Honor
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Memorial Day Weekend, Sunday, May 28, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“Act well your part; there all the honor lies.”
– Alexander Pope
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from William Sloane Coffin’s book, Credo:
How do you love America? Don’t say, “My country, right or wrong.” That’s like saying, “My grandmother, drunk or sober”; it doesn’t get you anywhere. Don’t just salute the flag, and don’t burn it either. Wash it. Make it clean.
“Behold I make all things new,” saith the Lord. Our revolutionary forebears seemed to understand that. Their political debate pitted one kind of future against another kind of future. In our own time, let us dare to see that the survival unit is no longer an individual nation or an individual anything. The survival unit in our time and henceforth is the whole human race and its environment. As Pablo Casals once said, “Love of country is a wonderful thing, but why should love stop at the border?”
Let us proclaim a new kind of patriotism, which takes as its object of ultimate loyalty not the nation-state, but the human race. Individuals and nations are at their worst when, persuaded of their superior virtue, they crusade against the vices of others. They are at their best when they claim their God-given kinship with all humanity. Our wills are not free when they will what is bigoted, narrow, and ungenerous. Our wills are only free when they can will the will of a loving God. “Thy will be done on earth.”
2. Our second reading is from a book in the bible that I have managed to avoid ever since I got here ten years ago: the book of Revelation. The authors of the very successful but despicable “Left Behind” series of novels use a literal reading of Revelation as their inspiration – and Revelation is chock-full of mean-spirited apocalyptic visions which imagine paradise for the faithful – very narrowly defined by the evangelical authors, of course – and for everyone else, which would be most of us, a lake of eternal fire and brimstone awaits. For me, those dark visions tend to overwhelm the book, but there are a very few verses which offer a wider vision of hope. Here they are – Revelation 21:3-5:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the home of God is among mortals, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true."
If Noah Webster were to knock on your door and ask you for a definition of the word “honor,”
what would you say to him?
These days we most often use the word honor as a verb –
we honor someone at a dinner, we honor the memory of a friend at a memorial service.
“Honor” is often used in the bible that way, too,
as in “Honor your father and your mother” or “Honor the Lord your God...”
Used as a verb, honor means to show respect for, or pay tribute to.
We hear honor used less often as a noun, but on this Memorial Day weekend,
I want to speak of honor as it is meant in Stephen Spender’s marvelous line
in our opening words this morning:
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
If you look, as I did, to see how Webster defines honor in that context,
you have make your way through eight other definitions before you get to #9(b):
honor is “an acute sense of personal integrity maintained without legal or other obligation.”
Walter Lippmann took that definition up a few notches
when he wrote that honor means holding yourself “to an ideal of conduct
though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.”
But even as those definitions tell us that honor is a code of conduct,
they don’t tell us what qualities are essential to the code:
what qualities define honorable behavior?
I think of honesty, discipline, skill, and courage –
and then I think that honor is an increasingly endangered virtue.
Because when a ideal of conduct is inconvenient, unprofitable, or even dangerous to uphold,
it’s all too easy to forsake the ideal, drop down to the quick hit or the cheap shot,
and then make excuses if you’re caught: the news is full of disheartening examples.
Even so, I think that the honorable course of action is not always as clear-cut as we wish it were.
A genius like Shakespeare understood that what is most honorable depends on the person.
Honor is often a theme in his plays, and he portrays honor as less fixed and more fluid,
less a set of rules and more a way of being in the world –
a way of life that takes into account the circumstances,
the human strengths and weaknesses of the people around you,
just as we would want someone to do for us.
Most colleges today have some kind of honor system.
I went to a school – Washington & Lee in Virginia – with a high-stakes honor system.
It was – and is – not interested in extenuating circumstances.
Any incident of lying, cheating, or stealing, no matter how trivial – is an honor violation.
So is the failure to report a known violation of lying, cheating, or stealing.
There is only one penalty: permanent expulsion from the university.
If you are found guilty in a closed session by a 12-member student panel,
you have 24 hours to leave town.
The system works.
During exams, professors leave the classroom and don’t return until the time was up.
In my day, you could leave a $20 bill sitting in plain sight anywhere on campus,
and it would still be there when you came back to get it.
But every year somewhere between eight and a dozen students simply disappeared.
I remember my surprise when I got to Yale Divinity School
and could earn some extra cash as a proctor for undergraduate exams –
your job was to keep watch so students couldn’t cheat as they scribbled in their blue books.
There were no proctors at Washington & Lee – and I’m glad we didn’t need them.
But, as editor of the school newspaper during my senior year there, I argued for a change.
I thought the harsh single-sanction penalty was wrong.
For me, permanent expulsion with no chance ever to return was like using the death penalty
whether the offense was serious or petty,
whether it was a momentary lapse of judgment or a pattern.
So I wrote that the honor system needed to make room
for two of the most basic tenets of western civilization: forgiveness and redemption.
