This from our service at 10.30 in the parish church at Abington...
READINGS/ Matt 5:43-48 and Eph 6:10-18
Let’s pray: may the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen
We’ve all heard the old saying:
‘Sticks and stones will break my bones,
but names will never hurt me.’
And you know, over the years,
I’ve come to look upon that particular saying with a healthy dose of scepticism.
While that may be the case that name-calling
won’t necessarily bruise your body or break a bone, that’s not the whole picture:
repeated, ongoing name-calling
can bruise the soul – can be soul-destroying;
it can break your sense of self down, bit by bit causing emotional and psychological harm.
It can be a powerful tool to dehumanise a person,
to effectively cause someone to become no one,
something other...
something other than human.
And when you’ve done that, you can justify any amount of bad behaviour...
Which is why name-calling is such a powerful weapon for those fighting wars:
it turns people into things –
faceless enemies that need to be destroyed at all costs.
And so, with the onset of the First World War, the propagandists got to work.
They produced countless recruitment posters
appealing to those who craved release from the humdrum of everyday life,
or to those who had been raised on heroic tales and wanted to be
noble and heroic themselves – fighters in a just and noble cause.
And in the midst of these, there were posters referring to those on the other side of the conflict as:
‘Murderers’
‘Barbarians’
‘Savages’
Posters designed to produce outrage,
urging their readers to avenge the dire doings of such
‘monsters’ –
posters trumpeting:
‘The Hun is at the gate!’
and
‘Destroy the mad brutes’
with depictions of the enemy as foul, slavering monsters devouring the innocent.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the battle lines,
the same thing was going on the other way around.
All sides in the conflict were at the same game:
doing their best to show the very worst in the other...
doing their best to demonstrate that they were not fighting normal, everyday human beings,
but terrifying beasts that needed to be destroyed -
dehumanising and othering the enemy.
In the end,
‘Sticks and stones will break my bones,
but names will never hurt me,’
is utter tosh:
as the propagandists knew and still know, name-calling can, ultimately, pave the way to killing.
Words matter –
words are powerful and need to be handled with care.
While meaning something else entirely, that old war saying
‘careless talk costs lives’
could be very readily re-purposed in this case.
In that great classic,
‘All Quiet on the Western Front’,
we see that tension between viewing the one
being fought as something other than human,
and realising, in the end, just how human they are...
During a raid across ‘no man’s land’, the main character in the novel, Paul,
dives for safety in a bomb crater to wait out a raid by the enemy.
At some point, someone falls into the crater with him.
Instinct takes over, and Paul immediately stabs the man.
He is now in the crater, for hours,
in the darkness,
in the mud,
with the man who takes a long time to die.
It is his first kill
and, it is ...traumatic.
Gradually, his own humanity asserts itself –
he helps his enemy,
makes him a little more comfortable, gives him water.
The wound, though, is mortal.
Eventually, the man dies.
As young Paul looks at his enemy up close,
the faceless enemy becomes human, just as he is.
Paul wonders about this man, his life, his loves.
‘I close his eyes.
They are brown, his hair is black and a bit curly at the sides.
The mouth is full and soft beneath his moustache; the nose is slightly arched,
the skin brownish; it is now not so pale as it was before, when he was still alive....
No doubt his wife still thinks of him; she does not know what has happened.
He looks as if he would have often have written to her;
she will still be getting mail from him.
To-morrow, in a week's time - perhaps even a stray letter a month hence.
She will read it, and in it he will be speaking to her.’
As Paul effectively ‘re-humanises’ his enemy, he is filled with remorse
and a desire to apologise, make amends:
'I speak to him and say to him:
"Comrade, I did not want to kill you.
If you jumped in here again, I would not do it,
if you would be sensible too.
But you were only an idea to me before,
an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response.
It was that abstraction I stabbed.
But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.
I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle;
now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship.
Forgive me, comrade.
We always see it too late.
Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us,
that your mothers are just as anxious as ours,
and that we have the same fear of death,
and the same dying and the same agony.
Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother...’
Paul will later find the soldier’s pocket-book,
and learn more about this man through the letters and photographs
that fall from its open pages.
Paul learns his name – Gerard Duval;
learns his trade – printer;
learns that he does indeed have a wife, and a daughter
as he looks upon them standing by an ivy clad wall.
