Community Christian Church
November 28, 2010 Advent 1
Roger Ray, Pastor
Isaiah 2:1-5
1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. 2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. 3 Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!
There have been three events on my mind this week beyond our family and church observances of Thanksgiving. Two are from the news and the third is more personal to our congregation.
The first is simply a statistic, albeit a sobering one. This week our war in Afghanistan marked 9 years and 50 days which is the length of time that the Soviet Union was involved in their last war in Afghanistan between their invasion and eventual unsuccessful withdrawal. Their reasons for invading and their very lethal tactics were very different from ours and yet the length and expense of their war and ours, both in human lives and in resources is just a sobering moment.
The second event in the news was the bombing of an island off the coast of Korea by the North Korean army. This was more than the usual saber rattling. This time there were casualties in what looks like an attempt at provoking hostilities.
It seems crazy to try to start a war on the Korean peninsula but the USA stands behind South Korea and China behind North Korea and so the stakes are remarkably high…. Frankly, about as high as they can get in the 21st century.
I am certainly not a military historian and I do not aspire to become one but I have heard historians make the claim that there has never been a nation which invested heavily in military hardware that they never used. The sole exception may be the nuclear arsenals amassed in the past two generations which, while used as a deterrent to war, have not yet been detonated. The North Korean government seems to be all too eager to push that envelope.
The third event is more personal to us. Though we cannot claim the Trobisch family to be exclusively our own, we certainly feel a kinship with them and they with us. David Trobisch delivered a lecture here on Matthew’s gospel two weeks ago and then left to join his wife, Vera, in Germany where Vera’s mother’s life was coming to an end.
On Friday, I received this note from David:
“At 2 AM this morning Vera's mother, Luise Hoch Braun, passed away. Born in 1917, she never knew her father, who died as a soldier in WWI. Her mother was killed by the French occupying forces, when her little village in the Black Forest was taken during the last days of WWII. Her husband Christian Braun, who preceded her in death eleven years ago, had lost both parents in WWI as well, so Vera never knew grandparents. Christian returned from a Russian prison camp with a severe head injury and never fully recovered from the physical and emotional trauma of the war. In all this Luise and Christian represent very typical German biographies of their generation. Luise Hoch Braun died of natural causes. She was 93. I feel blessed to have known her.”
Not to over simplify terribly complex international events but there are just three observations that I would like to make in response to these three pieces of news. The first is that sometimes wars are just silly….. war can be ridiculous, absurd, stupid. Two of the elements of St. Augustine’s just war theory are that for a war to be justified there must be an achievable goal and you must have a reasonable chance of obtaining that goal with less bloodshed in war than by any other method.
Invading a country which is already living in abject poverty with almost no infrastructure is a pretty long shot of meeting St. Augustine’s moral yard stick. The Russians spent lives and precious resources and had almost nothing to show for it when they retreated from Afghanistan and the more I hear about the circumstances on the ground in Afghanistan after a decade of American occupation, I am, to say the least, not encouraged.
Secondly, I would like to observe that wars are often started by the heinous actions of deranged or desperate people. The phenomenally dark ages style leadership of North Korea has invested so much of that nation’s resources in military hardware, to the point that most of the nation is totally black at night because there is no electricity and hunger to the point of starvation is common, that it becomes increasingly likely that using their military might is the only option they may believe that they have.
But from half a world away, we hope that South Korea and Japan and China are carefully considering measured responses. If, for example, Cuba had bombed islands in the Florida Keys, how likely would we be to make calm, level headed, measured responses? We expect Israel to respond to attacks very carefully. We pray for South Korea to be both strong and very very measured in how they handle North Korea but we don’t have a very good record of calmly trying to meaningfully respond to provocation
And the third thing I want to observe about these events is that war can be catastrophically personal. David Trobisch’s brief account of Vera’s family in which some never met their grandparents, some never met their parents, and everyone lived daily with losses of family members and their own health as a result of a modern war which seemed to have no way of stopping the bloodletting once it had begun.
Sadly, our experiences of war in the past two decades have largely been at a distance. In an all-volunteer army, it is mostly the very poor who fight the wars and in a strange economic twist, Americans received a tax cut as war spending spun out of control. This was an ill-advised policy that kept Americans from feeling personal loss while we ravaged two other nations. It seems to me that if a nation comes to the painful conclusion that a war must be fought that we all should make sacrifices to support the effort so that we will consider the real costs more personally.
