Dimensions Of Peace

September 25, 2005

Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Meditation

Let us not desire peace,

let us practice peace.

Let us not seek afar for peace;

let us open our hearts in compassion and love.

Let us not look for the softer easier path to human relationships,

let us work for justice, equity in being with others.

Let us not turn a deaf ear to the stories of our friends;

let us listen to each others’ accountings of our lives.

Let us not desire peace;

let us practice peace.

Let us be at peace in the silence

Peace be with you. Amen

Sermon

This morning in our concluding hymn, We Shall Overcome”, we will sing “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall live in peace someday.”

This is the age old longing of humanity, this living in peace, this peaceable kingdom where lion and lamb lie down together. This is our dream, our longing. And there are times when we need to restore this dream of hope and peace. This morning I want to urge upon you once again the message of Jesus, of Gandhi, of Dr. King, that the path to peace is peace, and that violence leads to violence. Collaboration is more powerful than coercion, Hatred breeds hatred; resentment fosters resentment. Let us therefore live in peace in the hope that someday all the world shall live in peace.

This choice between peace and violence is the great challenge of our day. In his book, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD, Jonathan Schell writes, “Fifty eight years after Hiroshima, the world has to decide whether to continue on the path of cataclysmic violence charted in the twentieth century and now resumed in the twenty-first, or whether to embark on a new, cooperative political path.” Schell continues, “It is a decision composed of innumerable smaller decision guided by a common theme, which is weaning politics off violence.” (386).

These decisions are at various dimensions, different levels. We need to practice peace, understand that violence breeds violence at all levels of our lives. In our responsive reading, Lao-Tse spoke of these levels: nation, city, and home concluding that if there is to be peace in these different dimensions, there must be peace in our hearts. I believe that our hearts will be at peace as we understand that violence fails us, that violence only leads to violence.

Lao-Tse reminds us that if there is to be peace in the world, our nation must be peaceful. Have we seen the failure of violence at a national, global level? I believe that one of the many lessons we may draw from the war in Iraq is that violence fails us, that violence only leads to more violence.

Why are we at war in Iraq? The Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan has been asking what is the Noble Cause her son died for? For many of us, no adequate reason has been given. It does seem however that one of the reasons for going to war in Iraqi is to secure sources of oil for America’s growing consumption. Has the loss of American military personnel secured more oil for us?

A leading scholar of how scarce resources cause of war is Michael Klare of Hampshire College. Recently he posted an article comparing Iraqi oil output before our invasion of Iraq and now. “According to the DoE, total production stood at 1.9 million barrels per day in May 2005, compared to 2.6 million barrels in January 2003, just before the American invasion.” The reason for the decline is that the insurgency has been attacking the exposed pipelines, among other factors. Klare concludes, “Any attempt to reconstruct American foreign policy on a more rational … basis must, therefore, begin with the repudiation of the use of force in procuring foreign oil…” Violence does not get us what we want. [LINK]

More than that, violence breeds violence. In the past few weeks, the Saudi Prime Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, has been warning that the war in Iraq is disintegrating the Iraqi nation. This threatens ethnic cleansing among Sunnis, Kurds and Shias, likely leading to civil war as we saw in the failed Yugoslavia. The neighboring nations, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia may be sucked into such war to support their various factions. "This is a very dangerous situation," Saud said, "a very threatening situation." [LINK] Violence breeds violence. Violence is not redemptive, but deadly.

Lao-Tse tells us that for there to be peace in our nation, there needs to be peace in the cities. What about our city? I am hopeful that the cause of peace has a new foundation here in Cincinnati. Following the race riots of April 2001, what is called the Collaborative Agreement was forged by the City, the Fraternal Order of Police and the ACLU. The Agreement calls for the establishment of a Community Police Partnering Center with an arm for members of the community to get involved, called Friends of the Collaborative.

It is all too easy to set up an opposition between police and the community. Instead of community and police seeing each other as part of an overall effort to make our lives more peaceful, police and community members may see each other as “them” versus “us.” This ‘us versus them’ dynamic aggravates of violence.

This past month, Rick Biehl and Cassandra Robinson of the Community Police Partnering Center met with a number of us in Krolfifer. He talked about how they set up teams of community members and police to work together to solve neighborhood problems. One problem he shared with us was near a bridge where drug dealers congregated. Through the work of the community police team, business owners realized that the drug dealers sat at night on milk cartons. So each morning the neighborhood business people would remove the cartons as part of their routine of opening up for business. When drug dealers sat on the bridge, neighbors cemented obstructions on the bridge railing to make that uncomfortable. The dealers moved on.

One of the major issues challenging the realization of the Collaborative Agreement is communication. How do citizens of Cincinnati find out what they can do, how can we and our friends find out that we can be part of building peace in Cincinnati? The local media does not seem interested in creating peace in our city. Alternative channels of communication need to be developed. The Metropolitan Area Religious Coalition of Cincinnati has taken a lead in this, having speakers such as Police Chief Streicher and court monitor Sol Green speak to its delegate meetings.

