The truth about War

Anzac Day, 25 April 2022

Dead Soldier [Getty images]

We set aside this day to remember and pray for our dead, in many wars. As followers of the Risen Christ we are called to seek and speak the truth: to repent; to see the bigger picture. Applying this to the violence that people use against each other in war, we are faced with Jesus’ clear command: “love your enemies” .

The Australian continent first began to see war on a large scale when the British Empire arrived here in 1788. In the following 200 years, about 60,000 First Nations people have been killed in the Frontier Wars, and their cultures largely destroyed, often deliberately. So we remember and pray for them.

We pray too for the European-Australian soldiers who have died in every war, from the 1890s Boer War, when we joined in the invasion of South Africa; and in 1915, invaded Turkey at Gallipoli. We pray for the 60,000 Australian soldiers, among millions of others, who were killed in WWI; about 28,000 in WWII, and 5000 in Vietnam. Then there is our part in invasion of Iraq; the prolonged fighting in Afghanistan, and many other places.

We also remember and pray for the soldiers of other countries who died opposing our soldiers. And the countless millions more civilians: children, women, the old, who died as a result of our weapons and our poisons: Agent Orange in Vietnam and depleted uranium in Iraq. We think of, and pray for, people who are dying in wars today, where we are involved physically involved: in Yemen, Ethiopia, Palestine and Ukraine.

While we need rituals in commemorating the dead, we must to be careful lest our ceremonies on days like this give even a hint of glorifying war. The first Christians, for 300 years, refused to fight in wars. Only when the Roman emperor Constantine began to grant favours to the church, did he get Christians into his armies. Before that, we used to follow Jesus’ command: “love your enemies”. Sadly, in our own day too, we have sometimes believed our governments and the media when they tell us to hate Germans, Japanese, Russians or Muslims.

War is not glorious; it is legalised murder; always a crime and a sin. If we see two individual people fighting over something, violently smashing each other’s faces, we call the police, bring them before the court, perhaps lock them up. If governments tell us to smash and destroy other people, we too-easily obey. We need to listen to those who know war’s true horror, and pray for all war’s victims.

The crime of war is always based on lies. In every war, governments use heavy censorship to stop us from knowing what is really happening. During the terrible battles on the river Somme and at Paschendale, when 60,000 men were slaughtered in one day on “our” side alone, the British newspapers reported a day of successful fighting.

Killing other human beings goes completely against our nature, so war always damages all those who take part, and the families they return to. Those who kill and who see murders around them are always seriously affected by some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. More Australian soldiers now kill themselves after they return home, than are killed in battles.

Today, we pray in repentance for the terrible crimes that all sides commit in wars. Rape is very common in war, and the torture of prisoners. Australian Light Horse troops massacred about 100 Palestinian villagers in 1918. Remember My Lai, the village in Vietnam where angry soldiers massacred more than 500 Vietnamese villagers? Such things happened often. Remember Abu Ghraib and Bagram prisons in Iraq, where US and British soldiers tortured prisoners? In Iraq, we were one of the “allies” who, against international law, destroyed water, power and sewage systems, causing untold misery and death.

War is terrorism. Our opening bombardment of Iraq was called shock and awe. War creates terrorists among the people we defeat; has given thousands of young Muslims good reason to hate us and to seek revenge against us. War is enormously wasteful. Just 3% of the trillions of dollars spent on weapons would very quickly feed and educate all the world’s children.

On some occasions, so called ‘peace keeping missions’ have been necessary, such as in East Timor, but if you look more closely, the fighting could have been avoided if Australia had not stood by and approved when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975.

On this day we must also pray for the wisdom to prevent future wars. What can we teach our children? That there are always alternatives to war. That in the 20^th century more great social problems were solved by non-violent means than by war: the peaceful expulsion of the British Empire from India and other colonies; the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa; the dismantling of the Berlin wall and the entire Soviet Union; the Blacks gaining civil rights in southern USA, all without war. There are many more examples.

Do we teach our children that in every major war, a few brave people have gone against the crowd, followed their conscience and refused to take part? Those conscientious objectors were often imprisoned, even tortured and killed, for doing what the gospel teaches.

Surely Christians need to oppose “arms fairs” where companies like Lockheed, Boeing and Raytheon advertise their deadly products, and children are invited to play with guns and climb on tanks? Surely we need to shun the violence in movies, video games and toys that promote killing people as a normal part of life? So we pray sincerely for the victims of all wars, as we rejoice at Easter in Christ’s victory of life over death.

Why do we gather at Easter?

Easter Sunday 17^th April 2022

[Isaiah 52:13–53:12]

Why do people still come to church in large numbers on Good Friday and to the Easter Vigil? Looking at the large crowds in our local church, I thought our reasons must be complex and varied. They would include a deep sense of gratitude to the man Jesus who “died for us,” – as the gospel stories say. So it’s something like gathering on Anzac Day to remember those who died in war?

