"A TIME FOR WAR; A TIME FOR PEACE"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, November 11, 2001

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Last week, I spoke on the need to reclaim humor in our lives. The title and topic last week were taken from the familiar lines of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes:

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to reap;

a time kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh.

And so derived the title and subject of last week's sermon: "A Time to Laugh; A Time to Cry."

This week's title and subject also come from the same passage. The lines from Ecclesiastes continues with these words:

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to rend, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. It is about a man who tries everything to find happiness, but fails to do so. He tried knowledge and wisdom as a path to happiness, he tried riches and wealth, he tried hard work and devotion to family, he tried a life of pleasure, but nothing ultimately satisfied. In the end, he seems ready to give up on his quest for happiness, though he discovers along the way he learned a lot about life; he had acquired a great deal of wisdom. In between the lines, the reader can see that though he never finds happiness, he does discover that much satisfaction still comes from learning what there is to know about life, living fully what life has to teach. The book itself is his story, and is generously salted with quite a few words of wisdom - lessons of life that come only from living it passionately.

Some of the wise sayings from the book of Ecclesiastes sound silly today, taken out of context of their time, though we must assume they meant something back then. For example, the wise hero of Ecclesiastes said this:

"Dead flies make the perfumer's ointment give off an evil odor; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor."

"A wise person's heart inclines him toward the right; but a fool's heart toward the left."

"One who digs a pit will fall into it; and a serpent will bite the one who breaks through a wall."

"If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth; and if a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie."

But this same wise prophet also had words of wisdom that have lasted the test of time, and are still invoked many thousands of years later:

"It is better for a person to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools."

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the talented, but time and chance happen to them all."

"The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war."

"Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what evil may happen on earth."

"Better is a poor and wise youth than an old foolish king, who will no longer take advice, even though he had gone from prison to the throne."

The book of Ecclesiastes is a compilation of insights gained from someone who over a long lifetime learned lessons to be passed on. He is not saying, "this is what you need to know or need to do to be happy." He is saying, rather, that here is what happens to us -- war and peace, laughter and tears, and so forth - happens because we are human. You can't avoid it, you can't resist it, but you can learn from it. Whatever comes to you in life, however challenging, can be expected and faced and accepted. And in the end, you don't need to let life defeat you.

These things will happen, he is saying: birth and death, laughter and tears, building up and tearing down, planting and reaping, love and hate, war and peace. These are part of life, of being human in this world, and our task is to deal with them the best we can; not to deny them, but learn from them.

Having said all this, I turn now more directly to war and peace, that part which is playing such a huge role in all our lives these days. I'm afraid this sermon will turn out to be a bit more personal than I anticipated, or perhaps than you may have anticipated. It was exactly two months ago today that our country, indeed our world, was awakened to terror, and in those two months, we have had time to react and time to mourn, but not a great deal of time to think carefully about what we are doing and what we should do.

There is a point at which we need to pause and reflect, reacting thoughtfully to what has happened. When I conceived of this sermon, it was in the context of considering, somewhat formally, the various factors in judging the justification of war, such as the traditional theological doctrine of just wars, or perhaps discussing the ethical aspects of several possible responses to the September 11 attack.

I may do some of that, of course, but in writing this sermon, what feels to me the most honest thing to do is to lay out for you some of my own personal struggles with what is happening. The subject is not theoretical. The subject is real, and it is in our faces, and in our lives, and in our dreams, and in our waking fears.

I confess that I am struggling with some of these issues more than I ever have. Intellectually, ethically, perhaps existentially, I am more challenged by what is happening now than anything I can remember. I am feeling pulled in different directions and wish honestly to share some of this struggle with you.

Over my lifetime, it has been my natural inclination to advocate for peace and nonviolent resistence. Let me offer to you some of my credentials in this area. I even have, one might say, a born pedigree for peace. My father, before I was born, was a pacifist and a conscientious objector in World War II. By sincere conviction, he was a follower of Thoreau and Gandhi and Jesus, pacifists all, who argued for confronting oppressors with non-violent actions rather than copying the violence that we condemn in their actions.

I learned these principles at home, and learned to respect them. Though I would place myself at that end of the continuum of peace and violence, I nevertheless could not become absolutist about it. I could never go so far as to say there is no condition in which defensive violence can't be justified. The Nazi concentration camps, for example, were about as extreme as it can get, and would by themselves, I think, justify a violent defense, even though as I understand it, we weren't sure about these camps until well into the war. So I've always allowed for extreme cases. One extreme case is when a killer is holding a knife to my child's throat, and the only way of saving my child is killing the killer. I have long believed that until I could advocate non-violence in such an extreme case, I did not feel myself to be a pacifist.

