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Crisis in the Middle East

Forrest Church • April 7, 2002

Every year, on the day time springs forward, attendance at All Souls drops by roughly ten percent. If I were insecure–I should say more insecure– I might attribute this to a conscious decision on your absent pew mates part. "Let’s see. We’re going to lose an hour tomorrow. Which one should it be. Ah, yes, why not church?" This may reflect the reasoning of a few soon to be lost souls, but most of those who otherwise might be with us this morning are simply out of touch with reality. They didn’t even know when they woke up this morning that they had lost an hour. That’s how out of touch they are. And when the truth hit them–courtesy, say, of National Public Radio, or when they turned on WQXR to hear the All Souls broadcast and got Stravinsky instead, it was already too late. Others, shooting for the 11:15 service will arrive to worship just in time for coffee hour. Given that coffee appears to be the Unitarian sacrament, this is not so complete a loss as if they were, say, Baptists. Nonetheless, be kind to them. They will be disoriented. They will just have become conscious of having been deprived of that precious hour that you yourself have long since been reconciled to losing. Then there is a third group. A creative few will even miss coffee hour. These are the people who, as I almost did, set their clocks back an hour last night, rather than forward. I was in Memphis yesterday speaking at a Unitarian District conference. That I wouldn’t return until about eight o’clock didn’t worry me, even though I still had my sermon to write. After all, I had an extra hour. This is what Christians call grace. I still believe in grace, though my faith was severely tested when I boasted of this extra hour to my seatmate on the plane, and she gently disabused me of my blessed state.

Time is a worthy subject for contemplation. To begin with, time is the most valuable thing we have to spend. Not that time is money. People say that, but time isn’t really money. Time is spiritual capital. We either invest it or we waste it. The time we invest redeems itself. Redemption is like when you take a coupon to the store–worth a tenth of a cent they say–and receive something of tangible value in exchange. We redeem the time we invest in memory, knowledge, and skill. We redeem it especially in love. On the other hand, the time we waste we lose. "Lost Time," Benjamin Franklin said, "is never found again."

"Do you love life? " Franklin asked. "Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of." Time is like health. We think about it only when we are running out of it. Time is also vengeful. When we waste time, time wastes us. When we kill time, time kills us. "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity," added Henry David Thoreau.

As hinted at here, my intention this morning was to pack everything I know about time into fifteen minutes. Have you ever seen "The Complete Plays of Shakespeare (Abridged)." You get all twenty-eight plays in about two hours. It’s really quite amusing. Carolyn and I saw it at Blair Academy, where our son Nathan is in school. At one point they pluck some unsuspecting spectator out of the audience, pull her onto the stage, and cast her in the role of the screaming Ophelia. On that particular occasion, Carolyn was the screaming Ophelia. I don’t know about her, but I found it absolutely terrifying. In any event, I was going to do to time what Blair Academy did to Shakespeare. Not offer you crib notes for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time–which, however brief, is the most widely unread bestseller of all time–but indulge in a spring lark to redeem our late lost hour. But I couldn’t do it. Not with the relentless, tragic news from the Middle East tearing at my heart. I must reflect this morning not on time, but on the times, these perilous times that so defy both reason and hope, the times of our life.

At the close of the Cold War, the historian Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of his own discipline, announcing "The End of History." No longer would competing ideologies or warring nation states divide and savage the world. In their place, unifying all peoples, would follow the inexorable expansion of secular liberal democracy, powered by the engines of global free-market capitalism. Driven aside by the march of progress, religion would recede from the public arena, nation states would take a back seat to the inexorable global march of unifying progress, and the world would be remade into a secular Kingdom of Heaven.

By this interpretation, global economic interdependence would guarantee peace in the New World Order much as mutual assured destruction ensured it for the Old. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman notes that–so powerful are the economic interests that bind them to one another–until recently no countries that contained McDonald’s franchises had subsequently declared war on one another. There is no question that global market imperatives foster stablity, but they also incite rebellion. One thinks of the haunting photos from the Ben Yehuda shopping mall in Jerusalem following a 1997 Hamas sponsored suicide bombing: havoc everywhere; golden arches in the background. Today the image is not so shocking as it was five years ago. We see it every day.

In 1993, four years after Fukuyama’s declaration of victory, Samuel Huntington reinserted history into the global mix with a vengeance, viewing a future marked by the clash of civilizations. President George Bush’s "Desert Storm" victory over Iraq had not, as promised, ushered in a "New World Order." Instead, it further precipitated the "New World Disorder," in which competing cultures would struggle to the death to capture both soil and soul. With the September 11 terrorist attack on America, President George W. Bush (tacitly acknowledging that the tides of history had swept away his father’s "line in the sand") declared an all-out war against terrorism. Updating his thesis, Huntington called the terrorist attack a "blow by a fanatical group on civilized societies in general." But he also fingered the entire Arab World as representing "a different civilization whose ‘violence propensity’ is exceeded only by that of China."

