FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS
October 27, 2002

We are living in times that try the human soul. 

We are living in a time of war. We are at war in Afghanistan and likely to 
continue fighting there for a long time. We have troops in tens of countries 
and are actively seeking to start a war in Iraq. The budget for the Defense 
Department once again is soaring at the expense of domestic programs. The 
President and his advisers have told us we are in an endless war.

We are living in a time of violence. Our schools are patrolled by police 
officers. Still, disturbed youngsters and adults have slaughtered our children. 
The D.C. area sniper—pray he has been caught!—has terrorized that area for 
weeks, and the disease of mass killing is found in Scotland, Germany, 
Canada, Bali, and other lands. Violence is our entertainment, as anyone 
watching the World Series knows; the commercials show ads for programs 
that celebrate guns, assaults, frightened women, death.

We are living in a time of outrageous greed. Top executives draw obscene 
amounts of money in salaries and benefits and, when they see the company 
going under, sell out while thousands of employees lose badly needed jobs 
and benefits. Sports figures and entertainers are paid staggering sums of 
money to play games and to look pretty. Politicians accept donations from 
special interests, pretending it has no sway over their vote. Laws are passed 
that favor the very well-off, with no benefit for the ordinary wage earner.

We are living in a time of gross immorality. Priests sexually abuse children 
and sometimes adults, and for decades hide behind the skirts of their 
bishops. The Vatican just this past week issued a statement more concerned 
for priests who may be falsely accused than for the victims of 
priest/predators. Shoddy workmanship from people more concerned about 
coffee breaks than doing their jobs well, Congressional representatives who 
did not even read the USA Patriot Act before falling in line with scarcely a 
dissenting vote to approve this assault on human dignity, and an attempt by 
ministers in our neighbor town Ypsilanti to deny full civil rights to lesbians 
and gay males and other sexual minorities and too many other examples 
point out the lack of integrity that is a characteristic of our times.

For such a time as this, a time when war rages and violence fills our lives, a 
time of massive greed and gross immorality, where shall we look for 
guidance and hope? Where can we find the values that can help us to be 
honorable and good? 

One very good place to look is in our own religious tradition. There we can 
see ideals that will instruct and inspire us with wisdom and with hope.

The first of these ideals is truth.

We say every Sunday in our Words of Affirmation that we will “search for 
truth in love.” That commitment to truth comes out of a long history among 
the Unitarians and the Universalists of insisting on a faith that is grounded in 
truth.

Truth is a demanding mistress. It demands that we gather all the facts we 
possibly can, even those that run counter to what we would like to be true.  It 
demands that we think critically, so that we see a question from various 
points of view before deciding what is the best way to believe or to act.
Truth demands that we keep an open mind even after having made a 
decision, so that we are receptive to new knowledge that might modify or 
revise our position.

Unitarians and Universalists have never been content to say that we shall 
believe it or we shall do it because it is written down in a book, not even a 
sacred book. Thus did Faustus Socinus in the late 16th century come to 
understand the tales in Genesis as metaphors of the human condition, not 
literal history. 

Unitarians and Universalists have never been content to say that we shall 
believe it or we shall do it because the leaders of our congregation or our 
movement tell us we should. Thus did John Haynes Holmes stand with eight 
others at the 1918 General Assembly of the American Unitarian Association 
and refuse to condone war because 300 others, including former president 
William Howard Taft, said he should. Twenty years later the AUA 
apologized for their action, which had resulted in the dismissal of 23 pastors 
who would not urge their congregations to be war-supporters.

Unitarians and Universalists have never been content to say that we shall 
believe it or we shall do it because it has always been that way. Thus did 
John Murray and Georges De Benneville and Benjamin Rush and Hosea 
Ballou insist that their Universalist faith was a faith in salvation for all, 
despite the long tradition in Christianity that only some would be saved.

