Monday, October 31, 2011

VETERAN’S DAY

    How many of us remember the Gulf War? It was the first "Prime Time" war that was ever viewed on national television. I remember that the war was never very far from our minds. We listened to the CNN news team in the Al Rashid hotel in Baghdad, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and in Jerusalem. We saw the skies full of tracers, jets parked on airbase taxiways, news teams in gas masks, and bombs blowing apart military targets with star-wars accuracy. The television brought a war into our living rooms for the first time in history.
    Part of the difficulty that humans have is that there are times when the only choices available are choices between two evils. I’m sure that our desires as Christians would follow the passages in Micah and Isaiah that speak of beating swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks; But in the book of Joel, written under Greek oppression after the return from Babylon, these words appear: “Proclaim this among the nations: Sanctify war, stir up the warriors. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.” You see, occasionally there is a need and a cause for war.
    Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address in 1864, captures some of the sadness of war: “Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, nor the duration, which it has already attained. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” Abraham Lincoln saw how slavery had caused the Civil War and how the war therefore was God's judgment on a nation that had permitted slavery. “Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”
    Yes, as much as we hate it, there are warriors and veterans of wars. As we pray for peace in our lifetime, we must also honor the men and women who have given of their service and even their lives for the freedoms that we have. Today, let us say thank you to a veteran for their sacrifice!

In His Service

Pastor John J. Dodd