In the preview of today's talk, I undertook to open up the question of whether martyrdom (in whatever sense) is saintly or senseless. I said my guess is that you'll decide it's somewhere in between, or can be both -- or neither, and that you're invited to assess which view you find more convincing. It seemed to me, as I re-read that introduction, that I was setting up a confrontation between two views, but I think there are some things we can nearly all agree on; let's look at those first.

First, in my experience most of us would say that there are some things, or most likely some people, who are worth dying for. I've not heard anyone say that they wouldn't die even for their beloved child or spouse, although for many of us, myself included, it's more a hope than a certainty that we would be brave enough to give up our life for our loved one. (I'm not conscious of having made any major sacrifice for anyone else, let alone putting my life on the line. So please take what I say as expressing my aspirations rather than my achievements!)

Second, we'd probably all agree that many things, or even most things, are not worth dying for, and that applies even when people we care about are involved. Few of us would die rather than allow our country, our culture, our traditions, or even our parents to be verbally insulted, though at some times and places such insults might have called for death rather than dishonour.

And third, I doubt anyone would give up their life if there were any other way possible - to court death as a way to make a point is surely foolish, although those who see martyrdom as a guarantee of heaven might see it otherwise.

On the other hand, here are two important things we might disagree on: whether it's ever worth dying for an abstraction or a value, as distinct from dying to protect a loved one; and whether the world would have been a better or worse place if Ghandi, for example, and Jesus, and Martin Luther King and others had not been martyred.

All of them could have avoided dying for what they believed in. When it comes to war, the line gets even fuzzier, because it's often especially hard to say whether, or at what point, the war is about protecting interests, protecting values, or protecting particular people.

I'd like to put my own position to you at this point (although it's not a very clear-cut one) because as always it colours the approach I'm taking to this talk. I'm a Unitarian partly because for me truth, as far as I can know it - truth about physical, metaphysical, ethical and all other realities - that truth, however limited my understanding of it, is a very high value. I don't know how to weigh it against love or to say which is higher, but I do believe that to witness to truth may be worth dying for, although again I'm very unsure whether I'd be brave enough to do it. I also believe that life can and does come out of death, but falsity cannot generate truth or hate generate love. And I recognize that the belief anything is worth dying for rests on the faith that physical life is not the measure of all things - that there are, in fact, "fates worth than death."

I haven't regularly attended Remembrance Day services for several years now, because they're uncomfortable for many reasons, but I used to. A few years ago on this day, on the most beautiful November morning imaginable, I walked along the old railway line which ran by the house where I was then living, in south-west Ontario, to the Kingsville Cenotaph, to join veterans, schoolchildren and their teachers, Christian ministers and assorted other citizens, in the annual Remembrance Day service. I had the usual bunch of mixed feelings as I listened to the readings and music and homilies and prayers, but the one thing I knew for sure was that it's important to remember those who died in wartime, and that what they did is worth remembering.

Please do not imagine that I think all wars are justifiable; maybe none of them are; almost certainly many are not. In place of a poppy I wore this button, given to me by a Mennonite friend, which reads, "To remember is to work for peace." Perhaps the need to work for a world without war is one of the few things we can all agree on. Many of those who died in the two great wars probably did so because they were run-of-the-mill conformists, ordinary people who did what they were told without much thought, or didn't like the alternative of jail and ostracism.

But some of them, at least, were people who believed that they were risking their lives for something of greater value than those individual lives. To the extent they believed that, to the extent that they were killed for their beliefs -- in freedom, or the greatness of their country, or the evil of fascism, or (rarest of all) the need to save the victims of persecution -- to the extent they were killed for their beliefs, they were martyrs. Martyrdom, after all, is not such an unusual event. Everyone except the staunchest pacifist -- and perhaps the pacifist most of all, as that poem by Edna St.Vincent Millay suggests -- everyone probably believes that some things are worth dying for.

Few of us here -- few Unitarians or free thinkers -- are likely to believe that objects or symbols are worth losing your life over -- flags, national anthems, holy grails, national boundaries, sacred books or buildings, all that kind of thing. We'd probably say that it's not a particularly good idea to get too attached to objects or symbols, let alone dying for them. When a symbol becomes more trouble than it's worth, ditch it -- don't die for it. I'd put most "isms" and institutions in the same category as symbols. I wouldn't die for any "ism" that I can think of: not pacifism or feminism or socialism or even religious liberalism, though those are all variously important to me. I certainly wouldn't die for the institution of Unitarian Universalism, or any other structure, no matter how good and helpful it is to my life. But there are a few, a very few, other things that I'm trying to live for and that I hope I would be willing to die for. Let's look at the one that's easiest to agree on first - the love which makes us say, "Yes, I'd die to save this person!"

