THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Sovereign God, ruler of all hearts, you call us to obey you, and you favor us with true freedom. Keep us faithful to the ways of your Son, that, leaving behind all that hinders us, we may steadfastly follow your paths, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”Luke 9:54.
As I write these lines, talking heads on the airwaves are reporting on and discussing the United States’ bombing of several sites in Iran thought to be connected with uranium enrichment for use in developing nuclear weapons. Once again, our nation has acted on its sacred creed of violence. The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. When push comes to shove, military force or the threat of military force is the only way to peace and security. No matter how many times this sacred creed has failed us, no matter how much blood has been spilt on wars that have not made the world one whit safer or more secure, we keep coming back to this core belief. When enemies will not be convinced, the command is given to call fire down from heaven to consume them.
This coming Sunday every preacher in the United States will be faced with this gospel over against our government’s decision to take us into war. How do we handle it? While I think Jesus’ words here are as clear as crystal, the church’s witness to them in word and deed has been mixed to nonexistent. It is telling that the cry for divine retribution against the Samaritans comes from the lips of Jesus’ disciples-who ought to know better. Sadly, generations of Christians for centuries to follow continued in this tradition, executing heretics, persecuting the Jews and sanctifying wars of the nations in which they resided. Nowhere is the confusion between faithfulness to Jesus and loyalty to country greater than in the United States, where in most sanctuaries the American flag stands in the sacristy along with its evil twin, the red, white and blue so called “Christian Flag.”
Witnessing to peace is never easy, but it is particularly challenging during times of war. I was serving my first parish when, in 1986 under orders from President Ronald Reagan, the United States carried out air strikes against Libya. Forty Libyans were killed. I prayed for peace, reconciliation and for the families of the Libyans who died in the attack. Following the service I was accosted by an angry parishioner who fairly shouted, “How dare you! How dare you pray for our national enemies who are shooting at our service people! How dare you disrespect these heroes.” Though I pointed out that the families of those killed were not our enemies and that, in any case, Jesus commands us to pray for our enemies, she was insistent that “those verses don’t apply when we are at war!”
Fast forward to the Sunday after September 11, 2001. On the way to church I noticed a van parked next to my favorite bagel shop. On one side was spray painted, “God bless America.” But as I drove by I could see in my rear view mirror another message on the opposite side of the van: “God damn Afghanistan! You are all going to die.” In my sermon that Sunday I related what I had seen and pointed out that the biggest threat to our country was not terrorism. The greatest threat we faced was being drawn into the vortex of retribution and becoming the mirror image of all we claim to hate. As I had done fifteen years before, I prayed for peace and reconciliation. I was taken aside by two of the elders and charged with being soft on terrorism and denigrating our service people. “For God’s sake pastor! Over a thousand innocent people killed and hundreds of our young soldiers soon to face combat, but you are worried about the terrorists that killed them? I wonder if you would feel that way if members of your own family had been in the twin towers.” I got similar feedback preaching peace during both Gulf wars. Preaching peace in time of war puts us at odds with our country’s belief that our wars are holy, that those who fight them are always only on the side of justice and that the blood shed in these conflicts somehow brings about our national salvation. When you preach peace, you are attacking deeply held beliefs that are part of our national DNA.
I want to be clear that, as the son of a World War II veteran and a colleague of people who have served in conflicts from Korea to Afghanistan, I understand the sacrifices soldiers make and the trauma they suffer. I know only too well the pain of family members who have lost sons and daughters fighting America’s wars. I understand how hurtful it can be to hear that the war in which your loved one perished was not holy. I fully understand how painful it can be to hear that the war in which you lost your mobility or mental health was not the noble and glorious conflict you thought it was. While I am unequivocally opposed to war, I love and respect the soldiers who fought in them seeking the same justice and peace for which I long. It concerns me that preaching peace might offend and alienate them. But I am far more concerned about the people in my grandchildren’s generation who will be called upon to fight the next war, which is sure to come unless we finally begin to understand war as the ugly, murderous abomination it truly is and not as the glorious struggle our national mythology tries to make it.
