Advent Sermon Series Part 1

I'll go ahead and post the sermons that I'm doing for the first three weeks of Advent on this blog.  It's a sermon series on the question "Who are we waiting for?"  Here's the first sermon in the series.  I'll post the others as I give them.

Who Are We Waiting For?

Part One:  Jesus as Human:  The Galilean Sage

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 27, 2011

Scripture:  Mark 8:27-30

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It’s Advent, that season of the church year in which we anticipate and prepare for the birth of Christ.  Recently one of our number said something at our Sunday morning adult education forum that suggested to me something that it might well be worth spending some time on this Advent season.  He said that he had been struggling recently with the question of just who this Jesus is.  That is, after all, one of the central questions—perhaps the central question—of the Christian life.  Jesus himself put it to his disciples.  Jesus asked his disciples who people were saying that he is.  They gave various answers.  Then he asked them:  “But who do you say that I am?”  Mark 8:29  We are anticipating and preparing for his birth, but who is he anyway that we should make such a big deal out his getting himself born?  Who do we say that he is?  That question is so important for Christians that I decided that I would do a three part Advent sermon series on the question “Who are we waiting for?”

That question arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being.   Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us.  So today you get part one of this sermon series,  Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child.  A human baby.  A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy.  “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on.  We’re talking about a human baby here.  A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world.  It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you:  Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that?  I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are.  I think there’s a good reason for that shock.  The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man.  Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up.  Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters.  It really matters because his call to us is to follow him.  His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him.  I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him if he were only God.  None of us humans could.  We aren’t God, or even gods.  In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans.  Jesus is truly human, and that really matters.  We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods.  The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human.  God actually became human in the person of Jesus.  In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human.  He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him.  Robin Meyers, the author of the book we’ve been reading in the Sunday morning group, put it this way in a response he sent me to some questions I had sent to him:  “One cannot emulate…that which is categorically different from oneself.  Whether it is a sports hero, or a comic book character, we admire as a fan what we cannot possibly be expected to imitate.  A human Jesus, on the other hand, takes away our excuses.”

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being.  What sort of human being was he?  What does it mean for us to follow him?  Follow him how?  Follow him in what?  In that book we read in the Sunday morning group in November I found a phrase that I think might be helpful in answering those questions.  Robin Meyers, that author I mentioned above who is also the pastor of a large, progressive UCC church in Oklahoma City, has a term for Jesus that he uses more than any other.  He calls Jesus “the Galilean sage.”  Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing.  It means a wise person.  As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), and quite apart from whether or not he did things mere humans can’t do (walk on water, raise people from the dead, and so on), Jesus was a wisdom person.  He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom.  He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God.  Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK.  Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught?  There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book.  So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are.  We all know something about worldly wisdom.  We know how the world works.  We know what the world values.  The world values power.  The world values wealth.  The world values success, prestige, and status.  The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way.  The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens.  They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them.  They use violence against their own citizens.  They execute people they believe are criminals.  They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like.  All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject.  You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite.  He taught nonviolence.  About that there is no doubt whatsoever.  He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  He meant inclusion of the outcast.  He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores.  He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.”  We saw some of that teaching in our reading from the Sermon on the Mount this morning.  Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity.  In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world.  Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God.  Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work.  It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important.  It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one.  His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being.  His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life.  Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

Yet at least since the fourth century CE the Christian church has focused much more on Jesus’ divinity than on his humanity.  It has so emphasized his divine nature that his human nature has often been ignored.  The church often makes him a God-Man to be worshipped rather than a God-filled human being to be followed.  The church has so often made him the magic key to heaven’s gate rather than a model and guide for human life on earth.  Yet what we prepare to celebrate is the birth of a real human baby.  A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy.  And that, my friends, is very good news indeed; for we await the birth of one who is one of us, one from whom we can truly learn, one whom we can truly follow.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

