Do We Really Want Peace?

Do we really want peace?  I mean, do we REALLY want it?  Of course, everyone says they want peace.  Even pentagon officials who lobby congress for more money for weapons say they want peace.  We heard in our reading this morning the slogan posted outside an Air Force base proclaimed “Peace is Our Business.”  Everyone is basically against war, against its bloodshed, its mass murders, its human and environmental devastations and consequences.  It’s easy to say we’re against war, but is being against war enough to achieve peace?

Unfortunately, peace is not going to come from simply reacting against war.  It won’t come from singing songs and holding placards on the corner.  Peace is going to require enormous organization and commitment to law and order on a worldwide scale.  A similar scale would be the international efforts to control contagious diseases.  Leaders in the fields of medicine and politics decided some time ago that the loss of life due to contagious diseases needed to be stopped at all costs.  In other words, they decided they would work together and pay the price to diminish and eventually stop the spread of death through contagious diseases.  The organizational efforts and costs have been and continue to be huge.  In addition to financial costs of immunizations and research, there has also been a willingness to restrict travel and migration and even trade of certain disease-bearing plants and animals.  A major worldwide commitment and coordinated effort has been necessary.  It could certainly be improved, especially regarding AIDS, but we are willing to pay the price to contain and hopefully eliminate contagious diseases.  

Are we willing to pay the price for peace?  Because, like everything else, if we really want it, we need to pay for it.  And the price of peace is high!  Let us not kid ourselves about that!  The question is whether we consider the price of war to be too high a price to pay.  

It being Christmastime, we’re all doing a little shopping these days, and probably doing some comparison shopping.  It’s a time of year when we think about whether we can afford this or that.  We consider how important people are to us.  We think about how much we’re willing to spend on various people.  We consider questions like, is this person important enough to me to buy a present?  Maybe this is a particularly good time to talk about the price of peace since people are usually willing to stretch a little bit when it comes to paying for things at this time of year!

I’m told there’s a rule in sales that if you don’t price your product high enough to lose some customers, then you have priced it too low.  I suspect I’m going to lose a few customers here in a second, but like I said, if we really want peace, the price is high. 

The first cost is the need to be willing to surrender some of our national sovereignty.  We all know how popular that is!  It’s not popular!  But there is no way to have real peace unless we’re willing to be in partnership with other nations.  Partnership, by its very nature, limits independence.  It’s just like a marriage in that we have to give up a level of independence in order to be married.  You can’t operate like you’re single when you’re married.  (At least not if you want to have a successful relationship.)  It’s a trade-off.

We decide there are things that we get from marriage that we cannot get on our own, but in order to get those things we need to give up certain other things, like total independence.  It’s a basic principle and it’s the same in a business partnership.  Each side joins with the other in a business partnership to gain something that neither one can have alone.  And it is the same regarding the union of states in the USA.  Each state has agreed to give up a certain amount of sovereignty in order to be federated with the other states that make up the union.  In order to have world peace, we need to decide that sacrificing a degree of our sovereignty is worth the benefit of peace – which we cannot have alone.

So if we continue to maintain that our complete sovereignty is a higher priority than eliminating war – we will remain in the situation we’re in.  If we continue to believe that sending our children to war and decimating communities including thousands of civilian men, women and children, is worth the price of total sovereignty, then we shall never know peace.

What surrendering some of our sovereignty means on an international scale is that we have to be willing to participate in, and respect, international treaties like the Geneva Convention, International Criminal Courts and organizations like the United Nations.  We cannot do as we did in the lead-up to the current war in Iraq, where we reprimanded Saddam Hussein for not abiding by the UN Resolutions while at the very same time we were telling the United Nations it’s irrelevant.  We can’t just sign treaties like the Geneva Convention and then engage in activities like we have in Guantanamo Bay.  The price of peace requires giving up some of our national sovereignty.

How much do we really want peace?  It is really a basic question of covenant.  And we have to ask how broadly we believe covenants can be applied.  I’m going to return to this issue of sovereignty and covenant in a moment, but first I want to describe a few of the other costs of peace.