A student convicted of an honor violation should be able, after some period of time,
to come back to school if he wished, seek forgiveness, and redeem himself
in the very place where his mistake had been made.
Well, I was tilting at windmills.
The counter-argument was: the system works – and if you water it down, it’ll stop working.
In other words, the counter-argument was utilitarian.
The system works – and the single-sanction penalty is an important reason why it works.
But I was twenty-one years old.
I didn’t believe that honorable behavior should ever be a product of fear.
I wanted it to come from a better place than that.
When I was in college, Harper Lee gave us one of the best examples in recent literature
of a person of honor: Atticus Finch in her much-loved novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Gregory Peck was the perfect incarnation of Atticus in the film: it was his favorite role, ever.
Atticus is a lawyer and a widowed father with two young children –
a daughter, Jean Louise, who everyone calls Scout; and a son, Jem.
One of several honorable decisions Atticus makes in the book is to represent a young black man who has been falsely accused of raping a white woman.
The story, as you probably know, is set in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama in 1932.
And so this decision is, to put it mildly, inconvenient, unprofitable and dangerous.
In a key scene, Tom Robinson, the wrongly-accused black man,
has been locked up in the town jail awaiting trial,
and Atticus hears that a lynch mob may show up after dark.
So he goes downtown after dinner, takes a chair from his office,
and carries it over to the front of the jailhouse,
where he uses an extension cord to plug in a light, and then settles down to read the paper.
We see and hear what happens next through Scout’s eyes and ears.
She and her brother have sneaked downtown, and they’re watching from a hiding spot
when four dusty cars slowly circle the town square and stop in front of the jail.
“In ones and twos, men got out of the cars. Atticus remained where he was.
‘He in there, Mr. Finch?’ a man asked.
‘He is,’ Atticus answers, ‘and he’s asleep. Don’t wake him up.’
‘You know what we want,’ another man said. ‘Get aside from the door, Mr. Finch.’
‘You can turn around and go home, Walter,’ Atticus said pleasantly.”
But the men don’t leave, and the kids break out of their hiding place and run to Atticus’ side.
He is dismayed to see them.
But Scout turns to look at the men, who smell of stale whiskey; she searches for a familiar face,
and at the center of the circle she finds one, and looking straight at him she says,
“Hey, Mr. Cunningham.”
Mr. Cunningham blinks, looking suddenly uncomfortable.
“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch.
I go to school with Walter. He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”
Mr. Cunningham nods.
“He’s in my grade,” Scout says, “and he does right well.
He’s a good boy, a real nice boy. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”
The men in the mob all look at each other, and then they watch as Mr. Cunningham
stoops down and holds Scout by both shoulders and says,
“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady.”
“Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. ‘Let’s clear out,’ he called. ‘Let’s get going, boys.’
“Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone.”
Honor is both individual and collective.
In his landmark book, Moral Man and Immoral Society,
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about how lynch mobs come to be.
He believed that we are all better – more moral – as individuals than we are as a group.
People will do things as a group – including terrible things – that they would never do on their own.
When Scout sees Mr. Cunningham and calls out to him, she reminds him of who he really is.
He can’t be part of the mob anymore.
Even though I think honor is an endangered virtue, I don’t worry much about individual honor.
Atticus stood between Tom Robinson and the men who wanted to kill him that night,
and new versions of Atticus are doing the same thing today in places near and far.
But I do worry about our collective honor.
That too often we settle, collectively, for less than honorable actions.
We let the lowest common denominator be the last word.
I find that if I listen to the news too much these days, my heart begins to shut down.
I can handle one hard story, or two, but I don’t know how to absorb a deadly earthquake in Indonesia,
another roadside bomb in Iraq and three more of our soldiers killed,<
government incompetence in the re-building of New Orleans,
a squad of Marines accused of shooting down women, children, and old men in their homes,
a young girl kidnapped from her home,
and starving children in Sudan.
I don’t know how to let it all in – and I don’t want to learn.
Instead, on this day, I want to pay tribute to men and women of honor,
who in both war and peace have held themselves to an ideal of conduct
that is often inconvenient, unprofitable, and sometimes dangerous.
They are the good news – a reminder that there are people who do get it right.
Can we follow their lead, not only as individuals, but as a nation?
Most of the problems we face today are too big for any one person to take on alone.
We need to re-learn how to act honorably together.
As Bill Coffin says, our revolutionary forebears, in their political debate,
“pitted one kind of future against another kind of future,”
and we need, more than ever, to do that today.
The verses from Revelation in our second reading are among the last lines in the bible.
“Behold, I am making all things new.
There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain,
for the old order of things has passed away.
Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
These verses are sometimes read at memorial services to comfort a family in its loss.
But they were written not so much to comfort us as to challenge us.
Because the old order has not yet passed away.
There is work to be done.
“Act well your part; there all the honor lies.”
In memory of all those, across the years, who have given their lives, let’s write that down.
Amen.