Sermon for 29 May 2005, 1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois
REMEMBERING BATTLERS FOR PEACE
Ronald J. Glossop
I. Introduction
A. This Memorial Day week-end is a time set aside to remember the soldiers who have lost their lives in defending this country from its enemies.
B. It is altogether fitting that we should honor these thousands of persons who have died so that we might have the freedom and security that we enjoy today.
1. For me, and I suspect for many of you, this sentiment is especially strong in relation to World War II, where there was little question about whether the war was necessary to defend us against the aggressive militaristic dictatorships of Germany and Japan.
2. Over the years our country has become a stronger and stronger force in the world and the weapons of war have become more and more destructive. It has become less and less certain that our nation's military forces are defending our freedom or that war is the best means of doing this. Changes are needed less we ourselves become the oppressors. We need to remember Lord Acton's warning that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
C. We need not and should not cease honoring those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our freedom. Their lives were cut off. They did not get a chance to grow up, to develop and use their talents, to have families, to know children and grand-children.
D. But it also is time to include in our day of remembrance not only those who have battled for us in our country's military forces but also for those who have battled for peace in the world, who have worked and are working to move us beyond nationalistic and religious wars and exploitation of the weak and powerless to a world of peace and justice for all.
II. The battlers for peace are more difficult to identify than the soldiers fighting for a nation. They do not wear uniforms, and their battling occurs on many different fronts. National governments do not give these heroes as much attention as those who fight wars. Converting human society from reliance on war to a new world of peace requires many kinds of change. It requires new kinds of efforts, often carried on by non-governmental organizations. It also requires serious thought in order to determine what kinds of change are needed and how best to bring about those changes.
III. When asked to identify the battlers for peace, most people are likely to think first of the proponents of nonviolent life-styles such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
A. There is no doubt that an important aspect of war is the reliance on violence, on pure physical coercive force plus the threat of great pain or death to those who do not yield.
B. Consequently one attractive strategy for ending war is to urge individuals to commit themselves to never use violence, not even as a means to resisting injustice.
C. Let me pause here to note that there is a tension between peace and justice. For the most part peace is the aim of those who are well off, those who want to preserve the status quo. On the other hand, usually justice is the aim of those who are not well off, those who are victims in the existing situation, the status quo.
1. As an illustration of this point, consider how in 1945-1948 the Israelis in the Middle East were calling for justice, for the need to create a new state of Israel, while now that they have their state and are in a dominant economic and military position the Israelis call for peace while it is the Palestinians call for justice.
2. Behind this tension between peace and justice is still another tension, a tension resulting from two different views of justice. The liberal view of justice focuses on the equality of all persons and the huge role of fate in the different situations of different persons, starting with when and where they are born and what traits they happen to inherit. The other view, the conservative view of justice, emphasizes the existence of "free will" and the capacity of individual persons to modify their lives if they will only exercise that capacity.
a. Following from the liberal view is the consequence that those who are well off have an obligation to be compassionate and helpful and forgiving to those who are not so well off. This liberal view tends to be supportive of social change to assist those who are not well off.
b. Following from the conservative view is the consequence that people generally get what they deserve, that they need to be rewarded for the good choices they make and punished for the bad choices they make. This conservative view tends to be opposed to social change since it holds that people generally deserve to be in the situations they are in. If I am well off, it is because my family and I have made good decisions, and if you are not well off, it is because your family and you have made bad decisions.
D. The implications of these comments about justice with regard to the quest for peace are that the issue of justice cannot be ignored & that establishing peace requires dealing with the issue of how to eliminate what is perceived as injustice without resorting to violence to do it.
E. And it is just this issue of how to deal with injustice which is addressed by Gandhi and King and Nhat Hanh. Victims of injustice need to have an alternative to using violence as a way of dealing with those unjust situations. The alternative they recommend is what Gandhi called "satyagraha," the force of truth. Victims must make those responsible for the injustice aware of what they are doing. Behind this strategy is a great truth, that most of the injustice in the world is the result of indifference rather than maliciousness. Most people who are responsible for injustices, both locally and globally, are unaware of their role in the situation. The champions of nonviolence argue that the way to stop the injustice is to make the perpetrators of it aware of what they are doing and to encourage them to respond by changing it rather than ignoring it.
F. Some other battlers for peace in this group are Arun Gandhi (grandson of Mohandas Gandhi), Gene Sharp, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, and Johan Galtung.
VI. Still another group of battlers for peace are those focused on the creation of political institutions that can resolve conflicts by political and judicial means rather than resorting to war. They realize that war is fought between one organized group and another organized group and that most of the violence committed in warfare is due to following orders from those higher up in the chain of command. Therefore peace requires a different political order.
A. One subgroup of battlers for peace focused on getting peace by creating democratic political institutions are the theoreticians who have argued for the need for global political institutions that can set policies for the global community and thus peaceably resolve conflicts among those who advocate opposing policies. In this group we find Abbé Saint-Pierre, Eméric Crucé, Anacharsis Cloots, William Penn, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, K'ang Yu-wei, H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, Philip Kerr, Emery Reves, Mortimer Adler, Clarence Streit, Lola Maverick Lloyd, Rosika Schwimmer, Frederick Schuman, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Grenville Clark, Louis Sohn, John Boyd Orr, G. A. Borgese, Pope John XXIII, and Benjamin Ferencz.
B. A second subgroup of battlers for peace would be the political figures who have worked to create democratic political institutions at the global level such as Woodrow Wilson for the League of Nations, Franklin Roosevelt for the United Nations, and Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak for the European Union plus the political figures who have worked to advance the work of these global institutions such as Dag Hammarsjold, U Thant, and Kofi Annan from within and such as Henry Usborne, Bernard Baruch, Harold Macmillan, Alan Cranston, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ted Turner from without.
VII. I apologize for just listing so many names, some of which you probably have never heard before, without providing any kind of description of the contributions made by each of these battlers for peace, but such amplification would require me to go on too long. I also apologize to those whose names should have been mentioned but weren't. On this Memorial Day week-end I trust that by mentioning these names I have at least started us in the direction of honoring these men and women (as well as those I didn't mention) who have worked for a just and peaceful world, not by serving in the military forces but by living lives which promote the welfare of all humanity, not just the welfare of one country. The personal sacrifices of our nation's military forces should not be forgotten, but in a changing world that needs to keep on changing, I think we need to expand the group of those we remember and honor on Memorial Day to include these battlers for peace.
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