First Parish Unitarian UniversalistBlessed Are the Peacemakers—Part Two
Unitarian Universalist Peace-Making in Times Past
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 15, 2007
March 18th was the Sunday closest to the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and coalition armed forces. Our worship service that day was a heartfelt “prayer for peace,” for which these paper doves you see here in the sanctuary first appeared (they have remained, at the request of several of you).
I began the service by telling how the dove became a symbol of peace. It’s from the story of Noah and the flood in the Book of Genesis in the Jewish scriptures. Do you remember why God sent the flood? The scriptures say that the God was angry because humans had corrupted the earth with their violence. (This is why people referred to Hurricane Katrina as an “event of Biblical proportions”) Only Noah and his family and two of every land-based animal species escaped its fate. When the dove that Noah sent off to look for dry land came back with an olive branch, it was a sign of truce from God, a peace sign.
I also quoted the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Rev. William G. Sinkford’s open letter to members of the US Congress that week in March, in which he wrote, “Rather than a surge of troops, we American taxpayers deserve a surge of truth.”
And then, in our service, we told the truth about the human cost of this war so far:
An estimated 3.8 million Iraqis have fled their homes as a result of it, no one knows exactly how many Iraqis have been killed but some estimates go over a ½ million, 500 US soldiers have undergone major amputations as a result of their service, many have severe head injuries, and more than 3200 have been killed, including 65 (plus two more since March 18 th) from Massachusetts.
Symbolizing all of these casualties, and all of the other human cost of this war, I read aloud, slowly and somberly, the names of the 65 service members from Massachusetts killed in Iraq. During the silence that followed, the congregation was invited to compose its own prayers for peace, which you did, with passion and purpose. I went around the sanctuary with the microphone so that those who wanted to could offer them into the silence. Also, we read aloud prayers from many of the world’s religions, taken from the United Nations’ Day of Prayer for Peace during its Year of Peace, 1986.
Our prayers, all of them, were deeply heart-felt.
I’ve asked Mary Ann Trupe to read hers aloud again today, because it took for its inspiration these paper doves.
“From the Safety of Our Sanctuary” by Mary Ann Trupe
May I send a dove?
Will the battle obliterate its flight?
May I send a dove?
Will our vainglorious fight impede its message?
May I send a dove?
May I ring a bell, breathe a prayer for all humankind?
May I send a dove?
May we share the pleas of our hearts
With our messenger, the dove?
About the prayers, I said, each of us hears the still small voice within us in our own way, each of us gives name and meaning to that which is sacred in our own way, and we each may understand prayer in a variety of ways too—for some of us it is a petition to God, the Goddess, or the Spirit of Life and of Love; for others prayer is the naming of our deepest longings and highest desires. For all of us, I believe, the power of prayer is that as we pray our prayer taps our inner strength and calls us out of ourselves and into love and service.
At the end of the service, we sent our prayers out like Noah sent out the dove … as we rang our historic 1825 Paul Revere bell high in the steeple, sending its peals forth as appeals for peace into our community, to commemorate those who have died in this war and to celebrate those who serve that peace may prevail.
We rang the bell 32 times, each time representing 2 of the Massachusetts soldiers killed in Iraq, 100 of the nearly 3200 US soldiers killed in Iraq, 10,000 of the estimated 300,000 Iraquis killed, and 100,000 of the estimated 3.8 million Iraqis who have fled their homes.
As moving as the service was, I’m sure I was not the only one who wondered: isn’t there something more we can do besides offer prayers, toll the bell, and (as some did that day during Coffee Hour) send letters to our representatives in the House and Senate?
Isn’t there some collective stand or action we can take?
Well, of course, yes there is. But, it would be quite a departure from our history to do so. Ours is not a so-called “peace church” as is the pacifist Society of Friends known as Quakers, the Mennonites and the Brethren, whose members are thereby granted conscientious objector status by the Draft Board. Nor were the Unitarians and Universalists before they merged to become the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961.
And so, today, I want to tell some of that history. Because if we are going to consider departing from it, we ought to know what our history is and why our forebears saw fit to make it so. On May 20 th, in the third and last sermon in this series on peacemaking, we will consider questions for the present such as: Should we become a “peace church” as a denomination? Should First Parish take a position in regard to the Iraq War? Or are we merely to pray for peace, worship peace, and proclaim it in general, without specificity to current affairs--discussing them, of course, but not proclaiming any position in regard to them?
So, let us look back at our history with peace-making.
First Parish was officially gathered in 1717, a Puritan congregation like most of the other “first parishes” in Massachusetts. It has occupied this, its fourth “meetinghouse” as they called their buildings in those days, since 1825. That was the same year that the American Unitarian Association was formed by liberal Massachusetts ministers questioning Calvinist theology and literal interpretations of the Bible. Three years later, in 1828, our Canton predecessors voted themselves to be Unitarian, and the Trinitarians left these pews in the meetinghouse they had helped to build, to form their own congregation, first building a church on Neponset Street and then their present one across Washington Street from us, thus returning to be our neighbors.
