Being Peace – Julia J Aegerter – Nov. 3, 2002
Writing sermons for this community is a challenging task. I was reminded of how challenging a number of times this past week.
On Wed. night I was speaking to a Vincennes University class about Unitarian Universalism and trying to explain our services and the mixture of beliefs of the congregation and how we held it all together.
It can be a difficult dance, on any given Sunday some of you come longing for a pastoral sermon to bring you comfort, others come wishing to hear a sermon promoting justice or peace, some simply want something which will give them a thought to take away and chew on over the week.
I went looking back over my sermons from the last few months and noted they covered globalization, war, patriotism, despair, and worry. And then last week meditation. Perhaps many of you would categorize sermons in an wither or fashion, sermons are intellectual or spiritual, political or religious, that we can do action or contemplation.
What I want to propose this morning is that this is a both/and proposition not an either/or. To be sure it is possible to do religion without giving any thought to action. This viewpoint understands religion or spirituality as all about the self and the relationship of the self to God. In this form of Christianity, for example, the emphasis is on one’s individual relationship with “the lord”. One is saved by confessing Jesus as Lord. In Buddhism it can take the form of an inward turning focused solely on becoming enlightened.
Religion also has its other pole. This has led to the understanding that one is saved by piling up good works. We often meet up with folks who believe this when we engage in work for justice. Sometimes when I meet advocates for one thing or another whether is people who are pro-life or people who are anti-war; find the same thing, the strong sense that where they are coming from is there own egos. They may say they are serving God and they might be but what is driving them is most likely their own egos.
Our Unitarian Universalist forebears were Christian and we have been influenced by the social gospel. Many of the people we claim as Unitarian and Universalist heroes were people who were busy working for justice. Within our Unitarian Universalist fold there were and still are humanists, who whether or not they believed in God, saw themselves as functionally ultimate. That is they believe that God is not going to step into to make things right; so if we want to live in the beloved community we must create it ourselves.
There are also those who follow more of a new age spirituality – seeking self-knowledge and peace.
These are two equally dangerous poles and I think false understandings.
We must both work for justice and develop our inner/spiritual life. Our work for justice, our stands against war, each and every action needs to come from a place of strength and wholeness.
We find this idea expressed in the Tao De Ching, The Daoist Scripture, Mitchell p 11) where it is written:
We join spokes together in a wheel,
But it is the center hole
That makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
But it is the emptiness inside
That holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
But it is the inner space
That makes it livable.
We work with being,
But non-being is what we use.
Being peace comes out of the space.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: “We may think of peace as the absence of war, that if the great powers would reduce their weapons arsenals we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons arsenals, we will see our own minds – our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of the bombs are still here – in our hearts and minds and sooner or later, we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women; to stop the war within.”
It is always interesting and sometimes enlightening for me to hear what people thought I said during a sermon. Apparently last week someone felt I was trying to speak against thinking. Actually, I am not against thinking, and not against daydreaming. I am in favor of knowing oneself. And I was talking about a method of becoming self aware and the type of thoughts that would occur if one embarked on a journey of meditation or a prayer practice of deep listening.
An analogy would be that maybe you like to sit in your house on a cold day and have a cup of tea and a fire and muse about something in your life. That is fine. But if later you go out to cut some firewood – it would be good if you kept your mind on chopping wood rather than daydreaming and reliving old times for then you are less likely to chop your leg off.
Meditation is actually a practice of concentration. It allows us to deepen our relationship with ourselves and others. When we study the writings of contemplatives we find a great compassion for others and a call to action.
The reason I want to encourage you each to develop some practice of meditation or prayer is because I think that many Unitarians tend to err on the side of action rather than contemplation and thinking and talking rather than listening.
We need to take time to develop the space within.
In the book of wisdom entitled Ecclesiastes (Ecc 3:1-8) we read:
For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. We often read Ecclesiastes at funerals to remind us that death is part of the cycle of life. But it is also an important message that joy is a part of life and that life is a mixture of joy and pain.
Being peace is about Finding Balance.
Taking time for joy – even when we know there is so much to be done.
Taking time to celebrate life even in the midst of death.
Yesterday people in Italy were grieving the loss of children from an earthquake and yesterday the sky was blue and the air crisp and the leaves were beautiful reds and yellows and falling into my backyard. Both of these situations were true and occurring simultaneously. The danger is that we will see the blue skies and demand that our life only be blue skies or see the earthquakes and pain and insist that life is pain and that is all there is.
We need to live balanced lives.
Being Peace is about being creative. It is being able to act rather than react. So many times we get stuck in patterns. Many of us can observe this in how we deal with our parents or children or friends or enemies. The patterns are predictable – you say yes – they say no etc.
The way out is to actually be present rather than running on automatic. On occasion I have had glimpses of such behavior. On occasion I have even exhibited it myself. Once I spent 5 mos. working as a substitute teacher, often the days were full of power struggles. But occasionally I was able to be creative and a whole new dynamic took place. In particular, I remember one junior high class. A number of young boys were trying to toss paper airplanes out the window when they thought I was not looking. The predictable response would be to try to stop them. Shut the windows, yell, and give out detentions or whatever. That is what they expected. But that day I responded differently, I challenged them to a contest. I shut the windows and gave them ten minutes to create a plane that would fly and we had a contest to see whose plane flew the farthest. That out of the way, everyone took their seats and they got to work on their assignment.
I think children love novelty – their eyes light up and it shifts their behavior – I suspect that is true of adults too. How wonderful it feels when some argument with a loved one is suddenly not moving down a predictable, tired and worn path.
I bet the Israelis and Palestinians would enjoy a new look at how to have peace if someone could think of it. I bet most of us would enjoy a new way of solving world problems – who knows maybe dancing contests would be more enjoyable than wars. If nothing else our sons and daughters would get to come back home with limbs intact when the war was over.
Or maybe just the leaders and not all the followers should fight wars – have duels like the “Good” old days. And the rest of us could just stay home and go about our business – enjoy the leaves – eat turkey or tofu – play soccer – sit around and smoke peace pipes with our neighbors and try to provide health care for our community and save water for our grandchildren.
Martin Luther King said “Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil.”
In speaking of his philosophy of non-violence he said: “I would say that the first point or the principle in the movement is the idea that the means must be as pure as the end. This movement is based on a philosophy that ends and means must cohere… For in the long run we must see that the end represents the means in the process and the ideal in the making. In other words we cannot believe that the ends justify the means because the end is present in the means. .. In the long run of history, immoral and destructive means cannot bring about moral and constructive ends.”
In Buddhist iconography, there is a bodhisattva who has 1,000 arms and 1,000 hands and each hand has an eye in the palm. The one thousand hands represent action and the eye in each hand represents understanding, the inner eye. When you understand a situation or a person, any action you do will help and will not cause more suffering. Being Peace is working with an eye in your hand.
My prayer this morning is that in a world which is so broken and desperate for peace we each find ways to cultivate our spiritual lives and live with an eye in our hands.
Amen. And may it be so.