Shall There Be Peace?                                                                    4/22/45

 

Scripture:  John 12: 23-32

 

Text:  John 12: 32;  “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”

 

Momentous days, are the days of this week.  The struggle in Europe with its tragedy, terror and triumph seems at a climax and perhaps nearer a close.  And that in the Pacific goes on apace.  Insofar as the cause of the United Nations can be advanced by force of arms, the advance seems to be successful - at the same terrific cost of life and treasure always exacted by war’s methods.

 

Meanwhile, a conference of representatives of the United Nations will begin next Wednesday at San Francisco, gathering by invitation of our government.  Its work, and the agreements reached there, may well be as important to the future peace of the world as any victory in arms - it can be even more important if moved by the right spirit.

 

The conference is being held in a city which was named for the good Saint Francis of Assisi - San Francisco.  Into this city, and to this conference, will come high officers of the governments of our own nation, of England, Russia, China; of the smaller countries of the United Nations - together with their advisory staffs.

 

Beginning with the findings arrived at in the Dumbarton Oaks meetings last year, these high representatives will proceed in a search for further agreement on the steps to be taken together, and the obligations to be mutually assumed, to assure just, equitable, enduring peace among the nations.

 

The eyes of thoughtful people all over the world will be focused on San Francisco.  Countless ears will be tuned to news from the conference.  The prayers of hosts of people, should and will be offered to God for guidance by the Almighty, and for the good, right, fair success of the deliberations there.  When we consider the magnitude of the task, its pitfalls of self-interest and misunderstanding, the urgent need of willingness to concede and compromise in non-essentials in order to reach unanimous agreement on vital points or essentials, we ought to be on our knees in prayer constantly during the sessions of this fateful conference.

 

Man has never yet devised, alone, a method for permanent, successful avoidance of war.  Meanwhile his wars get more and more devastating in destruction and human degradation.  Precisely because war becomes so increasingly destructive as to threaten the existence of modern civilization, it seems absolutely essential that some means be found to enable the nations to live in lasting peace, and cooperative harmony.

 

The effort to build lasting peace is one to tax the limit of ability in every man of every nation attending that conference!  In fact, more than man’s ability is needed if it is to succeed.  The blessing and guidance of God is needed.  Arrogant and willful man has always failed by himself.  Humble, sincere, consecrated man can succeed, and does succeed, guided and sustained by a holy spirit.  For that spirit, we pray during these coming days.

 

Several problems come into focus as the representatives of our nation join the others this week at San Francisco.  Indeed, the problems of peace are so great that it is remarkable that as much progress could be made as was made in the suggestions agreed upon at Dumbarton Oaks.

 

Some of the problems of peace in a post-war world are these.

 

1)  Probably the first - can we build some sort of world organization for peace?  That is a major testing of the coming meeting in San Francisco.  Critics of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals point to the imperfections and compromises contained and hint at further compromise.  Some devout Christian folk seem to believe that they cannot support the proposed organization unless it be practically perfect from their Christian point of view.  The alarming thing about such a position is that, this being the only proposal for world organization on the horizon, the only alternative is a return to the chaos of world anarchy, where the method is a “dog-eat-dog” kind of self-interest among the nations.

 

The job of tackling some sort of world security organization, however difficult, must be tackled.  Members of our State Department, and members of other governments have been studying and planning such organization for several years, paralleling their concern with the war effort.  The care and far-visioned statesmanship necessary is apparent when we remember that many of the nations of the world are far older than ours, with centuries of mind-set among their peoples.

 

It was difficult enough for thirteen brand new states in the comparative wilderness of America to organize a United States among themselves - so difficult that the effort could easilly have failed at the outset.  Probably no such complete unity is possible now for the states of Europe or the world.  But some sort of security organization can be begun, and this is the attempt, and the time for it.  Surely, if we will, we can!

 

2)  A second problem is this: can the strong protect the weak among nations?  The answer, taught in bitter experience, seems to be that the strong not only can, but must protect the weak.  When Italian armies were invading Ethiopia, Haile Selassie wrote: “I am not only performing my sacred duty to my people, but standing guard in the last citadel of collective security .... I must still hold on until my tardy allies appear.  And if they never come, then I say prophetically, and without bitterness; the West will perish.”

 

His prophecy almost came true!  While bigger nations stood aside and let the little countries be overrun, the juggernaut of force, both in arms and in foul philosophy, gained such momentum that the West was nigh unto perishing.  Can we realize that, in the end, the insecurity of the small is the insecurity of us all?

 

3)  Here is a third problem: can subject peoples be led to freedom?  Does freedom include the Orient?  Was it accident that the Japanese military sweep across the Far East found the natives of many places apathetic as to whether they were controlled by old rulers or new conquerors?  While in the Philippines where there had been steady progress toward freedom, there was an entirely different spirit, and where people fought for their freedom and peace?

 

4)  And how about this worrisome question?  Can we find homes for the homeless?  Probably the briefest statement of war aims was given by Jan Masaryk, foreign minister of Czechoslovakia in London, when he said: “I want to go home.”  Can his desire be fulfilled?  What about the wandering Jew (if indeed he is not reduced from minority to phantom in Europe)?  How about boundaries?  Can they be drawn fairly?  Before the first World War, there were 4,000 kilometers of frontier in Europe.  After it, there were 10,000, much of it a new source of friction.

 

5)  And what about clothing and food for the shivering and hungry?  This means not only emergency clothes collections and emergency rations now, but agreements that will make available to all, the necessary resources of the earth.  Can that be accomplished?  and how?

 

6)  One more problem:  Can our nations guarantee individual rights to intellectual and spiritual liberty?

 

Here, then, are a half dozen of the many problems which confront the world even before the war be ended, and to which right and workable solutions must be found.

