The Pieta, The Death of Wolfe, and Remembrance.

     Christian theologians and artists have always been in love with Jesus’ mother, Mary, who they named, Theotokos, mother of God. Liturgies, music, and prayers especially focused on her purity and suffering.

     One of the suffering moments—not actually mentioned in scripture—was when Mary first held the body of Jesus after it was taken off of the cross. This moment is called The Pieta, which can be translated as “The Pity,” or “The Compassion.”

     Here is an early example, the Rottgen Pieta from the fourteenth century. It is graphic and gritty and moves me. Jesus’ wounds still flow. He is emaciated, ugly, broken, just as you would expect a crucified holy man to look. Mary is shocked, on the verge of disbelief.

     The medieval Germans peasants who saw this Pieta in their church knew this kind of suffering for themselves. Medieval life was, as Thomas Hobbes said, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The Rottgen Pieta offered those peasants both a Jesus and a Mary they could identify with.

     But there is another, darker side to this and similar devotional sculptures. The sculpture suggests that suffering is holy. Mary and Jesus’ suffering here justifies suffering as a reality of life peasants had to accept. The Rottgen Pieta—and many more like it--was used by the church to teach, nurture—and control—peasant believers.

     Not so Michelangelo’s Pietá. It served a very different purpose for a very different audience. This sculpture, found in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, is one of the most admired works of art of all time.

     The earthy realism of Rottgen is gone, replaced unearthly Platonic idealism. Mary, even as the mother of a 31-year old man, is still a beautiful virgin, the prototypical perfect woman. And Jesus, even in death, is Adonis-beautiful, too.

     The story here is that Michelangelo was hired by the French Cardinal Jean de Bilheres to create this sculpture for two reasons. It was to serve—and for a while, it did—as Bilheres’ tombstone. But more importantly, Bilhere was in Rome as a French ambassador after a disastrous war between France and most of the small Italian Republics. It was a war marked by the brutal sack of Mordano, about 250 kilometers north of Rome. The French army put all its citizens, including women and children, to death. 

      Now, after this inconclusive but brutal war, Bilhere was supposed to help smooth things over. And so, he tasked Michelangelo, an Italian artist, to use a notably French and German theme, The Pieta, to sculpt a work of Italian marble to place in the French chapel of the first St. Peter’s in Rome, Italy. A peace offering that bound the two peoples together.

     With Michelangelo’s Pieta, the suffering of Mary and Jesus is a passing whisper—as Bilhere hoped the suffering of Mordano and Italy might be soon forgotten, too. The ugliness of war is here swallowed up by the stunning beauty of national reconciliation symbolized by Jesus’ reconciliation of humans to God, through his death. The Pieta is a stunning piece of political theater.







     Which brings us to a modern pieta, Pablo Picasso's Guernica. You've seen this painting. I don't know how to speak to its beauty--it is striking and compelling and abstract, though.

     Here Picasso painted the suffering of the village of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, just before WWII. The Nazi Luftwaffe bombed that little Basque village on a market day. There was no military target. The purpose was simply to sow terror. Two hundred and fifty townspeople died. It was a modern Mordano.

     Thus, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, Guernica is very, very political. But instead of trying to smooth over a war, it puts Nazi war crimes front and center, condemning them.

     And if you look closely, you will see on the far left, a pieta—Mary holding Jesus in her lap. It’s Rottgenall over, but in Picasso’s cubist style. Do you see it? On the left?

     In case you can't, here is a reproduction, done as a sculpture, by well-known American artist
Arthur Lopez, in the Mexican-American Santero style.

     I have one more pieta to show you, Benjamin West’s, “The Death of Major-General James Wolfe.”

     You remember James Wolfe. He was the commanding British officer during the French-Indian war. The French were besieged at Quebec, and tried to break through British lines with a surprise attack on the Plains of Abraham, that failed. The battle only took an hour, but during it Wolfe was shot and died of his wounds.

     The battle led, soon after, to France’s exit from New France. Wolfe has, forever after, been seen as Canada’s first war hero, and the epitome of the British Empire’s fighting spirit and military prowess.




