Be Still
Text: Psalm 46
In Flanders' Fields
In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly,
Scarce heard amidst the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Love and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders’ fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe,
To you from falling hands we throw
The Torch –be yours to hold it high;
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep though poppies grow in Flanders’ fields.
At risk of repeating what John read earlier in the service, there is a power to this poem that has endured far beyond those with a living memory of the conflict from which it came. We now only have one veteran from the First World War still living. At one hundred seven years old, John Babcock resides at a nursing home in Spokane, Washington… and even he never saw action on the fields of Dr. John McCrae’s poem.
Yet even so, it has achieved a near-mythic status within our Canadian culture. The reading of this is one of the earliest memories that I have of Remembrance Day services when I was growing up. Almost ninety years since the guns fell silent over those fields in Europe, this poem still has great power. It is still read with equal depth and conviction by those who fought and survived the Second World War.
In the words, it has this air of ironic stillness: images of poppies quietly drifting amongst white crosses, carried by the invisible caresses of the wind, or larks who still sing despite being drowned out by the thunderous roar of the guns below.
Read every year at Remembrance Day ceremonies, it is a reminder of the wars in Europe… of the horrible sacrifices made by individuals. These days it reminds us of our duty to struggle for peace in world. It reminds us of how wars have been fought for causes that become hollow and meaningless… On a broad sense, we can talk about the virtues of freedom and peace, of king and country, but to those on the ground, often they died for something far more important: for the lives of their friends.
These are dreadful lessons, paid for in blood… and sometimes we find ourselves still learning them. In the midst of this act of Remembrance, we need to ask “Where is God in the midst of all this?”
Taking Stock:
We’re still at the beginning of the 21st Century. Even now, the ironies of war are not lost on us. We can look back on 100 years of violence and bloodshed, we shake our heads, wondering if we have made any progress at all… but there are glimmers of hope.
During the 20th Century, war as a means of international policy has moved from the preferred option to a last resort. Even the recent attempts to revive gunboat diplomacy have failed miserably, reminding us of the First World War lesson that diplomacy by violence is ultimately self-destructive. Since the end of the First World War, people began to see that the price of war was too high. Even those conditions, powers, and people that led to the Second World War tried to reverse that historical lesson. The price we paid for that second lesson was over seventy million people dead, and advent of even newer and catastrophically powerful weapons.
Since the end of the Second World War, we have always lived with the possibility of a Third. There is little doubt that given our present military capacities, a global international conflict could well render all of civilization a smoking ruin. We have come very close in the past sixty years… while it was before my time, many of you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. The lessons of that experience are ones that we forget at our peril.
Yet in spite of all this, in spite of the recent unrest since 9/11, there are still glimmers of hope. The 20th Century is the only time in history in which there have been conscious attempts on the part of the international community to seek peaceful solutions between nations. The United Nations, for all its flaws, has met with a certain amount of success, diffusing many international conflicts before they have sparked into open warfare. It isn’t perfect to be sure, and we have a long way to go for true peace… but there is something to hope for… and a realization of how far we have come. In no uncertain terms, we have also come a very long way. After all, it has been eighteen years since the Berlin Wall fell… marking the end of the Cold War. Peace may well have a chance…
The Relationship between God and War
Yet as we know there are still those who pursue violence over peace. They seek to impose their will by force, and cite the name of God to justify it. Nothing undermines the credibility of faith more than invoking the name of God in war. Yet while we stand here in a church remembering those who have fought in war over the past century, we also bear some of that responsibility. When the First World War began, Canadians threw themselves into the war effort with cheerful abandon. God was on our side, and nobody questioned it. As a historian and as a minister, I get a queasy feeling when I remember that clergy were recruiters for the army. There was no questioning thought… no second-guessing that the people that we were going to war against were also Christians. The King needed people to fight, and die if necessary, and that was that. While his name was evoked… God was left out of the picture. This is one part of history that we cannot forget...
God has long been used to justify war throughout history. This reality provides a great deal of ammunition to the cause of atheism. The justifications come from Biblical images of God as a warrior. Selected verses can be used to beat the drums, and sharpen plows into swords, and pruning hooks into spears. We take bits and pieces of Scripture to justify what we want, without truly listening to what God is trying to tell us. History shows us that there is nothing more dangerous and destructive than a half-truth disguised as the real thing.
