 Give to us Peace in
Our Time, Oh Lord
A
Sermon preached at St. Luke's Church
by The Rev. James B. Craven III
on the first Sunday of Advent, November 28, 2004
IN THE
NAME OF GOD - FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT. AMEN.
Our
Jewish brothers and sisters have a name for it, Rosh Hashanah,
literally the top of the year, the new year. Their new year began
in October, but the Christian new year starts today, on the first
Sunday of Advent. It’s an exciting time, a good time to take
stock, and a busy time. Christmas is coming, but not yet. A baby
will be born in a manger at Bethlehem, a baby who is Christ the Lord,
but not yet. We have time, almost four weeks, to make sure not
only that there is room in the inn this year, but room in our hearts,
our minds, our souls, and in our actions, for actions do indeed speak
louder than words. And we are certainly called to action, not to
some passive faith, but to action, starting with the collect, written
for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and taken in large part from the
portion of Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome we heard only moments
ago:
Give
us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of
light.
When?
Now, in the time of this mortal life. That’s clear enough.
But the prophet Isaiah calls us too, in a sermon he preached more than
2700 years ago at Jerusalem. Assyrian invasion and military
occupation lay ahead. The same greed, hypocrisy, and injustice
that Amos had weighed against were the byword of the day in
Jerusalem. Many doubted the power of God to keep a descendant of
David on the throne of Judah, while as a Jesuit scholar has put it,
religion became a blank check for national wrongdoing. Into this
chaos Isaiah strode, and preached:
Come,
let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in this paths…He
shall judge between the nations.
And then came the words we have never fully learned, but at the same
time can never quite forget:
they
shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning
hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall
they learn war anymore…let us walk in the light of the Lord.
Isaiah gave us
that charge better than 2700 years ago, and the goal set before
us is as elusive now as then. We have progressed in so many ways,
yet we still kill each other regularly, and we are getting better at
it, unfortunately. There are small breakthroughs from time to
time. In Judiciary Square in Washington there is a sculpture, 16
feet high, of the blade of a plow, made from 3000 handguns, Guns into
Plowshares. And there are occasionally outbreaks of peace, though
I cannot think of any nation untouched by war, including Sweden and
Switzerland, in my lifetime. And as we know but have difficulty
acknowledging, all war is civil war.
Is there no end to it? Isaiah looked toward the messianic age
when peace would reign. We wait for what? The triumph of
common sense and compassion over national testosterone? Please
don’t misunderstand me. This is not about politics, and I have no
anti-military agenda. I gave 28 years, active and reserve, to the Navy
and treasure those memories, but I have grown weary frankly of seeing
young men go off to fight old mens’ wars, simply because folks can’t
get along. I am told the first song I learned as a child was Praise
the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, and I still know it. My
grandmother always said the second was Who Threw the Whiskey
in the Well?, but I digress. Four weeks ago I did the
memorial service for my class at our 40th Naval Academy reunion, and
the faces and voices of many classmates and shipmates came back to us
through the mists and fog of time. It seems like only yesterday
we were learning the names of the three countries which made up what we
grew up calling French Indochina: Laos, Cambodia, and
Vietnam. Then came new names we learned, where those we loved
died: Quang Tri, Khe Sanh, and Hue City. Every generation
has its own set of such names. James Michener wrote of the men of
the South Pacific that longer and longer shadows will obscure them,
until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear, like Shiloh and
Valley Forge. What names will follow Baghdad and Fallujah?
Sometimes human strife is unavoidable, and here I have in mind
Augustine’s just war theory. The Christ I know and understand and
try to follow most of the time, when I am not otherwise distracted,
would, I like to think, not have opposed our fighting Hitler and
pressing on to liberate the Nazi death camps, or to defeat the Japanese
warlords who had enslaved much of Asia and had perpetrated the Rape of
Nanking. The right and wrong of that war has always seemed rather
clear to me. Contrast that though with our 90 day war against
Spain in 1898, which then Colonel Theodore Roosevelt of Rough Rider
fame called “a splendid little war.” Then there were all those
wars of Empire that can be seen today in country churches all over
Britain, in memorial to Percy so and so, age 20, died defending the
Khyber Pass. Sounds like rather musty history until you realize
the Khyber Pass forms part of the border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and that American soldiers and Marines died there this
year too. The Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, the rebels in
Sierra Leone who chop the hands off of little children. The
terrors of the Darfur region in the Sudan. The Christian against
Christian strife that has defined Ireland for centuries, the
intra-Semitic strife that has defined the Holy Land for
millennia. There seems no end to it.
Was Isaiah just lost on these folks? Is Isaiah lost on us?
No one, no nation, these days is beating very many missiles or grenade
launchers into plowshares, and there is little encouraging in the
news. Just last week we learned how close North Korea and Iran
are to nuclear weapons, and to delivery systems for those
weapons. No comfort there.
So what do we do beyond admitting we have not been doing all that well,
asking God’s forgiveness, and resolving to do better? A noted
Episcopalian who knew war first hand, Walter Cronkite, has suggested
that we establish in Washington a Department of Peace, not to compete
with the diplomats at the State Department or with the armed forces at
the Pentagon, but a separate office altogether, devoted to one thing,
peace. Now Walter Cronkite knows, as we do, that this isn’t
really going to happen, but it’s an interesting thought to have an
office, the peace desk if you will, to which the executive authority
must go before applying brute force, to ask if just maybe what we are
about to do is perhaps preventable, if just maybe we don’t know what
sort of mess we are about to jump into.
A few Sundays ago we sang one of my favorites, the great Russian hymn God
the Omnipotent, in which each verse ends with the prayer “Give to
us peace in our time, O Lord.” A very stirring, majestic hymn,
the music and the thought stay with you. Give to us peace in our
time, O Lord. The thought is with me more and more, the older I
get and the worse the news gets. You know how a tune gets stuck
in your head and you find yourself humming it all day long, without
even thinking about it? The subconscious works in interesting
ways. It happened to me a month ago, in Annapolis, at the
reunion. Some of you may have seen Memorial Hall. I was
walking up the steps there, the chaplains’ offices on either side and
the mural of the battleship South Dakota behind, when I realized I was
humming to myself, "God the Omnipotent…give to us peace in our time, O
Lord." You walk into Memorial Hall and the first thing you see is
Perry’s flag flown at Lake Erie in 1813, crudely lettered "Don’t Give
Up the Ship". Beneath the flag though is the list of alumni,
classmates and shipmates all, killed in action, from the Mexican War to
Iraq. I have been there many times over the years, but this was
the first time I brought with me, with no premeditation whatever, God
the Omnipotent and its prayer, "Give to Us Peace in Our Time, O
Lord". I read the names to myself, the 40 or so I knew, those
eternally young, they who will not grow old as we who are left grow
old, and thought as always of two I was particularly close to, and the
tune grew louder in my head and heart. My eyes were filled with
tears and I found myself saying out loud, "Give to us peace in our
time, O Lord". I left and took a long walk, the hymn with me all
the way. Little did I know that Jane would have us singing the
hymn here at St. Luke’s a week later. Then Michael asked me to
preach on this day, so I looked up the lessons, and what do you know,
lest we forget here comes Isaiah telling us to beat our swords into
plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks. The old prophet just may
have been onto something, a variation if you will on casting off the
works of darkness and putting on the armor of light, as Christ is the
light. So as we try do to that in this Advent, may our prayer to
God the Omnipotent also be Give to Us Peace In Our Time, O Lord.
Amen.
Copyright
2004, by the Rev. James B. Craven, III for St. Luke's
Episcopal Church, Durham, NC
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