     Wolfe’s painting, of course, is yet another version of The Pieta. West knew Michelangelo’s Pieta well from when he lived in Rome as an art student. Here, West lays out Wolfe as Michelangelo laid out Jesus. General James Wolfe is a sacrificial lamb who died to establish true civilization in the New World jungle. One commentator writes, “This deliberate visual association between the dying General Wolfe and the dead Christ underscores the British officer’s admirable qualities. If Christ was innocent, pure, and died for a worthwhile cause—that is, the salvation of mankind—then Wolfe too was innocent, pure, and died for a worthwhile cause; the advancement of the British position in North America.”

     In contrast to other paintings of Wolfe’s death from the same era, West filled his painting not with regular soldiers, but with military dignitaries. In fact, none of these men were actually there. West added them to add dignity to the scene. One of those watching is a First Nations warrior, looking on Wolfe adoringly—in stark contrast to how most First Nations would have felt about these European wars that kept dragging them in.

     But West has no time for such objections. He is making myths that justify the violence, greed, and visions of world domination that are at the root of all empires, including the British Empire. West here is an evangelist for wars on behalf of the crown and for territorial expansion.

     All of which brings me near to the end of what I want to say this morning. All of these works of art that I’ve shown you this morning served propagandistic ends. In each of them, the story of Mary holding Jesus’ body, a religious theme—was used to score political points.

     The Rottgen Pieta served the churches need to tell the story of Jesus to illiterate peasants who needed comfort, assurance—and who needed to be kept in line. It said, “shut up and embrace your suffering, like Mary and Jesus did.”

     Michelangelo’s Pieta was meant to paper over war crimes. It was an offer of arm’s length, platonic friendship as a substitute for war.

     Picasso’s pieta was exactly the opposite. It served as a condemnation of war by including a very Rottgen-like Pieta that represents the evil of war.

     And the question for us, of course, is this. Will we let Remembrance Day, as well as its rituals and music, use us in a similar way? Or will we see through some of the myths to the fact of war’s evil? To the actual pain and suffering of both soldiers and civilians? Will we, perhaps, use Remembrance Day to organize for no more wars?

     This week, we ought to remember the heroism of our boys; but we also remember Flanders Fields and the poppies their bodies fed. We remember the WWI sacrifices of Vimy Ridge and the Somme and Passchendaele, but we also now understand that ultimately, these battles were fought for the elites of a British Empire against the elites of a German Empire, rather than for any common good or high moral principle.

     We have fought other morally ambivalent wars. The Royal Mounted Police against the Metis. The first overseas deaths of Canadian soldiers in a totally useless Anglo-Boer war that mostly served to make the British Empire richer while brutally erasing Africans. But our boys also died fighting the horrific reality of Nazism in what is sometimes called the twentieth century’s only just war. Our boys liberated extermination camps and liberated my ancestors in Holland. In any case, whether the cause was just or not or just middling—our men were always true and valiant.

     And now I wonder, how will history judge our time in Afghanistan, after the Taliban is back in control, as they seem destined to be? Or our material support for Saudi Arabia and its ruthless war in Somalia?

     I do not know.

     But today, we nevertheless remember the Christ-like suffering of all our military martyrs. In their memory, and to prevent the need for remembering more soldiers in the future, we commit our Remembrance Day not merely to making glorious national myths, but to learning the hard lessons of history, history as objective as we can make it.

     Even good wars are hell. We must do all within our power to avoid falling for heroic myths that want to use us, and instead, as a nation, build lasting peace wherever we can lend a hand.

     I am not naïve. I know that hating war cannot end war. But I plead with you, as followers of Jesus, who gave his own life as a protest against both religious bigotry and Roman military occupation, I ask you, as followers of Jesus to use your social and political and economic gifts and powers to make peace.

     This is the most fitting Remembrance of all.

Two War Stories--1917 and Ehud the Benjaminite

(If you would like to read the scripture where you can find the Ehud story, go to Judges 3:12-30. I'm going to be posting more of my sermons that deal with contemporary issues here, on the advice of my communication team. This is a sermon on this year's Oscar nominees, preached against the Judges story for comparison and contrast.)

