Poppies that are White

Genesis 22:1-19
Matthew 5:1-11


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

November 18, 2007

A few days before Veterans’ Day, still called Armistice Day in Great Britain—a day that marks the remembrance of the end of the horrors of World War I, I channel-surfed into a late night live BBC TV news broadcast of the Queen’s speech to Parliament. All the news broadcasters wore, in their lapels, large flat red poppies. Some of our church members here last week at RUC wore the same large red poppies. The red flowers, as I researched, are like the red poppies that grew and grow in France on the battle lands and white cross cemeteries of Flanders Field. I was moved, and glad to know, finally, the story of those red starched cloth cut outs, having for years donated dollars for little ones on wires from American Legion old men at grocery stores exits.

And so we spoke last week of the blood-red, war-red poppies and the complex issues of war and peace and honoring veteran warriors while hating war. As guidance from scripture, you looked with me at the whole idea of thinking—thought—and what role does thinking itself really play in how we act about war and peace, when the prophet Isaiah rapturously proclaims that, for God, “my ways are not your ways, and my thoughts are not your thoughts—as high as the heavens are from earth, so distant are my thoughts from your thoughts, says the Lord.” When the prophet so minimizes our thinking brains he lays the ground for St. Anselm’s famous book and phrase: Fides Quaerens Intellectum: “Faith in Search of Understanding.” Faith: the turning of the soul towards God in the night, looking for the flashlight of reason to find its way out of the dark. And war and peace are dark and murky, complex problems for the mind and the soul.

And this preacher suggested that men (and this is problematically still largely a male problem and, some suggest, naively perhaps, that part of the problem about war is that it is still left up largely to the thinking of men, usually the thinking of old men, even old white men), that men do not wear or pursue the red badge of courage because they’ve been thinking about it! Even when the thinking of the warrior is more like the thinking of the person of faith, what the Danish theologian Kierkegaard called “The Knight of Faith.” This we saw last week in how Jesus was supremely approving of the faith-attitude of the Roman solider, the centurion, who believed that faith in God is like martial submission: not my will, but thine be done. This is a notion so offensive to our liberal rational secular culture. But then we have been recently agreeing that Christianity is counter-cultural. We’re just not prepared—quite sincerely—for it to be counter to our culture. But it is: faith is not an interesting proposition discerned by argument. Faith is a persuasion, a submission, a compulsion, even an obsession—way beyond the gated community we call our brains.

And so my hope, on Veterans’ Day last week, was that the afternoon I was planning to spend at the Kennedy Center’s Veterans’ Day tribute would speak not to my thoughts but to my soul—as music and poetry speak to the soul. The benefit could be, I hoped, that the soul would beat the brain, that my soul, our souls, the human soul, the divinely-inspired soul could get us to the place of peace, that place of grace, that our reason seems unable to achieve, to take us to.

Now this is almost an absurd hope: to hope that music and poetry—semi-religious poetry, Walt Whitman, and the Latin language in the Mass—to hope for peace by religion in the soul more than through rationality in the mind. This is seemingly absurd, certainly counter-cultural, and more so because it has become fashionable to equate all religion with fundamentalism and all fundamentalists with violence: crazed Islamic, Jewish and Christian fundamentalists. One hardly can remember in this media-murky mess that Sufi mystics and poets like Rumi and Kabir are Islamic, to keep remembering that Jesus was a Jew and for all intents and purposes an earthly pacifist, and that Quakers and the Amish are Christians.

So, to place some hope in religious poetry and powerful music is to at least say that there is good musical poetry as well as bad, just as there is good religious reason as well as flawed.

But in the desperate struggle we are in to get finally away from the red of war that keeps our poppies turning red, to get to the white of peace that could finally drain the blood from our cemetery flowers, I believe that music and poetic language triumph, and triumph totally, over reason and the brain.

Many people (the writer Sam Keen being one) have documented how a nation’s language, its rhetoric, changes as soon as start the drum beats of war. The drum beats of war change people’s minds. The drum beats of war change people’s hearts, and when the mind and heart are changed, can the soul be far behind?

Now of course this is common knowledge. There is no conspiracy theory here. It’s like advertising—we keep it semi-conscious, what we’re doing with images and sounds, persuading people without another thought.

When armies show their colors, when color guards present arms, they show real colors, you know, like red. Of course, then, the case for white poppies of peace is a hard one when white is the color of surrender. With blaring bugles and beating drums, armies do not march under white flags! White is a non-color. White is no color, or all color. It makes peace a color-less sell, does it not?

