Hilton Head Island, SC – June 1, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 55:1-13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” – Isaiah 55:12 (RSV)
Very likely there have been wars as long as there have been enough males to take up arms against other males of other tribes or ethnic groups or, eventually, nations. War is very much a male enterprise, despite the Greek myths about the Amazonian women. Women may fight, and do, but most of them aren’t warriors by nature. Not all men are naturally warlike either. However, male warfare is as much about male hormones as about human history, as much about being disagreeable as about having disagreements.
For example, there are two United States Senators, one from the coastal Southeast and one from the desert Southwest, who invariably make the same suggestion for every dispute in every part of the world. Whether people are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Nigeria, or Yemen, inevitably they raise the battle cry, “Send in American troops!” It matters not what the issues are; force and weapons solve all quarrels, they believe. They constantly seek glandular grandeur.
The events which led up to World War II were precipitated by a disastrous and poorly conceived peace treaty from World War I. The Western Powers acted very naively in the twenty years between the gargantuan conflicts, while the Axis Powers were acting very aggressively. The First World War was a colossal blunder, but the carnage of the Second World War far surpassed it in terms of the increased millions of civilians and soldiers killed. Studs Terkel in his book called World War II The Good War. That is certainly debatable, but sadly it also may have been The One Tragically Necessary War.
For the past century and a half, the United States of America has been involved in more wars than any other nation in the world. Whether or not our national interests were truly threatened by international disputes, we have shown ourselves to be far more ready to go to battle than any other country, including Germany, Russia, Japan, China, Italy, the United Kingdom, or even Afghanistan, which has a three-thousand year history of wars both internal and external.
War is always glorified, both by those who win and by those who lose. The US lost the War of 1812, or most certainly did not win it, but to read our history books you’d never know that. We also lost in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but our children and grandchildren will not be told that. Maybe our great-grandchildren will learn the truth. But even then, those wars will be glorified, because if wars can’t be glorious, then why on earth would anyone fight them? Why indeed? There’s a question well worth asking, fellow citizens!
Our responsive reading, Psalm 144, is ascribed to David. King David was as bellicose a chap as ever drew breath among all the males of our species. He begins the Psalm, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; my rock and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge, who subdues the peoples under him” (Ps. 144:1-2).
Not only do we glorify war, we often loudly declare that God is on our side. In World War I, the belt buckles of the German soldiers bore the inscription Gott Mit Uns: God With Us. (That, incidentally, is pronounced Immanuel in Hebrew. What a linguistic travesty.) If God was with the Germans, was He therefore not with Britain, France, the USA, and all the others? But the US didn’t get into World War I until three years after it began, when both sides had suffered devastating losses, so did God choose the USA to get in the conflict and help bring victory, or did He stick with the Germans, as their belt buckles proclaimed? The psychology of war is always so skewed as to render it literally insane!
Whom should the USA back in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings? In Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, or Yemen, whom should we have supported, and now, in the summer of 2014, whom should we support? Is it always in our government’s interest to support one side or another? Must we insert ourselves into every conflict anywhere on the globe? WWJD: What would Jesus do? Of greater consequence, what would God do? Would God favor anyone going to war with anyone else, ever; would He? Can you honestly imagine such a thing?
To be sure, there is much bloodshed and warfare recorded in the Bible. If you believe that every word of scripture is directly inspired by God, then war seems not only acceptable but even divinely mandated. But if you believe that the Bible is inspired by God but written by ordinary people, then you can legitimately assume that the carefully crafted efforts to baptize war are human machinations, not divine ones.
One of the most amazing collections of letters in American history are the many hundreds of epistles sent between Abigail Adams and her husband John. They referred to one another as “Dearest Friend,” and that they were. However, they also were two quite different people, and maybe their love was so strong because they spent so many years apart during their long marriage. John was off in Europe on government assignments or in the White House during the four years of his presidency when Abigail was back in Braintree, overseeing their farm.
