[Peace-discuss] A sermon of Robert Jensen

[Morton K. Brussel]

Below are a couple of extracts taken from a talk by Robert Jensen to  
a Texas church congregation. Would that it be given to the churches  
of this community.

Jensen makes many other cogent, wise, and passionate remarks. The  
whole "sermon' can be found at (www.zmag.org):


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=9125

--mkb





…I have discovered, as have many others, that this is a world in  
which from the global to the personal, virtually no one is really  
safe. It is a world in which powerful nations unleash a grotesque yet  
sanitized violence that supposedly is for the benefit of those whose  
homes will be destroyed. It is a world in which men invade the most  
intimate spaces of women, and then demand that women remain silent  
about that violence. It is a world in which the affluent step over  
the homeless on their way to the mall. It is a world in which white  
people continue to demand that non-white people bear the burden of  
our inability to confront our own white pathology. And, most  
frightening of all, it is a world in which we are drawing down the  
ecological capital of the planet in a fashion that is unsustainable,  
not just over the long term but now even in a much shorter calculus.

This is the simple discovery we must confront: We were given a place  
in creation, with a beauty beyond the telling, and we have failed to  
care for it. And as our collective contempt for the non-human world  
has intensified, so has our contempt for each other. We have failed  
to care for each other.

Those are our failures, and we must step up to our responsibility for  
them. But we must also be clear that these failures are not just ours  
as individuals, but are the failures of the systems in which we live.  
The answer is not simply to make ourselves better individuals. We  
could transform ourselves individually into saints, but as long as  
those systems and institutions endure, we will be coping with the  
inevitable failures that are part of their nature. Capitalism  
produces inequality. Nation-states make war. A high-energy/high- 
technology society destroys the basis for sustained life.

…


Those are our failures, and we must step up to our responsibility for  
them. But we must also be clear that these failures are not just ours  
as individuals, but are the failures of the systems in which we live.  
The answer is not simply to make ourselves better individuals. We  
could transform ourselves individually into saints, but as long as  
those systems and institutions endure, we will be coping with the  
inevitable failures that are part of their nature. Capitalism  
produces inequality. Nation-states make war. A high-energy/high- 
technology society destroys the basis for sustained life.

…
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