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July 29, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Hosea
1:2-10, Colossians 2:6-15, Luke 11:1-13
“Praying Peace:
No More by Bow, by Sword, or by War”
How do we like God’s first words to us through
the prophet Hosea? We might as well take a whore as our spouse! We might as
well expect our kids to grow up like whores! In fact, this land produces
nothing but whores – nothing but unfaithfulness, untrustworthiness. I have
heard your cries, God says in effect – I have come to you, and loved you, and
made myself your God. I have made promise and covenant with you -- and you with
me! Now you act as if I don’t exist – as if we had made no commitment to each
other – as if we have no marriage, no union, no mutual responsibility to and for
one another. We are like those who hire whores to make us “feel good” without
any real cost or sacrifice to us. We look for a “feel good” God to substitute
appearances for the real thing.
God is even so desperate as to visit the sins of
us parents upon our children – to give our children names that mean such things
as, “God will reap what God sows.” “These people are not to be pitied.” “These
people are not even my people!” Yet and still, God being who God is, God cannot
help God’s self. God tries again and again. It is primary in God’s nature
never to give up! What else is resurrection but that very refusal of God to
quit on us? But God, thank God, does get smarter! God learns in the process of
loving God’s children – as any good parent does. Even we who are so clearly
“not God,” Jesus says, can do good and decent things for our kids – Imagine how
much more so God can do!
I have been dancing some time now around the
horror of our war in Iraq and how to hold one another responsible
(response-able) and accountable for it. I am hoping, God willing, to come out
and say a few harder things for me to say today – in hopes we can build faithful
dialogue in the direction of consequent action. To me this scripture makes
plain: if God ever was a “war-God,” God is trying to be one no longer. As God
calls Hosea to marry and bear children, God comes to realize that traditional
ways of treating children, of punishing them, do not work! God begins to say no
to war – “I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by war.” If God begins
to respond this way toward us who treat God as whores, and the children of
whores, in a land of whores, we may imagine how God is yet to be changed,
forever and again, by the birth of God’s own child!
Hosea lived and prophesied in a time and a place
where the priests of the palace were just as bought off, just as compromised,
just as much at the service, the beck and the call of our masters in power, as
any whore ever was! The priests of the temple, then and now, are not ourselves
p-r-o-p-h-e-t-s but make ourselves p-r-o-f-i-t-s by biting our tongues, blurring
our visions, forgetting our obligations toward the health and well-being of the
people. We care about how high our salaries (I am so glad to be at the top of
my profession here in downtown Reno!), how fancy our garments, how splendid our
buildings, how large our attendance and offerings, how mighty our music, how
pleasing our praise. But we forgot so conveniently and conventionally -- about
the young and the old, the sick and the poor, the hurt and the homeless, the
immigrant and the imprisoned, and the victims of violence, of terror and war.
And we offer no alternative to the king. Sisters and brothers, that’s where I
want to say we are as “prophets” today, beginning with this one before you – We
are offering no alternative to our king.
Not that the king is any great shakes of courage
or competency. Nor that the king’s court, the king’s legislative and judicial
branches, ever stand up to the king. But if we the people are not offered moral
power, we will settle for military power. Our spending on what we
euphemistically call “defense” has reflected that dilemma for generations now.
President Eisenhower warned against the “military-industrial complex” when he
left office in 1960. It has since grown into a
“military-prison-security-industrial complex” that runs our lives and ruins our
spirits. A recent Gallup Poll says that while only 25 percent of the people put
high trust and confidence in the president, and 14 percent in the congress, only
46 percent put it in churches and organized religions -- whereas 54 percent put
high trust and confidence in the police, and 69 percent in the military! Do we
find anything to give us moral pause about that? Anything
conscience-strickening?
German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer realized under
the Nazi regime how bought and bondaged the churches there had become. He was
arrested for plotting an attack on Hitler and died in a concentration camp days
before the liberation. While in the camp he pondered the future of the church
he saw as ruined by fatal allegiance to an arbitrary and unaccountable
concentration of powers in such a “unitary executive,” as we say – “The time of
words is over,” Bonhoeffer concludes. Paul echoes him here – School’s out on
our faithfulness. We may study our faith to spiritual death. When will we
start living it? When will be stop “feeling good” only and start “doing good”
also? “Our being a Christian today will be limited to two things:” Bonhoeffer
concludes, “prayer and righteous action.”
I am for that, for prayer and righteous action.
I am especially for action based on this particular prayer of Jesus, which is
fully a peace prayer as I see it. It does not charge anyone else with anything
for or against us. It only calls us to ever deeper trust in the God who keeps
coming in and to, with and for us. I am for action that starts with me -- with
putting my own trappings of power, of position and of prestige, limited though
they may be, on the line. For action that moves out from me to others as
colleagues and co-conspirators -- action that has the chance of building a
lasting movement of an enduring change we embody!
