Word and Table

This is my sermon for Sunday, November 18, 2007.  It is based on the texts of Isaiah 2:1-5 and Luke 21:5-19, and in it I rely heavily upon a Remembrance Day message from the Rev. Anne Le Bas and an article "Choose Love" by Yael Lachman found in Yes Magazine.

———-

Seven hundred years or so before the birth of Jesus a man paused for a moment to look at and examine the world in which he lived.
He was in a small nation named Judah,
and what Isaiah saw was not very pretty.
In fact, it was pretty brutal.
The mighty Assyrian empire had conquered nations and civilizations from the borders of  India all the way to ancient Egypt.
It was an empire like none had ever seen before.
Its armies had swept across the world,
holding its conquests in an iron grip.
Assyria was infamous for its cruelty . . . destroying without mercy,
uprooting and scattering defeated peoples as slaves across their empire,
and plundering and looting everything in sight to fund the huge military machine that kept the empire growing.
The kingdom of Israel had already fallen victim to its marauding armies,
and the leadership of that nation had either been executed or deported.
A little nation like Judah stood no chance against them.
The Assyrians were at Judah’s gates ready to bring destruction, death, and despair in their wake . . . All seemed to be lost.

I imagine most people in that situation would have either given up hope,
retreated into bitterness or anger,
and desperately sought whatever safety they could find for themselves.
But not Isaiah.
Instead, he wrote the words we heard in our first reading. 
"They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more."
Things would not always be as they are now, he declared.
One day God would create a new world from the current devastation,
a world in which the nations would no longer learn war,
but instead create a peaceable kingdom.

I tell you all this because I believe it’s important for us to understand the background to these familiar words from the prophet Isaiah.
You see, it is all too easy for us to be misled by their beauty and to think that they were written by someone who had no idea how wicked and hopeless the world can be.
Isaiah’s vision sounds like the dream of someone in an ivory tower,
protected and safe – an idealist without a clue,
But it wasn’t like that at all . . . far from it.
These words were written in the middle of appalling conditions,
and they were written by someone who was utterly powerless to do anything about them.

But though Isaiah’s words were written long ago,
when we look at our world today,
we can see that his dream is as far off now as it was then.
War is more destructive than it has ever been.
Wars have always taken a dreadful toll,
but that toll has grown greater as the technology of death has developed. Weapons - conventional, nuclear, biological, and chemical -
are capable of wiping out immense numbers of people indiscriminately,
and small groups of suicide bombers can terrify a whole nation,
disrupting its life completely.
But just as Isaiah could hold onto hope in the face of the Assyrian hordes who threatened to destroy his whole world,
perhaps we should not be too quick to give up on hope either.

Twenty years ago this past November 8th,
another man faced an appalling loss.
A bomb has exploded during a Remembrance Day service at Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, killing 11 people.
It was the highest death toll in a terrorist attack in Northern Ireland in over five years,
and at least 63 other people were injured in the blast, nine of them seriously.
The device went off without warning at 10:45 am at the war memorial where the townspeople had gathered to pay their respects to their fallen dead.
Hidden in a nearby hall,
the bomb blew out one of the building’s walls,
showering the area with debris and burying some in several feet of rubble.
The dead included three married couples, a retired policeman and a nurse.
Thirteen children were also among the injured.

When the bomb went off Gordon Wilson was standing next to his daughter
Marie, at the town’s war memorial.
She was the nurse who died.
Wilson was holding her hand under the rubble as she lost consciousness,
and his courage in responding to that tragedy is famous.
He refused to bear a grudge but instead insisted on moving on towards forgiveness and reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant people.
And because of this the people of Ireland and Great Britain talked about her tragic death for weeks, months and even years.
You see, as Ms. Wilson lay dying under the rubble,
holding the hand of her father, she began to reassure him,
and then, right before she died, she said,
“Daddy, I love you very much."
"Those were the last words she spoke,” reported Wilson,
and then he stunned everyone when he added,  "I bear no ill will at all.
Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life.
She was a great wee lassie,"
Further, Wilson said that in the first angry hours after the bombing,
his first reaction was to pray for his daughter’s killers.
Wilson was and is not interested in trying to fit his daughter into some
itemized list of political atrocities.
"Marie’s last words were about life," he said,
"It would be no way for me to remember her by having words of hatred in
my mouth.”

