Remembrance Sunday
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Isaiah 2: 2-4
Psalm 133
Revelation 21: 1-7
Matthew 5: 38-48
At the front of this church, in a glass encased box at the end of the Communion Table, is a book containing hundreds of names. Those names are a record of the members of the 48th Highlanders who have died in various battles since the formation of that regimental unit. We remember them with honour, as we do all those who have died in the battles of our world, and particularly all those who have, at one point or another, sat in the very pews in which you are sitting, but have journeyed from this community to distant places and lost their lives in conflicts on distant battlefields.
But even though we remember them with honour, it is nonetheless true that Remembrance Day is a strange day in the church.
In fact, when I was first ordained as a minister, just over eleven years ago, the annual Remembrance Day service was the single hardest worship service for me to prepare for.
This difficulty was rooted in the fact that, even when I was young, I was always slightly uncomfortable with the way that Remembrance Day services were conducted. So often, both in the church and in the community, the words that were spoken on Remembrance Day seemed to celebrate the glory and valour of those who had gone to fight; words were spoken about the heroism of the soldiers; and stories were told, sometimes in great detail, about the bravery and courage that they had displayed in battle. But I always found it difficult to reconcile the words that were spoken on Remembrance Day with the difficult biblical command to love one’s enemy. As we would remember the fallen heroes of wars past, and sing the national anthem, I sometimes found that those services seemed, at times, to present us with a vision of the heroic soldier, and to inspire more patriotic fervour—rather than to lead us into a state of solemn and sorrowful repentance for the sin that is war.
I was not comfortable with those services.
As I grew older, those difficulties in reconciling the logic of war with the radically challenging words of Christ led me to embrace, both by theological and philosophical conviction, a decidedly pacifist understanding of the Christian faith.
As a result, I have participated in anti-war protests; I have engaged in significant debates concerning the challenge of Christian participation in war; one of my own great heroes, in faith, is a Jesuit priest and poet by the name of Daniel Berrigan. Some of you might have heard of Berrigan who, with his late brother Philip, was an outspoken and often incarcerated critic of the nuclear arms race and of the war in Vietnam. A few years ago, while in New York, I actually made special arrangements to meet Dan Berrigan, and spent a wonderful afternoon in his apartment in the upper West side of Manhattan talking about his experiences and about the challenges of being dedicated to the paths of non-violence in an often violent world.
But this wrestling with the relationship between the Christian faith and war is not unique to me. The Church has a long history of wrestling with how to reconcile these seemingly disparate ideas – on the one hand, the call to follow a Lord who requires his followers to love their enemies, and do good to those who persecute them; and on the other hand, the idea that there may be times when the reality of injustice, evil and hatred is so powerful that it might be appropriate for people of faith to take up arms.
To address this challenging dilemma, some of the greatest thinkers in the Christian tradition began articulating a set of criteria by which to judge the merits of a war and to set parameters for the conduct of battle. The result was a set of principles which have come to be known as the ‘just war theory’.
Although the Christian just war theory emerged from pre-existing, primarily Greek philosophical traditions, the two Christian thinkers who explored those theories in the greatest detail were St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Largely based on their work, and over the course of centuries, the just war theory became divided into different but related parts. First, the just war doctrines sought to articulate the conditions that would legitimate the declaration of a just war (jus ad bellum). Second, once war had been declared, the just war theory sought to provide an ethical framework for the actions by which soldiers and states were to engage in war (jus in bello). And, third, what were the conditions that needed to be in place for peace to be established and the war could be considered to be ethically terminated (jus post bellum)?
Emerging from the work of Augustine, Aquinas and others, most ethicists – both Christian and otherwise – suggest that there are five criteria for assessing the legitimacy of a war:
1) that it is waged for a just cause
2) that it is declared by a legitimate authority
3) that it is engaged in with right intentions rather than for material gain or territorial expansion
4) that leaders and generals would not send their soldiers into battle unless there was a reasonable probability of success
5) and that it only be contemplated as a last resort when all other peaceful, diplomatic or viable alternatives have been exhausted.
Once war had been declared, the traditional just war theory suggested that there were three rules for its conduct as well – and those criteria for the conduct of war were usually understood to be discrimination, proportionality and responsibility. That is, first, that the conflict and violence must be discriminating, in that civilians should not be harmed. The principle of discrimination, of course, begs the question of whether weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, could ever be used because of their inherently non-discriminatory nature. Second, the war must be waged using methods that are proportional to the wrong that is seeking to be addressed. A massive, disproportionate and destructive military response to a relatively minor offense was deemed to be unethical. And, third, the war had to be waged responsibly, in that the political and military leaders and combatants must be held responsible for their actions both during and after the conflict. The Nuremburg trials in the aftermath of the Second World War are perhaps the most famous example of the attempt to address the issue of responsibility.
