I Sam 3:1-10
I Cor 6:12-20
John 1:35-42
This has been a week in which we have walked in the valley of the shadow. It has been a week in which war has rarely been far from our consciousness, first in the days leading up to the deadline and then, since Wednesday evening, in the hourly news reports from the Gulf. We have listened to the CNN news team in the Al Rashid hotel in Baghdad, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and in Jerusalem. We have seen skies full of tracers, jets parked on airbase taxiways, news teams in gas masks, and bombs blowing apart military targets with star-wars accuracy.

1. The Ambivalence of War

As Christians we have to feel ambivalent about what is going on. No-one in the world but Iraq approves the brutal rape of Kuwait, yet the world, and surely we gathered here this morning, are divided between those who wondered why we waited so long to respond and those who would have wished we waited much longer.

Our ambivalence is increased by what we know of our religion. On the one hand, Jesus was no militarist. He spoke of the blessedness of peacemakers, and on the night of his arrest told one of his followers, "Put up your sword; all who take the sword die by the sword." On the other hand, what are the disciples doing with swords? In Luke's version his followers ask Jesus, "Lord, shall we use our swords?" My picture of the disciples wandering about Palestine is not a picture of an armed band, but maybe my picture is wrong.

Looking to the Old Testament, we find in Genesis the key passage condemning the taking of life: "Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed; for in God's own image God made humankind." But in Deuteronomy God tells the Israelis that with respect to distant peoples the Israelis are to kill only the men while with respect to the Palestinians they are to annihilate every living thing: "But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive." In the book of Numbers, Moses is angry with his commanders after one battle. "What, have you allowed the women to live?" he asks.

 Our most poetic images of the peacefulness of our religion are the passages in Micah and Isaiah that speak of beating swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks; But in the book of Joel, written under Greek oppression after the return from Babylon, these words appear: "Proclaim this among the nations: Sanctify war, stir up the warriors. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, "I am a warrior."

The Bible will not tell us unambiguously what to do. In this morning's epistle reading, the Corinthians are struggling with this terrible freedom we have as human beings. "Yes." Paul says, "I am free to do anything, but not everything is for my good."

Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address in 1864, captures some of the ambivalence and sadness of war: "Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.

2. The Lesser of Two Evils

Recently, Gabriel Habib, general secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches discussed his attitude toward war. In contrast to some Roman Catholic friends who espoused the idea of a "just war", he indicated that the Eastern Orthodox churches simply "believe that any war is wrong. We are not peace churches. But from the theological point of view, no war is acceptable because it goes against love and destroys human beings. War results from human weakness. Thus you deal with it pastorally and pragmatically. You don't theorize about it."

Part of the tragedy of the human condition is that there are times when the only choices available are choices between evils. A week ago our Congress and our nation debated two alternatives with respect to Iraq. Each choice had its arguments and each carried its own dangers to American and other lives. Many would have chosen the evil of continued rape of Kuwait and continued development of Iraq's dangerous chemical and nuclear capabilities in the hope that sanctions and negotiations could produce a solution; our President and a majority of our elected representatives have chosen the evil of unleashing war in the hope that a victory will produce a solution.

3. The Call of God where we are

In this morning's scripture readings the boy Samuel hears the word of God while sleeping in the Temple; the two disciples of John the Baptist meet Jesus on the path where they are walking. God calls us where we are. Where we are this morning is that a decision has been made and we are at war. I believe that in a time of war, when the best choices we can make are nevertheless evil choices, God calls us to purify ourselves, address the causes, care for those who bore the burden, and heal the wounds so that a just peace may result.

 a. Purify ourselves

When soldiers of ancient Israel prepared for battle, they purified themselves. If they failed to do so, they weakened themselves and increased the chance for defeat or prolonging the conflict. For them, it was things that came from the body that created impurity, and their rules addressed everything from sex to field sanitation. For Jesus and us who follow him, what makes us unclean is what comes from the heart.

We must purify ourselves from racism; if we fail to, it will have a direct impact on this war. Racism seems to infect human beings like crabgrass infects lawns; the minute you think you have it licked in one area it pops up somewhere else. It has been years since any respectable newspaper would print a cartoon making fun of blacks; but in Wednesday's Washington Post, Doonesbury made a vicious attack on Arabs. Across our country Arab-Americans are worried that they will be subject to hostility. Each of us needs to be vigilant in our communities, our schools, our places of work and speak up whenever any expression of racism against any group arises.

We must purify ourselves from dehumanizing others. Racism dehumanizes others. Jews are upset when the world calls Zionism racism, but it was Zionism that produced the slogan, "A land without a people for a people without a land." How much trouble the world has had because of the attitude that no people lived there--just Palestinians.

