June 19, 2008
For the birds
Pentecost 6/7A 22vi08
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will… Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Mt 10.29,31).
There are the pictures at the end of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Soldiers, marines, men, women, usually smiling, some of them made at graduation or commissioning, others, less formal, many more than likely made to send home from war to the family, to the local newspaper. Surely, at the time, without much thought of dying. Yet, always the pictures “as they are made available, and as their deaths are confirmed.”
In its denial, the Administration, to put it mildly, takes exception to the pictures being shown in this way. Neither do they approve of the pictures of the flag-draped caskets. The president — the one who sent them all there in the first place — does not attend the funerals, but sends “condolences,” which is to let those who grieve know that he “feels with them their pain.” It makes one wonder, considering that when he had his chance, he found a way out and apparently felt no pain about that. He must take us for fools, as if to say that all wars are red, white, and blue bunting and never black crepe.
It is common knowledge that enlistments in the military are falling off noticeably, recruiting is getting more desperate, and quotas have not been met for some time. Perhaps it is one of the more hopeful signs of our times that just as we get into these patently pointless wars does the willingness of Americans to serve in the armed forces decline. On the other hand, to meet these declines, the Army hands out more and more seductive sales pitches to high school undergrads, most of whom are too immature to make informed decisions about killing and being killed. Only to be followed by the more candid message recruits get once they’re in. A staff sergeant asked a group of 150 infantrymen-in-training, “Does anybody know what posthumous means?” A few hands went up, but he answered his own question. “It means ‘after death.’ It means some of you are going to get medals, but only that way.”
The seeming inevitability of war as an alternative in the human scheme of things is a brutal reminder of our failure. It is not only a failure in our human relations, but a failure, as well, in our individual vocations as human beings. It is an insult and an impediment to God’s imagining of who we are and who we are to become. It is also the symptom of our loss of any sense of personal worth. Perhaps we go to war, and even claim to justify war as clearly some do, to compensate for that loss, to try to restore our ego by identifying ourselves with the glorious banners of our country. It knows no national boundaries.
These conditions are even more especially a sign of our failure to assume the true ministry of peace and justice to which we are called. To be sure, we set aside national holidays to remember the millions of us who have died in our wars, let alone the millions of bystanders and the enemies whom Jesus loved equally and also told us to love. And then we settle by defining peace in terms of the absence of war thus furthering the tragic irony of enslaving our lives that we might be free.
We can surely do more than that. We churchers might first of all cease our own internal wars and reenlist all that energy with the passion of Jesus in service to his gospel of the sanctity of life. We can unilaterally relinquish our political privileges and exemptions so to disentangle ourselves from the not-so-subtle stroking of our so-called “faith-based initiatives.”
Perhaps then we can assume our rightful sacrifice by standing in prophetic indictment against a culture whose very nature is to make war. Perhaps then can we more faithfully align ourselves with the God who created us and who grieves not only over our reckless abandon with human life, but even over each sparrow that falls to the ground.
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