I was flipping through the Moderate, Liberal and Progressive blogroll and happened upon this post. I think you'll appreciate the words of wisdom. I am pasting it here but I suggest you visit The Ivy Bush for all the embedded links.
http://theivybush.blogspot.com/2005/05/mem...day-sermon.html
Memorial Day, like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Independence Day, is a holiday that provokes strong emotions. It is not, however, a religious holiday. For that reason, we tend to give this and other meaningful but secular holidays a tip of the hat, but not organize Sunday worship around them.
This year seems different. This is the fourth Memorial Day in a row that our nation has been at war. This weekend’s cookouts and race events are sobered by the 184 members of the American armed forces who’ve been killed in Afghanistan. We are mindful of the 1,656 soldiers, sailors and Marines who’ve been killed in action in Iraq.
Or are we? Our political leaders, who ordered these young men and women into harm’s way, have been playing a game of chicken over judicial nominees. The news media is as devoted to Michael Jackson’s guilt or innocence as it is to events in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because so many have died, and because so many more seem not to be paying attention, perhaps we should pay attention to their deaths here today. True, Memorial Day is not a religious holiday, and the lectionary texts for this ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time only touch on the topic tangentally. Still, the lectionary was made for us, and not we for the lectionary. So we will reflect on the deaths of just under 1,900 Americans in combat over the past three and one half years, but try to reflect and remember as Christians.
As Christians. For the first 300 or so years of Church history there were no Christian war dead. Those closest in time and space to Jesus and the twelve disciples did not fight in wars. They had their reasons—theological and ethical. As worshippers of the God of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, they could not enlist in the Roman military where the Emperor was venerated as divine. Also, they were trying to obey the words of Jesus, as Jesus himself commends us to do in the gospel lesson. Those words included, "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you." It was risky, taking a stand for nonviolence in a violent world, yet they knew of no other, more solid ground upon which to stand that Christ himself and his words and example.
In the fourth century the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, and then made it the official religion of the empire. Christians who’d been jailed on account of their faith and seen brothers and sisters in Christ executed marveled at this reversal of fortunes. But the changed situation posed problems. How do you reconcile Christian ethics, which are based on love, with state power, which by its very nature is coercive? A nonviolent empire, except for the kingdom of God, is a contradiction in terms.
The solution that Christian theologians proposed was Just War Theory, a set of ethical guidelines for waging war. The criteria sometimes vary, but they usually include some combination of these six:
War must be a last resort.
War must be declared by a legitimate authority.
There must be a just cause for waging war.
There must be a reasonable chance for success.
The war must avoid targeting civilians.
The war must obey the rule of proportionality—use only the minimum amount of force
needed to achieve your objective.
Now it’s an open question whether or not the Church conquered the world or the world conquered the Church when Christian ethics were married to statecraft. Or, to put it in terms of the gospel lesson, is Just War Theory built on the solid rock of Christ, or the quick sand of worldly wisdom? Indeed, despite Just War teaching, some of the most unjust wars in history have been fought by and between so-called "Christian nations." Some Christians, including the Mennonites and the Quakers, still hold to the older ethic of nonviolence. We Presbyterians have honored both the individual decision to conscientiously object to military service and the decision to serve in the armed forces. Presbyterians have tended to see the sorry record of Christians killing unjustifiably not as a problem with Just War Theory, but as a failure to take it to heart.
An important side note needs to be made here. Pronouncing a war "just" does not make it "good." God hates violence. It was on account of violence that God flooded the world in today’s Old Testament lesson. At times war may be the lesser of two evils, or the least bad of a handful of dreadful options, but it is nonetheless evil and bad. War makes orphans and widows. It maims and cripples young men and women in the prime of their lives. Identifying a war as just distinguishes it from completely illegitimate forms of violence such as banditry, terrorism and tyranny, but it doesn’t wash away its essentially dirty character.
Of course in any war there are innumerable examples of bravery and self-sacrifice.
We remember those examples this weekend and give thanks for those persons who fully embodied the virtues of courage and devotion to the well-being of others. But a cloud hangs over war, and nothing can dissipate it.
