Come Wednesday morning; it will be one-hundred two years since the Great War in Europe ended. November 11 would become known in all the years that followed as Remembrance Day. I say this, not so much as a minister or a theologian, but as someone who needs to remember for the sake of peace. We hope for peace, something that we long for, but it is not easy. The powerful words expressed in Isaiah and Psalm 46 point to that day of hope, that day of everlasting peace. Through our hope that God tugs at us to make that effort to work towards real peace. I need to remember and find new meaning because finding real peace is challenging work. So today, I invite you to join me on a more personal struggle in remembering peace.
Some of you know that I studied international relations alongside military and diplomatic history. In short, I studied war. I studied war: the causes, the backgrounds –all about it. I learned about the weapons that we have; I learned strategy and tactics. I learned of our terrific capacity to kill one another for just about any reason, especially in the name of God. I have studied war; I have learned war. The scary part is, I am good at it. Remembrance Day is a very personal day for me, but not because I lived through it. It is personal, but not because I had a friend or relative who died in war. It is personal, yet I don’t live in a country that wears the physical scars of world conflict on its landscape. I was born almost twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War. My parents were born during the conflict, and have no real memory of it. There is no direct reason why it should be personal for me, and yet it needs to be.
It is personal because, as a historian, I struggle to find meaning in this special day. I have no direct connection to any war fought this century. If I do not remember, the lesson is lost if I do not learn, and we are doomed to repeat history again. If we do not learn, if we do not remember, we will not survive our next lesson lest we forget.
Yet now, over one hundred years later, we are people who are beginning to forget. In the last congregation I served, I presided at three veterans’ funerals. All of them served and even saw combat in World War 2. Each year, fewer and fewer of our veterans from these global conflicts are there to tell their story. Once we start losing the stories that define us, we lose our sense of meaning. Now, it seems, our ceremonies, our remembrances are in danger of losing their meaning. As our living memories are dying, the need to find new ways to remember becomes more important with each passing year. Without those who lived through the conflicts, we need to find new ways to listen to the story of Remembrance day, and make it part of our story.
Yet how do we do that? In Canada, we have lived for many years, isolated from the conflicts from around the world. Wars and skirmishes are fought “over there” someplace. Whether it is Chechnya, Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, it’s not right in our faces. It is far removed from our lives here. We live every day, assuming that we live in safety when we walk out our door, and we call it peace. Even in this time of Pandemic, we can take shelter confident in the security of our homes, not having to worry about shells suddenly raining down without warning. Yet, we have forgotten that peace is hard work. As much as I have studied the causes of war, I have also learned the causes of peace. We assume that peace is normal. Yet conflict and struggle have marred history. One military historian noted that there is but one page written on peace for every thousand pages written about war. War between nations, amongst human beings, seems is a constant. Since the end of the Second World War, there has always been a skirmish brewing somewhere in the world. I grew up with innate fear of being annihilated in a nuclear conflict.
The conclusion is startling: peace is not normal for us. It’s not something we want to hear. If conflict and strife is our normal state of being; if war is really in our nature, then what? Well, it makes the hope of true peace extraordinary and defiant. Peace breaks out when people begin to realize that the option of war is too costly. The decision to go to war is easy. The decision to go to peace is hard work. If peace were easy, then the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and all other places in the world would not flood our living rooms each night. Yet if it is such hard work, is there any hope for real peace? Yes. Peace, true peace, is what God calls us to live out, but we need to understand what peace is.
I finally come back to the words of Isaiah,
God shall judge between the nations
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
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 any more. –Isaiah 2:4
Isaiah’s words of hope spring out of the midst the darkness of war. The prophet was addressing Israel, who was standing on the brink of war with the Assyrian Empire. Under a new King, Assyria began to expand its borders again, moving to swallow up the lands it once controlled, and the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel were in its way. The kings were desperate to hold on to their power. The northern kingdom sought to make alliances with other nations, including Egypt, to stop the Assyrian tide. They chose war, and the Assyrians quickly annihilated them. The southern kingdom of Judah went the bargaining route to buy off the Assyrians and prevent them from swallowing them up. They taxed their people to pay tribute to the Assyrians and became a satellite state. Yet while this seemed to be the option of peace, it simply meant that Judah would die a slower, more painful death. In trying to preserve their kingdom for their own sake, they sacrificed their identity and what God was calling them to be. Neither action would bring peace, one would bring destruction, the other would bring slavery.
It was amazing that Isaiah pulled a sense of hope out of all this, and yet he did. He spoke of God’s peace, something far more potent than anyone could have imagined. He spoke of God’s peace, which would come, even if Israel as a nation ceased to be. He spoke of God’s peace, but not through negotiation, not through conflict resolution, but justice. Remember what Isaiah says about peace.
God shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples. Ah, now we are on to something! It is not the language of negotiation, or conflict, or war. It is the language of justice, God’s justice. The Greek philosopher Plato once said, without justice, there can be no peace.
Peace is not the absence of conflict. Conflict is a part of living together. True peace is when living together as people, as communities, as nations are done with justice and fairness. That’s what it takes, and yes, it takes hard work. Swords are beaten into plowshares and spears made into pruning hooks in the light of God’s justice amongst all peoples and all nations. The tools of war become the tools of peace. Peace springs out of a sense of justice; that all of us are treated fairly and equally in the world we live. Real justice brings real peace. But we misunderstand what justice is. We tend to see justice as something punitive, vengeful. Those who call out for justice seem to want vengeance against those who have wronged them. Vengeance breeds injustice, and the cycle continues without hope for peace. God calls us away from revenge, to work towards a real sense of justice, so that real peace might be achieved. But for us as followers of Christ, justice is not vengeful. Our sense of justice springs out of affirming that God’s love in Christ is for all. In God’s love, we find justice, we break the cycle that keeps us in war, and we see hope and work for peace.
So how do we work for peace? Negotiations on an international level is something that seems out of our hands. So it has to start from the ground up, from where we are. Remember for the sake of peace and seek justice in our own community, where you live: Work against injustice, do justice and love kindness. We can truly make a difference in the lives of the people we encounter. In all of my struggles to remember, I have found that the choice for peace is in our hands. God has placed this in our hands. This is where I find meaning in Remembrance Day. Peace has to start, with each one of us relating to one another.
This is our hope for peace. On Wednesday, when we stand in a moment of silence to remember those who have fallen in war. Remember for the sake of peace. Remember that we are called to express Christ’s love for one another for the sake of peace. Remember the hope that there will come a day when God’s true peace becomes a reality. Yet it will come through what God calls to do. In our hope for peace, in our remembering for the sake of peace, we work for justice so that we may have true and lasting peace. Our swords will become plowshares, and we our spears become pruning hooks, and that we will learn war no more.
Amen
