A Busted Flush?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday April 13, 2003
READING: Luke 21: 5-19
***
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but with everything that’s been going on in my life and in the world of late, I almost forgot that today is Palm Sunday. Here it is, the start of Holy Week, the most sacred season of the Christian liturgical calendar, and all I can think about is tanks and jets and automatic weapons, toppled statues of toppled dictators, and images from half-way around the world of people running through the streets, often carrying stolen televisions or other consumer goods on their backs...images that remind me, more than anything else, of the pictures from Los Angeles following the Rodney King beating.
War is never pretty, and this war is no exception. But I also have to admit, again with some embarrassment, that I’m actually kinda proud of the performance of our armed forces in Iraq this past month. I still believe that this war was one that could and should have been avoided, and that a policy of unilateral, preemptive military invasion is both morally wrong and politically wrong-headed. Yet the actions of our troops in the field have really been quite remarkable -- they have accomplished their mission with great effectiveness and professionalism, and with what must be admitted (by historical standards at least) have been minimal casualties on both sides. And so, while I would have just as soon not seen this war happen at all, I’m relieved now to see it rapidly drawing to a close, and only hope that whatever comes in the aftermath of battle will prove worthy of the standards set by our young men and women in uniform. As we all know, it’s a lot easier to tear something down than it is to rebuild something better in its place.
In many ways, I am as ashamed of our political leaders as I am proud of our soldiers and sailors and aviators. The President ostensibly ordered this invasion in order to protect America from the threat of Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” And who knows? they may still show up somewhere, but we haven’t found them yet, and they haven’t been used against us on the battlefield either. Saddam’s “regime” has been overthrown, but the future of the Iraqi people is still very much in doubt, and already we are hearing thinly-veiled threats from certain voices within the Administration that Syria and Iran should “draw the appropriate lesson” from America’s military success next door.
Opinion polls show that 71% of Americans approve of the President’s handling of this war, but not everyone in the world shares this high opinion of our Commander in Chief. If the end result of our overseas military adventurism is merely to cultivate resentment and bitterness, both among our historical allies, as well as the people we are purportedly attempting to help, it’s hard for me to see how that policy furthers American interests, or makes us safer from the threat of terrorism. Before we get too excited about celebrating the triumph of our military victory, we need to realize that, in many ways, the most difficult days are still ahead.
One of the most disturbing news items to come out of Iraq in the last few days, at least for me personally, was the report of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities. I was only a child when I first read about Mesopotamia -- the “land between the rivers” -- the “cradle of civilization” where over 7000 years ago human beings first began to live in cities. There are over 10,000 archeological sites in Iraq, and until just a few days ago, the National Museum of Antiquities was the home of the largest and most extensive collection of Ancient Near Eastern artifacts in the world.
But not any more.
It only took a few hours for looters to ransack the museum and strip it clean, while the curators watched helplessly, and American soldiers refused to intervene. It’s a tragedy of immeasurable consequence, as well as a poignant symbol of America’s own cultural myopia, that we should plan so assiduously to protect the Iraqi oil fields from sabotage, yet allow the wanton plunder of Iraq’s priceless cultural heritage.
Perhaps the most amusing news item was the unveiling of a deck of specially-designed playing cards bearing the names and likenesses of 55 members of Saddam’s inner circle wanted by American authorities as possible war criminals. The plan is to distribute these playing cards to American soldiers in order to help them more easily identify these fugitives from American justice. Saddam himself is the Ace of Spades, but so far the only card our soldiers have drawn is the Seven of Diamonds, 64-year-old Iraqi General Amir al-Saadi, who was Saddam's top science adviser and in charge of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program at the time of the first Gulf War, and who turned himself in to United States Marines after learning from watching the BBC that his name was on the list.
Saadi had been cooperating closely with UN weapons inspector Hans Blix prior to the start of the current invasion, and insists that, to the best of his knowledge, the Iraqi government had discontinued its weapons programs and destroyed its pre-existing stockpiles of chemical and biological agents long ago. Here are some quotes from an interview he taped for a German journalist just before his surrender. “I was knowledgeable about those programs, those past programs, and I was telling the truth, always the truth.... We were finally approaching the point of getting everything accounted for, but things have turned out differently.... Time will bear me out.... There will be no difference after the war is over.... I’m saying this for posterity, for history, not for defending the regime....”