In her biography of Abigail Adams, called Dearest Friend, historian Lynne Withey explains why the American Revolution was so devastating to the fragile American economy. She wrote, “The reasons for the economic problems of the Revolutionary years were complex. They stemmed largely from the army’s constant demands for men and supplies and the difficulty of establishing a coherent monetary policy for thirteen independent states with little sense of nationhood” (p. 87). Abigail referred to this enormous inflationary dislocation by telling John what it was like to try to buy and sell anything in rural Massachusetts. Merchants told her, “You shall have wool for flax or flax for wool, you shall have veal, Beaf” (spelled capital B-e-a-f; Abigail was a prolific writer, but a rudimentary speller) “or pork for salt…But money we will not take, is the daily language. I will work for you for Corn, for flax or wool, but if I work for money you must give a cart load of it to be sure” (p. 88).
When I was a boy, my parents said that something that was worthless “wasn’t worth a continental.” And they were born in Canada, for heaven’s sake! But they knew that a continental dollar became so inflated during the American Revolution that it virtually lost all its value. It was like Germany in the 1920s. Because of the Treaty of Versailles, it literally took bushel baskets full of German marks to purchase a loaf of bread. War almost always badly damages economies. Britain was the sole superpower of the world in the late 19th century, but by the middle of the 20th century, and after two major wars in which it was a major participant, the days in which the sun never set on the British Empire were over. War costs far, far more than it ever pays in any kind of acceptable dividends.
The British Empire fell apart for many reasons, but perhaps the main one is that they fought too many wars to try to maintain their dominance. The American Empire is already falling apart because we also have fought far too many utterly unnecessary wars. If our national debt eventually undermines our economic standing, it will be for a number of complex and disputatious reasons, but the unfunded and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will cost several trillion dollars by the time it is all sorted out, will be a primary reason. The United States Congress and one particular President over an eight-year period are primarily to blame, but the entire American people also are culprits, because we meekly stood by, and kept them in office while all the lunacy was going on.
The average number of civilian suicides of American young men is 19 per year per every hundred thousand. In the first couple of years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military suicides of combat troops were at about the same percentage. But from 2004 to 2009, they increased more than 50%, to 30-per-100,000. Those who never served in combat but might have been sent there also came close to the 30-per-100,000 figure. In other words, it was almost as bad to contemplate being sent into battle as actually going into battle. It is believed that 1800 soldiers took their own lives last year alone. At the height of the fighting, nearly as many killed themselves as were killed by enemy gunfire. In an all-volunteer Army, multiple deployments led to many more suicides than otherwise would have occurred had there been a draft to recruit fresh flesh for the slaughter. Every day, twenty-two military personnel commit suicide.
Up to 48,000 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are homeless. In 2011 there were 16,000, in 2012 28,000, and last year 48,000. War exacts terrible invisible wounds on countless numbers of soldiers. The second soldier who recently engaged in multiple murders in Fort Hood, Texas was being treated for depression, anxiety, and insomnia, according to Army records. Every week a thousand war veterans are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. No doubt more would be diagnosed, except there are not enough therapists and mental health counselors in the system quickly to make the diagnoses. A thousand funded positions have gone unfilled, because the VA and other organizations cannot entice enough skilled workers to take the jobs. William Tecumseh Sherman was far more correct in 2014 than in 1864; war IS hell.
The Veterans Administration is under withering scrutiny for mishandling many medical and other claims from war veterans. In February of 2010 there were 183,000 un-addressed claims. By 2012 that rose to over 600,000. With massive effort that figure has dropped to 400,000, but still, that many soldiers who need help are not yet getting it. War is hell for those in whose countries it is fought, but it is also hell for those who fight in faraway places and then return home, not as heroes, but with devastating physical, psychological, and spiritual wounds and scars, and few qualified people to attend to their injured bodies, spirits, and lives.
