8-15-8-6-45

Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan 73 years ago.  At the time of the bombing the city's population was approximately 340,00 - 350,000 people.  It is estimated that the bomb directly killed 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 2,000 Korean slave laborers. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought the total number of deaths to 90,000–166,000.  About 70% of the city's buildings were destroyed, and another 7% severely damaged.  This was the first time an atomic bomb was dropped on a city.  

Two days later another bomb was, this time on the city of Nagasaki.  At the time, the population of Nagasaki was estimated to be about 263,000 people -- 240,000 Japanese residents, 10,000 Korean residents, 2,500 conscripted Korean workers, 9,000 Japanese soldiers, 600 conscripted Chinese workers, and 400 Allied POWs  Less than a second after the detonation, the north of the city was destroyed and 35,000 people were killed.

On August 12, 2007 I preached this sermon at the congregation I was serving in Brewster, Massachusetts.  While many of the specifics are clearly of the time, I think the message still has relevance.

Opening Words:  The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.

by Wislawa Szymborska 

(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

Szymborska is a Polish poet and essayist.

She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. 

Reading:  “Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titantic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint- the man, the woman, the children, the ball- remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.”

From “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury.

* * *

At 8:14 there was a clear blue sky.  Birds flew in the morning sunshine.  Children laughed as they made their way to school.  People were doing tai chi and calisthenics in a city park.  There’d been a scare earlier in the morning but it seemed now that everything was okay.  Even when the world around you seems to be going crazy, days like this can make you feel alive and grateful.  The air is clean; the sun, warm.  You can forget the insanity.  On a day like this.  For a moment everything makes sense.

And in that moment—31,000 feet above the birds, and the children, and the men doing tai chi—the bomb doors on the Enola Gay opened and let loose a metal cylinder.  Ten feet long and two-and-a-half feet in diameter, it would change the world.  Not just for the people below or the people in the plane, but for every man, every woman, and every child who lived or ever would.

Forty-three seconds after it was flung loose that metal cylinder was 1,900 feet above the ground and it exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT.  The birds burst into flame in mid-air.  So did combustible things like paper—even as far as a mile away.  Instantly.

The people in the park right below turned to ash.  Instantly.  A woman sitting on the steps of her bank, waiting for it to open, was reduced to a shadow.  You can see it today in the Hiroshima Peace Museum where they moved the steps so that she might not be forgotten.

Next came the blast wave.  Moving at a rate of two miles a second, people were blown from their feet, buildings were blown to the ground, trolleys and cars were blown from the roads.  Glass shattered twelve miles away.  A boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street; his house collapsing behind him.  Within minutes, nine out of ten people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead.

And the numerous fires that erupted around Hiroshima soon joined together creating a monstrous firestorm that engulfed nearly four and half square miles of the city.  In its heart it is estimated that this beast reached temperatures of over seven thousand degrees.  (For comparison, the surface of the sun is just under ten thousand degrees.)  An interesting fact:  a postwar study showed that less than 4.5 percent of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima suffered leg fractures.  That’s not, of course, because those injuries didn’t occur but because those who couldn’t walk died.

It’s estimated that somewhere around 100,000 people died as a direct result of the blast and the fires.  100,000 people. 

Yet these are just numbers:  15,000 tons of TNT.  Seven thousand degrees.  100,000 people dead.  60 million dead if you add in all those—military and civilians—who died during World War II. 

And wasn’t it World War I that was called “the war to end all wars”?

But it didn’t, did it?  And neither did World War II.  Or the Korean War.  Or Vietnam.

And now we’re embroiled in a war which we started without provocation, a “pre-emptive war” which it is clear that our leaders lied us into launching.  Over 135,000 people have died, and our country alone has spent roughly $451,345,000,000 on the war—that’s as of 9:00 this morning when I checked a running total on the web.  The money we’ve spent on the war in Iraq could have paid for 59,780,739 kids to attend Head Start, nationwide, for a year.  Or it could have built 114,832 additional units of affordable housing in Massachusetts.  Or it could have hired 7,170 new public school teachers in Barnstable County alone.  So, what is the cost of this war?

Yet even more important than that is the question, “what is the cost of war?”  Any war?  What do we loose—not just how many lives are lost but how much Life is lost—when nations take up arms against each other? 

