On November 11th, we gather at the civic center to remember those who lost their lives in past world wars. We pray for peace for the world and for our children. Some years, it seems more exhausting, and thus all the more urgent, to pray for peace amid the on going violence and wars in the world.

Our November remembrance has included old war movies, majestic War Requiems, gay war ballets, and solemn reminders of the human tragedy of war.  While these continue, there are increasingly more questions and discussions critiquing the necessity and the nature of our involvement in current wars.

We won’t forget the great world wars.  But in today’s history, they are over-shadowed by ongoing warfare and terrorism.  With global media coverage, we know more than what we want to know about oppression and aggression.  We are exhausted.  Many countries will never forget war, because that is all their people have known.  They will have forgotten Peace, because it is something they have never known, or if so, only fleetingly.

We are exhausted.  Violence simply appears to be the nature of things.  It is what works.  It is inevitable, the last, and often the first resort in conflicts.  It is embraced with equal eagerness by people on the left and on the right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives.  The threat of violence, it is believed, alone is able to deter aggressors.

The roots of our devotion to violence are deep.   In writing on violence, Walter Wink ("Engaging the Powers") observes that the religion of Babylon ­ one of the world’s oldest- rather than Christianity, is the real religion of America.  “Jesus taught the love of enemies, but the Babylonian religion taught their extermination. "Violence was for the religion of ancient Mesopotamia what love was for Jesus; the central dynamic of existence.”

Unless God builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.
Unless God guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil; for God give sleep to his beloved.”

 Psalm. 127 ¹

In the beginning of time, when God built the house of creation, it was a good God who createed a good creation.  Chaos could not resist order. Good and evil came later. And evil is pervasive.  The culture of violence seeps through our scripture and religious history. The violence of the Old Testament has been problematic for Christians.  In the Old Testament, there are six hundred passages of explicit violence, and one thousand verses describing God’s own violent actions of punishment.  And our church, the house of God, down through the centuries has known its share of violence.

In the New Testament we are offered a new view of reality.  There is a shift from a God who punishes to a God who loves.   Jesus came speaking transformation, a new approach to violence, a third way.  Not one of retaliation, nor of surrender, but of non-violent engagement.

This past week I have been reading about war.  I noticed that the writers, as they reported were often overcome by the human tragedy of destruction.  It is this side of war and humanity that I want to look at briefly ­ the side of humanity where God has not built a house.

Leon Wolff, "In Flanders Fields" (1958) wrote in his preface, “I have tried, but without avail, to avoid saying that it [WWI] unrolled with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It did.”   In WWI 10 million people died.

The poem "In Flanders Fields", written by John McCrae, further unrolls the tragic spiral of violence by inviting the listener to “Take up our quarrel with the foe.”

John Keegan, a renowned writer on war, wrote that the First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.  Unnecessary, because it could have been stopped during the 5 weeks leading up to the first clash of arms.  Tragic not only because of the 10 million who were killed, but also because of the emotional, tortured lives of millions more.  And, he writes, “when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred [was] so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots.  The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct outcome of the First World War.  On 18 September 1922, Adolph Hitler threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realize seventeen years later: "It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain…No, we do not pardon, we demand ­ vengeance!”

The spiral of violence and the heartache of war continue on.

In a recent book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent, reflects on the addictive nature of war.  During his years as war correspondent he says that he found few sanctuaries from the conflict.  But he found one in the home of a couple in love.  He writes, “it was with them, seated around a wood stove, usually over a simple meal, that I found sanity and was reminded of what it means to be human.  Love kept them grounded.  It was to such couples that I retreated during the wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans.  Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving ­ often self-sacrifice—as well as desire.  For the covenant of love is such that it recognizes both the fragility and the sanctity of the individual.  It recognizes itself in the other.  It alone can save us.”

Viktor Frankl, in "Man’s Search of Meaning" writes of the grim battle between love and war in Auschwitz.  “A thought transfixed me; for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man [sic] can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.”

In the great commandment given by Jesus, loving God is the first demand.  Love of neighbour comes out of love of God.  Jesus didn’t say we should be nice to one another because God would like us to be nice.  He said the first and most essential thing is to love God. The centrality of Jesus’ message for breaking the grip of sin and death is: to love God.

Gil Bailie in "Violence Unveiled" comments that “the modern world came to believe that it could fulfill the requirements of the second commandment without having to bother with the first.”  He writes,” The creaking and groaning, indeed, the shouting and shooting, that we now hear all around us is coming from the collapse of that assumption.”

The challenge of the Christian church, and our personal challenge, has not changed over time.  Our challenge is to redeem our time, by following Christ, loving God, and teaching our children to love God.

Amen.

                                                                                                                                                                      Brenda Faust