The Fallen 2007

In the great epic poem of India, the Mahabharata, the action culminates in a great war between the armies of two sets of brothers, all of whom are cousins to one another. Arjuna is among the set of brothers who have been exiled, and are attempting to recapture their thrones. He and his brothers are the heroes of this story, the “good guys” if you will, even though it is clear that the cousins whom he is fighting are sympathetic characters as well.

And this is part of the problem. The morality of the war is far from clear. The cousins have a legitimate—though not exclusive—claim to the throne. And there is another, even larger problem. Arjuna LOVES his cousins.

As the section of the epic known as the Baghavad Gita begins, we see Arjuna surveying the battlefield just before the first of the fighting begins. And what he sees makes him drop his bow to the dirt, and sink to his knees in despair.

Now, Krishna, the Lord of the Universe, has promised to remain neutral in the battle—although he is clearly on the side of Arjuna and his brothers. Krishna promises not to fight, but will instead serve as Arjuna’s chariot driver.

So when he sees Arjuna collapse and begin to weep, the Lord climbs off of the chariot and puts a comforting hand on Arjuna’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?” He asks.

“I can’t do it, Krishna,” Arjuna cries. “As I look at the enemy line, I don’t see any enemies! Instead I see my relatives, my loved ones, the teachers I revered as a child, my mentors and playmates. How can I go forth and try to kill them? I simply cannot do it.”

And this is where the Gita gets weird. Krishna gives him a forty-page pep talk, the upshot of which is this: “Look, none of these people are real. YOU are not real. I am the Lord, and everything you see is just an expression of my being. You seem to kill, but you do not kill. People seem to die, but they do not die. For I am the only being in the universe, and I never die. This is all a grand illusion, a game, a play performed for my amusement alone. You are an actor, and this is your role. So pick up your bow, because the show must go on”—or forty pages of words to that effect.

And it works. Krishna reveals a vision of himself in his true splendor to Arjuna, who is utterly overwhelmed by the glory of the Lord. When he comes again to his senses, he picks up his bow, takes his place in his chariot, and signals the battle to commence.

There is a lot to love about the Gita. It is one of the most sublime, mystical texts in the whole of the human canon. But this message: “Go ahead and kill people, because they are not real,” is NOT, in my humble opinion, one of the more laudable aspects of this sacred text, and it has, no doubt, been used for eons to assuage the guilt of many a war-weary Indian soldier.

But while this message is undeniably horrid, it is also, nevertheless, understandable. War is terrible, the cause of unquantifiable suffering, and people must have some kind of myth or sacred context or explanation in order to make sense of its senselessness. We look to our religious traditions to give us hope when we are hopeless, courage when we are afraid, and answers when the yawning maw of Mystery threatens to devour us. And as attempts to understand war go, the Gita does a pretty good job. It has worked for a lot of people for a very long time.

Our Jewish/Christian heritage does the same for us, only perhaps not as mystically or gloriously as the Gita does. In our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon we hear the message that the dead have not, in fact, died, but have gone to be with the Lord. That their inheritance will endure. That they are happier now than ever they were when they walked upon the earth. And no doubt those words have given their share of comfort to those who faced battle, as well as to the loved ones of the dead in their grief.

But as I read this text this week, it rang hollow. It represents, I believe, a well-meaning, but ultimately naive attempt to explain away the awful magnitude of the evil that is war.

It does no good to say, “war bad, peace good,” for even warriors will agree to that. And the truth is that so long as there are tyrants, and as long as there is greed, men—and nowadays, women—will take up arms to protect themselves, and will lay down their own lives to protect others, even people they do not know, which is truly an amazing thing when you think about it. Yes, it will be nice when war is no more, as Isaiah predicts. But it has been nearly three thousand years since that prediction was made, and I do not see us much closer to its fulfillment than we were then.

It does no good to demonize the warriors, the soldiers on the field—indeed, it is my purpose in this sermon to praise them. When I first came to this parish, I was your typical, off-the-shelf variety liberal, spouting my own version of “war bad, peace good,” and all too willing to attack in my own way anything in a uniform.

