LIVING OUR TRUTHS IN LOVE
LIVING OUR TRUTHS IN LOVE
A Sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy
Delivered at
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola
13 April 2014
I have two questions for you:
First Question? Who was the last Unitarian President of the United States?
The answer is William Howard Taft the Republican who defeated William Jennings Bryant in 1906. Taft was defeated for re-election by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, largely because Teddy Roosevelt chose to also run that year on the Progressive ticket.
Second Question: Have Any of you read
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict ?
Me neither but I should have and will, soon, because the authors claim that “from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals.”
- Columbia University Press, Paper, 320 pages, 11 figures, 19 tables ISBN: 978-0-231-15683-7 $22.00 / £15.00
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15682-0/why-civil-resistance-works
A most hopeful assertion ! !
Yes, I must read that book.
As you may know, I am a pacifist – that’s spelled p a c
i -fist – but not a passivist, that’s spelled: p a s s i v ist – I registered as a C.O. during the Korean war and worked for the Quakers for five years in the 1950’s and 60’s. I have been a pacifist for 70 years and remain a pacifist today..
I’ve argued from this pulpit that war is never the answer. Sometimes a few of you agreed with me. Never did all of you agree with me. That’s par for the course for a UU Congregation. We include many views, even on the most important issues. May it always be so!
BUT, we UU’s do, from time to time make proclamations.
You hold in your hands one such: a recent statement of the Unitarian Universalist Association on the issue of War and Peace. The first page of five of a “statement of conscience” adopted by more than two thirds of the delegates to the UUA general assembly in 2010. The next four pages spell out how the principles enunciated on the first pay will be implement I hope you will take it home and read it carefully – marking where and why you agree or disagree. It is a fair statement of where we as a denomination stand. Not a creed or dogma binding on any one UU but a statement of things generally believed among us three years ago. It took four years of study and discussion in many of our congregations to come up with this statement of “things generally believed among us.” It is not the first such statement. And it is very different from some such statements made in our past. One made in 1917 for example.
We are fast approaching the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war to end all wars.
Garrison Keeler, on his radio program March 29, 2014. sang a song commemorating that war . http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2014/03/29/videos/index.shtml#video-8
Here are the words he said in introduction:
President Oboma was in Belgium this last week. You can see pictures of it – He was there to lay wreaths on the graves of Americans who died in WW1 at the Battle of the Argonne. A good thing to do. You can still honor people for the sacrifices they made even though we know from history that the sacrifice should never have been asked of them. It was a war that never, never should have happened. You can say that about many wars!
And these are the words he sang:
There was a war long years ago
ALL GONE, ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
Our men shipped out to meet the dreaded foe
ALL GONE AWAY
Fresh uniforms, the guns all shined and new
ALL GONE, ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
They marched away, the red the white and blue
All GONE AWAY
They shipped to France and fought at san Miguel
ALL GONE, ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
To be baptized by cannon shell ALL GONE AWAY
A million strong they marched to the forest of Argonne
ARGONNE GONE, ALL GONE AWAY M BOYS
Ah, the columns staged a good eight miles long
ALL GONE AWAY
SPEAKING
General Pershing sat in his headquarters far behind
And gave the orders to charge the German lines
And the general blundered and he gave the word
to charge the guns
And our men were massacred
And 26,000 killed on one fall day
ALL GONE, ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
And 26,000 men on the cold ground lay
ALL GONE AWAY
SPEAKING
And one man, Sergeant Alvin York from Tennessee
Was recognized for his heroic bravery.
And Sergeant York was sent home to ride in great parades
To draw attention from the mistakes the Generals had made.
A senseless war that never should have been
ALL GONE ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
A graveyard for sixteen million men
ALL GONE AWAY
And it was treason to ask why these good men should die
All GONE , ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
And so the people bought a dreadful lie
ALL GONE AWAY
A senseless war does not grow noble with the years
ALL GONE, ALL GONE AWAY MY BOYS
Instead of flowers we should all leave our tears.
ALL GONE AWAY
RESTRAINED APPLAUSE
End of first section of the show.
“A senseless war, that never should have been.”
Right?
“A senseless war does not grow noble with the years?”
Right?
History if filled with ironies. Fifty years ago current secretary of State, was leading a movement to end another war that never should have been, The Vietnam war. One hundred and fifty three years ago – on 13 April 1861 Ft. Sumter surrendered after the first significant battle of our civil war. Two hundred years ago the United States were fighting a British army in what came to be called the war of 1812.
Wars and the rumors of war seem to be the dominant theme in human history. Some argue war is in our genes. I don’t believe that. The capacity to react violently to threat or oppression IS in our genes. It’s part of our mammalian – indeed, our reptilian – heritage. But war is not the same thing as the individual’s violent reflex response. War is much more complicated than that. And so is the non-violent response to perceived threat or oppression. MUCH more complicated. Which brings me back to Jesus whose entry into Jerusalem on a donkey on the same day as – some authors claim – the Roman Procurator with his Roman Legion entered via another gate. Five days later, tradition says, the young rabbi was crucified on orders of the Procurator on the charge of leading an insurrection. You all know the story. He was falsely accused, I was raised to believe.
