Scriptures: Micah 4:1-4; Luke 1:68-79
The first Christmas Eve service I ever took part in as an ordained minister was in 1969. That was a year you may recognize as being in the heart of the Vietnam War era, and all was not well at First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Naperville, Illinois, a church where I had been an intern for a year while still in school and where I had been serving as Assistant Minister for all of six months. Earlier in the year I had given a sermon in which I had made clear my personal opposition to the war. I had done my best to speak as a Christian, to ground what I said in the Christian faith, and not to merely spray anti-war rhetoric around the sanctuary. I thought I had succeeded reasonably well, given that I was 27, relatively new to the Christian faith, and still getting used to the idea of preaching at all. Somehow though a fair number of the people who heard the sermon felt that I had spoken out of turn and in a way that was misinformed, insensitive, wrong-headed, offensive, and un-Christian. The senior minister, who was a gentle soul and very pastoral in style, was also known to oppose the war. Some people in the congregation were angry with war protestors in general and with their ministers in particular. Others were angry with the war itself and the administration in Washington. Many in the congregation were angry at each other. Some had children serving in Vietnam; others had children who were war resisters. Christmas Eve did not promise to be a time filled with good feelings and good will.
And it wasn’t. But at least as I recall it, something more important took place. It’s something I couldn’t have described very well at the time, much less 36 years later. And I’m aware that time can give things a softer, more positive appearance. But the way I have remembered it over the years, the service was alive that night. The songs we sang and the prayers we said were songs and prayers for peace. It was Christmas Eve after all and you couldn’t very well avoid the theme of peace. But somehow the words of scripture, carols, and prayers came alive off the page. There was nothing abstract about them. Praying for peace meant praying for loved ones to come home. It meant trying to heal broken relationships. Somehow the worship service was able to transcend the anger, maybe not completely, but significantly. It was not because anyone said profound words or because there was a direct effort made to manipulate the service so as to soothe hard feelings. Any intentional effort like that would have failed miserably. Nevertheless, simply by reading the scriptures and singing the songs, something happened that couldn’t be accounted for. And people who were bitterly opposed to each other in the church and out of the church, had been before and would be again, worshiped together for a few moments and became prayers together for peace. Because it was my first Christmas Eve as a minister and because it was the kind of occasion it was, it is always part of what is on my mind at Christmas.
I bring it up with you today for several reasons. War is again the context of our Christmas observances, a war in which our country is the major actor. It somehow seems like maybe now (as opposed to the way things were in 1969) it is more possible to ignore the fact or pretend that we can carry on with business as usual. As controversial as the current war may be, it is a less pervasive part of the public psyche, it seems, and more able maybe to be put to one side, bracketed somehow so that such things as Christmas celebrations won’t be overly troubled. But I’m thinking that if that’s true, it’s not a good thing. There is a war going on. And the big issue, as it were, that should be occupying us is not, as some would have it, whether it’s ok to say Merry Christmas as opposed to happy holidays all of the time, some of the time, or none of the time, but a war that our country is responsible for. And that war should be the context of our Christmas, even if it interferes with our business as usual, and if it doesn’t already we need to correct the situation.
I also recall my first Christmas Eve because of the way the peace scriptures associated with Christmas—we have heard two of them this morning—came alive back then and need to come alive again, need to come alive any time, all the time really, but especially in the face of war. My concern is that most of the time it is not that way. My concern is that we trot out the peace scriptures every year as though they were adornments. We use them to decorate our worship services and programs and then we wrap them up along with all the other decorations and store them away for another year. Typically, when we read them, they’re fine. They’re nice. They have a good ring to them. We can sit back and listen to them comfortably. But there’s too little life in them, too little urgency about them, too little that is heartfelt, too little that speaks to the soul. As I say, they just hang there like decorations—pretty words, familiar words, nice sentiments, but in the end easily set aside. Which also means that for me the issue is not only whether the words have any life. It is whether they burden us in any way, whether they make a claim on us, whether they sort of grab ahold of us on the inside and ask for a response. “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…that God may teach us the holy ways and that we may walk in those paths…and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees; and no one shall make them afraid. The mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”
What are we supposed to do with words like these? Nod and smile and say that’s nice? Listen, but with a private understanding that after all this is just a religious fantasy, a vision of some distant unrealistic future that will come about, if it comes about at all, only when time comes to an end, or heaven and earth merge into one. Or…do we take them seriously, pay attention, let the words sink in, let them make a claim and demand a response? What would it mean to treat those words of scripture as much more than decorations? What would it mean to have those words pressing on us, burdening us, and not leaving us alone?