How is it possible that we haven’t stopped fighting yet?  After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Pearl Harbor, the Congo, Korea, Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Sarajevo, Somalia, Northern Ireland, New York City, Bagdad—how can we still be slaughtering one another?  It’s been over thirty years since Edwin Starr shouted out, “War.  What is it good for?”  and answered himself, “Absolutely nothin’.”  How is it that we haven’t learned?

Maybe it’s because we keep talking about numbers.  Joseph Stalin said that the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. But there are no statistics.  There is no such thing as “collateral damage.”  There are only people—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents, grandchildren, neighbors, friends.  Strangers, even.  Enemies, even.  But no numbers.  Numbers don’t exist; only people do.  Until they don’t anymore.  Until they become shadows in a museum.

Or maybe it’s because we keep thinking that we can fight our way to peace, that the problem is some bad people over there and if we can just beat them into submission peace will prevail.  We believe that it’s in talking tough, acting tough, that we protect the peace.  We’re told—and many believe—that the best defense is a good offense and that while might might not make right, might in the hands of the good guys is there to be used.

Or maybe we’re still warring even with the mushroom cloud in our memories because we haven’t really explored an alternative.  One thing that gives me hope is the legislation currently before the U.S. House of Representatives to create a United States Department of Peace.  This legislation would:

l     Create a cabinet level position—the Secretary of Peace—who would be equal to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and would advise the president on peacebuilding needs, strategies, and tactics for use both domestically and internationally.

l     It would create a Peace Academy, on a par with our military service academies, which will build a world-class faculty of peacebuilding experts who would be able to analyze peacebuilding strategies at the highest level, advise other branches of government, and facilitate the training of peacebuilders for domestic and international service. 

l     This legislation calls for funds to create and expand proven domestic peace building programs in our communities.

In short, the Department of Peace would be dedicated to discovering, developing, and deploying methods to meaningfully prevent conditions of conflict before violence erupts—both abroad and at home.

Now, of course, lots of individuals and groups think that that’s just a nutty idea.  But peace will never be found at the end of the barrel of a gun.  Remember the quotations from the first of our peace services last year:

l     If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
~ Mother Teresa

l     There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.  ~ A.J. Muste

l     Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.  ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

l     Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.  ~ Martin Luther

I think that it was Einstein who, after seeing the devastation of the atomic bomb, said that humankind had progressed so far technologically that we now needed an evolution of consciousness if we hoped to survive.  And Al Gore, in his film An Inconvenient Truth, made the point that when old habits—and he used the example of humanity’s penchant for warfare—are joined to new technology—and here he showed a picture of an atomic mushroom cloud—the results can be devastating and so we have to somehow learn to break our old habits.

This week saw the sixty-second anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  During the service I’ve had this metronome beating out as fast as it can, and if each beat represents one person—one mother, father, husband, wife, sister, brother, daughter, son who died from the immediate effects of the bombing on August 6^th—then when our hour is up . . . at this rate . . .  we will be halfway through remembering them all.

But it’s not about numbers, and it’s not even about what has been done.  It’s about people, and about what we can do.  I’d like to see First Parish take its place as a leader in this work for peace.  We have strongly staked our place as an open, anti-oppression congregation.  I would like to see us take and equally solid stand as a place of peace. 

We are known for stands against the demonization of people because of their race, or their gender expression, or their sexual orientation; I would like us to become known for standing against the demonization of people because of their nationality or their ideology.  We are engaged with the work of ending violence in the home, let’s expand that to our world home.  Let’s build on the work we’re already doing—which so many of us as individuals are already involved in—and make peace one of our priorities.

Protests, vigils, letter writing, hosting community forums, working on legislation, running for office . . . we can do so many things.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes.  Edward Everett Hale.  “I am only one, but still I am one.  I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.  And because I cannot do everything, I must not fail to do the something that I can.”

Closing Words:  Every Day

War is no longer declared,
only continued. The monstrous
has become everyday. The hero
stays away from battle. The weak
have gone to the front.
The uniform of the day is patience,
its medal the pitiful star of hope above the heart.

The medal is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the artillery falls silent,
when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.

