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Connectional Ministries : Witness : Peace with Justice

God's Gracious Gift of Moral Ambiguity

By Rev. Jackson Day
Jun 6, 2007, 10:20

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God's Gracious Gift of Moral Ambiguity
by the Rev. Jackson H. Day

For five months of my life, I was a pacifist, and I view those months with nostalgia and envy.

I envy the purity of the pacifist, who has resolved the issue of the use of force by one human being against another, who has let go the need to protect possessions or even family, who has the moral clarity that what must be protected is no longer worth keeping, and therefore can always and in every situation reject the need for war and the need to be a warrior. I envy that kind of purity, because for most of us, most of the time, we cannot achieve it.

If you can’t be a pacifist and you still want to be a Christian, you have to live in a zone where you are always between two choices, a place of ambiguity, a place of affirming opposites, a place of balancing competing truths. We may hate war, but we recognize there are times we must engage in it. Therefore we may hate war, but we must honor the warrior.

That is especially true this Memorial Day Wednesday, when as of yesterday, 3466 American servicemen and women had lost their lives in Iraq. Should they have made their lives available to their President, and should we honor them for so doing?

Our first Scripture from the book of Samuel begins the story of Saul’s war against the Amalekites. Just a few pages on in the narrative, Saul suffers from “an evil spirit of the Lord.” He has headaches that David tries to soothe him from with his harp playing. He has anger management problems, and throws his spear at David. Some noted theologians who have analyzed this passage have their own thoughts as to what the evil spirit of the Lord is, but combat veterans know: it is post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. The narrative tells us Saul is being punished for disobeying God; his troops killed all the Amalekites, men, women, and even the babies -- but left some sheep and cattle alive. Combat veterans know that Saul is being punished for obeying God – we humans are not made or meant to take human life without paying a price, and Saul is paying the price with his PTSD. Even David, whom the crowds cheered saying Saul had killed his thousands but David has killed his ten thousands, discovers when he wants to build a temple for God that God won’t let him – he has too much blood on his hands. There is a price to being a warrior.

And we have our second scripture. It is night in the Garden of Olives and the temple guard has arrived to arrest Jesus. Peter draws his sword and cuts off the ear of one of the guards. You see, the disciples weren’t pacifists either; I suspect Peter wasn’t the only one of them who carried a weapon. But Jesus tells them an unpleasant truth: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

If there is to be any defense for our nation at all, then there must be those who are willing to take the sword and defend it. If the defense is to be effective, the willing defenders must be willing to take orders, even those with which they disagree, else their efforts are wasted.

But here is the heart of the moral ambiguity: If there are sufficient numbers willing to take orders, even those with which they disagree, then a terrible, terrible temptation has been placed in the hands of the commander to abuse that willingness for unworthy ends.

“Power corrupts,” Lord Acton told us, and “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “Why did you do it,” one President was asked. “Because I could,” he responded ruefully.

That President was by no means the first in history – or the last -- to abuse his power. In the Hebrew Scriptures one has only to look at what Solomon did with his power: great palaces, even a temple for a God who had never really wanted one, and women – 700 wives and 300 concubines: because he could. Because the king was corrupted by this power, the very age of Israel’s greatest outward glory was an age when Israel, beset by injustice and greed, was rotting from within. An undivided Israel would not survive Solomon’s death. Yet such is the power of the biblical media to spin the glory of leaders that we still refer to the “wisdom of Solomon,” and not the “foolishness of Solomon.”

There are simplistic responses to this moral ambiguity. There was a folk song from the 60’s that I loved until I listened to the words and realized they were directed at me: “He’s the universal soldier, and he’s to blame…” And in a certain way, it’s right – if there were no soldiers, there would be no power for Presidents to abuse. But there would be no power to protect home and hearth.

Jesus himself, he who told Peter to put away his sword, models the ambiguity. He restores to life a centurion’s daughter, whose father appealed to Jesus as one leader of warriors to another.

Centurions are just human beings, and they have daughters they love. But put a lot of centurions together, and there is an enormous temptation to the one who commands them. If you are not a pacifist, the solution is not to punish the warriors, but to demand accountability from those in power who command the warriors and their centurions to go here and there.

This moral ambiguity is a challenge, and in its challenge, it is a sign of God’s grace, a sign that God, who created us to live in this ambiguous world, believes we are up to it. God believes we can handle it. It is a curse, it is a challenge – and it is grace.

Let us then thank God for honoring us with this grace and not merely burdening us with it. And, especially during this Memorial Day week, let us honor the commitment of our warriors – and demand enormous accountability from their leaders.

Jackson Day, MDiv, MPH, is pastor of Grace UMC in Upperco, Maryland and Health Care Consultant with the General Board of Church and Society. He serves as Vice President of Pathways to Promise: Ministry & Mental Illness and the International Conference of War Veteran Ministers. He served as Chaplain in the U.S. Army, Fourth Infantry Division in the Central highlands of Vietnam. He is co-author of "Risking Connection in Faith Communities: A Training curriculum for Faith Leaders Supporting Trauma Survivors."

Date: 5/30/2007
©2005-2007

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