peace – Page 3 – Dan Harper

Heaven on Earth

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 and 11:00 worship services. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2010 Daniel Harper.

We all know what heaven looks like, don’t we? It has nothing to do with religion, it’s a part of our popular culture. You go to heaven and you get a long white robe, a halo, a palm frond, and a golden harp. Mark Twain parodied this version of heaven in his book Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. When Stormfield, a crusty stormy old sea captain, finally gets into heaven, after a few misadventures, he gets suited up in proper heavenly fashion, and then goes off to find a cloud:

“When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other people, I never felt so good in my life. Says I, ‘Now this is according to the promises; I’ve been having my doubts, but now I am in heaven, sure enough.’ I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in….”

But Stormfield knows only one tune, and everyone is playing something different, and after 16 hours of it, it gets pretty tiresome. Stormfield strikes up a conversation with the fellow on the next cloud over, and the fellow says to him:

“‘Are you glad to be here?’

“Says I, ‘Old man, I’ll be frank with you. This AIN’T just as near my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go to church.’”

So the two of them walk off, dump their robes and harps and halos, and go find something else to do. Now if you want to go to that kind of heaven, and get your white robe, and your golden harp, and your palm branch, and your halo, well, go for it. But I have no interest in going to that kind of heaven, and no particular interest in talking about that kind of heaven.

What if heaven has nothing to do with golden harps, and halos, and white robes, and clouds? What if heaven is not the afterlife? What if heaven is not a place separate from earth? What if heaven is for everyone?

Historically, the Universalist side of our religious tradition affirmed that everyone gets to go to heaven, based on the logical reasoning that if God is indeed good, then God would not damn anyone to eternal torment, since such damnation would be unspeakably evil. This was a radical idea in its day, but the Universalists did not stop there. Many Universalists abandoned traditional ideas of heaven, and began to wonder what it would be like if we could create a heaven on earth, here and now.

Back in 1943, when most of the world was embroiled in war and violence and killing, the Universalist Church of America issued an “Affirmation of Social Principles” which begins as follows: “We Universalists avow our faith in the supreme worth of every human personality, and in the power of me [and women] of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome all evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.” To progressively establish the Kingdom of God; to progressively establish heaven on earth. Such an ideal does not require a literal belief in either God or heaven; rather, this is a statement that presents us with the possibility that we can truly live out our highest ideals.

Now that we have established what heaven does not look like — no halos, harps, or clouds — we might ask what a Unitarian Universalist heaven might look like. And I have an answer that is of great relevance to us here in Silicon Valley: a Unitarian Universalist heaven might just be the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee is the fellow that developed the World Wide Web, and as it happens he is also a Unitarian Universalist. Back in 1998 on one of his personal Web pages on the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web site, he posted an essay titled “The World Wide Web and the ‘Web of Life’,” in which he says that although he developed the Web before he discovered Unitarian Universalism, he feels there are parallels between the philosophies underlying each. Unitarian Universalists, says Berners-Lee, “meet in churches instead of wired hotels, and discuss justice, peace, conflict, and morality rather than protocols and data formats, but in other ways the peer respect is very similar to that of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Both are communities which I really appreciate.”

So says Tim Berners-Lee. I would explain it this way: both Unitarian Universalism and the World Wide Web are designed to foster communities based on networks of trust and mutual respect, networks where you are judged by your contributions, not by your age, race, class, or social status. Neither Unitarian Universalism nor the World Wide Web are always successful in fostering those networks of trust, but that’s what they’re designed to do. The fundamental metaphor of each is a web: a web of information and communication for the one, and an interdependent web of all existence for the other. This is an ecological metaphor, which implies that individuals are part of a non-linear, non-hierarchical system; and this metaphor helps us remember that we are all interdependent and interconnected.

