Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.
Readings
The first reading was a short excerpt from the poem “Jerusalem” by Naomi Shihab Nye:
I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.
The second reading was from a poem titled “Poem” by Muriel Rukeyser:
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons….
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,…
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace….
The third reading was from the poem “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov:
…peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
Sermon: “World Peace”
When I was in my teens and early twenties, a fellow by the name of Dana Greeley was the minister of my Unitarian Universalist church, and he used to preach regularly about world peace. He had been a pacifist since before the Second World War, not only because violence was wrong but also because war could not solve the problems it was supposed to solve. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he became opposed to war for yet another reason: once atomic weapons became available, then war had the potential wipe out the entire human race. So as I recall it, Greeley had three good reasons to reject war: on moral grounds, because violence was wrong; and on pragmatic grounds, both because it could not obtain its stated objectives, and because it threatened all human existence.
I was convinced by these arguments, and became a pacifist myself. I was convinced to the point that I even registered with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a Quaker group, just in case the draft was reinstated. But I must admit I was not entirely convinced by Greeley’s vision for what a peaceful world might look like. Greeley was an internationalist and a strong supporter of the United Nations. The United Nations offered a concrete vision of international cooperation that was especially compelling to those who lived through the Second World War. However, I think that while people in my age cohort found the humanitarian mission of the United Nations compelling, what we saw of the Vietnam War decreased our confidence in the ability of the United Nations to end war.
Put it this way: Yes, of course there should be an international community, and of course that community should promote international cooperation in areas like public health and economic development. But what does a peaceful world look like? It’s not enough to say: a peaceful world is a world without war. That’s a vision that’s essentially negative. But what are the positive aspects of a peaceful world? There must be more to a peaceful world than merely the absence of war.
This reminds me of an old Chinese story that presents a vision of a peaceful world. The story of “Peach Blossom Spring,” first told by Tao Yuan-ming, tries to answer the question: How are we to build the kind of peaceful community we long for? I’m going to retell this story for you using the 1894 translation by Herbert Giles.
In the year 390 or thereabouts, when the north of China had been conquered by the Mongol invaders from central Asia, and refugees from the invasion filled the south, there lived a fisherman in the village of Wu-ling. This was during the Qin dynasty. The Qin emperors were powerful, and while some people said they did what had to be done in troubled times, there were others who said that government officials were vain and greedy, and did not have the interests of the ordinary people at heart. (How often do we hear the same complaint, even in our own day!)
To get back to the fisherman of Wu-ling:
One day, while out on the river, this fisherman decided to follow the river upstream. At one point, he came to a place where the river branched, taking the right or left branch without paying attention to where he was going. Suddenly he rounded a bend in the river and came upon a grove of peach-trees in full bloom. The blossoming trees grew close along the banks of the river for as far as he could see. The fisherman was filled with joy and astonishment at the beauty of the scene and the delightful perfume of the flowers. He continued upstream, to see how far along the river these trees grew.
When at last he came to the end of the peach trees, the river was scarcely bigger than a stream, and then it suddenly ended at a line of steep hills. There where the river began, the fisherman saw a cave in the side of the hill, and a faint light came from within it. He tied up his boat to a tree, and crept in through the narrow entrance.
He emerged into a world of level country, with fine houses, rich fields, beautiful pools, and luxuriant mulberry and bamboo. He saw roads running north and south, carrying many people on foot and in carts. He could hear the sounds of crowing cocks and barking dogs around him. He noticed that the dress of the people who passed along or were at work in the fields was of a strange cut. He also saw that everyone, young and old, appeared to be happy and content.
One of the people caught sight of the fisherman, and expressed great astonishment. When this person learned whence the fisherman had come, he took him home, cooking a chicken for him and offering him some wine to drink. Before long, all the people of the place came to see the fisherman, this visitor from afar.
The people of the village told the fisherman that several centuries ago, during troubled times, their ancestors had sought refuge here. Over time, the way back to the wider world had been cut off, and they had lost touch with the rest of the human race.
They asked the fisherman about the current politics in the outside world. They were amazed to learn of new dynasty that ruled the land. And when the fishermen told them of the Mongol invasions, they grieved over the vicissitudes of human affairs.
Then each family of the village invited the fisherman to their home in turn, each family offering him hospitality. He saw that this was truly a land of peacefulness and contentment. But at last, the fisherman longed to return to his own family, and he prepared to take his leave. As he said his farewells and began to make his way back to his boat, the people said to him, “It will not be worth while to talk about what you have seen to the outside world.”
