Enemy Combatants

April 22, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names, and mystery beyond all naming, we contemplate this past week and our hearts are heavy. We are frightened, worried, anxious, and uneasy. We find ourselves echoing the words of the character played by Sir Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man, “Is it safe?” That maddening question was asked over and over again to Dustin Hoffman’s character as he was strapped in a dental chair and tortured with a high speed drill. Is it safe? Is it safe?

It used to be said that there was safety in numbers, but the Holocaust, the Gulags, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and bucolic rolling hills surrounding Virginia Tech seems to nullify such naive notions. It is not safe. It will never be safe, and we’d best get used to it. In the late 1940’s I was taught a prayer that I said each night as I kneeled beside my bed, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep and if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I used to think that, that was a terrible thing to teach a child to say right before turning out the lights, but now, I’m not so sure. Perhaps, there was some wisdom in that prayer. Perhaps, it let me in on the adult secret that I hadn’t always been here, and there’d come a time when I’d be here no more. Perhaps, just perhaps, that was a good thing for me to know at the age of 4.

This past week’s massacre holds for me a bright and shining moment. Holocaust survivor Dr. Librescu stood in the doorway to his classroom, Room #204, Norris Hall and was shot five times as he yelled for his students to escape out the windows. The image of this man who had survived the worst that Nazi Germany could throw at him, the image of this man staving off death as his young pupils jumped to their freedom, this is the image that I wish to hold in my heart when I think of Virginia Tech. There was a massacre that day, but there was also an active demonstration of the power of love.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention once recorded a song entitled, It Can’t Happen Here. It was a parody and ironic because Zappa, whose favorite vegetable was tobacco, knew anything can happen anywhere, and more precisely, whenever something happens to one of us, it happens to all of us.

May we in the coming weeks not demonize the young Korean man who perpetrated those acts of violence. All efforts to scapegoat and marginalize him now are beside the point. He is one of us, and whatever his crimes we ourselves are capable of the same. To deny this is to invite disaster upon ourselves. Yes, it’s good to remember the noble acts, those done by the better angels of our natures, but we must never forget that other angels attend us and those lesser angels of our natures will, if ignored, act out when we least expect it.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON: Gangster State (Enemy Combatants All)

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.

And they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

(Martin Niemoeller)

Fear can make people do odd things, and it is the fear generated by the events of 9/11 and the events following that which have created an atmosphere of terror in this country. In this atmosphere the present regime has co-opted the rights of the people and is going about the business of greedy business in the name of our country. I don’t much like that. And I’m not alone in that dislike.

In an article copyrighted by the New York Times in 2004 Anthony Lewis has this to say;

“Fear of terrorism – a quite understandable fear after 9/11 – has led to harsh departures from normal legal practice at home. Aliens swept off the streets by the Justice Department as possible terrorists after 9/11 were subjected to physical abuse and humiliation by prison guards. Then, Attorney General, John Ashcroft, did not apologize – a posture that sent a message”

Anthony Lewis continues, “Inside the United States, the most radical departure from law, as we have know it, is President Bush’s claim that he can designate any American citizen as an “enemy combatant” – thereupon detain that person in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial, with a right to counsel. There was a stunning moment in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists (quote) have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States.” (End quote)

In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis expressed 75 years ago.

“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes lawbreakers, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.”

Senator Edward Kennedy just this past month on the 29th of March 2007 stated at an event organized by the Alliance for Justice, “At the heart of many of the serious challenges we face is the Bush Administration’s lack of respect for the rule of law.”

What I present to you today is not meant to convince you that the political right is wrong, or that the political left is correct. All I really want to do is pull back from this lawless situation that we find ourselves in, and ruminate upon what others have done in similar situations. And within that rumination I hope that we can find the room to understand what is happening to us as a people and a nation. The murder rate in big cities in this country has gone up since the inception of the war in Iraq, and need I mention the events at Virginia Tech this past Monday? Perhaps if we can get a perspective upon what is happening, then we can more readily go out and act, and stop simply reacting.

If you think that there is no chance that you are in danger from this government and that there is no way in hell that you would ever be considered an enemy combatant then I’m afraid that you are in the gravest danger.

The trouble starts with a State that wants all the attention. They’re jealous of life and as an institution, just like a cooperation, it, the government, the state, really has no life. As the former Yale Chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, remarked, “To die for one’s own country is on the same level as dying for the Post Office.”

During the initial stages of the Iraqi War the New York Times had a picture of an Iraqi man carrying the wrapped body of his sixth month old son. He’s walking into a cemetery where the article says the gravediggers have all run away because of the bombing. Down from where the man digs a hole for his little boy, another man stands waist deep in a grave. The black flies are everywhere. They cover the ground before he thrusts the blade of the shovel in. He is standing among the remains of his brother who died in the last Gulf War. There isn’t much there. In a hefty garbage bag hanging over an adjacent headstone are what remains of his sister-in-law and her two daughters. Remains is so apt a word here. I turn the page quickly I simply can’t read any more of this. Staring back at me is a young Iraqi who has bandaged leg stumps holding him upright in his bed. I can see the Broadway billboards now, “Collateral damage does Porgy and Bess.”

This, from my former teacher and head of the philosophy department at the University of Florida from 1965-1971:

Authoritarianism is the long shadow which the human species has dragged after itself during its historical pilgrimage toward the light. No one knows whether, during our immensely long trek, we have made any lasting advance in the direction of that light; but everyone knows that the only way of having a direction in which to advance is by facing toward that light and intending that direction. (Dr. Thomas Hanna, End of Tyranny 35)

Now let’s consider the long shadows of political leadership and what those shadows can cover up, and where eventually we end up when so led.

