The War - Can We Talk Here?

Tromaine Toy
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27 (NRSV)
After the death of Saul, when David had returned from defeating the Amalekites, David remained two days in Ziklag... David intoned this lamentation over Saul and his son Jonathan. (He ordered that The Song of the Bow be taught to the people of Judah; it is written in the Book of Jashar.) He said:
Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places!
How the mighty have fallen!
Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon;
or the daughters of the Philistines will rejoice,
the daughters of the uncircumcised will exult.
You mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew or rain upon you,
nor bounteous fields!
For there the shield of the mighty was defiled,
the shield of Saul, anointed with oil no more.
From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty,
the bow of Jonathan did not turn back,
nor the sword of Saul return empty.
Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!
In life and in death they were not divided;
they were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.
O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
who clothed you with crimson, in luxury,
who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.
How the mighty have fallen in the midst of the battle!
Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;
greatly beloved were you to me;
your love to me was wonderful,
passing the love of women.
How the mighty have fallen,
and the weapons of war perished!

Last week, if you were here, you know that we told the story of a battle. We got our cheers going and some of you were Israelites and some of you were Philistines and some of you got into it way too much. Together we told the story of David and Goliath and it was a lot of fun. We all love the story of the underdog taking on the giant and winning. We love the story of David’s trust in God and how God used unlikely things—a 12-year-old boy, a slingshot and a stone—to bring about a great victory. And there was that subversive message in there – that the weapons and might that the adults relied on were the things that could not win this fight.

But some of you pointed out to me that I conveniently left out some things as we told this story. There were some gory details in there that we kind of glossed over. There was the disturbing implication that the will of God might involve the killing of another person, even if he was a monstrous giant. And there is the continuing challenge of lining up these ancient stories with the messages of peace we have from Jesus. David is an awfully human person who has, as we find out in the readings that follow this week, some very outsized flaws. There’s a reason people don’t wear bracelets asking the question, “What would David do?” We might be disturbed at the answers we get!

But there might be good reason for us to ponder that question every so often, particularly as a people who live in the United States. Jesus, by and large, was teaching a people who did not hold political power and who were not confronted with the problem of what to do with military might. In Jesus’ day, the people of Israel were subjects of the Roman Empire who saw soldiers and armies as alien forces occupying the land. When Jesus talked to them about the sword it was usually about the sword being wielded by someone else.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that what Jesus had to say about violence and war is irrelevant. It’s just that, by and large (because there were some soldiers and centurions in the mix), the people who heard his message heard it from a position of powerlessness. David, however, was the first great king of Israel, ruling over armies and governing a kingdom that had to struggle constantly with what to do with its military might. That is more like the environment that we Americans face in our day and age. One of the responsibilities that comes with being blessed with great wealth and great resources is a continuing debate about how best to use those resources and what values will govern our use of military force.

Which brings me to Iraq and the Long War. I really didn’t want to go into this and you know all the reasons why I didn’t. I know that you feel as beaten up and bamboozled by the way we have been talking about this war for the last five years as I do. And after all that time, maybe you feel as I do that all the talk has produced a lot of heat and not much light, a lot of rhetoric and not much change, a lot of heartbreak and a lot of failed leadership on every side.

We are divided as a nation on what is happening in this war, but we have done a pretty good job of not talking about it, or at least not talking about it in ways that matter. Opinion polls tell us that a majority of Americans think that going into Iraq was a mistake but a majority of us also think that now that we’re there we should ensure that we don’t leave the country a mess. But right now it is a mess. We have moments when we hope that things are going to get better, but every day there are headlines reporting another car bombing, another setback in building a government, another American dying or being injured. It’s a bloody mess.

But I wonder if we know how to respond to this crisis. I hate this war. I really do. I hate that young men and women are dying. I hate that we had to have a moment at the beginning of the Northampton graduation to recognize the sacrifice of Tromaine Toy. I was glad that we had the moment, but I hated that this young life and 2500 others like it have been lost. They made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country – in the name of you and me. I hate that this war has not asked much from those of us who have not had to go and fight. And I hate that we have not grown closer to one another and to the ideals our country stands for because of the war – we have only grown more deeply divided.

Now don’t misunderstand what I am saying. We have many people in this congregation who have served and are serving in the military. We have people very close to us right now, David Ellis among them, who are serving in Iraq. Military service is a high calling in a country that is looked to by the world for the ideals it stands for and the might it holds. What I lament is what war does to us and what this war is doing to us. Because our language for talking about peace and justice and the responsible use of power is so impoverished, we cannot honor our nation or honor our troops without falling into warring camps.

Here’s what I mean by that: The opinions on this war have become so entrenched that I don’t think I’ve heard anything new come out of either side for the last year and a half. If you oppose the war the argument seems to be that since the reasons we were told we were going to war for turned out to be false, we have no moral obligation to offer responsible alternative plans and the entire effort has been to discredit the administration and to uncover its hypocrisy. Any talk of national ideals and the advancement of those ideals and opposing the real threats to those ideals are far down the list of talking points.

