The third year into the new millennium, and counting (depending, of course, on how you count it). And how appropriate, here on the first Sunday of this new year, 2003, that our Service of celebration is about Peace. Peace is so central to the deepest aspirations of our hearts. To achieve inner peace, to resolve painful conflict, to make peace with those in our lives with whom we have struggled, to make peace with our own inner demons, that is the pearl without price honored by the great wisdom traditions throughout time. It is the fundamental ideal that gives form to our vision for personal health, spiritual maturity and a civil society.

In my writing space, in my home office, I have two cards that are prominently placed. One reads: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." What that means for me is that if peace is truly both an interior and an exterior goal, then I, then we, must take great care how we reach that goal. We must find a path, we must create a path, that truly arrives at the authentic peace we seek, a path that is not compromised by debts, debts accrued due to behavior and the use of methods infected with violence, inequity, egocentrism or arrogant nationalism. We have come late to the full understanding that the means are never justified by the ends, for the means are, in fact, always inseparable from the ends they attempt to create.

Jimmy Carter, former Navy commander of one of the most lethal weapons ever devised, a nuclear submarine, 2002-Nobel-Laureate Jimmy Carter has struggled with the inseparability of means and ends. He ended his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize with these words: "Ladies and gentlemen, war may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always evil, never a good."

"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." This statement also carries an implicit understanding, and an imperative: We cannot achieve peace in our world---we cannot achieve peace in our world---unless we also, simultaneously, attend to peace in our own hearts. Given that dictum, that we live in times that are growing increasingly violent and dangerous ought to give us pause. How caught are we, as individuals, by the violence and inequity that so assault our society and our world? How much has the violence out there, actually taken up residence in here (in our own hearts and minds)? How peaceful are we really? How do we manage conflict in our families, our relationships, our church, our work, our lives? How do we deal with stress, and how it seems to make us behave in ways that are not ourselves?

I mean these questions, not as an indictment, but to link us, dynamically, in ways that are consistent with the values we profess as UUs. As a people of faith, we honor: The interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part. We cannot escape what happens in that web---a web that is not of our own making---we are woven into the very fabric of the lives around us, no matter how isolate we may feel, or desire to be. We cannot escape what happens in that web---though the forces promoting consumerism in our society make every effort to convince us we can, declaiming, insinuating, bribing us to believe that by owning sophisticated and powerful things our humanity will somehow be enhanced, made more invulnerable, made more essentially attractive, made free of restraints on our autonomy---as if our worth depends on things outside ourselves. We cannot escape what happens in that web, even when it is in a far away and "alien" place like the country of Iraq---though our government wants us to believe we can act, with full and unadulterated violence, as an independent agent, free from world approval, regardless of the consequences it will wreck upon the web of global relations, we can violently and preemptively assault that country, if we decide to do so.

No, we cannot escape what happens in that web, a web that is not of our making . . . but it is equally true that we can affect our interconnections, our relationships, our influence upon others, our very selves, and our world. The other card in my home office is the quote from the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley, the first president of the UUA, that is our centering thought for today. "We should have faith in peace, that it is good and that it is possible and that nothing else in its place will suffice." Greeley's statement is cast in the imperative tense, a command that says, "We should." In the strength of that directive, there is a clear implication: We should because . . . we can. (We have the power.) We can, if we choose to do so. We can have faith in peace. We can hold it as a good. We can believe fully in its possibility. We can come to know, in the very depths of our hearts, that nothing else in its place will suffice."

To truly give peace a chance in my sermon today, I am going to explore it in three parts: Inner Peace, 1st. Outer Peace, 3rd. And, 2nd, the Bridge that brings them together.

Inner Peace

I want to share an anecdote with you that lays the ground work for what I believe is one of the fundamental basis of inner peace. It was written by Dorothee Sölle, formerly the Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York---she was visiting there for nine years! (She must have been doing something very right!) Recently she has published, Theology for Skeptics, and Creative Disobedience.

When my eldest son was learning to read numbers, he stood still before a house on the street and would not move. As I called to him to get moving, he said [looking at the house's address], "Mama, look at this wonderful five hundred and thirty-seven!" I, of course, had never seen it before [though I passed it frequently]. He spoke the number slowly, tentatively, exploratively [ five hundred and thirty-seven]: He was profoundly happy.

I think that every discovery of the world throws us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears the veil of triviality. Nothing is taken for granted, least of all beauty. The jubilation of a five year old corresponds to the experience of "radical amazement," as [Rabbi] Abraham Heschel calls this origin of our standing-in-relation. Without this overwhelming amazement in the face of that encountered in nature and history, without the experienced beauty that can become visible even in a blue-and-white house number on a heavily traveled street, there is no . . . path that [can lead us] to unity. We need to be touched by the spirit of life. Without reinspiration, nothing new begins. Sölle goes on with a profound question:

Can amazement, the radical astonishment of a child, be relearned?

Whatever the often misused word meditation means, it contains a pause, a lingering for which individuals or communities deliberately take a different time and usually choose a different place. Listening, lingering, becoming still, observing, and praying are to make room for the miracle.

That is where inner peace begins, I believe, in the miracle of experiencing the miracle of existence---my existence and yours, and that of the simple reality of anything being at all. (You remember Heidegger's question: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?") Inner peace begins in an awakening in such a way that what seems trivial, is revealed as profound. It begins in an awakening where nothing is taken for granted. And then, over and over again, our amazement at life, and at our own place amidst it all, must be actively resurfaced and reaffirmed as we meet the inevitable demands of living.