If You Can't Win Telling the Truth You Deserve to Lose

So it has begun.  We all know that American presidential campaigns always feature dirty trucks and misleading campaign ads.  At least since the days of Richard Nixon that has been more true of Republican campaigns than of Democratic ones, but it goes on all the time in most presidential campaigns.  Yet Republican candidate Mitt Romney has gotten his presidential campaign off to a start that crosses even the very broad and fuzzy lines of American presidential politics.  His campaign has put out a television ad in New Hampshire that contains a flat out and very significant lie.  There's no other word for it.  It's a lie.  The ad features Barack Obama in 2008, then a candidate for the presidency, saying "if we keep talking about the economy we're going to lose."  The ad makes it appear that that is something Obama said about himself and his own presidential campaign.  It isn't.  Those lines were spoken by someone in the John McCain campaign.  Obama is merely quoting them.  When the full clip of what Obama said played it is clear that he was quoting a statement by the McCain campaign and hurling it back at them to show McCain's ineptitude on economic issues.  Romney's campaign has deceptively edited Obama's statement to make it look like he was talking about himself.  Romney's ad is a bald-faced, flat out lie.  There is no other word for it.

Readers of this blog know that I am no fan of Barack Obama's.  Elsewhere on this blog I have stated the reasons why I probably will not vote for him again.  I gave him a little bit of money in 2008.  I have no intention of doing so again.  He is a massive disappointment at best, and his values, which are a version of the basic values of empire, are not my values.  How one feels about Obama, however, should not affect one's reaction to this particular bit of deception and mendacity by the Romney campaign.  Even Romney supporters, if they have integrity (although frankly it is hard for me to see how any Romney supporter can have integrity since Romney himself has none), will condemn this ad as transgressing even the nearly nonexistent boundaries of American political polemics.

I once sent an email to the congressional campaign of Republican John Koster here in Washington state after I received a push polling call from his campaign that contained a flat out lie about Obama's health care reform.  I said that if you can't win by telling the truth, and I sincerely hope you can't, you don't deserve to win.  I now say the same thing to Mr. Romney and to all American political candidates.  Our politics are rotten to the core with the influence of money.  That much is obvious; but our politics are also rotten to the core with lying, with deception, with spin that has no interest in truth but only in manipulating uninformed and gullible voters.  Someone once said that the best thing you can say about democracy is that every other possible political system is worse.  That may be true, but our supposedly democratic system has so decayed, is so rotten with money and unethical campaigning, that sometimes I wonder.  It is becoming more and more a system in which I have no confidence.  The presidential campaign that is now beginning gives no sign that things will get better. They seem only to be getting worse.

Violence Is Now Our Norm

There's a commercial that has been running on American television lately.  It is an ad for a HTC cell phone.  As a young man walks through a city scene listening to music through headphones plugged into this cell phone all kind of things blow up behind him.  Several cars, including a police car, are flipped onto their roofs, which then collapse, presumably killing everyone inside.  It is a scene of violent mayhem breaking out in an American city; and the young man plugged into the cell phone walks through it completely oblivious to what is happening behind him.  Also running on American television are ads for several different video games, all of them depicting some kind of combat.  Sometimes the combat looks contemporary.  Sometimes it looks medieval, but it is always violent with lots of death and destruction.  Many, albeit not quite all, of our popular movies are immensely violent too.  The supposed sport of boxing, which is simply violence for the sake of entertainment, is making a comeback; and the even more violent extreme cage fighting is becoming mainstream.

The conclusion is inescapable:  Violence is now the norm of our popular culture.  The acceptability of violence is taken for granted.  We don't just accept it, we expect it.  We don't just tolerate it, we find it entertaining.  Our advertising agencies use it to sell even products that in themselves have nothing to do with violence, and advertising agencies succeed when they have their finger securely on the pulse of popular culture.  Violence is now our cultural norm.

Violence is our norm in more ways than in our popular culture.  It is our norm in foreign affairs as well.  When something happens that we don't like we find someone to invade, Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent examples.  More recently we have taken to targeting for death specific individuals whom we have identified as terrorists, never mind that they have never been convicted of anything through any kind of legal process.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about the evil of the glorification of the military and our calling everyone in uniform a hero.  Those dynamics too are part of the way in which violence is now our norm.

Of course violence has always been a big part of American culture.  Like every empire before us our country was founded in violence, expanded through violence, and preserved through violence.  Violence has always been part of our entertainment.  Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lived on movie and TV westerns in which the good guys always defeated the bad guys (and the Indians, who were mostly identified as bad guys) through violence and on World War II movies in which the horror of war was sanitized and violence was heroic when it was our side that applied it.  Still, it seems to be getting worse.  The violence of our popular entertainment is more graphic and, I think, more pervasive than it has ever been before.

