Proper 27 (32) 2006, Remembrance Day Observed

Proper 27 (32) 2006, Remembrance Day Observed
Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17; Psalm 127; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

War, and our remembrance of war, makes a lot of people feel uneasy.

For those of us who are already feeling made uneasy by the remembrance of war, remembering war within the worship life of the church makes us feel even more uneasy.

I find myself uneasy because I have made the move myself between being a pacifist for theological reasons, to being a proponent of just war for theological reasons, and now perhaps back towards a pacifist position.

I am uneasy because of my own troubled experience of the effects of war on my family.

I am uneasy because days of remembrance, like today, brings to mind the injustices perpetrated in war, at the same time that it brings to mind that many injustices were ended, and peoples defended, by acts of war.

I am uneasy because war is messy, and I find myself in the middle of a mess.

I’m now, to be honest, a little perplexed by it all, because both positions, that of just war and that of pacifism, can both be theologically grounded, while they are at the same time irreconcilable. Just war, properly defended, is primarily about seeking justice within a limited horizon of options, and defending the dignity of a friend who cannot defend him or herself. Pacifism is primarily about living out, personally and in community, reconciliation and the peace of God in Christ. They are both coherent responses to the sin of the world, and both positions have proponents within the church.

This parish lists those who have volunteered, or died in war, on the back of the nave, and many of our former Rectors pictured by my office are wearing military uniforms. My guess is, though, that within this parish there are people who hold very different views on whether a person can be a Christian and a soldier at the same time; yet this thankfully does not prevent us from worshiping together. The Anglican Church herself has never been a pacifist church, yet the Anglican Church has been able to bear pacifism as a legitimate, even compelling, position. This has never threatened our ability to be a church.

I would say, though, that at this point in our history, the burden of proof does lie with the proponents of just war. Just war, and the pursuit of justice through the mechanisms of governments and nations, is becoming increasingly difficult to do, at least for Christians, mostly because it is increasingly difficult to call our nation a "Christian" one. Our political landscape is simply more complex that it used to be, and the reality is that Christians no longer have the privileged voice we once had. Our wars, though sometimes motivated by justice, are also just as likely to be motivated by greed.

***

Turning to our gospel, we read not of war, but of scribes and widows. This passage is not about war any more than the rest of the New Testament. I think, though, it may still help us understand what we are doing today, remembering our war dead, and taking a moment to think about war as a Christian community.

On the one hand we read in this passage of a widow giving her offering at the temple treasury in Jerusalem. This widow impresses Jesus more than even the great and majestic temple that surrounds them. The nameless and unremarkable simple widow is more impressive to Jesus because the widow, in her simple action, sums up what Jesus has been teaching to his disciples.

The widow is an example of one of the last, on of the last who shall be among the first; the widow is an example of the kind of commitment that is not measured by grand gestures; the widow is an example of wholesale devotion to God; the widow “out of her poverty has put . . . everything she had . . .” into the temple treasury. The widow serves as an example of the complete commitment that Jesus has been preaching to his disciples.

On the other hand Jesus has few good words for the scribes; the scribes abuse their position of authority; they take advantage of their position,; they even “devour widow’s houses,” taking advantage of the poor in their distress, widows like the one Jesus points to as an example of devotion.

I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to draw some parallels between this passage and the wars we know and remember. The soldier, just like the widow, embodies many things that we could point to as Christian virtue; we can point specifically to the soldier’s willingness to give all they have to what they believe in. The soldier offers all he or she has, including the very laying down of their life for their friend.

And the scribes, at least some of them, the ones willing to devour widows houses for the sake of their own profit, are a lot like the men and women sending soldiers to war for their own profit. Not all wars are simply for profit; some wars are motivated by genuine concern for justice, or concern for the oppressed neighbour. But anyone who justifies war simply for profit, a profit hidden by lies, is no better than the scribe who devours the houses of widows.

But the scribe who may very well devour the houses of widows, and the mechanisms that may send soldiers to war for the profit of others, do not erode the dignity of the widow or of the soldier. Just as the widow has a degree of dignity apart from the scribes that will devour her house, so also the soldier has a dignity apart from the mechanisms of the state that puts them on the battlefield.

Their dignity, and our dignity, is in the self offering of our whole selves, not to the state, or even to the Jerusalem temple, but our whole self-offering, our very lives, to our Lord.

***

One of the things we are called to do, as Christians, is to remember. When you see me behind the table, and praying with you all, one of the primary things we will be doing together is remembering the acts of God in history, acts like the suffering, and the victory, of God. We remember the whole self-offering of Christ to the will of his Father, the redemption of the world through his self-sacrifice on the cross, and his glorious resurrection.

May we remember the widow, and even the soldier, not for the political machinations that lead them to their own self-giving, but for the example of complete self-giving that they offer. And may our remembrance of them point us not to our own idols, but rather to the self-offering we see in Christ, and may it lead us to our offering of ourselves, our whole selves, to the work and the will of God.