Friday, September 21, two days ago as I write this, was International Day of Peace. Today at my church in Monroe, Washington, USA, we had a worship service devoted to the theme of peace. We dedicated a peace pole our children and some adult volunteers made last summer. I gave a sermon with the title "Stop the Madness!" It begins with a story that I have already told in this blog, in a post near the beginning of the blog back in 2010 with the title "A Day at Gettysburg." That story is worth telling again. The message of that story and of my sermon today, that war is madness that we simply must stop, is worth posting here. So here is that sermon. May it inspire at least a few to undertake the hard and necessary work of peace.
Stop the Madness!
Rev. Tom Sorenson
September 23, 2012
Scripture: James
3:13-4:2c
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 may have told this story here
before, but on this Sunday when we mark International Day of Peace and dedicate
the peace pole the children made last summer it is worth telling it again. It was February 1991, or maybe 1992. It doesn’t matter. I was practicing law, and I had gone to
central Pennsylvania to take some depositions in a case I was working on. I had a free afternoon, so I went to the
Gettysburg National Military Park, the site of the Battle of Gettysburg during
the Civil War, one of our country’s first national cemeteries, and the place
where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address. It was a beautiful winter afternoon, clear,
still, and cold. Because it was a
weekday in winter I had the place almost to myself. I walked the grounds alone, in silence. I read the Gettysburg Address inscribed on
the monument erected on the spot where Lincoln gave it. I learned the story of the battle, how over
the course of three days more than seven thousand Americans died and many times
that number were wounded. I read about
Pickett’s Charge, when Confederate soldiers ran headlong into the Union guns
and were mowed down in their hundreds. I
saw the place where it happened, now lovely, peaceful Pennsylvania countryside;
and I tried to imagine the horror that had turned those peaceful fields into an
earthly hell. I saw the graves, row upon
row upon row of the graves of the Union soldiers who died there. They didn’t bury the Confederate dead there,
but I knew that even more of them died in that place.
I was stunned. I was overwhelmed. I was
heartsick, and one thought came to me again and again. It wasn’t a thought about the heroism of
those days, though heroism there surely was.
It wasn’t a thought about honor, for I could see no honor in what had
happened there. It wasn’t about the
rightness of the Union cause and the wrongness of the Confederate cause, though
surely the Confederate cause of preserving slavery was wrong—very, very wrong.
The thought that I couldn’t get out of my head was “madness.” The madness of what had happened there. The madness of that battle and of that war in
which more Americans died than died in all our other wars combined (World War
II included), for everyone who died on both sides of the Civil War was an
American. The madness of all war, the
madness of nations sending people, mostly young men, to kill and to die; and
the madness of people being willing to do it.
The madness of thinking that war is a normal and acceptable human
activity. The madness of thinking that
the slaughter of other human beings can be honorable and noble. In the still, cold air of a sunny winter day
in Pennsylvania I felt the madness of war in a way I never had before. I felt it in my bones, in my heart, in my
soul. It is a feeling I have never
really forgotten.
It is a feeling that came
rushing back upon me last Tuesday evening as Jane and I watched the PBS special
“Death and the Civil War.” So much
death. So much misery. So much loss.
So much grief. The madness of it
all. Last Tuesday, as we watched that
PBS special, I had already written most of a sermon for today based on the
passage we heard from James about the causes of violence. It was a very heady sermon, analyzing how
disorder in our souls produces violence in the world. It parsed the verses where James says what
the sages of other spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism, have been saying
for a long time. Our text says “For
where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and
wickedness of every kind.” And: “You want something and do not have it; so
you commit murder.” And: “You covet something and cannot obtain it; so
you engage in disputes and conflicts.”
The Buddhists say the same thing more simply: If you want peace in the world, begin by
creating peace in your soul. External
violence comes from internal violence.
And that is true. It is very true. It is profoundly true. James was speaking on the personal level, but
his truth also applies to nations.
Internal disorder leads to actions that disorder the world. We want oil, and we don’t have it. So we invade Iraq, lose several thousand
American lives, and kill many, many times that number of Iraqis. We are attacked. We are angry and afraid; and in our rage we
invade Afghanistan, a place no foreign power has ever successfully
conquered. A place where we are still
fighting, still killing, and still dying, more than ten years later,
perpetuating a conflict that has killed more Afghan people than we will ever
know. A war that has created far more
terrorists than it has killed. Our
spiritual disorder led us to commit acts of violence and destruction on a scale
only a wealthy, technologically advanced country can commit.
And last Tuesday as Jane and I
watched Death and the Civil War I realized that what our Sunday dedicated to
peace needed wasn’t a heady, analytical sermon (as given as we all know I am to
heady, analytical sermons) on the causes of violence. It needed a cri de coeur, a cry of the
heart. So today I give you my cri de
coeur. My cry to myself, to you, to my
country, and to the world: Stop the
madness! Look into your hearts! Look into your own souls for the cause of the
madness, the cause of violence, the cause of war. Discern your greed. Discern your rage. Discern your imperialist ambitions to dominate
the world just to satisfy your own ego and your greed.
We sang “God of Grace and God of
Glory” to open our worship this morning.
I chose it because of its line “Cure your children’s warring
madness.” War is madness. War is death and
destruction. War is pain and loss and
grief. War is lives ended and lives
destroyed. And war is unnecessary. Nonviolent action can always prevent war if
it is used creatively, assertively, consistently, and early. War is always a failure of the human
imagination, of the human spirit. War
may be the way of the world, but it is not God’s way. It must not be our way.
In that PBS program Death and
the Civil War Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
that our most sacred duty is to care for those who fought for our country and
to treat the bodies of those who died fighting with dignity and respect. My friends, that may be a sacred duty, indeed
I believe that it is a sacred duty as long as we keep fighting wars; but it not
our most sacred duty. Our most sacred duty is to see to it that
there are no more people who fought for our country to care for, no more dead
military bodies to respect, because there are no more wars. When will we get it? When will we wake up? When will we stop the madness? The time is now, not tomorrow. Stop the madness! Stop it now!
Amen.
