Scripture Lesson: Micah 4:1-3

Sermon Transcript for June 30, 2008

By Reverend Jim Ray

I appreciate the opportunity to preach here. I sit with you out there every Sunday and I’d forgotten what a challenge it is to write a sermon and get ready and preach it three times! My sympathies to Pastor Bob! He is more than deserved the vacation that he’s gotten and everything he gets reiteration for services here. And I admire him a great deal.

I’m going to preach today from a passage from the Old Testament Book of Micah in Chapter 4. “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temples will be established as chief among the mountains. It will be raised above all the hills and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, ‘Come let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of God of Jacob and he will teach us his ways so that we may walk in his paths.’ The law will go forth from Zion; the word from the Lord will go from Jerusalem. He will judge between many peoples and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plow shares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation. No one will be trained for war any more.”

What a great scripture! I think that the world has progressed to the point that we are about in the position to take that seriously and to prevent war. It will rid humankind of the worst scourge that we have, that we inflict on ourselves. We’ve heard this passage of scripture many times. There is a beauty and a stately ring to it and it arrests our attention, it captures our imagination. The words ring in our ears like a voice from heaven. Not just to those of us gathered here but to millions of people over the 2,000 years of the Christian era it sounds right, it sounds inspiring.

And then we get involved in the old ways and found ourselves trapped into the molds of war and strife anyway. We live in the real world where wars do occur and we do not know how to stop them or how to sidestep them. Now we need to realize that the United Methodist Church is ahead of us in this and in the Book of Worship, the Book of Discipline, the social principles, the United Methodist Church has laid out our beliefs about this. “We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. We therefore reject war as a usual instrument of national sovereign policy and insist that the first moral duty of all nations is to resolve by peaceful means every dispute that arises among them.”

So here we are at Grace United Methodist Church this 29th day of June, 2008. And I would like to invite you to think about getting serious about this passage of scripture that we have heard so many times. Let’s get ready to do what we can to put an end to war. Can’t be done in our lifetime—it takes a long time. It won’t be done in this century. But God will bring the peace if we will lend ourselves to His cause and follow Him in bringing together all of His human family.

War cost an awful lot; it’s terribly expensive. Stop and think about it—all the various cost that go into it. You can’t tab it all up. How we have enough to live on after spending so much on our wars is amazing. The neighborhood where I grew up I had two boys my age that I could play with. There was Sidney Wilson on my side of the railroad tracks and Mathew Wakefield on the other side of the railroad tracks. Now there wasn’t a distinction about that; both sides of the track were the same. We weren’t the down side or the up side but that’s where he lived. Mathew’s father was a horse trader. Really, he bought and sold horses. He had a big barn and a long set of stables in his yard and lot. And then there was the pasture behind there where the cows were raised. And it was interesting thing to experiment in the barn and to wander about that pasture. Back in the back of the pasture there was a creek called a famous name, “Peach Tree Creek”. It was little there but when it went 25 miles to Atlanta it got pretty big. And my Grandma, who lived on the north side of town, I’d see Peach Tree Creek when I’d get off the street car when I was old enough to let me do that, go see my Grandma. And it was quite a little river there.

Now when Mathew and I went back to Peach Tree Creek we took off our shoes and socks. We waded in early March. And the reason I remember this so well is when I got home I got a scolding for getting in the creek in the water in early March even in Georgia. It’s a significant name to us this morning talking about war because in the campaign to Atlanta there was a big battle called the Battle of Peach Tree Creek. Five thousand young men lost their lives in one day killing each other—all Americans! We don’t need to do that to ourselves. We need to learn how to work together and to eliminate war. By the grace of God it can be done!

Now while 5,000 men died in the Battle of Peach Tree Creek, it’s the campaign for Atlanta, 640,000 soldiers died in the Civil War. A huge amount! WWI claimed 9,180,293 soldiers. I don’t know who counted them that well but that’s the number I got off the Internet. WWII claimed 17,500,000 soldiers, sailors, marines. Civilian losses in Russia in the Second World War were 2,500,000 people. Now I’ve heard it recited more than once that Russia lost 20,000,000 people in WWII. That’s expensive! When the war was over, young women in the state of Mississippi who had been waiting for the young men to come back were disappointed because not many of them came back. Many of the young women in Mississippi never had husbands because they were dead. That’s the scourge of war.

Turning to dollars, depending on statistics from the Internet, WWII cost 3.2 trillion dollars. Now many of you were there with me. You remember living through those days and how we sacrificed. I had a permanent deferment as a ministerial student—a 4D, not a 4F that was for physical reasons, a 4D. I was a ministerial student; I didn’t have to go. I volunteered for the navy because all my friends were gone. It seemed to be the right thing for me to do. I joined the Navy and was in the Navy 2 ½ years.

War is so destructive. You’ve probably all seen pictures of Berlin after the Allies finished bombing it. Such buildings as they were were gaunt skeletons and no more. Everything else was ruble on the street. The destruction of property is unexplainable. How many schools could we build and pay for, how many hospitals could we build and pay for, how many highways could we build and pay for, how many student scholarships could we fund with the money that gets chewed up in war?

