“Hiroshima Haunting: Walking the
Water, Daring the Dream”
As we say in our bulletin this morning,
we remember the only atomic bombings in the history of the world --the only
destructive use ever of the very energy God uses to create and sustain the
universe and all of life -- because remembering life is sacred work for us.
It is the work our Lord Jesus gives us to do anew each time we break bread
and share cup in his name – Do this remembering me! Remembering life! We
are not reliving past or projecting future horrors. We are not assigning
guilt or blame. We are acknowledging that we human beings -- youngest, most
precocious, most precarious of all species -- like Icarus we have challenged
the sun, God’s very source and substance of life itself. That accounts for
the sunflowers in the bowls of water on the communion table today. We are
invited to come to the waters in memory of the insatiable thirsts of atomic
victims.
Yesterday the world held its breath while
sailors were rescued off the ocean floor. Tomorrow the world will hold its
breath till astronauts safely return from space. We know in our hearts how
delicate, how fragile, how vulnerable all of life is in this world. With
nuclear weapons the fate of the world, our only Earth, lies literally in our
hands. All of us in every nation are subject to nuclear terror. It started
with us. It can end with us. For our own sake, for the sake of all other
peoples, all other creatures, for the sake of our children and children’s
children, we can do something, somehow, somewhere, starting now.
As Carter Heyward puts it, “To forgive is
not to forget, but rather to re-member whatever has been dismembered. We
must recall as many, and as much, and as far back as we can bear.” I would
say we can never know too much about ourselves – about our own deepest, most
hidden selves -- about one another even all others -- about our species,
here and everywhere on the earth. I remember peace activist Brian Willson
once saying of people anywhere in the world, “We are not worth more. They
are not worth less.” I believe that is the truth. No one anywhere in this
world is worth any more or any less in the sight and the love of God than
anyone else anywhere in this world. Something about the radical
availability and equality of the sacraments -- waters of baptism, bread and
the wine of communion -- says so to us all the time. We are all in this,
all part of this – together! How do we learn to see all we do as acts of
kinship, of solidarity with everyone else on this earth? How do we start
asking of each major choice we make, how am I affecting the lives of others
I cannot see?
Ringing the bells, folding the cranes,
growing the sunflowers, touching the waters – these are for us in these
moments acts of life, acts of love, acts of remembrance, acts of resistance
-- in what poet Denise Levertov calls “the human war with ourselves, / the
war against earth, / against nature.” Even the trees, she claims, are not
indifferent to the slightest attention we give to this task of life-loving,
life-giving. God so loves the world as to give of God’s own flesh and
blood, so that everyone who believes in the Child and the children of God
may not perish but find eternal life! God does not send the Child of God
into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved --
through that child Jesus and through all the children of God! This is the
judgment, that the Light that gives life has come into the world, and we the
people of the world -- so far, to this time -- have loved light that gives
death more than light that gives life.
Sisters and brothers, so much of life
with Jesus, life offered to God, through the Holy Spirit, is all about
choices we make and actions we take. War is not working. Had we noticed?
Weapons of war, for all of the trillions of dollars we have spent on them,
are useless to God in us. How can we call Earth our home and expect to
disarm her if we cannot, will not, even disarm the homes we live in each
day? If we will not disarm our own hearts and minds? Fr. Daniel Berrigan
puts it, “We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and
large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the
peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course,
continues, because the waging of war, by its very nature, is total – but the
waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.” “There is no peace,” he
continues, “because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace
because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at
least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring
disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
I do not know what forms in what times
and places the peacemaking of this congregation is called to take – in our
personal lives as disciples of Jesus, in our life together as the body of
Christ. For some of us right now, I am sure, it seems like enough to make
peace with ourselves -- to make peace with the people we live with and love
-- to make peace with our friends and co-workers and fellow students and
even our neighbors not just down the street but just down the pew!
I do not deny the importance of that. We
have got to start right where we are, with what is the next step for us. We
cannot do all things, especially at once. But when will we see the “big
picture?” When will we be “born again” from above, as Jesus says, to behold
the whole world and to hold it, as gently as God does? We have got to start
somewhere, somehow, doing so now. It may be easy enough for me to say -- as
Julie and I go off for some weeks of renewal by some of the waters of our
life -- but I am prepared to go the distance with any and all of us as we
seek out what it means for us to make peace together – even disgrace, even
prison, even death. Please pray with me on how we are called.
As God in Joseph’s life is looking for us
to dare to dream God’s dream for us, even though our own brothers may get in
our way – and as Jesus in Peter’s life is looking for us to walk on the
waters with him, even though we may only get a step or two at a time – so
God in our lives gives us waters to walk by day and dreams to dare by
night. Will we sink? Will we fall? Will we fail? You bet! But will we
have tried? To see the world with God’s love? To hold the world with God’s
care? To pray and to act on the world with God’s justice and peace?
Starting right where we are? Learning, changing, growing? One day, one
step, at a time? Even as Joseph, facing dangers? Even as the disciples,
facing fears? We remember today all who -- no matter what their
relationship to the events -- have lived the last sixty years with
consequences of the bombings. We know how those who had the least to do
with making them happen may have felt the most pain and even most shame and
most guilt – as it is so easy in life for victims to be blamed and blame
themselves. Whereas those who had the most to do with making the bombings
happen may be the last to accept their futility.
What I want to say this morning is that
the haunting of Hiroshima in all of our lives and our life together need
not, can not be only be a haunting of horror. It may -- by the grace of
God, and the courage of all the survivors, along with those who re-member
them -- also be a haunting of hope. This morning, as every morning, is for
us not about blame and guilt. It is, we are, all about faith in Jesus!
Faith in who he is to us, and in what he offers to us as we come to believe
he and his life are the truth about us – our lives and our life together.
There are times when Jesus needs, for his own sake as well as for ours, to
leave us on our own – to go up the mountain by himself to pray, and to let
us discover for ourselves how we are learning, changing, and growing from
him. Often our boat, our life, is battered by waves -- of our own making
and far beyond. Often we get cut off from the land of all we have known and
trusted and found our security in. Often the wind of conviction,
confidence, comfort, convenience turns against us.
Yet at the peak and the worst of the
storm, there is Jesus! Haunting us, like a ghost – even daring the dream
and walking the water for us! Haunting us, like all the ghosts of those
gone before us in faith! Haunting us to dare the dream, walk the water,
ourselves! We may not get very far at a time. But Jesus is there to meet
us -- to reach us, to touch us, to see us with love and to hold us with
care. All Jesus is looking for from us is a “little faith” at a time – just
enough to take that first, often longest and hardest step. Jesus is still
about stilling the wind of our fears and our failures -- our defeats, our
despairs, our destructions, and even our deaths. The poet says of our re-membering
this day –
“We are holding candles: we kneel to set
them / afloat on the dark river / as they do / there in Hiroshima. We are
invoking / saints and prophets, / heroes and heroines of justice and peace,
/ to be with us, to help us / stop the torment of our evil dreams . . . /
Windthreatened flames bob on the current . . . / They don’t get far from
shore. But none capsizes / even in the swell of a boat’s wake. / The waxy
paper cups sheltering them / catch fire. But still the candles / sail their
gold downstream.” Still the candles, all of us, in every land, of every
age, sail our gold downstream. Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