Unitarians and Universalists have never been content to say that we shall 
believe it or we shall do it just because it feels good. Thus did we decide not 
to join the fledgling Federal Council of Churches in the early years of the 
20th century, as much as we wanted to be and would have enjoyed being in 
community with other faith groups.  We made that decision because the new 
ecumenical group had a requirement that we impose a creed on our churches 
and we are a fiercely anti-creedal people. Freedom is not for those whose 
views and actions are decided by what feels good.

Truth is a demanding mistress, but an honorable one. Truth will not 
guarantee us an easy life, but we shall proceed more wisely and more 
humanely if we seek to keep the goal of truth ever before us. Deceit, lies, 
evasion, propaganda, denial, “spin” are all paths to harm.

Our nation is at war. It is an undeclared war. It may be an unconstitutional 
war. It likely is in violation of international agreements. 

The president and some of his advisers are working hard to persuade the 
American people and the nations of the world that we should start yet 
another war. As citizens, we have a responsibility to seek out as much truth 
as we can about the war we are now waging and the war Mr. Bush proposes 
that we wage.

When my father spoke to his congregation in Nashville, Tennessee on 
Sunday, December 14, 1941, declaring that he was setting aside his pacifist 
convictions because he felt that war was in this circumstance called for, he 
faced the truth of what war would be like. “It was pathetic, “ he said, “to 
hear the cheering that took place in the Congress of the United States on 
Monday when our nation made its declaration of war. There is nothing in the 
whole sorry affair about which to cheer—it is a grim, ghastly, dastardly 
business that will tear from us many of the things that have been dear to 
us…. Let us go into this venture with eyes and hearts open to the difficulties 
that are involved, to the sacrifices that will be demanded, to the hardships 
from which there will be no escape.”

Without ever having gone to war, my father knew that war was costly in 
human terms. There was a price in human suffering to be paid. We had no 
right then, nor do we now, to ignore that terrible human toll as we 
contemplate the possibility of warfare.

Let us reflect on war by looking at what we have already done in 
Afghanistan. We have dropped 21,000 bombs and distributed 15,000 cluster 
bombs to add to the landscape of destruction, that is already the most heavily 
mined area in the world, yet more bright objects for children to pick up and 
thereby be injured or killed.

Let us remember the deaths of uncounted civilians, 800 by American 
reckoning and more than 4,000 by the count of the BBC, and the serious 
injuries that have taken 120,000 Afghan civilians to hospitals in neighboring 
countries. 

Let us not forget the financial cost of this war: $12.6 billion dollars in the 
past 12 months and a projected $600-$750 million a month for this fiscal 
year. The commander of our forces in that country has repeatedly said in the 
last few weeks that we will be there for a long time.

The truth about Iraq includes the existence of a brutal dictator who is not to 
be trusted. The truth is that we gave strong support to this dictator during the 
1980’s in his war with Iran. The truth is that we have friendly relations with 
brutal dictators in many countries. One of those countries, with which we are 
now in alliance, is Pakistan, a nation that we know—not just suspect but 
know--has nuclear weapons 

The truth about Iraq also includes sanctions for the past decade that have led 
to the death of 500,000 children and the destruction of the medical, 
educational, water and sanitation infrastructures in that country. Pencils for 
schoolchildren may not be imported because of the carbon that could be 
used for weapons.

An Army War College study concluded that Saddam did not gas the Kurds, 
as government leaders have asserted. Seymour Hersh of the New York 
Times pointed out the flaws in U.S. intelligence conclusion that Saddam 
sought to assassinate the former President Bush. 

According to Rolf Ekeus, head of the UNSCOM inspection operation in 
Iraq, the United States often “manipulated” the inspections by sending in 
spies as inspectors. 

More truth that we need to consider: leaders of various international aid 
agencies have made clear that there is no program in place that could handle 
the devastation of a war in Iraq, thereby exposing hundreds of thousands of 
civilians to hunger, thirst, cold, disease, not to speak of the risks of being 
bombed or shot.

The White House Budget Director, Mitchell Daniels, has acknowledged that 
war plans will lead to a cut back in domestic services, not least in education. 
The headline of a recent article was correct: “War will devour resources.”

