Speaking Up For Peace

A sermon preached by the Rev. Roger Scott Powers at Light Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, on Sunday, October 1, 2006

Esther 4

The Book of Esther is a novella set in the Persian Empire during the fifth century B.C. It is a legend that is read every year at the Jewish festival of Purim, which celebrates the deliverance of Jews from a pogram.

The story is unusual in three respects. First, the protagonist is a woman. Women's roles in public arenas tended to be marginal in those days, so it is striking to find a woman playing the central role in a story that is set in the most public of places, the royal court.

Second, Esther and Mordecai don't seem at all constrained by Torah regulations that defined Jewish identity. Esther is able to hide her Jewish identity, and nothing about what she wears, what she eats, or how she behaves reveals her secret or inhibits her activity in the Persian court.

Third, the story is remarkably secular. Even though it is a story about Jews being delivered from danger in an alien land, God is never directly mentioned.

Mordecai and Esther were cousins. When Esther's parents died, Mordecai adopted Esther and raised her as his own daughter. Esther was fair and beautiful and won the favor of the king, who set the royal crown on her head and made he queen.

The villain of the story, Haman, was the king's chief of staff. Haman was furious with Mordecai, because Mordecai refused to bow down before Haman and pay him homage. When Haman found out that Mordecai was a Jew, Haman plotted to kill Mordecai and all of his people. Haman manipulated the king to allow for the destruction of all the Jews throughout the kingdom, which we are told extended from India to Ethiopia.

And that brings us to chapter 4, which we heard read this morning. Mordecai mounts a nonviolent demonstration to get the attention of Esther. He makes a spectacle of himself. He tears his clothes and puts on sackcloth and ashes, walks through the city wailing with a loud and bitter cry, and ends up in the open square of the city in front of the king's gate.

It may come as a surprise to some of you that the tradition of nonviolent protest goes back many centuries -- all the way back to biblical times. But here it is in the story of Esther. Mordecai is engaging in a nonviolent peace demonstration on behalf of the Jews, who are being threatened with genocide.

Once Mordecai gets Esther's attention, he sends her a message about Haman's plan to destroy the Jews and asks her to speak to the king and save her people. But it turns out that Esther would be risking her life to go to the king without being called by him, and she had not been called by the king for a month. Mordecai replies to Esther: "Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family with perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this." Esther calls for a three-day fast. "After that," she says, "I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish."

I won't tell you how the story ends. Esther is a short book. You can read the last few chapters at home.

This was the story my wife Susan and I heard in the first few hours of our visit to the South American country of Colombia in March 2003. We were part of a 19-member delegation organized by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and the Witherspoon Society and hosted by the Presbyterian Church of Colombia and Witness for Peace. We went to Colombia to stand in solidarity with Presbyterians and others working for peace and human rights there. We also went to learn firsthand about the impact of U.S. policy in Colombia.

It was Wednesday, March 19, 2003, when we arrived in the capital city of Bogota, and we were all excited about beginning our 10-day visit. But, at the same time, we were all very mindful that a half a world away in Iraq, time was running out on President Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.

That afternoon we met with Ricardo Esquivia, a Afro-Colombian lawyer and political analyst closely associated with the Mennonite Church. Referring to the story of Esther, he said that perhaps people of faith in the United States are in the palace of the king in order to speak up. "If churches do not speak now with a prophetic voice, they will disappear," he said. "This is not a time to be silent. You must speak out and say no to war." "People in the U.S. don't realize that they reap what they sow," he continued. "If they plant seeds of death, they will reap a harvest of death."

That night the bombs began to fall on Baghdad in a strategy called "shock and awe!" From our hotel, we watched live television coverage of the attack on CNN.

That was three and a half years ago. Since then, more than 2,700 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action and more than 20,000 have been wounded. The Pentagon doesn't keep tallies of Iraqis killed in the conflict, but independent estimates run between 40,000 and 1000,000 Iraqis killed since the war began. [After this sermon was preached, a study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in the medical journal The Lancet, put the figure at 655,000 Iraqis killed as a consequence of the war.]

