PeaceBang

Excerpts from a Palm Sunday Sermon: “What We Love We Yet Shall Be”

“The goal of world community with liberty, peace and justice for all.”

It’s the sixth principle of our Unitarian Universalist Association. Liberty, peace and justice for everyone, and a sense of kinship between all the peoples of the world. A great idea. I’m for it. I’m for it. But how? I hear those words, which are easy to remember because they so closely echo the words of the pledge of allegiance we all learned as kids. Words that slide easily out of the mouth, with starry eyes, hand over the heart. Peace, liberty and justice for all. A tall order indeed. If you hold yourself personally responsible to fill that order, its expectations could feel a bit crushing. How are any of us supposed to bring peace, liberty or justice to the whole world, let alone all three?
The short answer is, we’re not. We can’t. But the longer answer is more complicated, and it has to do with what we can bring to the world where we are.

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What most particularly inspires me today is that Jesus was able to have that breadth of influence without ever being on television, without access to any kind of form of communication, without ever writing a word for posterity, without a computer, with no home, no credit card, no personal secretary, and he never even traveled that far beyond his own hometown. He did all that with nothing but a heart on fire and a pair of dusty sandals to walk around in.

If we have ever thought that saving the world required more than that, friends, we have been thinking too big, very likely over-reaching ourselves.
“Since what we choose is what we are,
and what we love we yet shall be,
the goal may ever shine afar,
the will to reach it makes us free.”
We sing those words as our Doxology on most Second Sundays, when we send our financial gifts – our offering — out into the world. These words remind us that bringing about peace, liberty and justice in any way, no matter how small or how significant, require first that we choose what we shall love, and then that we strive to reach it. That striving doesn’t need to take us geographically far, just somewhere new in the heart, new in our insides.

When he was saying goodbye to his community, Jesus said, “My peace I give to you. My peace I leave with you. Not as the world gives do I give you.”

Peace. The peace of knowing who we are and what we want to work toward, not just the peace of being comfortable and unbothered. We should not confuse the latter with the former. The peace of being comfortable and unchallenged is not peace but apathy. Our sixth principle tells us that we are communally committed to the goal of peace, liberty and justice for all. Not peace, liberty and justice as the world gives — through bureaucracies, and by government administrations that create a program in one era but demolish it the next — but peace, liberty, and justice as a way of being, as a way of ordering the way we look and think about things, as a way of disciplining ourselves and setting priorities that make demands on us.

What we love we yet shall be — and we are trying to love peace, liberty and justice for all people, a global goal that we mostly pursue here in our own local community. It can be done, friends. You know, Palm Sunday is notable for many reasons, but not least of all because it’s the one time we see Jesus riding on an animal rather than walking. He walked everywhere. As I said earlier, this man who changed the entire course of history never traveled very far from his own hometown. Think about that. A person can be an agent of peace, liberty and justice by walking around where they are; by letting their hearts be aflame with passion for the contribution they might make from right from where they are.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19th. I’ve had a lot of rage about it, especially when I think of your children in harm’s way, and all the carnage of the Iraqi people and culture. I am angry that my country has still required no sacrifice from me in order to make this war more real. I remember the monks who set themselves on fire in Vietnam to protest the war when the U.S. was fighting there, and I think, “We cannot set ourselves on fire, but we should allow our hearts and souls to catch fire. That fire is the divine presence in each of us, and it will not let us rest. And thank God for that. Nothing of worth happens without it.”

I have a colleague who is in Kenya right now, and others who have gone to Darfur, and some others who are going to train ministers in Zimbabwe this summer. And that’s all wonderful. But if we can’t go to Darfur or Zimbabwe, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create peace, liberty and justice where we are. Even the Ghandis and the Albert Schweitzers and the Mother Theresas and the Jesuses of the world all carried out their life work in very local communities. Of all of these admired people, Jesus was the least well-traveled.
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Oh, it would be exciting to be a jet-setting savior of the world, wouldn’t it. To be a Jane Goodall flying from one country to the next inspiring people to eco-consciousness, signing books for hour upon hour for adoring fans like me. To be Paul Farmer lecturing on three continents in two days, so committed to saving poor communities from the scourge of tuberculosis and HIV that he hardly ever sees his own family, beloved of appreciative patients and mentor to dozens of brilliant doctors worldwide. So admired that he’s practically a saint to some.

But then there is this other man, who had no passport, won no awards, never got invited to an industry banquet, never published a book, didn’t have a change of clothes and never even had a wife and kids to neglect for his noble cause. A local man, a hometown boy who took long walks and talked to people, shared his deep and profound admiration for humanity and reverence for his God, and who did nothing but try to set each community’s hearts afire with the idea that we live not for ourselves
alone, but for others, and that we are not a random accident on the Earth but children of a Creator who loves us to every last hair on our heads.

What does it all mean? It means that some lives are lived on a grand scale of nobility and achievement, and that others whose hearts are just as full of passion are lived on a far smaller scale – a very local scale – and are just as noble. The point isn’t the scale, but the intensity of the fire that burns within, and how willing we are to have love lead us in the direction illumined by that fire.
What we love we yet shall be. And we can become it together, right here. That’s good news.

from “What We Love We Yet Shall Be”
The Reverend Victoria Weinstein
Palm Sunday 2008