Thousands will die, perhaps tens of thousands, perhaps more. Life will 
become cheap, as it always is in war. We who perpetrate these acts will have 
to live with a soiled conscience, unless we share the view of the authors of 
the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, presented as 
required by law to Congress a month ago. 

In that document, the American commitment to an empire unchallenged by 
any one in the world is made clear. It was characterized by Hendrik 
Hertzberg in the New Yorker as “a vision of what used to be called, when 
we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination…a world policed 
and controlled by American military might.” 

This is not yet the policy of our government, but many in the circle of 
presidential advisers want it to be. We have an obligation as citizens to 
reflect on what war means in such an imperial context.

One of our guides to worthy behaviour needs to be truth, a full appreciation 
of what war means, of what war in Iraq means, of the context within which 
that war is set. 

A second ideal to which we can look is justice. 

Justice is about fairness and equity. Justice is about everybody getting a 
chance at a good life. It is about protecting the widow and the orphan and all 
those who are permanently or temporarily unable to care for themselves.   
Justice is about restraining or punishing those who do wicked things and 
compensating those who have been victimized. Justice is about process, 
being sure that we all stand equal before the law.

Justice is deeply a part of the heritage and current values of the Unitarian 
Universalists.

Justice is what the only Unitarian king in history practiced. King John 
Sigismund of Transylvania—whose picture is on the wall just outside our 
sanctuary—chose to use the power of his throne not to forbid religions other 
than his own but to open the doors of tolerance to be sure that all the 
religions were enabled to practice freely. His Decree of Toleration in 1568 
was the first such law in the western world. It made clear that this new 
Unitarian religion was not trying to destroy other religions, only to practice 
its own.

Justice is what the Universalists practiced in the early years of the 19th 
century when, to the disgust of other religious communities, they welcomed 
into their pulpit a woman, Maria Cook. In 1863, the Universalists ordained 
the first woman minister in the United States, Olympia Brown. Today more 
than half of our UU clergy are female. That same sense of justice for women 
inspired people like Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone and Lydia Maria 
Child to step forward and assert the rights of women as well as men.

Justice is what drove Theodore Parker to violate laws he regarded as 
immoral in order to end slavery in the United States. Justice is what inspired 
John Haynes Holmes to help found both the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Justice is what moved Unitarians and Universalists to found Service 
Committees—rescuing Jews and others from the Nazis, opposing laws 
favoring the death penalty, helping to teach farming techniques in countries 
of great poverty, and much else.

Justice is what drives the social action committees in our churches. Not that 
we all agree. We do not. Our own social action committee has a difference 
of opinion about the moral and practical correctness of war in the Gulf. The 
point is that both sides, all sides on any issue, are committed to trying to 
create and maintain a just world. These are what our programs on hunger, 
homelessness, arms control, support of the United Nations, and many others 
are all about.

Justice! 

What would justice look like in our times? 

Surely it would involve what the former Dean of the Business School, Joe 
White, has called “a major fix” of the business world. In the last year we 
have had revealed to us scandals of massive proportions in major 
corporations. It is shocking that a few people at the head of companies 
should have been so heartless as to sell their stock for a fortune when they 
knew the company was sinking, leaving thousands of employees without 
jobs or salaries or benefits. 

Having experienced this in my own family, I feel deeply the unfairness of 
the present system. My son was laid off from his job as an airplane 
mechanic, not given his last paycheck, and lost all his benefits, while a small 
group of the company’s leaders walked away with huge bundles of money. 
What happened at Dave’s company, Kitty Hawk, at Worldcom and Enron 
and Arthur Anderson and other places is too common. As Joe White said, 
“time and again people with serious conflicts did exactly the wrong thing,” 
cashing in for personal or professional gain.

Justice would correct the imbalance in resources in this country. An article 
in last week’s New York Times magazine pointed out that 13,000 families in 
America have almost as much income as the 20 million poorest families. 
The average income of these rich families is $17 million dollars. These 
families increased their annual income by 157% over the last two decades, 
while people in the middle layers of income increased theirs by only 10%. 
Factoring in inflation, the less well to do families actually fell behind.