The judgment of history has a funny way of trumping the momentary passions and political spin of the 24/7 news cycle. And nowhere is this principle more vividly illustrated than in the gospel narratives of the original Holy Week. I encourage everyone here, sometime this week, to take a little break from watching CNN and read them again for yourselves, but just in case you don’t get around to it let me summarize the story for you. For approximately three years following his baptism by John in the River Jordan, Jesus traveled with his followers among the villages of Galilee, developing something of a reputation for himself as an itinerant religious teacher and healer. The content of his teaching, as best as we can tell, wasn’t all that different from that of a lot of other Jewish religious teachers of the time. It would have been considered radical by some, because it tended to be critical of hypocrisy and of the privileged priestly class, and in that sense also subversive of the established order. But this was also very much in line with the traditional role of a Prophet in the Jewish faith.
And then at some point in his career, Jesus decided to travel to Jerusalem, for Passover. In those days, Jerusalem at Passover made Nantucket in August look mellow. The population swelled to perhaps ten or twenty times its normal size with pilgrims, all of whom were in a heightened state of religious enthusiasm. Passover is the commemoration of the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, and it always made the Roman “protectors” in Jerusalem a little nervous, for obvious reasons. It doesn’t really matter how powerful you are militarily, keeping the lid on a city swarming with religious fanatics, who are celebrating the memory of their freedom from past oppression, is never easy.
According to the Gospels, Jesus arrived in Jerusalem in a style deliberately evocative of a messianic prophecy from Isaiah, riding on a young colt (or maybe a donkey) who had never been ridden, and was greeted by a throng of cheering admirers. And the first thing he did was to go to the temple and upset the tables of the moneychangers, the merchants who exchanged foreign money for temple coinage so that pilgrims could purchase the ritual animals one needed in order to sacrifice properly according to Levitical law.
After that little outburst, he continued to teach on the steps of the temple for the rest of the week, criticizing those who held power and authority within the city, and protected from retribution by the size of the crowd, which might easily become a violent mob if provoked. At night, he and his followers would slip away to a private place to sleep, once again protected by their relative anonymity within the overcrowded city.
Unable to lay hands on Jesus by force, the temple authorities resorted to subterfuge. They bribed one of his followers to reveal to them the location where he slept, and seized him under cover of darkness. They tried him before a secret tribunal, found him guilty of blasphemy, then turned him over to the Roman authorities with a request that he be executed for sedition under Roman law. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, cared little for the legal nuances (not to mention the theological subtleties) of the case; he was only interested in preventing a riot. He offered to release Jesus to the crowd as an act of mercy, but when the mob called instead for the release of the revolutionary Zealot terrorist Barabbas, Pilate washed his hands of the entire situation, and turned Jesus over to his soldiers to be flogged and crucified, fully expecting that this would put an end to the matter.
But of course, things didn’t quite work out that way. And I hope I haven’t been too subtle (or for that matter, too heavy-handed) in relating this parable about the arrogance of power, and the ultimate power of the Truth. Jesus entered Jerusalem at the beginning of the week like a triumphant, conquering hero, but by the end of the week he discovered that the mob had turned against him, and he was executed like a common criminal. But it didn’t end there. The temple authorities thought that they could put an end to the teachings by putting an end to the teacher, but that didn’t happen either -- if anything, the faith only grew stronger and more formidable through the martyrdom of its founder, as the spiritual practices taught by Jesus rapidly evolved into a religion about “the Christ.”
Rome’s attempt to quell civil disturbance through the ruthless application of military force proved equally futile; within a generation they were back in Palestine with an entire army, laying siege to the city of Jerusalem and tearing down all but a single wall of the magnificent temple which stood at its center. And yet, when we think of Rome today, we think, not of Caesar, but of Christ; Christianity conquered the Roman Empire from within, transforming it into something far different than it was, and being dramatically transformed itself in the process.
History never really repeats itself; the nuances of cultural difference, the complexity of specific events, the dynamics of progressive change over time, make each new historical situation unique. But patterns of human behavior do repeat themselves within history, because frankly human nature hasn’t really changed that much in the past 2000 years, or the past 7000 for that matter. Sure we’ve made some technological progress, our scientific knowledge of the world is much better than it was; and I like to think that we’ve made some progress in ethics and theology as well. But unless we are willing to learn from the lessons of history, we find ourselves repeating again and again the mistakes of our ancestors, because it really doesn’t matter how much we know unless we are willing to be guided by the wisdom of that knowledge.
