Wars and Rumors of Wars

Many of us pastors feel called to prophesy on different subjects.  Many of my colleagues are passionate most of all about the issue of global warming.  I agree with them, but I feel called most of all to prophesy against violence and for God's way of nonviolence.  On Nov. 17, 2013, I gave a sermon on nonviolence, one of many I have preached.  It got a good reception from many in my congregation.  Here it is.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

November 17, 2013

 

Scripture:  Luke 21:5-19

 

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.

 

The ad runs frequently on the television these days.  In the background Frank Sinatra is singing “I’m gonna live until I die.”  The scene is a computer generated Las Vegas, but this computer generated Las Vegas is a war zone.  It’s not clear who’s attacking whom.  Young men and women are doing combat with the invaders.  They’re blasting away with great glee at enemy manifestations.  At one point a young man asks a young woman “How you doin’?” in a way that is clearly a come on.  She pushes him aside, blasts an enemy flying machine of some sort, then says “Great.  Thanks for asking.”  The hero characters wreak as much destruction on Las Vegas as their enemies do.  They leap off of buildings.  Somehow they end up in outer space, although it isn’t at all clear in the ad how or why.  Then they’re in Jeeps of some sort roaring through a frozen landscape and blasting away at enemies with great joy on their faces.  And all the while Frank Sinatra sings “I’m gonna live until I die,” a swingy, upbeat song about living life to the fullest as long as we have life.  The message is clear:  Living life until you die is making sure all sorts of other people die before you do.  It’s an ad for a video game, and it is unspeakably violent. 

The journal Pediatrics recently published a report on research someone has done into violence and the movie rating system.  The conclusion of the study is that the movies rated PG-13 today contain more acts of violence than movies in the 1980s that were rated R.  The study says that gun violence in PG-13 movies has tripled since 1985, when the PG-13 rating was introduced.  Movies that used to be rated R for violence are rated PG-13 today.  The study says that watching violence doesn’t necessarily make people more violent, although frankly I doubt that conclusion.  There’s some reason why there have been over 28,000 gun deaths in this country since the Sandy Hook school shooting.  I’m sure all the violence in our entertainment hasn’t done anything to lower that number.

Last Monday on Veterans Day we once again saw and heard repeated, ubiquitous praise of the military and of everyone who does or ever has served in it.  I mean no disrespect to military people.  My father served in World War II, and I have a nephew serving in Afghanistan right now.  I respect our military people, I wish them only well, and I do not judge the decision they made to enter the military; but I am frankly disturbed by the way we have taken to calling all American military people heroes.  Everyone who wears an American military uniform or who ever did is now a hero.  I’m sure some of them are heroes in various ways, some through committing incredible acts of courage on behalf of others; but all of them?  Just because they’re in the military?  I don’t think so.  And because we call them all heroes, it’s harder for us to oppose the things our government sends them to do.

A few days before Veterans Day I turned on the pregame show for the Oregon-Georgetown men’s basketball game that was played at an Army base in South Korea.  The ESPN announcers began the show by saying that they thanked all the men and women in the military for “protecting our freedom” and “defending our democracy.”  I thought:  Really?  Is that what they’re doing?  Aren’t they really projecting American imperial power around the world in ways that have nothing to do with defending our freedom and protecting our democracy from actual threats, of which there are in truth rather few?  That’s sure how it seems to me.  But we’re told over and over again that they’re all heroes who are defending and protecting us.  Have we forgotten that the purpose of the military is to inflict destruction, injury, and death on other people?  Have we so romanticized the military that we’ve forgotten that awful truth?  I’m afraid we have.

My friends, we live in a culture that more and more romanticizes violence and glamorizes the military, whose reason for being is violence.  Violence has become the norm in our entertainment.  Violence has become the norm in our presence in the world.  Violence has become the norm of our national life.  Perhaps we don’t want to admit it, but violence is the American way.  To some extent it always has been, but it’s gotten worse.  Much worse.

We’re Americans of course, but here’s the thing.  We’re also Christians; and if our being Christians means anything at all, surely it means that we seek to live according to the will and ways of the God we know in and through Jesus Christ.  We never do it perfectly of course, and you don’t have to agree with me on what I think the divine will and ways are; but please consider.  The God we know in and through Jesus Christ is fundamentally, foundationally, radically nonviolent.  That God just is.  I’m not making that up.  If we read the Gospels with an open mind and without all the filters that established Christianity has put on us, we will see that nonviolence was Jesus’ way.  It was what Jesus taught.  It was what Jesus lived.  It was how Jesus died.  Yes, there is divine violence in the Bible.  But books like Revelation that contain so much divine violence simply contradict the life and the teachings of Jesus.  Jesus lived and taught nonviolence, and he did that because he knew that God is nonviolent.  He knew that God calls us to be nonviolent too.  That’s just how it is.  I’m really not making that up.

Our Gospel passage this morning is part of Luke’s version of what scholars call the little apocalypse of Mark.  Luke took and modified it from Chapter 13 of the Gospel of Mark.  This little apocalypse is difficult and problematic in many ways, but I think there is a message in it for us this morning.  In our version from Luke it says “When you hear of wars and insurrections….”  In Mark, which Luke has modified a bit, the line is “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars….”  Most of what Luke mentions as things that are to come—wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues—sounds to me pretty much like life on earth as usual, not as something that didn’t exist but that is to come.  In any event, those things do describe our present reality pretty well.  Certainly we hear constantly of wars and rumors of wars, to use Mark’s phrase for it.  We have been at war in Afghanistan since 2002.  Within the last thirty years we have been at war in Iraq twice, once for many years with devastating consequences for that country that continue today.  We have used military force in Yugoslavia.  We have engaged in military operations in Somalia and elsewhere.  And rumors of wars?  Recently there were rumors of us going to war in Syria.  We hear rumors of war with Iran or at least of a lot of hawks calling for war with Iran.  Wars and rumors of wars are a normal part of our everyday existence.  We have even made them part of our entertainment.  We watch and digitally manipulate violence for fun.  Luke, and his source Mark, knew whereof they spoke.