If we are not going to be pacifists, then it’s essential that we think about war in terms of Christian Just War Theory. As Christians we belong to a multi-national, multi-ethnic body of Jews and Gentiles, black, white and brown, first and third world, this side of the railroad tracks and that side. We cannot think about war in terms of narrow national interests, for to do so elevates the state over the church as the primary community to which we are beholden, and makes nationalism, not the Triune God our ultimate authority.
What does Just War Theory say about the war in Iraq? I think that any fair analysis renders the war deeply questionable from the standpoint of Christian ethics. This is more a problem for us than it is for those who are serving there, for they only serve where we, through our duly elected leaders, order them to serve.
The war was one of choice and not necessity. In September 2002 this administration overturned a half-century of diplomatic and military tradition when it stopped asserting that we would defend ourselves vigorously if attacked, and started threatening that we would pre-emptively attack anyone we perceived to be a threat. Six months later we went to war in Iraq, even before the weapons inspectors had completed their work. But not only was the war a reversal of traditional foreign policy, it was a turning away from a millenium of teaching on war in the Christian west, a rejection of the Christian conviction that war ought to be the last resort. Others may have had to have died, but these 1,656 dead in Iraq did not. There were other alternatives to putting them in harm’s way, and that sobering fact ought to shame us this weekend.
The rationales for this war have shifted like the ground in an Iraqi sand storm. Originally the cause was to neutralize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. When it turned out that such weapons didn’t exist, the cause became establishing a beachhead of democracy in the Arab world.
Shifting rationales aren’t necessarily a fatal flaw. The Civil War started out as a war to preserve the Union. Only later did it become a war to emancipate the slaves. But in the case of Iraq it’s hard to see that what we’re fighting for is democracy. The insurgency is manned by Sunnis who boycotted the January elections. The new government, whose troops we’re training, is a coalition of Shias and Kurds. Our continued presence in Iraq on behalf of this government really constitutes taking sides in a sectarian conflict half a world away. Is that just cause for us being there?
And what of criterion #4, a Reasonable Hope for Success? In Tuesday’s New York Times, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson compared our predicament in Iraq to the situation in the 1920s when the British controlled Mesopotamia and faced a stubborn guerilla war. The British quashed the insurgency by raising their troop strength to 134,000 men. That's roughly the same number we have in Iraq today, but in the 1920s there were only three million Iraqis. Today there are 25 million to pacify. If we were to raise our troops to a proportionate number, that would mean a troop strength of one million men and women.
How would we put such numbers of boots on the ground there? The Iraqis themselves? Nobody thinks that the Iraqi Army is yet a credible fighting force. A draft?
Ferguson remarks that the British got their troops from India. We have no India but Ferguson suggests we do have a source of brown-skinned fighters—undocumented workers. Put those illegal aliens who volunteer for the military on the fast track to citizenship, says Ferguson, and perhaps we can raise enough troops to get the job done.
Now Ferguson goes on to criticize those who call for a pullout from Iraq, saying that failure is not an option. But if our best chance to win is deputizing the Mexicans who are currently hoeing tobacco and mowing the grounds of suburban office parks, then it’s hard to see how failure is but our only option.
A beautiful thing about Just War Theory is its practicality. It doesn’t allow us to fly off into utopian fantasies, but forces us to think about war concretely. What are we fighting for? How do we define success? How do we get there? Those who are prosecuting a Just War can answer these questions. Those who aren’t can’t.
This Memorial Day we can give thanks for the virtues of bravery and self-sacrifice that fallen soldiers have embodied. We certainly ought to pray for the loved ones they’ve left behind. We ought to pray for healing for the wounded, and pray for those such as the staff of the V.A. Medical Center across the street whose mission it is to heal the wounded.
But this year we have an added task. As Christians who are citizens of this country it is our calling to ask tough but reasonable questions of our elected leaders. What’s the mission? Is the cause just? How do we define success? What’s your plan for getting there? Asking questions is not un-American, nor is it un-supportive of the troops. To the contrary, questions like these safeguard the lives of American military personnel. If our elected leaders can answer these questions, then we can at least be satisfied that this grim business of waging war in Iraq is justifiable.
But if they can’t answer these questions, then we cannot be satisfied until the last soldier, sailor and Marine returns home. God forbid that we would be here a year from now, mourning the loss of still more men and women, and still lacking answers to these pressing questions.