Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
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1 Kings 22:29-38
Job 7:7-15
He appeared as a spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam’s Pythonesque 1977 film Jabberwocky, the movie inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem of the same name, but the actor behind the spaghetti was a poet in his own right off screen. Christopher Logue, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, was many things actually, including screenwriter, ex-con, and pacifist. Joan Baez sang his words, set to music by Donovan, on her eponymous first album.
Logue is known as much though for what he did not accomplish as for what he did. When he died in 2011, he left behind an unfinished modernist retelling of Homer’s Iliad titled “War Music.” Some portions had already been published, the slow and painful delivery of what looked to be a masterpiece. The poet’s death before the work was complete was a bit like when one of those new puzzle television series is abruptly cancelled and we never get the answers, but for the literary set. At least we know how the Iliad actually ends!
What was complete at the time of his death, those previously published portions of “War Music,” and what could be reconstructed from Logue’s notebooks, was posthumously published in a single volume in 2015. Early in, we find Antenor counseling the Trojan king, advising the return of Helen, the woman central to the decade-long siege of Troy. Antenor asks.
‘My King,
The winners of a war usually get
Something out of it.
What will we get?
Their camp. Their ditch. And who wants those?
Only Lord Koprophag, the god of filth.’
He continues:
Impatient now:
‘Stand Helen on a transport floored with gold,
And as they rumble through the Skean Gate
Let trumpets from the terracing
Bray charivari to her back’s bad loveliness.”
Logue uses the unusual word charivari, which means a noisy and mocking serenade. Let’s just say Antenor is not a slave to Helen’s legendary beauty. He’d be happy to see her gone.
While Logue’s version may be new and modernist, he has not altered one bit the mood of the ancient poem, which begins in medias res, that is to say, in the middle of the action. The Iliad was written at about the same time the Assyrians were destroying the northern portion of the divided kingdom, the portion known as Israel or Samaria, or in today’s second reading, Shomron, where they take the body of the wicked King Ahab, immoral and corrupt. His character is made clear by the ancient author who has Ahab enter battle in disguise, abandoning his allies when he is wounded.
Like the biblical Books of Kings, the Iliad speaks of moral ambiguity and the cost of war. While the recently deceased Harold Bloom laid all human complexity in literature at the feet of Shakespeare, there it is, in the Homeric epics, in scripture, over two thousand years before some uncertain author gave us Hamlet, that embodiment of sniveling teen angst.
Who can be more complex, more the twinned hero/anti-hero, than David, the boy slaying the giant in our Children’s Time, the king arranging the death of a man so he could steal a wife, the father crying out “Absalom! Absalom!” at the death of his rebellious third son?
You would think, with these stories of ambiguity and the cost of conflict so central to the Western cultural canon, that we would be a little more honest about war, the devastation it brings to people and places. Though there has never been an unnecessary war, for those who sound the charge and lead us into carnage always think their particular war is righteous, is justified. At least when Napoleon led his troops on a death march toward Russia, he went with them, taking the same risks, unlike modern politicians. There is a sort of integrity, albeit a twisted integrity, in being willing to take the same risks as the young..
Instead, we have supposed patriots who say “love it or leave it,” who declare that any question about the need and justification for war is treason, that it is not supporting our troops, it is un-American.
We consciously and sometimes subconsciously ignore the obvious lies in the propaganda, fear, and greed that so often become the toxic fuel of war. We are afraid that any crack in the facade of purity and unity will bring the whole edifice to the ground.
As well it should. For war may sometimes be a moral necessity, but it must never be glorified. There is no such thing as a good war, only a war that was unavoidable and carried out as efficiently as possible with minimal loss of life and spirit.
I was lucky. The only military intervention during my time in the Army was the invasion of a tiny Caribbean nation to liberate students at a fifth-rate medical school from the specter of socialism, the last spasms of the Cold War and the Red Scare, an invasion accomplished with tourist maps in which I did not participate. But even I had my moral qualms about what I was asked to do, for my unit had been assigned to a program using tactical nuclear weapons, that is nukes on the battlefield, and my Christian faith told me that this would be wrong. It is one of the reasons I chose not to re-enlist.
Never mind the horrors others have seen, the horrors others have done, sometimes legal and deemed necessary, but always scarring the soul of the warrior.
We lament the suicide rates, wrap it all up in the sterile and clinical post-traumatic stress. We wave the flag, we salute and build homes for soldiers and marines who come home incomplete in body, with psychiatric disorders, but we never see the wounds to the spirit, the soul injury. Far too many Christians worship a piece of cloth or some idea of America woven with threads of history, forgetfulness, and the perverted ideology of Ayn Rand, taking other gods when our faith says there is no other God but God, and every single human is our neighbor.
And somewhere, there is a soldier who fired a shot that killed a child. The order was given and it was legal and the action was deemed necessary, but that soldier cannot forgive herself, himself. They don’t really leave the house, for they don’t want to be with people, don’t want to see a child. The marriage ended and their own children feel rejected. Though they have much in common with the Vietnam vets down at the Legion Hall, they are not there, for they have not found any redemption. Sometimes they exchange an email with a buddy from their unit. Maybe, just maybe, they belong to a recovery group. But their soul is broken. We can try to love them toward wholeness, but they do not believe they are worthy of love. Like Job, they would choose death. And often do. This is moral injury and it can’t be medicated.
I support our troops, which is precisely why I cannot trade in the shallow and saccharine patriotism that is so common. I am a different kind of patriotic, precisely why I admit the faults of our past and the faults of our present, because I believe we can do better. I don’t so much believe in the America that has been as I believe in the America that might yet be. Like the prophets of old, I believe that what we might be will be better than what we have been, even if it is for the young to make that a reality, to finish the poem of peace, because our faith is one of hope.
Because I believe in the might be of me, of you, of church, I stand before a creative and creating mystery, look back at the clamoring cult of destruction and violence, armed to the teeth and planting the seeds of civil war, and I know that I cannot worship the Lord that gives life and worship the muzzle-flash of death at the same time.
And I am glad, so deeply glad, that I have never found myself in the position of having to decide when war is justified, when lethal force should be used by the police. Except that I do decide, and so do you, every time we go to the polls.
We must see the costs of war, in scripture, in history, in the faces of those who have seen and sometimes done the unthinkable. This is not veteran voyeurism. It is an inoculation against the viral spread of war-madness.
We must demand accountability when lethal force is misused by law enforcement officers who see civilians as the enemy, we must denounce politicians who falsely label people longing for freedom and opportunity the enemy, we must resist the narrative that says those with whom we disagree are the enemy.
There is real evil out there, real enemies, jihadis and extremists, kleptocrats and psychopaths, white nationalist terrorists and menacing giants. It is our job to stop the destruction, to contain the evil, to create paths to reconciliation wherever possible.
We honor our veterans not by glorifying war, but by acknowledging the terrible costs of war, not by turning them into two-dimensional heroes, but by remembering that they are exactly like you and I, not Captain America, but a kid, wounded, dying, weeping, the buddy, weeping too, trying to stop the river of blood that will not be stopped, the officer flying the helicopter that retrieves the body, the officer who walks to a door in Middle America and delivers the news.
Let us bray charivari at the backs of those who seek war for profit, at those who see violence as a path to power.
We honor our veterans by believing that if we live into the might be of the prophets and of Jesus, the might be of justice, of kindness, of humility, than the God who creates and calls will guide us into the ways of peace.
May it be so.
Amen.