The weakness of Huntington’s analysis of a world riven by conflicting civilizations is that Islamic, and more broadly Arab, society is almost as diverse in its manifestations as Western society is. Culture is a specifically local phenomenon. Particularities of distinct cultures are challenged by the forced intimacies precipitated by a shrinking globe.

Nonetheless, when post modernist Philosopher Richard Rorty defines progress as "an increase in our ability to see more and more differences among people as morally irrelevant," time and history have proved him naïve, if not flat wrong. It is precisely the differences among people, relgious differences, ethnic differences, especially the growing divide between haves and have-nots, that threatens to reverse the march of progress.

So what can be done? What can we even dare to think about the tragedy in Israel and Palestine, itself emblematic of a young third millennium riven by terror? Since nothing we say or do is going to change matters much in the Middle East, this morning I want, very briefly, to talk about our own hearts. If we can find hope within ourselves, then hope can be found everywhere. Hope is not optimism. Optimism is rightly dashed by almost every report out of Israel and the West Bank. Hope is to optimism what eternity is to time. With optimism as quickly dashed as time passes, meaning must dwell in a deeper place if meaning is to be found at all. So let us look into our hearts.

Whenever our hearts are torn by some dark passion, hatred can easily take them hostage. Otherly hate is as endemic to human nature as is brotherly love, if not more so. And it is almost always justifiable. When we are under attack, when we are vulnerable–a word that means, susceptible to being wounded–we armor our hearts. Fear alternates with anger. Logic drives the spirit of retaliation. When wounded, we seek to wound in return, driven by a raw passion for justice which itself can easily be hyposticized into a noble ideal. According to Enlightenment thought (reflected in the Declaration of Independence as stemming from nature and nature’s God), the first law of nature was almost universally held to be "self-preservation." When under attack, we reflexively seek to preserve ourselves by destroying our attacker. Think of how ugly divorces can become. Or of how savage even office or academic politics can be. An objective observer–that is to say, one whose life is not directly imperiled by the struggle–can see how easily the logic of hatred turns to madness, with mutually assured destruction the inevitable outcome of two people hell bent to protect themselves from one another. Revenge is ugly, and often self-destructive, but it is driven by the logic of justice and therefore can almost always be cast into an ends justifies the means interim ethic. This is why the most haunting and ironic lesson from history is that we should choose our enemies carefully, for we will become like them. This is as true for warring individuals as it is for warring nations.

If you look only at the atrocities perpetrated by one side or the other in the Middle East, you will be blinded by an absolutely appropriate sense of outrage. Again, think of how we, understandably, often take sides in a particularly brutal divorce. Our friend is a victim. Her own behavior is completely understandable given how outrageously she has been treated. But when the case comes before a court of law, the judge–ideally but never fully objective–makes a final determination on the distribution of property and visitation rights, even issuing court injunctions to mandate the behavior of one or both parties in the dispute. If the two parties were themselves empowered as judge and jury, the conflict would never end, or only end in mutually assured destruction.

As America seeks a role in the Middle East, the only hope is that our leaders will be equally intolerant of the violence sponsored by both parties, and equally sensitive to the worthy aspirations of each as well. Israel has a right to exist. Palestine has a right to statehood. These rights are not mutually exclusive. The president’s acknowledgement of this, expressed more clearly than before on Thursday, when coupled with Colin Powell’s embassy to the Middle East, strikes precisely the right balance. This doesn’t make me optimistic. But it does give me hope.

Let me close with a theological observation. According to the purest teachings of all the Abrahamic faiths, only an inclusive community aptly represents the beloved community. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike, the neighbor we are asked to "do unto" as we would have him "do unto us" is not our next-door neighbor, but the stranger in our midst. The saving power of Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan is that, in ancient Judaea, Samaritans were anything but good. Today Jesus would be preaching to Israelis the Parable of the Good Palestinian and to Palestinians the Parable of the Good Israeli.

The conflict in the Middle East, with its tragic international repercussions, is not only a religious conflict, but religion fires its passion. For this reason, religion–the best not the worst of religion–must contribute to its resolution. The same holds true in our personal lives, especially with respect to self-destructive hatred. We are instructed to love our enemies as ourselves, not for their sake, but for our own. In the final analysis, to love our neighbor as ourself may be the only thing we can do to help bring peace to the world. Peace begins with our own hearts. And when we fail, as we often will, perhaps this will induce us to become a little less judgmental of others who fail in their own all-too-human ways.

For both these things, we can’t afford to lose too many more hours. After all, one day time itself will be taken from us, and then it will be too late.