Are We Worth Dying For?

"Again the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, speak to the children of thy people, and say unto them, When I bring the sword upon a land . . . if our transgressions and our sins be upon us, how should we then live?" -Ezekiel 33: 1, 2, 10 "We are asking them to die for others. Surely our right to speak must be based on the fact that we have lived for others!" -John Haynes Holmes

John Haynes Holmes was one of the greatest Unitarian ministers of the 20th century. He was among other things the founder of the Community Church of New York City in 1929, which was not only interracial at a time when that was practically unheard of, but also open to all classes, faiths, and creeds. The affirmation of faith of Community Church, in use since its beginnings, was written by Keshab Chandra Sen: It reads as follows:

Unto the Church Universal
Which is the depository of all ancient wisdom,
And the school of all modern thought;
Which recognizes in all prophets a harmony,
In all scriptures a unity,
And through all dispensations a continuity;
Which abjures all that separates and divides
And always magnifies humanity and peace;
Which seeks truth in freedom, justice in love,
And individual discipline in social duty;
And which shall make of all persons, sects, classes,
        nations, and races,
One Beloved Community;
Unto this church and unto all its members,
Known and unknown throughout the world,
We pledge allegiance of our hands and hearts.

When I say "God," it is poetry, not theology. Nothing that any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that the poets have written about flowers, and birds, and skies, and seas, and the saviors of the race, and God--whoever that may be--has at one time or another reached my soul! The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library, but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted with my tears.

Holmes wrote, "We are asking them to die for others. Surely our right to speak must be based upon the fact that we have lived for others!"

In fact, Holmes said, he and his contemporaries had done just the opposite. They had lived mostly for themselves:

We have done a little, but not enough. We have given something to others, but kept more to ourselves. We are sinners in the sight of God at least. Therefore should we ask these men [and women] to die, only on the condition that by penitence we begin the task of making ourselves worthy of their sacrifice!

After this act of penitence must come a second--the act of consecration. Henceforth, in the name of those who have died at our command and for our sake, we must live as consecrated [people]. After all the blood and horror of this war, its willing sacrifice and noble heroism, no deed of selfishness on our part will ever be tolerable again.

. . .We have only to search the secret places of our hearts, to learn how largely we have lived only for ourselves. We have known generosity--but has it attained to the standard of Jewish law, which exacted a tithe of all that a man had for the service of Jehovah? We have not been without a sense of justice--but has it been quick to resent and repair, at any cost to ourselves, the injuries done to "even the least of these, our brethren"? We have shown love, but has it ever attained unto the measure of that love than which no man hath greater, "that he lay down his life for his friend"? We have been kindly, generous, self-forgetting, as such things go in this world--but have we ever done anything supremely great?

Indeed, if I thought that the result of this vast struggle between Germany and the allies, with its millions of dead and wounded, its incalculable destruction of property and treasure, its indescribable misery of unoffending peoples, was to be nothing better than the restoration of civilization as it existed before the war, I would be tempted to question if the cause was worth the life of a single soldier in the ranks.

In many ways, [it] was the most marvelous the world has ever known. But the masses of the people were still wretchedly poor; starvation, disease, and prostitution were still unconquered; the slavery of toil still broke the bodies and blighted the souls of men [and women]. The old evils, in a word, were at best only tempered, not abolished; and to these were added new and yet more dreadful evils. . . .

By now, of course, you get the drift of my thoughts. Another war rages (will it ever end?) and again the question must be posed: are we worth dying for? Is the society in which we live in this first decade of the twenty-first century worth dying for? When you consider that we are a nation with only 5% of the world’s population, but that we suck up 25% of the world’s energy and spew out 25% of the global warming gases; when you consider that we consume more oil than the European Union and as much as China, Japan, Germany, Russia, and India combined? When we still are unable to adequately clothe, feed, and provide health care for millions of our people? When we here in Massachusetts are seriously considering gambling as the panacea to solve our economic problems? Given our unprecedented collective wealth, how can this be?

And then, of course, there are our personal shortcomings: our inability to become the people we truly ought to be, given all our incredible advantages. Are we morally and spiritually worth the sacrifices that are being made in our names?

And what have we been asked to sacrifice, from our vast riches, except we be the parents, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or children of those who are fighting in our name? A letter-writer to the editor in the Boston Globe has written,

It is paradoxical that Americans seem unconcerned with the cost of the Iraq war and occupation, with daily reports of lives lost, dollars spent, and loss of national respect. There have been few demonstrations to end our involvement in the war, and few demands that the [present] administration change its policy or even state it more clearly.

The paradox persists because the administration does not demand any sacrifice, and Americans choose to go along with it. For example, there has been no appeal to cut gasoline consumption. There has been no request for new taxes to support the war. The administration has actually cut taxes and created a huge deficit. There is no plan to deviate from an all-volunteer army. There will be no draft. . . .

It is to the administration’s advantage that we not sacrifice, and it is in our own self-interest not to sacrifice. Along with sacrifice will come demands that the administration justify its handling of the war.

This moral shortcoming, the failure to experience meaningfully the effects of a war we are waging, prolongs the war, increases the number of dead and wounded, increases the deficit, and exacerbates our loss of respect among the family of nations.

James Carroll, the Boston Globe columnist who has been most vocally opposed to this war from its very inception, has recently written ["Forever the Victims," September 10, 2007] about America’s abiding sense of being innocent victims on the world’s stage as perhaps our greatest danger and definitely as the greatest danger we pose to the rest of the world. It is an analysis that, particularly since September 11, 2001, seems accurate to me. "Why do they hate us," Carroll mimics. Poor us. But the victim role for Americans is not logical, and the syllogism "We have been wronged, therefore we can do not wrong," does not follow. But some will say this one is only a small and insignificant war, nothing like the Great War of the early 20th century. I trust we are intelligent enough not to be fooled by numbers. Though deaths of our soldiers have been minimal compared to previous wars (though how minimal is the death of only one person’s son or daughter to that child’s parent?), the total number of casualties is approaching 30,000, not including the inevitable post-war trauma sufferers and those who will die later from causes as yet un-discerned. And then there are the large numbers of those wounded in this war who but for our spectacular medical technology would surely have died in previous conflicts. One wonders about the long term quality of life for them and their families and the prognosis for their devastating and life altering injuries.

Not to mention the untold number of Iraqi dead, most of them innocent victims of a war we are responsible for unleashing.

It seems to me that Holmes’s question looms as large today as ever it has before: are we really worth dying for? Though it may sound harsh, personally, I don’t think so. I don’t think that I have done anything particularly worthy of such sacrifice, and I’m not sure our country has collectively done anything of late to make it worthy of so great a sacrifice. As John Haynes Holmes concluded in his sermon of nearly a century ago, "We are not worth dying for, as we stand today--either ourselves, or the world we have made. Had we been worth dying for, there were no need to die!"

Our goal as religious people is to become worthy. We must not let past or present failure distract us from our sacred duty to become the better people we long to be or to build the better world of our dreams. We can and we must do more to make the world more fair, more just, more merciful, and more loving. As Holmes put it so poignantly, ". . .If on the ruins of the old world, gone forever, a new world shall be built, then, indeed, may we declare that these unnumbered dead ‘shall not have died in vain.’" It is a hope still awaiting our fulfillment. It is still our task to see it done.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading: Luke 6: 27-38