Jesus Christ's teaching of nonviolence has always been counter-cultural.  It was counter-cultural when Jesus preached and lived it in Roman-occupied Galilee.  It was counter-cultural when Gandhi taught and lived it in British-occupied India.  It was counter-cultural when Martin Luther King taught and lived it against American racism and unjust economic and foreign policies.  It is counter-cultural today.  Convincing Americans that violence is always immoral and that there are nonviolent ways of dealing with the problems we face is a very tough sell.  Trust me on that one.  I try to do it all the time.

The response from the defenders of violence is predictable.  They say:  Nonviolence doesn't work.  Violence is necessary to protect people.  Violence is necessary to defeat the bad guys.  Even those of us who advocate nonviolence might, in the right situation, resort to violence to protect loved ones.  Most of those objections simply are not factually true, and even when they may have some truth in them that modicum of truth doesn't make the use of violence moral.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler because he thought assassinating Hitler was the only way to end the war, but he never maintained that his doing so was moral.  He always said that it was something for which he had to ask God's forgiveness.

For all the arguments in favor of the use of violence, there are two undeniable truths for us Christians.  One, which applies to everyone not just to Christians, is that if humanity will not learn the ethic of nonviolence we almost surely will destroy ourselves and most of life on earth.  We have the means to do it.  We have have created nuclear weapons that are able to destroy the earth many times over, and humanity has never developed a weapons system that it hasn't used.

The other undeniable truth for Christians in that Jesus taught and lived an ethic of nonviolence.  Nonviolence wasn't incidental to Jesus' teaching.  It isn't something that we can say applied only to particular social conditions of his time and place.  For Jesus nonviolence was nothing less than the way of God.  We must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent.  Nonviolence was the way of God that Jesus taught with his words and lived with his life.  To follow Jesus is to follow the way of nonviolence.  Christians can and do reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence all the time, but no Christian can reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence and truly claim to be following Jesus in that rejection.  To resort to violence is to turn one's back on Jesus.  I simply can see no way to avoid that truth.

Violence is now our norm here in the United States of America, but it can never be the norm for a Christian.  The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to the way of nonviolence.  The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to an ethic and to a life that is counter-cultural.  The faith of Jesus Christ puts us at odds with our culture in many ways, but one of the most fundamental of those ways is how it puts us at odds with our culture of violence.  Being at odds with one's culture isn't easy.  I often think that it would be a whole lot easier, and life might be a lot more fun,  if I could just go along with the ways of my culture, the ways of violence, the ways of consumerism, the ways of economic injustice.  The problem is, I'm a Christian.  Violence is the American cultural norm, but it is not and will not be mine.  Am I sure that I can live according to the ethic of nonviolence in every hypothetical situation I or some proponent of violence can dream up?  No.  I am not Jesus Christ, and I know that I am his fallible follower.  Still, nonviolence is the ethic of Jesus, and I will be true to it to the best of my limited human ability.  As a Christian I can do no other.

The Empire Strikes Back

I don't often post my sermons on this blog.  You can find them at the Sermon Archive section of monroeucc.org if you want to see them.  This one, which I gave on Nov. 20, 2011, is, I think, so timely and so important that I am putting it up here on my blog.

The Empire Strikes Back

A Meditation for Christ the King Sunday

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 20, 2011

Scripture:  Matthew 25:31-46

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I imagine that most of you are familiar with the Star Wars movies.  In the first of those movies to be made (which turned out to be the fourth movie in the series—go figure) the rebels who are fighting the evil empire have some success in defeating the military forces of the empire, destroying its “Death Star,” a fearful weapon that had destroyed the home planet of some of the rebels.  The title of the second movie to be made (which turned out to be the fifth movie in the series—go figure) is “Star Wars:  The Empire Strikes Back.”  The demonic empire doesn’t back down and roll over in the face of the threat from the forces of liberation.  It fights back—hard.  The rebels pay a steep price for their resistance to the forces of empire.

Now, I wouldn’t be talking about the Star Wars movies in a sermon if I thought that they were merely sci-fi adventure stories, but pretty clearly they are not merely sci-fi adventure stories.  They are true myths, that is, they are stories that speak a truth about the spiritual forces, good and evil, that are at work in the world.  They speak specifically about the spiritual force of empire. 