 

Jack Finegan suggests not only these problems but one that is greater and more fundamental.  It is this: Can we make peace as great as war?  Consider some of the contrasts in which war usually looms bigger in our thinking than peace.

 

1)  War is urgent while peace may seem casual.  War presses for decision.  It has its “timetable.”  It has to be won, or it will be lost.  The old Confederate fighter’s saying, “Get thar fustest with the mostest” has returned to current use together with the negative statement used to explain many a defeat, “too little and too late.”

 

Really, peace is just as urgent, only we haven’t seen it in time.  Of course we were warned.  But we weren’t scared.  And so we didn’t heed the warnings.  Lloyd George said in 1919 that what was done in the peace treaty then would bring new war within, as he estimated, thirty years.

 

From 1930 to 1932 Bruening was chancellor of Germany while a republican form of government there was desperately struggling to survive.  In an act of personal and national humiliation, Bruening begged the foreign minister of France to lighten his country’s burdens and named “the sinister forces” which would secure control if he failed.  Both the entreaty and the warning were rejected.  And then it was too late.  For the sinister force named Hitler took control at the beginning of 1933.

 

In the same year H. G. Wells predicted, in his book “The Shape of Things to Come,” with almost complete accuracy, that the next war would break out in 1940 in Poland.  It came a few months earlier - and in Poland.

 

The whole world was warned, but it didn’t seem urgent.  Peace is just as urgent as war, if we may only get our thinking straight on the matter.

 

2)  And then, war is now “world-minded.”  Peace tends to remain “narrow-minded.”  When President Roosevelt asked that someone name this global war, he thereby named it himself.  Flat sectional maps do not accurately and comprehensively locate the places where the men and women of this church are fighting this war.  One needs a globe - and all of it - to put his finger on all those places. ----  Over all the continent of North America, Alaska through the states to Central America and the West Indies; South America; Africa; England, France, Germany, Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium, Italy, the Near East; India, China, Australia, the East Indies, Philippines, Islands of the Pacific and of Japan.  The members of this church are formed in battle line all around the globe!

 

The peace has to be made and maintained all around the earth, too.  No longer can the Pacific Ocean be a mere splash of blue on the map.  There are islands, people out there whose hopes and welfare are definitely linked with ours and who must be an integral part in the plans and planning of the peace.  Peace will never endure without their concurring voice.  Eventually, when they have become ready for it, even the vanquished nations must have a voice if peace is to remain secure.

 

3)  And of course war is thrilling while peace seems tame.  War is terrible.  It means bereaved homes, veteran’s hospitals, minds deranged from the ghastly deeds men have done.  But it is also thrilling in its call for the utmost physical strength and fitness; the hard and dangerous tasks.  Even at its grimmest, the common determination of a people seems something splendid, binding them together, aristocrats and slum-dwellers, in the will to resist. 

 

Can peace carry the same thrill?  Is there a challenge to any sort of United action in the face of a condition like this?  A young fellow was rejected by the army for physical disabilities traceable to malnutrition.  His mother begged authorities to take him anyway, for that seemed the only way that he would ever get enough of the right kind of nourishment.  Can’t peacetime order do better than that?

 

4)  Once more, war is sacrificial, while peace (while it lasts) is often filled with selfishness.  In war, millions turn their backs on home and loved ones in order to face duty, danger, and death.  Hosts of common folk give up whatever is necessary.

 

Do we look forward to peace only as the time when we can again do as we selfishly please?  That is what peace too often looks like in the light of war’s sacrifice.

 

Before this war, an observer remarked that it seemed to him that French and English youth expected something from the state, while German youth were being trained to a willingness to do anything for the state.

 

Unless we are willing to do something - a great deal - for peace - at least in fair proportion to what we will do for war, we are not prepared to pay its price.  Without the price, we do not possess peace!  If, on the other hand, peace seems to come at a high price, or even to be hardly attainable, hardy folk will remember that most of the real achievements of mankind have at first seemed unattainable.  A century ago railroads were deemed hardly practicable because of two definite shortcomings; first, a train cannot go uphill (except on a very gentle grade); second, not enough people would want to go anywhere in a hurry to make it pay.

 

185 years ago an English visitor to this country wrote these words:  “Fire and water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies of North America.  Nothing can exceed the jealousy which they possess in regard to each other.  The inhabitants of Pennsylvania and New York have an inexhaustible source of animosity in their jealousy for the trade of the Jerseys.  Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island are not less interested in that of Connecticut.  Even the limits and boundaries of each colony are a constant source of litigation.  In short, such is the difference of character, of manners, or religion, or interest in the different colonies that, I think, if I am not wholly ignorant of the human mind, were they left to themselves, there would soon be a civil war from one end of the continent to the other; while the Indians and Negroes would, with better reason, impatiently watch the opportunity of exterminating them altogether.”

 

Well, the gloomy prediction failed in fact.  For the United States did become a nation.

 

Let the United States now appraise carefully and faithfully the ability of greater states, and more widely differing, to find some common ground for the organizing of the peace.  Suppose we don’t like some things about our neighbor nations - they don’t like some things about us.  Can’t we look for the underlying traits in each other, on which we can build confidence, and proceed to an international neighborhood?

 

Hundreds of thousands have died in the belief that we will build a peace.  Peace had better be urgent, world-wide, thrilling and sacrificial for us and for the memory of those who have paid the price of life for it!  Here lies the moral equivalent of war in positive peace.

 

Peace isn’t just self-centered comfort.  Peace is triumph, struggled for, vigilantly guarded, defended, and laboriously built.

 

Pray God all delegates at San Francisco these coming weeks may prove valiant men, supported by valiant people, guided by an Almighty hand.

 

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            Delivered at Wisconsin Rapids, April 22, 1945.