I can’t begin to tell you how much it bothers me to think that someday posterity will remember America in the same way that we remember Imperial Rome -- a brutal, arrogant, bloodthirsty and oppressive military power whose ingenuity as engineers far outstripped their moral conscience. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me to think that, even today, there are many people around the world who look at the American flag and feel the same sense of revulsion I feel when I look at the red, white and black armbands and battle flags of Nazi Germany.
A generation ago the German people supported their troops through a series of stunning military victories: in Austria and Czechoslovakia, in Poland and Denmark and Norway, in France and the Balkans, in North Africa and Russia. They willingly sacrificed their own civil liberties in order to protect the security of their homeland from the supposedly dangerous influence of non-Germanic “foreigners” who lived among them. And then, as the tide of history turned against them, they found themselves essentially powerless to do anything to change it, compelled instead to follow their fanatical leader all the way down that terrible path which ends in history’s “unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
Don’t get me wrong. The United States of America is NOT Nazi Germany, nor is it Imperial Rome. And this is why it is so important for us to remember history’s lessons about the fundamental emptiness of military power, as well as the more subtle lesson about the transformative power of a good idea, faithfully held and practiced even in the face of adversity. I have little doubt that, on some level at least, the world will be a better place now that Saddam Hussein no longer holds power in Iraq. But it remains to be seen what kind of government we will be able to establish in his place, and whether we will attempt to do it all alone, or will at last enlist the assistance of others in a true “coalition of the willing.”
In this difficult task, American military power will matter far less than American compassion, tolerance, and generosity, as well as our willingness to put into practice our most cherished beliefs about human rights, civil liberties, and democratic self-determination.
It’s one thing to say the words. It’s quite another to put those principles into action, especially when we think we hold all the aces, and forget that there are always a few wild cards out there capable of transforming what we thought was a winning hand into a busted flush.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday April 13, 2003
READING: Luke 21: 5-19
***
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but with everything that’s been going on in my life and in the world of late, I almost forgot that today is Palm Sunday. Here it is, the start of Holy Week, the most sacred season of the Christian liturgical calendar, and all I can think about is tanks and jets and automatic weapons, toppled statues of toppled dictators, and images from half-way around the world of people running through the streets, often carrying stolen televisions or other consumer goods on their backs...images that remind me, more than anything else, of the pictures from Los Angeles following the Rodney King beating.
War is never pretty, and this war is no exception. But I also have to admit, again with some embarrassment, that I’m actually kinda proud of the performance of our armed forces in Iraq this past month. I still believe that this war was one that could and should have been avoided, and that a policy of unilateral, preemptive military invasion is both morally wrong and politically wrong-headed. Yet the actions of our troops in the field have really been quite remarkable -- they have accomplished their mission with great effectiveness and professionalism, and with what must be admitted (by historical standards at least) have been minimal casualties on both sides. And so, while I would have just as soon not seen this war happen at all, I’m relieved now to see it rapidly drawing to a close, and only hope that whatever comes in the aftermath of battle will prove worthy of the standards set by our young men and women in uniform. As we all know, it’s a lot easier to tear something down than it is to rebuild something better in its place.
In many ways, I am as ashamed of our political leaders as I am proud of our soldiers and sailors and aviators. The President ostensibly ordered this invasion in order to protect America from the threat of Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” And who knows? they may still show up somewhere, but we haven’t found them yet, and they haven’t been used against us on the battlefield either. Saddam’s “regime” has been overthrown, but the future of the Iraqi people is still very much in doubt, and already we are hearing thinly-veiled threats from certain voices within the Administration that Syria and Iran should “draw the appropriate lesson” from America’s military success next door.
Opinion polls show that 71% of Americans approve of the President’s handling of this war, but not everyone in the world shares this high opinion of our Commander in Chief. If the end result of our overseas military adventurism is merely to cultivate resentment and bitterness, both among our historical allies, as well as the people we are purportedly attempting to help, it’s hard for me to see how that policy furthers American interests, or makes us safer from the threat of terrorism. Before we get too excited about celebrating the triumph of our military victory, we need to realize that, in many ways, the most difficult days are still ahead.
