St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, November 2, 2008

The Price of War – Rev. David Mundy

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-18, 25 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

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The banner headline on the front page of the national newspaper this past October read Price tag of Canada's Afghanistan mission: up to $18 billion. After some pressure from opposition parties the Conservative government released an estimate of $18 billion for the military mission in Afghanistan, through to the Canadian withdrawal in 2011. Although this sounds like a massive amount of money – and it is – we have to put it in perspective. If the 2011 date is correct, our military presence in Afghanistan will have stretched over nine years, so $18 billion is roughly $2 billion per year. Canadians spend $18 billion each year on alcoholic beverages, so we could easily argue that $2 billion is a small price to pay to equip and support our military personnel in this war.

This is a matter of more than money of course. Within the newspaper report there was a much more sobering figure. It’s estimated that approximately 100 more Canadian soldiers will be killed in Afghanistan, in addition to the 100 who have already died there. It struck me that the priorities of the article were upside down. War is not primarily a matter of dollars and cents. The headline should have read Price tag of Canada’s Afghanistan mission: up to 200 of Canada’s finest.

How do we put a price tag on war? Is the figure of 200 dead a bargain calculated over nearly a decade? After all, the totals of 68,000 soldiers killed during World War One and 45,000 during World War Two are staggering by comparison. Even the Korean War which involved fewer Canadian soldiers and officers than Afghanistan resulted in more than 500 deaths.

Yet there is a part of us which understands that the death of even one person with a name and a personal history and a family left behind is too many. For those who have lost someone in the prime of life that single death might as well be a million or a trillion because their loved one meant the world to them.

This is the Sunday when we honour and reflect upon those who served in the wars of the past and the present and ask ourselves what we should say about war as the people of Christ who, as we heard last Sunday, taught blessed are the peacemakers. We come to worship God with poppies in our lapels and spend moments in solemn silence as a way of saying “thank you” for great sacrifice made by those who have fought in our wars.

Although many congregations acknowledge Remembrance Sunday, there are no scripture passages specially chosen for this day.

It happens, though, that our reading from the book of Joshua recalls the battles fought between the nomadic people of Israel on their way to the Promised Land. In many respects the older testament of our bible is a much more bloodthirsty compilation of books and there are many stories of skirmishes and battles in which the people are convinced that God has helped them prevail. There are even disturbing passages in which God instructs the victorious Israelites to show no mercy and destroy every man, woman, child and animal in their path. Although these troubling stories of a tribal God clearly surface in the bible there are probably few of us who accept that the God we worship is so deliberately destructive. In fact, we would argue quite the oppositive. Somehow people had co-opted God to suit their purposes.

In what we call the newer testament or covenant of scripture we are invited into relationship with a God of love rather than vengeance, and there is simply no justification of war in the gospels. As we heard last Sunday from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that it is the peacemakers who are blessed and later that we should turn the other cheek in conflicts. Even the book of Revelation, which is so often used to create a picture of an avenging, warlike Jesus is really about the Lamb who comes to offer an alternative to the violence and strife which are a blight on human history.

So what is the price of war and what do we say about war as Christians this morning? There is no reason for us to be observing Remembrance Sunday in this place of worship unless we reflect upon the true cost of war. We attempt to find that delicate balance between our deep gratitude for those who sacrificed their youth and even their lives for a higher good on the one hand, with the terrible consequences of armed conflict.

As I have already noted, not only is there a profound human cost of combatants and innocent bystanders in every war, there are the financial implications. Then there is also the price we pay for demonizing other human beings on the basis

Because I am one of those postwar Baby Boomers I grew up with television programs which had the good guys fighting the bad guys who were referred to as Krauts and Japs. During my teen years the Viet Nam war raged and the Viet Cong were referred to as Gooks. That’s what happens in wars because it is much easier to fight and even hate enemies who are simply not like us.

But reality does not always support those perceptions. In one congregation I served there was a married couple in the choir who had emigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1950's and whose children were born and raised in this country. I noticed that they were absent on Remembrance Sunday every year and eventually another choir member told me that they were always uncomfortable that day.

I wrote a note to them and received a long email in reply from her. She told me that even though her husband had served in the German army he had never been a Nazi and would not have supported the atrocities of the Concentration Camps if he had any idea of what was going on. But like so many other young men he had been conscripted to serve his country. She let me know as well that the two of them had been active members in their church during and after the war. In Canada Remembrance Sunday felt like an “us against them” day that they chose to quietly avoid.

I have never listened to the poem In Flanders Fields the same way since then that because I realized that every nation pays its price and mourns its losses, even when they are “the enemy” and even when they are defeated. Derek sang for us those poetic, chilling words:

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders Fields.

As Christians we need the reminder that “the dead” in the poem are not just the people who were on our side in conflicts, even though we may be convinced that our cause is good against the evil. And when we “take up our quarrel with the foe” perhaps we need to understand that the real enemy is always our human propensity to violence as a way of dealing with our suspicions and differences. For some reason these are the hardest lessons for humanity to learn, even when we see again and again the terrible cost of war.

What we learn is that wars rarely end when treaties are signed. The effects linger for decades and even longer, like dangerous toxins that have been spilled into the ground. The day after this week’s historic election in the United States the New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, offered that the Civil War is finally over, 147 years after the first bloody battle was fought at Bull Run. He is speaking of the remarkable symbolism of a bi-racial president in a nation which has never really reconciled to the issues of race which precipitated that war.

To simply say that war is categorically wrong or bad is to ignore the reality of evil in our world. Few of us are pacifists in the strictest sense. And we may quietly think that Jesus’ commandment to love one another and to turn the other cheek is rather naiive. Yet as Christ’s people we are constantly called to find that other way, whenever and wherever it is possible.

Our Rev. Cathy shared a story with me the other day which serves as a reminder that God is able to overcome the evil of this world and effect profound and hopeful change, one person at a time.

The story was about Jurgen Moltmann, a German theologian who is now in his eighties. During the Second World War, Moltmann was a teenager and an atheist. He entered the Luftwaffe, the German air force in 1944, near the end of the conflict. He was taken prisoner and incarcerated in Belgium where he and other inmates had to live with photographs of the dead from the concentration camps nailed to the doors and walls. He was ashamed of his homeland, but he was treated with compassion by Christians in the camp, including the chaplain. As a result of their openness to the enemy, Moltmann became a Christian and a leading thinker of his time, developing what he called the theology of hope.

We need these stories of reconciliation. We are all invited into a theology of hope in which our world can be transformed into the place where God’s shalom can flourish. As the passage from Thessalonians we heard today says “we do not grieve as those who have no hope.” This is Christ’s way.

Well, I have spoken about situations in the bible and the Civil War and the Second World War. We need to be rooted in the present, so I will bring us back to where we started. I will say again that the deaths of two hundred Canadian sons, and brothers, and husbands and fathers in Afghanistan is not a bargain. That figure is two hundred more than any of us should accept, even as we say “thank you” to those who have died and those who mourn them.

In recent weeks both the United Nations and one of Britain’s generals in Afghanistan have stated that this war is not “winnable” in any traditional sense of defeating the enemy. Eventually there will need to be negotiation with the Taliban, if this militant group will ever come to its senses and leave behind its warring ways. Surely the families of their dead also grow weary of death and destruction.

As foolhardy as it may seem, we must continue to pray for peace in our world, that the evil of conflict will be overcome, and that every land will be become God’s promised land.