In Defense of the Defenseless
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, March 25, 2007
David Pyle
UUSC Justice Sunday, "Drumbeat for Darfur"
Call to Worship
Gather here in witness, in worship…
Gather here in compassion, in community…
Gather here in prayer, in peace…
Gather here in hope, in humility…
Gather here, to symbolize how we are always gathered together…
In the Unity of the spirit.
From the Unitarian Church of South Africa
As we gather in the shadow of our mountain,
The ocean laps around our feet.
We reach deep for the silence within...........
Feel the rhythm of the ancient drum............
We light our flame, it lifts us high.
Our rainbow seems alight.
Diverse as we are
Together as one!
Our flame will shine afar
And guide our journey's light.
Prayer
Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love, Spirit of
Being…
Our world is on fire, troubled with strife brought on by the delusion of
separateness,
It is a separateness we feel all to often in our own lives,
See all too often in our own relations,
Find all too often in our own thoughts.
Our world is troubled, as our hearts are troubled.
Let us find the strength within ourselves to be in the world,
Witness to the interdependence of us all.
Give us the courage to recognize the inherent worth,
Not only of the victim, but of the victimizer.
Not only of the tortured, but of the torturer.
Not only of the pursued, but of the pursuer.
Give us the courage to live our lives as a shining example,
Of the way our world could be, should be.
Let us model in our church community the right and supportive relationship,
That the world so desperately needs.
Let us open a moment of silence, for the needs of friends, for the needs of each
other,
And for the needs of the world.
Amen, and Blessed be.
Reading 1: Story of Gadja
This story was written by Aid workers of the Norwegian Church Aid association. It is graphic, but so is life in Darfur. Please, try to be with and honor the witness in this story
Gadija: we live like animals
The situation in Darfur has been called the worst humanitarian disaster of our time. In Otash, the faces of the people behind the statistics show clear distress. Gadija and Abdall Karim's village was attacked at five o'clock one morning. First came helicopters, then shots were fired and bombs dropped. And then the Janjaweed arrived. Mounted on horses and camels. The couple lost four family members. They ran for their lives, carrying their baby Bakhat, and sought shelter in the woods. They hid there for seven days. Then they walked to Nyala, the capital of southern Darfur.
"We live like animals," says Abdall Karim. He walks over to the shelter he has built for his family. Gadija sits on the ground and tries to comfort Bakhat. He cries in that particular way that children suffering from malnutrition do. A sound that aid workers hear regularly in Darfur and across the border - in Chad.
Gadija finally manages to soothe her child, but the peace does not last long. Abdall Karim sits down, and it is as if the world outside has ceased to exist; there is no space for anything other than the child's cries and the terror in the eyes of his parents when they tell of the morning their life was turned upside down.
A woman tells of her baby who was shot aged only eight months old. She herself survived the amputation of both of her arms and breasts. Not everyone here has experienced such levels of violence - but all tell of attacks on villages, of children that were burned alive, of the mass rape of young girls, of kidnappings and mutilations. The psychological damage may take generations to heal.
"Our lives have been destroyed," says Abdall Karim. In Otash 5000 families, or around 20,000 people, have sought refuge. They live in temporary shelters, constructed of grass and bamboo sticks. Many are recent arrivals. All possessions have been either stolen or left behind in the village.
"Look, my son lies dying and I do not have the money to take him to hospital. I walked with him in my arms for two hours, but when we arrived at the (state-run) hospital we were refused admittance," says Abdall.
Together with Gadija, he tries to pass the time. They talk about the way their life used to be. Of their 120 sheep and goats they kept back home in their village. "The attackers took everything. It was only when we hid in the woods that Bakhat fell ill," explains Gadija.
She knows all too well that two children were buried in Otash today. The old and the very young are the first to die in conditions like these. "How many more will we lose?" ask the people of Otash.
"Please tell the world about how things are here. We cannot go home - if we do, we will be killed. But what kind of life is this?" asks the married couple.
Some hours later, the sky opens once more; the
thunder, lightning and rain is merciless. In Otash it is impossible to protect
oneself against the forces of nature this afternoon. The desert floor washes
away with the rain. Bakhat seeks the warmth of his mother's body. Together they
wait for the sun's rays to warm them again.
Reading 2: Selection from "The Buddha and the Terrorist" by Satish Kumar
The following story is based upon a Buddhist Parable about a bloodthirsty murderer, called Angulimala, which means Wearer of a Necklace made of Fingers. Angulimala believed in his anger that if he could make a necklace of a thousand human fingers, he would have enough power to rule the world. The Buddha, upon hearing of this, set out to meet him. This version of the story was written by Satish Kumar.