I’ll let Tim Berners-Lee tell you how this relates to heaven, although he doesn’t use that word. I’ll intersperse a little commentary among Berners-Lee’s words:

“The is one other thing that comes to mind as common between the Internet folks and the Unitarian Universalists [says Berners-Lee]. The whole spread of the Web happened not because of a decision and a mandate from any authority, but because a whole bunch of people across the ‘Net picked it up and brought up Web clients and servers, it actually happened. [Commentary: Just like heaven, the ideal of the Web existed, not as something that would happen later if you were good, but something that could happen now if you put in a little effort.] The actual explosion of creativity, and the coming into being of the Web was the result of thousands of individuals playing a small part. In the first couple of years, often this was not for a direct gain, but because they had an inkling that it was the right way to go, and a gleam of an exciting future. It is necessary to Unitarian Universalist philosophy that such things can happen, that we will get to a better state in the end by each playing our small part. [Commentary: Heaven is like the World Wide Web, it will happen if each of us makes a little effort to make it happen.] Unitarian Universalism is full of hope, and the fact that the Web happens is an example of a dream coming true and an encouragement to all who hope.”

If people of good will and sacrificial spirit put their minds to it, they have the power to overcome chaos and evil and progressively make real idealistic utopian visions. By working with, not against, the power of the interdependent web of all existence, we can actually makes our ideals come true.

Believe it or not, this same basic concept can be found among the earliest Christian communities, before the creeds and dogmas mucked everything up. Those early Christians were trying to figure out how to live out the teachings of the rabbi called Jesus. Some of the parables of this rabbi named Jesus seemed to imply that heaven was about to burst upon us, not after death, but really soon, maybe now; in fact, some of those parables could be interpreted as meaning that heaven is happening here and now and you and I can be the causes of it [e.g., Matthew 13.33], or that heaven is happening here and now but its growth is obscured from view [e.g., Mark 4.26-29].

These early Christian communities tried to create institutions that would encourage the emergence of heaven in the here and now. (Mind you, the later creeds and dogmas have obscured much of this from our view, but this really did happen.) Twenty years after Jesus was executed by the Romans, Christian communities had a weekly meal that was central to their worship services; I’m not talking about communion, I’m talking about the agape meal. The idea was that the rich folks would contribute the bulk of the food and drink, so the poor people could come to church and eat their fill. People being what they are, sometimes the rich people, who did not have to go to work, would start early and eat all the food they brought before the poor people showed up after work [1 Cor. 20-21]; Paul of Tarsus chastised the Christian community of Corinth for allowing exactly this kind of behavior. But the ideal was that each person would bring as much food and she or he could, and those who couldn’t afford to bring any food could come and get one good meal each week.

This egalitarian communal meal, which was abandoned by later Christian communities, was a way of living out and actually experiencing the connectedness and interdependence of all humanity. This essential interconnectedness of all humanity was what Jesus meant when he talked about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven [Bernard Loomer, “Unfoldings II,” pp. 2 ff.]. So the communal meal of early Christian communities was a way of teaching the whole community about the interdependent web of all existence, the Web of Life.

This is not unlike what we do with our second Sunday lunches here in our church. On the second Sunday of the month, Susan Plass and Edie Keating and their helpers put together a meal while the 11:00 worship service is going on. When the 11:00 worship service lets out, we all walk over to the Fireside Room next door, and load up our plates, and sit down at a long table with other people from our church. There is a suggested donation of four dollars to pay for second Sunday lunch. I trust that if someone is waiting in line to eat and cannot afford to pay the four dollars, the people next to him or her will say, Go ahead and eat anyway. And I know that some people contribute more than four dollars, because they have the money and they want to make sure everyone else can eat.

But there is more to the Web of Life than giving food to someone who doesn’t happen to have four dollars in their pocket on the second Sunday of the month. You never know who you’re going to wind up sitting next to at one of these second Sunday lunches. I like them because my partner and I don’t have children, so our second Sunday lunches are about the only times I sit down at a meal with children and teenagers. You might wind up sitting next to someone who grew up in another country, and there’s a good chance you’ll sit next to someone with different skin color than yours. You might wind up sitting next to someone who has a different accent than yours — as someone from eastern Massachusetts, I always wind up sitting next to someone with a strange accent unless I sit next to Phyllis Cassel who also grew up in eastern Massachusetts. This is the beauty of these second Sunday lunches — you wind up sitting near people with whom you might otherwise not share a meal. You understand your place in the diversity of humanity, and you understand how we are all connected and interdependent in the Web of Life.

