Sermon for Sunday, November 11, 2007

A TIME FOR WAR AND A TIME FOR PEACE

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Veterans Day

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

¹ For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: ² a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; ³ a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; ⁴ a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; ⁵ a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; ⁶ a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; ⁷ a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; ⁸ a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Last Sunday when we were remembering and giving thanks for persons we have loved and lost, I was aware of a favorite uncle of mine as I was growing up. He was almost like a very dear grandparent. He was a veteran of the First World War and had been trained as a machine gunner. Just before he was to go into the front lines, the war ended. If he had to go the front, he believed he would have lasted only a very short time because the story in my family was that the life expectancy of machine gunners in the trenches was very short.

He is one of the Veterans I am thankful for on this Veterans Day. 

And I also have a special place in my heart for the soldiers from WWII who were rightly honored in the recent fifteen hour PBS series by Ken Burns. This generation is a very modest generation and some of these folks have only been willing to talk about their experiences from sixty years ago just in the past few years, and it is worthwhile to sit with them, if you are fortunate enough to know them, and just to listen. I commend the books that have been written about this modest but heroic generation—“The Greatest Generation” Tom Brokaw calls them. I commend highly the books by distinguished American historian Stephen Ambrose on World War II— “The Victors”, “D Day”, “The World Within War”. Ambrose was very involved as a consultant on the WWII museum in New Orleans which I have not had the chance yet to see but intend to. 

And I commend to you both the DVD and the book from the PBS series by Ken Burns on WWII. I want to quote two of the veterans who were in that series. Sam Hynes from Minneapolis who was a 20 year old captain was one of the interviewees in the PBS film. He said to Ken Burns, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometime necessary wars. And I think one might say “just” wars. I never questioned the necessity of that war.”

 This is a veteran speaking about the differences between a good war—there are none he says—and a necessary war.

The other WWII veteran I found very moving in the interviews was P 47 pilot Quentin Aanenson from a farm near Luverne, Minnesota. Right after D Day, the Normandy Invasion that turned the direction of that war, Captain Aanenson and others in his 391^st fighter squadron in Normandy were assigned to destroy bridges and railroads and to bomb and strafe any enemy forces trying to get to the battlefield.

Here is what he says about his strafing missions:

We caught a group of Germans that were on a road in an area where there were no trees, and so there was no place for them to hide…and I remember the impact it had on me when I could see my bullets just tearing into them. We had so much firepower that the bodies would just fly some yards. And as I was doing this, I was doing it knowing I had to do it. That was my job. This is what I had been trained to do and I dealt with it fine. But when I got back home to the base in Normandy and landed, I got sick. I had to think about what I had done. Now, that didn’t change my resolve for the next day. I went out and did it again.

There are no good wars. War is sometimes necessary, one veteran says. And after combat in a necessary war, the P 47 pilot comes back and gets sick from what he has done. Some of our veterans will be able to identify with those statements. And in my experience, some of the people who are most opposed to war and only see it as a last resort are military veterans who have been in combat.

I want us to think about war and peace from the foundation of our faith. I ask us today to start, not as citizens of a particular country, not as members of a particular political party, but first of all as Christians. Even as followers of Jesus we have a diverse history regarding violence and war. Jerusalem, the birthplace of Judaism and of Christianity, is the one city in the world where more wars have been fought outside her walls than any other city in the world. And when we read the Old Testament, we often get a picture of a God who approves of violence and of the Israelites wiping out an enemy. In fact, there are parts of the Bible we do not choose to read in church, such as Psalm 137, where the psalmist wants to take the children of his enemy, the Babylonians, and kill them by throwing them against boulders. This is while the Jews are in captivity in Babylon.

And even when we look at the Ten Commandments, the sixth commandment which we sometimes quote saying “you shall not kill” does not quite say that. The verse is better translated “you shall not murder”. It is a different Hebrew word than the word for kill because the Israelites, whether we agree or disagree with them, did see that there were some circumstances in which killing was justified.

We certainly have the words from Jesus against violence and killing, but the whole picture in the Bible is more mixed in thinking about violence and war.

If we look at the last 1500 years of thinking and tradition in our faith, we get some additional help and we get some other mixed thinking. In the fourth and fifth centuries, theologians began to say that there are some circumstances for Christians in which war and violence can be justified, can be the right ethical choice. This line of thinking was very careful and cautious and laid out particular circumstances, but it has existed for 1600 years.

The whole picture is that there are at least three different approaches to war in Christian thinking. These are very well laid out in the 68 page booklet we have distributed from our shelves since early 2003 when we brought author and ethics professor Dr. Joe Allen from SMU to speak to us as we were about to invade Iraq. I think we distributed 200 copies of this book at that time and other copies since then.