But what happened afterwards did not end with Wilson individual response.
Out of that ruin grew an organization which is still going strong,
the Spirit of Enniskillen Trust.
This group does all sorts of work with young people growing up in places where there is conflict and division,
helping them to develop the tools to listen and to debate peacefully with those who differ from them to end cycles of vengeance and suspicion.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares. said Isaiah.
It is work like this that can help make his vision a present reality.

What does it mean to beat your sword into a ploughshare?
It means taking something destructive and transforming it into something creative and life affirming.
A sword kills:
a ploughshare opens up the ground for new life,
for the seed to grow, to flourish and to multiply.
Of course Gordon Wilson and his wife, Jean, were devastated at their daughter’s death,
and of course they were angry,
but they chose to take the sword of that anger and beat it into a
ploughshare that has brought life and hope to many others.

They are not alone in doing this.
We can all think of examples.
Nelson Mandela, leading a process of reconciliation in South Africa,
despite his own suffering.
Former hostage Terry Waite, who has been involved in work to promote healing and justice after his long captivity in Lebanon.
Waite and Mandela and many others are motivated by the desire that their own suffering in war should not be wasted pain,
a sword which destroys themselves and others,
but that it be beaten into a ploughshare to bring life out of death.

And for followers of Christ, the prime example of this act of beating swords into plowshares is that of Jesus himself,
who took the cross, an instrument of death,
and turned it into a symbol of new life and hope,
a demonstration that God’s love is not defeated even by the worst the world can do.
Jesus could have avoided his death -
he could have changed his message to suit those in power.
He knew that preaching a message of radical love and empowering those whom others had a vested interest in keeping down was bound to get him into trouble,  but he did it anyway.
He knew what would happen to him,
and he also knew what happens when violence and the sword rule.
Our gospel lesson attests to this.
When some people exclaimed about the beauty and splendor of the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus replied,
“As for these things that you see,
the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another;
all will be thrown down."
He then added,
and you don’t have to be a prophet to realize this truth about our world,
"Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”
And to his disciples he said,
“They will arrest you and persecute you;
they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons,
and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.
You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death.
You will be hated by all because of my name.”
And what he said for his followers also came true for him.
And yet, he never responded with violence or hate,
but always, always with love,
and with forgiveness,
even as they nailed him to the cross.
And for countless millions of his followers throughout the ages,
it is this symbol and Jesus’ story,
which has inspired them to respond to evil with love,
and to keep responding that way even when they suffer as a result.

Now I’ve never beaten a real sword into a real ploughshare,
and I don’t suppose you have either,
but my guess is that it would not be an easy thing to do.
It must take effort and time.
It must be noisy, perhaps even painful too.
You’d have to be skilled and practiced in metalwork. 
You’d also need a good deal of faith.
What if you need that sword again in a hurry - what will you do then?
Above all it would be an active process,
a process in which you have to get personally involved.
It wouldn’t happen all in a moment and all by itself as if by magic.
In the same way, choosing God’s way of life and love rather than destruction and hate is not easy either.
That is why people so often fail to do it,
why they lapse so easily into seeking vengeance,
into narrow mindedness and prejudice,
and into a fearful suspicion of anything or anyone different.

Perhaps we hope that we will never be faced with the challenges Isaiah or the Wilsons or others have faced.
Perhaps we would rather not think about how we would behave if we did.
But the truth is that we can’t wait until the bomb goes off or the Assyrians are at our door to discover what we are made of.
People of reconciliation of love and of forgiveness are able to respond as they do because they are already in the practice and habit of beating swords into plowshares in their everyday lives.

We may not like to recognize it,
but the truth is that we all carry swords that need beating into plowshares right here and now.
We can all wield weapons of destruction if we choose to.
They may not be made of steel or iron, but they are no less damaging.
Our words and our attitudes can destroy others.
Our silence can mean that evil goes unchecked.
Our greed can rob others of the chance of life.
Envy, fear, insecurity can lead us to cut others down.
We look for the causes of war in great political events,
the decisions of governments and generals,
but in reality they start in the small decisions that each of us make about the way we relate to those around us.
On their own they may seem like nothing,
but taken together our actions or inactions are the seeds that lead to war.

And just as war is our responsibility, something we set in motion here and now in the small things we do, so too is peace.
Whenever we see others hurting and do something to set that right,
we strike a hammer blow that shapes the destructive sword into something positive and good.
Whenever we turn aside to do something about a wrong that we would rather
ignore,
we beat that sword into something that will bring life.
Whenever we look at another person and see the commonalities we share
rather than the differences of culture or outlook that divide us,
we take one small step towards that world of peace for which Isaiah longed.

