The Fog of War

2013-11-10 The Fog of War

1 Samuel 17:1-11, 38-50

"...the Lord does not save by sword and spear."

So, I worked long and hard on a sermon for today. It's a real hum-dinger. But then I started reading and thinking a lot about Veteran's Day. So I put the other sermon in Time Out.

I think of you in our congregation who are veterans and I think of all the living veterans of wartime and of peacetime. You deserve so much. You deserve so much more than one day of parades and school assemblies. Those are good; but you deserve more. You deserve more than sentimental attempts at thank-yous from those of us who've barely left the safety of our neighborhoods. You deserve more than what people can give because we've spent three hours watching, "Saving Private Ryan," or all however many versions there are of "Rambo." Or playing "Call of Duty" for days on end. You deserve more.

The Bible is, in many of its pages, a horrible, savage book. It's brutal when speaking of war. It tells what war does to men and to women. It tells of how even children are conscripted into service, sometimes willingly, and sometimes as innocents. Because the Bible is a book written from the perspective of a particular people, it glorifies the victories; it makes war the servant of God and of God's people. That's the luxury of hindsight.

So, thinking of war got me thinking of my favorite war story in the Bible: David and Goliath. That's such a great story. Little shepherd boy David slays giant Goliath with one stone. Yea, David! Yea Israel! Yea, God! That's nice. Church is nice. God is nice. We don't usually read the un-nice parts. We politely censor the ugly bits about sweet shepherd David decapitating Goliath with Goliath's own sword, and then taking the fly-swollen head back for display in Jerusalem. We skip over the slaughter of the retreating Philistines. We don't touch the insanity David's victory brought upon King Saul which eventually led to a military coup. That would take too long. That's not nice.

So we turn the horror, the horror, into a children's story. Like a short a movie with a happy ending. Not that there's anything wrong with children's stories or movies with happy endings. It's just that in these cases they paint less than half the picture. We who want so badly to believe we live in a world of clean lines and Kum By Yah deserve better. Our veterans who understand war's glory and its evil - you all, and we all - deserve better. We deserve truth.

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A couple of months ago I watched a movie called, "The Fog of War," on Netflix. That hardly qualifies me as an expert on anything except how to operate Netflix. But it did open my eyes to something other stories and movies had skipped over. "The Fog of War" is a documentary, told mainly through the unscripted words of Robert MacNamara, Secretary of Defense during Vietnam. MacNamara just sits in a room and talks. (I know; But I've seen "The Avengers" about 10 times and I was looking for something different.)

I have to say "The Fog of War" was one of the most fascinating and terrifying things I've ever seen, and I've watched "Breaking Bad." MacNamara is usually portrayed by historians as either a genius or a megalomaniac, depending on your point of view. But the film, I think, allowing his own uncensored arrogance as well as introspection, portrays him as a human being, a brilliant, complex, deeply flawed and deeply dedicated participant in the "fog" of war.

The "fog". It's the thick, chaotic haze where simple right and straightforward wrong blur together into something most of us who've never fought in real combat simply can't get. By the end of the movie, you realize that the enemy isn't so much the human being on the other side of the rifle sights, or the block of color on the drone control screen, but that the true enemy is the fog. The fog that irrevocably changes everyone it touches.

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"Voices in Wartime" is an anthology of articles and poetry about war, written by veterans themselves. One of the articles in the book is written by Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent with 15 years of experience in places such as El Salvador, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf.

In his article, titled, "The Collective Madness," Hedges writes, "The reality of combat is nothing like the image I think many of us carry into combat. First of all, there's the factor of fear, which is overpowering in situations where violent death is all around you. Fear is something which you have a constant second-by-second, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour battle to control. You always have moments in which fear takes control and in which you fail, in which your instincts towards self-preservation make you crumble. And anybody, including soldiers who tell you otherwise and come out of combat, are not telling you the truth.

It's a constant battle against fear. There are always times when fear wins. Courage is not a state. Courage is an act. And I think one of the reasons that those who carry out what we would define as courageous acts are often very reticent to speak about it afterward is because they're not completely sure they could do it again."

