Independence Day 2018

Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 379

But if you would offer me burnt offerings,

then let justice surge like water,

and goodness like an unfailing stream.

The Hebrew prophets, like many Americans, never hesitated to point out the hypocrisy of ritual worship. They watched their fellow citizens go through the motions of religion and rebuked the lot of them. Your solemnities, cereal offerings, stall-fed peace offerings and noisy songs, they said, meant nothing to the Lord.

American critics who complain about idle gestures are no less eager to rebuke hypocrisy than their Hebrew ancestors. They frequently lambaste anyone who attends a church or offers a prayer. 

However, they say little about the insincerity of secular holidays. Citizens use these occasions to play with fire, relax with family, crowd the highways and trash the parks; and pay not even lip service to those rituals that might enhance our sense of civic responsibility. On this Fourth of July, not many citizens will march in patriotic parades; fewer will heed patriotic speeches. If the entertainment media notice the festive occasions it's only to broadcast televised sports or to announce "holiday sales" in supermarkets and furniture stores.

The hypocrisy of these national holidays is palpable but protests are rare. The worse hypocrisy, however, lies well below the surface and is far more sinister. That is the unwillingness of citizens to take full responsibility for our endless wars.

I met a Veteran who told me he would not attend the country church where he grew up because, "They're all hypocrites." In a flash of insight, I knew what he meant. He could not enter that once-familiar church of friends, classmates, neighbors and family because they -- his countrymen -- had sent him to Vietnam. This Veteran learned to calculate every step, listen to every sound, watch every motion, and expect a threat from any direction. He killed "gooks," burned villages and saw trusted friends die. But he could not talk about it. He was not the boy they'd sent to war. They did not know him when he returned -- and did not want to know.

Like many Veterans of more recent conflicts in Cambodia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq, he had been charged with silence for the rest of his life. The Veterans don't explain to this chaplain what laws they might break if they talk. They don't describe the consequences that might ensue. They are sworn to silence. They cope with overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame; they dare not speak of them even in the sanctuary of Roman Catholic confession. They must take these stories to the grave.

But we sent them there. We are responsible for what they did. We were aroused by newspaper stories television images, hysterical reporters and demagogic politicians. We believed war was the only answer. "They asked for it!" we said of our "enemies." "Violence is the only message they understand!" We sent our sons and daughters into foreign lands knowing nothing of their culture, language, religion or history to teach them a lesson. We trained our young adults to use a jackhammer where a tack hammer would do; and they did it well.

And now they must not tell us what happened. We don't want to know.

The military has its own reasons for their silence. National Security, they call it; but they know civilians have no stomach for war. We like our myths of virtuous soldiers defending our homeland against remorseless terrorists. If we knew what war actually costs our young people in terms of traumatic fears, endless shame, and inconsolable regret we might hesitate to enter another war. The military-industrial complex might lose a percentage of its revenue. I call this hypocrisy.

When we choose war we should understand we send our young people to do what soldiers have done for many thousands of years. It will not be pretty, romantic or glorious. Nor even satisfactory. If any good comes of it, it will be born of horror; more by the grace of God than the efforts of man. There will be no clear victory because the purposes of a military presence and actions shift and change continually. No one can predict the outcome; few will remember why we engaged in the first place.  

Are we prepared as churches, family, neighbors and friends to share the guilt and shame of returning combatants? To say, "You didn't do this; we did it! We sent you; we're proud of you; we're grateful to you. And whatever you did, right or wrong, in reckless violence or with careful deliberation, we did it." 

This has not been the way we conduct wars. 

War needs no justification. We do it quite readily without reason or excuse. But we might own our responsibility for the mayhem and not require Warriors and Veterans to hide its reality from us.