At its meeting last Wednesday evening, the Board of St. John’s voted to become a Friend of the Collaborative. As each Friend needs to submit a work plan, the Board’s work plan includes urging the entire congregation – that is you - to vote for St. John’s Church to become a Friend of the Collaborative. In future newsletters and services, we will communicate with you about what is going on. We hope that you will decide to become part of this network of peace in our city. The Collaborative Agreement is a great opportunity here in Cincinnati to break the cycle of violence, a chance to say we know what it means that violence breeds violence and we want to end violence in our city.

Lao-Tse says that for our world to be peaceful, our nation must be peaceful; for a nation to be peaceful, our city must be peaceful. And for our city to be peaceful, our families need to be peaceful. It seems to me that our homes are one of the great places to practice peace. Violence breeds violence. If you have lived in an abusive or alcoholic family, you know how readily the slightest thing can lead to great pain and suffering.

At one point I needed great spiritual sources to practice peace. My step son and I didn’t get along. His purple Mohawk wasn’t the problem. What was difficult was that fairly regularly he would challenge me, saying he had a gun in his room and was going to shot me in my sleep. It would have been easy to be caught up in the cycle of violence, responding to his violent statements with my own demand to search his room. I knew that challenging him in any way would be an escalation. It would only worsen the situation. And so far, I am still here.

In our families we can be caught up in the great rush to be on time, to get to school, to arrive at work appropriately dressed, with the right face on. Children and others may not appreciate our sense of urgency and it is all too easy to speak harshly or make demands on one another. A child may disagree with you. It is may seem that you are being challenged as to who knows more, challenged to play the game of who is right. Having the right answer to a question your child asks may not, in fact, be what the question is about at all. Your child may be pushing your buttons just to see how you are going to react. And how do you react?

Let there be peace in your heart.

Lao-Tse says for there to be peace in our world, there must be peace in our nation. For the cycle of violence to end in our nation, there must be peace in our communities. For violence not to breed violence in our cities, there must be peace in our families. And, Lao-Tse concludes, for there to be peace in our families, we need peace in our hearts.

And who would not have peace in their heart? But wishing is one thing and having it in our hearts quite something else. We need to have peace in our hearts. Do you have peace in your heart? How does peace happen in your heart?

For there to be peace in our hearts, we need to monitor our emotions. Some attitudes, some feelings lead to peace. Some lead to anger. It is easy when alone to be at peace. By oneself, not in a rush to get anywhere, we can count our breaths, take the time to be mindful of the steps we walk, to notice the changing colors of the trees. However, we also need to practice mindfulness, self awareness, in times when it is not easy.

One of our emotions that is most corrosive of peace in our hearts is envy, covetousness. It’s the only emotion that has a Commandment about it: don’t covet your neighbors spouse, don’t covet your neighbors SUV.

Covetousness, envy eats away peace in our hearts. What is envy? I was watching a National Geographic programs once about monkeys. As usual, I was surfing the channels, and came upon the program as they were showing how macaques make noises by clattering small stones together and moving them around on rock ledges. An interesting means of communication, I thought. The show went on to something else: they showed a macaque holding single rock, as if it were holding a child or favorite toy, perhaps a transition object. Weird, I thought. And they commented that macaque’s seemed to treasure them, even though there were lots of rocks just like it all around.

They continued with the macaques interested in treasured rocks: a higher status macaque would come along and take the rock away from the first macaque and he would treasure it. All these rocks around and it’s just this one rock that the alpha macaque wants! Now that’s covetousness. Here are the roots of violence, I thought to myself.

The Geographic special continued by flipping over to a pre-school classroom. They showed the same behavior among little kids. A child, perhaps three years old, spontaneously went over to a shelf and picked up a teddy bear that had been sitting there for hours, maybe days, totally neglected and out of mind. The child took the teddy back to his seat, sat down.

What happened next? You guessed it; some other child came over and grabbed the teddy away. From being totally uninteresting, the teddy bear became the source of a fight. That is envy, and that greediness, covetousness destroys peace in our hearts. When we fear we do not have enough, when we fear we will be left behind, we need to renew our commitments to peace, to walk in peaceful ways each day of our lives.

In our reading this morning, Thich Nhat Hahn told us,

If you nourish your hatred and your anger, you burn yourself. Understanding is the only way out. If you understand, you will suffer less, and you will know how to get to the root of injustice. The Buddha said that if one arrow strikes you, you’ll suffer. But if a second arrow hits you in the same spot, you’ll suffer one hundred times more. When you are a victim of injustice, if you get angry, you will suffer one hundred times more. (page 204)

Violence breeds violence. If the cycle of violence is to be broken, let it begin with us, let it begin here.

“Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall live in peace.” Treasure this seed deep in your heart. Jesus once said that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. This does not mean necessarily that those who swing their swords will not die peaceably in their beds. We know better that that. What I believe Jesus meant, is that in the universe, embedded deep in our hearts, is the knowledge that hatred and bitterness destroy, and that peace and joy build us up.

As Lao-Tse taught, for there to be peace in our world, our nation needs to be at peace. Peace in our nations requires peace in our communities. Ending the cycle of violence in our communities rests upon peace in our families. Peace in our families begins with peace in our hearts.

Violence has failed us. Let us live in peace.