Lamentations 1:1-6
SERMON
In the Protestant tradition, we tend to think of “the” Reformation as beginning when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses for an academic disputation to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. The 508th anniversary of that supposed event, Reformation Day, will be Halloween. I don’t know how we are supposed to reenact the Diet of Worms, an important part of the Reformation, with children ringing the doorbell every five minutes, though if you do your candy shopping right, you might offer a diet of worms of a different gummy sort.
You can predict what I am about to say next. We are not certain that exact thing happened on that exact day. Luther did mail his document to Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz, on October 31st. He may have also posted it on church doors, at All Souls and other parishes, sometime in the following days and weeks, as was customary. But this initial act was not quite as dramatic as tradition would have us believe.
Luther’s was not the first attempt to reform the Christian church, nor would it be the last. We trace our particular history as Congregationalists to the Swiss Reformation, and Huldrych Zwingli. That reform began with what was quite literally a sausage party, though one held during Lent, and so violating the fasting requirements of the Roman church.
Centuries earlier, Peter Abelard advocated for human reason in reading scripture instead of unquestioning belief, and was condemned as a heretic. Italy’s Waldensians refused to baptize infants, and denied transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and wine become actual flesh and blood. The Lollards also rejected transubstantiation, and also, daringly, rejected papal authority.
I could go on, for there were dozens of reforming movement in the regions controlled by the Roman church, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the four patriarchs who never submitted to the patriarch of Rome in the first place, the original tradition we broadly label as the “Orthodox” church.
But this is not a Reformation sermon. Today, we celebrate two contemporary American saints, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, and one traditional saint, Francis of Assisi. I’d like to suggest that Francis, in particular, led his own kind of reform movement, and that he did so from a place of brokenness.
We have the stories, the paintings, the various religious orders, from the original Order of Friars Minor to the countless offshoots, as well as Franciscan movements in other traditions. There are Lutheran Franciscans, Anglican Franciscans, and Ecumenical Franciscans, this last group including lay members like our own Crystal.
The stories, some true, some maybe not so much, are lovely, and do what great stories are supposed to do, serve as mirrors so that we can see ourselves, and beyond ourselves the world, connect our tragedies and our blessings, our oppression and our transcendence, to the great story.
It is no surprise that a culture that has lost the ability to read, even to sit through a full length movie, that is drowning in a tsunami of Tik-Tok videos, has lost empathy and relationship. Story has always been about meaning making and connection.
Francis di Bernardone was the son of a wealthy merchant in an age when what we now call Italy was torn with warring factions and city-states. Scholars would eventually lump the largest groups into two broad categories, though in reality the divisions meant little politically. In 1197, the “popolo” party with which the di Bernardone family was aligned initiated a civil war in Assisi, driving the opposing faction from the city and destroying their towers, for as anyone who has been a tourist in northern Italy knows, towers were a thing. The losing faction fled to Perugia.
In 1201, Assisi launched an offensive against Perugia. It did not go well. In fact, by some accounts, it was a slaughter. Francis and many of his companions were captured, and though he was wealthy enough to afford a horse, and therefore was kept with the knights to be ransomed, Francis was traumatized by the experience, and his health declined dangerously while in custody.
Francis was released from the Perugian prison after a little over a year. Back home, he experienced what we now call flashbacks. His sleep was torn by violent dreams. He had post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
John Grant, writing in CounterPunch in 2016, described a modern iteration of PTSD. “The challenge these days,” he wrote, “is less emotional healing than how to unlearn the hyper-vigilance and shoot-first, ask-questions-later violence necessary for survival in a combat zone.”
Grant was correct in saying the constant and reactive terror remain long after veterans return from the combat zone, but he is understating the toll of emotional and spiritual distress on those who serve. I’ve met veterans who suffer what we now know as moral injury.
And not just those who serve. Civilians are being slaughtered in Gaza and Ukraine, by the criminal regimes of Israel and Russia, starvation as a weapon, drones delivering their deadly payload on a nightly basis. Multiple generations are being traumatized. More Palestinian civilians have been murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces since the current war began than all Americans killed in the war in Vietnam. Never mind the generation right here at home traumatized by active-shooter drills and actual active shooters, the constant slaughter in our classrooms and houses of worship.
We can admire the conversion, of a sort, of Francis, from party boy of the upper middle class pre-captivity to advocate for radical simplicity and service post war, can admire the charisma that made him so attractive in both lives, and still see in his behavior that he was deeply wounded. He did not need the stigmata, the supposed wounds of Jesus, in order to suffer. The wounds of war never fully healed.
Believe it or not, today’s scripture, the lamentation after the Babylonian victory and destruction of Jerusalem, was selected months ago, and this sermon, with a focus on Francis, PTSD, and war was started on Monday, before the terrifying demagoguery that took place at Quantico this week, when a Secretary whose job is no longer defense, but is instead war, sought to turn our professional military into a violent terrorist organization, and their Commander-in-Chief encouraged them to wage war on our own citizens.
It is, at least partially, our own fault. We have normalized war, from the constant hot and cold wars of our active military and the special forces who operate in secret, with no public oversight, to the war on poverty or drugs or homelessness.
It doesn’t help that scripture gives divine sanction to war, even to genocide, committed on behalf of the people of God, or against the people of God as punishment. It doesn’t help that it was a warring man who changed Christianity from an anti-imperial religion to a tool of empire, that Christians have waged crusades against members of other faiths, and even our own faith, that countless generations have sung “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
For the record, I have no desire to be your general. Jesus tells us the first shall be last, commands that I be the servant of all, not the commander of all. The arrogance and ego of Douglas MacArthur cost something in the neighborhood of 100,000 American lives, never mind the allies, enemies, and civilians lost in his unnecessary campaigns. And this is a man so many still consider a hero!
I understand that sometimes you must fight. We don’t need to look to ancient Assisi when the President of the United States declared a civil war this week, invasive violence against our own cities and citizens.
Resistance is necessary, non-violent if at all possible. As we remember at the start of every service, many of the founders of this church were criminal human traffickers, helping people escape race-based and brutal slavery, a bloody stain on all of our myths about a free country.
But it was not non-violence that ended slavery, for the violent man knows only one form of power, and will always use it.
It was the threat of violence that was meant to keep the Little Rock Nine out of school, and it was the threat of violence that got them in.
We waited too long to confront the genocidal racism of the Third Reach because we were busy supporting the colonial racism of the British. How many lives were saved by the lives that were taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? We will always err in the grim calculus of war.
I don’t have answers. I have lamentations, for kibbutzniks and Palestinians, for Ukrainians and the citizens of Chicago who were abducted on a city bridge because of the color of their skin and the accent of their mother tongue, the music of a multi-cultural America silenced by hate. I pray for Marimar Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz. She was shot and he was arrested in an alleged car ramming incident in that city, though video footage seems to undermine the claims of ICE.
I will even lament if we ever get Netanyahu or Putin in the dock to be judged for their crimes, not because I am against accountability, but because I am ashamed we ever built a system that allowed such crimes to happen in the first place.
I will lament until we can worship without worry, until our children can safely go to school, and no neighbor ends up in the ditch, or ICE custody.
May we pray that day into reality, in our hearts, and in our world. Amen.