Justice does not tolerate greed.

Nor does justice accept or excuse gross immorality, such as that perpetrated 
by some 800 or more American Roman Catholic priests. The sexual 
depredations of these men should be punished with the sternest kinds of 
penalties. Every one of them should be brought before a court of law. Those 
who are members of the Roman Catholic faith who are trying to get these 
priests defrocked deserve our support. That is precisely what we in the UUA 
have done with our clergy who have crossed ethical lines of sexual 
behaviour with children or with adults.

Justice also would demand of us as a nation that we honor the international 
organization we were so instrumental in founding. Justice would call upon 
us to recognize that in a chaotic and dangerous world, the U.N. is truly a last 
best hope of humanity. No nation is wise enough, no nation is moral enough, 
no nation deserves to be a power that bestrides the world. Not even the 
United States. 

Justice calls on us to see the value of listening to and respecting one another 
in an international forum. Justice says that we cannot pick and choose which 
laws we shall abide by, which treaties we shall honor, which covenants we 
shall accept. Justice says that we should all stand before the bar of 
international justice. Justice would not allow the abrogation of solemn 
treaties like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto Treaty any more 
than those who abandoned these documents would teach their children that 
they do not have to keep their promises or honor their word.

As the American Anti-Imperialist League, among whose members were the 
then minister of this congregation and his predecessor, put it on October 30, 
1900 in a document opposing the war in the Phillippines, “We hold that 
what is immoral for men (and women) to do acting singly is immoral for 
them to do acting collectively as a nation. Each step in a course of action 
must be moral if the end is not to be tainted with immorality.”

Justice like truth can be a hard taskmaster, but justice is an important ideal 
that can guide us in parlous times. Our heritage offers us many models of 
justice for such a time as this.

The third ideal is love. 

All religions teach love. All human beings try but often fail to put it into 
practice. Too often we limit our loving to those close to us or to those like us 
or to those who do what we want them to do. Too often we mistake lust for 
love, adulation for love, dependency for love. It is none of these things.

Love is embracing and universal. Love is seeing the deep connection that 
binds all human beings together. Love is understanding that even beyond the 
human race there is life that we must appreciate and protect. 

Love is realizing that my own desires are not the most important thing in the 
world. Nor are they to be dismissed. We must love others as we love 
ourselves, so love begins with each of us caring for ourselves so that others 
do not have to take care of us. Love keeps us humble because we know that 
we are not all that matters.

Love holds us together even when we do not agree with one another, as 
often happens in a family or among friends, and sometimes in a 
congregation.

Love endures, as nothing else can or will. Love ennobles us, as nothing else 
can or will. Love may break our hearts, but more than anything else it can 
bring us a sense of contentment. 

Love is the founding ideal of the Universalist movement. Those early 
Universalists in the 18th and 19th centuries spoke and wrote of a God who is 
Love, of a God who would not abandon a single human being, no matter 
how wretched. They believed that Love was the ultimate force in the 
universe and that love would win out over hatred and violence. 

Hosea Ballou spoke for them when he said that “if we agree in love, there is 
no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other 
agreement can do us any good.

Love is what drove Clara Barton onto the battlefields of the Civil War, there 
not to fight or kill but to heal and comfort, to bring balm to the wounds of 
that dreadful conflict.

Love is what inspired Jane Addams to work with the immigrants in Chicago, 
come there from many lands with a diverse mixture of languages and 
customs. She created in Hull House a multi-cultural home for people of 
many understandings, a place where they could learn about democracy 
without sacrificing the pride they felt in their own heritage. 

Love is surely what has inspired a man not of our faith but of such good 
heart that he deserves mention when the word love is used. Jimmy Carter, 
whose presidency is not highly regarded, Jimmy Carter, a southern Baptist, 
is the best former president in the history of this nation. The Nobel 
Committee recognized this in awarding him this year’s Peace Prize. He won 
that award because he creates peace by his demeanor, one of respect
and affection, because he listens to all sides in disputes, because he is willing 
to get his hands dirty, as he does when he works for Habitat for Humanity. 
Love is at the heart of the man and what he does.

