Sermon: The Wound of Our People
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Sermon: The Wound of Our People Texts: Jeremiah 8:4-5, 8-12, 15; Luke 6:27-36, 41-42 Date: June 8, 2008 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church Have you ever walked into one of the grand old cathedrals with their soaring stone arches and their glinting stained glass, marble floors, cool air, flickering candles casting shadows on devotional art? Go in your imagination to one of those houses of worship, a real one or one you are constructing out of pictures you have seen. Have you connected with the ambiance of your cathedral? One of the things I have noticed about cathedrals is that they are most often quiet places. Even the noisiest tourists lined up outside a cathedral snapping their gum and discussing the price of gelato tend to quiet down once inside a cathedral. Voices turn to whispers, and one finds oneself tip-toeing around. Have you ever noticed that? I am indebted to (retired) Chaplain/Major General Kermitt D. Johnson who linked this experience of entering a quiet cathedral with a nation going to war. In an excellent article in the Christian Century he quotes historian Arnold Toynbee’s comment that war is “an act of religious worship.” “Appropriately,” Johnson writes, “when most people enter the cathedral of violence, their voices become hushed. This silence, this reluctance to speak, is based in part on not wishing to trivialize or jeopardize the lives of those who have been put in harm's way. We want to support the men and women in our armed forces, whether we are crusaders, just warriors or pacifists.” Imagine what the “cathedral of violence” might look like. The mighty columns are made of submarines. The beams and buttresses, missiles. Where you might see banners in a cathedral, flags hang. The stain glass windows depict the military heroes of bygone days: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower. As in many cathedrals, we are surrounded by the tombs of the honored dead. Thousands of little candles flicker, lit by relatives praying earnestly for the safety of their loved ones in battle. In the background, the organist softly plays a stirring medley: “My Country, `Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Artworks hung on the walls celebrate the sacrifices of the martyrs, lives given unselfishly for noble causes. The nation’s Constitution is ensconced on a brass stand decorated with a shining eagle, open to the Second Amendment. It’s quiet in there, it’s hushed. Hushed. The noise of the battle, the crack of gunfire and booming of bombs, the groans of the wounded, the wailing of the bereaved—those sounds are too far away to be heard within the walls of this cathedral. It’s hushed in here, but for the strains of the patriot’s hymns and the deep, commanding voice of the elegantly uniformed authority on the dais. Most of us wouldn’t dream of disrupting a service of worship, even if what we thought the leader was saying or doing was repugnant. There’s a strong social tradition of respect for the proceedings that keeps us silent. I find Chaplain/Major General Johnson’s metaphor so powerful as he compares a general reluctance to dissent in a time of war to the tradition of quiet in a cathedral. Johnson continues in his essay, “Furthermore, those who interrupt this service of worship [in the cathedral of violence] become a source of public embarrassment, if not shame. The undercurrent seems to be that dissent or critique in the midst of war is inherently unpatriotic because it violates a sacred wartime precept: support our troops.”[1] I’ve struggled for the duration of the current war with my own and others’ willingness to, for the most part, be silent. We have been hushed in the vast cathedral of violence that stretches from sea to shining sea. Hushed. I use that word both as a verb and as an adjective. We have been hushed/shushed by social pressure not to violate what Johnson has called the sacred wartime precept to support our troops. On the whole, we have become hushed persons. We citizens even stayed pretty quiet through revelations of our own representatives using “enhanced interrogation techniques”—otherwise known by the less elegant term “torture”—on our enemies. Why is that? Do you ever ask yourself that? Why have we been hushed when there has been such clear evidence of abuse meted out at the hands of those we have sent to war? Is it because we believe that it’s acceptable to torture our enemies? Some would say yes, that torture may yield intelligence that would save American lives. The hypothetical case of the ticking time bomb has been discussed in many contexts—would it be ethical to torture someone who knew where the location of the ticking time bomb was in order to find and disarm it? Torturing one with the hope of saving other lives? Some would say yes, and apparently, some of our representatives are acting on that theory. I believe there are myriad problems with this