My sermon this morning took a completely different turn from the one I'd planned. I hate that. I was all set to drive home a point about peace arising from the ethical use of power based on our modern traditions of sweet reason. But the spirit yanked me in a new direction; it annoys me no end but I have to follow. This new direction dictated my choice of scripture -- both have to do with turning one's world upside down.

We all have a fundamental sense of an ideal world, and the world we have now, and how we fit. What's good, what's bad, who we can trust, who we can never trust. We first form this understanding as children. In general, the people we feel most kinship with are the folks who lived in the same world when they were children. For many of us in first world countries, our way of looking at things gets shaken up when we leave home, when we go to war, go to college, get married, have our own children.

I liked Donald Murray, the writer of the "Now and Then" column in the Boston Globe. He wrote about how the world is full of unexpected twists and turns. Last year about this time he wrote on where he learned about life; on the street corner, standing on the edge of the bunch of boys watching and listening and occasionally being pummeled. He said, "I was a wimp but learned to appear tough."

Where did you first learn about life? I mean life, the way things are, the way things ought to be. Right and wrong. Getting along. Taking a stand. Letting go. Did you learn from people who loved you, or people who didn't care about you at all? Which lessons stayed with you and which lessons were true?

Donald Murray said, "I was a wimp but learned to appear tough. It was a long time before I learned that we were all wimps looking as if we were tough." He finished by telling us that he spent 17 years learning to be what he was not, and the rest of his 64 years trying to recapture what he was before he was tough.

I spent my formative years trying to be the underdog triumphant. Right against might. The meek Christian inheriting the earth. But, most of all, I wanted to be right. Murray wanted to be tough. Individually, our understanding of life and our place in it is shaped by how we feel trying to negotiate our way in a dangerous, haphazard world. We seek security and prosperity. If we think of ourselves as religious, we seek security and prosperity often in the name of God and in our understanding of what happens after we die. Collectively and historically, we manifest our core understandings about life with our faith, our nationality, and our civilization.

Listen to two different ideas about waging peace, from two different Americans in two different times. Governor Thomas Dewey, who was the first one I could find to use the expression "waging peace," said in a 1948 speech, "We can once again lead from strength and not from weakness. We can make it clear to all the world that America stands with the free peoples of Europe and of North and South America and elsewhere in the world, determined to uphold the cause of human freedom and able to back up its determination." Almost 60 years later, this still sounds very familiar.

Contrast Dewey's affirmation with what UUA President Bill Sinkford said in his holiday message last December, "Waging peace calls us to stand with all the commitment to life that our faith inspires in us. To live out Sophia Fahs' bold affirmation that each night a child is born is holy. To become willing to face and name our deepest truths, and still to open ourselves to others whose truths are different. To prepare room in our hearts and lives for a new way of being. In a culture that urges us to seek safety in ever bigger cars, houses, and opinions, we must find the courage to acknowledge our vulnerability, to admit how much we need one another's love and care if we are to forge a collective future."

We still live with violence. What happens when our hearts -- our core understandings -- are violated? What happens when we are threatened? What happens when our sense of place, of right and wrong, is challenged: When we struggle all night with the stranger who rewards us for striving with God, as Jacob learned from his angel? Or when the Advocate that Jesus prophesied will tell us that he will prove us wrong about sin, about righteousness and about judgment? Or when another religion, another nation, another civilization tells us we are sinful and dishonorable and must suffer for this? How can we envision peace? How can we even think of reconciliation? Yet this, this is the place where peace is most vital, and most elusive.

I started this sermon by thinking about the meaning of peace, especially in light of our world today. Ambrose Bierce once defined peace in international affairs as, "a period of cheating in between two periods of fighting." You don't have to look far to prove his point. I am not an expert on war. I am not even a pacifist. I am a witness to what our nation and other nations claim as justification for war. That justification ultimately derives from our beliefs about our civilization. Our civilization is powered by our ethics and morals. Our ethics and morals emerge from religion. So, what drives us to war? What keeps us there? What drives us to peace besides sheer exhaustion? Is there something about the nature of religion that contributes to dissention and war? And if there is, what can we do? What should we as people of faith do?

Last summer, Bill Sinkford visited Kyoto, Japan to attend the Eighth World Assembly of Religions for Peace. He joined leaders from the Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and Jewish faiths for days of deep sharing and dialogue. "Together," he said, "we crafted statements of belief and understanding, and trust and hope grew among us. Yet the religious leaders from the Holy Land, representing the three great Abrahamic traditions, were not able to agree on even a common preamble, let alone a joint statement. That failure haunts me."