In researching my sermon for this week I found an article that had been written eight days after September 11, 2001.
“The author, Yael Lachman, wrote:
I was up in the mountains last week.
Tuesday morning, just after dawn,
I crawled out of my tent and ran smack into a ranger whose job that morning was to whisper the news from New York and Washington, DC.
When he had finished, we looked at each other for a long, helpless moment. Then we both turned away before either of us could cry.
The ranger went off to find more campers.
stood there staring at a tree.”

“There are moments in your life when the world splits open and forces you to decide what is most important to you and what you are going to do about it. Immediately, my mind thought of all the scenarios taking place back in the city:  fear and hysteria crackling over the airwaves;
calls for retaliation;
a declaration of war . . . and unthinkable devastation.
Then something made me stop and look.
Right in front of me, the river ran down the mountain.
A [groundhog] froze on a rock.
The real world grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back from the brink. Once it had my attention, it demanded to know exactly what I intended to do. What is required of me, right now, by everything that is holy?

That’s the question, and we must find an answer fast.
We can no longer fail to respond.
Standing by the river,
I scrambled around in my mind for inspiration,
for an image of someone wise who had lived through a war and who could tell me who I was supposed to become in these desperate days.
I was expecting a freedom fighter, maybe—someone with a gun.
But the person who sprang to mind was Chiura Obata,
the Japanese-American painter who fell in love with Yosemite and the High Sierra.
He appeared to me looking exactly as he does in a photograph from 1942, taken at the Tanforan detention center.
In the photograph, Obata is calm and smiling,
teaching a bunch of children to paint.”

“Of all the things to do.
There’s a war on, your people have been rounded up like cattle,
and there you are playing with a paintbrush.
I blinked, hoping to conjure a more martial role model this time,
but Obata stubbornly remained.
He sat before me, out on a rock in the middle of the river,
watching impatiently as I struggled to comprehend.
Then all of a sudden, I got it.
Obata wasn’t teaching those kids how to paint;
he was teaching them how to love.
Day after day, right through the barbed-wire fence,
Obata taught those children how to see beauty, how to keep their hearts open. He knew that when evil and destruction arrive,
we must refuse to stop loving the world.
Then—and this is the crucial thing—
we must act on behalf of that enormous love.”

And then Lachman says something that we may not want to hear.
“What America has just painfully learned is that we have not loved enough.
We have cringed at gruesome wire-service photos and turned our backs on the suffering of the world.
We have allowed our own government to bomb civilians,
withhold medical supplies,
and sell weapons to brutal thugs in every part of the globe.
Through our own ignorance, we have helped create a world where desperate people will gladly sign up to be the messengers of death.
And now that death and destruction have reached our own shores,
we must decide how we are going to respond:
with love, or with fear.
The whole world is holding its breath,
waiting to see which one we will choose.”

So, he asks, which will it be?
“Love, or fear?
[Yes, Lachman says] there are people who will try to tell you that love is a luxury and that life in all its miraculous beauty is less urgent right now than the need to retaliate against the forces of evil.
[But} I am here to tell you that unless we respond with love,
we will certainly hand evil a great victory.”

Of course, we all know, some six years later, how we responded.
With fear, with the sword, with the spear.
And, though you are more than welcome to disagree with me on this,
I believe the costs of this decision will be with us for many years to come,
and it will be far more than the hundreds of billions of dollars we have already spent and will yet spend to prosecute a war whose foundation was and is fear.
How much would it have cost us to respond in love?
What if we had used all these resources to try and build bridges to our enemies rather than kill them?
Would we be any worse off than we are now?
And if I may, allow me to ask the simple question that was so popular a few years ago:
“What would Jesus have done?”
The man who said, among many other things:
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Do good to those who would or have done you wrong.”
In looking at his war-torn world over 2500 years ago,
the prophet Isaiah foresaw a world where:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks, 
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
and neither shall they learn war anymore.
It is obvious that that day has not yet arrived,
and sadly, this is partly due to the fact that those who claim to follow Jesus refuse to live by his words.
We have declined to act as he would act.
We have chosen and still choose the sword and the spear.

My friends, we all hold in our hands the tools that shape the future.
It is up to us whether they are swords that bring destruction, death and despair or plowshares that bring life, hope and love.
Amen.

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