approach. For one thing, there is ample evidence that such “enhanced interrogation” yields very little reliable intelligence—people will say anything to end the pain they are suffering. Asking or commanding a person to torture creates two victims—the one who suffers the abuse and the torturer who must live for a lifetime with the guilt of their wrongdoing. Evidence of abuse also strengthens the insurgents against whom we fight As Chaplain Johnson points out, when we capitulate to the terrorist ethic---that the end justifies the means--we are handing those who oppose us a “priceless ideological gift,” photos and stories that will be used to encourage further attacks against our soldiers. Furthermore, we want the Geneva Conventions to be a standard applied when our soldiers are in captivity, so we cannot hypocritically say they apply to other nations but not to us. All that aside, from a Christian point of view, torture simply doesn’t pass what I think of as the basic “smell test” of religious ethics: the Golden Rule. “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you;” or in its other (older) form, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” I was interested to see something akin to the “smell test” applied to an official conversation about the use of torture when Johnson cited a Congressional hearing in his essay. “In Senate testimony, Senator Jack Reed (D., R.I.) asked the military this question: ‘If you were shown a video of a United States Marine or an American citizen [under the] control of a foreign power, in a cell block, naked with a bag over their head, squatting with their arms uplifted for 45 minutes, would you describe that as a good interrogation technique or a violation of the Geneva Convention?’ The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, answered: ‘I would describe it as a violation.’” Chaplain Johnson writes, “The next question might be: Why have these and other violations of the Geneva Conventions been certified as legal when employed by the U.S.?” There are various phrases used to describe this phenomenon, phrases like “American exceptionalism,” which attempt to describe our ethical blind spot where it comes to what Americans do (as opposed to what the rest of the world does). The prophet Jeremiah’s critique applies here: “They acted shamefully, they committed abominations; yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush.” [Jeremiah 8:12] One of the distressing aspects of the photos that came out of the Iraq prison, Abu Ghraib, was the smiling faces of our soldiers posed over the humiliated prisoners. No shame apparent there. I ran across a poem on the Poets Against War website that reacted to one such photo: HILLBILLIONS by Jeannette Allée"So there was a glitch in the system." The line that captured my imagination in this poem was the equating of “class” with the ability “to imagine, with our homo meaning humankind, sapience,/the life of the other.” That is, I think, the essence of what Jesus challenges us to do when he asks us to love our enemies. He calls us to see the enemy as a person whose life is of value and worth, like ours is. This takes an act of compassionate imagination, especially when a person is very different from ourselves, and when we are frightened. Fear is another reason we have been hushed in the cathedral of violence. Fear functions as a lump in the throat that may keep a person silent about a moral issue because that moral issue crops up in the context of a threatening situation. One of Textweek’s commentaries on Luke had a quotation about typical human behavior in the face of a threat that helped me think through this. Peter Steinke (How Your Church Family Works) writes, “At the onset of threat, self-preservation has more relevance for survival than self-awareness. Long before we could ever talk or think, we called on automatic processes for survival [fight or flight]. We call on them again and again. Besides, they act faster than the thinking processes. When we are anxious, we act before we think. The Automatic Pilot joins forces with the House of Emotion and dominates. In a reptilian regression our behavior is not mediated through the neocortex. Anxious, we are apt to lose objectivity and civility. We are in a position to be neither responsible nor loving. Reason and love are best served in time of calm. “In periods of intense anxiety, what is most needed is what is most unavailable -- the capacity to be imaginative. Again, this is as true in the church family as in all relationship systems. Threatened, any of us may dispense with our Christian convictions and values. Anxiety is no respecter of belief systems. It is an indiscriminate trigger. Threat is threat. The reptilian brain is not impressed by the sincerity of what we believe to be true; it does what it is designed to do: react instinctively. [p. 18]”[3] Perhaps reacting instinctively out of a basic, reptilian brain is what inspires people who are frightened and angry to