It may well be coincidence that President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize on the 61st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but that in no way diminishes the significance of each occasion. I am unashamedly proud of this man of hope, and I here share with you what I considered to be the highlights of his acceptance speech:
We are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter and can bend history in the direction of justice…As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naïve in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King…For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world…To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason…war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such…we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. “Let us focus”, he said, “on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions…Furthermore, American cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves…That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace…I also know this: the belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice…we honor [our troops] not as makers of war, but as wagers of peace…Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct…We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard…First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior…such pressure exists only when the world stand together as one…Only a just peace based upon the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting…if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise…No matter how callously defined, neither America’s interest nor the world’s are served by the denial of human aspirations…it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear to these movements that hope and history are on their side…But I also know that sanctions without outreach and condemnation without discussion can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door…For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want…The absence of hope can rot a society from within…Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All of these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, or the staying power, to complete this work without something more, and that is the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there is something irreducible that we all share…Most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam…Holy War can never be a just was. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint, no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or even a person of one’s own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but the purpose of faith, for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us…Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. We are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us…But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached, their faith in human progress, must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey…For is we lost that faith, if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace, then we lose what is best about humanity. We lost our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass…Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him”…So let us reach for the world that ought to be, that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls…We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that, for that is the story of human progress; that is the hope of all the world; and at his moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.
Upon Obama’s conclusion, one of the pundits commented that he didn’t know if the world was ready for Obama the President, much less Obama the theologian. Amen!
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