In this time, in all times, love is a powerful force for our own personal well-
being and a powerful force for good in the larger society.

We are so constructed as human beings that it is important for us to love and 
to be loved. If we are loved by our spouse or partner, by our parents or by 
our children, by our friends or by our colleagues, whatever burdens we may 
carry will be made lighter because of that love. 

The love that leads us to send a card or make a phone call or pay a visit to 
someone who is ill or having difficulties is felt by those of us who receive 
these kindnesses as a great boost to the spirit. I speak from the personal 
experience of twice in the last year having lost a parent, and then being 
carried gently through the season of grief by so many expressions of 
sympathy and support. I know I am not alone in feeling buoyed up by such 
thoughtfulness because people tell me how much such gestures have meant 
to them in their hour of need. .

Love shores us up and makes our life glad, even if only for a few moments 
every day.

Love is also a great social force. It encourages us to build bridges of 
understanding with those with whom we are in disagreement or those whom 
we do not know very well. 

I somehow was put on an e-mail list that sends me regular bulletins from 
Jerusalem about a group of women from the three central faiths of that 
region, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They meet monthly and they open 
their hearts to one another. They are committed to creating a loving 
atmosphere in which disagreements can be aired, in which that which is 
strange in the other faiths can become familiar even if it is not accepted as 
truth, in which they work toward establishing a community of people who 
can help their respective groups to learn how to talk to one another and listen 
to one another. The work of these women is guided by love. It is inspiring 
work done in the midst of the most hostile circumstances. 

In Ann Arbor, there are a number of similar conversations going on among 
people of quite different faiths and traditions. We have not just talked with 
each other but helped one another. Many members of this congregation have 
reached out to the Islamic community and especially the family of Rabih 
Haddad. Sometimes, as happened yesterday, we can work together to speak 
our common commitment to peace. Tonight several of us will be attending 
the annual banquet of the American Muslim Council.  All these actions are 
driven by love.

Last Sunday I preached in the Maumee Valley UU Church. One of the 
congregants there had a crazy wonderful idea of bombing Iraq “with 
kindness. Deliver by air medicines and food for the children. Simultaneously 
drop leaflets explaining: A. The American people have no quarrel with the 
Iraqi people. We do object to the Iraq government’s accumulation of 
nuclear, biological, chemical weapons. B. The medicine and food are gifts 
with no strings attached. C. The American people hope that the Iraqi people 
will solve their problems—weapons and Saddam. America has no desire to 
interfere with Iraq.” I salute Ford Cauffiel and Doug Tracy for such a loving 
idea!

Love is the most realistic practice and goal that life offers. I think of the 
damage done by imperialism, wars, violence, and hatred. Then I think of 
what Nelson Mandela did. He loved his jailers and became their friends. 
When he was released after nearly 30 years in prison, he did not turn on 
them but remained their friend. His spirit became the spirit of his country so 
that the transfer of power from a tiny white minority to a black majority was 
accomplished with little bloodshed—contrary to what every observer said 
would happen.

That is what love can do, and that is why it is such a compelling ideal.

These are the times that try our souls. We are besieged by war and violence. 
We are confronted with greed and immorality. We know that there are no 
simple solutions to the many and complex problems of life on this planet or 
life in our homes. It is my conviction that there is no better way to confront 
these challenges than by seeking the truth, by pursuing justice, and by 
always, always reaching out to one another in love.

As I finished the preparation for this sermon, it came to me that the ideals of 
which I speak are the very ideals we say together every Sunday morning, 
just phrased a bit differently. These Words of Affirmation, familiar to most 
of us, printed in every Sunday program, I leave with you as the ideals by 
which we might live in such a time as this: “The spirit of this church is love 
and service is its law. This is our covenant with each other: to dwell together 
in peace, to search for truth in love, and to help one another.”

Copyright, October, 2002, Kenneth W. Phifer















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