Shadows of War

I grew up, like everyone else in my generation in this country, in the shadow of war. As a child, I remember my parents trying to shield me from the images of war flashing across the TV screens during the First Gulf War. As a teenager, the unforgettable events of 9/11 and the subsequent unending wars loom large. Kids, like the kids I grew up with in a small town, went off to war and not all of them came back alive. If I think through the news I’ve seen in my lifetime, most of it is dominated by war, by reports of body counts and returning bodies, reports of torture in military prisons and large scale offensives. Images of tanks and machine guns, sniper rifles and wounded bodies.

In the shadow of these wars, the world has grown more militarized. Sometimes I’ve seen this firsthand. In southern Mexico, in Oaxaca, I walked through squares full of police gripping AK-47s, all too ready to fire on unarmed civilians. I drove down deserted rural roads full of armored trucks with federal police bristling with weapons. I walked across borders with assault rifles trained at my head and witnessed the desert between the U.S. and Mexico transformed into a war zone with barbed wire and giant fences and fully militarized police.  

But, the whole time I was away from home, away from the harbor, I held it in my heart. I was never naïve; I remembered the harbor as a place with little for me to do as a teenager and a place I could not wait to leave, I remembered how easy people could be with their fists, and how rough parts of town could be. I always remembered the grind of survival and the palpable sense of despair that could descend on us. But I also remembered a place where neighbors knew each other, a place of peaceful lakes and stunning forests, a place of rough neighborliness and fierce independence.

 

On Friday, though, I was shocked. I know I should not have been. I knew the Aberdeen police had an armored vehicle and that SWAT teams were more militarized everywhere. But knowing is different than seeing. When I walked down by Cherry Street and I saw a MRAP parked outside a little working class house and I walked past young men carrying assault rifles, something in me froze.

 

This was Aberdeen. This is where I walked as a kid. And a team of military style fatigued local police were pointing military grade weapons at a house I’d passed a million times.

 

Suddenly, I was aware of a terrible fact. The wars that had haunted my TV screens and loomed large over my life had come home. The shadow of war had found a home on the streets of my childhood. Kids who had grown up here, like me, were carrying assault rifles—not only in far distant lands—but at home too and those rifles were pointing at our own people.  

 

Its only been a few days but I can’t shake this feeling of dread. Now, I know that police were responding to what seems to have been a shooting. And I know that the woman inside that house was armed. And I am so very glad that no one else was severely hurt or injured.

 

Its just that I can’t shake this feeling that something has changed terribly in this place where I grew up. That my nieces and nephews are growing up in a world where military sniper rifles are increasingly directed toward civilians. Where the wars I grew up with have come home to roost.

The Tenderness of the People

 “We love because he first loved us. Those who say ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

The early Jesus movement—a movement of people who were largely forgotten, largely poor, largely outcast— became known as a group that loved each other and cared for each other. In a world that told them they were worthless, in a world that robbed them of rights, in a world that targeted them, they instead created a world where they protected each other and cared for each other.

This is not always a warm, fuzzy thing. It is not always a comfortable thing.

It can involve great risk. It can involve great danger.

Love means fighting for each other. It means standing up for each other. It means taking risks for each other.

Often there is a high cost to love.

In our first reading, we read the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. This is the first conversion story in the book of Acts. The first conversion story in the NT. The spirit sends Philip to meet with someone that the world of the Romans had no use for. He was an African man, likely a slave, a man with no rights under political or religious law. He was a eunuch. Sometimes this was physical but sometimes eunuchs were men who would now be considered gay. Queer. Or Transgender. The first conversion story in the NT is of a black man who did not live up to, did not conform to society’s definition of gender or sexuality. An outcast. A transgressor. A queer.

And the early Jesus community took him in as one of their own. And stood with him.

“We love because he first loved us… for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

You have all been following to some extent what has been happening in Aberdeen. The largest encampment of folks who are homeless was given eviction notices in March and have been fighting for a place to stay ever since. We have tried to do anything we can to stand with them—going to city council, petitioning the city, gaining support, trying to work with churches to open up their property for campers to use.  

But the most powerful witness has been the folks in the camp who have stood up for each other. Some of you were there when the mayor and city officials met with campers. A group of campers went to that meeting and stood up for themselves and the people they were in community with.

People took great risk to show up to a meeting like that. People took great risk for their friends.

I don’t think we always realize that to live on the streets in the US is to live in the shadows. It is to live in constant fear of arrest. It is to be called names to your face by people in power.

The streets of the harbor are a rough place, a difficult place, as over half our population struggles to survive. The brightest moments of hope are those moments when people find ways to take care of each other. By checking in on people who are sick. By supporting each other in hard times.

And by taking a stand when people have nowhere else to go. In Aberdeen, people on the streets and in poverty are learning to claim their own leadership.

They tell their stories so that they and their neighbors can have somewhere to live. They risk being called names to speak out to city council and beg city leaders to make sure people are not thrown away. They are my heroes.

 

There is a saying, used often in Latin America, that “Solidarity is the tenderness of the people”. I like that.

As rough as the streets of the harbor are for people who are struggling, I stand in awe of the tenderness of the people wherever I see it. I consider myself honored beyond measure to witness it.

“We love because he first loved us… for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

If you haven’t noticed, this is a sermon of stories. Stories of love that I have witnessed.

A few weeks ago, I went to a meeting in Olympia, where a group of parents from Guerrero, Mexico were touring.  Last September, at a teacher’s training school for poor students called Ayotzinapa, 43 students were kidnapped and disappeared. Their parents have spent months looking for them. There is little doubt that these students’ disappearance was connected to the Mexican police. Over the past few months, citizens of Guerrero have taken the streets by the thousands to stand with these parents and their disappeared sons. Moms and dads of these disappeared students, most small farmers, have been touring the US, telling their story and issuing their demands that the Mexican government return their children and they know what happened to them.

As they spoke with us, I thought again of the great love, not only of parents for their children, but the great love of the people around them, people who stood with them as they searched for their lost children, often at very great cost. I got a glimpse of a whole city, a whole people coming together. I wondered what that would look like here, on the harbor.

It’s a terrible and a beautiful thing to witness love.

“We love because he first loved us… for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”