            Before we read today’s scripture, I invited the children to leave for Sunday School. You see, our scripture for today was a war story, a particularly violent war story. I didn’t want to have to explain it to the children or apologize to the parents.

            And the movie that I’m going to review today, 1917, was rated “R.” That means anyone under the age of 17 who wants to see the movie has to be accompanied by an adult. 1917 is very violent.

            Why do we like these stories? Why are we such suckers for violence, murder and mayhem?

            So, first, the story of Ehud and Eglon. Not only is it violent, but ironically, this story is also supposed to be a divine comedy. Unfortunately, most of the humor gets lost in translation. I'll try to give you a taste of it, though. 

            Ehud is a Benjaminite, which means, in Hebrew, "son of my right hand." But we are also told that Ehud is a left-handed “son of my right hand.” Right off, the audience wants to know how the left-handed son of a right-handed people will take advantage of this confusion. 

            What is more, the obese King Eglon's name sounds like the Hebrew word for "fatted calf." So, now Hebrews are asking themselves how a left-handed son of my right hand is going to slaughter the fatted calf. 

            As it happens, after Ehud delivers Israel’s war tax, or tribute, to King Eglon, Ehud manages to trick the King’s retainers into leaving, so that Ehud is alone with the King. Then Ehud grabs his sword, successfully hidden on the wrong-right side of his body and buries it in Eglon’s belly. 

            Ehud then dumps the dead King in a bathroom, shuts the door, and runs. In Hebrew what follows literally reads: "The servants came and saw, look, the doors of the upper room are locked, and they said he must be relieving himself. They waited a long time and look, he's not opening the doors of his room, and they took the keys and opened them, and look, their lord is sprawled on the floor, dead.”

            Next, the Israelites take on the Moabite army. The Moabite soldiers are said to be “vigourous and strong,” though the word used can also mean "fat." So, in a neat little parallel to the fate of their master, all the "fat" Moabite soldiers are struck down too. 

            This story, whenever it was read, had Israelites rolling on the floor with mirth and laughter. When they finally quieted down, one of them would only have to say, "he was relieving himself," or "they were all vigorously fat soldiers" or “look,” and everyone would break out in laughter all over again. 

            The Oscar nominated 1917, on the other hand, isn’t funny. Not at all. 

            In brief, two British soldiers, Schofield and Blake, have to cross no-man’s land to warn 1600 isolated British troops to call off a doomed attack.

            It’s a death trip, underlined by images of burial, bottomless pits, and a hellish inferno.

            At one point, a German airplane crashes, Lucifer like, out of the sky. After rescuing the German pilot, the pilot plugs a knife deep into Blake’s belly and kills him—an echo of Ehud and Eglon. Only Schofield is left. So, we all pray, with Jean Valjean, “Bring him home. Bring him peace. He is only a boy.” 

            And that morning, after navigating Hades and bullets, Schofield gets to the 1600 isolated troops. And some of them survive.

            So why do we throng to see 1917? Why are we such suckers for this violence, murder and mayhem? 

            You are probably thinking, “well, we like these stories because they have deeper meaning, a moral.” Maybe. But just because a story has a meaning, is it the right one? Consider Ehud and Eglon again. It is quite clear that this story is told—as are all the stories in Judges—to convince the Israelites to worship Yahweh, and Yahweh alone. If they do so, God will give them health, wealth, and peace. If they do not worship Yahweh, however, God will abandon them, and they will be conquered.

            The problem, of course, is that this isn’t true. Whether or not the Jewish people have been faithful over the past twenty-five-hundred years, their history has almost always been, regardless of their piety, one of suffering, persecution, exiles, pogroms and holocausts. Even now, anti-Semitism is on the rise, and most of the nations surrounding Israel want the Jewish state quashed. It is ugly.

            Meanwhile, sadly, the State of Israel has responded with military occupation and illegal settlement and confiscation of conquered Palestinian territory, a universally recognized war crime and not peace at all.

