St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Pictou , NS ; Nov 11^th 2005

 

The Cost

 

Micah 4:1-5

Matthew 22:36-40

 

Any single, thinking, caring Christian or human being for that matter, finds themselves stretched between Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour, God’s hope that our swords will be beaten into pruning hooks, our spears into pruning hooks, on one hand and the insanity of human conflict we call: war, on the other.

 

To a person we can agree on such things that “Hitler had to be stopped,” but we diverge and argue on the rationale, the need, and the right to go to war.

 

We can argue as we want, but the bottom line is that 200 million people died in the last century from war. As a human race, we have to admit our brokenness, and our failure to share the bounty and the beauty of the gift of life and the planet we were given to share with each other as brothers and sisters.

 

It seems that we can’t get along with each other.

 

We live in a world now where everything is measured:

-Americans are fond of measuring everything by football fields. (that oil tanker is 7 football fields long; that building is three football fields high.)

- Every mention of an athlete is followed by their stats: whether they have died, killed their teammate, have HIV, been expelled for drug use, committed assault, been promoted, sold or traded to the next slave owner, their stats are always quoted.

- hurricanes have the Richter scale,

- we have numbers for all of our medical tests, and

-the minister quotes the numbers on how many died in the last century from war.

 

But how do we really measure the cost of war?

- the cost to the veterans we are honoured today to have sitting in this church?

- to the those names on the wall plaques in churches and cenotaphs all over the world?

- to our country, to humanity?

 

Robert McNamara, former US secretary of defense and architect of the View Nam War finally broke his silence over the war in Iraq awhile back and said that the USA had committed the exact same 11 mistakes in going to war in Iraq as they did in going to Viet Nam . I guess you have to say that the cost here is common sense, but you may have another word. Then there is the cost of human life, trust, anger, fear and grief, pain and suffering: immeasurable.

 

A program on the WWI Battle for the French village of Pashendale the other evening said that 300,000 Allied troops died in that one battle; Makes 911 look small; just one battle being 100 times worse then that day in September a few years ago. We can measure those 300,000 deaths but not what it did to the families.

 

I heard a woman interviewed who told about her mother who lived in a village, east of Berlin . When the Russian troops passed on their way to Berlin at the end of WWII, she was raped 25 -30 times a day. Her daughter said that she was never the same again. How could she be? There isn’t even a way we know to measure the suffering of this one single woman and how she suffered because of Hitler’s insanity.

 

On The VE Day celebration in Charlottetown , May 8^th 1945 , my Uncle Charles, then ten years of age, was on a float with an effigy of Hitler on it and he fell off, was run over, and was killed. My father was 17, was there and identified him. My grandmother was downstairs for the first time since Christmas, recovering from diphtheria. She was in the sun porch with her Union Jack waiting for Charles to come home. He never did. 1945 grief counseling was for the doctor to give my grandmother and my Aunt Audrey needles to put them to sleep and our family was never the same again.

 

There is simply no way to measure the cost of war:

-          we can’t use football fields,

-          we can’t use Richter scales,

-          averages, or any combination of numbers in any way to measure what war does to the human soul.

 

Trying to measure the cost of war takes us right “off the scale” of any kind of measurement we might try to take.

 

Surely this fact alone should bring us to our knees in humility, both with grief for the human race and in gratitude for those who fought, paid the price in so many ways, and especially for those who paid the supreme price and offered their lives for us on the altar of freedom.

 

What can we do? What is our response to such cost?

 

Surely, we must remember. We must never forget to honour their memory and what they gave us.

 

But we must also be willing to seize and to carry the torch that was desperately thrown to us from failing hands as they went down for the last time.

 

Our identity and civility as human beings have been passed on by the telling of stories as long as human beings have lived. Those of us who are alive must not let the torch go out and keep telling the stories. How else will young people know who they are and value the cost of freedom, unless they are taught: a better alternative than going to war and learning first hand. “Lest we forget.”

 

We can carry the touch by honouring what has been passed on to us: by pausing, giving thanks, and remembering the cost of the gifts we have received.

 

We can carry the torch by standing for civility, by making our churches strong, by fighting for justice, by voting, by serving our community, by loving and caring for our neighbour, here and around the world wherever people are in need of our help, as we are able to share what we have.

 

We can address the cost by being grateful; we can live with an attitude of gratitude.

 

We can address the cost by honestly standing for freedom every chance we can get.

 

We can carry the torch by believing in and standing for… peace.

 

Forgiving someone in need of our forgiveness would increase the peace in our world and honour those who fought to give us that choice to exercise that same gift.

 

We can address the cost by living as fully and with as much love as we possibly can.

 

We can live our lives to prepare for that day, when:

“nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

Neither shall they learn war anymore;

But they all sit under their own vines

and under their own fig trees,

And no one shall make them afraid;

For the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.”

 

AMEN                      Rev. Alan Stewart