I am deeply honored that Donna invited me - a relatively new member - to preach at Judson this morning. I think part of the key to Donna's success is her ability to ask various ones of us to do things we like to do . . . and I do like to preach.
However, between you and me, I also have a complaint. When Donna first asked me to preach it was for a mid-summer Sunday. I had thought, in a very preliminary way, about a nice mid-summer sort of sermon and service. Then she asked if I would trade for today. Now being a basically nice guy, I said "yes." I didn't tell her that I hate preaching on Memorial Day weekend.
It is not just that half the congregation is always out of town; this particular Sunday carries too much weight and too many conflicts. In the liturgical calendar, today is at the beginning of "Ordinary Time." Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, all of that is past . . . we are now in the run from May to November of liturgically "nothing special."
But in the United States, Memorial Day carries far too much weight. Memorial Day, or Decoration Day, started in the North as a day to put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers during and after the Civil War. It has expanded over the century to a day to remember all who have gone before, and to remember especially those who died in war - all wars. And it has taken on, at many times, a frighteningly patriotic tone-with flags and marching bands and things that make many of us at Judson very uncomfortable. In my former church, in spite of my best efforts against it, the church administrator managed to be sure that we sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic every year on Memorial Day weekend. (Thank you, Michael!!!) And this year, Memorial Day has also taken on something more appropriate: it is a time to protest war - to say no more war and no more war dead. But for this veteran of the Anti-Vietnam War effort, there is still too much patriotism and too many mixed messages associated with this day for it to all cohere.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Paul's letter to the Ephesians that Dave read for us. Paul, for all his considerable faults, could at times cut to the very heart of the matter.
In Ephesus, the early church was deeply divided. There were Jews and there were Greeks in the congregation, and the differences between these two groups led to friction when trying to create a new identity for the early Christians: Was Christianity a sub-set of Judaism? Did a Greek have to become a Jew first - and if a male, be circumcised (a bit of a barrier on the adult male recruitment front!) - before becoming a Christian?
And Paul said - STOP all that foolishness. You are one people, one humanity, because you are all God's creation. The faith of the early church, Paul said, is not one of walls and divides. Jesus, Paul said, "has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." And Jesus, Paul said, "came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near." Peace because there "are no longer any strangers."
Now this business of peace to all - near and far - is not always easy.
We began today's service with some words from Maya Angelou: While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation . . .
Angleou continues:
This is particularly difficult for me when my mind falls upon the cruel person, the batterer, and the bigot. I would like to think that the mean-spirited were created by another force and under the aegis and direction of something other than my God. But since I believe that God created all things, I am not only constrained to know that the oppressor is a child of God, but also obligated to try to treat him or her as a child of God.
Or as James Cone said: When we call God Parent we inherit a whole mess of kinfolk we may not care for.
But we humans do not learn this lesson very well.
In its official policies today, the U.S. government - a government that ignores the separation of church and state with its faith-based initiatives - seems to act in the arena of foreign policy as if what Paul said was: Those born outside of the U.S. are forever strangers and aliens; as if citizens of Iraq or Iran or other places that upset us are forever cut off by a permanent dividing wall of hostility.
And this terrible war drags on and on.
One moving reminder of this war was brought home to me recently by a group of courageous high school students in Wilton, Connecticut, who performed at NYU. Instead of producing the usual senior class play, these kids and their brave teacher decided to use the words of various people living through the war in Iraq as their play, a play they called Voices in Conflict. The school banned the play, but happily it will appear soon in New York - and today's program has the details.
Voices in Conflict begins with various notes. One note, a letter home, says:
And then I saw a Marine in High School and I was like, thats it. They're mean. They're tough and they got cool uniforms and Chicks dig em.
And another:
You wanna be the coward? You wanna be the guy who doesn't do it?
And then it leads us through various letters - some positive, some negative, some funny and upbeat, some terribly depressed from women and men in the war zones - and ends with a long June, 2003, letter to his little brother from Junior Perez, of Norwalk, Connecticut:
Wazup little guy? How is everything with you? I'm sitting here in a humvee listening to the radio waiting to send self propelled missiles into someone's house. You know, if something does happen to me out there and I can't make it home you have to buck up and take care of everybody. You have to finish school. See this is all fun and shit but if I finished school I could be sitting behind a desk somewhere not sitting in a hot truck in the middle of Iraq. Anyway, be good. Junior
There is a postscript following this note: "Junior Perez died in Iraq on July 27, 2003. He was 23."
Junior Perez is a face on a too faceless war.
In my generation, in the war in Vietnam, the draft meant that most of us were touched by the war. Some of us were Conscious Objectors, or went to Canada, or developed a sudden new passion for teaching in New York City (which was a draft exempt job), but few of us did not know someone who fought in and was damaged in Vietnam. Today the class divide is much greater. For the most part, the poor of both sexes fight and get hurt. "If I finished school I could be sitting behind a desk somewhere not sitting in a hot truck in the middle of Iraq."
But this is not just true of this war. Most wars are fought disproportionately by the poor, even if they are planned, in David Halberstam's haunting words, by "The Best and the Brightest."