As we enter the 21st century, however, the challenges to these just war doctrines are becoming increasingly clear, and increasingly troubling. We live in an age of suicide bombers, atomic weapons, preemptive strikes, shock and awe campaigns, biological and chemical weapons, increasingly large numbers of non-combatant casualties, technologically guided weapons systems, misleading justifications for war, significant economic interests on the part of political leaders, rogue states and non-national international terrorist organizations. And, in such a context, the traditional principles of the just war theory are increasingly being viewed as anachronistic and even completely obsolete. Moreover, historians and ethicists are increasingly questioning whether most attempts at holding parties responsible for their conduct in war have applied to the losers more than to the winners. To cite only three examples -- the firebombing of Dresden, the repeated use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some of the incidents in the war in Vietnam all, in some way, defied some of the essential principles of just war conduct. However, in the aftermath of those atrocities, one might properly ask whether politicians and generals are held responsible for their ethical conduct during wars that they have won.
In light of these changing realities, there are a number of significant Christian thinkers who are beginning to ask whether we, as Christians, must re-evaluate, and perhaps even discard, our traditional acceptance of the just war theory. It is a difficult and challenging question – but it is a question that we must confront.
However, in spite of all of these personal journeys and philosophical explorations, I have to admit that I no longer have difficulty preparing for Remembrance Day services.
What changed my mind and my heart about Remembrance Day was not any lessening of my dedication to the pursuit of peace, nor any particular change in my leaning towards pacifist ideals; in many ways, I continue to question the logic and the rhetoric of war, and to question war’s actual effectiveness in establishing the conditions for peace.
Rather, what changed my mind was when I started to speak with veterans—elderly men, for the most part—in those conversations that one perhaps only has with a minister. It was in those conversations that I came to a very different perspective on the need for Remembrance Day. In nursing homes, in hospital rooms, and in times visiting with them in their homes, I heard stories of what they had experienced -- of the excitement that they, as young men, had felt, but also of the loneliness and fear that they had known. We spoke of the reasons why they had gone to war, of family members and friends who had never returned from those wars, and of the ways that their lives had been shaped by those events. And what particularly struck me was that it was sometimes not until I was preparing to conduct their funerals that I discovered that some of them had never spoken with their own families about what they had seen, and about what we had spoken about. I came to realize that those conversations that we had shared with each other were a sacred gift, to me.
It was those conversations with elderly veterans—not only at Remembrance Day, but throughout the year—that helped me to realize what the veterans most wanted us to remember on Remembrance Day. They, of all people, did not want us to focus on the glory and heroism of war, but rather to remember the urgent need for peace. As young men, they had seen what happens when peace does not exist—and what they had seen was, often, horrific. Many of them, in those quiet conversations and in their own way, were the most outspoken opponents to war that I had ever encountered – not because they had avoided the fighting, but because they had experienced it. What they wanted, at Remembrance Day, was not for us to wrap ourselves in patriotic celebrations, but rather to pray for peace. They knew that the alternative to peace is simply too horrific, too terrible—and they never wanted their children, their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren to experience what they had experienced, or to see what they had seen.
And so, we gather together at this Remembrance Day, once again. As we do so, we once again lament the fact that our nation is watching the bloody corpses of young Canadians coming home in body bags from the conflict in Afghanistan. In a few years, we will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the war to end all wars – even though the hundred years since that conflict have been the bloodiest years in recorded human history. Perhaps the only legitimate reason for bearing arms, in the modern world, is so that we might, as a last resort, embrace our ‘responsibility to protect’ the poorest, most oppressed and most vulnerable people in other sovereign states, but we are doing very little to end the rape and massacres that are taking place in the Darfur region and in other parts of the world. Our neighbours, to the south, have amassed the largest military arsenal in history -- even though if we, as a human race, dedicated a fraction of the amount of money that is spent on armaments, each year, to the eradication of disease and poverty, millions of lives would be saved. In such a world as this, with these troubling realities before us, we must ask whether it is possible that we too easily what both our faith – and the veterans of past wars – are calling us to remember?
To question these troubling realities should never be understood as a way of dishonouring those who have died. To the contrary, as we honour and remember, this day, those who have fought in the past -- and as we mourn the continuing scourge of war -- let us rededicate ourselves to working and praying for justice, for love and for peace. Let us strive for peace between cultures, peace between nations, peace between religions, peace between neighbours and peace between enemies—if for no other reason than so that young men and women will no longer be called upon to put their lives and their futures at risk in distant battlefields.
As Christians, we proclaim the good news of the coming, to this world, of a new and different kingdom. In baptism, we are made citizens of a kingdom whose king did not take up arms against his enemies, but rather opened his arms to his enemies, and prayed for their forgiveness even as they were nailing his arms to a cross. Though we might seek to be loyal citizens of the countries in which God has placed us, and though we might give thanks for the gift of a country of peace and of prosperity, we should never forget that our ultimate allegiance is to a kingdom not of this world.
And it is our allegiance to that kingdom which invites us, on this day of all days, to live in this strange tension of honouring those who have died while simultaneously remembering the call of Christ to love our enemies. We are called to remember that challenging call, and the biblical vision of a time of peace. And we cling to that call and that vision until we as a human race actually live to see the day that Isaiah saw so long ago – that day when,
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 any more.