Today is our Newcomer’s Circle facilitated by Karen Lapidus, and I wanted to share my hopes for you as new friends of our church, and in truth my hope for all of us, including myself. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it is very important to live a life of peace. To live a life of peace – not just wait for it or work for it – but to recognize in our efforts that we can be embodiments of peace. We can find peace in our bodies, peace in our relationships, peace with our minds, peace in times of war, conflict, and uncertainty. For me, peace is not the absence of conflict. Peace is not being homogenous, trying to make everyone the same. For me, peace is the awareness that we are part of a whole. What I do to you, I do to me. What I do to the earth, I do to me. What I do to me, how I treat myself, will dictate my thoughts, actions, and perceptions of how I will treat you and the world. Living a life of peace is living from that awareness as much as we can. It’s paying attention not to harm others, not to harm the earth, not to harm ourselves. Of course this is impossible to do perfectly, and I don’t think perfection is the point.

But if we seek to be aware of our wholeness, a new kind of life becomes available to us, a rich and deep life. How do we do this you might ask? How do we discover this wholeness, which includes us? There are many paths, and we find a path here. The simplest version of this path is found in our covenant which we recite every Sunday. It begins with a faith statement: Love is the spirit of this church. And then it tells you how this faith is embodied, tested: Service is its law. This is our great covenant or great promise: this is the goal of our church: to dwell together in peace, to dwell together in an awareness of wholeness without discrimination, to seek the truth in love, and to help in one another. Seeking the truth in love is seeking truth from an awareness of wholeness. It means that in seeking the truth, I may be right or I may be wrong in what I think is true. But in seeking truth from a place of wholeness, I will intend not to harm anyone or harm myself in discerning what might be true.

 

It’s a path of humility. It’s admitting that no one here including myself really knows the truth, but we will be skillful about seeking to encourage one another by being aware of how we live, how we seek truth, how we seek to be of service.
I’ve been thinking about the role of faith, given that our theme this month is “Renewing Faith,” and what it is we’re actually renewing. We don’t require anyone to adopt a faith statement to be a member, to say this is what I put faith in now and for all time. We don’t require that. Instead we require that you follow a covenant, a promise of how you aim to behave, how you live your life. How you and I live our life – this is the matter of greatest importance. On the path of living a life committed to service, dwelling in peace, and seeking the truth in love, there are endless depths of understanding. It is not that one understanding is superior to another, but there are different depths.

 

On one level, most people will agree that it is good to be of service: to do good for others, good for our planet, good for ourselves and our families. This is a fine awareness. But there is another level: If you combine acts of service with faith in love, faith that peace is possible, we will dwell together in a very different quality of life. Our life will feel different, and the way we view others will be transformed, we will feel a wholeness, a life that is vast, a life that we belong to now on this day as we are.
Faith that love or peace is possible is just another way of saying hope. Hope is trusting that love or peace is possible. I think this kind of faith is crucial, but so is doubt. Doubt keeps us from being complacent. Doubt encourages us to test things for ourselves out in the real world and to reflect on our own lived experience. Doubt helps us to transform a pretty idea into something real and tangible. But I see that many unwittingly put their faith in ideas such as: look at how horrible the world is, and look at how awful it’s always been, and look at how impossible it is to do anything good that lasts, and then unwittingly will seek to prove this faith to themselves through action or more often inaction.

It perpetuates itself, the more frozen we become, the more we become convinced that the world is a hard and horrible place. That path is not wrong. It’s based on a lot of truth and certainly experience. And one can live that path, and that would be ok. But it’s a choice. And there are other paths that are also true, are also real, paths that are life giving and transformative.
My faith, my hope, is that peace is possible. And that hope compels me to embody that hope, to live it imperfectly to the best of my ability, to make it alive in my life for the benefit of all life. Faith in peace encourages me to treat myself with kindness and compassion, it encourages me to be at peace with myself. It encourages me to not let rage and despair harm myself or harm others. It encourages me to develop an attitude of non-harm or minimal harm so I can perceive a situation more clearly, and can be of service to myself and others.

I think it can be tempting to believe that peace will be possible after war ceases, after a pandemic completely subsides, when our climate and environment is no longer in jeopardy, and we can add many more things to this list. But I’m becoming more convinced that we can’t and shouldn’t wait for peace to arrive at some ideal hour. We must embody it now, for ourselves, for our families, for our church, for our community, for a community over 5,000 miles away. Peace is the way, and that way makes life worth living. We cannot afford to wait. Peace is the recognition that everything we do, everything we think, everything we say, is part of a whole. We all impact and shape eachother’s realities, we shape each other’s experience. Peace is the way to justice, because justice is a respect for the whole of life. You can’t have one without the other. But if you seek justice without peace, you lose both, because true justice is peace. It’s being able to live together without harming one another, in equal respect and dignity.