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Hedges goes on: "I read a psychological study that said that being in sustained combat is the psychological equivalent of being in a car crash in which your best friend is killed. These are very, very heavy things to bear. When we see the distress that is unleashed in those who return, we turn away because the myth is so much more enjoyable than the reality. The myth was peddled to us during the war in Iraq by the cable news networks where the coverage of the war existed in essence as a celebration of our incredibly powerful weapons systems and, by extension, our own power.

"War is not clean," he writes. "War is very messy. War is never as tidy as the images of war make it out to be. In fact, war is just pure chaos. The noise itself is deafening, almost unbearable, overloading your senses, along with everything else. You are assaulted in a way that you are completely knocked off balance emotionally, psychologically, and often physically.

Says Hedges: "We don't want to see and we don't want to hear. We turn our backs on those who come back from war and bear witness to war, and I think this has been true for generations and generations. The reason is because it's so difficult to see, so difficult to look at, so difficult to ingest, and it's so much more enjoyable to ingest the bands playing, the flags waving, and the hero charging up over the hill, which is a lie. It's just not true."

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You veterans, please know we are grateful. We can't begin to thank you enough, because we can't understand how war has changed your hearts, your minds, and your souls. On this and every Veteran's Day weekend, we're so, so grateful. But if we're honest, the gratitude that most of us, including myself, feel so strongly, is selfish. In part, it's selfish gratitude. We give you parades and speeches; we say, "Thank you," in large, grandstanding ways, because the bands and grandstands are attempts to compensate for our own guilt over being secretly glad we've never had to see, and feel, and experience battle, and bear the nightmares, and PTSD, and traumatic injuries. You veterans have breathed in the fog; it's in your blood. We've read about it in the safety of our bedrooms, and watched Netflix movies about it.

Which reminds me of a song by Lyle Lovett, which came out during the Iraq War, called, "Natural Forces." Lyle sings,

Now as I sit here safe at home

With a cold Coors Lite an' the TV on

All the sacrifice and the death and war

Lord I pray that I'm worth fighting for

...and then the soldier replies,

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline

For it's on my RPG I ride.

Till Earth an' hell are satisfied

I'm subject to the natural forces.

Sometimes at night I hear their voices.

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The shepherd boy David's shouts to Goliath, that he will win the battle because, "...the Lord does not save by sword and spear." Well, for a moment, that's true. A well-aimed rock to the forehead works just as well, if not better. And while he doesn't save with a sword, David sure picks up one as insurance, as does the whole army of Israel, as they terminate their Philistine foes with extreme prejudice. It's kind of like the saying, "Trust in the Lord, and keep your ammo dry." "The Lord does not save by sword and spear." Maybe not. But David keeps them nearby, just in case. Or maybe David's not talking about himself.

Long years later, a descendant of the house and lineage of David will again arise. This descendant will at last be the one who fulfills the prophecy of David. This new man will truly save his people without lifting sword or spear. Yet Jesus will be pierced by a spear and nailed to a cross in what looks to be epic failure.

The great writer, Frederic Buechner, in his book, The Magnificent Defeat, says,

"...we are free to resist [Christ's love], deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, God's power, is itself powerless."

Jesus doesn't defeat the armies of war. Jesus defeats the fog. Jesus defeats the fog that confuses the senses of anyone who soldiers for justice and truth and peace. Jesus clarifies. Jesus purifies. Without sword. Without spear.

Jesus saves with relentless, never-surrendering love. This is how God conquers our enemies. This is how God conquers us. This is how God conquers the fog that turns humanity against itself. This is the something better that all soldiers of the war against the fog don't deserve, but receive as a gift of new and everlasting life.

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On Veterans Day, we thank you who have tasted the bitterness of war on our behalf. But as well we pray for the day when we will have no more veterans, and no need to thank them, when the words of Scripture will be fulfilled, saying, "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, Micah 4:3)

A little boy named Cameron Penny was in the fourth grade in a Michigan school when he wrote this poem. It was originally published in the November/December 2001 issue of North American Review.

If You Are Lucky In This Life

by Cameron Penny

If you are lucky in this life

A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies.

And when the soldiers look into the window

They don't see their enemies

They see themselves as children.

And they stop fighting

And go home and go to sleep.

When they wake up, the land is well again.