I would like to return for a moment to Mark Twain’s story about heaven. It turned out all right for Captain Stormfield in the end. He left his cloud, dumped the robe and halo and harp and palm leaf unceremoniously along the road, and eventually winds up running into Sam, an old friend of his, who tells him, “‘It’s the same here [in heaven] as it is on earth — you’ve got to earn a thing, square and honest, before you enjoy it….’” — and when it comes to happiness, Sam tells Captain Stormfield that there’s plenty of pain and suffering in heaven, too, because, says Sam, “There ain’t a thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self — it’s only so by contrast with the other thing…. Well, there’s plenty of pain and suffering in heaven — consequently there’s plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness.” But we don’t need some supernatural heaven in the afterlife; we can institute heaven here on earth. We can, if people of good will and sacrificial spirit work together to progressively establish a world of justice and goodness. As Captain Stormfield might put it, “‘That’s the sensiblest heaven I’ve ever heard of, Sam….”

The Last True Story

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning comes from The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, a book by John Crawford which tells the story of his tour of duty in Iraq. I thought is was important for us to hear the words of an Iraq veteran this Memorial Day. This is from the end of the book:

It was raining the day I stepped off the plane and into a chilly Georgia morning. The line of soldiers, heads down, struggled underneath the weight of their gear across the tarmac and into the long, low building full of Red Cross coffee and doughnuts. Along the way a general stood shaking hands and exchanging salutes with returning soldiers. Next to him, a young lieutenant shivered as he held an umbrella out at arm’s length over the general. Neither had combat patches on their uniforms, and I splashed by without saluting or shaking hands.

The first time I had been at the airport, there had been banners and flags, family members waving fervently at the departing plane. This time the weather, I guess, had kept them home, and the gray sky was the only real witness to our return. Clouds or no, the “freedom bird” had landed and our war was over; we were home.

That night, in the same dilapidated World War II barracks that we had deployed from an eternity before, I didn’t sleep. I thought it was because of the Christmas-morning-like tremble in the air. In reality, I had become addicted to Valium in Baghdad and was going through withdrawal. Sitting alone on my bunk in the darkness, I felt a wave of nausea approaching. That sick feeling hasn’t entirely gone away yet….

While many in my platoon had relatively easy transitions, within days, I found myself kept from homelessness only by the hospitality of a friend with a sofa. It was like being at a party and going to the restroom for fifteen months and then trying to rejoin the conversation. Everyone and everything had changed without asking me first.

…to be continued…

The second reading this morning is a continuation of the first reading.

I took solace in becoming the kind of self-deprecating drunk who shows up at parties naked and wonders why everyone reacts the way they do. The sequence of events that followed culminated in my waking up on the dingy bathroom floor of an even dingier one-bedroom apartment devoid of furniture, except for a couch pulled from a Dumpster early one rainy morning before the garbage man could claim it. In that bathroom, fighting off sickness from the year’s excess, with my dog eyeing me and wondering if a coup d’état would be necessary to ensure his continued food supply, I did some soul-searching.

I didn’t find a whole lot. I don’t have nightmares, or see faces. When there is a flash outside my window at night I know it’s just lightning and not a flare or explosion. I can even drive without cringing at the slightest pile of rubble along the roadside in anticipation of an ear-rending explosion and shrapnel tearing through my flesh. I rarely get into fights with people who I imagine are “eyeballing me.” I actually adjusted quite well.

It certainly could have been worse. One of my buddies got locked up in an institution by the police for being a danger to himself. Another woke up in the hospital with no memory of the beating he received from police — not for being a danger to himself, but to everyone else. One guy got a brain infection and wakes up every morning expecting to be in Iraq. Two more are in Afghanistan, having re-upped rather than deal with being at home. Five more went back to Baghdad as private security guards. Their consensus on how it is a second time around: still hot and nasty….

War stories end when the battle is over or when the soldier comes home. In real life, there are no moments amid smoldering hilltops for tranquil introspection. When the war is over, you pick up your gear, walk down the hill and back into the world.

