Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
2 Samuel 1:19
Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places! How the mighty have fallen! 20 Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon; or the daughters of the Philistines will rejoice, the daughters of the uncircumcised will exult. 21 You mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you, nor bounteous fields! For there the shield of the mighty was defiled, the shield of Saul, anointed with oil no more. 22 From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan did not turn back, nor the sword of Saul return empty.
23 Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely! In life and in death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
24 O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you with crimson, in luxury, who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.
25 How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
26 I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
1:27 How the mighty have fallen, and the weapons of war perished!
We have a text before us today, a text that describes the woe felt even by the winners of an ancient war. But we are gathered here today at the end of an emotional week filled with both great sorrow and with, may I say, almost astonishing joy.
We entered this week still reeling from the murders of nine innocent people who had gathered in prayer and Bible study in Charleston, SC.... We entered this week struggling with both grief and our determination to make certain that these lives would not be forgotten, that their deaths would mean something. There have been predictable delaying tactics and symbolic opposition but if I may say it just this way....things have gone so unpredictably well that it seems as if news commentators at Fox have almost been afraid to face the cameras in their studios.
Fifty years ago, as the Civil Rights movement began to draw numbers and show signs of potential victory, states across the south began to see Confederate flags in their cheap gifts shops and small minded state legislatures decided to display that flag as a part of their state flag or in their state capitols in order to tell the sons and daughters of African slaves to stay in their place.
In recent years the presence of those flags, especially in states where the black population is actually nearing a majority has become increasingly insulting. The evil little man who murdered those nine members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston wanted to start a race war but because of the grace, the love, the willingness to forgive and to grieve without violence, on the part of the survivors in Mother Emanuel Church, there not only has not been a race war.... There has been a race peace.
Alabama and Mississippi have voluntarily taken measures to remove the Confederate flag from their capitols and I have confidence that the same will be true in South Carolina.... In fact, I hope to be there to see it with my own eyes..... I start driving tomorrow morning.
Friday I was still trying to enjoy the Supreme Court's decision that upheld the Affordable Care Act without gloating..... I'm really trying to keep the schadenfrueda out of my heart.... Some days, it is harder than others.
I was preparing to listen to President Obama's funeral eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinkney when the news arrived that the Supreme Court of the United States of America had rendered a decision that now ends the legal battle for marriage equality in America. I started my public life of protest and demonstration during the Vietnam Era. I'm not used to good news. I'm used to being on the right side but in the minority, having to be satisfied with small gains, little victories, bits of progress around the boundary lines.
Real progress in eradicating racism, defense of access to health care for the poor, and equal rights for the LGBT community in one week is just about more than my 58 year old heart can stand.
In simpler days, when things are more stable, more predictable, most of us could not name more than two or three justices on the Supreme Court but in this turbulent era most of us know every member of the court, how old they are, who appointed them, where they go to church and often when one of them has a cold.
From the time the high court gave George W. Bush the 2000 election, which he did not win, to their decision to turn our government over to the highest bidder in the Citizen's United decision, some of us have had difficulty praying for their good health. Please allow me the luxury of understatement today, I am trying my best to be nice.
I had one mother and one father, none of my siblings are gay, and I'm not gay but the course of my life pushed me into a position where I either had to publicly defend gay rights or hate the man I had to look at in the mirror every day. It was never my fight personally, but it has been my Waterloo, Little Big Horn, and D Day for most of my adult life.
The Supreme Court does not have the power or the authority to wipe out prejudice, but you would have to have a cold hard place in your chest where your heart is supposed to be not to recognize that we have won. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, our sisters and our brothers are free at last.
So let's take a moment for our viewers on line and those of you gathered here today to congratulate one another, to thank those who have kept up the drum beat, who have worked, sacrificed, been fired, and taken personal risks to see this day arrive. The most controversial and difficult battle of our adult lives is over and we have won.
Please, let's try not to gloat, name call, demean, or alienate those who hear our "amens" and "hallelujahs" with sorrow. Let's try to create a path for them to find their way into the celebration of the breaking of chains and the liberation of love.