 

I think it is technically possible to live this way of life without faith perhaps, but I think it’s hard to feel joyful doing it. I think without faith it becomes dry and can feel like a chore, like another thing on our to do list. I think without faith we can fall into the common trap that we live a life of service for some future result or we do acts of benefit to improve our life. I think both of these are true on one level, but there is another layer of depth available to us, when hope joins our activity. We realize that we are not doing anything for our life. We are doing what we do, committed to serving one another, because it is our actual life. It’s an expression of the life we are already living. Living a life of peace, living a life of love, shows us our life is part of something vast and wonderful – our life is part of Ukraine, our life is part of this earth, my life truly is yours. Experiencing that, living that, is a new kind of life. It is transformative, and there is no end to that exploration. There is no end to that discovery.

 

That experience is available to all of us. It doesn’t require a certain background or education, or a certain set of skills. It’s available and you have the only prerequisite required: you’re alive. Your aliveness is part of that wholeness. Living that awareness is living a life of peace, that is a life of love. And that is a great joy.
The wonderful thing about this church is that you don’t need to believe a word I’m saying. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. You’re not required to think what I think, and I think it’s actually healthier that you find your own understanding. That being said, my hope for all of us is that we discover that life of peace for ourselves. To my mind, that is the goal of all our principles, and in my mind that is the goal of any worthwhile path: how to live at peace with ourselves, how to cease from causing each other harm and misery, how to encourage peace among our families, with our children, how to be at peace with the earth, how to encourage and feed life rather that destruction for shortsighted gain.

I don’t think there is one way to live a life of peace, and I don’t think perfection is the goal. The point is to find through our actions a new way of life, a life that is not discriminatory, a life that teaches us how to be more kind, more gentle, more humble.
If a bullet fired 5,000 miles away can impact our life here, if a virus thousands of miles away transmitted to 1 person can transform our life, why can’t one single thought or action of peace here transform the world? Why not? One simple act – holding up a peace sign, with a thought that wishes the whole world well – Ukranians, Russians, our whole world. We have the power to transform the world: whether we are sick, whether we are old, whether we are busy, whether we feel lonely. Whatever our conditions are, that life is available to us, always, a life of peace.
I’ve been inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh, the peace activist who said that Buddhism is peace. I would say the same thing for Unitarian Universalism. When it’s practiced, it is peace.

When it’s lived, it becomes love. You don’t need to be a Unitarian Universalist to live this way. There are many ways to encourage and show us how to live that way of life. But if you feel encouraged to live that life here, that’s good. In my mind, it’s the main reason we are here. I recommend approaching faith with a curious spirit, valuing doubt as critical, so that you have to live it to find out for yourself.
As the world feels dangerous and precarious, I think we need people who can embody peace, people who can embody love through a commitment to service and humility. I think it teaches us and teaches the world what it means to be human in the deepest sense. A life that cares for fear and anxiety with compassion. A life that shows us that there is more to us than greed and fear. There is much more. I love that Kathleen Hogue shared with us the story of Noah. I think many of us have had moments of wondering how we as humans can keep going on this way, seeing all the horrible things that we perpetuate throughout the generations. My favorite part of that story is the rainbow.

 

I’ll save the destruction and flooding for another sermon, but I love the rainbow. The rainbow was a sign of a covenant, a promise, not too unlike the covenant that we have at this church. The rainbow was a reminder that peace is possible, that beauty never leaves us, even if after destructive storms. It was a sign of love, love for all humankind, love for all the animals of the earth. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to look for signs of love. I’m heartened by the majority of a worldwide community that wants peace, and no more war. I’m heartened by a bit of a relief from a pandemic that is nearly two years in motion. I’m heartened by our newcomers and all seekers, who are seeking a community to support them in living their best life, according to values of peace and love.
I’m really grateful for all the creative expression in this church. Jennifer whose practice is to write a poem every morning, and who was willing to share one of them in our service today. Jeff’s music, and all the wonderful musicians we have in this church.

All those who express their creative spirit through serving the community in writing grants, feeding the hungry, helping with housing, dismantling oppression in law and policy. Those who are committed to a practice of expressing kindness for yourself and kindness of our world, dismantling oppression and harmful perceptions in ourselves so that we may be more clear and open. I’m grateful for all of you who practice an awareness of peace, a willingness to care for your own pain and suffering with a commitment to not make things worse. I’m grateful for those who live the connection between justice and peace, two sides of the same coin. I’m grateful to all of you for deepening and renewing my faith.

Topics: Peace and Justice