Sermon

The readings this morning came from a book written by a John Crawford about what it was like for him to return from serving in the Iraq War. They paint a pretty bleak picture of what it’s like to be a returning veteran. But I’d like to add something else that Crawford says. Near the beginning of the book, he writes:

“As much as I feel like this book is the story of innocence not lost but stolen, of lies and blackness … I should also share a few words from my father, from a phone conversation we had about halfway through my time in Iraq. He said to me, ‘Son, of all the things I wanted to see you achieve, a combat infantry badge was the last. It is also the one I am most proud of you for.’”

This is Memorial Day weekend, and Memorial Day is an appropriate time to reflect on what our veterans go through; it is an appropriate time to remember that we should take pride in our American servicemen and servicewomen; it is an appropriate time to reflect on the moral issues that go along with war, moral issues that reflect, not on individual veterans, but on all of us who are part of American society.

On this Memorial Day in the year 2009, what is uppermost in our minds is the fact that the war in Iraq has been going on for more than five years now. When we are in the middle of such a war, a war that threatens to drag on for quite a while longer, it’s easy to forget the origins of Memorial Day.

Historian David Blight tells us that Memorial Day was first celebrated in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865. The city of Charleston had been evacuated, and the only non-combatants remaining in the city were African Americans who could not get out. The Confederate Army had established a prison camp on the site of a race course. 257 Union soldiers died in that prison camp, and were dumped into a mass grave.

In April, 1865, the African American community of Charleston decided to create a proper gravesite for the Union dead buried in that mass grave. They disinterred the bodies, and reinterred them in individual graves, and African American carpenters built a fence around the new grave yard.

To officially open the new grave yard, the African American community organized a parade of some ten thousand people, including African American schoolchildren and ordinary African American citizens. White Americans were represented by some nearby Union regiments, and some white abolitionists. All these people gathered in the new graveyard. They listened to preachers, they sang songs like “America the Beautiful” and “John Brown’s Body” and old spirituals. And at last they settled down to picnics, and to watching the Union regiments marching about.

This was the first Memorial Day: a day to commemorate those who had died in the war, to honor those who had fought in the war, to reflect on the meaning of the Civil War, and to reflect on the end of the war. These are still the purposes of Memorial Day today: to commemorate those who died in war, to honor the veterans, to reflect on what wars mean for us, and to think about the end of the present war and the eventual end of all wars. That first Memorial Day was celebrated in that newly-built cemetery; and it is still a tradition in many families to go to the cemetery on Memorial Day, and tend to the graves of family members who have died.

I’d like to reflect on some of these points with you this morning. I’d like to begin by thinking about how we might best honor our veterans. I’d like to reflect on the meaning of war, particularly what the current war means for us. Finally, I’d like to commemorate those who have died in war.

1. How might we best honor our returning veterans? This is a question that the United States has struggled with again and again. Sometime we give our returning veterans parades and hero’s welcomes; just as often, we have seemingly forgotten our returning veterans. Or, as we heard in the readings this morning, the welcome given to returning veterans is not much of a welcome.

There’s an underlying problem here. When we send soldiers off to war, we have trained them to do a very specific task, which is to wage war. When soldiers return home again, we have to think about how to help them make that transition. It take months to train a soldier to go to war; we should expect that it might take months to train a soldier to stop being a soldier. It isn’t enough to greet a returning soldier with a salute and a handshake from a general without a combat badge. Nor can we try to make this the sole responsibility of the military; in a democratic society, it is the responsibility of all of us.

We all know that our democratic society has to take the responsibility for making sure all returning vets get integrated back into society. There are veterans who become non-functional, and we have to take care of them: either by helping them become functional once again; or if that is impossible, then we have to adequately care for them. When we hear that a disproportionate number of homeless people are veterans, we know that we have not done a good job of caring for our non-functional veterans.

Then there are the veterans who are basically functional, although they may need several months of transition time. For these men and women, society has to make sure that their transition goes smoothly. John Crawford’s transition did not go smoothly, and he says that at one point the only thing that kept him from homelessness was the kindness of a friend. This represents a failure by society — by us — to take care of returning veterans who will go on to lead fully functional lives.