Do I think the current administration has
achieved a high degree of impeachability? You bet! Especially with how low the
bar has been set. Do I think, playfully speaking, there is a quicker way to a
woman president than the next election? But where would we start? What part
of our system has not been infected? Executive? Legislative? Judicial?
Military? Moral? How do we impeach an administration that keeps trying so to
capitalize on the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11 -- without also impeaching a
congress that falls for it all without question or real critique? And without
impeaching ourselves, a national people whose national pride stays so wounded
and confused as to believe whatever we are told – so long as it makes us “feel
good” – which is what we expect of church as well! We are so desperate even for
a war that we can “feel good” about once again. I am not against “feeling
good.” I am against it for cheap easy reasons.
For months now I have been delivering versions
of this letter I am about to read to Senators Ensign and Reid and especially to
Representative Heller – who represents not the whole state but us. I have been
writing, refining, sending, delivering this letter because I believe that we as
the church have something to say about the process of confession and change,
repentance and renewal of our moral compass and action. I have been pleading –
Please reassess your support of this war –
and of war and terror as instruments of policy and practice in today’s world.
What can a person of your insight and integrity find encouraging about this war
– for the Iraqis or for us? Please help our nation and world peoples to do the
right and promising thing for all our children. Did you see the picture just in
the paper of a blonde U.S. soldier doing an “eye scan” to build security data on
a brown-eyed Iraqi teenager? Can you imagine how ours or any teenagers would
respond to such invasions of them?
What are we achieving? End our part in
perpetuating this war. Turn to the United Nations. Engage all the nations in
this region so long ravaged by occupation, terror, and war. Declare a new
beginning in search of ways to stop doing harm to each other. Only then may we
find ways to do good to each other.
If war is so effective a solution, why do we
have to keep doing it all the time? Why is military spending so wildly out of
proportion to everything else? Why do we think war is the first (preemption)
and only (escalation) way to fight for values and commitments in the world? The
world only fears, mistrusts and resents us.
I beg you to reconsider this, not only in a
political but in a deeply personal way – in a moral and ethical way – before
making any more talk of “victory” in this war. As a United Methodist I have
failed my brother President Bush by not helping him to find a way to confession
– which is not defeat but wisdom! There is a such a fear across all party lines
of acknowledging that we have been morally and ethically uninspired about this
war. Nothing essentially moral and ethical can be “won” in any way. It must be
risked in real living, growing, relationships.
To me it is totally unconscionable that we
are leaving it to our sons and daughters as soldiers to end this war. They did
not start it. We did. If past experience is any instruction, only when so many
of our soldiers die, and so many of them get wounded, and so many of their needs
go unmet, and so many of them just refuse to fight any more – because their
morality and their ethics are not so negotiable to them as ours are to us – only
then will this war end. I believe that way of ending represents a total failure
of your will and of mine. A much truer “victory” or “success” would be to
confess and start over again.
Sisters and brothers, such confession and such
change must start with each one of us -- with you and with me, right where each
one of us is -- in every relationship and dimension of our own personal and
political life – with our prayer and our righteous action. I am not prepared to
say how that prayer sounds and how that action looks for any one or for all of
us as a congregation. I am not even prepared very often to know how it sounds
and looks for me to confess and to change. I just know as a people of faith we
cannot be faithful without it. God knows that through asking Hosea to bring
kids into the world – much less bringing God’s own kid into the world – seeing
in that Kid the kids of the whole world. Next week we remember the Holocaust
and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We lift up the youthful idealisms
of Anne Frank and Sadako, and celebrate the banners and flags of hope created
for us by Youth ArtWorks.
How shall we “name” our own next generations?
In the way God directs Hosea’s namings here? What life, what place in the
world, what use of their powers as persons and peoples, shall we invite them
to? What blessings, what curses, what choices between life and death are we
leaving to them? What is our legacy, especially of hope to them? How do we
want them to remember us – as they look back upon the prayers and the
non-prayers, the actions and the non-actions of our generation? What do God’s
“pity” and God’s “forgiveness” look like and act like to us? God’s healing and
whole-making love – that God cannot keep from expressing, no matter how many
times we sin against God and one another? Which we know is sinning against our
own best and fullest selves?
What does it look like, and act like, for us to
honor God’s promise as in Jesus’ prayer? To welcome God’s dwelling among us?
To receive our bread day by day – never to waste or to hoard it? To accept our
forgiveness and to forgive others as well? And to stop playing the “hero” to
all? As if evil, trial and temptation, somehow can be defeated by us? Who as
Jesus says are “evil” ourselves? And how does God, how do we, keep from just
giving up? May we promise each other right now -- as those who keep knocking at
midnight -- no matter how inconvenient, or inconvenienced we are, no matter whom
we disturb or what trouble we make – may we promise each other, we will not give
up?
I ask these things in Jesus’ own inconvenient
and troublesome name. Amen.
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