One of the lessons I feel I've learned in life is to resist all absolutism when it comes to opinions and ideology. I believe there is little merit in any rules that say there are no exceptions, or in any viewpoints that don't allow for adjustments under differing circumstances. In my mind, consistency of belief is a virtue that we can take only so far. Better that beliefs be flexible enough for new experiences, and better that our values be adaptable to life's inevitable changes, than it is to honor consistency of belief more highly than the belief itself. That is why I cannot be an absolutist about pacifism or for that matter any religious doctrine or political ideology. I reject absolutist doctrine in any arena. Perhaps I give too much credence to the familiar words of Emerson when he said, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

I nevertheless grew up with a great respect for the philosophy of non-violence. At the same time, I learned also to respect many others who fell elsewhere on the war and peace continuum. The courage of convictions displayed by those who volunteered for World War II and Korea and Vietnam was commendable. They were men and women of honor who acted on their convictions, who saw a line, like that of protecting innocents, and stepped in to act. And we all have benefitted from their courage. In defeating the Nazis in World War II, for example, these heros helped make their generation the "Greatest Generation," as Tom Brokow's popular book suggests.

But back to my credentials on war and peace. I was a college student during the Vietnam war, and those who lived through those years can evoke from that fact quite a number of stereotyped images. Some of those stereotypes, though not all, would be true. I believed the war was a mistake, and said so in a variety of venues. I co-founded a peace group at Anderson College, and participated in a number of anti-war marches. It was important then, as it is now, to remember that what was objectionable was the policy, not the everyday people who supported that policy, or carried it out. Our views of government policies should not be transferable to people who have different views. Those who served in the military during these times are deserving of respect and even admiration, at least for following their convictions.

I will also mention that I was actively involved in opposing our government's involvement in wars in Central America in the 1980s. I even visited Nicaragua during the height of that war, and traveled, along with a Methodist minister and a Lutheran minister, and a dozen of other laypeople, in a group called "Witness for Peace." It has been pretty well documented by now that the United States was sponsoring death squads that were terrorizing people throughout the region, and it was wrong.

And, in fact, I was also not supportive of the Gulf War of 1991. While in this case, at least, our government was honest about what it was doing, and in this case, at least, strong efforts seemed to be made to minimize civilian casualties, nevertheless it seemed that the rationale for the war was primarily economic, and I had difficulty finding that to be an acceptable justification for war.

So having laid out these peace credentials before you, and by doing so perhaps alienating half of you, I am ready to share with you my somewhat excruciating dilemma, and in doing so risk alienating the other half.

Even in light of my rather consistent record of opposing wars, I confess I find today's situation drastically different from any other I could even conceive. It is unique. It is, from my point of view, a killer holding a knife at my innocent child's neck, and me having the means to stop him only through violence.

If the information we have is correct, and granted that we can never know for certain when war censors our information, the goal of the terrorists is different from any other enemy. They are not wanting to conquer our country and take it over. If they were, there might be some credibility to a Gandhi-like posture of non-violent resistence that might ultimately topple the invaders. They don't want to conquer us, they don't want to exploit our wealth and take our resources. They don't want us for slave labor, or to convert us to their religion or ideology. Their objective is different from any other war ever fought. Their goal is to kill us. They want us dead. You and me and your children and your spouse. They are not making demands. They don't say, for example, that they will stop their terrorism if we agree to pull all Americans out of the Middle East. They do not say that we must stop our support for Israel before they stop their terrorism. There are not asking anything from us; there is nothing they want from us, other than our death. This is that "knife-at-the-throat-of-an-innocent-child" situation which I always dreaded when I considered the pacifist position for so many years.

My approach to this war, then, is quite different than in any other case. I do not say that fighting the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden is all we need to do. There is plenty else we can do, and must do, policy-wise, to change the situation for the future so that this won't happen again. But there will be no opportunity to revise our policies if the terrorists aren't stopped now.

I hope you understand that this is not easy for me. This is not the most difficult sermon I've ever delivered, but it probably is the most difficult to think about delivering. It rubs against life-long feelings and patterns. And yet, I fear that, for me at least, the only justification for pacifism in this case is an absolutism which I cannot embrace.

Having alienated most everyone in the room by now - first by listing my peace credentials, and then by giving my views on this war -- let me turn back again and modify and qualify some of my statements. I see a self-defense justification for this war, but there are very definite boundaries and limits to my support.