And there are the veterans who made it through the war basically intact, and who have an easy transition back into civilian life. Even with these men and women, we can’t abdicate all responsibility. When these veterans come back to civilian life, they need society’s help — they need our help — as they reclaim old jobs or find new jobs. This may be a difficult task for us in the current economic climate.

I’d have to say that our society does not do a particularly good job at supporting returning veterans. We don’t necessarily do a bad job, but there’s no real enthusiasm for it. I think part of the problems is that less than one percent of the population is on active military duty during this current war; there are so few returning veterans as a percentage of the overall society that it is easy to forget them or ignore them. And so as a society we don’t make the effort to re-integrate returning veterans into society. In fact, the taxpayers demand that we don’t spend enough money on returning veterans: there is never enough money for the part of the military budget that deals with returning vets.

Morally, this is selfish and wrong. If we’re going to have a war, we have to clean up after that war. This means in part that we have to take care of returning soldiers. This has to be figured into the true costs of every war. The politicians must be forced to figure this cost in, and we as voters and taxpayers have to hold military and political leaders accountable to this.

2. Those are some thoughts about how we might honor returning veterans. Next I’d like to reflect for a moment on the meaning of war, particularly on the meaning of the current war.

One of the central aspects of war that we tend to ignore in our society is that every war requires some kind of atonement. Even a war that is completely justifiable on moral grounds would require atonement for the very simple reason that any war involves killing, and killing always requires atonement. Since war is a society-wide phenomenon, the killing that takes place during war must be atoned for by everyone in society. This is part of the purpose of Memorial Day, in my opinion. That very first Memorial Day was to remember the Civil War, which was fought for the morally justifiable purpose of ending slavery; nevertheless, even after the Civil War, those African American citizens of Charleston atoned for all the killing that went on by building a suitable cemetery for the war dead. This is one reason we visit graves and cemeteries and memorials on Memorial Day.

Obviously, we visit graves and cemeteries and memorials to say goodbye to those who died in war. We have all seen those images of Vietnam veterans at the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, D.C., with tears in their eyes as they see the name of a friend who died in that war. This is one way we atone for the killing that goes on during war: we remember it, and we grieve over it. This is a very traditional part of Memorial Day, and this should continue.

But that is not enough. Somehow we have to atone for all the evils of war — not just the killing, but the waste, and the disruption, and the tears in the fabric of society, and the weakening of the moral fabric of society, all of which are results of war. And it is we, you and I, who have to do this, because the evils of war have been done in our name and for our sakes. Even if we didn’t agree with the war, even if we voted against the politicians who supported the war, even if we actively opposed the war (as I did), we do live in a democracy, and in a democracy we are all responsible for public policy.

So how can we atone for all the evils of war? — which, by the way, sounds like a pretty big job. Basically we atone for war by continuing to work towards making our society the kind of society in which war is no longer necessary. And since we live in a democracy, we will find different ways to do this work. Since so many wars are rooted in fights over resources, some of us might find ways for us to use fewer resources as a society. Since so many wars are rooted in hatred of Otherness, some of us might work to increase understanding across religious, ethnic, racial, and other boundaries. In this congregation, many of us are artists of one kind or another, and the artists among us might make paintings and poems and sculptures and plays and music that leads us towards a future that does not require war. I’m a minister, and one of the things I try to do is to popularize the teachings of Jesus and of Buddha, both of whom taught that violence is unnecessary. In short, reducing the likelihood that we will wage war in the future is the best way to atone for waging war in the present.

There is one kind of atonement that all of us should do; we should all grieve the loss of life. In the case of the Iraq War, we should especially grieve the loss of our own American servicemen and servicewomen, because they are closest to us; but we should also grieve all loss of life that occurs during this war, for we are in some sense responsible for it. We Americans don’t like the thought that maybe we should feel a little guilt, but we have to feel at least a little guilty that we’re alive while other people died in a war fought by our country. This is another purpose of Memorial Day: to grieve the deaths of all those who die in the course of war.

