Sermon: Learn War No More
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Sermon: Learn War No More Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122 Date: December 2, 2007 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church Last night I had the strangest dream I ever dreamed before; I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. The prophecy in Isaiah this week has a certain dream-like quality, beginning with the first phrase, “In days to come…” It’s a sort of once upon a time for the future, a vision of what the world will be like when the Day of the Lord finally arrives. There is unity, joy, wisdom, light, peace; and the prophet holds out this tantalizing promise: “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.” Ain’t gonna study war no more, ain’t gonna study war no more… What good is such a dream? Have you ever had a beautiful dream during a difficult time in your life, a dream in which all is well---you’re in an exotic place eating delectable things without gaining an ounce and everyone is getting along and you’ve got the singing voice of an angel and everyone adores you—and then you wake up. And your kids are cranky and the mortgage is past due and your spouse is still mad at you and your back hurts and it’s raining and the morning news is all mayhem. Did the beautiful dream just make reality seem even worse by contrast? No, dreams serve a purpose. They give us rest, they remind us of the beautiful possibilities. I think God broadcast this dream of peace into the world through the prophets for a good reason, and it’s not just to make us feel bad about our failures as we compare what is with what could be. The dream of peace stands glimmering in the future to call us toward something better than current reality. It lures us toward greater good. It gives us a target to aim for: to study war no more. The beautiful words of Isaiah bid us to dream with God about a world outside our current reality. To dream with God is not to escape from reality (like our nighttime dreams of beautiful scantily-clad people on tropical beaches hand feeding us chocolates) but to lean toward a reality yet unrealized. Elise Boulding captures this sense of leaning forward with her term “spiritual daydreaming:” “Spiritual daydreaming is a linking of the mind and the heart and the spirit in a looking ‘out there’ to see what we could become.” It’s a kind of social daydreaming in which one uses the power of imagination along with mind, spirit, and heart to envision what we are working for. Boulding believes that people longing for peace have not done enough of this dream-work that focuses on the end goal and the steps that need to be taken between here and there. We have to be able to visualize a future different from the present.[1] This dream of God’s captured by Isaiah lacks specifics. But there are peacemakers out rattling the world’s cages that have done some spiritual daydreaming resulting in definite proposals for how we as a human race might do things differently. One essay I read recently by Richard Falk points out that one thing we need to do is stop thinking about preparation for war and war itself as normal features of world politics. Falk writes, “Although war has seemed irrational since the creation of nuclear weapons if not earlier—with their catastrophic, even apocalyptic, properties—ideas about the normalcy of war have persisted…With good reason we condemn suicide bombers who kill dozens in Sri Lanka, Palestine, Iraq, and Britain, yet we rarely contemplate our own ‘civilized’ readiness to sacrifice millions of our own citizens and murder millions of innocent persons in foreign countries [in the case of a nuclear exchange]…For the mainstream, including the media, this national readiness to commit mass suicide and engage in terrorism on a grand scale as been treated as morally, politically, and legally unproblematic.”[2] We have seen war as so normal that we have had a hard time challenging going to war in a meaningful way. The wars in which we have been engaged in my lifetime have been distant and we have distanced ourselves from them. I think Falk is right on when he says we don’t like to contemplate what we as a nation are doing or seem willing to do. But it’s time to turn from the nightmare of the normalcy of war to God’s dream of peaceful co-existence. Falk cites Albert Einstein’s observation, “the atomic bomb changed everything except our way of thinking.” So now it’s time to change our way of thinking. Falk believes that war is now basically dysfunctional. It would be good to eschew all wars. The war reflex seems so hard-wired into global politics that to set such a goal at the present time is implausible. However, Falk makes a strong case for renouncing “wars of choice”—“wars that cannot be convincingly justified by either defensive or humanitarian necessity and are hence undertaken for strategic reasons in violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.”