I’m not going to answer those questions this morning. Some of you know me well enough to know I was going to say that before I said it. You’re not surprised. I am going to urge that we live with the questions and not just put the questions or the scriptures politely aside. I am not willing to say that the scriptures speak of turning swords into ploughshares and therefore Christians need to be peacemakers and therefore the only Christian position on the war in Iraq is to oppose it and therefore it is the duty of Christians to be carrying signs, writing letters, and voting for candidates who oppose the war. I am not willing to say all that. Too many therefores. I am not willing to say that because the scriptures speak of turning swords into ploughshares that the only Christian option is to oppose and refuse to participate in all wars. I am not willing to say that there is no room for honest differences in the church with regard to the wisdom or morality of specific wars. I am not willing to say that it is the business of the church to become a foreign affairs think tank and offer opinions from the sidelines on when war might be called for or how or when it should be ended once it is begun.
I am also not willing to say such questions are none of our business. I am not willing to abandon questions of war and peace to public officials or to people whose Christianity does not seem to challenge or even trouble very much their decisions to wage war. I am not willing to say that it’s ok to talk about peace so long as you only talk in the vaguest generalities and don’t actually apply it to any specific situation. I am not willing to say that the only role for Christian individuals or for the church is to wish wistfully that the world were different from what it is. I am not willing to talk of peace only so long as it doesn’t offend anyone or only at Christmastime and a few other appropriate occasions. And I am certainly not willing to suggest that the burden laid upon us by visions of swords being turned into ploughshares and by larger visions of shalom can be discharged by having carried a sign or by holding a certain opinion about the war in Iraq—“we shouldn’t have done it”.
I’m very much aware that all these things that I have just said I’m not willing to say or do don’t just fit together neatly and logically and form themselves into a clear policy on how the church, or how you and I, ought to deal with the context of our Christmas this year, with the war in Iraq, or with matters of war and peace in general. If you took all the statements I just made and put them together and tried to say what it all added up to, there would be more inconsistency than logic, more confusion than clarity. It is an inconsistency and confusion I believe we are called to live with. At least most of us. For those who understand themselves to be pacifists, a position I respect a great deal but have never quite been able to come to myself, not forty years ago when I was considering whether to be a conscientious objector and not now, but for those who understand themselves in that way, there is maybe a greater degree of both consistency and clarity. For the rest of us, who admit to some possibility that war can be a moral choice, who hold to no absolutes in such matters, who in each case must wade through the arguments and allow for the arguments of others, for the rest of us it seems to me there is little choice but to live without the benefit of clarity.
In any case, clarity is not my purpose today. It is to say simply that I am burdened. Burdened by the testimony of scripture and the call of conscience on the one hand and by the reality of war on the other. And I believe the church ought to be burdened. Christians ought to be burdened. We may not be able to agree but we ought to be burdened by the reality of war. And we ought not to celebrate Christmas in casual disregard of the issues we are confronted with. That is why three days before Christmas I wanted to have a vesper service in which we face squarely the issue of war and let it face us.
Furthermore, I believe we do have a calling, we Sojourners, to commit ourselves to being a “peace church”, not maybe in exactly the same sense as the historic peace churches, Brethren, Mennonites, Quakers, but nevertheless a peace church. I believe we are called to make that a core part of who we are, not that we are a church opposed to the war in Iraq but that we aspire to be a church committed to nonviolence as a way of life, committed to a process of discovering what that would mean for us if we were to make that central to who we are. May our Christmas be troubled by visions of peace in a world beset by violence. May our Christmas be blessed by prayer and hope that God will guide our feet in the way of peace. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 18, 2005