In the nineteenth century, soon after the Civil War, America’s great philosopher and original psychologist William James struggled with these issues of war and peace. Trying, as a philosopher and America’s first psychologist, to combine thinking with psychology, he came up with this new idea: what humanity needed, he argued, was “the moral equivalent of war.” What he meant was that the human psychological attractions and aptitudes to war-making could not be changed but the resulting activity could be re-directed towards equally moral goals, causes.

Well, we have in fact been trying that, in a progression from violence to peaceableness. We’ve gone from a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” then to rid the world of fear and want in the name of religious tolerance and political freedom, to wars on poverty, wars on cancer, wars on drugs.

The problem for “white-peace” here is that wars have to start out feeling thrilling. Remember “shock and awe”?

William James’ friend and fellow nineteenth century great, Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame, knew this when he wrote “war is a boy’s game.” And youth, boys and girls, want excitement, thrills, colors, moving songs and something with a beat to it.

Walt Whitman, another nineteenth century great, the poet and the wound dresser in Washington D.C. hospitals, knew the power and poetic and musical thrill of war. Here is how he pictured that, the soul stirring power of war: in these words which were sung last week at the Kennedy Center tribute, with the music of Ralph Vaughn Williams. Listen to these images and rhythms and see what Whitman knew war could do, would do, to the human condition. And if war and its words and colors and music is our enemy, then let this poem define the full stature of our foe.

He writes:

“Beat! Beat! Drums! Blow, Bugles Blow!”

He calls on the power of war, picturing it this way:

As if ironically addressing war, he beckons it “through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force.” He menacingly calls, because he’s seen and known, for war to burst: “into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, into the school where the scholar is studying.”

The poet has the winds of war, bugle and drum, “…leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride, nor the peaceful farmer (leave him without) any peace…so fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.”

He doesn’t relent “over the traffic of cities…beds prepared for sleepers…no sleepers must sleep in those beds.”

These bugles and drums of beating war go on to stop the talkers from talking, the singers from singing, the lawyer from rising in court…and here Walt Whitman delivers his death blow to the pretentiousness of our thinking: he commands drums and bugles—knowing that this is what they do, to: “make no parley—stop for no expostulation, mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,” not the beseeching old man, nor the young, and then this hurt: “let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,…so strong you thump, O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.”

The frank question here is simple: can our religion be a soul-stirring religion? Can our faith stir our souls more than this? Now you will know why I read that awe-filled Abraham-to-sacrifice-Isaac story. It is the reddest of stories.

Only one theologian, as far as I know, the great Dane Soren Kierkegaard, has ever been able to make proper sense of the story. He calls Abraham not only the father of faith, but the knight of faith, knowing that God and only God can command us to sacrifice our sons. So awesome is this story that our enlightened liberal brains simply shrivel in the fire of it. But since we let our government do this everyday, call up our sons for sacrifice, do we not need a God who can get so red?! Don’t we have to imagine God, if we are to believe in God at all, to be at least as great a commander as our little commander-in-chief so that when we turn to the Beatitudes we nearly faint to hear God in Jesus command us to do even more than to kill for him, but to die for him, not to sacrifice our sons but ourselves? Doesn’t the blood drain from our faces when he turns us to consider the lilies of the field? Does not white-poppy power trump red-poppy power when this son of Abraham and his God, Jesus Christ, tells us that kingdoms are made of the poor in spirit, that mourners find comfort (not revenge), that earth land goes to the meek, and that good people win in the end and merciful people receive mercy and pure hearts see God and peacemakers are in God’s very family?

It is a stupendous vision of hope—these Beatitudes of Jesus. The heart that pumps this hope is full of the colorless pure blood of forgiveness. This is what William James did not get to in his hope for a moral equivalent to war. What we need in each human heart is the thrill to forgive, not the guts to kill. Whitman’s transcendent hope, so Christian in its founding—is for the warrior to say, as I heard sung last Sunday, “For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead. I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin….I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.”

This, my friends, is the passing of the peace, the kiss of peace to the enemy, not the kiss of death to the foe. And from that change of heart which changes blood from red to white comes Whitman’s Christian glory. May it thrill us beyond thinking and drums. He says that there is a “word” and that this word is “over all.” It is a word that is “beautiful as the sky!” And its beauty is this: the beauty of this word is that war, “war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost.” War when it meets this forgiving word will just simply lose! And when war itself meets defeat—as it must in the face of this beautiful word, “forgive!,” then “…the hands of the sisters Death and Night,” the hands of those dark sisters, Sister Death and Sister Night, well, why they will “incessantly, softly wash, again and ever again, this (our) soiled world,” the red of our blood-soaked hands washed clean in the everlasting waters of forgiveness. Let us and our children forever remember these hands, once so unnecessarily red, now washed clean.

Amen.