His enemy is not a beast, rather, he is a fragile human being:
so very human, so very normal.
Sticks and stones...
and names that can do terrible, terrible damage.
We know now, what those who entered into the First World War did not:
that it wasn’t to be the
‘war to end all wars.’
We know that other wars have followed,
we know other names that have been used within the machinery of war.
Yesterday marked the 81st anniversary of the
Kristallnacht pogrom
against Jewish people in Germany and Austria.
90 Jews were murdered.
Hundreds of synagogues were burnt.
In the years preceding, and, in the war that would begin the following year,
a long campaign using words had been waged against those who were Jewish...
dehumanising words,
words describing Jewish people as:
‘sub-human’
‘parasites’
‘vermin’...
Words that lulled people into an acceptance of genocide.
Words have continued to be employed down the decades since,
in order to wear the cogs of conscience down to allow for horrors to continue.
And friends, as an aside, I am very concerned about the way words
are currently being used within political debates and in the reporting of them by the media:
politicians and journalists are playing a deadly game when using words such as:
‘surrenderers’
‘traitors’
‘mutineers’
‘enemies of the people’
‘fascists’...
these from all sides of the political fence.
It’s language that’s seen the rise in death threats to different politicians,
and, in the case of Jo Cox, her death.
It does feel like democracy is broken when we can’t
debate differences of opinion without ‘othering’ and name-calling.
Let’s get away from that:
it is entirely possible to hold different viewpoints and have a civilised discussion,
and even learn from each other.
There can be courtesy, listening, respect, even if you still strongly disagree at the end.
‘Help me understand why you think this...
talk me through it so I can see where you’re coming from,’ is always a good approach.
Wherever we may find ourselves –
in life,
on the political spectrum,
when faced with those who for whatever reason wish us harm –
what is our response to conflict of all kinds as followers of Jesus?
First, we look to scripture, and what we see in our reading from Matthew
is Jesus, the Word of life,
using words of love.
Words that rehumanise.
He calls upon us to not only love our neighbour,
but to
‘love our enemies’.
He calls upon us to pray for those who persecute us.
To actively attempt to love our enemies,
to do the work of praying for them...
involves imagination:
it is the work of seeing the person.
Trying to move past the fear,
to move past the hatred,
to move beyond bitterness,
and begin to imagine who they are,
what their motivations are,
their background, their families.
To see beyond the label,
even if what someone has done is horrific, is ‘beastly’ even, to see that they are human.
Sometimes, that’s a harder thing to work through than making monsters of them.
If this is indeed a human being, what was it that caused them to do
whatever it is they may have done?
‘Othering’ is almost too easy:
accepting that someone is human and has done awful things is hard and sobering work.
It makes us ask hard questions of ourselves:
if the same circumstances were to arise... might we, too, be capable of terrible things?
So:
Love.
Pray.
Break down the wall...
see the person.
To love is the hardest thing we do –
it is both a beautiful and terrible thing,
powerful and vulnerable.
There is nothing at all wishy-washy about love.
In calling us to love,
in calling us to pray,
Jesus asks us to break damaging and recurring patterns of human behaviour.
It is the work of peace-making, peace-building,
for God’s kingdom is one that is harmonious –
the peaceful, peaceable kingdom.
But how do we do this hard task of loving and of praying for those
who we may find it difficult to see as fellow human beings?
Again, we turn to God’s word.
Relying on our strength alone, it’s almost impossible.
And so the writer to those in the church in Ephesus effectively says:
‘no, no, beloved, not in your strength, do this relying on God’s strength.
Wear spiritual armour, for loving is hard and can feel like a great battle.
In God’s power, you will find that you can stand firm, and do this task of loving
that you’ve been called to.’
As we remember today, all those who have fought in wars,
those who are currently fighting,
and all those who have been caught up in conflict over this last century...
may we put on love as our armour,
may we commit to breaking the cycle of conflict –
may love help us truly see each other:
as human,
as fragile,
as precious in God’s sight;
and may the power of God’s love, lived within our lives,
finally see an end to war,
where all can live in peace with one another,
and in doing,
not wither and perish, but rather,
where all may blossom and flourish. Amen.
