At the first, before Hallmark and
commercial interests took over, Mother’s Day was not about pretty cards or
candies. Originally Mother’s Day was about world peace. In 1878 Julia Ward
Howe called for the celebration of an annual "Mother’s Peace Day" to
dramatize the cause of world disarmament.
Julia Ward Howe was not a pacifist. She
wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic during the US Civil War. But she
witnessed the tremendous hatred and loss of life and destruction that tore
our country apart during that terrible War Between the States. She wanted to
find an alternative to war.
Howe instinctively knew that women as
women would incline to support disarmament. As a woman - wife, mother, poet,
volunteer, abolitionist and suffragette - Howe appreciated the contributions
of women in giving birth, in nourishing and rearing children. Women have
made far greater contributions to human development and culture than have
men, but our history books for the most part concentrate on the exploits of
men. Early on, men went out to hunt with their bows and spears to kill
animals for food. Sometimes they killed men from other tribes who they
thought had invaded their territory. Men invented blacksmithing and
metallurgy and technology to make more powerful weapons. History is full of
stories of the wars that men make with their weapons.
Meanwhile women progressed from
gathering food—seeds and fruits and roots—to cultivating food.
Women invented agriculture. Women invented spinning and weaving to make
clothes and shelters. Women invented pottery, and other peaceful innovations
to improve the quality of human life. This original work of women is what
makes Rural Life Sunday worth celebrating. In the Bible it says the first
man called his wife Eve, for she was the mother of all living. So it’s
natural and proper and right for women to mobilize for peace, which values
and nourishes life.
A full century before the nuclear arms
race and world terrorism, Julia Ward Howe spoke to audiences all over the
globe about the irony - and the folly - of stockpiling weapons in the name
of peace. In 1878 Julia Ward Howe issued her Mother’s Peace Day
Proclamation. She cried:
"Arise then, women of this day! Arise all
women who have hearts! From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes
up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, disarm!’ Say firmly:
In Jesus’ day and time, the ruler of the
world was Caesar, the Roman Emperor. The first and greatest Roman emperor
was Augustus Caesar. This Augustus Caesar defeated all enemies and ended the
civil wars. This Augustus Caesar guaranteed safe travel everywhere, because
he cleared the pirates from the seas and robbers from the roads. World
economy flourished. Roman armies maintained law and order. After Augustus
died, the Romans changed the calendar to begin the year on Augustus’
birthday, September 23. They proclaimed: "The birthday of our God signaled
the beginning of Good News for the world because of him." [Crossan,
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography p 1]. This Augustus created the Pax
Romana—the Roman Peace—that was a great benefit to Roman citizens. But Roman
Peace was very hard on anybody who would not bow to Roman power.
When Jesus was about fourteen years old,
Augustus died and Tiberius, the adopted son of Augustus, succeeded him. So
Tiberius Caesar was called the son of god also, and he was worshipped as
such. Under Emperor Tiberius, the Roman governor Pilate crucified Jesus,
because Jesus was a threat to the Roman Peace. When he was on trial before
Pilate, Jesus said, "My kingdom is not from this world." That doesn’t mean
that Jesus’ kingdom is somewhere out of this world, up in heaven. It means
that Jesus’ kingdom is not based on domination and the imposition of
overwhelming power. Jesus gives the peace of reconciliation with God.
Reconciliation, the peace of Jesus Christ,
is that inner peace of which the pastor wrote, the peace he had in
spite of the terrible tragedy of his son. But the peace of Christ is not
just for individuals, but for the world. That’s what we pray for in the
Lord’s Prayer: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven." This is a point we should keep in mind, especially on this
Ascension Sunday. In the Bible story, Jesus left his disciples and ascended,
went up, into heaven. But this is only a symbolical way of saying that Jesus
in his human bodily form is no longer with us. Now, we are the body of
Christ. It is through believers in Christ, the people of God, that Jesus
carries out his ministry on earth. And that’s why we have to act with and
for Jesus to oppose armed force and war and to work for reconciliation and
peace on earth.
On this particular point, it is worthwhile
to turn to the Old Testament text we read this morning, 1 Samuel 8.10-20.
God had delivered the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to be God’s people.
God had led them through the wilderness. God had settled them in the
Promised Land. They had no central government and they had no standing army.
And they weren’t satisfied with that. They asked Samuel to appoint a king
for them. They said: "We are determined to have a king over us so that we
also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out
before us and fight our battles." So Samuel gave God’s people this message
from God:
11
He said,
"These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take
your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to
run before his chariots; 12 and he will appoint for himself
commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his
ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the
equipment of his chariots."
These words accurately describe what the
ruler of a nation does: he focuses his energy first of all to establish an
army, so the ruler takes. He takes your sons as soldiers in
the ranks and as commanders of his army. All this is costly, of course,
because armies do not produce usable goods. Armies rather use up material
goods at a great rate. Armies are parasites on civil society—they take
energies and resources away from private hands. Samuel says, "The ruler
takes your sons to plow his ground and to reap his
harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his
chariots. He will take your daughters to staff his royal household; your
goods and lands as royal possessions and to reward the members of his party,
and in the end you shall be his slaves." Militarism eats up
resources and ultimately brings poverty.
