Chapel Reflections on the Start of the Iraq War

This is an occasion, I am sure, that all of us have hoped would never come. With every effort to prevent a military invasion of Iraq now having failed, we find ourselves meeting with a full scale war underway and the misery that it brings. For those who will most bear the brunt of the misery there is, of course, no time for reality television or academic discussion such as this. For the people on the ground in Iraq, the Iraqi population and the men and women of the Allied forces ordered there into battle—whose average age is younger than that of most graduate students—the demands of this hour are more immediate and in many ways, no doubt, beyond our comprehension. We must mean more than a platitude to say, in the first instance, that our prayers are for all who at this moment are suffering and dying and directly threatened—and for those who are trying to end the carnage and to care for them. The ten minutes that Dean Keller has invited us to speak set a useful limit that forces us to concentrate our attention on what each of us sees as most crucial to our vocational situation. The assignment has led me to question my own theological responsibility and what this task calls for at the present time. I confess that I have a very low tolerance for talk as rationalization about suffering, especially my own talk. Day and night finds no lack of “talking heads” on television delivering their opinions. Preachers exchange their sermons, retired generals boast of our latest weapons, academics rush into publication, politicians do their photo-ops. It all strikes me sometimes as exploitation—using the pain of others to increase our own particular network ratings. The most important witness to me after Nine Eleven came not so much from speeches or learned articles but from two business friends of mine whose task it was to determine who was alive and who was missing among the hundreds of employees in their firm at the World Trade Center. For days and many nights they worked over employee lists, calling families, checking and rechecking, with no time for talk about their agonizing or the “much speaking” (Mt. 6:7) going on around them. They simply turned to the immediate task at hand. There comes a time and place when faithful witness does call for speaking, and then we pray that it will not be idle chatter but a word that is needful, a word that conveys more power than our own. A statement from the book of Acts regarding Paul before King Agrippa has often seemed to me to epitomize such crisis situations. As Luke recounts the scene, Paul says, “And now I stand here on trial for hope in the promise made by God to our ancestors” (Acts 26:6). I call this verse to mind as one brief way of noting what strikes me as several of the most crucial points of a faithful calling. 1. “anD now I staNd hErE.”