Expanding health care coverage, removing exemptions for pre-existing conditions, and offering subsidies for those of us who don't have group insurance has lowered health care costs while bringing better health care to millions. Removing the absurd restrictions the gay and lesbian couples in America have suffered under will stabilize families and will actually have a sizable boost to the economy in home ownership and joint pension and investment holdings.
This week's political "wins" have almost no downside. But there are battles that even when you win, you have still lost. If I may return to this Old Testament text we have before us today from 2 Samuel, and I don't expect any of you to be especially interested in the history of ancient Judah, but let me just say that this passage comes at the end of a civil war and it is spoken in voice of the guy who won the war and yet he is full of lament and grief.
David has won a throne. He is king but both his foes and his friends lay dead on the battlefield. How the mighty have fallen.
Before we invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, more than 20 years ago, Sting sang this line in a song about losing faith:
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse
Sometimes musicians are prophets. There may have been times in history when nations went to war to resolve their differences and there were boundary lines drawn and issues settled.... I'm not a historian, I'm willing to believe that sometimes that method worked and had defensible outcomes. I'm pretty sure, however, that those days are now over. The unintended outcomes of military solutions are almost certain to be worse than the goals that are accomplished.
There are things to hate about Isis, there are human rights violations enough to sicken our souls in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, in China, in Russia, in Israel, and in the Sudan.... There are crises that cry out for solutions but almost none of them have solutions that can be found at the end of a bayonet.
Shortly before he died, Howard Zinn spoke at Boston University and in that speech he pointed out what should be the obvious fact that:
Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant.
Maybe it has not always been this way but it has certainly been this way during my adult lifetime. We send the children of the poor in our nation to go and kill their children of the poor in another nation and then we sit back and are astonished that it never turns out well.
No one disputes the fact that Saddam was a bad guy but by invading the country we have only made matters worse, killing ten times as many innocent citizens as Saddam killed and, after such excessive violence, we created Isis and now the survivors are much worse off.
I'm not saying that we should do nothing in the face of tyrants and human rights atrocities, I just think that we need to recognize that military action will almost never provide the solutions we want. Saudi Arabia beheads many more citizens than Isis and, in fact, this year they are on track to set a record and they are one of our closest trading partners. We have influence in Saudi Arabia and we are not using it.
For centuries there were regional wars between Spain, England, France, Germany... but they are too smart to do that anymore. 70 years ago Germany was bent on world domination but they made the mistake of using armies to accomplish that. Now they are nearing domination of Europe though advances in technology and the marketplace.... While we are footing the bill for most of their national defense.
China has often been portrayed as a looming competitor with the United States so we're trying to build up a navy big enough to contain a continent while they are building solar panels and wind farms. We may very well fall into the same trap that snared the Soviet Union in the 1980's.... we may exhaust our nation's resources on military expenditures until we defeat ourselves through economic collapse while China becomes the dominant world player through superior infrastructure and technology.
It should be obvious that our navy will be as useful as a manual typewriter in a computer lab. We have had the luxury of fabulous national wealth to allow us to go on as if it were 1945, dragging our feet on developing national health care that other nations took care of 50 years ago. While other nations are making higher education either free or at least very affordable, we are creating for profit colleges and making education less and less accessible, literally dumbing down our nation through economic mismanagement.
I'm grateful for the advances we have made, especially in matters of social liberties though even there we are decades behind other developed nations. But nowhere are we more out of sync with reality as we are in the universe of military spending and foreign policy.
If all you have is a hammer, the whole world can look like a nail. I know that we can be smarter than that, and as a pastor, as a spiritual person, as someone who hopes to stir the conscience and inspire the hearts of people, I know that we can be better than we have been.
We need to send more teachers and engineers abroad than we send soldiers. We don't need more drones and fighter planes; we need alternative energy sources so that we can stop fouling the earth's atmosphere. We don't need more aircraft carriers and battleships; we need to be building water purification plants and desalinization facilities to give clean water to the world. Nothing creates peace like a stable economy and safe environment.
America has been rich and we have been powerful. Now, in the 21st century, it is time for us to be smart and good....And then we can again say that the United States is the greatest country in the world.
So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.
So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.
We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.
