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Based on the Scripture readings: |
2007 September 16 |
Peace Repent, Peace RememberI want to share three brief stories to introduce the topic of war and peace as a part of our worship and faith and mission. These stories help us to ponder what to say, what to do, but moreover what to believe, in church. You may agree with everything that I say or very little of it, but try to listen for what God says to all of us, and then come to sermon feedback to continue in conversation. First, sometime this summer Matt Aufman sent me an Internet link to an interview with the Roman Catholic priest who served as Chaplain on Tinian Island in the Pacific in 1945. Fr. George Zabelka was the priest for the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This Lieutenant Colonel was a career chaplain, and his interview was conducted in 1984, when he was on his way to Nagasaki, as he puts it, to repent his sins. So his interviewer asked him what they were. Zabelka said that he thought he was a good priest, keeping his flock, as he put it, close to the heart and mind of Christ. He listened to their stories and nightmares and shared the sacraments. But he says he was brainwashed -- his term -- by his superiors in the Church who never addressed the moral dimensions of air raids and the mass killing of civilians in that war. They never addressed how you can keep communion with Christ while disobeying his clearest teachings. And their silence, he said, was a stamp of approval for war. He called that corruption of the faith and, in strong language, Christ-killing. He points out what I never knew before: Nagasaki was the first and largest Catholic city in Japan, where three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed on August 9th, 1945, as the Roman Catholic pilot of the bomber flew what he called his mission. And Zabelka said, still the hierarchy of Church was silent: they did not speak to the morality of war. That was his sin, too, he said: silence. And he wanted to repent. Second story: when I was a high school senior, shortly after the Congress approved another $700 million dollars to fund war in Viet Nam, I registered for the selective service. I grew up as a Quaker, and I had every defensible reason to be a conscientious objector as well as every logical reason to believe that I might still be sent to a confusing and deadly land, but I went alone -- and felt very lonely -- to the post office one day to organize my registration forms. Most of you know how conflicted, divided, and concerned our entire nation was in those days, when we spent years, lives, and billions of dollars pursing an unwinnable conflict to keep our enemies over there and another region democratic, against the moral values that we claim when we invoke the founders of this country. Yet at that time, other than stand in a few demonstrations, I did not do anything much to avoid that fighting company or registering in it.  Third story: in 1998, the brilliant theologian Dr. Walter Wink published a volume of analysis of Christian faith amidst corrupted culture entitled The Powers That Be. And I am about to reduce four volumes of his work to a few sentences, but here is one of the central assertions of his text: there is a spiritual reality at the heart of everything in the created world, but much of this reality has become corrupted so that some powers in our midst have become destructive, and here he highlights the human tendency toward idolatry. That is, some powers in our midst -- groups, institutions -- have come to value, pursue, and even worship the wrong stuff. Their god is not our God. Hence, he says, parts of our culture have come to embrace what he calls "the myth of redemptive violence." Again, reducing enormous text to a single idea or two, this myth can easily be revealed in cartoons, such as Popeye and Olive Oyl among dozens of other narratives, where a hero is attacked and suffers grievously, appears doomed until he miraculously breaks free, perhaps with the aid of spinach, then vanquishes villains and evil with great destructive shock and awe and restores order. Wink points out that this narrative and notion that we have to beat the life out of the evil ones, and that we are justified in doing it, is also at the heart of the Babylonian creation myth and the thinking of many cultural and national leaders but that it is not our Christian story. The absence of knowing our Christian story well, in addition to the silence of our best people at times and the inaction of so many at others, all together leaves a tragic mix of danger in our world. As has been said before, if we don't stand for something, we may fall for anything. Neutrality is capitulation. And silence can be death. We are again at war in our nation. This war includes offshore prisons, torture and almost global spying. And often it seems as though there is nothing that we can say, especially if we wish not to be called unpatriotic. Often it seems that there is nothing that we can do, because the influence of individuals seems so inconsequential. And often the prevailing beliefs in our culture, those about why we are at war, those about who is worthy to comment, those about whether good soldiers and their families are injured by criticism of the war, and above all those about what is moral and what is Christian, There are many ways to view and receive the teachings of Jesus and many revelations that rise from the prosecution of his violent death. Thousands of morals and messages also are woven in the fabric of the Hebrew Scriptures, but there are several central themes that flow through them all and stare us in the face whenever we do not turn our back: there is a God, and we are called to acknowledge God's way: thou shalt have no other objects of ultimate truth or power or concern before Me. This God is not simply the god of our culture or self-aggrandizement or even success, nor of any single nation or truth: this God is holy and other. This is the God of all being, of Shalom, community, reverence, and even sacrificial love, say the scriptures. This is the God who says love your enemies. This is the God of flesh or incarnation. There are, historically, culturally, personally, even intellectually many, many powers that seek to distract us from the God of creation and resurrection, and these powers sometimes take the form of nation or wealth or beauty or wisdom or empire, but these are not God as they stand. They are all too often destructive and whenever we follow them, religious history asserts, we die, collectively or individually. And, yes, we are an imperfect people -- none of us what we are meant to be, but, to quote Walter Wink, "Nothing is outside the redemptive