            So, it isn’t true that when Israel walks with the Lord, in the light of his word, what a glory he sheds on their way; it isn’t true that while Israel does his good will, he abides with them still, and with all who will trust and obey.” We used to sing such meaning for ourselves too, but that is not how the world turns. Sometimes, often even, evil nations, like evil people, prosper. And nations trying to do the right thing, fail.

            And what is the moral or meaning of 1917? That heroes triumph over adversity? That something as hellish as war cannot stop brave men? That to do one’s duty is the main thing? That today is a good day to die? I don’t know. For all of its macabre beauty 1917 left me feeling depressed about the human prospect. 

            So why do we throng to see it? Why are we suckers for violence, murder and mayhem?  Well, maybe such stories excite our basest, most ancient fight or flight instincts, without actually putting us in danger. Plus, there must be 101 reasons philosophers could give for the appeal of violence as an artistic subject. 

            But here’s the thing. If nothing else, both of these stories reinforce something that we all know but all too rarely focus on. War is hell. 

            

            I do not mean to say that when we are up against some final wall, and it is a matter of war or death camps, or basic freedoms—I do not mean to suggest we should never fight back. I am, at best, a half-baked pacifist. 

            But I am saying that those who live by war, countries that make war a habit, that find provocations easily, who cannot refrain from using violence to further what they think of as being in their national interest—those who live by the sword will die by the sword. This is another Biblical meaning than the one in Eglon and Ehud’s story, a very different one, and it is, I think, much closer to the truth. 

            I sometimes fear that here in Canada, as a neighbour of the USA and a partner with NATO, we are at risk of forgetting that war is hell, that it is not the answer, and we have begun to buy into the myth that might makes right, and anyways the West will never lose.

            We live in an era where, for meaning, we are inundated with half-truths and excuses and propaganda and fake news. I invite you to remember that even the Bible—as in the story of Eglon and Ehud—even the Bible gets meaning wrong sometimes. Think critically. Especially about military affairs and war.

            We live in an era where our neighbour to the South, the United States—a country of which I am a citizen—has intervened militarily in the affairs of its neighbours to its South, in Central and South America, over 80 times in 100 years, mostly in the name of democracy. Well, then, Central and South America should be among the most democratic places the world.

            We live in an era where our neighbour to the South, the United States, has been at war in the middle East continually since 2003—a good part of that time with our Canadian help. For all such violent interventions, this is still one of the most dangerous places in the world. 

            I don’t know how to fix these geopolitical matters. You don’t either. But, at the very least, when it comes to our prayers, we need to be with Maya Angelou, who prays, “Father, Mother, God, you, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give all the world that which we need the most: peace.” 

            Except that we must pray this prayer having learned from Ehud and the Israelites that ultimately God chooses to answer our prayers for peace only by making us humans responsible to make it so. It’s our job and ours alone. There is no “trust and obey God” path that guarantees peace, no “but we’re a Christian nation,” narrative that secures our superiority. We should try to learn, instead, how, by our voting and investing, in our politics and locker-room conversations, in our schools and churches—we could learn how, not merely to pray for peace, but to wage peace, ourselves. 

            You know. What Jesus wanted.

The Hunger Games and Us

            Imagine a Canada where 90% of the population went to bed, hungry, every night. Imagine a Canada where the central government made everyone work a 12-hour day, paid them less than minimum wage, and never let them take a walk in the woods, either.

            Let’s also imagine that the other ten-percent of the population in this imaginary Canada, the rich, all live in the capital. And that the food and clothing, cars and radios that the 90% poor grow or manufacture all goes to the rich people in the capital. Nothing is left over for the poor.

            Now imagine one more thing. Suppose that every year, the rich people in the capital chose two teenagers from each of the provinces to fight in an arena. It’s like a Survivor television series type of fight, where only one of the teens can win—as in the Roman Coliseum game, with their gladiators. People in the capital love watching this game. In the lead up to the actual Survival Game—they call it the Hunger Games--contestants are paraded on stage and wear designer clothing to do meet and greets, and are all interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on Q. Once the contest starts, alliances between the contestants come and go. They try to outsmart each other, take all the food, and win special immunities while everyone in the capital bets on which Hunger Game participant will win. And along the way, a lot of blood and gore is spilled as contestants fight it out—to the death. It’s all very entertaining.

