April 13, 2003
Readings: Isaiah 50: 4-9 ; Luke 19: 28-48
It’s Palm Sunday. On this nice warm day, you–some of you–have no doubt been hoping for a word of encouragement in the faith, a word reassuring about God and family, about love and community. These are good things. But delivering that good message to order is not my job. A preacher is to be a reed in a trumpet blown by the Holy Spirit. Just a reed to resonate to the forces of some power we find we can’t quite account for. We call these forces ‘of God’ because they are caught up with truth and goodness, ultimately. Or we hope so, since we can’t see what is ultimate. A good preacher wants not to blow his own horn, as they say, but do the reed’s part only. Therefore, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord. They may not be acceptable in your sight, O church.
As I was reading the scriptures for this day, praying to be a reed, there came to me this vision, again and again: Palm Sunday is about war and peace. It is not a vision for peace; no, it is a cry against eyes shut from the things that make for peace. It is a vision of humanity descending into bloody war, in the very presence of God’s offered and still more excellent way. Palm Sunday is about war on Iraq and all the other rotting nations where U.S. military will be sent to kill in the coming years. This is what I saw. I saw also a church rising more meaningful, more called, more sent than at any time in a hundred years.
The Palm Sunday pastel is of Jesus descending the west side of the Mount of Olives on a young donkey. But they wanted him on a stallion, you know. That’s the hee-haw point; they wanted him to lead a hard army against the Roman legion in an Abrams tank, but he rode a bicycle. No–much more than a bicycle, for Jesus was playing an ancient tune. The image of “the king– triumphant and victorious he–humble and riding on a donkey” came from their old story. It is a quote from the prophet Zechariah (9:9), the promise they were always forgetting or discarding, that people of God will not need their tanks and guns, for the Lord alone will defend them.
But what a silly promise, and what a girlish passion the Bible is! What is God against weapons of mass destruction? Against jets smashed into tall buildings, or the temple in the beloved city cascading to the earth in dust and death, or anthrax leaked from an army lab or SARS or Bradley fighting vehicles? What is God? A pious concept! A very present help in time of personal trouble, yes, perhaps–but no competition for the real works of men at war. Nevertheless, why is this man coming on toward our great city astride a donkey? Some well-read member of the mob mentions Zechariah, Chapter 9 and fast! the word, like buckshot through the crowd: A play is underway! Jesus is playing one of the oldies from the prophets. This is fabulous! They love the energy, the intelligence, the imagination–the love of this guy! They throng to take part in the spectacle, grabbing off their cloaks, palm fronds from the trees, flower petals, anything to strew in the road as he passes. Someone shout/sings a line from Psalm 118: “Save us, O Lord! Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” The clergy, annoyed,tell Jesus to settle the crowd down. Jesus presses into service another scripture that hasn’t meant anything to anyone for centuries. It’s Habakkuk’s word about a vision:
“Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie… Since you have plundered many nations, all that survive of those peoples will plunder you–because of human bloodshed, and violence to the earth, to cities and all who live in them. Woe to you who set your nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm! You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples; you have forfeited your life. The very stones will cry out from the wall…” (Hab 2: 2-11)
Then Jesus came near and saw the city, and he wept over it. “If you, even you, had only known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” You see, Palm Sunday is about war. And now the old, old story is leaping to life as if no one had read it for a hundred years. For the Lord Jesus is weeping over Baghdad and Basra and Najaf. It is not that the weeping has only just begun; the cheeks are creased with tears. It is just that the weeping is not ending now, or soon. For the ignorant, arrogant, timeless descent into violence is what Passion Week is for. The crucifixion–it is always the same: the mob and their masters gone mad for human sacrifice; to satisfy the gods, any blood you require, O gods, to purge evil from our midst on the horns of a goat, that we may not see it; to pin the failure on a donkey.
In 1994, Walter Davis of San Francisco Theological Seminary published a vivid and painfully persuasive account of America’s generation-long failure to deal with the evil of Viet Nam. He wrote:
“Rather than recognize the limits of power and the inability to achieve political goals through force alone, we [Americans] redouble our efforts. The Rambo films present this strategy. But torquing up the level of violence merely destroys the human qualities of the hero himself. Desert Storm provides an example in real life No stone was left unturned. The most advanced weaponry was massively deployed to obliterate enemy forces, many of them in a “turkey shoot.” In order to ensure a decisive victory, 100,000 Iraquis were killed, four million Kurds became refugees, and the infrastructure of an entire country was laid waste.” (Walter Davis, Shattered Dream, p. 119)
But this was not enough. A darker spirit is haunting America, its shadow side so deep hardly any catch the vision. Because the things that make for peace are hid from our eyes, more war is needed the way some need more heroin. This war is not about anything the president and his cohort claim; this much, at any rate, is coming into view. It was not about self-defense in any urgent sense of the word. Iraq’s army was a ragged, unequipped squadron trying to snarl the feared invader like a homeowner with a kitchen gadget against an unseen intruder. Time Magazine quotes some eager American lieutenant on the scene: “Let’s quit pussyfooting and call it what it is. It’s murder, it’s slaughter, it’s clubbing baby harp seals…” (Time, April 14, 2003) It wasn’t about self-defense.
The supposed weapons of mass destruction were never prepared for use. Was that a lie to jump start the war, like the decades of CIA lies about the strength of the Soviet Union, now part of historical record, laid down to justify military build up at home? I don’t know. But lies have a way of rising from the mud in which they are conceived to put on fearsome flesh. A New Yorker article recently recalled Tolstoy’s observation: “What an immense mass of evil must result… from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.”
