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 Sermon
04/18/10
Gandhi and the Creation of a Culture of
Nonviolence ~ by Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
April 18, 2010 Third Sunday after Easter
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Acts 16:20-29; Matthew 5:3-16, 38-48, 7:12-14,
24-27
Why
would a Christian church have a worship service celebrating a Hindu
man?
One reason was expressed eloquently by the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “It is ironic, yet
inescapably true that the greatest Christian of the modern world was
a man who never embraced Christianity.”
But this congregation has more specific
reasons. Our Covenant says,
“We embrace community with all creation, in the way of Jesus
Christ, promoting understanding and compassion, justice and
peace.” Our Mission
Statement says, “We feel called to promote Christ’s way
of nonviolence, creating a loving, just society for all.” Gandhi embodied these ideals every
day of his life for over forty years.
And we have a more urgent reason to reflect
on Gandhi. Since Martin Luther
King Jr. Sunday, over forty of us have signed the King Center Pledge
of Nonviolence, promising to make nonviolence a way of life for
ourselves and help create a culture of nonviolence in our
society. Twenty of us have
just finished discussing the book In
Search of a Nonviolent Future and we have decided to keep meeting
to work on projects promoting nonviolence.
But even if all we had done was read
today’s scripture passages, we would still have plenty of
reason to celebrate Gandhi.
The Beatitudes bless those who are poor in spirit, those who
are meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who
are merciful, those who are pure in heart, those who are peacemakers,
those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. No one exemplified these qualities
better than Gandhi. He
perfected Christ’s teaching not to meet violence with
violence. He taught the world
what loving your enemy really means.
He studied the Sermon on the Mount and he lived it.
Today’s story from the Book of Acts is
just the kind of love Gandhi showed.
Like the Apostle Paul, Gandhi was in jail often—so often
that he sometimes jokingly gave his home address as a particular
prison he frequented. Like
Paul and Silas, Gandhi would have taken a flogging from a jailer and
then turned around and tried to save the jailer’s life.
So in celebrating Gandhi, we are really
celebrating the way of Jesus Christ.
And in studying how Gandhi went about creating a culture of
nonviolence in India, we are really learning how to go about
establishing the realm of God on earth. And in saying this is urgent for
our congregation to do, we are saying that the violence of war and
the violence of global environmental devastation and the violence of
poverty and the violence of the media and the violence of our
over-busy lives and the violence of our children’s
over-scheduled childhood, and the violence of materialism and
consumerism, all have attained cataclysmic proportions, and that the
culture of violence today threatens to destroy the conditions of life
necessary for the realm of God to exist on earth.
Mahatma
Gandhi held prayer meetings morning and night in his later
years. The book Gandhi the Man, by the late
spiritual teacher and Berkeley professor, Eknath
Easwaran, tells this story:
One
evening at [Gandhi’s] ashram hundreds of people had gathered
for the nightly prayer meeting.
The sun was about to set and it was the time when snakes begin
to come out after the fierce heat of the Indian day. This evening a cobra was seen
gliding toward the gathering.
A cobra’s bite is swift and deadly, and in the villages
of India, where medical help is usually far away, such snakes strike
terror into everyone. A ripple
of panic began to sweep through the crowd, and there was danger that
some might be trampled if the terror spread. But Gandhi quietly showed a sign
not to move.
Gandhi
was seated on the platform. He
wore only his dhoti or loincloth; legs, chest and arms were
bare. While the crowd held its
breath and watched, the cobra made straight for Gandhi and slowly
began to crawl over his thighs.
There
was a long moment of silence in which no one dared to move or make a
sound. Gandhi must have been
repeating his mantram, Rama, Rama, Rama.
Even the cobra lost all trace of fear. In its own way it must have sensed
it was in the presence of someone who would never cause it
suffering. Slowly, quietly, it
crawled away, leaving everyone unharmed. (p 115f)
Gandhi’s
behavior with the cobra goes against the myth that the culture of
violence tells us, that violence is the way to security and survival,
the way to peace. It would be
hard to find a clearer illustration of the saying of St. Seraphim of Sarov: have peace in yourself, and thousands will
find salvation around you.
Christ
and Gandhi both insist that this power of peace is available to every
one of us, if only we will choose it, and they show us its way. You can see some of the elements of
it in the story about the cobra.
The
first thing to note is the centrality of God in the story. Gandhi said that the practice of
nonviolence was impossible without faith in God. Not only did he hold prayer
meetings morning and night, but he prayed without ceasing, as the
Apostle Paul called it. A
nursemaid had taught him to say the name of the Hindu god Rama whenever he felt afraid. It became a mantra for him. He repeated it on his long morning
walks, he repeated it when he lay down to sleep, he
repeated it whenever danger was near.
The word Rama was on his lips as he
died.
Gandhi
said, “My greatest weapon is mute prayer,” and this is
the prayer that he meant. In
Prayer of the Heart we learn to pray in the same way to focus our
minds and hearts on our intention to remain centered on God. This is the essential foundation of
all nonviolence. It helps us
let go of all that threatens to knock us off Christ’s way of
love.