            This is the storyline of a series of novels that have taken the young adult market by storm. The first two movies—staring Jennifer Lawrence—of the Hunger Games franchise have grossed more than 1.5 billion dollars, worldwide, over the past two years. When the third movie, Mockingjay Part 1, debuts in a few weeks, it is expected that the movie will gross over 200 million dollars during its first week.

            The Hunger Games—as you can tell from the trailer—is incredibly violent—not as a celebration of violence, but—and here is where it gets interesting, for me—as a prophetic critique of violence. The Hunger Games movies are, in part, a commentary on our culture’s bloodlust, on how we as a society have learned to embrace, and even enjoy, violence.

            We do, right?

            The highest ratings on TV are for shows like Ultimate Fighting or WWE Smackdown, where blood and gore, real or simulated, are a regular part of the draw. Best selling video games, like Grand Theft Auto or God of War, regularly feature rape, murder, mayhem, and death—all to hateful dialog. I won’t mention hockey or football. As a society we tend to look the other way when the poorest, least educated, youngest people among us are forced to grow up, fight, and often die in a subculture of drugs, gangs, and violent prisons—although the beheadings of Western reporters by ISIS are very popular on the web. South of the border, people somehow have it in their heads that it is a God-given right to carry hidden handguns into schools and shopping malls.

            Much too soon after we sacrificed our young men and women to take trips down the Highway of Heroes, we have boots on the ground, again, in Iraq. While we all deplore ISIS, the West’s track record in the Middle East strongly suggests that our military solutions have simply not been a solution to these sorts of horrific internecine fights going on there. In fact, truth be told, we did more than our fair share in inciting those conflicts. After World War I, we drew the boundaries that would never work. We colonized those countries, rather than let them develop on their own trajectories—taking what we wanted while doing little or nothing develop democratic institutions. We meddled in their politics to give them rulers that they didn’t want—or, when they got the ruler they wanted, we sponsored coups. As much as Israel needed a homeland, we were completely tone-deaf to how our support of anything that Israel did also created millions of refugees and unending war. And so on. Our latest invasion of Iraq, on grounds that turned out to be completely wrong, has dropped that country into endless civil war and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Our military solutions and power politics over the past hundred years have left much of the Middle East a wasteland.

            Not what you would expect from “Christian” nations reaching out to other nations. Even a casual reading of the Old Testament shows that God does not condone violence, whether individual or national. The sixth command states baldly, and rather boldly, “Thou shalt not kill.”

            The Old Testament also warns the Israelites against depending on weapons of war if they hope to be a nation of shalom. In Psalm 20, for example, we read: "Some trust in chariots and some in horses but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." Isaiah wrote, "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, and who trust in chariots but do not look to the Holy one of Israel, or seek help from the Lord." These words are especially ironic this week, given that the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, just visited Egypt and when he was done, he happily announced that Egypt would join in the battle against ISIS. Salvation for the latest coalition!

            I understand, of course, that these texts were written for an Israel that was supposed to be a theocracy. I understand that the geopolitical “move,” that God wanted Israel, as his “covenant” nation to make don’t translate well into our secular era. I understand that along with this theme there are others in the Old Testament that seem to glorify war. Still, at the heart of the Old Testament there is a vision of shalom, and a call to wise governance to achieve it, that is far too easily overlooked.

            Moving on to the New Testament. Jesus says, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." He adds, "Do not resist an evil person.” And, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." And rather than call down several squadrons of angels in F-35 Raptors to save him from at his arrest, in Matthew 26 Jesus actually follows his own advice. He turns the other cheek. He allows Judas and the leaders of the people and the Romans to seize him. He allows himself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter. To change the cosmos. And he asks us to do likewise.

            I find it surprising that so many of Christians pound the table and insist on taking the Bible literally about matters it hardly discusses, like homosexuality or whether you can use hymns in worship or free enterprise or even democracy; but that when it comes to a theme that is front and center from beginning to end for the whole Bible, that is, God’s desire that his people should wage peace and nonviolence, we say things like, “well, that’s The Sermon on the Mount. All exaggeration. An ideal to dream about. Can’t take that literally.”