So what are we to do?  Well, Luke gives us at least a partial answer to that question.  He says that all the travail that he says will come “will give you an opportunity to testify.”  In the midst of all of the turmoil and suffering of the world, in the midst of wars and rumors of war, we have an opportunity to testify.  As our culture becomes more and more violent, we have an opportunity to testify.  As we expose our children to more and more graphic violence on television, in movies, in video games, and in the news we have an opportunity to testify. 

Luke says we have an opportunity to testify.  I’d say we have a duty to testify.  That video game I talked about at the beginning of this sermon is called Call of Duty.  Well, I hear a call of duty too, only it isn’t a call to violence like that video game is.  It is a call to testify.  Testify yes, but to what?  To the way of nonviolence.  To our Lord of nonviolence.  To our God of nonviolence.  To the sinfulness of violence.  To the harm that all violence does to God’s beloved people (and all people are God’s beloved people).  We have a duty to testify to the harm violence does to God’s good creation.  To the way our human violence hurts, saddens, and even angers God.  To Jesus’ call to all people to a better way, to the way of peace, compassion, forgiveness, and care for all people. 

Friends, I am really disturbed these days by many things—global warming, the takeover of our political system by the richest one or two percent of our population, our refusal to provide health care to all, by the prevalence of homelessness and poverty among us, and many other things as well.  But most of all this morning I’m disturbed by my culture’s violence.  I’m disturbed by the way we glamorize and romanticize violence.  I’m disturbed by the way we see guns and violence as a solution to nearly every problem.  So this morning I testify.  I testify against violence and for Jesus Christ and for God and their way of nonviolence.  We live constantly with wars and rumors of wars.  It’s about time we stopped.  Amen.

That's Not What They're Doing

That’s Not What They’re Doing!

Reflections on the Role of the American Military 

Not long ago I turned on ESPN and got the pregame for a college men’s basketball game between my Oregon Ducks and Georgetown that was to be played at an American Army base in South Korea.  The commentators began their show by thanking every American serving in uniform for “protecting our freedom.”  They called them all heroes for “defending our democracy.”  I mean no disrespect for our people in the military, but I just wanted to scream at the television:  That’s not what they’re doing!  It just flat isn’t.  These simple sportscasters were mouthing the myths of the American military.  We justify maintaining a military apparatus grossly out of proportion to any legitimate defense needs by saying that whatever our military forces are doing it amounts to protecting our freedom and defending our democracy; and it’s all a lie.  The myth we tell connects our people to the military and to the purposes for which our political leaders use it, but it’s all a lie.  That’s not what they’re doing.

Consider the facts.  Who, if anyone, is threatening our freedom and our democracy today, other than the Republican Party of course (and no, I am not advocating using the Army against the Republican Party).  No nation is threatening us through a traditional, organized military force.  Yes, the Russians have the capability of hitting us with long range atomic weapons, but they certainly have no intention of doing so.  Why would they?  They have absolutely nothing to gain from it and human civilization to lose.  We have land borders with only two nations, Canada and Mexico.  We hardly need to spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined like we do to defend ourselves from nonexistent threats from Canada and Mexico.  No nation on earth has the ability to invade us from the sea.  There simply is no conventional military threat to our existence, to our freedom, or our democracy.  There just isn’t.

There is a threat to our safety from terrorists.  There’s no point in denying that painful and tragic reality.  They, however, are hardly a threat to our existence.  If they are a threat to our freedom or our democracy it’s our own doing, not theirs.  We are so willing to compromise our freedoms and pervert our democracy in the name of fighting terrorism that the terrorists have had some success in that regard, and they remain a threat in that way.  Yet what we need to be defended against is less the terrorists themselves than it is our reaction to their threat.  We’re really good at reacting in ways that compromise our freedom and generate wave after wave of new terrorists hell bent on hurting us.  No one can contend that what our military forces are doing is defending us from ourselves, so this reality doesn’t make the claim that our military is defending our freedom and protecting our democracy true.

So clearly our conventional military forces are not defending our freedom and protecting our democracy, so what are they doing?  They are projecting American imperial power around the globe.  We do not have what, by worldly standards, would be a reasonable military force.  We have an imperial military.  We have military forces that function not to defend us but to impose our presence around the world.  They may be protecting some of our interests, or, more correctly, they may be defending some of the interests of the wealthy elite who really run this country.  We have substantial military forces in the Persian Gulf region to protect our oil supply for example.  Our forces may still be fighting Communism, never mind that Communism is dead.  That’s why we still have those forces in South Korea for my Oregon Ducks to play basketball in front of.  It’s not that our military forces don’t function.  It’s not that they don’t have a mission.  That function and that mission are not, however, to defend our freedom and protect our democracy.

So why do we say that those things are their mission?  Why do the American people buy the lie that that is their mission despite all of the undeniable evidence to the contrary?  Because people are gullible.  Because the ruling elites have a massive investment in keeping the American people on the side of the military.  Because we have to convince ourselves that spending those massive amounts of money on the military is somehow worth it.  Because, since thank God we don’t have a draft, the military needs to keep getting people to volunteer for military service.  Because those who volunteer and their families need to believe that they are doing something worthwhile.  There are lots of reasons why we believe that our military is defending our freedom and protecting our democracy.  Problem is, that that claim is true isn’t one of those reasons.  That’s simply not what they are doing.  We will never have a sound, healthy nation until we stop living the lies we tell about our military and start dealing realistically with the world as it actually is.