We come up against some of those complexities which seem to permeate life when we consider what it means in practice even to live for someone, let alone to die for them. There's a kind of living martyrdom which most of us find disturbing to contemplate which involves subordinating all your own needs and wishes to those of another person -- giving up your life, in a sense, even though you may survive physically. This can be quite awful, as in the stereotypical case of the mother who lives only for her children and when they've gone finds herself with no life of her own, or quite wonderful, as in the case of the woman who gives up much of her life to care for her husband who has Alzheimer's disease, or her child with multiple disabilities, and probably no one can be completely sure which it is in any particular case.

Physical martyrdom seems to me to have some similarities: it can be quite awful, as in the case of, for example, Thomas Becket the mediaeval priest immortalized in T.S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral, who seemed to be courting death, seeking martyrdom -- or quite wonderful, as in the case of Ghandi who knew exactly what the difference was between passivity and non-violent resistance, and who always sought life for himself and everyone else. The difference lies somewhere in the person's priorities, I think. From what we know of the historical Jesus or Socrates or Michael Servetus, our Unitarian forebear burned at the stake in the 16th century (and it's admittedly little that we know about them) it doesn't seem as if they were looking for death, but that if death followed from their priority of proclaiming the truth as they saw it, they were ready for it.

Ah, Truth. You may notice I've already moved on to the second thing I said might be worth dying for. It's a much more difficult area to decide about than love, because as we religious liberals are so fond of saying, truth is different for each one of us and is at best only a glimpse of the big Truth. But however unclear our limited perception of truth may be, I believe it's right up there with love as a value and a priority. We ex-Trinitarians are drawn to threes, and I've wondered whether there might be three supreme values -- love, truth and beauty, for example -- but I can really only affirm two, love and truth. I don't think I'd die for beauty, although it's important to me. I hope I would die for truth, even my poor and petty understanding of it, as Socrates and Jesus and Joan of Arc and Servetus and so many others did.

As in the case of love, I think the truth about some particular thing is much more compelling than Truth in the abstract. Jesus died, as far as we can see, for proclaiming that observance of the law is less important than generosity of spirit; Socrates for some dangerous educational ideas; Servetus for challenging orthodoxy about the nature of God. None of them died for Truth in general, but for specific beliefs. Was any of these beliefs worth dying for? Perhaps the world would have been better off if they'd avoided death -- they could have done. I doubt it, but that's impossible to prove and it only partly expresses my reason for admiring their martyrdom.

I admire these martyrs because they maintained their integrity, the wholeness and holiness of a life which makes no difference between what is thought and said and done, where belief and speech and action are all of a piece. Galileo is an example of someone who traded his truth for his life when he did as the Church required and signed a statement that he was wrong about the earth moving round the sun. I'd almost certainly have done the same thing in his place, but I admire Galileo a little less for the recantation which enabled him to avoid death.

Many of us have observed that it's quite possible for religiously liberal people to continue to stay in the more traditional churches, even after they've mentally rejected the commonsense meaning of the words they repeat in the church's creeds. They do it by convincing themselves that there are levels of meaning which lie beneath the plain or apparent sense of the words -- that, for instance, the words "only Jesus saves" means that the spiritual way of life embodied in Jesus is the only way in which we can reach human fulfillment, or some other such interpretation.

And please don't misunderstand me: I have great respect for people who decide that the value of staying in their religious community by this means outweighs the value of leaving it for the sake of a more straightforward fit between belief and statement. When Galileo saved himself by withdrawing his statement that the earth moves round the sun, he's said to have muttered under his breath, "But still, it moves!" Many people who recite the apostle's creed are like that, I think; they say under their breath or silently, "`Descended into hell' means that Jesus experienced all kinds of agony", and so on. And after all, we interpret the words that are said even here in our own ways, and we mean different things when we say the same words. There's hardly ever a perfect fit between what we say and what we mean.