But then I met the people who worshipped here, and began to minister to them. Most of the men had been soldiers in their youth, and I quickly realized that a large part of their identity, and indeed their self-esteem, derived from the fact that they put their own lives in danger in order to save the world from evil in the Second World War. And they had won. And they were proud of themselves, and one another, and their country, and the legacy of freedom and democracy that they had left to us, their descendants.

I came to love these people, and I came to understand that they viewed the knee-jerk pacifist liberalism of the sixties as an unprovoked spit in the eye, a denial of everything they had fought for—and that their friends and brothers had died for.

Eventually, I got it. They were patient with me. I tried to be sensitive to them. I realized that my own cynicism was born of the fact that my generation had never witnessed a truly just war. And it was all too easy to confuse the motives of the men and women in the trenches with the motives of the politicians pulling the strings. But they are NOT the same, and I realized, perhaps a little late, that they never had been.

Yet my cynicism is as understandable as the patriotism of those veterans that served in World War II. In our own time we have seen way too much of the poor and the young being viewed as expendable in order to further the financial and political ambitions of the old and the rich. But we also have enough distance from the popular pacifism of the Vietnam era not to demonize the footsoldier for carrying out the orders of those commanding them from half a world away.

I want to believe that there will be a reckoning for those who have perpetrated needless slaughter and suffering and crippling debt on others and, indeed, upon their own people. I want to believe that some day the leaders of nations will be called to account for their actions before the God they so loudly and obnoxiously claim to speak for. But I recognize that this is a revenge fantasy, and I will not be holding my breath.

Instead, I suggest we put our energies elsewhere. I suggest that we love and support those who, for various reasons of their own, have elected to put themselves in harm’s way. My nephew Dylan, earlier this year, went off to boot camp to become a Marine. He did not do it to preserve US oil interests in the Middle East or to punish one people for the sins of another. He did it to prove to his own father that he was worthy of his love. That side of the family has a long tradition of Marines, and Dylan wants to make his Dad proud. I secretly think that his Dad is scared silly, but he did not stop him.

Dylan is not the only one in the military for reasons of his own, or for reasons unconnected to the war at hand. For some, it is the only way they will be able to finance their education. For some, it is a way out of poverty. And for most, I believe it is a sincere desire to make the world a better place.

Whatever my feelings about the reasons we are at war, my heart, my compassion, and my prayers are with Dylan and every one of our brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews and loved ones and strangers that are serving in our armed forces. They deserve nothing less than our unqualified encouragement to be brave, be safe, be fair, and to come home alive.

But my prayers are also with those whom our efforts are effecting. The lives, homes, cities, and cultures we have decimated and endangered. For if God has heard our cries of rage and pain, God has heard theirs, too. So I pray for the Afghani people, and the Iraqi people, and the Iranian people, who want nothing more than to build lives of safety and prosperity for their families, the same as we do.

Today, we honor the fallen in war, because it is not enough to say, “They are in a better place.” It is not enough to say, “It does not matter who dies, because all is illusion anyway.” These excuses do not suffice to explain away the horror or the pain or the grief. We honor them because there is no explanation, and no excuse, and no comfort that will satisfy the magnitude of suffering we humans have inflicted upon one another.

We honor those who have given their lives in the noble cause of freedom, and we also, with perhaps a bit more sadness, honor those whose lives were taken from them—and from us—for more dubious reasons. Let us pray for those in uniform today, no matter what colors they wear. Let us pray for ourselves, that our hearts may crack like a stone, and pour forth understanding and compassion on all those who take up arms for the most disperate, desperate, and complicated reasons. Let us pray for those who have died and gone before us.

We shall remember them. Let us pray…

For all those who have fallen in war,
Lord have mercy.
For all those who fight today,
Christ have mercy.
For all those who have lost loved ones,
Lord have mercy.
For our sins, and the sins of our nation.
God help us. Amen.