3. And perhaps the best way to grieve is to commemorate those who have died. The way we do this is to remember all the people who have died, in all the military actions our country as gotten involved in. That means remembering even the small military actions that resulted in loss of life. That makes a fairly substantial list. In my lifetime alone, I remember the war that spread from Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos; the Cold War; the invasion of Grenada; the military action in Panama; the Persian Gulf War; the military action in Somalia; the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head; I’m sure there were some that I’ve forgotten.

When we start remembering all the military actions America has been involved in, we are doing two things. First, it helps us to remember that lots of low-level American servicemen and servicewomen have died in the service of this country; and that reminds us that there are plenty of returned veterans, American servicemen and servicewomen who didn’t die, to whom we owe ongoing support. Second, remembering this long list of military actions by our country makes us reflect on the morality of our use of military force. From a moral point of view, this long list makes me think that maybe we could have gotten away with fewer wars. Maybe we could devoted more of our resources, and more of our attention, to humanitarian aid, to supporting United Nations peacekeeping missions, and so on. Helping other nations in peaceful ways is morally better than being involved in war.

I’d like to end by reflecting on the possibility that we could someday end war. At this point in history, we may not have a choice: we can no longer afford to carry on long, drawn-out wars. We are going to have a hard enough time paying the cost of re-integrating so many returning veterans, and providing them with sufficient services to make sure they have the support they deserve. The current war, a horrendously expensive war, is dragging down our economy by putting our country further into debt, which makes it less attractive to buy Treasury bonds. We are going to be paying the price of this war for years to come through our taxes, and I don’t see how we are going to be able to afford another war any time soon. That’s the price we pay in money, but there’s another price we pay, and that’s the moral price.

In our culture, it’s not very popular to say this. Americans like to think that we are always in the right, which means that there is no moral price to anything. So now I get to be the cranky preacher who says: sorry, but there is a moral price. If we don’t find ways to atone for the killing that has been going on in our names, then we will pay the moral price for this war in guilt and shame, and guilt and shame take a long time to finally do away with. Perhaps it is impossible to end all war; human beings are by no means perfect beings, and we are going to continue to get ourselves into situations where we have to go to war. But war has become a luxury that we can no longer afford to indulge so frequently. We need to continue to work towards making our society less dependent on waging war. Since our current war is, at root, a fight over oil resources, some of us will find ways for us to use fewer resources as a society. Since many wars are rooted in hatred of Otherness, some of us will work to increase understanding across religious, ethnic, racial, and other boundaries. The artists among us will make paintings and poems and sculptures and plays and music that leads us towards less dependence on war.

So on this Memorial Day, we will look forward to reducing our society’s reliance on war. And we will also do all the things that those citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, did on the very first Memorial Day. We will have parades. We will commemorate the dead. Some of us will go to tend graves. Some of us will have picnics. We will all pause for at least a moment to remember Memorial Day, and then pause for another moment to look forward to the day when we will reduce our reliance on war — or even end war altogether.

Just Wars, Unjust Wars

This sermon was a revised version of a sermon first preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford from March 25, 2007. Because Dan was ill, Karen Andersen delivered this sermon. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Sermon

This morning, I had planned to preach a sermon titled “Emperor as God.” But a couple of things got in the way of that plan. First of all, my mother-in-law, Betty Steinfeld, whom I loved dearly, died a week ago today. Second of all, I somehow managed to a nasty gastro-intestinal virus early in the week. Between those two things, and some other things going on, I’m afraid I didn’t have the energy to write a whole new sermon — instead I rewrote a sermon from March 25, 2007. Indeed, I’m ill enough that I have asked our worship associate Karen Andersen to preach this sermon for me.

…

We Unitarian Universalists are both Christian and not-Christian; some people call us “post-Christian.” Although “post-Christian” can be meant as an insult, I like being a post-Christian. As a post-Christian, I can hold on to the best of the Christian tradition; and through the use of reason I can reject the parts of the Christian tradition that are obviously wrong-headed.

