The Catalyst?

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight, because my conscience leaves me no other choice.  A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war:
This way of settling difference is not just.  This business of burning human beings with napalm,
Filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane.  Of sending men home from the dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've spent much of my free time this week listening to the new Linkin Park album, A Thousand Suns, and this selection of a sermon is included as an interlude between tracks.  It's quite a different direction than other Linkin Park albums.  However, I do notice an expansion of a theme from the previous album, Minutes to Midnight: advocacy for peace and justice, perhaps best exemplified by the MLK quote, and this one as well:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

 - J. Robert Oppenheimer

Thinking about war breaks my heart sometimes.  There is a opposition inside myself, on the one hand compassionate caring for the people of the world, a love that doesn't leave room for intentional harm against another, let alone murder.  On the other hand, I understand there are those that would act to remove me from this world, a stance I can't see myself agreeing with.

So how does personal (and country) defense reconcile with the idea of do no harm?  Most of the time, for me, love wins out.  I stand opposed to war in all forms.  Yet, isn't there honor in defending your way of life against all odds?  How can I not advocate action when our fundamental being is under attack?

When I was in college, after 9/11, my grandmother was constantly pressing me to stand as a "Conscientious Objector."  She feared that there would be a draft, and I would be the first to head to the front lines.  While I never believed for a second that the politicians in Washington would actually dare to enact a draft, I also felt that, if it came down to it, I might join the military in some capacity, in order to help defend the country.  While I vehemently opposed the war in Iraq from its inception, I understood why we attacked Afghanistan, and didn't so much support it as not oppose it as much as I might have.

Here we are, nine years after 9/11, and the war in Iraq is finally drawing to a close (Mission accomplished?).  The war in Afghanistan is still full of action, full of killing, full of dying.  I wonder now why we started, if it seems as it does now that we never want to finish.  I think it was never meant to last this long, and the longer it goes on, the sadder I feel.

Is this why I came to seminary?  Could this be another direction to go?

Or is this just what happens when you listen to A Thousand Suns twelve times in four plus days?