            But the early church took the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ warning about not living by the sword unless you want to die by the sword, very literally. Every Roman soldier who converted to Christianity was required to get out of the army as soon as possible. All Christians who joined the army were excommunicated. Origen, a church father, put it this way: "We will not take up the sword against people and we will not learn warfare again, since we have become sons of peace through Jesus, who is our commander."

            Eventually, three hundred years after Jesus’ death, the Church changed its mind about violence. Constantine saw Christians as an untapped resource for winning the empire the old fashioned way—at the end of a sword. Christian leaders from Augustine to Calvin taught that Christians could fight in wars. They called it the Just War Theory. That is (far too briefly) war may be okay where a nation’s home territory is attacked and the war can be fought so that civilians and innocents will not suffer catastrophic deaths. We mostly thought that Just War Theory was okay, until it came to Dresden or Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

            Still, even my own sense of justice and outrage at what the Nazis did makes it impossible for me to argue with the fact that Hitler had to be stopped. My grandparents harbored fugitives from the Nazis, and participated in the violent underground. These are told as heroic tales, not as deviations from one of the Bible’s core themes. But even so, the Bible’s overarching message about how Christians must avoid violence makes me nervous when it comes to most arguments that this or that war can be just—especially since it has become a knee-jerk reaction for us in the West to suppose that any war our nation fights in, so long as we can somehow figure out how to call the enemy “terrorists,” must be just. It is usually only ten years after—after Vietnam or Iraq—that we finally admit we were wrong.

            So now, preparing for war has become a way of life for us. As of about two years ago, Canada has officially decided to shape its armed forces for NATO-led combat rather than primarily for peacekeeping. And the American citizen in me is ashamed to admit that the US has fought something like 100 wars in the past 150 years, many of them to protect the interests of its banana companies, Wall Street investors and petty dictator-friends. When I lived in The Philippines, people knew that they had fought a bloody war for independence from the USA for fifty years, after the USA took the Philippines from Spain and promised, but did not deliver, on independence. You don’t learn that in American schools.

            We just don’t see the world politics through Biblical spectacles. Instead, we tend to put on our nationalist, we’re-always-right spectacles on instead. And in the meantime we have been made dead to the costs of violence through our entertainments and government speechifying. We especially love pretend violence. But that pretend violence may just be an emotional fifth column that also erodes our moral revulsion for real violence. We watch “shock and awe,” or read about drone attacks that kill scores of civilians as if from a Roman Coliseum portico, scorecards in hand. If the Hunger Games franchise of films teaches us anything, it is that a little media and a little government support go a long way to making even the most unthinkable horrors okay, just fun and games and patriotism.

            What do we make of this? I am actually not as certain as I have sounded so far. ISIS is revolting. But Jesus’ warning that those who live by the sword will die by the sword unnerves me. I feel very uncomfortable explaining the West’s reliance on armed conflict away. I can’t ultimately do it, in fact. This prophetic word from Jesus does not bode well for the United States or its Canadian allies, given our habitual fighting of wars in far away places that we cannot win, wars that seem to do more to radicalize another generation against the West than they do to bring on the peace. Jesus’ warning that those who live by the sword will die by the sword is a perfect word for those of us in the West who are numbed against taking violence on the computer console seriously. When will the other shoe drop? Will we too, finally, die by the sword? Will it be a thousand small cuts in the alley ways and homes and reservations and prisons and police actions that finally get us, or some one else’s shock and awe?

            The Apostle Paul said that Christians were chosen to be ambassadors of reconciliation. Did Paul mean only that we’d be able to make up when we disagreed with near neighbors? Or did he have a more cosmic vision? Is the Sermon on the Mount a radical call to really choose another path, as the early Christians certainly thought it was, or is it hyperbole?