Now we come to a puzzling twist in this process of thinking about war. That is that we human beings are double minded about it. Yeah, we’d like to save all of that money, we’d like to save all of those lives, but on the other hand we kind of like war, find it hard to give up. Theodore Roosevelt, you’ve probably heard of this, in the Spanish-American War riding up San Juan Hill was quoted as saying, “Isn’t this glorious!” He thought it was. We have glorified war. War memorials, war memory’s influenced the statues and ornaments on our courthouse lawn. Lynn and I lived in Greencastle, not too far away, for seven years. There is a monument on the courthouse square and unless you know, you’d have a hard time guessing what it was. It was a German U-2 rocket. We somehow have an affection for war, even the weapons of our enemies. I remember seeing a rusty army tank on somebody’s courthouse square. And I take my grandchildren to a Museum of Human Conflict in Louisville. Very interesting place! We wanted to go back; it depicts all kinds of conflicts human beings have had for these thousands of years.

We have an attachment for war that we’ve got to deal with. Try to shut down a military base and you’ve got a lot of objection. Most people work there, that’s the biggest reason, that’s a good reason. But they can work elsewhere. But there was a small air force base after one of the hurricanes that hit Florida near Miami. I can’t remember the name of it, you might. But the Department of Defense thought, well, it’s been hit so hard by the hurricane, let’s just close it and do away with it. Huh uh, don’t you even try. Don’t take our base! And it is still there today. We have an attachment to war that we may not want to admit.

There is reluctance to give up war, but if we will and can overcome our reluctance we are going to have to understand that things will have to change. Give up some of the things that we like, and love, and are accustomed to. My daughter and son-in-law from Washington, D.C. are here. They will be at the next service. They are members of the Baha’i faith. Rachel knew I was going to preach this sermon on war and ending war. She sent me a bunch of books from the Baha’is because, listen, let’s be honest, they are ahead of us in thinking about how to get rid of war. I borrowed from them liberally today in what I am saying.

To have universal peace we have to move in the direction of less emphasis on national sovereignty and more emphasis on thinking globally, thinking about each other. In time an enhanced and wizened United Nations can arise and will arise. The Baha’is call it world government. That means that the United States won’t have the stature that we have now. We are not going to have that stature forever; no empire has lasted forever. But we would be more secure than we are now. As will all of the other people of the world who come together to work together. We need to see that permanent peace will not come until all of the people’s of the earth respect all of the other peoples of the earth. And it is our American manifest destiny; I want to retool that word that first came out. It was our manifest destiny to take and to defeat and to grab the continental United States or at least what’s the United States now. It is American’s manifest destiny to lead the movement toward people respecting each other and working together in mutual harmonies. International democracy, global democracy—that may sound threatening; we won’t have as much power as we have now, but we won’t need it!

Now we are getting down to the nitty-gritty about how to fulfill the passage of scripture about having war no more. We already are moving in the direction of having cooperation between the nations. When the 13 colonies banded together to oppose the oppression of King George in England, they had no dream of the American nation as we have it now. They were 13 colonies and they expected to be 13 colonies each with their own little territory and its own pride. But by the grace of God as they worked together that changed, we have the American nation. Illinois doesn’t make war against Indiana; and Missouri doesn’t make war against Tennessee. Now think of that! When we have a higher union, we are moving in that direction. You see, we’ve already accomplished some of that of which we are very proud.

Same thing is taking place in Europe--the Euro union. Now they are not going to be the United States of Euro; they are not going to copy us because they are different people and a different place and they are doing it in a different way. They are doing it in their way but they are moving toward a union in which they cooperate together and study war no more.

You may have read some articles about the post-American era of history and it appears more frequently in editorials and thoughtful articles. And I would simply comment on that, the times they are a changing. You can’t look to the past to fill in the blanks for the future. But under the fatherhood of God, the father of all people, and with the idea of democracy lifted to a global scale, we can wipe out war.

Verse 2, Micah says, “Let us go to the mountain of the Lord to the house of Jacob that he will teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” He will teach us his ways; we walk in his paths. God’s wisdom wells up in the hearts of people. We can count on people wising up. The prophet Jeremiah said, “At this time I will put my law in their minds and write it in their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother say ‘Know the Lord’, because they will know me from the least of then to the greatest.”

To paraphrase the Prophet Jeremiah and the Prophet Micah, it will be the decision of all people to come to Zion, that’s an Old Testament term, for the community of nations where we will put our heads together in democracy for the glow. Nobody will have the power to make war and we won’t have war. As people on planet earth see and appreciate their interdependence as it develops before our eyes in the 20th Century and 21st Century, and we know that my welfare is dependent upon the goodwill and the good judgment of all the other people who share this home in space, they will give up their right to make war on each other as they share the benefits and cooperation of goodwill. Then we will reroute our resources to build up the earth and helpful institutions of health and healing and learning and give up the rivalry that leads to destruction.

This is a great tradeoff. We will give up our insularity and our local pride and vanity and replace it with respect and caring. And we will be in a position to practice the Biblical directive to be swords and plowshares and spears in to pruning hooks. We will think of war no more. There is a word for this; the word is “progress”.

E-mail Comments to: Pastor Bob Coleman