One of the most disturbing news items to come out of Iraq in the last few days, at least for me personally, was the report of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities. I was only a child when I first read about Mesopotamia -- the “land between the rivers” -- the “cradle of civilization” where over 7000 years ago human beings first began to live in cities. There are over 10,000 archeological sites in Iraq, and until just a few days ago, the National Museum of Antiquities was the home of the largest and most extensive collection of Ancient Near Eastern artifacts in the world.
But not any more.
It only took a few hours for looters to ransack the museum and strip it clean, while the curators watched helplessly, and American soldiers refused to intervene. It’s a tragedy of immeasurable consequence, as well as a poignant symbol of America’s own cultural myopia, that we should plan so assiduously to protect the Iraqi oil fields from sabotage, yet allow the wanton plunder of Iraq’s priceless cultural heritage.
Perhaps the most amusing news item was the unveiling of a deck of specially-designed playing cards bearing the names and likenesses of 55 members of Saddam’s inner circle wanted by American authorities as possible war criminals. The plan is to distribute these playing cards to American soldiers in order to help them more easily identify these fugitives from American justice. Saddam himself is the Ace of Spades, but so far the only card our soldiers have drawn is the Seven of Diamonds, 64-year-old Iraqi General Amir al-Saadi, who was Saddam's top science adviser and in charge of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons program at the time of the first Gulf War, and who turned himself in to United States Marines after learning from watching the BBC that his name was on the list.
Saadi had been cooperating closely with UN weapons inspector Hans Blix prior to the start of the current invasion, and insists that, to the best of his knowledge, the Iraqi government had discontinued its weapons programs and destroyed its pre-existing stockpiles of chemical and biological agents long ago. Here are some quotes from an interview he taped for a German journalist just before his surrender. “I was knowledgeable about those programs, those past programs, and I was telling the truth, always the truth.... We were finally approaching the point of getting everything accounted for, but things have turned out differently.... Time will bear me out.... There will be no difference after the war is over.... I’m saying this for posterity, for history, not for defending the regime....”
The judgment of history has a funny way of trumping the momentary passions and political spin of the 24/7 news cycle. And nowhere is this principle more vividly illustrated than in the gospel narratives of the original Holy Week. I encourage everyone here, sometime this week, to take a little break from watching CNN and read them again for yourselves, but just in case you don’t get around to it let me summarize the story for you. For approximately three years following his baptism by John in the River Jordan, Jesus traveled with his followers among the villages of Galilee, developing something of a reputation for himself as an itinerant religious teacher and healer. The content of his teaching, as best as we can tell, wasn’t all that different from that of a lot of other Jewish religious teachers of the time. It would have been considered radical by some, because it tended to be critical of hypocrisy and of the privileged priestly class, and in that sense also subversive of the established order. But this was also very much in line with the traditional role of a Prophet in the Jewish faith.
And then at some point in his career, Jesus decided to travel to Jerusalem, for Passover. In those days, Jerusalem at Passover made Nantucket in August look mellow. The population swelled to perhaps ten or twenty times its normal size with pilgrims, all of whom were in a heightened state of religious enthusiasm. Passover is the commemoration of the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, and it always made the Roman “protectors” in Jerusalem a little nervous, for obvious reasons. It doesn’t really matter how powerful you are militarily, keeping the lid on a city swarming with religious fanatics, who are celebrating the memory of their freedom from past oppression, is never easy.
According to the Gospels, Jesus arrived in Jerusalem in a style deliberately evocative of a messianic prophecy from Isaiah, riding on a young colt (or maybe a donkey) who had never been ridden, and was greeted by a throng of cheering admirers. And the first thing he did was to go to the temple and upset the tables of the moneychangers, the merchants who exchanged foreign money for temple coinage so that pilgrims could purchase the ritual animals one needed in order to sacrifice properly according to Levitical law.
After that little outburst, he continued to teach on the steps of the temple for the rest of the week, criticizing those who held power and authority within the city, and protected from retribution by the size of the crowd, which might easily become a violent mob if provoked. At night, he and his followers would slip away to a private place to sleep, once again protected by their relative anonymity within the overcrowded city.