            I am just as stuck with the rhetoric of winning the world for democracy and as the next person. When I visited the 9/11 memorial a few weeks ago, I was deeply saddened—here, then, were North Americans who died by the sword because (I know this is only part of the story—but an important part) we had used the sword overseas in a never-ending circle of violence. Sill, I think that ultimately, as Christians and as civilizations formed in part by the Judeo-Christian tradition, we ought to be betting our marbles on the counter-intuitive wisdom of Jesus. Those—including whole nations—who live by the sword, certainly will die by the sword. Does it follow, instead, that if we live by the hand outstretched to help, we will be helping ourselves?

            There is a poem by Harry Kemp that I first read in a sermon by Harry Fosdick, the famous Liberal preacher, that gets it right and goes like this:

I saw the conquerors riding by,

With cruel lips and faces wan,

Musing on kingdoms sacked and burned,

 There rode the Mongol, Genghis Khan.

And Alexander, like a god,

Who sought to weld the world in one;

And Caesar with his laurel wreath,

And like a thing from Hell, the Hun.

And leading like a star, the van,

Heedless of outstretched arm and groan,

Inscrutable Napoleon went,

Dreaming of Empire, and alone.

Then all they perished from the scene,

As fleeting shadows on a glass,

And conquering down the centuries came

Christ, the sword less, on an ass.

        So what do you think? Do we believe that? Trust that? And shall we try to figure out what that means, personally and for our nations, now, before we find ourselves looking back on another hundred years of war?

        Or, is something more like the Hunger Games our future?

On the Eve of the Our Reprisal Against Syria

            I am wondering about this international rush to punish Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons. I don’t like it. I fear that it is hypocritical and self-serving.

            But first a caveat. I am sure—as sure as a twenty-first century guy who didn’t live through the gas attacks on the front lines of some WWI battlefield like Ypres—I am sure that the use of chemical weapons is a terrible evil. No one in his or her right mind would condone such use.

            Why? It is a potentially painful way to die—perhaps like bleeding to death from shrapnel. It is a weapon that can be used as easily against civilians as against soldiers—like nuclear weapons or landmines. Chemical weapons are also a sort of mirror on human depravity. The suffering that followed their use in WWI has sunk so deep in (most) nation’s psyches that it is a place we just can’t go back to. But mostly, chemical warfare is thought of as especially evil because it is a weapon of mass destruction. Their use cannot be easily restricted to a front line or military installation. Noncombatants suffer.

            And that is just how it is with war, especially modern war. The truth is, whereas several hundred civilians died in the chemical weapons attack earlier this month, a hundred thousand have already died in the larger Syrian civil war. By bullets. Missiles. IEDs. Infection and disease. Bombs. And beyond Syria the toll rises into the millions. Why don’t we pull together an international treaty to outlaw bullets? Nuclear weapons? What is it about chemical weapons that move us more than these other, arguable far more effective and destructive weapons?

           

            I listened carefully to what John Kerry and Prime Minister David Cameron had to say, and while they were obviously outraged at the use of the chemical weapons, neither explained why this form of warfare was particularly immoral compared to the larger war or nuclear weapons or land mines  It was almost as if their outrage made a more nuanced explanation of the moral issues unnecessary. “Can’t you see how mad I am. Of course the use of such weapons is evil beyond imagining!” They reminded me of the preacher who put in his notes "weak point; pound pulpit." This has happened before. Who can forget Colin Powell’s raising the spectre of chemical weapons before the start of the Iraq war?

            I also believe our outrage at Syria’s use of chemical weapons is a rallying cry for the West right now because our cultural narcissism needs something to be outraged at to justify itself. We need to assuage a vague but collective sense of guilt we have that is occasioned by our pervasive lack of gravitas when it comes to almost everything we do or do not do, from popular entertainments to climate change.

            Of course, cultural narcissism is only a partial explanation for the outrage. For others, this moral outrage is a cover for our own reliance on even more deadly weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear weapons. This moral outrage justifies our reliance on the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us against. This moral outrage at Syria justifies our sales of arms to just about every nation that wants them. This moral outrage gives civil Christians the opportunity to act like peacemakers when generally they love nothing better than having their country build more chariots and rely on more horses. This moral outrage is a deep magic that excuses our boredom with news from Egypt and Syria and the Congo and so on. I mean, did you see Miley’s performance at the VMA? Now that was shocking!

