In Memoriam: New York and Arlington

*Preached at Grace North Church September 16th, 2001 by John R. Mabry*

In 1212, after several Crusades failed to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, Pope Innocent III hit upon a brilliant idea: send the children to fight. After all, he thought, the reason our previous Crusades have failed is because the soldiers were sinful, and God could not allow the sinful to triumph. By this logic, then, those who were not sinful would triumph, and who is more innocent and free of sin than children?

Now, anyone familiar with Catholic theology of original sin will see the flaw in this logic. In Roman Catholic teaching, children are BORN sinful and just get worse. But apparently is was their RELATIVE innocence that would prevail in this case, and so it was that hundreds of thousands of parents allowed their children to march out of Europe to their deaths in the "holy land."

The children's crusade, as it is called, is one of the true embarrassments of European and Christian history. Seldom have religious and political leaders been so clueless as to the evil of their actions as in this case. Any time we say, "children are expendable" or even civilian men and women are expendable we are teetering dangerously close to a moral chasm from which we cannot hope to return.

What makes the Children's Crusade especially heinous, however, is that this unthinkable violence was carried out in the name of God.

We should not, however, be surprised at this. After all, the Bible tells us that God is a god of vengeance, a God of war, that God will not tolerate the wicked and demands their punishment. The Bible gives explicit instructions that anyone who murders, commits adultery, has sexual relations with someone of their own gender, eats shellfish, or touches the skin of a dead pig should be put to death immediately in a divinely sanctioned act of mob violence, which I suppose is why there were so few football teams in ancient Israel. Every time a tight end received a pass, he was no doubt killed for it. People took great delight in carrying out God's vengeance against the wicked, always have, and I suppose, as long as people presume to know what God is thinking, they always will.

And this is precisely why we must be very careful, very deliberate, very thoughtful about just exactly what god we choose to worship: a god's followers will always feel they have license to mirror the behavior of their chosen deity. If you worship a god of war, you have license to be a man of war. If you worship a god of vengeance, you have license to exact that vengeance. If you worship a god of hate, then hate is part and parcel part of your spiritual practice.

We have had plenty of this in our own tradition, of course, and the Children's crusade is just one of many horrific examples. Others include the genocide of countless Native peoples, the burning of nine million innocent women accused of witchcraft in the middle ages, and many other crimes against humanity, all performed with the name of Jesus on our lips.

Our Jewish forebears in faith were no different, I am sorry to say. If you recall David's actions in Fr. Richard's course on Samuel, David apparently didn't bat an eye at murdering literally thousands of children and civilian men and women in the service of his God and his own political gain, not necessarily in that order. And yet, we laud this criminal as a hero of our faith. Jewish history, and the Bible in general is filled with such horrors, which we too easily gloss over as being God's "just punishment" of the wicked, as if we, the biblical authors, or anyone else knows the divine mind.

The terrorists that perpetrated the unspeakable tragedy our nation witnessed this week were similarly misguided, but I do not doubt that every one of these terrorists genuinely believed they were acting for Allah, that they were carrying out Allah's holy will, that they were but the instruments of Allah's just vengeance, however misguided it might seem to us.

I must admit a bias of my own, here, and apologize for it ahead of time. It is difficult for me to be an impartial scholar of world religions, for as much as I strive to hold all religions and all holy books in equal reverence, I admit some difficulty when it comes to the Koran. I have, on many occasioned, set out to read this revered scripture from cover to cover. Each and every time, my efforts have been frustrated by the content of the book itself. Quite frankly, no scripture I have ever read is as bloodthirsty as the Koran. If you have ever attempted to read it, you know what I am talking about. There is not a single chapter in the Koran that does not revel in the horrible punishment reserved for the wicked, barely a single page that does not glory in the agony that the heathen will endure in hell forever. It is difficult for me to read this book and believe it is a text inspired by the God of my experience, and I have never been able to finish it before grinding to halt in the horror and depression it's imagery inspires in me.

But for all of the violence of its holy book, Islam has historically understood the concept of the "holy war" metaphorically, as a war fought within each and every person, a war between allegiance to the ego, and submission to Allah. In the middle ages, Islam inspired the height of enlightened culture, through its influence women were granted amazing freedoms and privileges unheard of in previous cultures, and art and philosophy and science flourished. Islamic mystics, the Sufis, are pacifists and pantheists, and find in the Koran an invaluable symbolic template for spiritual growth. Again, this is difficult for me to fathom from the pages of the Koran itself, but it is heartening that Islamic culture has tempered the "justice" of its holy book with moderation and mercy.

The fundamentalists who have taken over many of the Islamic countries in this century have little connection to the Islam of the past. To say that the Taliban fundamentalists are representative of Islam is like saying that the Southern Baptist fundamentalists are representative of the whole of Christianity. Imagine if you will what life in the United States would be like if Southern Baptists staged a coup and took over the nation, holding it hostage by martial law. Imagine if they insisted that all women wear ankle-length dresses, and all men have crew cuts upon pain of death. Feminists, artists, homosexuals, socialists and freethinkers of any stripe would be lined up and shot in the name of God. This is the world depicted in the horrifying novel THE HANDMAIDS TALE by Margaret Atwood, and it is a horrifying vision indeed. It is also startlingly close to what has happened in many Islamic countries.

My heart goes out to sincere Muslims who live here in the United States. There are more than six million of them in this country today-in fact there are as many Muslims as there are Lutherans in the US; and they are, by and large, godly, compassionate, tax-paying citizens who cherish their freedoms as Americans as much as we do. I shudder to think of the backlash Muslim Americans may face in the aftermath of this tragedy. It is no more their fault than any of us sitting here were responsible for the Children's Crusade.

But the cautionary message that I want to impart goes beyond the boundaries of any particular religion. Whether you are Jewish, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan, or Zoroastrian, the warning is the same: be careful what kind of God you worship, for the behavior of any particular God cannot help but be reflected in the behavior of his or her worshippers. It is no surprise that some of those who worship Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, have at times included ritual murder as part of their religious observance. It is no surprise that the God of Israel who commands that men, women, and children be slaughtered inspired men such as David who carried out such horrors without a second thought. It is also no surprise that Allah, who glories in the destruction of the wicked would find among his worshippers men who are only too eager carry out this destruction by their own hands.

This is not just a matter for the government, or the Taliban, or for the courts; this is a matter for every person of faith to wrestle with in the cave of his or her own heart. Which god will we serve? Will we worship a god of vengeance, hatred, and punishment, or will we serve a god of peace, compassion, and love? Unless your god is a schizophrenic maniac, you cannot have it both ways. This wrestling is the true jihad, the authentic holy war that each and every one of us is called upon to fight. Let us pray.

God, the compassionate, the merciful, we cry to you in our darkness and distress. How can such unspeakable horror happen in your name? How can we who love and serve you embrace other people of faith as brothers and sisters in the wake of such tragedy? Help us to grieve together with those who lost their lives, let us stand in solidarity with those whose religion has been scapegoated, help us to withdraw our projections from one another and from you, and help us to sit in the super-ordinary silence where there are no answers, and where all questions cease. Help us to enter the cave of the heart where you abide forever, where we can simply be with our grief without casting blame, or explaining it away, and help us to see our own responsibility to choose what god we will worship, and how that worship is acted out n our lives. For we ask this in a name in which unspeakable horrors have been committed, and who calls us in to a new relationship with God, with ourselves, and with one another, even Jesus Christ. Amen.