It’s just after the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Today is also Palm Sunday, that day when Jesus of Nazareth went to Jerusalem, and challenged the ethics of the regional political and religious leaders. Today, I find myself holding on to the best of the Christian tradition.

And I believe the best of the Christian tradition can be found in what is popularly known as the “Sermon on the Mount.” This is a sermon that was supposed to have been preached by the great rabbi and spiritual leader Jesus of Nazareth, long before he went into Jerusalem. Jesus and his disciples were going through the countryside in the land of Judea. Rumors began to spread through the countryside that a great and good and wise man was preaching with such authority and such deep humanity, that he was said to be the Messiah, the Chosen One who would lead the Jewish people into righteousness and freedom. Thousands of people flocked to hear this great man preach. His disciples found him a hill on which he stood while the people gathered around him. And there he preached a sermon that contained the core of his beliefs.

In that sermon, Jesus of Nazareth preached: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

And then he also preached this:

“‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your [God] in heaven; for [God] makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly [God] is perfect.’”

Taken as a whole, the Sermon on the Mount comprises what is arguably the highest and best statement of Christian ethics. On this fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I would like us to reflect on the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” To help explain what he meant by this, he offered a dramatic example of how we are to live this out in our own lives, saying:

“‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also….” [5.39-40]

That is an utterly ridiculous statement. If anyone strikes us on the right cheek, there is no way that we are going to just stand there and offer our left cheek also; we would either call the cops, sue the jerk who hit us, call the domestic abuse hotline, or simply walk away. But to just stand there, waiting to be hit on the other cheek — we are not going to do that, it is asking to be hurt.

Or take a more extreme example. When the fanatics hijacked those jets and flew them into the World Trade Center towers, our natural impulse was to strike back, to invade Afghanistan. Of course we invaded Afghanistan. We sought justice. We sought justice for the hundreds of people who died in terror on those jetliners. We sought justice for the thousands who died in the twin towers: the people who burned to death, the people who jumped to their deaths rather than be burned. Of course we invaded Afghanistan to hunt down terrorists; we could not sit passively waiting for the terrorists to strike again.

The Christian tradition tells us that some wars can be just wars. Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest Christian thinkers, said, “In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged.” We fulfilled the first criterion, because our sovereign powers, the President and Congress, approved the invasion of Afghanistan. Thomas Aquinas continued, “Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says: ‘A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs….’” Clearly, we had been wronged; clearly we fulfilled this second criterion as well. Thomas Aquinas says we must meet yet a third criterion for a just war: “Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. Hence Augustine says: ‘True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.’” And when we invaded Afghanistan, we assuredly felt that our object was to secure the peace, to punish evildoers, and to uplift the good.

And then we took another short step; on March 20, 2003, we invaded Iraq. That was but a short step further along the same path. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t the invasion of Iraq justifiable? Can the invasion of Iraq be justified religiously as a just war?

Most Christian religious leaders and thinkers did not believe that the invasion of Iraq was justifiable. A typical example: on March 9, 2003, former president Jimmy Carter, a Christian and a deep thinker in his own right, said:

“As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.”

Jimmy Carter, who has studied Christian just war theory and who has updated that theory to account for the way the world works today, had an updated list of criteria for a just war. But he said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq failed all his criteria for what constitutes a just war. And he asserted that most Christian religious leaders and thinkers agreed with him.

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Perhaps some of you believed then, and believe now, that the invasion of Iraq was justified. And I know that you can make sound arguments that invading Iraq was politically justifiable, that it was a pragmatic act. Many of our political leaders made exactly such arguments as Congress voted overwhelmingly to invade Iraq; and while some of those political leaders have since changed their minds, it does not seem to me that they changed their minds on the basis of religious conviction. Politically, the invasion of Iraq seems to have been justifiable.

I readily admit that I am not competent to argue whether the invasion of Iraq was politically justifiable. I am not a politician, and I know I am somewhat naive when it comes to politics. But to anyone within the Christian tradition — even to those of us who are post-Christians — the invasion of Iraq was not religiously justifiable. To Christians and to post-Christians, the invasion of Iraq must be considered immoral and wrong.

