What Did We Learn?

If you are of my generation, then 1) you remember “The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam” and 2) you knew who Robert McNamara was.

The Moratorium was held on October 15, 1969 and by some accounts was the largest nationwide anti-war demonstration in the country. Whether or not it had any affect on the outcome of the war is anyone’s guess. Richard Nixon indicated that it would not have any effect on his policies.

That particular time period is somewhat of a blur for me as I struggled with college and my own expectations (some of which are documented in “Our Father’s House”). I should feel lucky because I am certain that others struggled and lost their struggles. I was not doing well in college and the draft seemed a certainty in a life full of uncertainties.

The one thing that I did not like then (and which I am opposed to today) was the draft. I would have almost certainly joined the Air Force and followed in the footsteps of my father and grandfather but the specter of a process that took away my choice to do just that never set right with me. My participation in the Moratorium was as much my own statement about the inequities of the draft as it was against the war.

It was about protesting a system that sent too many young men off to war who, because of their economic status, could not escape the draft by enrolling in college or use their “daddy’s” influence to get an appointment into the National Guard. (One of my roommates that year, on the verge of flunking out of school, was able to obtain a slot in his hometown’s local Guard unit, with the help of his family, and spent his military career safely ensconced at an Army base in Germany.)

It was protesting a system that continued to send young men off to war and saying that we were winning the war. But we kept sending more troops overseas and it looked like some sort of Kafkaesque bottomless pit. And it did not help, when Richard Nixon, a master of the system if there ever was one, said that our protests did not matter.

I was saddened to hear of Secretary McNamara’s death. For many, the Viet Nam War was “his” war; I saw it more as Lyndon Johnson’s war. I just wish that his protests and thoughts about the war had come a little sooner and a little more loudly. Perhaps, it would have changed the course of the war.

But in the course of what he has said and written since then, in the course of what he said in the private councils of war, maybe we will learn something about war and its futility.

Mr. McNamara noted that Curtis LeMay, commander of the XXI Bomber Command, once said, in reference to the firebombing of Tokyo, that “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” McNamara said “And I think he’s right. He – and I’d say I – were behaving as war criminals.” McNamara also asked “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” He could not answer that question, a question that the leaders of all countries should consider. It is a question that we all must consider as well.

There are two other insights from Robert McNamara’s life that we need to learn. He pointed out that the greatest lesson that we can learn from war and about war is the need to know who the enemy is. We must put ourselves in our enemies’ place and empathize with them. The failure in Viet Nam can be seen in our failure to understand the enemy we were fighting, the failure to see the limits of high-tech weaponry, a failure to tell the truth to the American people and a failure to grasp the nature of the threat to which we were responding. While for Mr. McNamara, that threat was communism, the points still bear true today.

If we do not understand who we are fighting, if we feel that our technology can do things that it really can’t, if we do not understand the threat, and if we do not tell the American people the truth, then we will not win any war in which we engage our military today.

I conclude with the closing paragraphs of the New York Times obituary:

“What makes us omniscient?” he asked in “The Fog of War,” released at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“We are the strongest nation in the world today,” he said. “I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning.”

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” Mr. McNamara concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.

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Cross-posted to RedBlueChristian

Build It and They Will Come

This is the message that I gave on the 6^th Sunday after Pentecost, 20 July 2003, at Tompkins Corners United Methodist Church, Putnam Valley, NY.  The Scriptures for that Sunday were 2 Samuel 7: 1 – 14, Ephesians 2: 11 – 22, and Mark 6: 30-34, 53 – 56.

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It is one of those little bits of trivia that even though I claim Memphis, Tennessee as my home, I have only been to Graceland when forced to go or by accident. If you were to ask me how to get there, I honestly could not tell you. Similarly, even though I have ties to Iowa, I have no idea where the “Field of Dreams” is located. It does exist and it is in Iowa but that is all I know.

The problem with certain locations or certain phrases is that they become a part of our lives whether we want them to or without any encouragement on our part. The phrase “build it and they will come” was the cornerstone of the movie to build a ball field in the cornfields of Iowa so ball players of the past could come back to life and play baseball. It is now a phrase that is used to justify almost any project in which we want people to come.

David wanted to build a temple for God, a place to house the Ark of the Covenant. There is, to some extent, some logic to David’s thoughts and desires. After all, he was living in a fine palace while the Ark was still housed in a tent. And if you are a leader whose position is ordained by God, shouldn’t God’s house be a better place to live than the one you live in?

But God, through Nathan, indicated that He was quite satisfied with the arrangements. After all, over the past years, the Ark had been housed in a tent among the people and nothing had been said then. So why worry about it now? God, again through Nathan, points out that the only house that really matters is the house of David and God promised to insure that house would live for a long time.