As the theologian Walter wink has reminded us, all human institutions have a spiritual dimension to them.  The technical term for the spiritual dimension of an institution is its “power.”  Human institutions are somehow more than the sum of their parts.  They behave in ways that aren’t dependent solely on the will of the individuals who make them up.  They have a spiritual essence of their own, that is, they have their “power,” which is the spiritual side of their existence.  Power here doesn’t mean force or even the ability to do things or make others do things.  It refers to an autonomous being that is spiritual rather than physical.  Everything in creation has its power.  An institution’s power is its spirit, it is the way in which the character of an institution is maintained over time even though the people in the institution change.  All human organizations—governments, corporations, universities, service clubs, churches, every human organization—has its power.  Ideas and concepts have their powers too.  In our country the powers of nationalism and consumerism are particularly strong and active.  The powers are invisible, but they are the strongest forces at work in the world other than, we hope, God.  Every human institution acts according to its power.  That’s why groups of humans will do things that the individual humans in them would never do on their own, as when people who in civilian life would never think of taking another human life have no compunction about doing it when they are part of a nation’s military engaged in warfare.  They act not according to their own character but according to the power, the spiritual essence, of the military of which they are a part.

The powers are often demonic, which means that, like individual humans, they often act in ways other than the ways that God their creator intends and desires that they act.  Under the influence of their power, institutions act for their own self-preservation rather than for the good of God’s people.  They use violence to perpetuate their own might, caring more for status and influence than for justice.  Lucas’ empire of the Star Wars movies is a brilliant depiction of the spiritual power of empire, not only as it exists in a galaxy far, far away but as it exists in this world here and now.  That’s what makes the Star Wars movies so compelling.  They are mythic stories about, among other things, the power of a very real worldly institution, empire.

There have been empires in the world for as long as there have been written records of human institutions.  One very appropriate way to look at human history is to see it as a succession of empires—Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, the Arab Empire the Turkish Empire, the British Empire.  Each has risen, had a period of domination, and fallen again, and despite significant differences between them all of these empires have acted in some similar fundamental ways.  They have all established, defended, and tried to perpetuate themselves through the use of violence.  They have all been ruled, through one mechanism or another, by an elite of the wealthy.  They have all put their own power and survival ahead of all other concerns, and they have all claimed to bring peace, security, and prosperity to their people through the liberal application of force.  Those similarities reveal the power of empire in the technical sense of that word.

           Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, what we used to call Christ the King Sunday.  The parable of the Judgment of the Nations that we just heard calls Jesus “king.”  In the first three Gospels Jesus proclaims not himself (as he does in John) but something he calls “the Kingdom of God.”  The original Greek word in the Gospels that gets translated as “kingdom” is basilea, a word that in other contexts gets translated as “empire.”  We could very appropriately say not the Kingdom of God but the Empire of God. 

What Jesus taught and showed with his life is what we could call counter-empire, that is, empire the way God intends and wants it to be, in sharp contrast to empire the way it actually is in the world.  He showed us what empire is like when it is not fallen, when it is not demonic.  We see a little bit of that teaching in Matthew’s judgment of the nations scene.  That parable, like virtually everything else Jesus said and did, turns the world upside down.  It raises “the least” to the level of Jesus Christ himself.  “The least” here clearly means the ones the world thinks of as the least—the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  This parable puts them on top, making them of equal value with Jesus Christ himself.  In the empire of God, the least are the most.

           Empire isn’t a concept that applies only to other people and other times.  Many of us Americans today have come to understand our country in terms of empire.  The United States may not have anyone we call the emperor or even the king, but we are nonetheless the dominant world empire of our time.  We see our imperial status in the way the country was formed by expanding and taking over land that had belonged to others, to the native nations, to Mexico, and others.  We see it in the way we use our military power today to project and to protect our supposed economic and political interests around the world.  Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11 are perfect examples of the working of the power of empire.  Empire uses military force to project itself in the world, and the United States has done that more times than we can keep track of.  President Obama, our current emperor, just last week announced a new deal with Australia that will have us creating a new military presence on the north coast of that country, a move in pure imperial style to protect our supposed interests from a supposed threat from a competing empire, China.  We have some sort of military presence in over 150 countries around the world.  We spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined spends on theirs.  We are indeed today’s world empire. 

