B
Proper 8 BFC 2015
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
June
28, 2015
All
of my children have been given names that reflect the deep meaning and legacy I
hope is imbued in their lives. Jacob is
named after the “one who contends with God and humankind” hoping he will enter
the struggle with courage and is the name of the first “Mulberry” who was born
in the United States, his family brought here to this continent as an
indentured servant. Sophia is the name
for Divine Wisdom a sign of female strength, creation, and work hoping she
might know herself as a person of wisdom, strength, creation, and divine
work. That she might be a Divine
Architect in her world. Abraham, well,
you can guess. Abraham is named after
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which fought against fascism in Spain and for the
16th President of the United States, in hope that he might be a
person of courage and resolve. He was
born in Princeton, Illinois, the preaching home of Owen Lovejoy, the great
Congregational abolitionist, credited with believing in Lincoln’s character
enough to get him the Republican nomination.
If you are going to be an Illinois
native, as I am, the advent of the 4th of July is about a return and
remembrance to all things Lincoln. So about
ten years ago, when the Abraham Lincoln Museum opened up in Springfield,
Illinois, I knew there would be a weekend when I would load Jacob, Abraham, and
Sophia in the car, and take the hour trip to enculturate them in the angels of
their better patriotic nature. At the
time I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political
Genius of Abraham Lincoln, a gift sent to me by my aunt for my birthday and
signed by the author. Lincoln was and is
indelibly etched on my heart and my brain.
I grew up in a town where Lincoln
practiced law and two sites are marked in Metamora where the famous
Lincoln-Douglass debates took place. When
the movie Lincoln showed up in theaters some years ago, my brother went with
the other New Berlin, Wisconsin, high school history teacher to see if
Spielberg “got it right.” Both of them
were Lincoln lovers, debated each other about which of their small hometowns
had more Lincoln lore than the other. So
when Spielberg had Lincoln mention our hometown, Metamora, twice, Andy stood
up, pointed to his colleague, and said, “There it is. Cased closed.
There it is!” Lincoln runs in our
veins.
So, again, it only made sense, in
celebrating the 4th of July about ten years ago, that I would load
up everybody in the car on Friday and make the trek to the Abraham Lincoln
museum in Springfield. There was an
Abraham Lincoln impersonator there, greeting people and taking pictures with
families. Two movies with some great
special effects for the sons and some period dresses for the daughter seemed to
make the trip enjoyable for everyone.
Except me. I wanted to hear his
words, those words which seemed to have been wrought from the suffering and
sacrifice of his life and the time, those words which did not claim innocence
nor claim righteousness. Oh, there were
snippets and tablets with whole speeches.
But I wanted to hear those speeches which openly
used religious language to define the difficult times but did not use that
religious language as if he was the only person with the authority, character,
or power to use that language.
In the book, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes mention of the
overflowing, youthful optimism that was America
In the Scripture verse we have
from Hebrew Scripture this morning, King David is confronted with suffering,
death, and mortality. Saul, his
predecessor to the throne, is dead and so is Saul’s son Jonathan. David had a unique friendship or relationship
with Jonathan, one that surpassed his love for women. For the first time in the glorious empire
that he has created and is beginning to create for Israel
In contrast, we seem to be a
culture forever bound to our innocence to define us as a nation. In the terrible tragedy of 9/11, our nation
was offered a chance to mature and pay attention to why terrorists might target
icons like the World
Trade Center
Some years ago I organized an
event at the local church I pastored titled, “Voices of Peace”, a collection of
Christian voices dramatized to remind us that peace making and building is a
part of our faith tradition. As I
researched different Christian voices within our own country to include in that
presentation, the clarion call, the repeated critique was that America needed
to give up its innocence, its understanding that it was without or with less
blemish among the nations.
I believe one of the best
Christian critiques of American culture is done by theologian and scholar, Dr. Cornel
West. West believes we are a culture
that avoids suffering and death at all costs, a suffering and death that would
call into question our conformity, complacency, and cowardice. If we do not deal with the systems of death
in our history and present—systems like racism, materialism, and militarism—we
end up with a Peter Pan mentality and a Disneyland
sensibility. Death and suffering, when
engaged, West believes, bring about a maturity and a sensibility that move us
to call into question the evil that is within us. But in a death denying, death ducking, and
death dodging society, we grow old, we grow powerful, and we grow rich, West
says, but we never grow up. Unlike
David, we never seem to grow up.
