“God Weeps: How Much Re-membering
Can We Bare/Bear?”
Rev. Susan Adams, a missionary in Japan for
13 years, now a volunteer at the Asian Rural Institute in Tochigi
Prefecture, Japan, has been our close friend since her days as a student
pastor 30 years ago. I just learned last night that for the website for the
United Church of Christ she has written this prayer, “Remember and
Transform: A Responsive Prayer on Hiroshima Day, Friday, August 6, or the
Sunday preceding or following.” I invite us to close our eyes and receive
these words in the way of meditation –
At 8:15 in the morning
of August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was
dropped from a USA
B-29 bomber on Hiroshima, Japan. More than
one hundred seventy
thousand people died instantly or within
hours. Few were
soldiers. This prayer brings that tragedy before God once
again. It expresses
both lament and longing – a long for peace.
Let us join in prayer
on this day of remembrance for Hiroshima, to
recall the past, to be
challenged in the present, and to seek hope for the future.
O God of power,
gracious in love, you gave humankind responsibility
to care for all the
earth. But often we put our faith in military power
even though you call
us to build a community of trust and love.
By both our actions
and inactions, by our participation in the systems
Of society, we often
become agents of violence and destruction.
O God of all, out of
death and despair, turn Hiroshima into a symbol
of hope that nuclear
weapons will never again be used to kill and destroy.
Let us remember
Hiroshima as a beacon – committing ourselves to
find ways to live
together in peace. May we not be just peace lovers
but peacemakers.
O God of infinite
possibility, transform our hearts and minds. Give us
courage to use our
skills and technology to transform weapons
that destroy into
gifts that cherish all of life.
Isaiah said: “It shall
come to pass that the peoples shall beat their
swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.”
O God, make your
vision real when “nation shall not lift up sword
against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.”
O God, forgive,
transform, bring your peace. Amen.
“More than one hundred seventy thousand
people died instantly or within hours. Few were soldiers.” No wonder God
weeps. War in our times, with our technologies, knows no limits, respects
no bounds. It is strictly uncontainable, uncontrollable. War’s side
effects live and fester in us unawares. There is no conceivable good served
by war any more. Jeanmarie Simpson, author of “A Single Woman,” the life
and times of first US Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin, passionate pacifist in
behalf of all women, all children everywhere, reminds us, “In a hundred
years, nearly 200 million civilians have died on this beautiful Earth at the
hands of armies, governments, causes and platforms . . . We must seriously
explore alternatives to war, or we will continue dancing toward certain
obliteration.” Yet themes of military experience and expertise, preparation
and determination in war, with barely a reference to war’s causes and the
scandals of global imbalance, injustice, dysfunction, resound from all of
our candidates for highest office.
Shirley Erena Murray’s hymn we just sang
portrays God weeping, God bleeding, God crying, God waiting, -- like any
so-called “normal parent,” anguishing over God’s children, especially over
God’s “chosen child,” embodiment of God’s life, God’s light, God’s hope, for
all the nations, all the peoples, all the children, all the creatures. God
weeps because God loves, God cares, like any parent, any adult, with hopes
and dreams for the children. God is forever offering us calls out of Egypt,
out of what numbs and dumbs us, out of whatever pain and suffering, loss and
grieving, leave us feeling most helpless and hopeless. God calls from those
tragic circumstances and conditions we come to accept as inevitable,-- so
many forms of bondage, so many forms of “blindage.” God calls us to
freedom, to trust, to compassion, to solidarity. We grow resentful, go our
own ways, choose our own gods, create our own idols, serve our own masters
of war.
We get addicted to our own powers to “play
God,” powers to punish, hurt and destroy. Are we doomed to return to
Egypt? To abandon our quest for freedom and to settle for new domination
instead? Might we not become so able and so willing at oppressing ourselves
that we need no one else to oppress us? In the names of our safety, our
strength, our security? Where does it say that the rest of the world exists
to supply our resources and serve our well-being? Are we all together in
this world, on this earth, or not? Where are our cries for global
well-being? Where is our commitment to our same incredible powers for good
as for evil? For creation as for destruction? Jeanette Rankin says we can
no more win a war any more than we can win an earthquake! How dare we
explain our insistence to turn away from the God who weeps for us and calls
us home?
Hosea the prophet concludes God has every
right to justify punishment even against God’s own chosen child. Yet how
can God, how can any parent, give up? Abandon our children, whatever the
cost? God is the one who remembers, the one who renews, the one who repairs
and restores, -- in the spirit of Carter Heyward’s words, “To forgive is not
to forget, but rather re-member whatever has been dismembered. We must
recall as many, and as much, and as far back as we can bear.” We are not
asked to be God, my sisters and brothers, -- thank God! We are not asked to
pretend to superhuman qualities of grace and goodness. But we are asked, in
every possible way, to let God be God of our lives! To let God work grace
and goodness within us and through us. We are asked always to start our
prayers with ourselves, that we may be open, receptive, made new again by
the word and the work of God in our lives.
God knows God has every right to be angry!
God has all the power to punish and to destroy – even as we do! But God’s
nature is to be as the Holy One in our midst. God is the alternative one,
the one who surprises, the one who creates, the one who starts over again,
-- even as the potter keeps working the clay through one false start after
another. Jesus embodies that God for us. Jesus so often, as in this story,
chooses not to exercise lordship, not to exercise judgment over others.
Jesus will not decide for us what we can decide for ourselves. Rather Jesus
chooses to take our questions and push our questions deeper. Jesus asks us
to go to the heart of whatever the issues we face, -- and to find there
questions we may never have asked, alternatives we may never have seen,
choices we may never have entertained, in our lives before!
God the weeping, loving, caring,
compassionate parent here, chooses to be “holy.” (a four-letter word among
our children growing up in the parsonage!) God chooses to be different,
chooses to do what we might least expect God to do. And we can be “holy,”
too! John Wesley, our founder, says we can be personally holy, and socially
holy as well! For the sake of any just one of us, God is committed to
saving all whom God possibly can! For the sakes of Jesus, Moses, Buddha,
Mohammad, Jeannette Rankin, -- and all others whom we hold holy in life!
Let us imagine even that one just person from each of our own lives! That
one person in whom we could see and hear “holiness” at its best -- God
showing and speaking through! In whom we could place our most trust and
hope.
It’s all about knowing, accepting the limits
of our own powers. God’s will to love, like that of any parent, finally
proves stronger than God’s will to punish. Wars will end only when we, like
God, refuse any longer to punish, -- either “our” children or “their”
children – whoever “they” may be. Wars will end when the men and the women
parents of this world agree and unite to refuse to kill one another’s
children any more. Refuse to give our own children up for killing any
more. Only then may our children themselves also choose to refuse to kill
any more. Jeanette Rankin puts it to us as God might put it to us –
“Men and women are like right and left
hands: it doesn’t make sense not to use both. Women have something special
to contribute to the progress of civilization. A mother experiences what it
means to care daily for the gradual growth and maturing of her beloved
children. Her life is given for her children, not by her death but by her
living, in her looking always to the future, towards the fulfillment of her
ideal. Self-control, compassion, honesty, integrity, and love must be
conceived in our minds, incarnated through our daily actions and living, and
patiently sustained in adversity. To go in the direction of the threat, to
face the enemy with our precious lives and the lives of our children and our
children’s children in our hands, to seek humanity in the hearts of our
enemies – this is the great work of mothers and of nations.” She pauses
before she says, “A dead enemy cannot become our friend.” Is it not finally
so obvious to any parent? Any lover of children? Any lover of life? “A
dead enemy cannot become our friend.” And, Amen.
Rev. John Auer