As the human costs of the war mount up, so, too, do the enormous economic costs. A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service shows that the Iraq war is now costing almost $2 billion a week, nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago. That same congressional study puts the total cost of the Iraq war at $379 billion so far.

Meanwhile, growing sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims in Iraq is looking more and more like a civil war. And even the U.S. intelligence community is saying that "the Iraq conflict has become a 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world" and "shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders."

I was against the war before it began, as were the vast majority of church leaders and ecumenical bodies. However, once we had invaded, I felt it would be irresponsible for us to pull out of Iraq without first restoring order and stability to the nation and rebuilding what it had destroyed. I felt it was our responsibility to clean up the mess we had made in Iraq. And I worried that a U.S. withdrawal might make a bad situation even worse.

I still believe that we have a responsibility to rebuild Iraq. However, I no longer believe it is possible to restore order and rebuild Iraq while U.S. troops remain in the country. U.S. troops are seen as an occupying force, and so, as long as they remain in Iraq, they will continue to be primary targets of terrorists and insurgents. Furthermore, Iraqis who cooperate with the American occupation (as Iraqi government officials, police, or security forces) are seen as collaborators and thereby also become targets of terrorists and insurgents. The U.S. presence in Iraq has become part of the problem in Iraq, not part of the solution. Withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would remove a major cause of the insurgency and eliminate a primary target of the terrorists.

I have come to the conclusion that pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq is a more responsible course of action than leaving them there indefinitely. The best way to support our troops is to bring them home. They have been put in an untenable, no-win situation. The hearts and minds of the Iraqi people cannot be won at gunpoint. And as long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, they will be the targets of terrorists and insurgents. I believe it's time to end the occupation and bring our troops home.

As many of you have undoubtedly heard by now, I was arrested this past week in Washington, D.C., protesting the war in Iraq. Seventy others were arrested with me, including Andrew Foster Connors, pastor at Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church here in Baltimore, Gwin Pratt and Tim Simpson, both pastors at Lake Shore Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and Rick Ufford-Chase, executive director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and the immediate past moderator of our denomination's General Assembly. We took part in an interfaith peace witness on Capitol Hill calling for "a concrete and rapid plan to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and to support a comprehensive peace process."

Our nonviolent peace witness was part of the "Declaration of Peace" campaign, which called for a week-long series of events across the country to urge the prompt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Ours was one of the 375 "Declaration of Peace" events that took place in cities and towns across the United States from September 21 to 28. Thousands of people participated in vigils, peace concerts, marches, rallies, teach-ins, reading of the names of the Iraqi and U.S. war dead, interfaith services, call-in days to Congress, and acts of nonviolent resistance. More than 275 people in 22 cities were arrested as they engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience at Congressional offices, military bases, military recruitment centers, and at the White House.

I could no longer keep silence at such a time as this. I had to speak up for peace. I was haunted by the words of Ricardo Esquivia hours before the war began: perhaps people of faith in the United States are in the palace of the king in order to speak up. "If churches do not speak now with a prophetic voice, they will disappear," he said. "This is not a time to be silent. You must speak out and say no to war."

Again and again, I hear people asking where are the churches? Why aren't they speaking out against the war? Well, the truth is that most national church bodies have made statements against the war. But up until now those statements have not translated into letters and phone calls to Congress and the White House. They have not been lived out by Christians in the public arena -- in peace vigils, marches, rallies, and other acts of nonviolent resistance to the war.

We dare not remain silent at such a time as this. As U.S. Christians, as followers of the Prince of Peace, we have a responsibility to speak up for peace. Like Esther, we are being looked to by our nation to be a prophetic voice for peace in the halls of power. We must find the courage to speak up and speak out, and we must put our words into action. The Church has an essential role to play as the conscience of the nation. I believe it is time for the Church to step up and fulfill that role by providing moral leadership against the war.

May it be so. Amen.