HomeGood Morning!
I have varied sermon styles. Two weeks ago my sermon was an historical lecture with moral questions and ethical challenges in it.
The sermon this morning is a conversation I am having with myself and to which you are listening. If you listen well (you see how I have just switched the burden to you)...if you listen well and carry on a parallel conversation with yourself, then I hope it may lead to a religious search within for you.
I am someone who has always believed in a world of human rights and peace, and I have always respected and supported those organizations whose goal is to achieve these. And I have always seen these goals as mutually supportive. I was therefore quite surprised about a year and a half ago to discover that major Human Rights organizations like amnesty International and Human Rights Watch sometimes find themselves in conflict with peacemaking groups and organizations (if I may use the phrase “in conflict” when referring to peacemaking groups).
To understand the differences between these two kinds of groups it is important to understand what their approaches are to what they do.
Human rights organizations have a three fold mission. First, they foster appreciation of and support for human rights around the globe. Second, they speak out against human rights violations that are taking place. Third, they seek to uncover past violations, naming the victims and the perpetrators and seeking justice for the victims. This is based on a philosophy about human rights that claims that to be silent about abuse is another form of victimization, that people who were abused or killed have a right to have their pain and suffering openly acknowledged, that their families have a right to know what happened to their loved ones, and that where possible the perpetrators of crimes should be brought to justice both as a restorative principle for the victims and as a deterrent to future crimes. This philosophy of victims’ rights or survivors’ rights is of growing import in our national legal system and is embedded in our own congregation’s Safe and Sacred policy around sexual abuse. The pattern is clear: break the silence, acknowledge the suffering, bring justice, and thereby empower the victims and encourage healing.
Peacemaking organizations do something very different. Where violence or discord exists or threatens, they seek to bring or maintain peace and calm. One of the first steps in that process is ending the ongoing cycle of accusation and counter-accusation, of blame and counter-blame. One seeks to shift the conversation from fruitless mutual recriminations to a vision of a future of possibility and peace. Achieving that goal will require that people give up the goal of retribution.
And that is one of the principles of peace making: Peace and retribution are only both possible where one side wins. Peacemaking seeks to have all sides win, and that means peace rather than retribution.
Note that these approaches can be used at any level. Think of human rights work as legalistic and peacemaking as negotiation and mediation, and either one can work in divorce or child custody cases, in criminal justice work, in circumstances of communal violence and in international affairs.
A human rights report was issued describing a particular engagement in Bosnia as a human rights violation and naming those responsible for the action. Some of those named were taking part in the peace talks aimed at ending the violence.
Peacemakers accused the human rights organizations of threatening to derail the negotiations thereby prolonging the violence and causing yet more death and destruction. Human rights groups accused the peacemakers of a willingness to let people get away, literally, with murder.
Note that this is not about a conflict of good and bad, but of a conflict of two Goods. There are two poles in this sermon, contradictions between good and evil within the human mind, but also, and more importantly, conflicts between two goods within the human mind.
What struck me about this difference between the human rights stance and the peace-makers stance is that I have held to both beliefs simultaneously, and had not seen the possible contradictions between them. That got me to thinking about other possible contradictions in my beliefs. One problem there is that it is so easy to see the contradictions in others and sometimes not possible to see the ones within ourselves.
A few weeks ago someone pointed out to me that most of those people who want us to get out of Iraq want us to get into Darfur. And that was a moment of surprise for me. Both Darfur and Iraq are now problems primarily of communal violence. No matter what one thinks about how we got into Iraq, what now is the difference between Iraq and Darfur? If Darfur, why not Iraq?
With respect to Iraq, I have not spoken to this issue for a long time. I will take this opportunity to do so. Part of me believes it is important for us to get out of Iraq. We went in for bad reasons, and I believe we were misled about the reasons. But in invading Iraq we destroyed the physical infrastructure, we destroyed the military infrastructure, we destroyed the legal infrastructure and we destroyed the social infrastructure. I believe we are morally oblige to repair what we destroyed. Whatever I may think about how we got into Iraq, to leave now, leaving the people there with the mess we created, would be morally wrong. I don’t see a good solution to Iraq; I see no good options. But back to today’s sermon:
I am a Humanist and do not believe in God. But there was the night several years ago when, after a very difficult day, I walked out under the stars, looked up into the night sky and said, “You’ll have to take this; I can’t”. And it worked. I felt a burden lift from me. I remain a Humanist, and tell myself that I simply let go of things over which I had no control anyway. Yet I cannot help but wonder at a Humanist who stands under the stars and says, “You’ll have to take this, I can’t.
I believe that morality is what human beings make it to be. History shows this to be true. If circumstances require that we kill our neighbors--either because there is a famine or overpopulation or simply because they have something we want--then we kill them and call it a commandment of God. So our so-called morality is merely a reflection of human need and situation. And in a universe with no god, it could not be otherwise; morality is ours to determine.
And yet I believe that there is an ultimate, definable and knowable moral code that lives in our hearts and for which we are reaching; or if not reaching for, which we know and are striving to deny, because that moral code would require that we not do things we lust to do, like kill through war and capital punishment, or steal through war or business. And it is by that not yet fully discerned moral code that I judge human behavior.
But how can one judge by a code that is not yet fully known and cannot even be described in basic terms?
And how can such a code exist if there is no God?
I am as I stated before, a Humanist. And yet I am also a Universalist. I believe that though God does not exist, God is a being of absolute and unconditional love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness and is too good to condemn his children to eternity in hell and therefore all are saved.
I used to tell myself that I am a Humanist in the sense that I do not believe in God, but that if God existed, then he would have to be the Universalist God of love because no other God is worthy of worship—or even existence. Now that is fascinating: God does not exist, but if he did he would be like this.
But today I see within myself a sense that I am a Humanist in the sense of believing that God does not exist, and I am a Universalist in the sense of believing that we are all saved. Those do not go together and yet they both live in my heart.
In others I see such contradictions as either failings of logic or as hypocrisy. In myself, I see such contradictions as paradoxes, as holding truths in tension.
And so I find myself facing a life of living with ongoing contradictions.
I can choose to think live life in a manner that removes those contradictions. Or I can choose to live with them.
In a world inhabited by humanity, a creature of such promise and of such disappointment, of such grand potential and proclamations of creativity that so often wallows instead in violence and destruction;
I can choose to live with paradox within myself and others, accepting and maybe even affirming these as part of the human heart and spirit;
to proclaim love as the true state of the human heart, and yet to acknowledge the hate that lives within me and others;
to hold up forgiveness as the highest act of the human spirit, and yet to accept that we wreak vengeance and punishment;
to claim a belief in human unity and inclusion, and yet know that human beings divide and exclude one another for the frailest of reasons;
to reject God and yet to believe in and depend upon God’s mercy at the same time, because that may be our only future hope;
to see humanity and life in all of its possible ugliness, and yet to hold on to hope that the future may be full of beauty.
Let this acceptance bring its own peace of heart and mind.
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