          We see our imperial nature at home too.  Just one quick statistic:  In 2007 the top 1% of our population owned one half of all of our country’s wealth, and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite few that we have observed since the 1980s has only accelerated in the years since 2007.  We think we’re a democracy, but those are the wealth distribution figures of empire; and empire can never coexist with democracy for long. 

          We are empire, and the empire strikes back.  It strikes back against anything that it perceives as a threat.  Last week it struck back across the country against the Occupy movement, a movement that names the radical income and wealth disparity in our country and calls it undemocratic.  The power of empire acts in ways blunt and in ways subtle to perpetuate empire.  The various police agencies who dispersed Occupy groups across the country recently may not have consciously coordinated their efforts, but in the combined assaults on Occupy groups across the country we see the power of empire, that is, the spiritual dimension of empire, asserting itself through those various police agencies. 

          We also see it in the way the so-called “mainstream media” reported the assault on the Occupy movement.  NPR, for example, reported the authorities in New York justifying that assault by pointing to the First Amendment, saying it guarantees the right to gather but not the right to encamp, that is, it’s ok if you gather in protest as long as you don’t do it for too long or too effectively.  Sources less beholden to the empire for their financing reported a real attack, with police destroying property and assaulting protesters.  In Seattle King 5, a mainstream media outlet, reported the attack on Occupy demonstrators in downtown Seattle with pepper spray as a reasonable response to provocation from the demonstrators.  On the other hand, the Rev. Rich Lang, a local United Methodist pastor and activist, reports how he was temporarily blinded by pepper spray as, dressed in clerical garb and wearing a cross, he tried to separate police and protestors.  He was not threat to anyone.  An 84 year old woman was also attacked with pepper spray.  Are we supposed to believe that she was a threat to the police?  Lang speaks not of a reasonable police response to provocation but of the reality of police brutality and a breakdown in discipline among the police, who continued attacking protestors well after any conceivable reason for doing so had ended, not that there ever really was one to begin with.  The spirit of empire affects every aspect of American life.  Some Americans are finally starting to wake up to that reality.

          Today we celebrate Reign of Christ, or Christ the King, Sunday.  We could call it Christ the Emperor Sunday, but Christ’s empire is radically different from the empires of the world.  It is an empire in which the last are first and the first are last.  It is an empire in which peace is attained through nonviolence and justice rather than through violence and oppression.  Unlike in the world’s empires, in Christ’s empire people are more important than profit; and all have enough because no one has too much.

          Christ the King calls us to the task of building God’s empire of peace and justice. To do that we must dismantle the structures of worldly empire.  We must renounce militarism and the use of violence as a tool of national policy.  We must overturn structures that create and perpetuate the power of the wealthy at the cost of the welfare of God’s people and of God’s good creation.  If we do, the empire will strike back.  Of that there is no doubt.  It struck back against Jesus, crushing him like an annoying gnat and thinking that that act of violence destroyed his word of the Kingdom of God.  It didn’t.  It didn’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God then, and the violence of empire can’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God today. 

Today is Christ the King Sunday.  We know what Christ calls us to do.  Are we ready really to accept Christ as our king?  Are we ready to renounce the power of empire and really work for the building of the Kingdom of God?  It isn’t easy.  The empire strikes back.  Jesus knew that the empire strikes back, but that threat didn’t stop him.  Will it stop us?  Amen.