resort to torture in the first place—that certainly comes out in the interviews with soldiers in the movie we’re showing on Wednesday, “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.” Perhaps that same fear, though on a less intense level, is what keeps most of the citizenry mute about torture. But that’s not what the gospel calls us to be; acting like reptiles is not what God expects from us. We are to be "children of the Most High." What God hopes is that we will be merciful, as God is merciful. That we will be able to rise above our fear long enough to imagine that the enemy is worthy of love or at least some level of respect and dignity. That we will treat others with respect and that we will demand the same from those who represent us. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the revelations of the abuse of enemy combatants at the hands of some of our military and para-military contractors has inflicted a deep wound on our people. A deep, painful wound. We have been forced to come to grips with the fact that we are not always the Good Guys, no matter how much we yearn to believe that we are. That loss of belief in our national innocence is not a bad thing; taking away the veil of glory from the uglier aspects of war is a step toward clear-eyed maturity. But it is painful, is it not, to know that this violence is the aspect of American culture that is being burned in the consciousness of some who may never know anything about the gentler, more generous side of America. It is deeply painful to know that our representatives have inflicted terrible suffering on those who are perceived (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) to be enemy combatants. It is a wound so painful that it is no wonder we would prefer not to learn about it, think about it, talk about it, or take any action to end it. When I was trying to choose a text to address this topic, some of Jeremiah’s words came to mind, which is in the context of an indictment against false prophets and priests: “ They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” [Jeremiah 8:11]. If I am right that this torturing we have done is a wound for our people, it seems important that we who follow in the footsteps of the great healer, Jesus, attend to it. It is mighty tempting to gloss over it or cover over it, treating the wound of our people carelessly or lightly. We are tempted to do so because we want to the keep the peace. We don’t want to be the ones who look like we are violating the “sacred precept” to support our troops. Even here at EHCC, we don’t want to have division in our community between those who would prefer to take a united public stand and those who would prefer to leave actions with political implications to individuals. I genuinely respect those who hold different views about the appropriateness of community action about issues when we may not be in total agreement about what must be said or done. But I am also haunted by the possibility that some future prophet may look back at our generation and conclude that we who are called to be lovers of the people and healers of the world have treated the wound of our people carelessly, content to cover up or ignore the most grievous sins of our fellow countrymen and countrywomen. How we may act so that we help create a social movement for change continues to be a conundrum in a church that is united but not unanimous. I do believe it is possible to rise above our reptilian nature and aspire to something greater, both as individuals and as a people. Jesus calls on disciples to do what is tough but not what is impossible. We can turn back when we have taken a wrong road. We can tame fear and practice love and respect, even for our enemies. Our ability to do this will depend in part in which house of worship we are choosing to dwell. Do we worship in the cathedral of violence, hushed by fear and awed by the lure of domination? That cathedral may have a side chapel that is dedicated to personal piety, but it is clear in this house where the power emanates from. Do we offer obeisance in the cathedral of violence? Or do we worship in the sanctuary of the Lord? That cathedral may have a side chapel dedicated to our love of the nation, to the beauties of patriotism, to the honor we pay to those who sacrifice for our country. But that is still just a side chapel, and it is clear in this house where true reverence and the soul’s surrender are due. Lord, help us to clear our throats of the lump of fear, to find our voices and offer our strength; “keep us from judgments hard and cruel, that we may dwell with you.”[4] [1] Johnson, Kermitt D. Title: Inhuman behavior: a chaplain's view of torture [2] http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/poemsoftheweek.asp, August 2007 archive [3] cited at textweek.com, Brian Stoffregen’s commentary on Luke 6 [4] Bayler, Lavon “Your Ways Are Not Our Own” New Century Hymnal #170
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