On the other side, there has been a tendency to caricature any plan for Iraq other than the one being carried out as a “cut and run” strategy – a phrase that no one likes and which immediately cuts off any rational debate. Just as worrying on this side is the tendency to talk about this war only as a way of preventing a war over here. We hear the phrase, “We’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here.” When we hear this it makes the people of Iraq and Afghanistan into shields protecting us from harm. They die so we don’t have to – that’s a position none of us should want to take. Again, what we long for is not phrases and talking points but an appeal to our basic ideals as a nation and how those are being advanced. We want to know that we are acting in harmony with “the better angels of our nature” and that we are not losing our basic values.

So I’ve wandered into the thick of it here. I’ve wandered into it because I am aware that I avoid talking about the war in this place because I know how conflicted we are and how we as a congregation are of different minds about what this war means. But if we can’t find a way to talk about the deepest questions facing our nation in church, then we are abdicating our role as Christians as truth-tellers. If we do not seek the truth in a nation that needs to hear truth, we are not servants of a God who confronts us with difficult questions of love and justice, asking us continually, “Are you on my side? Is this course of action you are considering something that reflects my will for the world or are you acting against it?” We can never stop listening to those questions because that challenge is always before us.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was someone who saw something prophetic in the ideals that bind us together as a nation. When he was confronting segregation and the injustices that were confronting the African-American population, he used the language of the Bible and of the American nation because he felt that there was something uniting them. He believed that when this country was at its best, living up to its best ideals, it was also striving to live up to God’s ideals.

Sitting in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was imprisoned for his work on behalf of black civil rights, King said of the protestors who joined him, “One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”[i] King chastised the church of his day and its leaders for refusing to join in the sacred work of calling the nation back to its roots.

I am afraid that we are in a similar day. Our nation has forgotten how to talk about life and liberty. We have forgotten how to speak to one another in a respectful way that is not trying to score points or win an argument but in a way that honestly strives after truth. We have forgotten how to listen for God’s challenging word. And so we have a broken political establishment that may not be strong enough to unite us again. When the democratic institutions that represent the people fail it is up to the people to reform them. The church should be asking the questions that help them to do that: Who are we? What is it we believe that we are called to be and do? How can we carry this out by doing the greatest good and the least amount of harm? How can we make sure that no one gets left behind?

There is a temptation, which I recognize in myself, to say that the church is the church and the affairs of the world should not concern us. We have a different language in the church and we should look different from the world, to the extent that we downplay the importance of what happens in the world. There is some truth in that. Our highest priority is to follow Jesus Christ and to be the church of Jesus Christ.

But even while we’re trying to get our discipleship straight in the body of Christ, we are also involved in the world and the most powerful nation in the world cannot be without its Christians in helping to determine who it is and what it should be. We need to take part in this dialogue. The world needs us. Our nation needs us.

We began this sermon with David and I want to end with David. Last week we saw him as a boy defeating one of Israel’s enemies. In this story today he is in a much more complicated setting. God had let him know that he would be Israel’s next king, but he refused to kill Israel’s current king, Saul, even when he was given the opportunity to do that. David respected Saul, even though Saul was trying to kill him. And David loved Saul’s son, Jonathan, who would have been considered next in line for the throne.

But as Saul pushed David away, David became more and more associated with Israel’s enemies. In fact, he receives word of Saul and Jonathan’s deaths as he is toying with an alliance with the dreaded Philistines. You would think that David might be happy to get word that the man who had tried to kill him was dead and that the obstacles to his being crowned Israel’s king were removed. But David’s response is a lament.

This lamentation in the first chapter of Second Samuel is one of the most beautiful in the Bible. David curses the Philistines and even the ground of the mountains where Saul died. He remembers the dead men as valiant warriors and strong leaders. He praises what they did for the nation of Israel and he weeps over Jonathan whose love “was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

But the most profound phrase of the whole poem is one which is repeated three times: “How the mighty have fallen! How the mighty have fallen and the weapons of war perished!” Here is the deep sense of regret and loss over what the war has brought him.

As we remember today the mighty who have fallen and what the weapons of war and the rhetoric of war have brought us, perhaps we can pray for a word from God that will help us stop talk past each other, that will help us stop talking so much that we cannot hear what God would have us to be and do, and ultimately that will help us stop this war, which, like every war, casts its casualties upon mountains, fields, deserts and city streets, until we can learn the ways of peace.

We’re not the only nation seeking God and we’re not the only nation God blesses. God loves Iraqis and Afghanis and Sudanese people, too. But on this day, as the United States celebrates its birth, we pray: God bless America so that we may bless the world. Thanks be to God.

[i] Letter from the Birmingham City Jail [1964]