We must purify ourselves from our own aggressiveness. We were offended 30 years ago when Stokely Carmichael assured us violence was as American as cherry pie. So what is it that makes our incidence of murder and other violent crime 10 times higher than in Europe? We live in a country where the NRA says guns don't kill people, people kill people -- and people believe them! We live in a country where it took a Supreme Court decision to declare that every American doesn't have a right to his or her own operating machine gun.

Tomorrow we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr, a man who was not held back by the dehumanization and racism that surrounded him, a man who gave our country a renewed dream of something we all share together, a man who became a martyr to our uncontrolled aggressiveness. He opposed the war in Vietnam, seeing it divert the resources that could have been used here for our war on poverty, our battle with racism, our search for social justice. In the midst of a new war, his analysis must continue to trouble us, even as his dream gives us strength.

b. Address the Causes

God calls us to address the causes of war.

Abraham Lincoln saw how slavery had caused the Civil War and how the war therefore was God's judgment on a nation that had permitted slavery. "Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

In Iraq, we are paying the price for inequities between rich and poor, for the humiliation and dehumanization Arabs have felt from Westerners, and, most of all, for the greed of our world's arms manufacturers and the foolishness of their countries. In the last 10 years, Saddam Hussein has spent $82 billion in armaments, mostly in the Soviet Union and France. In the same time period we have sold billions of dollars worth of arms elsewhere. It is these arms which transformed Saddam from a nasty thug who committed his first murder in his teens to a dangerous thug whose menace to the world, expressed in the world's 4th largest army and his intolerable chemicals, required a response.

The civil war was a turning point for America because it ended slavery. The current war will be a turning point for the world only if it has some impact on the senseless arming of countries like Iraq which would have done so much better to spend its resources on the welfare of its people.

c. Care for those who bore the burden

God calls us, in Lincoln's words in that famous second inaugural address, "to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan."

When we send soldiers into war, we ask them to enter the valley of the shadow. I'm sure that one of the reasons the 23rd Psalm is a favorite of soldiers is its reference to the comforting presence of God even in valley of the shadow of death.

But make no mistake: the valley of the shadow is the domain of evil. We ask our soldiers on our behalf to suspend the morality they have been taught from childhood and to do things which humans must be ashamed to do. What we ask them to do will change them forever. War is defiling, and those who participate in it are defiled. When King David thought of building the Temple in Jerusalem, he was told by God, "You shall not build a house in honor of my name, for you have been a fighting man and you have shed blood."

In the days of Moses, soldiers who returned to the camp of the Israelites from combat were told, "Camp outside the camp seven days; whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves and your captives on the third and on the seventh day...You must wash your clothes on the seventh day, and you shall be clean; afterward you may come into the camp."

That passage recognizes that we must plan for re-entry. After World War II soldiers had a chance to process the change from war to peace on the boat ride home, and to re-enter society in the parades that followed. They had opportunities to clean up their stories and retell them. They had public affirmations which told them that despite what they had been participants of, their country welcomed them back and cleansed them from their entry into forbidden realms.

After Vietnam there was no such process. Soldiers found themselves in Greyhound stations trying to buy a ticket home 36 hours after they had been in combat, or standing in airports in uniform near chanting demonstrators who called them babykillers. Nurses in uniform had to hitchhike because taxis wouldn't give them rides. We thought somehow that to give our veterans the rituals of support and cleansing would mean support of an unpopular war, and today 20 years later there are still Vietnam veterans who are psychologically outside the camp, waiting to be cleansed, waiting to be welcomed home.

 When the 450,000 American men and women who have participated in Desert Storm come home, they will need our understanding and support, and they should receive it from us without it being conditioned on how successful the war was or how palatable its conduct. Through our elected leadership we sent them there, and we owe it to them.

d. Heal the Wounds

God calls us to heal the wounds of war.

In 1918 a war was won, but the peace was lost because of pettiness, vindictiveness, and the creation of a humiliated Germany. World War II succeeded because of the Marshall Plan and other efforts which created a world in which losers could join winners with productivity, equality and self-respect.

The minute Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat, we will be tempted to turn inward and forget what we have done in the Middle East. But if today's war is compared to the surgical removal of a cancer, can we really believe that somehow, once the cancer of Saddam is excised, Iraq can get up off the operating table, give the surgeon a cheery thanks, and walk out the door? If we are not willing to put out resources to heal the wounds as we did after World War II, we will surely once again lose the peace after we win the war.

Conclusion

Our religion is concerned not only with inward and spiritual peace, as important as that is, but with peace between us humans and our nations. The requirement for that peace is a far greater commitment to the will of God than we have yet shown, but there is nothing impossible about it. As Martin Luther King Jr had a dream, so did Isaiah, a dream that under God can become reality:

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.
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.
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.

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Updated May 14, 1998