There is also, in each of us, a desire to escape from the evils that might happen in our own lives, and that threaten our world: the sufferings caused by cruel wars in Yemen, Ethiopia and Ukraine; the terror suffered continuously by Palestinians and people in Afghanistan. Children starving in famines; and especially the grave crisis that global warming will bring on our world in the near future.

For thousands of years people of every race and religion have gathered, trying to connect with their gods or God, but on Good Friday there is a deeper dimension. We know that the death of Jesus was somehow linked to the mystery of God freeing us from the evil in our world. We who follow Jesus know that Jesus’ death and Resurrection is the answer to our searching. The gospel writers – and especially our own experience of Christ – tell us that here we are in touch with Infinite Life.

But in seeking God, we need to be careful not to fall into some ancient errors. One common error about Good Friday can come from this reading from the prophet Isaiah. About 700 years before Jesus, he wrote about a “servant of God” who underwent terrible sufferings: “He was pierced through for our faults… The Lord burdened him with the sins of us all.” We even hear the terrible words: “the Lord has been pleased to crush him with suffering.” What can all this mean?

Those ancient people did not think of God in the same way that we do. They knew God as creator, the origin of everything, so they would say that God caused all the evil that happens to us. That’s true, in a sense, but it does not include all the other complex causes, especially our freedom. So when Isaiah described a person who endured great agony, he could say: “the Lord has crushed him with suffering.” The Scriptures also said about a tyrant’s cruelty: “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart”; and even that God sent the plagues or famines that killed many people.

Much later, Jesus showed us that God is our loving parent, in his story of the father who loves and forgives his wastrel son to the point of foolishness. Jesus’ Good News is that God goes to extreme lengths to find us when we “stray”; and does not condemn an adulterous woman; that God lives in our hearts as the Holy Spirit, helping us to love and forgive each other, as God does.

Those ancient peoples also imagined that God got angry or jealous, as we do. The ancient Psalm 38, that we used on Good Friday, said “God, do not rebuke me in your anger”. But if we believe that God is a petty tyrant who gets annoyed and will lash out at us, then we have completely misunderstood the gospels, and Jesus. So what can it mean, this talk of a suffering servant, who “atones for our sins”? Perhaps Isaiah was glimpsing, far in the future, a Messiah who was not the warrior-king that people longed for, but was Jesus, the nonviolent “Beloved son”, who would be murdered for challenging the cruelty of the state and the injustice of religious leaders?

It was not God who crushed Jesus, but greedy and unjust leaders, who can be found in every society. All the evil in our world comes from our self-centred and unloving choices, which hurt others, especially when made by people with power. After doing evil, the powerful then punish “whistle-blowers” who try to expose them. This happened recently to the brave people who exposed the war-crimes of the SAS in Afghanistan and East Timor; and to the two men who told how the Australian government cheated to steal oil and gas from East Timor, one of the poorest countries on earth. Look also at how some of our Catholic church leaders are still fighting strenuous legal battles against victims of priests’ sexual abuse.

Jesus did not die as a “sacrifice” to placate an angry God. He came among us as God, to share deeply in our pain, grief and despair. State and religious leaders falsely accused and murdered him. His death teaches us some astonishing truths: first, how much God loves us, and second, that God’s power can shine through our worst human failures, even our death.

When we call Jesus’ death a ‘sacrifice’ we mean something “made holy”; a gift of love to God or to other people. Isn’t this why we gather to celebrate this deep mystery? God with us; God showing us the way to life without end. Happy Easter! Alleluia!

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God’s Power?

Lent – Sunday 5C         3 April 2022

[Isaiah 43:16-21, Philippians 3:8-14, John 8 1-11] 

     In the myth of the Exodus, quoted here by Isaiah, the Hebrews rejoiced that their powerful God smashed the might of the Egyptian empire and freed their slave-ancestors. God did this by sending plagues on the Egyptians, with the last plague killing every first-born human and animal. Then God’s power divided the waters so that the Hebrews escaped, but the Egyptian army was drowned when the water returned. As those former slaves wandered through the desert for forty years, their powerful God provided them with food and drink. Then God commanded the Hebrews to massacre whole populations so that they could take over their lands and towns. As the story goes, God told them to commit genocide, and they obeyed. If we believe that God commands God’s followers to do these things, perhaps we need to ask some serious questions about our view of what God is really like.

Fortunately, the Judaeo-Christian tradition has developed. John’s gospel makes it clear that Jesus is God come among us: ‘Before Abraham was, I am’, . . .‘I and the Father are one’. And today’s reading shows God, Jesus, being challenged to pass judgement on one of society’s favourite victims, a woman who had committed sexual sin. It is worth noting that her male partner was not brought to be judged. Maybe he was among the men—religious officials—who were accusing her. In this case, God acts very differently from the God who was thought to command murder and genocide. This God does not demand that the woman be crushed by rocks hurled at her, although at that time, people thought ‘God’s Law’ demanded that terrible penalty. No, Jesus—God—paused, then challenged the woman’s accusers about their own lives. None of them is innocent, so they all quietly leave. Then Jesus sends the woman away. What does this tell us about God’s power?