Pursuing peace means giving up, to a large degree, one of the world’s biggest businesses, and one of Americas most lucrative industries.  Military manufacturing makes trillions of dollars annually.  You and I can sit here and say, “sure, let’s give it up.”  But the power and interest of military manufacturers is deeply entrenched. 

Everyone says they want peace, everyone likes to sing songs about peace, but are we willing to pay the price?

A third cost is, we need to accept globalism on a grand scale.  I’m not talking only about the international laws of justice but open markets and free trade.  We can’t maintain tariffs and protectionism and economic imperialism and expect to have peace.  Obviously we can’t let globalization create more poverty and despair – that won’t help the effort for peace.  Clearly, globalization has to be done in sustainable ways both for the environment and for the elimination of poverty.  But to try and resist the global nature of human community and economics in the 21^st century is to engage in a futile version of isolationism and protectionism.  The cost of peace is very high.

            A fourth requirement of attaining peace is religious.  People need to be willing to live in a religiously pluralistic world.  We need to find ways to encourage interfaith dialogue and understanding.  We need to be willing to make room for different religious perspectives.  One thing that people like to say is that all religions have peace as their aim.  However, all religions also have scriptures that can be used to endorse and incite violence.  ALL religions have them, and it does not help to ignore these controversial passages.  It is not enough to say that those who read them and promote violence are not real members of the faith – because they turn around and say the same about us.

What really needs to happen is the acknowledgment of these difficult passages in the scriptures of the world, and the acknowledgment that they can be interpreted in different ways.  So we need to have candid dialogue about these passages and their interpretations.  But more importantly we need to be honest about the conditions of poverty and oppression that cause people to turn to scriptures and interpret them in ways that lead to violence.  Otherwise religion will continue to breed hatred and division, not only between but also within the major religions of the world.

            The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with examples of God using violence to perpetuate the Jewish people and religion.  The Islamic scriptures have passages that are easily used to promote violence.  Hindus in India over the past two decades have been using their faith and scriptures to justify the destruction of mosques.  And Christian history is littered with examples of scriptures being used to justify violence.  Ignoring these realities and these passages will not lead us to peace.  They require a willingness for serious confrontation and deliberation.  

The price of peace is high.  But the cost of war – in lives and devastation, is still higher.  So peace requires a lot more than simply reacting against war.  It is an enormous undertaking that requires incredible organization and commitment.  It requires giving up some national sovereignty.  It requires major downsizing of one of this country’s and the world’s biggest businesses, which will involve the dismantling some of the most entrenched power in the world.  It requires opening up to global markets in ways that are sustainable.  And it requires significant religious dialogue and introspections with a level of candor that has yet to be achieved.  Moreover, it will require a lot of forgiveness, mercy, compromise and probably reparations in places like Israel where conflict and tensions are ingrained.  So my question still stands, whether people really want peace.  We certainly long for it, but are we willing to pay the price for it?

There are some who will say that humanity has always had war and it’s a fantasy to imagine a world without it.  These people will resolve themselves to accept war as a necessary evil.  Keep in mind the same argument was made about slavery, and racial inequality, and gender inequality.  Smallpox and polio and other such diseases also used to be permanent fixtures of life on earth.  But all of these seemingly universal and permanent aspects of human existence have been widely diminished and greater freedoms have been won.  

Freedom from war is a freedom worthy of our highest efforts.  I am purposefully using the language of “expansion of freedom” because it has become the stated rationale for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There were other rationales given of course.  The agreement to put our troops into combat was based on the premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but there were none.  Then the rationale was given that there was a link between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden and the events of 9-11.  But we found out that this rationale was completely unfounded as well.  Next we were informed that the reason our troops were killing and dying and being wounded in Iraq was that civilization itself was under attack.  However, Iraq never attacked our civilization. 

