“Working It Out Some Other Way”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
November 12, 2006
Remembrance Sunday

Ecclesiastes 3:1-10        Matthew 24: 36-44

            “But on that day and hour no one knows, neither angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew  nothing until the flood came and swept then all away, so too will be the coming of the son of Man.

            Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding; one will be taken and one left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if they owner of the house hade know in what part of the night the thief was coming he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready for the coming of the son of Man.”

            This morning we gather to remember and honour those Canadians who served and died in war. This year is particularly sobering given that we are including in our remembrances Canada’s first casualties of the 21^st century, forty-two men and women who have died in Afghanistan, with many more wounded. 

            The Rev. Colonel George Fallis built this sanctuary exactly 10 years after the end of World War 1 for two purposes. The first was to create a lasting legacy, a monument to the men and women whose funerals he presided over on the battlefields of France. But he also built this sanctuary as an icon representing the possibility of lasting peace. Responding to contemporary critics that the sanctuary glorified war, he wrote that every brick and window was intended to proclaim the “great message of peace”.  Both aspects of this legacy have been passed on to subsequent generations at Canadian Memorial, including our own; together, they are the torch which has been passed to us to hold high against the darkness of violence and war.

            Such a tiny, deceptively simple word: “war”.  Phonetically, it doesn’t carry the weight of the terror it represents. Headline: Vancouver Sun, November 11, 2006. “Since World War 1 More Than 100 Wars and Civil Conflicts Have Been Fought. One Hundred and Sixty Million Have Died. Whoever thought up the word war must have believed that it represented a fairly mundane state of affairs. It really should be one of those multi-syllabic Germanic-sounding words, with hard edges to it and difficult to get out. “Weltunshtukkenliberbachtenich.” By the time you’re finished with it, everybody within hearing distance should have been sprayed with saliva. It should not roll off the tongue effortlessly. We should not be able to say “Canada is at war”, and then go back to eating our breakfast.  It should sound as terrible as it actually is.

 I swore ten years ago when I came to this congregation that I would never preach a sermon about war in the abstract. Here is an excerpt of a poem called Becoming Milton, by Coleman Barks, to help ground ourselves in what we’re talking about when we use that little word, “war”. 

Milton, the airport driver, retired now from trucking, who ferried me from the Greenville-Spartanburg airport to Athens last Sunday, midnight to 2:30 a.m. tells me about his son, Tom, just back from the Gulf war. “He’s at Fort Stewart with the 102^nd Mechanized, the first tank unit over the line, not a shot fired at them. His job was to check the Iraqi tanks that the airstrikes hit, hundreds of them.  The boy had never even come up on a car accident here at home, twenty-four years old. Can you imagine what he lifted the lid to find?  Three helmets with heads in them staring from the floor, and that’s just the one tank. He has screaming flashbacks, can’t talk about it anymore. I just told him to be strong and put it out of his mind, with time, if you stay strong, those things’ll go away.  Or they’d find a bunker, one of those holes they hid in, and yell something in American, and wait a minute, and then roll grenades in and check it and find nineteen freshly killed guys, some sixty, some fourteen, real thin.

They were just too scared to move.  He feels pretty bad about it, truthfully, all this yellow ribbon celebrating.  It wasn’t a war really. I mean, he says it was just piles and piles of their bodies.  Some of his friends got sick, started vomiting, and had to be walked back to the rear. Looks to me like it could have been worked out some other way.

            Do you think that if Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush had to read that poem every morning for the past five years, they would have “worked out some other way” in Iraq? Probably not. Ideology blinds in an absolute fashion. Thank God that our American friends seem to have had enough of this nonsense.

            How will history judge our mission in Afghanistan? Do we really believe as a nation that we can bomb Islamic fundamentalism into submission? Does anyone remember why we’re there? It’s foggy in my mind. I know it’s connected to terrorists. Not the ones responsible for 9-11. They were different terrorists. These are Taliban – not related to Al Qaeda. We didn’t used to call the Taliban terrorists. They were freedom fighters when we gave them guns and trained them to fight the Russians. They are very unpleasant human beings to be sure. But are they a threat to our national sovereignty? Why have we in Canada accepted President Bush’s framing of American foreign policy as a “war on terror?”  You see, if it actually is a war, then we know what to do. Send in the troops. Humans are good at that. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. But what if we framed it as systemic injustice, poverty, women’s rights, the politics of oil, cultural and economic imperialism?  Well, then we’re not so certain what’s to be done. It gets a whole lot more complex, which to me suggests we’re getting closer to the truth of the matter. Bombing those things won’t make them go away. If we use these as frames of reference, then, in the poet’s word, we’re going to have work it out “in some other way.”

             Why have 42 Canadian men and women died in Afghanistan? It shouldn’t be fuzzy in our minds. Any one of these men and women sitting here with medals could tell you in a heartbeat why they served in Europe. I am grateful to the men and women serving in Afghanistan. But we don’t honour our troops, nor our veterans, by settling into an easy acceptance of the little word, “war”.

