16th
Sunday after Pentecost; Yr. C, September 8, 2013
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
Sermon
preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
Nothing has been more in the news this past week than the situation in
Syria, and the proposed military action the president set before Congress. I have heard about it on the radio, on
numerous postings on Facebook, on TV news and NPR talk shows. Everyone is talking about it, and offering
their own opinion. To all of that, I
say, thank God. I am so grateful that
the president did not just run ahead and act on his own. I’m grateful that he didn’t call Congress
back early to make a rushed decision.
I’m glad that we’ve all had the opportunity to talk about what’s
happened and what’s been proposed. I
don’t know how this will all end up, and I don’t want to guess at the political
side of all this … I’m just happy that we’re talking about it.
Clearly, no one can
dispute what has happened and continues to happen in Syria. The government there is killing its own
people in massive numbers. Bashar
al-Assad’s government is a modern day reign of terror. He has killed and made homeless hundreds of
thousands of people, and in one chemical weapons attack, almost 1500 people,
400 of them children, died horrible deaths.
Given the far-reaching hand of our surveillance capabilities, I would
guess that our president, members of Congress and many in the Department of
Defense have had to watch satellite footage of the carnage. No doubt, that experience has had some
influence in moving them to take the side of military intervention. I’m thankful that I have not had the
opportunity to watch such events myself.
I don’t know how I would endure the powerlessness I’m sure I would feel
watching the innocent suffer, watching children die. In the face of such helplessness, I’m pretty
sure I would want to respond with power, to make someone pay, to put an end to
the suffering … first and foremost my own.
It’s difficult for me to sit with pain.
15 See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and
adversity. 16 If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I
am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and
observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and
become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are
entering to possess. 17 But if your heart turns away and you do not
hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, 18 I
declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land
that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. 19 I call heaven
and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and
death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may
live, 20 loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him;
for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land
that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to
Jacob.
Obey the commandments of the
Lord. Walk in the Lord’s ways. Observe God’s decrees, God’s commandments,
God’s ordinances. Do not follow false
gods. Choose life. It all sounds so simple. The Israelites have been wandering in the
desert for forty years, and Moses is in the middle of his farewell address to
them. They are standing on the edge of a
new age. Moses is asking them to choose
who they will be, and how they will act in this new phase of their life in
covenant relationship with their God.
Moses won’t be there to guide them.
They need to choose for themselves.
We also stand at the edge of a chasm. We are walking into uncharted waters after
years – centuries even – of doing things a certain way, of responding to
violence with more violence. A friend of
mine recently posted this quote from Thomas Merton on Facebook. “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.
It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth
and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” (Thomas Merton) Will we, as Christians, be a
people of peace, or a people of war?
Will we seek retribution or will reconciliation be our goal? Peacemaking is hard and difficult work. It means we have to sit with pain.
If we call ourselves Christians,
then we must surely seek to follow the example of Christ, a leader who always
stood with the vulnerable. Jim Wallis of
Sojourner magazine reminds us that that is where we need to be now, with the
vulnerable.[1] There is a humanitarian crisis beyond almost
anything we’ve seen before in the Middle East.
A third of the Syrian population is now homeless. A million refugees have flooded into Lebanon
alone. It’s the Syrian people who
desperately need our help and a military intervention most likely won’t help
them. In fact, it will likely involve
civilian casualties, and lead to more violent responses in the region. Wallis urges us to work with other countries
to provide for all those who have been displaced, to help move others out of
harm’s way, and to support those countries who are taking in the refugees. In the name of Christ, we can stand with
those who are suffering without succumbing to that deep desire to strike back.
Wallis doesn’t absolve anyone from
being held accountable for the abhorrent crimes that have been perpetrated
against the Syrian people. In fact, Wallis
calls for our nation to work relentlessly to bring about justice by uniting the
international community. He says, “put him [al-Assad] on trial in absentia to
prove that he used chemical weapons against innocent civilians, bring his
criminality to the United Nations and other international bodies, and then
surround him with global rejection, isolation, and punishment”.[2]
Daryl Byler, a former regional
director of an international humanitarian organization, who lived in Jordan for
six years has talked to numerous contacts in the Middles East about U. S.
military intervention. None of them (whether
they support al-Assad or not) see it as a useful intervention. He says, “Even if military strikes substantially weaken the Syrian government,
can the United States be certain that the conditions on the ground are
conducive for the formation of a new government that will better serve the
interests of all Syrian people? The Middle East is an honor and shame culture.
A far more effective response would be to work with Arab governments to broadly
expose the evidence of chemical warfare, using pictures and stories of innocent
children and civilians to publicly shame those who perpetrated inhuman acts.”[3] That kind of strategy might not seem like
much of a response to us given the magnitude of the crime, but that’s because we
don’t really understand the power of honor and shame; we don’t experience the
prosperity of honor or the curse of shame that’s at work in much of the Middle
East.
I
have found myself deeply disturbed by these last few days. I desperately want the killing to stop, so
badly in fact that I considered military strikes not only unavoidable, but
perhaps even justified after the recent atrocity. As I’ve looked at comments posted by
Christian friends on Facebook, and read perspectives from some of our Christian
leaders, and been reminded of some of the statements made by Christian
peacemakers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Merton … I began to wonder
if I was giving in to violence more for my own sake, than for others. Was I trying to soothe my own feeling of
helplessness behind a few tomahawk missiles carefully aimed at those who would
find no compassion in me? Perhaps.
But
I am a Christian, and a follower of Christ.
I am called to choose life, not death … life for me and for all
others. God is crying for the Syrian
people, and I am convinced that God is using all God’s power to move our world
toward peace. “Peace demands the most heroic labor
and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It
demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of
conscience.” (Thomas Merton) May we as
individuals and a nation, seek the ways of peace, especially when the seductive
pull of power tugs us toward violence. It
is the power of love and justice that will lead us to peace … not the use of
force. Please pray for peace as our
nation’s leaders come together in the next few days to make decisions that will
impact the world, and our future. Pray
for all those who have died, and for the living who desperately need the
world’s help. Pray that we do not turn a
blind eye to the suffering, but instead bring it vividly, and irrefutably, to
the world’s attention, especially to those who are supporting the Syrian
regime, and demand justice. Pray for
strength in the midst of powerlessness.
Pray for life, not death, so that we may live … so we all might live.
Amen.
[1]
Wallis, Jim.
Respond, But How? What We're Missing On Syria. 9/5/2013. http://sojo.net/blogs/2013/09/05/respond-how-what-were-missing-syria#.Uis39lq59ek.email.
[3]
Byler, J. Daryl. Byler: Don’t
strike; shame the perpetrators. Times
Dispatch.com. 9/5/2013.
http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/guest-columnists/byler-don-t-strike-shame-the-perpetrators/article_f8a21f45-c6b9-52bc-a12d-45636c3051fd.html.
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