The first approach to war is that of the crusader who says, we have God on our side, our enemy is absolutely godless and sub human. It says, we have no doubts about our cause, we can do no wrong, and we need to annihilate our enemy. The most notable example of that approach was during the several crusades around the 12^th century where the Pope sent troops to recapture the Holy Land and on the way from Europe slaughtered Jews and anyone else they thought were not like them. When they arrived in Jerusalem, they showed no mercy, slaughtered 40-50,000 Muslims and the streets literally ran with blood—all in the name of Jesus Christ. Incidentally, the Muslim general Saladin in 1187 who re-conquered Jerusalem turned out to be much more compassionate toward the fleeing Christians then they had been toward his people in 1095.

The crusade approach sees things in absolutes, in black and white—good guys like us and bad guys like them, and we good guys can do little that is wrong. 

The second approach to war is the pacifist approach that says war and violence are never justifiable, never right, and that the only Christian approach is pacifism and non violence. There are some churches and denominations that advocate pacifism as the only ethical stance and who believe that any act of violence is wrong. 

The third group is the one most of us as United Methodist Christians are in—a group that says there are some circumstances where violence and war, wrong though they usually are, are justified and necessary given some strict criteria, and those criteria are listed in brief form on a page in your bulletin. 

This is the position of Dr. Joe Allen who wrote the booklet War: A Primer for Christians, and who told 400 of us back in February 2003 in our old sanctuary that he did not believe the invasion of Iraq fit those strict criteria for a just war. I disagreed with him them. Now I believe he was right and I was wrong.

We are in a very painful, very agonizing place in our country. We have wounded veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with more serious wounds and disabilities than ever before. That is due to the excellent and immediate care that critically wounded soldiers are getting and it will be incumbent on us to see that they get care and acceptance and rehabilitation here from a system that some believe is doing an inadequate job for our veterans. In fact, in a Friday newspaper report, the American Journal of Public Health states that 1.8 million military veterans are uninsured and unable to get care in veterans’ facilities because there is no VA facility nearby, or the nearest facility has a long waiting list, or they cannot afford the co payments required of some veterans. I have reproduced that article for you on the wall where sermon copies are.

Twenty five of us last week heard Roxane White, Director of Human Services for Denver, tell us that ten per cent of the 10,000 homeless persons in the Denver metro area are veterans, and that the number is increasing. Many of those persons have mental illness and head trauma. I find those numbers very troubling.

In our country, we are so painfully divided as you see from recent polls. Almost two thirds of Americans believe we should not have invaded Iraq, and the two thirds do not support our war efforts there now. We have some leaders saying that if we do not stay and finish—perhaps even taking many years to maintain a presence—that we will send a message to our enemies that we are not tough and persistent and that we will give up after just a few casualties. These leaders tell us that if we do not defeat the terrorists in Iraq, that they will come to us. They tell us that we need to be willing to suffer casualties and deaths of soldiers and civilians if we are to defeat global terrorism.

We have other leaders saying that our troops have done what we can do in Iraq and that our ongoing presence there may even be keeping the Iraqis from becoming stronger and may be creating dependency on us. These leaders say the ongoing presence of American troops may even be creating more terrorists and that we need to bring troops from Iraq and focus on Afghanistan where Al Quaeda and the Taliban first were concentrated and where they are now getting stronger. They also point to polls saying that Iraqi citizens are ready for our troops to leave. Some of these leaders have doubts that Iraq as a single country is not really a country and needs to be divided into a loose federal arrangement of regions or states.

We have many on both sides who are extremely concerned about how terribly stretched and over extended our military forces are and who are deeply troubled that we are not giving troops enough down time between assignments in battle zones. They say we are damaging our army and other branches.

We have people in our congregation and in our country on all sides of those issues and perhaps even taking other positions as well. And we have people who are advocating for, and others who are very anxious about, an attack on Iran.

What I hope you and I can do is to look at our Biblical and theological foundations first—not our political party first but our Biblical and theological foundations first including the wisdom of dialogue on “just war” to stay in civil conversations with each other and not to just have knee jerk reactions or question the patriotism of anyone who thinks differently.

I believe that we live in a very dangerous and precarious world, and I believe that we need a strong military presence to help us stay strong. I could wish it were not that way, but I believe that is just a realistic perspective. And I want us to treat our veterans, who have risked self for country, with appreciation and respect. I also want all of us, and especially our leaders, to use every means of diplomacy we can to create a safe and just world and to solve problems without violence.

Over and above any opinions about current wars is the fact that today we are honoring persons who have promised to serve and obey for the well being and safety of our country and that we want to offer our gratitude. And at the same time we believe in the words of Jesus who says that the peace makers are blessed by God and are children of God; and in the words of Isaiah, we long for the time when God will help us beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks so that we will need to study and learn war no more. 

We want to ask our precious WWII veterans to stand first and then we will recognize other veterans. We will then hear the song that ended each episode of Ken Burns PBS series on WWII.

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