peace in our lives and, hopefully, life by life, peace in the world.

This is not where most of us start. We look outside our windows, we read our newspapers, we note the votes of Congress, and we know that peace is not there and we are not at peace. We have trouble imagining peace in our world, and we know that peace is not real without justice, and we know that justice, also, is in short supply. Peace and justice are the themes of my sermon today which I take from two principles from our tradition—printed on the back of your order of service. We are instructed to seek justice, equity and compassion in human relations and to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. It is telling to me that we separate in our principles how we are to treat one another individually from what we are seeking in world community.

Thich Naht Hanh doesn’t—the individual relationship, the internal relationship is the beginning of world peace. But for us, practical western thinkers, peace is not a river flowing through a mountain valley or a sense of calm within— peace, real peace, requires that people be treated fairly, that we own up to our failings, that decent livelihood be possible for all people, that people not be starving to death, that people not be devastated by poverty or famine or war, that people be allowed to speak and question and practice their religions without fear of confinement or torture. This is the concept of justice—peace that flows from fairness.

As former president Jimmy Carter said Friday having earned this year’s Nobel Peace Prize: “My concept of human rights has grown to include not only the rights to live in peace, but also to adequate health care, shelter, food and to economic opportunity. I hope this award reflects a universal acceptance and even embrace of this broad-based concept of human rights.”

I believe that Thich Nhat Hanh wants the same kind of peace, but his radical way of beginning with each person may throw us off (even though it is our second principle to promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations). But we usually think of global peace when we think of peace.
Last week, our Unitarian Universalist district assembly voted against going to war with Iraq—our district extends from Montana and Utah, parts of Idaho, through Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico and a bit of Texas—there were about 200 delegates at the meeting and it was nearly unanimous. At the same time, the president of the Methodist bishops, Sharon A. Brown Christopher, wrote a letter to all 8.4 million Methodists in the United States, which include President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to stand against a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, she said that a preemptive war “goes against the very grain of our understanding of the Gospel.”
The United Nations, which has allowed this issue to fester, needs to pursue every possible recourse, and Saddam Hussein is in gross violation of numerous UN resolutions, she said, nevertheless, war should not be used as an instrument of national policy.

Similarly, our district resolution of immediate witness voiced the need not to use force preemptively and also called for the need of UN and other regional support if there should be any attack. All of this, of course, was too little too late to make much of a dent in public opinion or Congressional votes. Also too late, apparently, were the voices of more than 3,000 peace protestors heard here in Denver and many, many more in London. We are at the brink of war and we are caught between the tension of peace and justice and most of us are sadly aware of how complex this particular situation is, how unclear the path is before us, how uncertain is the survival of many no matter which way we may go.

Roy Jones, minister emeritus at the Fort Collins Unitarian Universalist church and the minister who conducted this church’s first dedication of babies and children, was a pacifist who went to jail for his pacifism even during World War II. Jones says we need conscientious objectors and conscientious warriors. We need people who talk clearly and thoughtfully and with wisdom on both sides of a difficult and complicated situation. We need people who make sense.

And we need people to talk, no matter what they think, and to talk and talk—because communication, continued and sustained, is the only thing that keeps us from war, and war is the place where communication stops and straightforward fear and the fight for survival begins.
In our present climate of near war, I would remind us today that to talk and voice your opinion is to be a patriot, no matter where you stand on the issues. If we speak and debate we are standing for our principles—we may not agree with what happens or with each other, and history may flow against us—but we must continue to talk to one another; we must continue to believe in the enterprise of community and human possibility; we must continue to believe in the possibility of peace with justice and fairness and liberty, no matter what events may occur, and no matter how many steps some may feel we take backwards.

I cannot personally see the need for a preemptive strike against Iraq, and I hope that the additional tension mounting from terrorist threats also does not cause us to act precipitously, but I still hope and pray that our leaders, and most leaders, have before them the goal of a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all—that these are not just stagnate words written in our nation’s history which have lost their punch in the cynicism of our times.
The only effect we can each individually have is to voice our thoughts and concerns, write letters or make telephone calls, or email our positions—this is the job of being a citizen. Being a citizen, expressing your heart-felt sentiment and arguing for your cause, is the only way to fight creeping cynicism, and cynicism, my friends, will keep us from ever achieving any goal.