Does faith lead us inevitably to violence? It's easy to point fingers at Islam when we're in the midst of these wars. Islam seems like it has a unique propensity for violence, but it is not alone. One does not have to look far in the past for aggression in the name of religion -- it continues as it has for millennia. In America, even during peacetime, we have experienced systematic violence against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, animists, this list goes on. Abroad, we look to recent conflicts in Iraq (Sunni vs. Shiite Muslims), Ireland (Catholic vs. Protestant), Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; and Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), the Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists); Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhist vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians).[1] People are dying, civilizations are falling, as a direct result of a deadly combination of religious differences and scarce resources.

Most faiths have a systematic justification for war as a means to peace. Let's look at the Abrahamic traditions. The Hebrews and the Muslims start with a presumption of warfare; warfare against polytheists. The meaning of peace in this context is not simply a cessation of hostilities, harmonious relationships or inner contentment. Peace in this context is surrender to a public security and order; an order that is rooted in an understanding of right relationship with God.

This kind of peace is called tranquilitas ordinis, the "peace that springs from the just ordering of human affairs." In our tradition, it originates in Hebraic and Stoic thought. The Hebrew Bible and the Koran lay out in explicit detail how the ancients are to wage war against their polytheistic neighbors and stay in right relationship with God. It is above all a matter of staying in right relationship; through times of war, times of prosperity, and times of occupation and exile. The core meaning of peace in Jewish and Islamic traditions is surrender. "Islam" is usually translated as "Peace," but it is a peace which is rooted in surrender.

Christians started with a presumption of pacifism. Early Christians believed that Christians should not fight. It was not until Augustine that Christians adopted the concept of just war. Their fundamental question was how could people of faith engage in legitimate violence without passion or greed? For centuries, each of the three great Abrahamic faiths had philosopher theologians who tried to moderate their doctrines of aggression. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae said it best, "Among true worshippers of God those wars are looked on as peacemaking which are waged neither from aggrandizement nor cruelty but with the object of securing peace, of repressing evil and supporting the good."

We must ask: Whose peace? Whose evil? Whose good? We must ask: Whose freedom? Whose democracy? We must ask, what is the meaning of sin, righteousness and judgment between one civilization and the next? What are we missing? What does peace really and finally require? What is it that our religious leaders were unable to express?

I wanted so much to tell you that, with mutual respect, dialogue, and shared action, we can hope to live side by side with our respective understandings and perpetuate peace. I wanted to tell you that our idea of just war -- the surrender of our enemies to our magnanimous umbrella of freedom and democracy -- was too limited a view of the future. I wanted to tell you that love, power and justice in equal measure, were more important than surrender.

But I realized to the dismay of my enlightened soul, that surrender is the key to peace. Not the surrender of our enemies. Not surrender to pacifism. Not even the surrender to God's plan.

The key to peace is for us to surrender our authority -- even if we have the superior military, the superior rationale for war, the superior morals and ethics. If ultimately peace is to exist, even more, survive, then we must understand in the deepest core of our individual and national being that our survival rests in the hands of our enemy. We must be mighty, we must be resilient, and yet we must be dependent. We are, in Donald Murray's words, all wimps who want to appear tough. I am not saying that everything is relative. I'm not saying that one tradition's beliefs and ethical behaviors are as good as another's. I am suggesting that we hold onto our core understandings; but, in the end, we must detach and disengage those understandings from power. Victory does not equal peace. At best, it is only a temporary respite between hostilities. We must look for co-existence, and more. We must look for dependence. I know, I know how impossible this seems when we are face to face with those who want to exterminate us. But this is what we must find a way to accept.

I didn't tell you the setting for Jacob's story. The night that Jacob separated himself from his family and community to wrestle with the stranger, Jacob was in flight from his brother Esau. He felt guilty because he had tricked Esau out of his birthright and he feared Esau's retribution. After struggling with the angel, after discovering that he, Jacob, was to become a mighty nation Israel, Jacob gathered his family and all he owned and went in search of Esau. They met, and Jacob bowed down seven times and submitted himself to his brother. Even though he had been crowned a nation, he surrendered himself to his brother Esau. They parted in peace.

Albert Einstein said, "The world we have created is a product of our ways of thinking. It cannot be changed until we change those ways of thinking."

I cannot lean on the things I used to. That's the work of finding a new foundation, a new way of trusting God, and trusting others. In this work, like all of life, the beginning of peace is when your heart gets broken, and you have to respond with peace.