When set into the whole context, the larger picture, there is a change in understanding. The Bible changes its imagery of God from that of a warrior, to Jesus calling us to turn the other cheek. We ask, what happened? Has God changed, or have we? Maybe we’re missing the big picture…
Words from Psalm 46:
“[God] makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted amongst the nations,
I am exalted in the earth.”
God is the one who brings peace. If there is anyone who brings war, it is us. We simply tack on God as an afterthought to make our fights legitimate. When we say that God is on our side, we are creating God in our own image… we violate the third commandment… We know that one… The one that says you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain. These days we’ve cheapened it by saying it applies only to swear words… but that’s not what it means. It means that we cannot justify our own actions by simply tacking on God’s name.
All God asks of us is stop for a moment and listen… “Be still, and know that I am God!”
When I served as Presbyterian Chaplain at UWO, there was an Orthodox Rabbi who read Psalm 46 directly from Hebrew translating as he went. When he got to that line, he said “Desist, and know that I am God.” Stop your fighting! Listen, even for a moment… and know that I am God… the one who brings an end to war.
God’s call to peace
We now live in an age where considering war is flirting with disaster. We point to governments and leaders, shake our heads, saying it is their fault, they got us into this. Yet, we forget our own role, and how important each of us can be. Because ministers were amongst those who supported the call to battle in the First World War, I can’t put the blame somewhere else. I realize that I was raised in a different age, but if we don’t learn the lessons of the past… What then? One of the lessons of the past century is how much responsibility we really do bear… how many of us have forgotten that Adolf Hitler was elected? The call is no different for each of us. Peace starts at home… Peace starts with an act of remembrance… a poppy, a poem… Peace starts when we are still, listening for the presence of God when we remember those who died.
Our call through this act of remembrance is to keep that testament alive and let God shape and change us towards a life of peace, rather than making God a rubber stamp for our own shallow goals. That is the torch and the promise we keep with those who have died in war, that their struggle may not be in vain… working and praying that we may never see war again. We work and pray so that we may be God’s agents of peace. We pause to remember, to be still and know that God is God.
Amen.
In Flanders' Fields
In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly,
Scarce heard amidst the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Love and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders’ fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe,
To you from falling hands we throw
The Torch –be yours to hold it high;
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep though poppies grow in Flanders’ fields.
At risk of repeating what John read earlier in the service, there is a power to this poem that has endured far beyond those with a living memory of the conflict from which it came. We now only have one veteran from the First World War still living. At one hundred seven years old, John Babcock resides at a nursing home in Spokane, Washington… and even he never saw action on the fields of Dr. John McCrae’s poem.
Yet even so, it has achieved a near-mythic status within our Canadian culture. The reading of this is one of the earliest memories that I have of Remembrance Day services when I was growing up. Almost ninety years since the guns fell silent over those fields in Europe, this poem still has great power. It is still read with equal depth and conviction by those who fought and survived the Second World War.
In the words, it has this air of ironic stillness: images of poppies quietly drifting amongst white crosses, carried by the invisible caresses of the wind, or larks who still sing despite being drowned out by the thunderous roar of the guns below.
Read every year at Remembrance Day ceremonies, it is a reminder of the wars in Europe… of the horrible sacrifices made by individuals. These days it reminds us of our duty to struggle for peace in world. It reminds us of how wars have been fought for causes that become hollow and meaningless… On a broad sense, we can talk about the virtues of freedom and peace, of king and country, but to those on the ground, often they died for something far more important: for the lives of their friends.
These are dreadful lessons, paid for in blood… and sometimes we find ourselves still learning them. In the midst of this act of Remembrance, we need to ask “Where is God in the midst of all this?”
Taking Stock:
We’re still at the beginning of the 21st Century. Even now, the ironies of war are not lost on us. We can look back on 100 years of violence and bloodshed, we shake our heads, wondering if we have made any progress at all… but there are glimmers of hope.
During the 20th Century, war as a means of international policy has moved from the preferred option to a last resort. Even the recent attempts to revive gunboat diplomacy have failed miserably, reminding us of the First World War lesson that diplomacy by violence is ultimately self-destructive. Since the end of the First World War, people began to see that the price of war was too high. Even those conditions, powers, and people that led to the Second World War tried to reverse that historical lesson. The price we paid for that second lesson was over seventy million people dead, and advent of even newer and catastrophically powerful weapons.