care and transforming love of God" in our story. Just think of today's words from scripture. To a world that knew warfare and faithlessness upon the very territory that today is Iraq -- ancient Babylon -- Isaiah the prophet says that warfare will be over. Whatever is corrupted, bent, distorted can be fixed, which is also Walter Wink's belief. Isaiah, however, puts it very simply: when we live in God's ways God is with us, and when God is with us we live in new ways. These are the ways of peace, so Isaiah calls our hope Prince of Peace, and that is his reign. In what could otherwise seem a tortured explanation of the blood of Christ, the author of Ephesians asks us to focus on both the message and the means of good news. Christ is our peace, and our peace is to break down the dividing walls of hostility, seeking transformative reconciliation, and in an exposition that would inspire Rene Girard or anyone who seeks the integration that unifies the divided self, he speaks of gathering together the far off, the near, the divine, the spiritual, the multitudes, and the individual in one holy temple of the Lord that is Christ. Now that may sound like too much, but if nothing else he is saying that our hope, Christ's work, and true peace are all of the same cloth in God's way. God gives us a vision and a story in new life. What to make of all these lost items in Luke? How do they speak of peace? Well, they tell us of a God who never gives up and will not rest until all the dimensions of the realm are in place. In a faith that has so much to do with community and nation and group, every individual counts and God, along with we who would follow divine challenge, have the task of getting back every person and power to its created purpose, if you believe that sort of thing. God doesn't write folks off very easily. God doesn't give up, no matter the powers. So what can we say today, many years, many lives, many billions of dollars into another war? How will we be criticized for saying it? And what can we do and believe? I preface my answer by saying that I asked a colleague how and why his church had gotten so involved in the campaign to protect Darfur, which is wonderful. He told me that it was because We will have diverse opinion in this room, but do we have diverse conviction? That is, aren't we all here somehow to seek and somehow to serve the God who somehow comes to us in Jesus Christ? And if that is the case, then our call is not so controversial or complex: we must say something about our faith, even if we are not the policy-makers who determine how precisely to apply this. We must do something to represent that faith, something non-violent and love-based, which leaves a lot of inclusive room. And we must constantly inquire of each other when we are confused, listen to each other so we can learn, and even chide each other a bit -- a Biblical value -- press each other, when we are adrift or confused or in such pain that we cannot think and see. Fr. Zabelka used this example to analyze war in 1984. He said if someone asked him if it was acceptable to kill an innocent child so that you could pursue some personal or corporate or national policy, he would clearly say that this was un-Christian and mortally sinful without doubt. Nine men in a mine shaft, one Haitian beaten by policeman, Terry Schiavo connected to life support all inspire our highest moral analysis and concern. They all energize us to talk and write and think and send donations and letters because they all have such urgent moral dimensions. Save those lives. Protect those rights. So shouldn't war, with hundreds of thousands of innocents injured, assaulted, imprisoned, and bankrupted inspire the same? Shouldn't war inspire our Christian moral analysis and engagement? Isn't this outrageous to our family values? Our webmaster Steve Willner told me that one of my sermons simply entitled Peace has the largest number of hits from outside our own website, which means some people not looking for us are looking for that and have chased it down. In it I talk more about the theory of war and peace in our history, so you might enjoy it, too. Today I ask that we find ways to end our silence, or if we've already been speaking, speak up a little bit more. Today I ask that we find ways to learn ever more about non-violent resistance, which I know you know is what Jesus preached, and Gandhi and King learned from him. It is something we can do for our world, our community, our children, too, teaching them alternatives to the myth of redemptive violence. Today I ask that we learn a little bit more about our core values and beliefs: everyone here would enjoy Wink's Powers that Be, or just the interview with Fr. Zabelka or my sermon on the web. Fr. Zabelka is on some levels inspiringly old fashioned, which I say as a compliment. He said that he was worried about a Day of Judgment, when we died, and his hope that God would In 1956 Albert Camus wrote in The Fall, "I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day." Jesus never made it precisely clear which of these perspectives was just right. And some of us dismiss these notions and images as unnecessary to our faith. But our faith is constant in its images of harvest and of reaping what we sow. It's another of those themes that run through century after century and book after book in the Bible. It is a call to care for our world and our actions and our friends and our enemies. Whether or not you decide to sign the letter that our UCC offers to us, or write another one, or something clearly alternative, I commend you to the active love of God as your inspiration. God wants us engaged. Whether or not you read volumes on just war theory or many verses from the scriptures, I commend to you one thought that you can even read quoted at sporting events: For God so loved the world that he sent the Son… that the world might be saved. This is not partisan politics on our plate today but practical Christianity. Ours is not a faith without clear themes that span the millennia and confront our own culture. Our faith is not always simple but also complex and even mysterious. Yet our word from the scriptures is consistent: seek peace, vanquish violence, restore the lost ones, and know that this is a demanding task. Speaking of another war, another time of violence but the same concerns, in his 1983 Templeton Prize address, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said this:
But remembering is not that hard. And God remembers us, always. And as Walter Wink says, "Nothing is outside of the redemptive care and transforming love of God." And that is good news. Amen. http://www.nhcc.net/sermons/Sermon20070916.htm |
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