A Veterans Day Meditation on American Heroes

It’s Veterans Day here in the United States of America.  Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal this year that it usually is.  Maybe that’s because it falls on a Friday this year, thereby creating an uncommon three day weekend for some.  Or maybe it’s because today is 11/11/11, a once a century date that some think has some sort of mystic or magic significance.  (Earlier today I saw the time of 11:11 on a digital clock, making it 11:11 on 11/11/11, yet nothing mystic or magic happened. Go figure.)  Maybe those things explain why Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal than usual today, but I suspect that there is a less benign reason why we now make such a big deal out of Veterans Day.  I suspect that we make such a big deal out of Veterans Day because the demonic myth is growing and spreading among us that everyone who serves or who has ever served in the American military is a “hero.”  For example, as I write this I have on the television the “Carrier Classic,” a college basketball game being played on the USS Carl Vinson, a huge American aircraft carrier.  The ESPN crew sits behind a desk with a big banner in front that reads “America’s Heroes.”  QED.  I have written on American militarism before.  See in particular the post on this blog titled “Christianity and American Militarism:  Comments Prompted By President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech,” posted on January 26, 2011.  I will not repeat here what I said there, but I reaffirm here everything that I said there.  Here I want to reflect more on the way that we call everyone in the American military a hero and to ask:  As it relates to the question of the military, who are the real heroes in American life?  Who should we, as Christians, really be celebrating?

The way in which we call everyone in the American military today a hero is tremendously destructive.  It is destructive first of all because it isn't factually true.  It’s not that some, perhaps many, American military men and women don’t commit acts of heroism.  They do.  They commit acts of bravery and self-sacrifice under the horrific conditions of war.  They engage in acts of service to people at home and around the world in times of natural disaster.  It is not my intent here to deny those facts or to minimize them.  Yet it is also undeniably true that most people in the military lead ordinary, routine lives, going to work each day, raising families, living lives no more heroic than the lives the rest of us live.  It simply is not factually true that everyone in the American military is, in any meaningful sense, a hero.

That, however, is not my main point here.  Rather, what I most want to say is that calling everyone in the military a hero is profoundly destructive in a more fundamental way.  Calling everyone in the American military a hero is destructive because it makes it more difficult than ever to criticize American militarism and to oppose the way in which we use the armed forces to project aggressive American imperial power around the world.  After all, if the American military is made up entirely of heroes, then whatever they do must, by definition, be heroic.  It must be honorable.  It must be something we all should, indeed we all must, support.  Criticizing any use of the military becomes an attack on heroes, and what decent person would attack heroes?  The myth of the American military as made up entirely of heroes is one of the primary tools that the powers use today to perpetuate empire, to perpetuate a culture of violence and the lie of American superiority over other people in the world.

Let me suggest that there is another group of Americans, much less well-known and totally uncelebrated in our public life, who are indeed heroes whom we should be honoring today.  They are the men (mostly) who, in a time when service in the military was mandatory for those who were drafted (i.e., forced involuntarily into service in the imperial war machine), refused to serve in the military out of convictions of faith and conviction of conscience.  Some of these men were Christians from the historic peace churches—Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and some others.  These men could sometimes get conscientious objector status.  Others were Christians or not Christians at all who for whatever reason were not able to obtain that status.  Some went to jail.  Some fled the country.  All of them are heroes.  They are heroes because they took great personal risk in order to be true to the teachings of their faith or true to the dictates of their conscience.  They took a risk, and many of them suffered, to be true to the ethic of nonviolence.  Christian or not they all were witnessing to the truth of the way of nonviolence..  They took a stand for the way that truly makes for peace, for nonviolence, which Jesus taught was the way of God.

What is a hero?  A hero is someone who risks much to save others.  A hero is one who risks much to take a stand for conscience, to stand for what is right when doing so isn’t popular, won’t be understood, and can have significant negative consequences for the person taking the stand.  Americans who have said no to the war machine have risked much to save the world from violence.  They have taken a stand for conscience, stood for what is right, when what they have done has not been popular, has been misunderstood, and has often had significant negative consequences for them.  They are heroes.  The world may not see them as heroes, but Jesus said “my kingdom is not from this world.”  John 18:36  They may not be heroes by the standards of the kingdoms of the world, grounded in violence, but they are heroes by the standards of the Kingdom of God, grounded in nonviolence. 

So today I celebrate the heroes.  I celebrate the heroes of the Kingdom of God, the heroes not of the world’s way of violence but of God’s way of nonviolence.  Those who have refused to fight and all who have devoted their lives to ending war, to working toward a world in which no one would ever fight again.  They are not “veterans.”  No one plays basketball games on aircraft carriers, or anywhere else, to honor them.  The world does not celebrate them.  The world mostly condemns them, but then the world condemned Jesus too.  Our call as Christians is to be true to the Kingdom of God, not to the empires of the world.  So today let us celebrate some real heroes, heroes of the Kingdom, heroes of faith, heroes of conscience.