Regardless of whether or not a member of your family was going to have to don a uniform and be deployed to the battlefield, if we had asked Americans if they were willing to pay for an invasion of Iraq, if rather than a tax cut, if the average family four was asked if they were willing to pay an additional $20,000 in taxes to effect regime change in Iraq we might have gotten a more clear picture of how important that war was to Americans.
That’s ultimately what the image of beating a sword into a plowshare in our scripture lesson from Isaiah is about. When I was first introduced to the study of economics, we used a graph which contrasted “guns and butter.” “Guns” represented not just military hardware but all rather it represents all long term hardware investments such as bridges and houses. “Butter” was used to represent everything which was intended for immediate use, like clean water, electricity, food, or clothing.
In the ancient world, when metal is very scarce, a sword literally is beaten into a plowshare when the need for a sword is over. Conversely, plowshares are taken to make swords when a nation goes to war. We saw this in our own country right up to the time of the Civil War. Part of the post war hunger in the south was caused by the fact that all of their farm equipment had been melted down to make cannons and cannon balls.
We don’t see it or feel it as directly as people did in generations past. In Gone with the Wind you see the dramatic image of a huge party where those in attendance were asked to donate their jewelry to pay for the war effort. Now the IRS does that by making certain that you never can afford to buy jewelry n the first place…. It cuts out the middle man and makes war funding more predictable.
I suppose that no sermon on Peace can ever be complete without that familiar quote from President Eisenhower about every war ship being launched is tantamount to a theft from the poor. I suppose we turn to him because he was, after all, a war time military general, so his cautions against the military industrial complex come from a highly informed and first hand perspective. A more complete quote of the Presidents speech delivered in 1953 to an assembly of journalists goes like this:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.”
Now, prices have gone up a good deal since Eisenhower delivered that speech 57 years ago. But we still turn to him because he certainly wasn’t soft on defense. He was not a religious pacifist nor was he a tree hugging, dirt loving hippy. He was experienced in both the battlefield and the White House and he understood the dangers inherent both in international relations and in the threat posed by the violence of poverty domestically.
An intelligent politician has to balance the guns and butter priorities of a nation….. not creating poverty at home in order to strengthen global defenses nor irresponsibly consuming locally while leaving ourselves in danger. That’s the politician’s task. Our task is rather different.
Spiritual communities have a natural predisposition to be advocates of peace for a list of reasons which really should not require enumeration but in light of the fact that in most cases, and in most nations, when politicians hold a sword over their heads and call for war, most churches act like middle school cheerleaders at a homecoming football game.
While St. Augustine influenced the early church to test any proposal of war with a litmus test of questions, demanding that war be the last option and not the first and that it must have a goal worthy of the costs and that the war will be plausibly winnable, few religious communities seem to be willing to take the time to ask those questions before rushing out to bless the tanks and bombs. In our world, it may be that St. Augustine’s just war theory does not go far enough.
What is clearly true, is that our churches are not having a sufficient influence on our population to inculcate into our culture a passion for peace. There are military academies, military scientists and strategists, scientists, manufacturers and statesmen lending all of their genius to being able to win a war and only some feeble preachers mumbling about peace.
Albert Einstein said that it is impossible to simultaneously prepare for both war and peace.
If we put anything like the same effort into the science of peace making…. If we invested as much money in to doing the things which stabilize the peace as we put into our capability of winning a war, then I think that it is possible for our world to outgrow war altogether. Though Einstein was crucial to winning the war effort in WWII, he later emphatically said that “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
If the church of the future is to have any value at all it must not continue in the way of being a rubber stamp of whatever government is in charge of the nation where it meets, whether that is the German church in Nazi Germany or the British Church of the old empire or the American churches in this American empire. If we are not devoted to honest reflection and the search for truth then what are we?
When we fight poverty and hunger, we are working for peace. When we advocate for the environment, we are working for peace. When we challenge the prejudices which condemn other religions, other races, other sexual orientations then we are, in effect, working for peace.
We are religious people and so, yes, we pray, we pray for peace but we pray in harmony with the old African proverb which says, “When you pray, move your feet.” There could be a time of real peace in the world and that time will come when people of faith first decide that they are willing to work for justice.