God wasn’t so much interested in the physical building as much as He was in those who live there. And I think that is a most important idea. It is not where the message of the Gospel is heard but if the message is heard. We need to know that when the Methodist revival was in its infancy, the Anglican Church barred its leaders, including Wesley, from preaching in the Anglican churches of the time. So they moved to the fields and preached to the people there. And because the laws barred them from meeting in churches, they created meeting houses and had class meetings rather than worship services to get around the law. There is a need to send the presence of God during worship and that comes from within the people, not from within the building.

There is no doubt that we need to have some place to worship. As soon as stable congregations formed, Methodists built houses of worship. These early meeting houses were simple structures, without ornamentation and designed to accommodate as many people as possible. The Book of Discipline from the first conference of 1784 stated, “Let all our chapels be built plain and decent; but not more expensive than is absolutely unavoidable: otherwise the necessity of raising money will make rich men necessary to us. But if so, we must be dependent upon them, yea; and governed by them. And then farewell to the Methodist discipline, if not doctrine too.”

The rationale for this approach was that expensive churches required money that could be used for better purposes. And early Methodists also feared that extravagantly constructed churches would lead to pride and vanity and lower the spiritual tone of the church. In addition, many of the early Methodists were poor and could not afford nor would they feel at home in elaborate buildings.

From my own experience, I know that when a church is more concerned with its appearance and its physical plant, its concern for the people comes second. Now, there is no doubt that we need to have a good building to hold our services in but we need to focus on what transpires in the meeting, not where the meeting is held. I have preached at the Stone Church over in Cragsmoor, near Ellenville, and it is a lovely old stone church built in the late 1800’s. It had fallen on hard times and had begun to fall apart. Even the Episcopal Church had written it off, saying it was not worth the time and effort to assign a pastor to that area. But a number of people felt that its heritage and beauty were too great to let go and have worked diligently over the years to bring it back. And they have succeeded.

Regular services are held with pastors of the local churches providing the worship leadership. And they have opened the church to couples seeking a spot for a wedding. The couples must do everything including providing for the preacher to hold the service. A reasonable fee is charged to hold the service on the grounds of the church. But having the wedding in the Stone Church is no guarantee that the marriage will be successful. The success of a marriage is found not in where the marriage is held but what is in the marriage. Just because a marriage ceremony was performed in a beautiful old church or the expanse of a broad field in a park will not make the marriage work; it will be the desires of those in the marriage who make it work. The setting will make it that much better.

It is not the building that makes a church successful; it is the people inside the church. Paul’s words to the church at Ephesus are meant as a reminder that there was a time when members of the church would not have been welcome in the tabernacle. He wanted people to remember that there was a time of exclusion and discrimination in the church. There was a time when those called the “uncircumcised” were derided and ridiculed.

This was in part because there was a membership requirement to enter the temple or the tabernacle. And that membership requirement separated you from God. But through Jesus, that membership requirement was removed and there was no separation between individuals, no barrier preventing you from coming to Christ.

Unfortunately, despite this message of inclusion, there are many churches in this country today who forget that all who believe in Christ have equal access to Christ and that there is no membership requirement. I have seen too many churches that are more of a country club than a church. Membership is dictated by what you have, not who you are. And the members are quick to remind you, perhaps in unstated ways, that you are not welcome.

People come to a church because they are searching, searching for that something that will bring peace to their lives. They will not come to places were they are not welcome or where barriers are placed in their way.

The people came to Jesus no matter where he was. As it stated in Mark, wherever Jesus went, the people brought their sick friends so that they could be healed. Jesus did not establish barriers; He broke them down. He extended God’s mercy to all the people, not just a select few.

The saying goes that if we build it they will come and that is certainly true. But if the people are not made to feel wanted, they will not come a second time. I think that one of the reasons that many of the main-line denominations have shown a loss in membership over the past years is that they no longer make people welcome. They no longer remember the days when they were the ones on the outside looking in. It is not what we did that brought us to Christ but rather what God did for us.

If in building our church, we put up barriers we will most certainly keep people out. And that is not what the church, whether a fancy building or simple shack, is about. It is about bringing the people in, of being able to give the Gospel message to all whom would here it. The barriers may not be that visible; they may be in the way we greet someone or talk with someone. It may be in how we react to what someone says to us.

The people will come but will they stay? The people came to hear Jesus, to be in his presence no matter where He was that day. And God is quite content to be among the people, no matter where that might be. But we should remember what Paul wrote, that once we were the ones on the outside and barred from ever coming in. Shall we put up barriers that keep people away or shall we extend the spirit of Christ, just as it once was extended to us?