The Buddha followed the path to the Jeta Grove through the fields alone, unhindered and undisturbed, deep into the cool of the woods. He kept walking, going deeper and deeper into the forest. In the stillness of the trees, the Buddha's steps were the only sound, and the only man to hear them was Angulimala. He wondered, "What is that sound? Who is walking? Who dares to come and invade my territory?"
In the distance he saw a figure in a yellow robe moving slowly. Angulimala shook his head in disbelief, then looked again. The moving figure was coming towards him.
Feeling happy, Angulimala grabbed his sword and stood up.
"Ah ha! I am going to get ten more fingers for my necklace without much effort!" he said to himself.
He brandished his sword and moved toward the approaching figure. Seeing his furious face, the Buddha realized that he must be Angulimala. The Buddha smiled and kept moving. Angulimala was amazed. He had never encountered a person who was not afraid of him and did not run away from him.
"Doesn't this ignorant fool know who I am? Soon he will know," murmured Angulimala.
Within seconds he heard a sweet voice calling "Angulimala, Angulimala, Angulimala."
"How puzzling! He obviously knows me, knows my name and yet… and yet?"
Angulimala shouted back loudly, "Who are you? Why aren't you running away from me? Don't you know I am going to kill you without blinking an eye and thread your fingers onto my necklace?"
"Yes, yes, I know who you are. But do you know that I can be killed without blinking an eye?" The Buddha paused for a moment, and then said, "I am always ready to die. Dying harms no one. But killing? How do you feel about killing others, Angulimala? Have you looked deeply into your feelings about killing?"
The Buddha looked at the man in front of him. Blood was still dripping from some of the fingers on his necklace. His bloodstained clothes and sweating body gave off a disturbing smell. Aggression emanated from his heavy black mustache and beard and his long matted hair. His strong and fearsome appearance would have driven away most mortals, but the Buddha stood like a rock.
"I know you can kill me, and maybe you will," said the Buddha. "But when you kill, you kill none other than yourself. Because I am none other than you, and you are none other than me. Whatever you do to me you do to yourself, Angulimala. Let me tell you one thing. You are capable not only of killing. You are also capable of loving, you are capable of compassion. You are capable of change, you are capable of friendship."
The Buddha stopped speaking and smiled.
"I have no friends"
"But I am your friend, Angulimala"
replied the Buddha.
Sermon:
In October of 1996, I was serving as a NATO Peacekeeper in the area of the Former Yugoslavia known as Bosnia-y-Herzegovina. A young, idealistic U.S. Army Sergeant, I was serving as an intelligence analyst for the international peacekeeping force that had been created after the signing of the peace accords between the Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Muslims.
We lived and worked on the grounds of a former ski resort, a place where the Yugoslavian communist party leaders used to go on vacation. It was now without power, without running water, and the building that I lived in had walls marked with craters from bullets and artillery shells, all of the windows blown out. It was like camping inside a building.
Each floor of the building had a local woman who was assigned to collect our laundry, wash it at home, and bring it back to us two days later. On my floor, that woman was a nice, sweet, grandmotherly woman of about 60 years old. When she came to pick up the laundry, I would often speak with her for a few minutes. At first, we talked about America. She had learned English years before, when she worked for the Yugoslavian government.
We spoke about life, about our families. She soon mentioned that she had a wonderful 30 year old daughter who would make a wonderful wife for some American soldier who wanted to take her back to the States (hint hint). Most often, though, we would just share a few words, and maybe a cookie or two, and then be on about our business.
One day, while we were talking, another local woman passed by us in the hallway. This woman was young, perhaps in her mid twenties. As she passed by, a look of absolute, abject hatred passed across the face of my sweet, grandmotherly friend, a kind of hatred that it is hard to imagine unless you have seen it… or felt it.
I guess I looked surprised and shocked, because my grandmotherly friend seemed to feel she needed to explain… "You see that girl?" she asked me.
"Yes" I replied, a little dubiously.
My grandmotherly friend's eyes took on a light, a glint of bright fire and passion as she said "She Chetnick" (a very derogatory slang term for a Bosnian Serb). "Me Muslim, she Chetick… When you Americans leave, we kill all the Chetnick!" she said, as she drew her hand across her throat.
Here was this sweet, grandmotherly woman, who made me cookies, who wanted me to marry her daughter, discussing with me why all of the Bosnian Serbs had to be killed. Discussing with me the necessity of Genocide.
It is hard for us Americans, especially those of my generation and younger, to imagine that kind of hatred. Those of you who lived through the civil rights movement, or through the Nazi regime in Europe have more of an exposure to the kind and level of hatred and evil that can bring otherwise sane people to the point, not just of believing in murder, but to believing that an entire culture, and entire race of people must be killed. The kind of hatred that can fuel a war of retribution that can take a once modern, once beautiful city such as Sarajevo and decimate it.
