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.