I want us to step back just a little this morning from our world situation and think about what makes us and our institutions move. You do not have to agree with this perspective, but I would like to share with you an idea of theologian Walter Wink’s. Wink has written a book called Naming the Powers—the Powers are things that permeate institutions and humans and which go largely undetected in our modern, post-modern times. In fact, Wink argues that institutions are embodiments of Powers and that they also have internal powers as well. One way to think about this is that many institutions have an “essence”—something we feel, that gives us an immediate response, even if our response turns out to be wrong or false. When we walk into a school or a city or county building, we often have an immediate sense of whether the place is fair or unfair, tightly run or loosely run, full of light or full of sadness, operated with everyone’s concerns in mind or operated from the top down.

We might have similar notions about organizations and countries. Organizations can really strike us as varied, filled with different spirits, powers: the Ku Klux Klan, the Sierra Club, Focus on the Family, the League of Women Voters, the American Indian Movement, the Libertarian Party, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, on and on. Most of these organizations illicit reactions from us that we have learned through news accounts or knowing members or being members. Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, Guatemala, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, China—I am not promoting generalizations or stereotypes, but suggesting that all kinds of organizations and institutions have internal and external rules that cause us to react to them one way or another. And institutions have a life of their own, including this church. No one person holds all the power or knowledge or definition. Where is that source?

You don’t have to believe in demons and devils and angels and saints to know that sometimes something ugly or beautiful seems to have seized an organization or a person, that people can seem to be on automatic pilot based upon this guiding genie or power, that people and groups of people can do incredibly evil or incredibly good things that are surprising and unexpected.

Symbols and metaphors also can hold and capture the imagination of the powers—flags, religious symbols—crosses and chalices and saints, patterns of behavior, well-known rulers and leaders, books, sacred texts. When the powers gather and the symbols merge, imagination is seized, and incredible things happen: The Berlin Wall can come down; students can make a stand in Tenneman Square, 3,000 people can gather to stand for peace, when maybe only 50 or a 100 or at the most 1,000 could have been imagined.

Unfortunately, evil also can reign: the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, terrorism, random horror, whether an anthrax scare or the sniper who is stalking Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C.

The need to appreciate imagination is my main point in bringing up Wink’s idea of unknown powers, evil and good, demons and angels, that may guide institutions, people and countries. If the world were an easy cipher, and all its institutions followed a set of known rules and goals, then we would have achieved world peace long ago, unless you believe that people are inherently evil and incapable of bringing about the goal of good. The powers, emotions, feelings, desires, hungers, evils and goods that guide and rule people and institutions are simply more complicated than a simple, this or that, answer to a problem could ever solve. For example, history, alone, known and unknown, guides so much of what happens that it does seem to have a force, or a power, all it’s own. And it’s so difficult to break the pull of history, to change the tides of time.

If we can begin to imagine the forces that drive us and rule us, our histories, our flaws, our vanities, our desires, our denials, the symbols that give us a visceral reaction, then we can begin to imagine how we can work within our culture, or our institutions or own families for changes that would go deeper than the surface.

To go back full circle, to the start of this sermon, we probably can’t expect to change the world if we can’t even imagine changing ourselves; and we probably can’t expect the world to change if we’re not ready and willing to participate in those changes directly, so, whether we think it’s an Eastern or a Western philosophy, we probably do need to imagine that change begins with us, that peace begins with the individual—that we must affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations to affirm and promote a goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. That’s why we get so perturbed, for example, to learn that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves—he is supposed to be a symbol of peace, liberty and justice. In the days and weeks ahead, we are faced with the possibility of real war. Wherever you stand, whether you are a conscientious objector or a conscientious warrior, I urge you to hold fast to the possibility that peace begins with you. That you can treat others fairly, with equity, or not; that you can seek a better, more just world in your back yard, or not; that you can be compassionate, even to your enemies, or not. That your own kindness—your own calm and gentle power— may be the only thing you can offer when our world is filled with turmoil and crisis. Choose kindness, choose compassion, be fair—imagine peace, imagine justice. AMEN