It is awarded
for desertion of the flag,
for bravery in the face of friends,
for the betrayal of unworthy secrets
and the disregard
of every command.

by Ingeborg Bachmann, Austiran poet

Human to Human

"Laughing Christ" by Fred Berger

My kids like to watch the online talk show, "Good Mythical Morning."  This morning my older son came downstairs and said that he'd just watched an episode that mentioned a man named Alex Mitchell.  Mitchell had some fame in his native England back in 1975.  While watching an episode of The Goodies, a British comedy troupe, he suddenly died ... apparently from laughing.  (Okay, from a rare heart condition, but it was his laughing that triggered the heart attack.)  It turns out that he wasn't the first.  There's even a Wikipedia entry -- "Death from Laughter" -- that chronicles reports of these deaths (reports of which go back as far as the 5th century BCE!).

On the other hand, it's long been said that "laughter is the best medicine," and in his famous 1985 book, Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins claimed to have "laughed himself to health," setting the stage for the modern "laughter therapy" movement.  The poet (and Unitarian!) E. E. Cummings once wrote, "the most wasted of all days is one without laughter."  As a juggler/magician/clown myself (in a previous life) I would have to concur.  It is good to laugh.  In fact, on an episode of the PBS program Nova titled, "What Makes Us Human?," one of the things lifted up was laughter.

So why does the picture above surprise so many people?  It's a picture of Jesus ... laughing.  That's not the way he is generally depicted, nor is it the way most people think of him.  Serious.  Otherworldly.  Detached yet intense.  Sorrowful.  Judgemental.  Spiritual (whatever that's supposed to look like).  These are all ways we've been taught to imagine Jesus.  But laughing?

Whatever else this Jesus was, he was a man.  Even those who affirm that he was God and man together have to agree that he was a man.  Yeshua ben Miriam.  Jesus, son of Mary.  He ate.  He slept.  (Those are both in the Bible!)  He also went to the bathroom, and bathed, and stubbed his toe, and burped, and got angry, and wept (those last two are in the Bible, too).  And if he was human, he laughed.

That might be part of the problem with thinking about Jesus laughing, that whole thinking-of-him-as-human thing.  The Jesus I was taught about in Sunday School was somehow above all of that mere-human stuff.  His hair was always neatly quaffed, his robe a brilliant white; his teeth sparkled, and despite wearing sandals in the desert his toenails were always clean.  (Maybe that's because he didn't so much walk as glide along the ground.)

Here's the thing, though -- what would such a being have to teach me?  Any lessons he could impart wouldn't be relevant to me because I live fully in this world -- the dust and dirt, blood and sweat of it.  I falter.  I fall.  I fail.  And even with the miracle of modern washing machine technology my clothes get dingy after a time.  So maybe this is one of the reasons so many people have felt the need to leave the Christian traditions -- because they intuit that this all-too-perfect God/man really has nothing to say to them ... nothing that could really apply to their own lived experiences.

And maybe that's one of the reasons he's been depicted like this.  It is likely that in the begining this gandiosity was intended to make him more relevant, more important, more trustworth.  Just as one might believe a king because he is, well, a King, so too this King of Kings should be listened to.  Yet over time this elevated status made it harder and harder to take Jesus seriously and, so, gave Christians an "out."  Perhaps if only unconsciously we were able to say, "these are good teachings, yes, profound, but not really anything I have to pay attention to because they can't be meant for me.  I'm a mere man, and he's a God-man."

Marcus Borg, Stephen Peterson, and so many others have made their careers on trying to re-introduce and reclaim the human Jesus.  (This was the intent of my first book, too -- Teacher, Guide, Companion:  Rediscovering Jesus in a Secular World.)  Because if this Jesus was a human being like me, who understood the kinds of trials I know ... then maybe his message could have meaning in my life.  Should have meaning in my life.

So it's important to me to know that Jesus laughed.  He asked his disciples to let children come to him -- and who can have a bunch of children hanging off them without laughing?  His first miracle was recorded as the turning of water into wine at a wedding.  You think he could do that without a smile on his face?  And if he could laugh, and he could cry, then maybe he could get scared, and feel alone, and worry about what to do next.  Maybe he could understand what it is to be human because he was really human too.  And when a wise human has something to say to me, something drawn directly from his own human experiences, then I don't really  have an "out."  Then it's harder for me not to listen.

One last thing -- if you are still having trouble imagining Jesus with a smile on his face, check out this collection on Pinterest.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

PS -- that bricklayer in England who died while laughing at an episode of The Goodies?  His wife wrote the group a "thank you" card, thanking them for making his last moments so enjoyable.