More than 800 military recruiters are being investigated for pocketing up to $300,000,000 in illegal rewards to themselves for convincing young men and women to sign up for the Army, National Guard, or the Reserves. The recruiters were not promised this money; they just took it for themselves from the recruitment coffers. War is always a corrupting hell. Profiteers always take advantage during wartime. Because billions or trillions of dollars are thrown at wars, some of that free-flowing money is bound to be filched by sticky fingers throughout the system.
Jeff Shaara wrote two excellent books based on the American Civil War. His father before him, Michael Shaara, wrote another such novel, The Killer Angels, based entirely on the Battle of Gettysburg. Jeff Shaara, like his father, follows the history of events, but he enlarges on the history with fictional observations which are true to the facts but are not themselves necessarily factual. In his second book, Last Full Measure, the younger author had Ulysses Grant pondering a late 1864 editorial in a Richmond newspaper by the governor of Georgia, who decried Sherman’s infamous March Through Georgia. The governor wrote, “Wars are the exclusive property of the men who fight, and should never injure the innocent civilian.”
Mr. Shaara put these words into Gen. Grant’s mind as a result of that line in the editorial. “He (Grant) had read that the first time with astonishment. Read it now with disgust. He put the paper down. Innocent? he thought. Where is the line? Does the man who works in the munitions factory differ from the man who grows the food? Do they not both support the ability to fight a war?” (p. 344) Every war in which America is involved while we are alive is our war; it is not their war, the war of the generals and admirals and officers and enlisted men and women. If We the People do not stop wars, then We the People support wars. That’s how a democracy works. There is no moral middle ground. All of us are involved, whatever the rationale or outcome.
Ancient Hebrew did not have quotation marks. But the people who translated Hebrew and Greek into English put quotation marks where they thought they belonged, on the basis of the context in which the ancient words were written. All of Isaiah 54 and 55 is in quotes, because from the context we may deduce that it is God who is speaking directly, not Isaiah. If you note that nevertheless it was Isaiah who actually wrote the words, not God, I will agree with you, but I am sure that in Isaiah’s mind, most of the time in his prophecy the prophet was doing the talking, but sometimes it was God Himself who was talking. Isaiah 55 is one of those purported times. You may want to argue that point, but you’ll have to do it by yourself, because I won’t join you.
Randall Thompson was an American composer who lived in the early part of the twentieth century. He wrote a wonderful and too-infrequently sung oratorio called The Peaceable Kingdom. It is based on various passages from the prophecy of Isaiah, including Isaiah 55:12. We sang this oratorio when I was in college, and it was one of the most moving and inspiring pieces in which I ever participated. It is based on powerful poetry, and it set to magnificent music. All four choral parts begin quietly with the opening line, “For ye shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace.” Then there is a growing crescendo, “The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing,” and then that sublime poetic image, “and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” At that point the four parts divide, singing in harmony but with differing levels of volume, “clap their hands, clap their hands, clap their hands,” and at the very end the sopranos sing “shall clap their hands,” and the altos, tenors, and basses follow in an artful decrescendo, “clap their hands.”
The Peaceable Kingdom is there. It is always there, just beyond our reach. But we can touch it and bring it to fruition, if together we will to do it. But peace, like war, requires an enormous social and political act of will. Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan: they all beckon, as other places and other conflicts have always beckoned. War comes easily to men and nations, but it is a delusion to think wars can ever succeed, at least by any reasonable and objective and acceptable measures. War illustrates social and political failure as surely as divorce illustrates personal failure. There is no such thing as a truly good war, nor is there a truly good divorce. Both create unspeakable hardship and heartache, and once they have happened, there is no going back. So they should always be avoided, if at all possible.
I am not saying everyone or every Christian or every religious or moral person or every nation should be pacifists. But I am insisting that in every war everyone always loses. There are no winners in wars, only losers. You and I and all people should seek the winning side, the side of poetry, the side of peace. Give peace a chance. We have given war far, far too many chances.