In the end, the rationale that has had the longest political shelf-life to explain why our soldiers are killing and dying and being wounded in Iraq has been the expansion of freedom and democracy.  So I want to finish my sermon this morning with some comments that will put the idea of expanding human freedom into an appropriate historical, religious and American perspective.  To do so I must assert that freedom is best expanded and maintained through covenant. 

Covenant is a mutual agreement entered into by two or more parties.  Now, I’m not saying that freedom comes from covenant.  I believe that freedom is an inalienable right as it says in the Declaration of Independence.  I agree with the founders of this nation that it is a God-given birthright of all people. 

But I won’t argue with the agnostics on this point.  As long as we can agree that freedom, whether given by God or not, is the essential character and the intention of human reality.  So freedom is not created by covenants, but it is best maintained and expanded through covenants.

When the idea of freedom was articulated in the Declaration of Independence, a new creation in human history came into being.  People were freed, for the first time, from the bonds of government, as they had always been known.  In order for this new form of government to come into being it required effort, organization and commitment.  (It also required war with the British.)

In the end, Americans won their freedom and came up with a system of government to maintain it.  Through creating our government and constitution, we demonstrated that humans are capable of organizing and covenanting together to raise the level of human affairs to new levels or creation and liberty.  What was required was the surrender of a degree of personal sovereignty, and then the surrender of a degree of state sovereignty.  In doing so, we created a union bound together by a covenant that supports and upholds our individual freedom.  But it’s a freedom that is limited by the bonds of agreement that allow for its survival.   

Our country is based on a national covenant entered into with the understanding that such federation allows for the greatest possibility of individual freedom, and the greatest possibility for the unfolding of human personality.  This may seem a little heavy for first thing Sunday morning, but I’m trying to explain why waging a war of choice in an effort to expand freedom, like we have done in Iraq, is a perversion of the American ideals of freedom. 

Over the past 5 years our nation has been wandering in the desert (literally and figuratively) because we have lost site of the nature of our liberty and the political and human covenants that sustain and expand it.  In our desert experience, there are many who have grasped onto authoritarian solutions much like the Israelites of old sought security in feeble practices while wandering in the desert with Moses. 

There is a model of expanding liberty that is consistent with the American heritage.  It is a model of expanding moral freedom, grounded in covenant, promise and conviction.  Such an approach also has the potential to someday lead the world toward freedom from war.  In other words, we can give up the notion of spreading freedom around the world through preemptive strikes, and still be committed and effective in expanding human freedom.

The box that we’ve been painted into by current American policy is that our military actions over the past 5 years have been necessary, and that if we had failed to be preemptive and fail to stay the course, we will be judged by history as being morally ambivalent if not bankrupt.  But I would argue that we will be judged by history for rushing into a war of choice, based on unfounded rationale and faulty evidence.  By not adhering in a number of substantial ways to the Geneva Conventions, and by acting to weaken the credibility of the United Nations.

There is no doubt that the first priority of our nation must be to secure our own freedom and democracy.  It would indeed lack moral clarity to try and achieve peace at the expense of our own liberty.  By securing our own freedom first, we can then go about the work of inviting others into the covenant of freedom.  We must not to this through preemptive wars and violence.  We must do this by example, persuasion, diplomacy, expanding justice and expanding human affection over self-interest.

I’m not trying to claim that this combination will immediately create an end to war and conflict.  The American Revolutionary war was necessary to forge this nation.  The Civil War was necessary to maintain the union and to expand human freedom with the abolition of slavery.  The Second World War was a righteous cause to stop Hitler and maintain our freedom against fascism.  War will not end overnight.  The price is very high and the road is very long.  But we must always stay true to the guiding principles of this nation.  We must remember that liberty is the birthright of every human being.  And we must seek to expand out covenants around the globe through mutual affection and mutual agreement.  Not through war or authoritarianism.  If we do so, we can participate in the spread of moral freedom and set the stage for a world that may someday know freedom from war itself. 

In these troublesome times, with our troops overseas in combat, and our leaders confounded as to what course to take, may we heed the words of Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address:

With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nations’ wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

May it be so.

Amen.

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