            The reading from Ecclesiastes doesn’t help in this regard. The writer tells us that there is a time for everything under the sun, including hate and war. All the other polarities listed in these ten verses, birth and death, planting and plucking up, breaking down and building up, weeping and laughing, etc. I can affirm and understand. But when it gets to verse eight, I’ve never been able to agree. A time for hate and a time for war?

            It’s important to remember that this was written by a person who believed that the way things are is the way God must have created them to be. What he saw when he looked at history was that every time there was peace, another empire would come along and start a war. Peace, then war, peace, then war. It must be God’s way. Must be a time for everything.

            But remember this: When this book was written, it was thought that we were locked in to an endlessly repeating cycle of events; everything came round again and again, like the seasons. Summer, fall, winter, spring. Repeat.  The writer had no way of understanding the evolutionary nature of the universe. What we now know is that the universe is developing with direction and purpose that what happened in the past is not necessarily repeated in the future. He couldn’t know that what happened in the past doesn’t necessarily cycle back again. The past can be a foundational structure for a more evolved, more complex, more beautiful future. Before we gained an evolutionary awareness, no more than a handful of decades ago, fatalism was inevitable. What has been is what will be, forever and ever. Amen. 

            But ever since Einstein took a peak through the telescope of his buddy, Edward Hubble, the reign of fatalism was finished. He saw that the universe was expanding, and if it expanded, that meant that it had a beginning. And if it had a beginning, then it was clearly developing. It was going somewhere. And friends, everything hinges on sorting out the direction of that development. It’s not purposeless and it’s not random. Everything at all levels, physical, psychological, cultural, and spiritual is moving inexorably in the direction of increased consciousness, increased beauty and complexity, and in the human realm towards love.

            How do we know? As Christians we know because in the fullness of time Jesus emerged from this glorious planet open to the Spirit of God, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God, and not the Kingdom of Caesar is the direction this universe is moving.  A reign of peace shall prevail, and not the scourge of war.  He didn’t have a time for war and hatred. God had moved Jesus Christ beyond such a time. So we look at him, and see the future. We know that there will come a time when we won’t study war any more, when standing armies will be a thing of the past, and we won’t feel like we need to put them to use simply because they are there. We know that we will have honoured the veterans and the nursing sisters here this morning, when the last bullet and shell has been destroyed. This is where we’re headed. And here’s what Jesus tells us to do: live now as though it is already a reality.

            War, in an evolutionary universe, is not inevitable. A season for hatred and war?  Jesus declared it defunct. The rest of history, from this moment forward, is about living into his dream. Our lives, from this moment forward, are about creating the conditions for the reign of peace. We must find a way to work it out “in some other way.” To be in Christ is to be involved in an irreversible transformation of consciousness, what St. Paul called a “new creation”. In this new age, war is over. Peace is coming, and it can arrive faster than you might have imagined.

            The Scripture reading from the New Testament is a little hard for us to comprehend two thousand years later. Jesus compares the age he was living in to the age of Noah. “For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” First you have to know a little something about the “days of Noah”, and then a little something more about the “coming of the Son of man.” You remember the legend of Noah. God sends a flood to wipe out humanity. Why? Because humans were so violent, and God wanted to start over. Here’s another feature of the story. Afterward, God is sorry for what he’s done, so he puts a rainbow in the sky. It’s not for our sake. It’s to remind him never to do that again. Every time he looks at the rainbow, it reminds him that using violence to end violence is not a good idea. Next time you see a rainbow, think about it as God reminding Godself, through your eyes, to “work it out some other way”.

            As for the “coming of the Son of Man” think of it as a reign of lasting peace. The point Jesus is making is that this reign of lasting peace can happen just as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Flood came upon the earth. Just as nobody was prepared for the Flood, so it is with the coming of the Son of Man. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding; one will be taken and one left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” Let’s not get caught up in the bumper sticker rapture theology. The point is that you have to keep alert or you’ll get left behind, like in the days of Noah. What he means is that it’s possible to get apprehended by the possibility of peace. 

            One day you find yourself sitting at your office desk and in the twinkling of an eye, you get apprehended by the Son of Man, and you see the futility of violence. You decide right there and then that you’re going to be involved for whatever life you have left in the sacred project of “working it out in some other way”. Your own life will change. You never know when the possibility of peace might grab you by the collar and carry you away into another realm. It’s a realm of hope. You awaken to a gospel promise that love will find a way, and it suddenly dawns on you that it might as start with you.  You begin making connections between social justice and peace. You go to that person who has always bugged you and you ask whether the two of you might “work it out in some other way”. You find yourself writing your MP, asking honest questions about why we’re at war and what that means to her. The Son of Man has apprehended you. It’s come upon you as suddenly as a flood, except that what’s washing over you is life, not death. It’s a baptism of light that’s flooding your soul, a catastrophe of conscience that’s sweeping you away and carrying you into a new creation.  Your whole life becomes a march for peace. Your very being is a placard that reads, “Let’s work it out some other way”. Friends, you don’t want to get left behind.