Remember, less than a decade before the outbreak of the three sided, religious hatred fueled war in Bosnia, the world's eyes had been fixed on Sarajevo, as it hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.
The Bosnian War was a multi-sided, multi-state war that began in 1992 and continued until late in 1995. NATO troops began arriving in early 1996, and by the time I arrived in October of that year, there was still occasional fighting between the different para-military units. Many of these units of irregular, guerilla soldiers were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the war. Units such as Arkan's Tigers, the Black Swans, and the White Eagles, coming from all of the different ethnic groups involved in the fighting, were responsible for mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, genocides of whole towns and villages, and many other brutalities.
What I have been talking about is graphic, more graphic than we would usually have in a Unitarian Universalist sermon… but I tell you about it for a reason. When I came back from Bosnia, a scarred and scared young soldier, I went on a search for some vision, some way that I could not only find healing from the hatred and atrocities that I had borne witness too, but in which I could begin the work of healing this world of this kind of hate filled religious and culturally motivated killing and war. That search led me eventually to a small, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on Galveston Island, in Texas… and to two ideas, healing and saving ideals, that I had never encountered before.
The inherent worth and dignity of every person…
The interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
I think that we of liberal faith often forget just how radical the ideas behind those two concepts really are. The seven principles seem so obvious to us, we sometimes have trouble imagining how others in the world, or even others in our own community would have any problems believing in them. There are often calls to make the seven principles more specific, claiming that they don't really say or require anything challenging of us.
Of course everyone believes in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, don't they?
Of course everyone believes in the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, don't they?
When I first read them on the back of a card that a caring older woman handed me as I visited the Fellowship in Galveston one afternoon, I certainly did not see them as something that everyone believed in… Far from it. I had been back from Bosnia for over four years, still seeking to find a way to end religious hatred. But none of the groups I joined seemed to have any hope of making a difference… none of it helped… none of it gave me the opportunity to use my personal faith in a church dedicated to ending religious hatred, to promoting equality, and to seek an understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit as interconnected and dependent upon one another. No where could I find a way to turn my own hurt and anguish from my experience in Bosnia into a way to positively work for change in this world…
That is, until I read those two, simple, saving lines of grace at the beginning and end of the Unitarian Universalist seven principles.
The inherent worth and dignity of every person.
The interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Each and every one of us is a unique, valuable, and irreplaceable jewel, set in a cosmos-spanning web of intricate connection and beauty, in which who we are is reflected through the jewels of every other person around us. What supports one of us supports us all, what damages one of us damages us all. We are all connected in that web, whether we are Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat, American Liberal, American Conservative, Darfur refugee or Sudanese Janaweed Militiaman. The amazing vision that began my healing from the atrocities of Bosnia was this simple, beautiful understanding of the world and of our place in it.
This is our Good News, the Gospel of Unitarian Universalism… and in some ways, this sermon is my testimony. Those of you who might be from or familiar with traditions like the Southern Baptist Church that I grew up in will understand what I mean by a Testimony. It is a time when a believer stands up and tells of the experiences in their life that have convinced them of the importance of the "Gospel". Of how that good news saved them. How it saved me.
Perhaps the separation inherent in naming someone else as other, as inherently different and less than yourself stands at the root of all war, of all atrocities such as mass-rape and genocide. Each side in war begins to identify the other sides as inherently different than themselves, as a separate race, a separate tribe, a separate culture, a separate religion, a separate people, a separate and lesser kind of human being.
They begin to identify others as not being of the same inherent worth and dignity.
They begin to view others as cut off from their interdependent web.
A few weeks ago, my fiancée Sandy and I were heading out after a play to grab a bite to eat. We had just pulled up to an intersection when a man crossing the street was struck by an oncoming car. I did not even see the accident, just the man fallen on the pavement and a car speeding away in the night's rain.
I have to admit that, for a moment my mind told me to just make my turn and go on… someone else would stop to help. It was raining and cold, and I had not brought my coat. Besides, my fast-food would get cold… but then my training kicked in, and perhaps my faith. So with just a little bit of self-condemnation at the thoughts that had gone through my mind, I parked the car in the lot of a nearby bank and ran towards the intersection to help.
As I ran, I was convinced that by the time I got there some minutes later, there would be plenty of help, and I could go back to my car. I was sure that at least a dozen people would have stopped by then. But as I turned the corner around the bank towards the intersection, the only person who had stopped was a homeless man, who was standing over his injured friend yelling at the passing cars, begging someone to stop.