One of the most moving places I have ever found among those patriotic shrines that dot our nation is in a small corner of the Battlefield Green in Concord, Massachusetts. There, in a place generally passed over by the site-seeing tours, is the grave of the British soldiers who died at the beginning of the Revolution. Their grave marker reads: "They came 3,000 miles and died/ To keep the past upon its throne." I suspect most of those young men buried there had not finished school and, for the most part, did not come from the upper crust of British Society.
In so many wars, they came 3,000 or 6,000 or 12,000 miles and died. To keep the past upon its throne.
I know both Barak Obama and John Kerry have apologized for saying something like this, but I won't: We honor the individuals and we weep with the families, but those who have died in Iraq have died to keep the past upon its throne. And if we who gather here and in churches all over the U.S. on this Memorial Day weekend not only weep with those who weep for lost loved ones - U.S. families and Iraqi families - but also commit ourselves in every way possible to saying "No more war," "No more war in Iraq now," "No more war, period," then we have missed the point.
Now I believe everything I have said this morning as strongly as I believe anything, but if I stopped here there would be something wrong. This might be a brave sermon in some churches but it is probably as close to orthodoxy as anything that could be said at Judson. I think we who gather here also need to push ourselves further.
I like today's sign at the front of Judson, "The war in Iraq is a symptom. The disease is arrogance." I think that is right. And that brings met the last of this morning's three readings.
I know that many here are familiar with Thich Nhat Hanh's words. These words were not formed in the comfort of a quiet retreat. Thich Nhat Hanh was a leader of the Buddhist community in Vietnam. He protested the war in that country - both the U.S. aggression and the wars of the governments North and South. He saw fellow monks and fellow citizens killed by all sides. He led the Buddhist Peace delegation to the Paris Peace talks and was shunned by all sides. And it was out of that experience that he said:
To make peace, our hearts must be at peace with the world. Trying to overcome evil with evil is not working for peace . . . Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of the bombs are still here, in our bodies and minds.
So today, as we say "No More War," "No more Memorial markers for war dead," I think we must also ask not just how can we protest this war (though it is my opinion that we must do that), but how do we "look deeply into the weapons and into this war and 'see our own minds'." What energy are we putting into the universe? Is it the energy of peace . . . or of war?
This is not easy.
Recall Maya Angelou: I am constrained to know that the oppressor is a child of God, but also obligated to try to treat him or her as a child of God.
We are a nation with many internal "dividing walls of hostility." We are blue and red, straight and gay, conservative, liberal, radical. But we are also people with a 'dividing wall of hostility' deep in our own human souls, and until we heal our own internal walls I am not sure how much peace we can really bring to the world.
I have a very hard time thinking of George Bush as a child of God. But I have to. I do not have to go along with or in any way allow what he is doing, but I must be very, very careful not to hate him.
This is not being weak or passive. It is not saying we don't care or opting out, which is also in its own way unloving, but it is - at a very deep and fundamental level - finding compassion for ourselves, our dearest loved ones, and this whole funny company of our fellow human beings on this planet earth.
We need to be careful and gentle and compassionate. When we say (or think in the secret recesses of our minds), "Well, we live in Greenwich Village, we are sophisticated New Yorkers, and those yahoos are not," we are also allowing war to take root in our bodies and our minds, and we are inevitably putting the energy of war and of dividing walls of hostility out into the universe.
When we allow self-righteousness into our discourse or into our most private thoughts, when we say, as I too often do, "They are just evil," we are building our own dividing wall of hostility, and the result can only be more division, and ultimately division turns to violence and more war. When we won't or can't talk to those who hold different views, we cut ourselves off from a healing dialogue that is essential to our own survival as individuals and as a human race.
We Americans, it seems, in too many cases, prefer dividing walls and gated communities and ways of walling ourselves off from each other and from the conversations that might help us understand each other and live in a deeper peace with each other.
One of my mentors, Mel King, the first African-American to be nominated for Mayor of Boston, said, "We Progressives will not succeed until we stop being afraid to talk to our next door neighbors."
When I was involved in the Anti-Vietnam War movement, I confess I found the Fellowship of Reconciliation to be, to put it mildly, a bit on the insipid side. Those of us who were "real militants" took a harder line. But I have become convinced that they were right and I was wrong. That A. J. Mustie was right: "There is no way to peace, peace is the way."
Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a time in 1966 when he was in the U.S. speaking against the war in Vietnam. A young American "peace activist" shouted at him, "The best thing you can do is go back to your country and defeat the American aggressors! You shouldn't be here. There is absolutely no use to your being here!" (Every time I read that, I cringe. It could have been me saying something like that.) But the quiet monk responded to the shouter:
Sir, it seems to me that many of the roots of the war are here in your own country. That is why I have come. One of the roots is our way of seeing the world. Both sides are victims of a wrong policy, a policy that believes in the force of violence to settle problems. I do not want Vietnamese to die, and I do not want American soldiers to die either.
And he continued:
The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives . . . We have to transcend the tendency to take side . . . We need links. We need communication. Practicing nonviolence is first of all to become nonviolence.
This is not passivity. This is active, difficult, courageous commitment to a different way of living.
So on this Memorial Day weekend, let us remember all those who have gone; let us commit ourselves to ending this terrible war; but let us also commit ourselves to finding peace in our own hearts and to being peace in the world.
Let us - by the grace of God - go in peace.
Amen.