Unable to lay hands on Jesus by force, the temple authorities resorted to subterfuge. They bribed one of his followers to reveal to them the location where he slept, and seized him under cover of darkness. They tried him before a secret tribunal, found him guilty of blasphemy, then turned him over to the Roman authorities with a request that he be executed for sedition under Roman law. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, cared little for the legal nuances (not to mention the theological subtleties) of the case; he was only interested in preventing a riot. He offered to release Jesus to the crowd as an act of mercy, but when the mob called instead for the release of the revolutionary Zealot terrorist Barabbas, Pilate washed his hands of the entire situation, and turned Jesus over to his soldiers to be flogged and crucified, fully expecting that this would put an end to the matter.
But of course, things didn’t quite work out that way. And I hope I haven’t been too subtle (or for that matter, too heavy-handed) in relating this parable about the arrogance of power, and the ultimate power of the Truth. Jesus entered Jerusalem at the beginning of the week like a triumphant, conquering hero, but by the end of the week he discovered that the mob had turned against him, and he was executed like a common criminal. But it didn’t end there. The temple authorities thought that they could put an end to the teachings by putting an end to the teacher, but that didn’t happen either -- if anything, the faith only grew stronger and more formidable through the martyrdom of its founder, as the spiritual practices taught by Jesus rapidly evolved into a religion about “the Christ.”
Rome’s attempt to quell civil disturbance through the ruthless application of military force proved equally futile; within a generation they were back in Palestine with an entire army, laying siege to the city of Jerusalem and tearing down all but a single wall of the magnificent temple which stood at its center. And yet, when we think of Rome today, we think, not of Caesar, but of Christ; Christianity conquered the Roman Empire from within, transforming it into something far different than it was, and being dramatically transformed itself in the process.
History never really repeats itself; the nuances of cultural difference, the complexity of specific events, the dynamics of progressive change over time, make each new historical situation unique. But patterns of human behavior do repeat themselves within history, because frankly human nature hasn’t really changed that much in the past 2000 years, or the past 7000 for that matter. Sure we’ve made some technological progress, our scientific knowledge of the world is much better than it was; and I like to think that we’ve made some progress in ethics and theology as well. But unless we are willing to learn from the lessons of history, we find ourselves repeating again and again the mistakes of our ancestors, because it really doesn’t matter how much we know unless we are willing to be guided by the wisdom of that knowledge.
I can’t begin to tell you how much it bothers me to think that someday posterity will remember America in the same way that we remember Imperial Rome -- a brutal, arrogant, bloodthirsty and oppressive military power whose ingenuity as engineers far outstripped their moral conscience. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me to think that, even today, there are many people around the world who look at the American flag and feel the same sense of revulsion I feel when I look at the red, white and black armbands and battle flags of Nazi Germany.
A generation ago the German people supported their troops through a series of stunning military victories: in Austria and Czechoslovakia, in Poland and Denmark and Norway, in France and the Balkans, in North Africa and Russia. They willingly sacrificed their own civil liberties in order to protect the security of their homeland from the supposedly dangerous influence of non-Germanic “foreigners” who lived among them. And then, as the tide of history turned against them, they found themselves essentially powerless to do anything to change it, compelled instead to follow their fanatical leader all the way down that terrible path which ends in history’s “unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
Don’t get me wrong. The United States of America is NOT Nazi Germany, nor is it Imperial Rome. And this is why it is so important for us to remember history’s lessons about the fundamental emptiness of military power, as well as the more subtle lesson about the transformative power of a good idea, faithfully held and practiced even in the face of adversity. I have little doubt that, on some level at least, the world will be a better place now that Saddam Hussein no longer holds power in Iraq. But it remains to be seen what kind of government we will be able to establish in his place, and whether we will attempt to do it all alone, or will at last enlist the assistance of others in a true “coalition of the willing.”
In this difficult task, American military power will matter far less than American compassion, tolerance, and generosity, as well as our willingness to put into practice our most cherished beliefs about human rights, civil liberties, and democratic self-determination.
It’s one thing to say the words. It’s quite another to put those principles into action, especially when we think we hold all the aces, and forget that there are always a few wild cards out there capable of transforming what we thought was a winning hand into a busted flush.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 5:48 PM