In Sunday’s gospel, Jesus rebukes his disciples for wanting to nuke the Samaritan villagers who would not receive him. That should serve as a warning to all subsequent disciples of Jesus against violent retaliation. All four gospels testify to Jesus’ refusal to allow his disciples to employ the sword to prevent his arrest and execution. That leads invariably to the question: if we are not permitted to take up the sword in defense of the Incarnate Son of God against death by torture, when is taking up the sword ever justified? When are we human beings ever justified in determining which lives are worth preserving and which are expendable? What political, religious or military objective outweighs the infinite value of a person created in God’s image? As I cannot answer any of these questions, I am left with the conviction that, as a disciple of Jesus, violent and coercive force cannot be an arrow in my quiver.
“But what about…” Yes, I know that preaching peace triggers a whole slew of objections to the effect that “doing nothing” is as blameworthy as taking less than ethically pure action. That is why I emphasize that pacifism is not passivism. Non-violence is not inaction. Jesus was hardly passive when confronting injustice and oppression. Like those who have perished in combat, Jesus gave up his own life for those of his people. His weapons, however, consisted in his proclamation of good news to the poor, his examples of empathy and compassion and his acts of justice and mercy. Jesus’ strength consists in his power to resist evil without being seduced by it. He confronted violent oppression without being drawn into the vortex of retributive violence. Jesus would not allow his enemies’ hatred and cruelty to replicate themselves in his own soul. That is the very same struggle to which he calls us in these days of increasing violence. It is very literally a struggle between life and death.
These days, I am not doing much preaching, so I write to encourage those of you who are. Across the street and across the world violent rhetoric, violent threats and violent acts are spiraling and drawing the world into the dark night of endless retribution. Bunker busting bombs might destroy weapons of mass destruction, but they cannot extinguish the hatred inspiring people to build them. Only mercy, empathy and compassion can do that. Peace, it must be understood, is not a distant or abstract ideal. It is the only alternative to our mutual destruction. If now is not the time to preach peace, when? If not us, then who?
Here is a poem by Siegfried Sassoon whose verse ruthlessly strips away all of the patriotic jingoism glorifying war and reveals the cruel, dehumanizing and brutal nature of combat.
Counter Attack
We’d gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!
A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
An officer came blundering down the trench:
“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went …
Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step … counter-attack!”
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle … rapid fire …
And started blazing wildly … then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans …
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
Source: This poem is in the public domain. Siegfried Sassoon (1886 –1967) was an English poet and novelist. He became widely known as a result of a protest made against the First World War in 1917. As a young man, Sassoon’s greatest ambition was to be a millionaire and a poet. He joined the army at the outbreak of the First World War, rose to the rank of lieutenant and fought with the infantry in France. Sassoon was shocked by his experiences fighting on the western front where he developed a deep hatred for war in general and the world war in particular. Though awarded the Military Cross for outstanding bravery, he did not see this as a great honor. When he was sent home for treatment of a wound and recovery, he decided not to return to his regiment. He wrote a letter to his commanding officer, explaining that he was not coming back because he wanted to protest about the war. He explained that he believed politicians were prolonging the war instead of using chances to make peace with Germany.
Though a soldier would ordinarily earn a court martial under these circumstances, given Sassoon’s impressive combat record, he was given the opportunity to renounce his views and rejoin his regiment. Sassoon refused, but his friend, fellow poet Robert Graves, was able to convince his senior officers that Sassoon was depressed and too ill to fight. He was thereafter sent to a hospital in Edinburgh, that specialized in treating soldiers suffering from what was then called “shell shock.” Sassoon eventually returned to active service, but was again wounded, this time so seriously that he could not be returned to duty. During the war, Sassoon’s poetry had become very successful. He went on to write several very successful novels as well. You can read more about Siegfried Sassoon and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 