Ezekiel 37:1-14
SERMON Miller’s Cornfield
As I have shared in the past, I grew up in a home with three faiths: the Southern Baptist church, the problematically-named Washington Redskins, and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, so basically religious, corporate, and nationalist forms of racism. And growing up in Virginia, there was no lack of Civil War battlefields within driving distance, from Bull Run to Appomattox, where we could pay homage to our treasonous dead. That was us, smelling like a campfire with the pop-up camper behind the station wagon, Dad reading the monument to some brigade funded by the Daughters of the Confederacy, the lot of us standing before a diorama as the narration and lights walked us through the tragic battle.
But it was a Boy Scout trip that brought me to Antietam while hiking a portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Trail. While some multi-day battles saw more total casualties, September 17, 1862 at Antietam holds the horrific record as the bloodiest single day in American history, with over 22,000 dead, wounded, or missing. That is more than double the number of all Allied casualties on D-Day.
Decades later, I still remember a statement made by a National Park Service guide, that one of the three battle sites at Antietam, Miller’s Cornfield, had been leveled in the fighting, first from overhead artillery fire, then rifle fire, then a bloody slugfest of close action combat that seemed to favor first one side and then the other, eventually holding for the South, but at an impossible cost. She described the corn cut down by the bullets, even in that age before assault rifles. The only harvest that autumn was the dead.
This is, of course, only one form of crop loss and subsequent famine in wartime, with the loss of labor and conditions too dangerous to plant or to harvest adding to the direct impact on non-combatants. Then there are the blockades and shortages as resources are diverted to troops in the field.
It had never occurred to me before that day to think about the damage war does to the environment, even if the environment in this case was human made, a field of corn ready to harvest. I’d eventually learn about the Ardennes forests destroyed by the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, hear my own father describe the apocalyptic hellscape he survived in the Korean War, one of the few aspects of that experience he ever shared.
We think about the human cost of war, talk about the human cost of war, and we should. But we must also consider the cost to creation, for God’s good creation is, as our Unitarian Universalist friends state in their principles, an interdependent web. We are but one small part of that web, albeit a malignant part, a cancer spreading and destroying everything we touch and even things we cannot reach, microplastics in the deepest part of the ocean.
There can be no better example than the Persian Gulf, and the current conflict over the Strait of Hormuz. Every tanker that burns spills barrels of oil, thousands, sometimes millions. Every plane that is shot down leaks fuel and other toxins. Every fire that starts in those drought ravaged lands spreads.
And here is this body of water, this gulf, home to a unique ecosystem due to its geography, already threatened by unchecked and arrogant development by the Gulf states, where rich petro-traffickers and autocrats construct artificial islands for their skyscrapers using exploited labor from other countries, convinced by their theology, if they bother with belief at all, that everything is about them all the time, just as Christians have for too long foolishly accepted the lie that the earth exists for humans.
The Persian Gulf was once home to the second largest dugong population in the world, a species of aquatic mammals closely related to manatees, though no one knows how many are left at this point. The islands off the coast of Iran are vital breeding grounds for many sea birds, including the Lesser Crested Tern and the Crab Plover, both listed in the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds, an international treaty focusing on species that depend on wetlands.
Just south of the Straight of Hormuz, in the Arabian Sea conflict zone, lies Masirah Island, an important hatching ground for loggerhead sea turtles. The waters of the Gulf are also home to a critically endangered humpback whale population.
We’re obsessed with gas prices, fuel prices generally, and I get it. The war isn’t helping my personal economy either.
The more enlightened among us may think about the innocent lives lost, Iranian school girls, may pray for the hundreds of thousands displaced in Lebanon.
But how many news reports have you heard about dead dugongs and plovers?
And since this war has become an excuse to lift the sanctions on Russia, providing the war criminal Putin with the petro-dollars he needs to continue funding his wars of aggression, maybe we should be talking about the 385 endangered species in Ukraine as well.
I would describe this as inhumanity if it were not all too perfectly human, human exceptionalism and careless disregard, our human intelligence applied to all of the worst possible uses, ethno-nationalism and jihad and a capitalist battle royale, everyone bought into this Thunderdome as the way we are meant to live, greed and fear the only two real motivations of our species, and like the Lorax, I want to speak… for the mangroves and the dugongs and the plovers.
Because it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be this way.
We don’t need to sow salt in the fields of our enemies, an ancient and deliberate form of ecological war crime. We are poisoning our enemy’s water, and ours in the process. We are destroying the ability of the planet itself to sustain the amazing and diverse life it took millions of years to create.
Who needs the Islamic State when we have BlackRock and Blackwater, Netanyahu and Trump, corrupt men and corrupt corporations creating chaos and death to cover for their crimes, autocrats who require enemies in order to oppress their own people? For the first step toward dictatorship is the creation of enemies that can never be defeated.
And we’re not even attacking the ecosystem directly in this war, at least as far as I know. During the Vietnam War, we sprayed Agent Orange, a herbicide and defoliant, on twelve thousand square miles, destroying old growth forest, reducing biodiversity in what Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme called ecocide. More than fifty years after that war and there is still exposure, still a high rate of birth defects in the human population. Imagine what it did to the animal population.
And while they were spraying the jungle with Agent Orange to expose the Ho Chi Minh trail to bombing, they were spraying Agent Blue on crops in a program few knew about or know about all these years later, a program intended to starve the enemy. So we were sowing salt in the fields after all.
Never mind the mines, in the sea, on the land. A landmine does not know the difference between a human and wildlife.
The women and men on those boats off the coast of Iran are the sons and daughters of our neighbors. Boots on the ground, in Iran or in one of the neighboring nations being attacked by drones and missiles aren’t footwear. They are people.
And even if no one but me speaks for the dugong and the Lesser Crested Tern, the math of the war does not math. The surest investment you can make is to murder those you call terrorists and the innocents you consider acceptable collateral deaths, for in that action you are guaranteed to reap new terrorists a hundred-fold.
But there is good news, in the midst of all this chaos.
Today, we are aware of the ecological damage of war.
Today, you cannot hide war crimes, for the truth comes out, whether the FCC threatens the licenses of broadcasters or not, whether the Pentagon created a blacklist of banned journalists or not.
Today, a movement of resistance is rising, not because we don’t like the price of the pump, though that too, of course. A movement of resistance is rising, a movement of justice and kindness and humility, of economic justice and concern for the least among us, a movement that is not only universalist in taking in our fellow humans, but in taking in every living thing, dugongs and plovers and mangroves.
May we repent of our unwilling complicity in the crimes done in our name, and may we actively resist. May we throw monkey wrenches into the gears of war’s machines just as the one we follow once flipped tables. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
we want one or the other,
good guys and bad guys,
neat boxes and perfect circles,
and you give us both/and,
heroes who are deeply flawed.
We pray once again for the women and the girls
victimized by a man we once admired,
for Dolores Huerta,
and the others unnamed,
for the United Farmworkers,
now freighted with the toxic legacy
of misogyny and the abuse of power.
We are mindful of the gospel story
of the woman accused of adultery,
the adulterous man nowhere to be seen,
and Jesus calmly stepping in
where murder was certain.
We do not know her story
but trust in the obstructive non-violence of Jesus,
and pray as he taught us saying:
Our Father…