Poppies that are Red

Isaiah 55:6-11
Matthew 8:5-13

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Rockville United Church

November 11, 2007

Some people wear white poppies for Veterans Day. The idea is that a white poppy is pure like peace, whereas the traditional red poppy is like the blood of war. There’s a lot to think about there: Peace – white; war – red. But, of course, thought – thinking – is weak, weak as a spring breeze when it comes to the storms of war. Men don’t wear the Red Badge of Courage just because they’ve been thinking about it.

I’m not going to ask you to wear pacifist white or warrior red, as an intellectual choice. My wish, however, is for these thoughtful sermon words to lead you to your soul. This afternoon I’ll be listening, at the Kennedy Center, to the Washington Chorus tribute to our nation’s veterans. The music includes Vaughan Williams’, Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace) with words from America’s Civil War poet, Walt Whitman. I hope to have such words and music enter my own soul and to shape my faith; to preach next week on poppies that are white.

Now at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, World War One ceased. What an hour for hope! Several minutes ago at 11 o’clock, 2 minutes of silence were observed in this country in our time zone – as they are around the world most especially in British Commonwealth countries, because of their particular desire to remember the horrors of trench warfare in France, horrors that disillusioned the western world about itself.

A Canadian officer wrote a poem about the loss of his friend in that war and the image in that poem of red poppies blooming in the battle land and cemeteries of Flanders Field has become a western world symbol of remembrance of those who died:

“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 amid the guns below.

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields”

Much of that sentiment happens in America on Memorial Day where the compounded losses of two world wars are remembered. In 1951, President Eisenhower signed a law to change the name of this Armistice Remembrance Day to Veteran’s Day and we are called to honor the nearly 30 million living American Veterans. A somber honoring filled with the ambiguities of honoring warriors while hating war.

It seems to me a starting place for Christian thought and feeling about this ambivalence -- to honor warriors and to hate war-- is to know that real warriors hate war, but they don’t hate themselves nor the honor they merit.

It has never been a simple ethical issue, war. Bumper-sticker thinking doesn’t help. A yellow ribbon saying “Support our Troops” can go on a pacifist’s car. The Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” clearly is beyond human achievement, as are they all, are they not.

You may want to be a pacifist. You may want to be a warrior. But for starters, as a Christian, it’s not as easy an issue as we want it to be. If then we don’t think about war and warriors in simplistic terms of absolute good or bad, then we are ready to do something many progressive Christians I know are not doing, and that is to tolerate people who are warriors and the logic of the warrior mentality. Many liberal Christians act like soldiers have leprosy, as if soft love is morally or spiritually superior to hard love, tough love. The atmosphere of many of our churches and denominational meetings are, what can I say? Well, “pastel”. I think you know what I mean. A woman historian has written an important book called “The Feminization of Christianity.” It has to do with Victorian culture and how it took over church life. It is not about feminism nor even women and equality. It’s about, for example, the slender tapered fingers of Phillip Brooks, statued in Boston, and the sweet sentiments of his song, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Somewhere along the line, Aunt Polly took over the church and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Jim got left out. It is a narrow-minded prejudice to cultivate a church culture in which a warrior would feel uncomfortable simply by being a warrior -- as if he or she is defacto evil. What’s worse is if we, who think of ourselves as peace makers and peace advocates and peaceful, imagine we are somehow only full of virtue.

I’m afraid this centurion Roman Soldier, from our Christian reading, must get trotted out on a yearly basis as a textual antidote to the simplistic and really contemptuous moralisms of we liberal Christians.

But it is clear that Jesus is as respectfully open to this warrior as he is to just about everybody else except Pontius Pilot and some high priests. But even more, Jesus respects and sees faith in the manner of thinking this soldier has. He thinks as one “under authority.” And our liberal enlightenment rationalist world view is horrified. As if anyone who follows orders, lives under authority, must be a Nazi or a fool. We have made “Think for yourself” a commandment.

As an intellectual, I agree. I taught prep-school kids to think about religion for themselves. I taught doctors in family medicine to think psychologically about patients. But my friends, faith is not about thinking. “Fides Quaerens Intellectum”: faith in search of understanding, reason is a tool. But faith is a total following. Faith is a submission. Faith is a giving in and a giving up of self. And in that sense warriors are more faithful than thinkers, because warriors are willing to put themselves in a position to give up self.

This is the faith Jesus admires in the soldier he meets. The soldier talks about his work life the way Jesus talks about his prayer life: “Not my will but thine be done!”

Our intellectual liberal habits, so practiced among our tribe, are just a dodge from commitment, obedience, faithfulness, discipline, and the humility that comes from knowing your place in the cosmic order.

And in the cosmic order we are in the dust department, star dust, but dust. That is a fundamental biblical perspective and in the cosmic order our thoughts are, as Isaiah says, not God’s thought “for as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9) We can not and should not tolerate hearing that from some king or president. But we need to re-learn how to hear that from God.

After World War I one of the most read writers of the 20th century JRR Tolkien, wrote his master pieces the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings as his response to World War I. Prior to the war he and 3 of his friends at Oxford had formed an elite club of literary world shakers. They saw themselves as the New Rulers of Imagination and Learning. They didn’t all survive the war and their pride was destroyed. The great imaginal shift in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is this: The real heroes, the protagonists, are very, very small and largely powerless against the giant forces of the world – except for their honor and their willingness not to use self-power but to trust in selfless, other-power, the ring.