But of course the fisherman hoped to return to that lovely peaceful land. He made mental notes of his route as he proceeded on his homeward voyage. When at last he reached home, he at once went and reported what he had seen to the ruling magistrate of the district. The magistrate, greatly interested, sent off men to help him find the way back to this unknown region of peace and plenty. But, try as he might, the fisherman was never able to find it again. Later, a famous adventurer attempted to find the land of Peach Blossom Spring, but he also failed, and died soon afterwards of humiliation. From that time on, no further attempts were made.
The story of “Peach Blossom Spring” is a Utopian story. And in fact, the Chinese name of the story, Táohuā Yuán Jì, has come to mean much the same thing as our English word Utopia: a place of perfection that doesn’t really exist.
We can find versions of the Paech Blossom Spring story in our own time. When you hear people who want to go back to a simpler time, they’re looking for a land that’s stuck in the past, just like the land the land the fisherman found. Or when you hear people who don’t like the current political administration say that they’re going to emigrate to another country, they’re actually looking for a land like the fisherman found, removed from the real world.
Utopian fantasies have become our primary means of expressing our vision for a peaceful world. I consider this to be unfortunate, because we know that Utopian visions are impractical and can’t come true. Utopias can only exist if they are completely cut off from the rest of the world, but this is impossible in an interdependent world. A Utopian vision for the world is a dead end.
Yet we are still liable to fall under the spell of utopian visions. Many people in our own time fall under the spell of religious Utopian visions. So, for example, the Christian vision of heaven can function as a kind of Utopia: you can only reach heaven after you die, and you can only reach heaven if you’re extraordinarily good or lucky; this kind of vision of heaven neither pragmatic nor fair the vast majority of humanity. Our Universalist forebears rejected this conception of a Utopian heaven, saying that everyone gets to go to heaven, and also saying that the only hell was the one we humans created here on earth. Thus our Universalist forebears conclude that it’s up to us to fix the problems in this world, to create a Utopia in the here and now. I agree with our Universalist forebears, but this still leaves open the question of what is a positive vision for the world we’re trying to create.
I don’t think that any one person can provide us with a perfect vision for a peaceful world. That vision can only emerge through communal endeavor. And I suspect when a compelling vision for a peaceful world emerges, it will be far less grand that either the United Nations or Peach Blossom Spring. I think it far more likely that we will find a truly compelling vision for a peaceful world in the mundane details of life. So if we’re going to look for compelling visions for a peaceful world, we might do well to begin with images like the one offered by Joy Harjo in her poem titled “Perhaps the World Ends Here”:
[This copyrighted poem is online here.]
Of course if we’re not careful, even this prosaic vision can seem a bit Utopian. Anyone who knows anything about domestic violence, for example, knows that a kitchen table can be a place of fear and even violence. But the poet acknowledges this when she says that the kitchen table “is a place to hide in the shadow of terror.” There will be violence even in a peaceful world; but perhaps the difference is that the existence of violence will be recognized, and instead of being glorified it will be addressed openly.
I see one big barrier to a widespread adoption of this particular vision for a peaceful world. Joy Harjo’s vision of the peaceful kitchen table owes a great deal to her roots as an enrolled citizen of Muscogee Nation. That is to say, hers is not a vision of the individualistic suburban American nuclear family, but rather a vision of peace rooted in the human connection of extended family and supportive wider community. This is not a vision of life as portrayed on a picture postcard, but rather life as it really is, messy and complicated, but also filled with love and connection.
This makes the image of the kitchen table compelling to me. The kitchen table in the poem is messy: babies teethe at the corners, so at the very least it’s a table covered with baby drool. The kitchen table in the poem is also the place where people put themselves back together after having fallen down. That is to say, the kitchen table in the poem is not some kind of Utopia. But at the same time, it is a place where you can find support when life gets difficult; it can be a place of joy and of triumph; it can be a place to give thanks. It is a human-scaled vision, and a vision grounded in human connection.
I think if we’re going to envision a peaceful world — not as the absence of war, but as something positive — we need to include in our vision the importance of human connection. Not some abstract connection, but the connection that can happen around a kitchen table. If we’re going to envision a peaceful world, we need to include all the messy complexities of human life. It’s not enough to have some big abstract vision, we need a vision that includes teething babies, and drinking coffee, and raising children, and preparing and eating meals together.
Actually, this sounds a bit like what we’re trying to do here in our congregational community. God knows, we are not perfect. But we try to be a community rooted in human connection. I might wish we had some teething babies, but we are a place where people can put themselves back together after having fallen down. We do give children instructions on what it means to be human. We do sing with both joy and sorrow, we do pray with both suffering and remorse. And we do give thanks. Probably the most important thing we do is to give thanks that we are here, and that we have the strength and the ability to make this world just a little bit better.