The 20th Century theologian Karl Barth says this about Pontius Pilate:

He was bound to act according to strict law, but does not do so and lets himself be determined by “political considerations.” (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 108)

Pontius Pilate, a man who essentially disappears from history, evaporating like the water that dripped on the floor after he washed his hands of the whole ordeal, broke a covenant that existed between himself and Rome. As an administrator and agent of the Roman Emperor, Pilate was expected to carry out the Roman law. But, Pontius Pilate did what was expedient. Expedient – politic though perhaps unprincipled.

Karl Barth gives me the title to my sermon here:

In the person of Pilate the state withdraws from the basis of its own existence and becomes a den of robbers, a gangster state, the ordering of an irresponsible clique. (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 111)

And what does this mean that Pilate broke the Roman covenant – what does it mean that he would not uphold the Roman law?

Covenant is relationship and relationship presumes personhood. As long as Pilate acts according to what he knows to be Roman Law he occupies the personhood of his life. Yet, when he breaks covenant, even the pagan covenant of Roman law – he breaks with relationship, personhood and becomes a loose cannon.

What does Pilate do? He does what politicians have more or less always done and what has always belonged to the actual achievement of politics in all times: he attempts to rescue and maintain order in Jerusalem and thereby at the same time to preserve his own position of power, by surrendering the clear law, for the protection of which he was actually installed. Remarkable contradiction! (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 111)

What I’m saying is this; in a post-modern world where we have lost the myth of reason’s ability to explain the universe or God, when the metanarrative seems to have lost its foothold, where ambiguity reins downs upon us until we are soaked in the showers of impotency, perhaps it is time to rejoice! Rejoice that we live in a time when the State is a negative format. Rejoice that we live in a time in which we can understand the developing scenarios. Rejoice that we live in a time when we can see in the dark room of our souls that the polarities have been reversed. Everything we know to be light is seen now by the state as darkness and everything that shines forth from the state is nothing but bright midnight.

Are you confused as to what to believe, what to act upon, what next to do – take a look at this country under its present regime and go ye therefore in the opposite direction.

Yet, unfortunately, the imagination of the people in this country is produced, coddled and prodded by sound bites & wars that look like super-bowls. Smart bombs, and shock and awe are Reality Television at its ultimate destination – we sit and watch as other people die.

As Rome degenerated and eventually fell the emperors gave the people bread and circuses to fill their stomachs and amuse their spirits. We watch as the covenant is being broken and we cheer as the pieces fall down around us. We fail to see that those maimed, starved and blown up are, in fact, ourselves.

In the immortal and unforgettable words of the cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The reason we are the enemy is we are out of covenant and communion – even with ourselves.

As Thomas Paine expressed it – “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives (in) to a superficial appearance of (its) being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” (Hanna, The End of Tyranny 13)

As time goes by and more and more original wrongs slide into the category of the right we begin to be able to witness horror and turn away with a shrug. How long will it be before Virginia Tech becomes a documentary, is given an award, and we forget about it? But even though these meteorites of injustice do not annihilate us they do alienate us.

Susan Sontag recently wrote in The Nation;

It will always be unpopular – it will always be deemed unpatriotic – to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one’s own tribe. (Sontag, The Nation 11)

If freedom cannot be found in the Gangster State, then there’s even less hope for the dominant culture’s churches. Since the time of the early Levites when the high temple positions were up for the highest bid, churches have been tainted by the State. There have always been and always will be gangster churches mirroring gangster states. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his feelings about the German Church’s actions during World War Two would be a good witness here.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Cassius says, “And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the Romans are but sheep.”

The truth be told we are not comfortable in this society with the gray areas of life. Reason and its metanarrative have brought us to a place that appears to be a crossroads. One road leads to truth, life and justice – the other to destruction. Unfortunately, the roads are marked with a sign that spins freely in the ground at one moment announcing the road to the right being the road to perdition, then a change in the wind declares it to be the road to the left.

Left or right, it simply makes little difference at this point in our country’s history. “For nearly 800 years since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, our laws have insisted that every single human being is entitled to some kind of judicial process before he or she can be thrown into jail – We have gone back to a pre-Magna Carta medieval system, not a system of laws, but of executive fiat, where the king – or in this case the president simply decides, on any particular day, I’m going to throw you into prison.”

And that prison is a small “Devil’s Island” comprising 45 square miles at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Guantanamo is, in fact, at this point in time, an interrogation camp – the kind outlawed after the Nazi Holocaust in the Geneva Convention of 1949. It is an interrogation camp that is totally and flatly illegal. During the 17th Century the English Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act to keep political prisoners from being sent to remote islands and never seen again. This practice is precisely what the Bush Regime has revived.

George W. Bush mirroring Pontius Pilate has broken covenant with the law of our land. Covenant is relationship and relationship presumes personhood. As long as George W. Bush follows the law of the United States and the Magna Carta he can be said to occupy the personhood of his life. Yet when George W. Bush breaks that covenant as he has done by ruling by presidential fiat, then he breaks relationship with the law of the land, he breaks relationship with the personhood of his life, and be becomes nothing more than a loose cannon, a man beyond the law – there is a name for this. George W. Bush is, in fact, in sheer opposition to; the Constitution of the United States, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the will of the people and the Kingdom of God whatever you perceive that Kingdom to be.

We can blame it on 9/11. We can blame it on the President. The President can blame it on Osama Ben Laden and the terrorists can blame it on fate, but “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”