May 26, 21013
Memorial Day Weekend
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-13
Pine Valley Christian Church
Rev. David Hansen
Memorial Day is a time to remember and honor men and women who have died on the field of battle in wars past and present. It is also a time when we pay tribute to those who have served in the military. We have a number of veterans here in the congregation this morning that we want to recognize and thank. We also want to honor and thank the families of men and women who have and who are serving. They, too, make a great sacrifice. We know this by the high divorce rate among the families of veterans. And consider this number 25:1. In 2011 that was the ratio between the number of veterans who committed suicide and the number of soldiers who died on the battle field. Twenty-five veterans took their own life for every soldier who died in combat. That is a chilling statistic.
And, in 2011, the United States spent $775 billion in the military budget—not including Homeland Security or intelligence. That figure, $775 billion, is 40 percent of the world’s military budget in 2011. The United States spent five times more in its military budget than China. It is the elephant in the room that Congress refuses to talk about.
I think it is important for us to recognize the thank those who have served in the military and those who are there now, and their families. I think it is also important to remember that the first Christians were Conscientious Objectors. They refused to serve in the military. Some refused because they believed war was wrong, some refused to serve because they refused to pledge allegiance to Caesar. Today we still have people who claim CO status on religious grounds. We need to remember that this is an important and honorable part of our tradition.
It was not until the 4th century that the Christian church developed the Just War Theory. That theory guided the church for many centuries. Then during the Vietnam War some church leaders developed a Just Peace Theory as a counter to the Just War Theory. Today we don’t hear a lot of debate about either of these theories. The times have changed.
Contemporary thinking about war and peace, theological thinking about these issues, is framed by a debate between two brothers, H. Richard Niebuhr and his brother Reinhold Niebuhr. They were both important theologians in the last century. And they disagreed with each other. We need to remember what they said as we think about war and peace today.
Before we get to them, I want to say that as a child I used to wear a red poppy on Memorial Day. I brought a painting of a red poppy by my mother. I think it was one of the last things she painted. When I was a child we wore red poppies on Memorial Day and we learned John McCrea’s poem,
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for war and a time for peace. Today I am wondering when peace will have its turn. When will it be a time for peace? I think the United States has been at war or preparing for war for my whole life and even longer than that. Reinhold Niebuhr and his older brother H. Richard debated the issue of war and peace. It is some of the best writing and thinking about this issue that I have read.
Reinhold Niebuhr was the founder of a school of thought called Christian Realism. He was heavily involved in Democratic politics. He and Hubert Humphrey and Eleanor Roosevelt were co-founders of Americans for Democratic Action. But he was not a one party person. Republicans read his work, too. His ideas have influenced presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, who cited Reinhold Niebuhr as his favorite theologian, and every president in between. The neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush have studied Reinhold Niebuhr.
Reinhold Niebuhr famously said that original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith. He believed that self-interest and self-preservation lie close to the heart of our motivation. And what is true for individuals is even truer from groups. He wrote about this in a book that he titled Moral Man and Immoral Society, and in another book called Man’s Nature and His Communities. He said that because of self-interest the best we can hope for is a balance of power between competing centers of self-interest. Conflict, he said, is a given. The best we can do it try to minimize the damage. Early in his ministry he supported strong unions. He said that workers need to have as much power as management so that they can balance the power of management and we can have peace in the workplace. Later he brought his idea into national politics. He supported the idea of a balance of power and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. He supported a strong military presence in the world because he believed that original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith. The laws of self-interest and self-preservation mean that the best we can hope for is to minimize the harm by creating a balance of power between competing interests.
H. Richard Niebuhr did not share his brother’s pessimism, or his belief that original sin as the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith, or his idea that the best we can do is to achieve an approximation of peace through a balance of power. He told his brother that if he was right, then human history is a tragedy and love is nothing more than an ambulance driver racing from one disaster scene to another. Instead of talking about the doctrine of original sin, H. Richard Niebuhr spoke of original love. Instead of talking about the balance of power, he talked about the power of love. He said that the purpose of the church and its ministry is to increase among all people the love of God and the love of neighbor. We need to be as serious about love as we are about war. H. Richard believed that we need to devote our resources and energy to increasing the power of love.
The good news is that the brothers remained friends, but they never settled this disagreement. And that is as it should be. We each have to decide what we believe. Is sin the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith? Or, is love more than an ambulance driver rushing from one tragedy to the next? Is there a time for peace?
David Stockman, who was President Reagan’s Secretary of the Treasury, recently said that the United States is, or is becoming, a warfare state. Last week President Obama said that democracy cannot endure in a perpetual state of war. We cannot be a warfare state and a political democracy.
We each have to decide what we believe. I believe that President Obama is right. I also agree with President Kennedy who said that we must put an end to war, or war will put an end to us.
When he talked about his pilgrimage to nonviolence, Dr. King said that he became a disciple of nonviolence when he learned that this did not mean non-resistance to evil, but the power to resist violence nonviolently. This is the power of love.