Now the stated reason for going to war is changing again. Language becomes slippery and meaningless, as in Orwell’s 1984. Now it’s about how cruel the regime was to its own people. True, it was. Are there not twenty more just as bad? On what principle shall we refrain from making war on them all? And now we’re going to save Arabia from itself with democracy. Six months ago, Americans would not have bought this argument for war–would not have paid for it! But fear helps empty the stomach and prepares it for the wasting of much blood and money. So heaping servings of fear have been piled on our plates. Seventy years ago–some of you were alive then–the president of this great nation in a time of great trial said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” That was great leadership. Now, our leaders tip wisdom on its ear. They push and push people toward nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. Last week, this government’s newly appointed Minister of Information for Iraq, the former CIA director James Woolsey, told Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Syria: “We want you nervous.” This is to say, We want you terrified. We are ready to make war anywhere. This is terrorism, pure and simple. Ah, the very stones of this nation’s poor cry out from the wall as the billions they made with their underpaid sweat are turned over to the rich and the warring without apology or explanation or complaint.
There comes a moment in the development of the news when events may no longer be parked in a corner of our life with the word politics and thus artificially separated from God and God’s justice. Such is the strong word of the Bible. At such times, religion, if it is to mean anything to ourselves, and if our God is not to shut the ears from all our soundings, must connect the stars through which this globe is hurtling, to reveal again the constellation of the cross, formed from heaven for earth, and show this way, the way of Christ, to those made blind by fear. With such guidance, joined with all people of faith, our ship of Earth might in time, just in time, turn toward the things that make for peace. But here, the year 2003, is an historic turning point between a fate of violence so awesome and destructive that those of us who see it will wish we had been born with our mothers and grandmothers–and a choice to see the things that make for peace.
Here is what this war is about. It is about getting Viet Nam right. All the major players in the present plan are members of that tragic club of losers. This war is about recovering for America a sense of purpose, without facing the question, why we are a people so lost and spent on selling and buying, buying and selling, to no end. This war is about distraction and diversion. At home, we are a house divided into rich and poor, more sharply than any other highly developed nation. The news this week: New York’s poorest third of school children are performing progressively worse under new standards imposed by the “results-oriented” administration. But the school budgets are being slashed. Forty-two million Americans must pay for health care from their own paltry after-tax wallets. This is what the war is about. The 21st century is not going to be the American century. China and India, developing so fast, have between them populations nearly ten times larger than that of the U.S. What on earth will prevent them from becoming the center of history? Only war. That is what this war is about, for the present administration has declared its policy that no nation will be permitted to rival its military power. Our leaders will help us to this appalling mission by inspiring us to terror or TV–anything, really, to keep our heart and mind from our strange national sorrow, that we, just like Israel of long ago, no longer understand our place in history. We thought we were special, an exception among the nations, a light to the nations with a mission of salvation. In fact, we have written an extraordinary history, a grand experiment in human community and law and liberty. But now, a new frontier must be struck. We need to learn how to live making peace inside our borders, inside ourselves, inside our souls. This is hard. Americans don’t want to learn how to live out the basic religious story they claim to claim, the Holy Week way of the cross. No, some of our religious and political leaders are eager to turn even Christian faith into a cause for war, making a crusade of salvation on the Middle East, and teaching “greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends” as if it were a motto for the Marines.
Christ calls to you, O church. A vision: to resist in yourself the evil spirit of nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that grips so many in our nation. To learn this discipline, O disciple, that is your calling. For this you have been set apart. And you know about this! Central Church was once a great and proud church. Now its faithful are learning what all creatures of spirit seek to learn, how to give up our life that we may save it; how to let God do something new. This is the way that makes for peace. It is the only way. Individuals are called to it; so are churches, and denominations, and nations. To pass this way is to enter a dark night of the soul. The ego–the flesh, the Bible calls it–rebels. It would rather fight for its short years of short breath than give itself up to any great unknown, God-given. That is what this war is about: a struggle to the death to maintain the old ways, the old economy, the old slavery, the old authority, the old domination system. It is not so much, I think, that the leadership is lying or plotting, but that they have not the spiritual depth or understanding to see the things that make for peace. Their eagerness for power blinds them to the new, and so they defend what was, acting, as they suppose, in behalf of their people. And actually, they are right in this assumption, precisely to the extent that the people of this nation are prisoners of the flesh, servants of Mammon, patrons of all things passing away, afraid to lose their life that they might gain it. Empires have always functioned this way. One could say that there is nothing to be done for it. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under thesun.” (Eccl 1.9)
Still I wonder. I have known the new thing of God to come breaking in mystery and power out of darkness. So have you. We know discipleship in Christ to mean, first and last, humbly to see and acknowledge fear within, and its offspring–yet to let the Spirit of God master these, with neither chariot nor horse, that we ourselves might be peace in a world locked in fear. We know, and would have others know, that coming of the king within, triumphant and victorious because he has come humble and riding on only a donkey through the night of grief and despair.
“The dark night is an emptying experience. Naming, grieving, and relinquishing prepare us to receive. The new is not given on demand. It is beyond conscious, rational control. It cannot be managed by objectives. Instead, we can nourish hope amid the darkness not only by attending to the message of the prophets of exile but also by retelling the stories of modern prophets who have spoken and acted on the best in our nation’s narrative.” (Walter Davis, Shattered Dream, p. 169)
To a nation with a noble narrative, God is calling the church from its tomb of silence and fear, that we might turn, turn, turn from America’s appointment with selling and killing and war to something new under the Son. To the things that make for peace.
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2003
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