These are harsh words. To say that the invasion of Iraq was immoral and wrong, is to accuse our elected leaders of being immoral. And because we live in a democracy, this means that the entire electorate has allowed immorality to rule our foreign policy. We have allowed the United States to become an immoral nation. Even more harshly, those of us in this room who can legally vote, or who participate in the political process in any other way, have aided and abetted an immoral war.

These are harsh words, because if we acknowledge that we ourselves have aided and abetted an immoral war; we have aided and abetted immorality. This fact rose up into my consciousness as the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approached — the fact that I myself was in some small sense participating in an immoral war.

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So how can we make amends for this invasion of Iraq? Let me tell you how one man did so.

Two years ago, on Friday, March 16, 2007, there was a Christian Peace Witness for Iraq down in Washington, D.C. To mark the fourth anniversary of the immoral invasion of Iraq, scores of Christian religious leaders planned to commit civil disobedience in front of the White House. They planned to trespass on White House grounds and commit the radical act of praying for peace. Thousands of other Christians were going to light candles and surround the White House with light, surround the White House with prayers for peace.

I called up my friend Elizabeth — she’s a Quaker and a pacifist who lives in Washington — and asked here if she was going to participate in this Christian Peace Witness for Iraq. Yes, she said. I said the whole thing seems hopeless, and that praying for peace seemed hopelessly impractical. Well, said Elizabeth, we can’t do anything else, but at least we can pray. So I told Elizabeth that if she’d put me up for the night, I’d come down and pray for peace in front of the White House while other ministers and clergypeople got arrested for praying. Now I wasn’t going to commit civil disobedience, but I did want to be there as a witness.

And at about eleven o’clock, there I stood in front of the White House in the freezing cold, snow on the ground, along with two or three thousand other people. The organizers announced that the people who were going to commit civil disobedience should get ready. Beside me, one man said to another, “OK, Rev., guess this is it. You’ve got my cell phone number?” The other man, presumably a minister, was an older African American man whom I guessed to be about 70 — and I give that description of him so you realize that this wasn’t the stereotypical crowd of young white hippie peaceniks. The minister nodded and said, “Yes, I’ve got it, and I’ll call you when it’s time to bail me out.”

What a ridiculous thing for a seventy year old minister to do: to stand in front of the White House on a freezing cold night, and get arrested for praying for peace. I almost decided to join that 70-something minister right then and there. What a silly thing to do, to get arrested like that. It’s as silly as turning your left cheek should someone strike you on your right cheek. It’s standing there in silent witness to immorality and violence: not turning away, not striking back, not seeking legal redress, but standing there as if to say: “What you are doing is wrong, is immoral.” At that moment, I sure wished I was the one who was going to get arrested.

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When we are told to turn the other cheek, it’s usually put in such a way that it means we are supposed to be meek and mild and to accept whatever crap is dished out to us. That’s not what it means to turn the other cheek. To turn the other cheek is to stand up in the face of immorality, to stand up against that which is wrong, to stand up in witness that there is a better way to live. Therefore, I do not recommend to you turn the other cheek. If you stand there in the face of immorality and violence, chances are that you’ll just get hit on the other cheek; or maybe you’ll get arrested for praying. Better to put up with immorality. Don’t turn the other cheek.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others….” I have told you not to turn the other cheek. Maybe if we just ignore the war in Iraq, it will go away. Trust Barack Obama and the new batch of political leaders — they’ll get us out of Iraq, and you and I don’t have to do anything. Or maybe you agree with the political expediency of the war in Iraq, and you think we should continue to fight it with increased troop levels.

But I have to tell you, we cannot justify the war in Iraq on religious grounds. I have to tell you that we must somehow figure out how to let our lights shine: that is, we must somehow figure out how to proclaim the immorality of this war. Making such a proclamation will come at a price — like that man in Washington, D.C., we might wind up getting arrested; or look what happened to Jesus of Nazareth after he went to Jerusalem and began protesting the immoralities of his day. There will be a price, but we must somehow figure out how to ask forgiveness for our own complicity in the prosecution of this war; we must let the light of love shine in the darkness of violence. May our very being, the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts, become prayers for peace.