Since the end of the Second World War, we have always lived with the possibility of a Third. There is little doubt that given our present military capacities, a global international conflict could well render all of civilization a smoking ruin. We have come very close in the past sixty years… while it was before my time, many of you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. The lessons of that experience are ones that we forget at our peril.
Yet in spite of all this, in spite of the recent unrest since 9/11, there are still glimmers of hope. The 20th Century is the only time in history in which there have been conscious attempts on the part of the international community to seek peaceful solutions between nations. The United Nations, for all its flaws, has met with a certain amount of success, diffusing many international conflicts before they have sparked into open warfare. It isn’t perfect to be sure, and we have a long way to go for true peace… but there is something to hope for… and a realization of how far we have come. In no uncertain terms, we have also come a very long way. After all, it has been eighteen years since the Berlin Wall fell… marking the end of the Cold War. Peace may well have a chance…
The Relationship between God and War
Yet as we know there are still those who pursue violence over peace. They seek to impose their will by force, and cite the name of God to justify it. Nothing undermines the credibility of faith more than invoking the name of God in war. Yet while we stand here in a church remembering those who have fought in war over the past century, we also bear some of that responsibility. When the First World War began, Canadians threw themselves into the war effort with cheerful abandon. God was on our side, and nobody questioned it. As a historian and as a minister, I get a queasy feeling when I remember that clergy were recruiters for the army. There was no questioning thought… no second-guessing that the people that we were going to war against were also Christians. The King needed people to fight, and die if necessary, and that was that. While his name was evoked… God was left out of the picture. This is one part of history that we cannot forget...
God has long been used to justify war throughout history. This reality provides a great deal of ammunition to the cause of atheism. The justifications come from Biblical images of God as a warrior. Selected verses can be used to beat the drums, and sharpen plows into swords, and pruning hooks into spears. We take bits and pieces of Scripture to justify what we want, without truly listening to what God is trying to tell us. History shows us that there is nothing more dangerous and destructive than a half-truth disguised as the real thing.
When set into the whole context, the larger picture, there is a change in understanding. The Bible changes its imagery of God from that of a warrior, to Jesus calling us to turn the other cheek. We ask, what happened? Has God changed, or have we? Maybe we’re missing the big picture…
Words from Psalm 46:
“[God] makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted amongst the nations,
I am exalted in the earth.”
God is the one who brings peace. If there is anyone who brings war, it is us. We simply tack on God as an afterthought to make our fights legitimate. When we say that God is on our side, we are creating God in our own image… we violate the third commandment… We know that one… The one that says you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain. These days we’ve cheapened it by saying it applies only to swear words… but that’s not what it means. It means that we cannot justify our own actions by simply tacking on God’s name.
All God asks of us is stop for a moment and listen… “Be still, and know that I am God!”
When I served as Presbyterian Chaplain at UWO, there was an Orthodox Rabbi who read Psalm 46 directly from Hebrew translating as he went. When he got to that line, he said “Desist, and know that I am God.” Stop your fighting! Listen, even for a moment… and know that I am God… the one who brings an end to war.
God’s call to peace
We now live in an age where considering war is flirting with disaster. We point to governments and leaders, shake our heads, saying it is their fault, they got us into this. Yet, we forget our own role, and how important each of us can be. Because ministers were amongst those who supported the call to battle in the First World War, I can’t put the blame somewhere else. I realize that I was raised in a different age, but if we don’t learn the lessons of the past… What then? One of the lessons of the past century is how much responsibility we really do bear… how many of us have forgotten that Adolf Hitler was elected? The call is no different for each of us. Peace starts at home… Peace starts with an act of remembrance… a poppy, a poem… Peace starts when we are still, listening for the presence of God when we remember those who died.
Our call through this act of remembrance is to keep that testament alive and let God shape and change us towards a life of peace, rather than making God a rubber stamp for our own shallow goals. That is the torch and the promise we keep with those who have died in war, that their struggle may not be in vain… working and praying that we may never see war again. We work and pray so that we may be God’s agents of peace. We pause to remember, to be still and know that God is God.
Amen.
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