To begin with, every good faith effort must be made to keep fighting among the military, and not harm civilians. If we bring any moral high ground to this situation, it is regard for loss of innocent life. This moral advantage will be easily surrendered if we decide to target civilians. There are two corollaries to this point:

First, any action we take should not be intended, or perceived to be, some kind of retaliation or punishment of evil-doers. Our purpose is self-defense against individuals and groups who have vowed to kill us. Our purpose is not to "pay back" for what they did to us.

Another corollary of this is to keep it clear that our enemy is the international terrorist network, and not Afghanistan, and certainly not Islam. Granting that news is censored in time of war, and what we learn is largely what our government wants us to learn, nevertheless it seems that, so far, our policies are have been carried out along these lines. The dropping of food relief to civilian Afghans must be a precedent in the history of warfare. However effective or ineffective it may be, it is at least a symbolic reminder to ourselves, as well as to others, that the people of Afghanistan are not our enemy.

We are hearing a number of voices, I think reasonable, suggesting we should re-evaluate our policies toward the Middle East. There should be a fresh look at the Israeli/Palestinian peace process and land settlements, we should consider a development plan, like a sort of Marshall Plan, to address the poverty found in some middle and central Asian countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and so forth.

I have sympathy for those who caution that a military solution alone will not be a lasting solution. It will not. And the military campaign should not be misconstrued to be the ultimate goal. But still given the present situation, no other policy, or policy review, will have even a chance until this these terrorists are blocked from their goals.

I also wish to make a point that, I believe, transcends all these issues. In conversations with quite a number of people in this congregation, I am well aware that there is a wide diversity of views on this topic. Like pretty much the whole country, we are united in wanting to see terrorism stopped and having America feeling safe once again. Like the nation as a whole, we all grieve the loss of innocents, and wish to make the killers accountable for their crimes.

But there are widely different points of view about how his should be done. As has been the case in any U.S. policy, there is a continuum we can use to identify what we think should be done in this situation.

If there is one point I could make this morning it is this: in this place, personal respect for others is more important than point of view. Our Unitarian Universalist values implore us to respect one another, even if (maybe especially if) our opinions differ strongly. It is a given that each one of us believes what we believe in good faith, with the conviction that one policy rather than another would bring about the greater good for this country and for the world. No one here holds their own belief out of ill will for others, or based on malevolent intentions. In a Unitarian Universalist setting, viewpoints tend to be strongly held. But it is also true that in a Unitarian Universalist setting, viewpoints must be held at least with a little tentatively, with some sense that we may, ultimately, be wrong. And if we acknowledge our own fallibility, which is the same as acknowledging our own humanity, then we must also accept that someone else, with whom we disagree, could, ultimately, be right.

During the Vietnam war, the greatest divisive piece was not the war itself, but the attributing of bad faith to those who disagree. One side was not war-mongering, they believed that the policy was in the best interests of not only the United States, but of the Vietnamese people, and for that matter, the whole world. The other side was not a bunch of traitors, rather they likewise believed they were advocating what was best for the country, sincere in the conviction that it is patriotic to speak out when you believe policies are mistaken.

I have never delivered a sermon like this in this church. It is normally my approach to examine ideas from different points of view, commenting on pros and cons but leaving conclusions more open-answered. I could have done it that way today. I could have simply expressed the different points of view, analyzed the issues involved and let the conclusions be drawn individually.

But I expressed this particular view for several reasons. First, it was painful for me to get to that place, and it is still painful, but I wanted to share some of that struggle with you. More than that, though, I believe the most important task for this church at this time is to honor and respect each other, even if there can be, and maybe especially when there is, disagreements on policy. If I truly mean this to be such an important task, then it would work best to model it. The only way to model respect for different points of view is to begin by expressing one such point of view.

The book of Ecclesiastes reminds us of the breadth and depth that life gives us, whether we want it or not: laughing and crying, mourning and celebrating, planting and reaping, war and peace.

Our task is to learn the lessons that come from fullness of this life. None of us has completed our learnings. All of us have more to learn. This fact ought to teach us humility. Those who agree with us, and those who disagree, are still learning, just as we are. My answers, as your answers, are the best we can do based on our learnings to date. The real gift of community is learning life's lessons together - benefitting from each other's insights.

We, as Unitarian Universalists, affirm in life a continuing search for truth. Many, many people, unwilling to accept that their views need to be adjusted, and that there can be times they need to change their minds, have themselves been the cause of violence and war. We can never finish the search for truth - whatever that truth may prove to be - for each of us as individuals, as nations, as communities, with respect for those who think differently.