[3] This would be a specific step we, as a nation, could take toward God’s dream of peace. To renounce wars of choice. (Renounce! What a great word!) Falk’s explanation of this proposal: “Renouncing wars of choice would not mean fully repudiating the war/security nexus. But it would involve a dramatic upgrading of trust in peaceful methods of dispute settlement and a long-overdue downgrading of war as a rational and beneficial use of power. It would represent a significant step toward acknowledging what any visitor from another solar system would immediately realize: that war, once the glory of tribes and nations, has become, due to the march of technology, an elixir of mass death and little more—at least from the perspective of producing security.” We are mired in a miserable war of choice at the moment. It seems there is a growing national consensus of regret over the choices that got us here. Perhaps this will be a teachable moment for our country as more people come to realize that wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan are not producing security. Perhaps we will have the strength to renounce future wars of choice, and therefore inch closer to God’s dream. We have to imagine it first (back to the “spiritual daydreaming”). We have to imagine that we, as a nation, step back from the dangerous precedence of pre-emptive war and face into a more hopeful future by renouncing wars of choice for sake of humanity. I believe we have to take a personal stand first. Try saying it silently to yourself: “I renounce wars of choice.” How does it feel? Does it make you feel kind of silly, since you are not the one who’s personally going to decide about the next armed conflict? What difference does it make if you or I renounce wars of choice? There’s a sculpture in WashingtonD.C. that speaks to that question. It’s called “Guns Into Plowshares.” A large block of black granite is shaped into a plow. Into its side are melded hundreds of handguns that were turned in to the local police as a part of a buy back program. Many people surrendered the handguns they had originally thought would obtain security for them. All these disabled weapons together give the plow its backbone. I am convinced that we as a nation or human race will never be able to change our ways until individuals have a change of heart. We surrender our willingness to resort to violence one at a time in order to transform the global war reflex into a reflex for peace. It may not seem like much, but peaceful individuals are a prerequisite to a more peaceful world. Still, we may feel powerless to do anything with an impulse for peace. I have been thinking about a scene in Will Ferrel’s movie “Taladeega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby.” Will Ferrel’s character Ricky Bobby, a Nascar driver, has been in an accident and survived without a scratch. But it was traumatic for him, and he believes he is paralyzed. He sits in a wheelchair while his doctors and friends plead with him to get up and walk, but he can’t because he truly believes he is paralyzed. Finally he tells his friends that he will prove he is paralyzed by sticking a knife into his leg. They try to stop him but he does it. Pause. Then, of course, he screams in pain and leaps up out of his wheelchair, suddenly believing he can walk, but OH MAN that hurts! I wonder if we are being called to a similar healing. We, like Ricky Bobby, have been through a terrible trauma: 9/11. And then one thing led to another, and many people have ended up feeling paralyzed, like there is nothing we can do to change the course of events. But our paralysis is a delusion. We are never powerless to effect a change for good. We just need to stand up and bring our gifts, whatever they are, toward building a peaceful world. Perhaps contemplating the horror of war, much as we dislike it, is part of the healing. Maybe we have to purposefully be knifed by the pain of it in order to be motivated to stand up for peace and justice. But we are not left to just feel the pain of the world. We are also lured by God’s dream for us, the dream we are longing to make true. We are drawn to walk toward that dream glimmering in the future when the children of God will dwell in peace, beating their swords into plowshares, studying war no more. We humans have been capable of so much; can we not walk in the light of God? Listen to this word from William Sloane Coffin: "We have learned to soar through the air like birds, to swim through the seas like fish, to soar through space like comets. Now it is high time we learned to walk the earth as the children of our God." [1] Boulding, Elise “Envisioning the Peaceable Kingdom” Peace Is the Way: Writings on Nonviolence from the Fellowship of Reconciliation Walter Wink, ed. Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books, 2000, p. 130 [2] Falk, Richard “Renouncing Wars of Choice: Toward a Geopolitics of Nonviolence” The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God Griffin, Cobb, Falk and Keller Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, p. 69 [3] Ibid. p. 70-71
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