St Paul had a vision of the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus and thought deeply about it for the rest of his life. He found that the risen Christ—God—was his friend. In today’s second reading he tells us that knowing this friend answers all our needs and is the key to our happiness. Nothing is more important than finding that Christ is our personal friend. The infinite power of Christ’s resurrection, and his love, removes all our fears, even our fear of sin, of enemies, and of death.

I have a little story about how I discovered this truth. Way back in 1979 I was with a group driving to Bathurst, in NSW. We stopped for petrol in a small town. As I walked around, I must have pulled the handkerchief from my pocket and unwittingly dropped the rosary beads that I always carried. We drove on. When we arrived at Bathurst, I discovered that my beads were missing. No big deal, you might say: buy another rosary. But those beads had been given to me by my mother for my 16^th birthday and I had always carried them. I had myself made a new cross for them; and when visiting Jerusalem, I had touched them to the tomb of Christ, the actual place of his resurrection.

Grieving at losing my rosary, I went for a walk, wandering through unknown streets. I came to a church, and the front door was open, so I went in. Unusually, the lectionary, the book of readings, was open on a stand in front of the altar, and facing towards me, so I went up to read. The first words I saw were these words which we read today: “Nothing can happen that will outweigh the supreme advantage of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For him I have accepted the loss of everything, and I look on everything as so much rubbish if only I can have Christ.

In the forty-three years since that day, I have found that the more we lose and let go of what we call our “property”, and of our pride; even our health, the more Christ, our loving friend, can fill us with his Infinite Love and use us. Surely this is God’s infinite power: not to destroy Egyptians or adulterers, or, today, to destroy those who invade other countries: Russians now, but in 2003, the soldiers of USA, UK and Australia in a much worse invasion of Iraq. Surely God’s Infinite Love is forgiving all people’s sins, and inviting us all to work to bring about wholeness and unity?

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A New Beginning

Baptising Eloise                                                                    27^th March 2022

[Mark 10:13-16, Ephesians 4:1-6]

Recently we baptised beautiful Eloise. About a year old, she is the great-grand-daughter of my first cousin, which makes her my first cousin ‘thrice removed’—I think! As we watched this lovely new human being in the midst of her loving extended family, we saw with new eyes a fragment of the awesome splendour of the universe.

We might see the baptismal ceremony merely as a routine: as what we Christians always do to new babies or adults joining the church. Or we can see it more deeply: as reaching out to the Transcendent Mystery from which we all come, and as thanking God for this amazing new life, asking that this new member of our community become part of the community of Christ, our main link to the vast, unknowable Mystery.

Baptism is an initiation ritual. The person being initiated is symbolically washed and anointed, clothed in white and given a gift of light. These gestures don’t just show that the baptised person is special. They remind us—as Jesus told us in the Good News (gospel)—that the Transcendent Mystery is not only awesome, but is personal, and loves us. Not only is God the ultimate source of the planet we walk on, a speck among the impossible-to-imagine trillion galaxies, but God is the origin of Eloise’s parents’ love that produced this new little person.

The reading that Eloise’s parents had chosen led us to think of the world into which Eloise will grow in the near future. Is our human family taking every care “. . . to preserve the unity of the Spirit”, as St Paul urged the people of Ephesus to do? Or are we at each other’s throats in rivalry and wars? The newspapers and tv channels are showing us horrifying images of the savage attack on Ukraine; but the media are selective, and don’t show us the much worse war in Yemen, where our allies right now are supplying weapons, and Australian arms-makers are profiting from people’s suffering. Nor do the media seem to remember when Australia helped the USA and UK to invade Iraq and destroy that country and many of its people.

It is terrible to think that Eloise might have to face the results of even one nuclear weapon being used, as our allies used them against innocent Japanese mothers, babies and grandparents, in 1945.

I told Eloise’s family that I had just come from meeting with many people, mostly young, who were bravely trying to show the world that they are deeply concerned about our climate crisis, which is possibly already irreversible. Nine times last week these courageous young people blocked trains and trucks from entering Sydney’s huge container port. Yes, they caused inconvenience to some people, even financial loss, but as they said, they are trying to show us that the coming climate disaster will cause far greater losses, and we must all act against it, now. Our government must immediately stop exporting and consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels, and every nation must do more to stop destroying our environment.

Eloise will certainly face longer heatwaves and bush-fire seasons than we have ever known. She will never see the Great Barrier reef as her parents or grandparents might have seen it, and there are animals, plants, birds and insects that she will never see alive, because our generation is letting them become extinct. She will experience rising sea levels and unprecedented floods like the floods that have twice destroyed Lismore, NSW, in the past month. She will be be challenged to help some of the vast numbers of refugees fleeing from famines and other disasters.

At her christening, we prayed for Eloise, for her parents, and for the world in which this weak and vulnerable little person will grow to be strong. We prayed that she will have courage to join with others to change her world, demanding the kind of government that works for the common good of all people.

Eloise will face great dangers, but she will know that we are all one human family, protected by the Infinite Love which made us and our planet. In the difficult times that lie ahead, this love will never fail us.

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