We were a couple of hours into a journey that would take most of the day, a ferry down the Rio Escondido toward Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.
From our position near the bow, I looked back at our guide, and past her to the machine gun nest on the boat’s roof. We had been invited to these best of seats, she explained, not only because Americans who were violating the U.S. embargo by even being in Nicaragua were assumed to be the “good guys,” but also because U.S.-backed terrorists frequently attacked the ferry. They would not attack if they saw gringos on the boat for fear of bad publicity. Our visibility was protection for the locals, and indeed, the only American who had been shot while making the journey up to that point was an African-American, for descendants of enslaved Africans live on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, so he looked like a local.
Being the “good guys,” we felt righteous and smart, that great vice of educated white liberals, the temptation of the savior complex. After all, we were there to learn, but our very presence also showed support for the government that had thrown off a brutal dictatorship, the victorious Sandinista movement that was rewarded with a resounding victory in the nation’s first free election in decades. We were meeting with top Sandinista officials, even attended an event with the president of the country.
Last Sunday, the leader of that great struggle for liberation, for literacy and freedom and opportunity, cemented his autocratic rule of Nicaragua.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Daniel Ortega is simply Anastasio Samoza redux, the corrupt head of an evil dynasty.
And lest we should be tempted by that same self-righteousness my fellow travelers and I were feeling on that eastbound ferry, let us remember that the United States put the Samoza dictatorship in power, and U.S. Cold War paranoia about creeping communism created a state of perpetual threat in Nicaragua, laying the foundation for the Ortega dictatorship.
Bullets and bombs and children dropped out of helicopters, for dropping their children from helicopters we supplied was one of the ways the Samoza regime interrogated prisoners in the 70’s.
I don’t see why we have a need for a metaphysical hell. We seem more than capable of creating hell right here.
Violence generally and warfare in particular have very much been on our minds and in our hearts this year, for while we are still living with Covid-19, now endemic in our country because of stupidity, we were only six days into the year when there was an attempt to violently overthrow our democracy, and since then Ethiopia has descended into civil war and our own long war against rural Afghans came to a close with our complete defeat at the hands of the Pakistan-backed Taliban. Never mind that we have crazies with AR-15s shooting up shopping malls and grocery stores.
So as we come to this seventh day on the week when we are called to honor those who have served in our military, it is worth wrestling with a faithful response to human violence and warfare.
While we have earlier myths, the start of the Hebrew story really begins with the true story of oppression, of slavery in Egypt. Their rebellion is led by a murderer named Moses, but the only violence we encounter is divine violence, the slaughter of the first-born in every household that was not passed-over, the drowning in the Red Sea of Pharaoh’s troops.
After a symbolic forty years spent wandering in the desert, the Hebrew refugees arrive in Canaan. There, if we are to believe the text found in Joshua and Judges, they engaged in divinely-sanctioned mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The good news is that there are plenty of holes in their story, this fiction that there was a pure Hebrew race. Not only does the text undermine this narrative, but so does archeology. The reality is that Hebrew identity was manufactured in the service of uniting many diverse tribes in the region, and when it comes to the leveled cities and murdered infants, it didn’t happen, at least on scale.
That said, there were humans, so there was war. The great King David gets his start, at least in one version of the story, by killing the champion of an invading army. As an adult he would lead a coup d’etat and succeed. The next five centuries are filled with warfare, sometimes between the two successor states to David’s once-united kingdom, sometimes with their neighbors, but more often, the Hebrews are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of resource-rich river valleys on the Nile and along the Tigris-Euphrates. For the next three and a half centuries what was left of the Hebrew people was under foreign occupation, until a rebellion in the Second Century B.C.E. gave them a brief period of independence. By the time Jesus is born, this independent Judea had collapsed due to infighting, absorbed into a Roman Empire that stretched across all of southern Europe and northern Africa.
Which brings us to Jesus… the blank screen onto which we project our own agendas, whether they be nationalist zeal and the drumbeat of war or opposition to war and peace marches.
Neither Jesus the Christian Soldier, ever onward, nor the wimpy Jesus frolicking with lambs and children appears to reflect the reality, not in the historical-critical context, not even in the text itself. Today’s reading reminds us that the story they told about Jesus was of a man who expected warfare and violence. His confrontation with the bankers in the Temple was not non-violent resistance. And while it is true that he was passive and obedient while in police custody, that ended for him as it does for so many black men in America.