The sun is always out in America America
Almost every candidate for
president, including the brother of the president who brought us this war,
admits that entering into war in Iraq was wrong. We had a moment in our nation’s history
when we could have used the “catastrophe” of war for a confrontation with death
and critical reflection about our place in the world. We are using every form of death ducking,
death denying, and death dodging tactic to refuse to engage this war. We are morally numbed, powerless and avoidant
of the death. Shock and awe was beamed
into our television screens like a fireworks display, as if we were an audience
to its glory and beauty with a refusal to print any pictures of the grotesque
and ugliness caused by that modern warfare.
For many years we were forbidden from seeing the caskets draped in our
national colors as they made their way home.
These Iraqi, Afghani, Pakastani people are God’s children, they were
made by the same Creator of the Universe, fashioned by the generative forces of
the world. What happened in Fallujah and
Haditha and what is happening in Guantanamo Bay and Syria are morally wrong,
sinful, dreadful. Now we are never quite
sure of the numbers of dead killed by remote, clean, at no-cost-to-us drones
that fly overhead and wreak collateral damage.
We think we can leave the room a mess and expect it to be clean when we
return.
This war is wrong. And the longer it continues, the more it
indicts us as a people who lack compassion, mercy, and justice. We are not innocent! And, as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., said so
many years ago, with the violence we see in our country, “Our chickens have
come home to roost” in tragic and terrible ways. We cannot practice war abroad and not expect
violence and war to course through our bloodstream in the national narrative at
home.
As a church that proclaims in all
of its bulletins, newsletters, advertisements, that we are a just peace church,
we will need to decide whether that is some schmanzy-danzy title or whether
that has something to do with our spirituality.
For spirituality is not about whether we feel or believe in God. Rather, spirituality is about concrete
practices we do week in, week out, day in, day out. Spirituality says we recognize our own
mortality but in between our birth and the death we shall all experience, we
will fill our lives with practices that reflect our most deeply held values. As a just peace church, we need to engage the
suffering and death of this war to ask ourselves what we are doing monthly,
weekly, daily to stand against this war.
Perhaps we could sit down with a
list of the Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakastani civilians killed in this war and pray
for one of them every day. We could
enculturate our children into this practice by praying for one of the children
under the age of eighteen killed both home and abroad—to enlarge the hearts of
our children and help them grow into the maturity and courage God wills for
them. We could covenant that every week
we will take five minutes to read a story about a U.S. family that has lost a
son or daughter to the violence and war at home and abroad. Or we could find pictures on the net of the suffering
and death and force ourselves, as Emmitt Till’s mother did, to look at the
pictures over and over again until our heart is softened and our will becomes
resolved.
And what will we do together? How will we be a just peace church in the
midst of violence and war that should undercut the very innocence we
protest? Should we put an ad in the
paper, decry the war with air time on TV? How do we practice building and making the
peace together? How do we engage the
suffering and death that continues at our hands?
In a
letter to the parents of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, Abraham Lincoln related his
profound sorrow, having known their son himself. He ends the letter to them by writing,
In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your
sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young
friend, and your brave and early fallen child.
May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power.
Sincerely your friend in a common affliction --
A.
Lincoln[2]
About ten years ago, my children enjoyed a visit to
a historic museum, but I missed Abraham Lincoln’s words, so often not words of
innocence, or triumph, or victory, but words that engaged suffering and death,
that questioned why war in the midst of so much death, that wondered aloud if
perhaps war itself was a punishment for the collective sins of a nation, for
the slavery it practiced, the violence it instilled such that violence in war
had become who we were as a nation. His
patriotism did not require his praise but his critical reflection and
confrontation with death. I missed these
words of humility, of maturity. I missed
these words:
Neither party
expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already
attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should
cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and
astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes
[God’s] aid against the other. It may seem strange that any [people] should dare
to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other
[people]'s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of
both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The
Almighty has [God’s] own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of
offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that [one] by
whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one
of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which,
having continued through [God’s] appointed time, [God] now wills to remove, and
that [God] gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to
those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from
those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to
[God]? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war
may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth
piled by the bonds[person]'s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid
by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still
it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether." With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on
to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for [the
one] who shall have borne the battle and for [their] widow and [their] orphan,
to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations.[3]
I sincerely hope and pray that my
children forever remember that 4th of July and the trip we took to
Springfield. I sincerely hope that just some
of those words might be written on their hearts, that I might teach them what
it means to be a “just peace” people, that this scourge of racism and war not
continue to be our country’s spiritual practice. I pray that we all might have a blessed,
memorable, and meaningful 4th of July, one that might bring forward
our confrontation with death, our critical reflection, and our courage. Amen.
[1] Cornel West, “The 2006 Barry Ulanov Memorial
Lecture,” Union Theological Seminary, New
York New
York
[2]
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/ellsworth.htm
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