*At about the same time that liberalism was taking hold in the first parishes in eastern Massachusetts two hundred years ago, Universalist churches were being started in New England with many of the same beliefs as those held by Unitarians, but with a somewhat different focus and often a less affluent or learned membership. (The Universalist Church in Canton was begun in 1806 by people who had heard the great Universalist preacher John Murray preach at the funeral of Canton’s best-known Revolutionary war hero, Colonel Richard Gridley).
But the differences between Unitarianism and Universalism were not that great to begin with, and over time they lessened, until the two movements merged in 1961, giving us two heritages within which to locate ourselves when it comes to a question like the attitude toward war and peace.
Both movements were in their earliest years firmly Christian, with the Bible as Scripture. This put them within a tradition that could not be more complicated on the issue of war. What is the Christian attitude toward war? It ranges all over the place, understandably. Tales of conquest from what Christians call the Old Testament glorify warfare, mayhem, and slaughter, even as those same books repeatedly glorify peace and long for its establishment. Jesus is known as the Prince of Peace, but in the Gospels he says, “Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)
Not surprisingly, numerous acts both of peace and of war have been undertaken in the name of Christianity. One does not have to look far. One of the early ministers of First Parish in Wayland, Josiah Bridge was an ardent supporter of the Revolutionary War – it has been said because he was so upset with the Quebec Act of 1774, one of the so-called Intolerable Acts, not only because it made Ohio part of Quebec, but even worse, it legitimated Catholic worship within Quebec – and you can imagine what that might lead to – Catholics in even New England. So he was all for war.
But the Universalists’ first statement declared in 1790, “Although defensive wars are lawful, there is a time coming when universal love of the gospel will put an end to all wars. Hence members should cultivate brotherly love, considering all men as brothers.”
And then you have the father of Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, in the aftermath of the war of 1812, co-founding the Peace Society of Massachusetts, the first in the country, championing Christian pacifism. His fervor was matched on the Universalist side by Adin Ballou, who wrote in 1846 what has been described as “the earliest complete treatise on non violence in the world” [Paul Sawyer], titled “Christian Non-Resistance in all its Important Bearings, Illustrated and Defended.”
Two years later Thoreau’s more famous essay “On Civil Disobedience” appeared, in which he described his one day in jail for poll-tax evasion in protest of slavery. He doesn’t mention the now-famous encounter between him and Ralph Waldo Emerson in which Waldo is reportedly to have said disapprovingly when he visited Thoreau in jail, “why are you in there, Henry?” and Thoreau replied, “Why are you out there?”
But peaceful beliefs were tested by the existence of slavery and eventually by the Civil War itself. Even some of the Abolitions of strongest engagement believed that slavery should be abolished by moral suasion or economic forces or anything but war – until the war came. Indeed, even before the war, Thoreau, Emerson, Bronson Alcott and other Concordians were backers of John Brown, one of the least pacific figures in American history.
It was an exceptional soul who stuck to his pacifism as did the Universalist Adin Ballou. In his autobiography he wrote, “it was hard for me to understand how professing anti-war Abolitionists of long standing should so forget or ignore their former protestations against the use of violent means for carrying forward their work and freeing the bondsmen, as to be swept into the foaming vortex of blood and death. As for me, I remained unmoved, except for sorrow for such an end by evil means, and pity for the sufferer who had rashly plunged into a lion’s den.”
But neither the Universalists nor the Unitarians were among the Peace Churches, as they are called. Those are churches whose members refuse to fight, because of their Christian commitment. Basically, they are three in number: the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Religious Society of Friends, which is to say, the Quakers. There is a lot of variety even within that group, for some members are willing to serve in a war effort as long as it does not involve killing, such as driving an ambulance. Others will have nothing to do with military service, which is also true of Jehovah’s Witnesses, although they do not consider themselves a Peace Church. There are some other, even smaller groups that are also pacifistic like the Schwenkfelters, the Amish, Hutterites, and others.
The distinction used to be more important because the government granted conscientious objector status to members of those groups but not to most other people. That is no longer the case. It is quite possible to qualify for that status as a UU, about which helpful information is to be found at the UUA website, but it helps if the person has talked to me previously so that I as their minister can attest to the depth and sincerity of the commitment.
That we are not a Peace Church was most dreadfully put on display during the First World War, and right after the heyday of American Peace activities, that so flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. But the Great War – or the World War, as it was called, before they knew there would be another – elicited such nationalistic militarism, it was no longer socially acceptable to demur. But two of our great forebears, among others, did so-- affirming their pacifism and their opposition to the war: the Universalist Clarence Skinner and the Unitarian John Haynes Holmes.
Such was the passion of the day, though, that the Unitarian General Conference of 1917 (their GA), led by moderator and former US president William Howard Taft, passed a resolution supporting the war, 236-9. And the Directors of the Unitarian Association voted the next year that “any society employing a minister not willing [to be] an outspoken supporter of the United States in the vigorous and resolute prosecution of the war cannot be considered eligible for aid from the Association.”