Our earliest Christian Testament texts, some authentic letters by Paul, were written about twenty years after the state-murder of Jesus, but the bulk of the Christian text tradition develops after the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which began in 66 C.E. It was the first of the Jewish Wars, each ending in a crushing defeat. By the time these wars were over, most Hebrew sects had been wiped out, and everyone understood that it was insane to try to fight Rome.
If you walk away from today’s sermon remembering nothing else, I ask that you remember this: there is no single correct Christian or “biblical” answer to the question of war and human violence. You want pacifist Jesus? You’ll find him. You want a biblical warrant for total war. You’ll find it. The commandment says “thou shalt not murder,” not thou shalt not kill, for the Tanakh is filled with sanctioned killing.
And while we may yearn for peace, while we may proclaim the sanctity of human life, and we should, for it is a sacred thing we cannot create, the truth is humans are aggressive primates with just enough brain to rationalize our violence and scapegoating. There has never been a time without human violence, has never been a utopia except in books, and if young adult fiction has taught us nothing else in the first two decades of the 21st century, it is this: one person’s utopia is always another person’s hell. I may long for a peaceful humankind, but until Homo Sapiens is replaced by Homo Pacificus, I don’t see it happening, for fear is strong, and we have not proven ourselves better than our wiring.
And even apart from this soaring and transcendent call, this ethic of life that takes in every human, and in a church like ours, the whole of the living planet, there is the simple and practical question of ethics and reason, and I am thankful that no one cares enough about what I have to say that I have to be responsible for acts of war. Oh, I am responsible in that my vote helps decide who votes for war, in that my tax dollars paid for the drone that murdered a household in Kabul, but that responsibility is shared and easy to ignore. I don’t have to ask myself whether it is okay to take up arms to protect the vulnerable from the powerful, for those decisions are never easy, and the consequences never predictable.
Should the Allies have bombed the train tracks that led to Auschwitz? This was a question first asked by historian David Wyman in 1978 and still hotly debated. Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement with Hitler looks stupid in hindsight. Should the Allies have stood up to the Nazis earlier? Would it have saved more lives? Would the citizens of democratic nations have tolerated another war when the Great War, the “war to end all wars,” was still a lived memory?
Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who committed crimes against humanity. But his regime also protected minority communities like the Christians, Jews, and Yazidis of Iraq. We went into that war based on the lies of evil men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and destabilized the entire region, creating the power vacuum later filled by ISIS, now truly a world-wide web of fundamentalist terrorists pursuing jihad. Those minority communities have largely been wiped out, the Yazidis suffering enslavement and rape as an act of genocide.
We might agree now that the violence and warfare of World War II was justified by what we would learn about German and Japanese atrocities, but decide that the invasion of Iraq was not justified despite what we know of Hussein’s atrocities. But let me add a few more names to a list that includes Auschwitz and Nanking. Names like Wounded Knee, Tulsa, Manzanar, and Rikers Island.
I get the desire for peace. We cannot create human life. We should do everything in our power to avoid taking it. Though with that comes the obligation to create the conditions in which those lives can be lives of thriving.
I do not believe we honor our veterans by celebrating warfare, through jingoism and nationalism, with glitter and sparklers. Though I’m always up for a free donut.
Nor do we honor them with an unrealistic pacifism. We honor them by making sure we only go to war, only use violence, when it is absolutely necessary, when it prevents an even greater violence. We honor them by making sure that the wars we sanction have realistic goals, that the wars are kept as short as possible, the casualties as limited as possible.
We honor them by being honest about the cost of war, not only to the family in the house in Kabul, but also to the soccer dad drone pilot who stands on the sideline of the soccer game in the middle of America knowing that he killed innocent children.
We honor our veterans by demanding that the military stop pretending that war is like a game played on an X-Box in order to recruit a generation of video game-addicted kids.
A faithful response to human violence and human warfare is driven by humility and love and a knowledge of the sanctity of human life, but also by our courage to protect the vulnerable. There is no easy answer, no one “right” answer. There never was.
May God be with us as we discern and debate. Amen.