March 19, 2008
Holy Wednesday
Observance of the 5^th Anniversary of the War in Iraq at Grace Cathedral

Early in the evening of March 19, 2003, I was standing in a long line at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey. Instead of the usual hustle and noise of a crowd about to board planes to fly all over the world, there was, among us, an anxious, ominous silence; a quiet, but reigning grief, as if some one beloved and known to us all had just died.

The guards and the airport authorities were more nervous than we were–no one was looking at us as we crawled through the long lines and made our way to waiting planes; their eyes and minds were somewhere else–everyone knew that the bombs were set to hit Baghdad at 9pm and it was now about 7:30 in the evening.

My plane was in the air and flying toward home when the first cruise missile struck Baghdad. For nearly two hours, missiles and bombs struck the palaces, military complexes and government buildings of the city, the heart of Saddam Hussein's power base. This terrible night of bombing became known to the world as the "night of shock and awe."

How strange and awful to be flying in the same night sky as those bombs and missiles! Far from any thoughts of being unsafe or in danger, I had only feelings of a more intimate relationship to the violence, grief and terror that was unfolding in the heavens that dark night.

It is now five years later and the world has held this bitter cup of war and destruction in its hands all this time. Jesus lamented that the spirit is willing, but the body is exhausted. The toll of this war has been taken, not only in the obscene numbers of civilians and military dead, but with those who are permanently damaged in body, mind and spirit. The toll has been taken in the loss of infrastructure in the country of Iraq and on our own economy, as it has cost trillions of dollars and still counting. But the deepest damage has been upon our spiritual well being as a global community, as we have allowed ourselves to be a part of an unjust and immoral war. Our sense of moral leadership and our witness to our own moral courage and ability to end this war is at an all-time low. The spirit and the body are certainly weak.

We can no longer watch and pray for this war without expressing our grief, our outrage and our anger–for as religious people of all faiths, we need to remember that anger is one of our greatest spiritual benefits; if our anger arises out of our deep reverence for the sanctity of all life. William Sloane Coffin reminded us on the second anniversary of the war that only our reverence for life can restrain violence, whether that violence be against nature or each other. Tonight we lament the suffering and the violence in Iraq and we vow to end the war before it is too late.

On this holiest of Wednesdays, let us watch and pray with new resolve, remembering to reinvigorate our spirits with the vestments of holy anger, so that we may never tolerate the intolerable, never behold an outrage with indifference.
Let our flesh never become so weak as to forget the power within each one of us to work for peace, pray for peace, believe in the power of peace. Let us rededicate ourselves to the vision of a world in which nations do not attempt to resolve problems by waging war on other nations–let nations learn war no more!

The prophet Jeremiah cried for peace, lamented a world without it. Let us continue in that spirit to lament the absence of peace even as we continue to trust in the presence and power of God to bring it to fruition.

Let us pray.

As we watch and pray with you, O Lord, help us to stay awake to the cries of the world and the cries of our own hearts. We lament the suffering and violence of the war and the suffering it has caused around the world. By your tender mercy, we pray for the dawn to break into our dark night, to light our path and guide our feet into the way of peace.

Amen.