One of the New York Times’ best sellers this year is a book titled, ZEALOT which purports to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was a violent insurectionary not the ‘apostle of peace’ I was raised to revere. Given the contradictory nature of the documents that purport to describe Jesus, you can paint Jesus as a violent revolutionary or a passivist – a non resister. After all, Jesus did say, “Turn the other cheek.” But the Jesus I was taught to revere also said, “Love your enemies.” “Do good to those who spitefully use you.”
“Love your enemies?” “Do good to those who spitefully use you?” That is far more revolutionary than turning the other cheek OR drawing a sword or dropping a bomb !
That is the Jesus I admire; the Jesus that Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Haines Holmes sought to follow in their strugges for justice for oppressed peoples.
John Haynes Holmes? Who was he? Well, in 1917 he was minister of the very large Unitarian church in New York City. He was one of the founders of the ACLU and the NAACP. He also was one of the first to introduce Gandhi and his philosophy of non violent resistance to the American People. For all of these things he became the exemplar for many young ministers in the 1940’s; including my Methodist mentors. And later myself. But John Haynes Holmes was also the minister who was forced out of the American Unitarian Association by the former U.S. President, William Howard Taft who was, in 1917 the Moderator of the American Unitarian Association annual gathering.
Here’s a description of the meeting from the UU Biographical Dictionary.
At a meeting of the General Conference of Unitarians in Montreal in September 1917, Holmes, as Chair of the planning Council of Ministers, a group charged to “present the position of the Unitarian Churches,” outlined various positions discernible among Unitarians and urged the Conference not to commit to a particular one. He cited Unitarians’ traditional support for free expression of minority views. “It would be difficult to name our reason for being if the privilege of non-conformity were denied or even threatened among us,” he reasoned. “By tradition and by practice we are dissenters. The cause of all dissent is our cause.” Holmes proposed a resolution in favor “the ministry of reconciliation, the preparation of peace, the establishment of social justice, the proclamation of God’s law.”
When Holmes ended, William Howard Taft, President of the Conference and former President of the United States, denounced Holmes’s report as an “insidious document” and moved a resolution attesting to the sense of the Conference, that the “war must be carried to a successful issue to stamp out militarism in the world.” Taft’s resolution carried, 236-9.
The editor of the AUA’s magazine, the Christian Register, soon characterized opposition to the war effort like Holmes’s as treason. Eliot wrote that he expected disloyal ministers to be dismissed. Ministers “addicted to pacifist principles,” he wrote, “cannot be permitted to plead a noble tradition of freedom of speech to justify or to mask sedition.” In 1918, the AUA Board moved to deny financial aid to any church whose minister “is not a willing, earnest, and outspoken supporter of the United States in a vigorous and resolute prosecution of the war.”
Later that year Holmes resigned his ministerial fellowship with the Association,.
But Holmes’ congregation stood with him, and withdrew from the American Unitarian Association becoming the Community Church of New York. John Haynes Holmes died April 3, 1964 an eloquent defender of Gandhian Non Violent Resistance to the end. .
The people who called themselves Unitarians were not always as anti-war as we seem to be today.
So, where are we UU’s as a denomination on the issue of just wars? I remind you once more that no one can speak for all UU’s or compel any UU to affirm what she or he does not believe, but BUT a congregation can compile a list of “things generally believed among us” and a general assembly of delegates compile a list of things generally believed in our congregations. That’s the long document you find in your order of service.
Let me summarize:
The first section and fourth pretty much the stated policy of the Obama administration. War as a last resort and never pre-emptive or unilateral. Section two is a reaffirmation of UU’s commitment to “honor the truths of multiple voices”. And section five commits the UUA to support both the conscientious warrior and the conscientious objector to war including conscientious objectors to a particular war. The final section is a “mea culpa”, a rare bit of humility and a commitment to “speak truth to power” as the Quakers have been doing for four hundred years.
My friends, there is much in this document to discuss and debate. I hope we can schedule a second hour discussion in the near future. Perhaps even a congregational vote in a year to affirm as a congregaton the proclamation of the delegates to the UUA general assembly.
But I must share with you my own firm conviction that “War is never the answer.” In the nature of the case no one can honestly say what would have happened had a nation not gone to war. But anyone can SEE the results of having gone to war, over and over and over again. Given that knowledge, I do not see how any rational person can have faith that war IS the answer to any conflict.
What is the alternative? Passive – ism? Non-resistance? No. The alternative is Civil Resistance. Hopefully non-violent civil resistance; hopefully non-violent civil resistance in a worthy cause. And, as we have seen it is very difficult to prevent non-violent civil resistance becoming violent. Fortunately, the craft of civil resistance is evolving and the commitment of nations to find alternatives to war is strengthening.
Thanks to Netflicks, I’ve been watching old video’s of “The West Wing.” Each week for seven years viewers watched a fictional Democratic president struggle with and resolve difficult problems. Oh that were that easy! But In the fourth epsode of the series, the fictional President’s wife reminds him, when a hurricane threatens destruction of a major battle group at sea, that “You can’t fix everything.”
We the people, not only our president, need to remember that and not, when there seems no solution to a problem, reflexively “call in the Marines.”
We UUs can, and should, passionately debate our beliefs, our ‘truths’; we can even passionately insist ours is the true truth and still remain in community – even friends. But how we live our truths can be a matter of life and death. Insofar as we live out our truths in love will truth ultimately prevail. That is my faith. May it be yours also.
Please join me in a time of quiet contemplation of the thoughts here expressed.
SILENCE