Letting
go, or detachment, was also a constant practice of Gandhi’s
spiritual life. Gandhi said, “There comes a time when an
individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive
in its effect. This comes when
he reduces himself to zero.”
This detachment is what Jesus meant by being poor in spirit
and meek.
Detachment
does not mean to stop living—just the reverse. It enables us to live
fearlessly. As a boy Gandhi
was so afraid of people that he ran home from school every day so not
to have to say a word to anyone.
Through his spiritual practice, he was able to become detached
and courageous enough to give his life completely to help other
people.
So
when the cobra came toward the crowd at the prayer meeting, Gandhi
knew how to control his fear and have peace in himself. And he was able to act with the
power of nonviolent love.
As
soon as we start to study Gandhi we need to learn two Sanskrit words
that were at the heart of his life work. They are satyagraha and ahimsa. The word satyagraha is made up
of two words, satya
that means truth and agraha that means “to insist on” or
“to hold to obstinately,” or, as Gandhi saw it,
“power” or “force.” Satyagraha
is the power that comes from holding to the truth.
For
Gandhi, the deepest truth was that all life is one, that God is in
all and all are in God, and that in fact we are each in each other,
completely one. Satyagraha means letting the
truth of our oneness guide our actions. It means having compassion for all
and wanting peace and sufficiency and justice for all, loving our
neighbor literally as our self.
The
other word, ahimsa, is
translated as “not harming” or “nonviolence,”
but in Sanskrit it is more positive than that. Ahimsa
is the way of being that naturally rises in us when we let go of all
forms of violence. It is very
close to the New Testament Greek word, agape, meaning charitable, Christ-like lovingkindness, a love that creates community and
restores broken community. Satyagraha is ahimsa in action, as Easwaran says.
Whenever
you hear the word nonviolence associated with Gandhi, these two words
are at play, satyagraha,
which you could translate as truth force or soul force, and ahimsa, which you could
translate as a peace-making, charitable, Christ-like love.
As
the cobra sped toward them, Gandhi showed how these work. First, he signaled to the crowd not
to panic, not to be afraid.
They trusted him because of the power of satyagraha. They knew—they could
feel—the truth that Gandhi was one with them,
that he placed their interest above his own, and so they did
what he said.
Second,
he signaled to the snake that it was welcome and he would not hurt
it. His ahimsa, his perfect love and kindness, allowed the snake
to remain nonviolent itself and finally leave of its own accord.
This
is exactly how satyagraha
and ahimsa worked on a much
larger scale with the three hundred and fifty million people of India
and the all-powerful British Empire.
With satyagraha
and ahimsa Gandhi was able
to persuade the Indian people to do exactly the opposite of what
their fight or flight instinct insisted on; instead of killing the
snake with a violent revolution, as had begun to happen, he led them
in a decades-long nonviolent campaign. The British eventually responded by
leaving of their own accord, not as defeated and humiliated enemies,
not with pent up violence that they would unleash on another victim,
but as converted friends.
Gandhi
was not the first person to transform an empire through nonviolence. Jesus did it before him and taught
him the way. Jesus showed how
strong lowliness and self-sacrifice can be. Self-sacrifice has been abused by
some Christians and abandoned by others, but sacrifice in the spirit
of Christ is transformative.
The word sacrifice means literally to make sacred. A Christ-like sacrifice transforms
a situation by the power of love that is in the self-giving. Gandhi said, “A nation that is
capable of limitless sacrifice is capable of rising to limitless
heights. The purer the
sacrifice, the quicker the progress.”
Gandhi
believed that human capacities were literally limitless. He knew how difficult it is to love
perfectly, and he felt at the end of his life that he was still far
from it, but he believed humanity could advance if it could create a
culture of nonviolence to teach Christ-like love to generations to
come. He wrote, “War
will only be stopped when the conscience of humankind has become
sufficiently elevated to recognize the undisputed supremacy of the
Law of Love in all walks of life.
Some say this will never come to pass. I shall retain the faith till the
end of my earthly existence that it shall come to pass.” (Peace Is the Way, Walter Wink ed., p 3)
Gandhi’s
vision will come to pass only if we work to make it come to
pass. Christ came to recruit
us for this very cause. We
have the opportunity to fulfill that calling now in this church. Our nonviolence discussion group
has decided to continue to meet on the third Tuesday of every
month. It invites you to join
its efforts. The group hopes
to teach people of all ages how to pray like Gandhi and how to
practice nonviolence in daily life.
We hope to encourage more people to be involved in local food
production, which uproots violence and cultivates peace in a variety
of ways. We hope to help the
town of Thetford create a system of
restorative justice. We hope
to help promote the Peace Teams that are currently going into areas
of conflict around the world, as an alternative to military service.
The
violence in our world is like a cobra coming toward us. Only someone who is trained in the
ways of nonviolence can hope to respond with Christ-like fearlessness
and love, with the power of peace.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, Christ offers us the spirit
and the motivation of nonviolence; Gandhi offers us the methods of satyagraha
and ahimsa and constructive
program. The decision we each
have to make is whether we will accept what they offer.
Will
we enter into the patient work of learning and training and sacrificing
to create a culture of nonviolence?
Let us pray in silence…
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