But for some of us it's vitally important to try to narrow the gap, to try to make our lives a more integrated whole of words and faith. We might see such people as Galileo who saved his skin (as I expect I would have done) by saying one thing and believing another, and Machiavelli who taught princes and plebians how they could use words to manipulate rather than to express conviction - we might see these as clever people, people of intellectual genius, but not high heroes, not folk of the greatest integrity.

What difference it would have made to the world if Galileo had stood firm, or if Martin Luther King had avoided crowds, or if Nelson Mandela had died in prison, we'll never know. I can't even know exactly how much difference their lives or deaths have made to me or to any of you. But I do know that the martyrdoms of people who found truths worth dying for have inspired and uplifted me and taught me more than the lives of those who put ordinary, sensible human limits on their integrity. "Their death becomes a triumph; they died not in vain", as we sang earlier -- I wouldn't have sung those words if I hadn't believed them.

The traditional focus of November 11th is death in war. Remembrance Day was originally called Armistice Day and focused even more narrowly on the deaths of soldiers in the First World War. I haven't focused on that. It's not because I don't think we should remember and honour the deaths of those who have fought in wars and those who will lose their lives in the current war being played out in and around Afghanistan. It's more a matter of realizing how amazingly complex is the question of what we would die for and, at least as importantly, what we are ready to ask others to die for. It's not you and I who're going to risk being casualties of this latest war, but it's you and I who are charged with the duty of either supporting or protesting the policies which send other people into death's way and into the position of bringing death to others. I suggest to you that perhaps one vital question to ask ourselves as we consider the extent to which we can support this or any war, this or any cause which involves conflict, is: "Am I willing to die for this cause?" Because if I wouldn't die for it, how can I ask anyone else to do so?

I was in correspondence with a member of the Lakehead congregation in Thunder Bay recently, about my visit there next weekend. Today, this member (whom I won't name only because I haven't asked his permission) is also giving a talk for Remembrance Day. In the script of his talk, which he sent to me, he tells some of his military experiences of wartime, and says

With all these memories perhaps I should appear regularly at Remembrance Day ceremonies, but I do not. Why? I think the central reason its discomfort with the worship of military sacrifice implicit in standard ceremonies. I find it interesting to note that the cathedral walls of Protestant Britain and north Germany are filled with plaques honouring the military dead while in Catholic countries they are occupied by statues and paintings of the saints. Certainly the war-dead deserve to be honoured, but not to the exclusion of others. In World War II as many civilians as soldiers lost their lives, and in recent wars their ratio has increased. In my opinion these unwilling sacrifices to war should also be remembered.

Also worthy of remembrance are those who saw wars coming and did their best to head them off, and thus make the honoured sacrifices unnecessary. Frequently they were treated as outcasts, and as now were a tiny, but important, minority. Probably the outcasts of outcasts were the young men who secretly went off to Spain to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. If the liberal democracies had supported the democratic government of Spain as they should have, fascism would have been stopped in its tracks, and World War II might never have happened. It is a matter of great satisfaction that these men, dubbed "premature anti-fascists" by the RCMP, were finally honoured on October 20 in Ottawa.

I've heard it said that it's more important to determine what we will live for than what we would die for. I respond only with this: what we live for and what we would die for are surely, at best, the same. Even if we're no martyrs, we shall die. It will matter whether or not we've given all that we can to the best that we know, and that we have lived and died for the noble and not the base. Here's a reading from Socrates -- or rather from Plato, who has given us all we know about Socrates. This is from Plato's account of the point at which Socrates defends his decision to die (by drinking hemlock, you'll remember) rather than to give up his values. Whether it's Plato or Socrates speaking, about 400 years before the Common Era, I think it's worth hearing.

"Someone will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong -- acting the part of a good man or a bad. Whereas, according to your view, the heroes who fell at Troy were not good for much . . .

. . . if you say to me, Socrates, this time we will . . . let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing this again you shall die -- if this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy . . . Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, . . . either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.

What would you die for? To stop fascism and other cruelties? To retaliate against, and to avenge, terrorist attacks? For the truth? To protect your loved ones? What would you ask others to die for? Let our answers not be too hurried or easy. May we consider with great seriousness the causes for which we would be willing to lay down our lives or ask the final sacrifice from others. And may we never take lightly, but honour in every way we can, those who have made their own decisions with integrity and have died for their highest ideals - in war, in peace, in the past and in this present time. Let us remember them, and let us dedicate ourselves to honouring their memory with the way we live. So may it be.