This is worth our thinking about, sisters
and brothers. I read the other day that it costs about one million dollars
to recruit and equip one ordinary soldier--one million dollars each. Many of
the people who sign up to join the army or the reserves or the National
Guard are poor young people who can’t find jobs and who want an education.
So they join up with the armed forces, and some of them end up dead or
terribly disabled. How much better it would be if the government spent that
one million dollars to provide better education, better health care, better
opportunities in civilian life for each of these young people. But no. To
support our bloated military budget, the government is cutting funds for
education, cutting funds for Medicaid, cutting funds for housing, cutting
funds for keeping roads and bridges and waterways in good repair. On top of
this greatly unbalanced regular federal budget, our president and congress
are asking us to pay another 82 billion dollars for the war in Iraq in
addition to the billions we have already spent.
We have to borrow that money, because we
already run the greatest deficit in the entire history of our country. We
borrow this money from banks in other countries, most prominently Japan,
China, and India. If our federal debt continues to grow at the present rate,
the banks in other countries will stop lending money and start calling in
their loans. Then we will become a third world nation. Just as Samuel told
the people of Israel, if the people of God want to get organized like the
nations of the world, you need to know what it’s going to cost you. In the
end, you will become impoverished; you will become the slaves of your
rulers.
For the past sixty-five years the single
most expensive item in our federal budget has been making and keeping
nuclear weapons. Sixty years ago this August, one US airplane dropped one
atomic bomb on Hiroshima and totally destroyed it. Three days later another
US airplane dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki and totally destroyed
it. We believed what our government claimed, that the bombs ended the war
and saved millions of lives. Ever since that time, our whole national policy
has been based on the belief that nuclear weapons are a good thing. We
believe that nuclear weapons can protect us from any enemy, and the more
bombs we have the better.
General Lee Butler has recently gone
public to warn his fellow citizens of the US that such beliefs are
dangerously mistaken. General Butler was for some years the chief of the US
Strategic Air Command (SAC), in control of our nuclear weapons capabilities.
He admits that he shared this faith in nuclear weapons, but from first hand
experience he has now come to see how mistaken such beliefs are. Speaking to
the National Press Club, General Butler said:
[These beliefs] gave rise to mammoth
bureaucracies with gargantuan appetites and global agendas. They incited
primal emotions, spurred zealotry and demagoguery, and set in motion
forces of ungovernable scope and power. Most importantly, these enduring
beliefs, and the fears that underlie them, perpetuate cold war policies
and practices that make no strategic sense. They continue to entail
enormous costs and expose all mankind to unconscionable dangers. I find
that intolerable. Thus I cannot stay silent. I know too much of these
matters, the frailties, the flaws, the failures of policy and practice.
General Butler continues:
This abiding faith in nuclear weapons
was inspired and is sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades
by a priesthood who speak with great assurance and authority. I was for
many years among the most avid of these keepers of the faith in nuclear
weapons.
Please notice, dear brothers and sisters:
General Butler uses religious language: He speaks about a priesthood
using a catechism to inspire faith in nuclear weapons. In
biblical terms, sisters and brothers, this is idolatry. Faith
in nuclear weapons is a religion, and it is a direct and arrogant violation
of the first commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
Another expert on military affairs speaks
in similar terms. Andrew Bacevich is a graduate of West Point and a Vietnam
Veteran. He is now the director of the Center for International Relations at
Boston University. Bacevich has written a book The New American
Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. Bacevich calls Marxism and
fascism examples of "Modern man’s effort to replace the one true God in whom
he had lost faith with a god of his own devising." Bacevich credits the US
with having helped to overthrow Marxism and fascism, but he goes on to say
that now various architects of US policy have "nourished their own heady
dreams, hardly less ambitious than those of the Marxist and fascist true
believers whom they resemble in spirit" [p 1]. In Bacevich’s book, US trust
in military power and the almost constant waging of war have made militarism
a new religion.
The seductive religion of militarism has
crept up on us so stealthily and gradually that most Americans, including
Christians, have not been fully aware of it. But these military men now use
religious language to warn us of the dangers, not only to ourselves but also
to the world. General Butler concluded his speech at the National Press Club
with these words: "We cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded
homilies of the nuclear priesthood. It is time to reassert the primacy of
individual conscience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of
humanity."
Friends, I say to you that "the primacy of
individual conscience, the voice of reason, and the rightful interests of
humanity" are the Spirit of God at work in the human heart.
Jesus is Lord
was the earliest Christian confession of faith. Jesus is Lord—not
Caesar with his armed power to impose passive obedience on the rest of the
world and call it "peace"—butJesus is Lord. The peace of
Christ is reconciliation with God, the living God, the God of life. Jesus of
flesh and blood has "ascended." Jesus of flesh and blood has left us, the
Church, God’s people, to be his flesh and blood body now spread over all the
earth. Jesus commissions us as his witnesses and his co-workers to struggle
faithfully and nonviolently to overthrow the nations’ false god of war. Let
us now, today, on this Mother’s Day, dedicate ourselves to heed Julia Ward
Howe’s cry for Mother’s Peace Day. Let us seek the things that make for
peace in the spirit of our foremother Eve, the mother of all living, in the
Spirit of God the Creator and sustainer of all things, and in the Spirit of
Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.
Arch B. Taylor, Jr.