Becoming the soldier that I once was, I somehow got two cars to stop and block traffic for us, creating a safe space in the intersection. My mind registered the cars that drove by, some of their drivers yelling at us to quit blocking traffic, to pick him up and carry him out of the road. At that moment they were unimportant. Only the injured man mattered.
The ambulance came, and the drivers quickly picked the injured man up and headed for the hospital in the way they do when someone is seriously injured.
The following morning, I woke up angry… angrier than I have been in years. The attitude of those who had passed by the injured man had seemed secondary to me the night before, but now it fueled a strong anger in me. I sat fuming over what was wrong with those people…
Those people.
Within a few hours, I went from being justifiably angry at the actions of certain people, to being angry with the people themselves, to erecting a wall of otherness between myself and those same people.
Those people! It is so, so painfully easy to begin to identify others as "Those People"… different than me. Less than me and my kind. It is not as far a step from that to hate, and from hate to atrocity.
What inspires compassion in us is the ability to connect with other human beings, to move beyond our own individual concept of self to seeing the inherent interconnected nature of all life.
Anger about behavior can fuel a passion to better the world, but when our anger moves, as mine did, from the actions that people take to the people themselves, what it does is create new separateness, closing off the ability to feel compassion. And we so desperately need compassion, for all of us.
This Sunday is Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Sunday, a day when UU congregations across the continent unite together to take a look at the injustices within our world, and to see how our faith of deeds not creeds can work for a more just, sustainable future. This year, this morning our congregations unite to speak out about the continuing mass atrocities and genocide that is occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan, in Africa.
As horrible as the atrocities that I encountered in Bosnia were, they pale in comparison to the over 400,000 people who have died in this ongoing genocide. More than 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes, creating unimaginable conditions in refugee camps in Sudan and Chad. It is estimated that another 1 million people could die in the coming year from food shortages throughout Darfur. Some 80% of the children in the region are suffering from malnourishment, and current humanitarian efforts are only reaching 20% of the population. Between 500 to 1000 people are dying every day because of the crisis in Darfur.
Beyond the deaths, tens of thousands of women and young girls have been brutally raped, tens of thousands of children have been orphaned, and through the camps diseases such as HIV and hepatitis are spreading rapidly. If this is not evil, then I do not know what evil could possibly be.
When we begin to see others as inherently less than ourselves… when we begin to see them as being cut off from our interdependent web, it is then that we allow evil to begin to flourish, to begin to grow. When we take that separation from others to the extreme that we find justifications for killing, for mass rapes, for making war upon them, or even just for showing the kind of lack of compassion as has been shown by the world for the continuing crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan… it is then that evil is truly and fully unleashed upon the world.
How do we oppose this evil? How do we make a difference in the ongoing Genocide in Darfur? How do we make a difference in the lives of those who are suffering in the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan? How do we make a difference in the poverty stricken regions in Latin America? How do we work towards changing lives to change the world?
We know the traditional ways… we know about collecting and giving money to organizations like the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and Unicef. We know about bearing witness… about speaking out about the injustices and atrocities occurring in these and other parts of our world… including the injustices and atrocities occurring right here in Illinois. While all of that is vital… what I have in mind is more fundamental than this.
As members of a Liberal Faith movement, we need to learn to make a practice, lived in our daily lives, of the ideals of the inherent worth and dignity of every person that is connected together in the interdependent web of all existence. We need to becoming shining examples of how we as humans can learn to live in right relationship with one another, dependent upon and supportive of one another. We must learn to share our Good News, our Gospel of right relationship in the only way we can… not with words, but with deeds, with how we live our lives.
In our story this morning, the Buddha knew that angry, broken, hate-filled Angulimala could be healed… by learning his connectedness to all, shown through the Buddha's offer of compassion and friendship, he could leave behind the killing. This angry, broken, hate-filled world can be healed. It must be healed. As the Buddha did in our story, we must learn to embody in a living example how to live in right relationship in this world, supporting the inherent worth and dignity of every single jewel in this interdependent web of all existence of which we, of which the Darfur refugees, and of which the Bosnian and Sudanese war criminals are all a part. This is our Gospel, this is our mission, and this is our prophetic purpose as a liberal faith, to be lived in each and every one of our daily lives.
"This little light of mine… I'm going to
let it shine… let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!"
Benediction
Go in peace, to create peace in the world…
Go in Joy, to create joy in the world…
Go in love, to create love in the world…
Go in hope, to create hope in the world…
Go in friendship, to create friendship in the world…
Go in compassion, to create passion in the world…
Know that you are the spark, that can ignite the transformation of the world.
Go in peace.