Imagine.*
Suppose in 2007 the Directors of the present UUA voted that any congregation employing a minister not willing to be an outspoken supporter of the Iraq war cannot be considered eligible for aid from the Association??? Or, as is perhaps more likely now, what if they said any congregation employing a minister who does support the Iraq war will be so harmed? Unthinkable. Our polity, which gives independence to each congregation and “freedom of the pulpit” to each minister, prohibits such interference.
While the Unitarians had supported the First World War, by contrast, in the period following it, the Universalists maintained their support of passivism. In 1923, for example, they “undertook a ‘Christ crusade… to promote peace, outlaw war, exact respect for laws and secure through cooperation with other religious forces in the world a nobler brotherhood.’” And into the 1930’s, the peace commitment grew strong among clergy of both denominations.
But, the Unitarians were averse to taking stands on such issues as an association, whereas the Universalists were not so averse. In fact, a controversial statement passed the Universalist convention in 1925 stating that “the spiritual authority and leadership of Jesus meant a complete condemnation and renunciation of violence between nations as well as between individuals, operative even in times of warfare itself.” And in 1933 and again in 1939, Universalist delegates voted to request of the US government the “same legal status afforded to Quakers” regarding conscientious objector status. The request received no response.
*Things have swung back and forth since, and by the sixties, resistance to the war in Vietnam was commonplace among the congregations of the recently-created UUA. Resolutions supporting the peaceful resolution of international conflict have been passed on many occasions by the yearly General Assembly since.*
[For those of you who are new to our movement, the General Assembly is held at the end of June, each year in a different city rotating around the country (this year in Portland, Oregon), and is both like a convention with speakers and workshops and an Annual Business Meeting, attended by 4000 people. Our own Jan Sneegas is the person in charge of General Assembly and First Parish is entitled to two delegates in addition to the Minister. Let a member of the Parish Committee know if you are interested in being a delegate.]
*And then just last June, meeting in St. Louis, the General Assembly did two things. First, it changed the way the movement handles what are now called Congregational Social Action Initiatives or SAIs. Time was, General Assemblies would pass quite a number of resolutions every year. But then it was decided it would be better to pass just one a year and have it go through a three-year period, by the end of which congregations would all have gotten involved in discussing and refining the motion, until it finally came up for a vote.
That meant at any given time, there were three motions making their way through the process, with others waiting in line to try to join in. Last year, at GA in St. Louis the process was changed again so that when a motion is accepted for study and eventual action, it is the only one on the table until it gets voted on three years later. This gives the congregations more time to consider and act on these important matters of public witness.
For a motion to get that far, so that it might become the issue for study and action, it has to have been proposed by a congregation or District and been approved by a denomination-wide parish poll. The first issue to be taken up in this new, more focused way, is the peacemaking issue, which was proposed by the First Parish in Wayland, having been authored by one of its members, Deborah Kelsey, and approved by their Parish Committee after discussions and some collaborative co-editing. You can go to the UUA website, locate the videos of that GA, and watch Deborah speak to the 4000 UU’s gathered.*
The text of the issue reads as follows : Should the Unitarian Universalist Association reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes between peoples and nations and adopt a principle of seeking just peace through nonviolent means? The document continues with some background, a list of possible study questions among which is an alternative question, “Should we adopt a specific and detailed “just war” policy to guide our witness?, and a list of possible actions for congregations to take.
We’ll hear more about all of this on May 20 th when I want to devote the service to considering our involvement in peacemaking in the present and near future.
Let me mention here that on the prior Friday, May 18 th, we will be showing a related film, “Ground Truth,” as the last in our Social Witness Film series. The topics for this series were chosen to coincide with issues that came up at General Assembly last year: Global Warming, Anti-racism, and Peacemaking. “Ground Truth” has been described as “quietly unflinching,” and is not recommended for children. Its subjects are patriotic young Americans - ordinary men and women who heeded the call for military service in Iraq - as they experience recruitment and training, combat, homecoming, and the struggle to reintegrate with families and communities. I hope you will consider viewing this powerful film with me on May 18th.
Now four years after the beginning of the war in Iraq, should we depart from our history and seek status as a “peace church?” Should we, either as a denomination or as a congregation, take a position for pacifism, or for a “just war” policy, or no position? Should we, either as a denomination or as a congregation, take a position regarding how peace should best be reached in Iraq?
At a minimum, First Parish in Canton is a place where we can pray for peace, as we did on March 18 th, tapping our inner strength, and inspiring ourselves as individuals to work for whatever path to peace seems most promising to each of us.
But, can we be more? Do we want to be more? What more would we want to be? By what process, by what majority, would we decide?
I’m sure you have important things to say about this subject and I look forward to the conversation.
Our history is history, what shall we be and do in the present?
Amen.
Between the asterisks are paragraphs taken, with permission, wholly or in part from “Regarding Peace” a sermon by the Rev. Ken Sawyer of First Parish in Wayland MA preached on February 18, 2007. Several of the quotations within are from a paper written by the Rev. Paul Sawyer (no relation), “Unitarian Universalism and The Movement for World Peace” presented in Pasadena, CA on June 18, 2006.