            I do not pretend to know what the answer is in Syria or Egypt or anywhere else in the world. But that does not mean just a violent response is the best one. It reeks of international “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This approach has not made Middle East more prosperous or democratic or friendly to the West over the past fifty years or so. Remember how years before 9/11 Clinton was lobbing cruise missiles at Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps? Why should another round fired at Damascus help bring peace and prosperity or amity there? Why shouldn't it spark a wider war? Did shock and awe solve Iraq’s problems? Not knowing the right answer to Syria’s convulsions doesn’t mean we should fall back on solutions that have not worked before.

            So tonight I am sad. I’m tied up in knots, actually. Partly it is the swelling moral outrage that demands military action, now! And partly, it is the lack of similar outrage over the first 100,000 to die there. 

Remembering My Boer Relative's Execution

            This past Sunday my church commemorated Remembrance Day, and that brought a story to mind.

            Many years ago, a relative of mine—my grandfather’s cousin, and so my first cousin three times removed—enlisted to fight in the Boer War, in Southern Africa. The Boer War was the first war that Canadians went overseas to fight. They did so for patriotism, for Empire, and for King, though probably not so much for Sir Wilfred Laurier, the Canadian Prime Minister at the time. Laurier would only send volunteers to South Africa because he didn’t want to offend Quebecers who thought fighting a war for England halfway around the world was just plain stupid. Maybe my fellow Canadians were right.

            The thing is, my grandfather’s cousin didn’t fight for the Canadians or the British. Pieter Schuil was a Dutchman who volunteered to fight for the Boers in a fit of righteous indignation at what the British were doing to the Boers. Tragically, Pieter was ultimately executed by firing squad. I have a letter written to Pieter’s parents, in Dutch, by the English Chaplain who prayed with Pieter on that last day, both on bended knee, Pieter with a Bible in his hands.

            There is more to Pieter’s story. It seems that he may have been unjustly executed, though this is disputed. The British claimed that while carrying a white flag, he came toward the British lines, and then suddenly lowered the gun and started shooting. At his court marshal hearing, Pieter claimed that it was no flag of truce, but just a hankie tied to his gun for no reason in particular, and that he never approached the English lines. He had been unhorsed, and was simply caught up in the British advance.

            And there is more yet to the story. This was a war for empire in its worst sense. The Boers had set up two small independent countries to get away from British rule in the Cape. What is more, they didn’t ask the Africans, whose land they conquered, for permission to set up those countries. After gold and diamonds were discovered in the one of little Boer states--which had made peace with Britain earlier--the British attacked in order to add the Boer territory to their own. It was an imperialistic land grab for the empire. Again, no one asked any Africans for their permission.

            When the British regulars defeated the Boer armies, the Boers refused to surrender and engaged in guerrilla warfare. The British responded by pretty much burning down every Boer farm they could find, inventing concentration camps, and then filling them not merely with soldiers but with women and children from the burned out farms. At least 20,000 Boers and an equal number of Africans charged with feeding the Boers died of hunger and disease in the camps. Pictures from the camps look eerily like pictures from Nazi concentration camps 40 years later. It was a dirty war that brought no honor to England, the Boers, or Canada.

            An interesting personal footnote is that forty years later, after the Second World War, my Shona daughter-in-law’s grandfather, a wealthy African cattle rancher, had all his land expropriated by the British so that they could give it to returning war veterans. Without land to range and feed his cattle, he sold most of his heard at a huge loss and became a refugee in what was then Rhodesia. No one ever asked him what he thought of the Boer War or the two World Wars. His descendants mostly grew up poor and landless and angry that white invaders had dispossessed them of everything they owned.

            War is an ugly business. So what do I do on Remembrance Day? Should I remember my family members who died at war, even if they fought on the losing side? Or when they fought for mistaken ideals? Or should I remember only Canada’s heroes, young men and women who fought with honor and courage, even if the wars they fought were sometimes unjust? Or should I have preached a sermon on how all war is hell and how we all ought to work like angels to make sure we don’t fall into another? After all, as Jesus once said, those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and “Love your enemies,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

            And, by the way, who exactly is calling Christians children of God these days, anyway?