There is so much more, of course, that we need to discover and give space to within ourselves to establish an authentic duration of inner peace. (So that it is not there just in brief moments, but is durably alive throughout our days.) There are, for instance, skillful means, as the Buddhists put it, that we need to learn (how to manage the chaos in our own minds), and wisdom that we need to give credence to, and compassion that must be cultivated, in order to secure a more permanent home for peace in our hearts. Yet although there is much more we could say about inner peace, this morning I feel it is enough to declare that we must return to the sense of awe and amazement, to the recognition of the beauty of the wonderful numbers five hundred and thirty seven, as a primary and necessary step if we are ever to live peacefully in our hearts.

The Bridge

How can our five year old amazement be nurtured into the kind of maturity that will stir our wills and our intelligence so that we can take meaningful and effective action to heal the world, to right inequity, to bring justice where oppression rules? Again, Sölle's words:

The practice of amazement is also a beginning of leaving oneself, of a . . . freedom from one's own fears. In amazement, we abandon triviality and embark on the second path of the . . . journey---that of letting go.

The active bridging that leads from inner peace, to the creation of peace in our communities requires intense, disciplined and courageous acts of Letting Go: Letting go of the grip fear has on us. Letting go of our need to make things go just as we want them to go. Letting go of the ways we view our self, the ways we identify our self, ways that tell us we can't do X or we can't do Y (e.g. speak in public or lead a group through a difficult task), and we certainly can't do Z or W (e.g. give up our beautiful home or high paying position)---and still be worthwhile, and still have dignity. But we have to be constantly engaged in that kind of letting go, in order to be able to live our inner peace in direct action in the world.

Sometimes that letting go involves actual quitting, actual stopping, actual saying "no" to things we have always done, that have given us meaning, that have proven to us that we are worthwhile. (And how powerful this lesson is as we grow older.) Sometimes we have to stop what we are doing, because what we are doing is investing too much in trying to convince some inner critic, some inner judge, that we are good, that what we are doing is right. The Bridge of Letting Go calls us to an authenticity that is not based on the judgment of our peers, or of our parents (who, for some of us, are often still alive as judgmental voices in our heads/hearts), or of some authority we believe is a better person than we are.

The Bridge of Letting Go calls us to realize our own intrinsic worth, in the experience of amazement with life and our own being. When we can get in touch with that amazement, and take the steps to let go of what gets in the way of knowing the real joy of it, then our chances of acting in the world as agents of genuine change is greatly increased---our chances of doing more good than harm is greatly increased---you remember the medical dictum to doctors going out into the world to heal: "Do no harm." Outer Peace

I want to lift up two things that can help us to increase the likelihood that acting to make changes in the world will really be authentic and really make a difference: (1) We can allow our community of faith to nurture and guide us; and, (2) We can challenge our community of faith to support us.

A community that will, with sincerity and spunk, offer us love when we ask for support to do a difficult thing, a community that will respectfully and readily respond to us when we offer it a challenge from our hearts, such a community is what the Quakers called a "Gathered Community." A Gathered Community is one in which what is Sacred---that is, what is profoundly active for the Good through human minds and hearts---is deeply and communally felt. A Gathered community is one in which what is Sacred is visible in how people treat one another, and in how courageous they are in speaking truth to power---that is, in how visibly that community is able to manifest love.

We have entered a time, in our nation, and in our world when acting for peace has become an imperative we cannot deny. Bill Sinkford, president of the UUA, recounts in the latest edition of the UU World magazine (Jan/Feb, 2003) how he attended an extraordinary meeting back in October. At the Arlington Street Church in Boston, many folks, notables included, gathered to celebrate the "rich history of Unitarian Universalist leadership in protecting civil liberties." Dan Ellsberg was there, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, which were published by the UUA's own Beacon Press when no other publisher would do it. Ellsberg, who was suffering from laryngitis said, "I would have gotten out of a sickbed to come here to be with you. Beacon Press and the Unitarian church have shown the civic courage we need, our country needs, to survive." Sinkford followed that quote with his own words: "In this age of terror and war we are again called to civic courage, again called to assure 'the civil liberty of objection.' "

Defending civil liberties is certainly one of the most important ways we can act for peace in our time. And . . . standing here in this little cabin of truth telling, speaking now from the right of freedom of the pulpit . . . it seems to me one of the most important civil liberties we can engage in now is to dissent from waging war on Iraq. As long as we promote war as a solution to problems that can more adequately be addressed through the use of international law, and the force of engaged global dialogue, as long as we promote war instead of seeking real avenues to peace, we will create only a vision of despair, we will commit the moral error of resorting to an evil that could be creatively and powerfully avoided, we will promote not a vision of peace, within our own individual hearts as well as throughout the world, but a vision of an impotent humanity. What could be more impotent than resorting to war?

President Sinkford ended his column in the World with words that bring the inner and the outer domains of peace together through actions of viable transformation. Here is what he wrote:

I urge you to get involved. [And he was directly addressing me, and all of you assembled here.] Make your congregations centers where "the civil liberty of objection" can be exercised in the safety of religious community. It's easy to assume that the first step is action, but we will act more wisely if our first step is reflection. Let us continue to affirm, in the words of a 1951 joint resolution on civil liberties by the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America (ten years before they consolidated to form the UUA), our "loyalty to the freedom of the mind to believe and of the tongue to speak what the mind believes," and [our conviction] that "national security is guarded more through freedom and constructive criticism than it ever could be through the silence of conformity and fear."

May the peace that comes from nonconformity and fearlessness . . .

The peace that comes from working to find inner strength and resolve . . .

The peace that comes from letting go of what hinders our understanding and inhibits love . . .

May that peace rise among us like a great healing tide.

And, may this congregation stand its ground.

May this congregation stand its ground as a community of peace, where each individual is valued, where truth is honored, and where love is the basis for all that we do.

Ashé-Amen-Ameen. Shalom. Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Kurt Kuhwald