What a wonderful prophecy of hope the prophet Micah holds out!

“they shall beat their swords into plough shares,
and their spears into pruning hooks,
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”(Micah 4 : 3)

This rings especially welcome to us on a day when we remember the victims of war, wars that were advertised as “wars to end all war” but turned out to be only a hope.

At the height of the Cold War, back in the sixties, when the U.S. and the U.S. S. R. faced each other with terrible weapons of mass destruction, even before that term was invented, with the destructive power to end civilization many times over, the U.S.S.R. did an interesting thing. They gave to the United Nations a statue that depicts this prophecy of Micah’s.

You will find this statue in the United Nations Plaza. A strong man is seen wielding a hammer and beating on a sword. Already you can see the bottom of the sword taking on the form a plough share. There was some cynicism expressed about this gift and yet it is a powerful reminder of a prophecy of hope that the world, certainly the leaders of the nations need to hear.

I was moved to write a hymn about this:

Strong was that workers arm,
who hammered on that sword,
who made from iron shard,
a tool to serve the Lord.

That sword soon changed its shape,
it lost its ugly might,
it found another task,
for food and peace to fight.

Strong was his firm resolve,
no more to hurt and kill,
but turn his back on hate,
and seek to serve God’s will.

And still that hammer rings,
its call sounds us to pray,
that folk throughout the globe,
that call may yet obey.

Strong faith, strong arms, strong love,
are needed in this age,
against the powers of death,
a peaceful strife to wage.

That blacksmith could be you,
we each can strike a blow,
against the trust in arms,
the seeds of love to sow.

Our Lord declined the sword,
he healed the servant’s ear,
Oh God, give us such faith,
to conquer hate and fear.

I don’t consider myself a pacifist, although I have a strong tendency in that direction. I do abhor all war. I have known some pacifists and have admired them greatly. One of them, Prof. Ernie Best who taught theology at the University of Toronto, refused military service and instead spent time teaching in the Japanese Internment camps in the interior of British Columbia. Another is Ursula Franklin who recently published a book: The Franklin Reader: The Map of Peace, which gathers some of her writings and speeches on the subjects of peace, environmental protection and feminism. She has been a professor of world renown in the field of metallurgy. These and others were not cowards or anti-patriotic. They heard and responded to a higher ethic one to which I fear i can only pay lip service.

I am not a pacifist but I believe that Jesus was. Reading the gospels there is no way that I can imagine Jesus taking up a gun, aiming at other humans being, pressing the trigger and sending them into oblivion. Nor can I imagine him activating a bombay door to release high explosives to fall on cities far below. Nor could Jesus imagine a time like ours, our problems and our weapons.

Only once in my life have I seen shots fired in anger. It was at Gaza a few years ago and it was a horrible experience. I along with the Primate of Canada, Michael Peers, Michael Ingham, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church and another United Church minister were there to visit both Palestinians and Israeli.

I have not experienced war but escaped it by a hair’s breadth. My parents and I lived in the German speaking part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. Our home was only about ten kilometres from the German border. My father as an ardent anti fascist and was well known for his political views. Thus when the German army marched in after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain concluded the Munich Agreement with Hitler ceding that territory to Germany, we were on the run.

We managed to escape to Britain. It was there that i saw a film that frightened me. It depicted some of the terrible scenes of the Spanish Civil War when the German air force in support of Franco bombed Republican cities. I could hardly wait to get as far away from Europe as possible. We were successful in that. We came to Canada and were settled on an abandoned homestead in northern Saskatchewan. The one room log cabin that we occupied with another family had no glass in the windows when we arrived. There was no well, the nearest supply of water was half a mile away. There was no electrical power, the nearest line was fifteen miles away over roads that were mere ruts in the dirt. These were difficult time for us who had never been on a farm before. But we were away from war.

I recall one evening as mother and I were walking home from work on the potato field. Suddenly mother grabbed me by the arm. By the look in her eye I thought that she had finally snapped. She then pointed to the shacks in the distance and said to me, “Do you see those places?” I said, ”Of course mother, that’s where we live.” And she said: “yes, and they are bomb proof and don’t you forget it.”

Life was hard and unusual for us city people but we were safe.

Soon Canada was also in the war and building up a war industry. Father left the farm and went east to be trained as a quality control engineer for aircraft production. Mother and I followed a few months later and took up residence in a community around a war plant in eastern Ontario. In my school holidays I also worked at the plant for fifty-five hours a week. I spent the summer of 1944 grinding the rollers on which the turrets of Lancaster bombers revolved.

The war ended in May of 1945. In the fall of that year the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment returned from Europe. They had fought from Sicily up the Italian boot into Europe. The day they arrived all of Belleville and area were at the CN station to meet them. Schools were closed. The Reserve Army, now Militia, were also there in full battle dress, my father among them.

The first train to arrive had red cross markings, it bore the soldiers who were non ambulatory, we did not see them. Half an hour later the next train arrived and we watched as the soldiers filed off and took their positions in platoons on the parking lot of the station. The band then struck up and the regiment marched off through the city to the armouries. We screamed ourselves hoarse as welcomed our men home again.

Then suddenly something happened to me. In my mind’s eye I saw my two uncles, father’s brothers, who had been killed on the other side, one in the early days of the war on the Russian front, the other in the very last days as the German army was retreating through Austria.

I was overcome by a sense of ambivalence. One the one hand I saw the soldiers who had fought against my personal enemy, Adolf Hitler, to liberate my homeland, on the other hand I also saw the faces of the enemy, they had a familiar face. I felt like some who persist in driving a car with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. I wondered whether I was the only one in that crowd who felt that way. This experience had a profound affect on my.

Last year shortly after the new War Museum opened I was teamed up with Francis Itani who read from her book Deafening. I followed with a theological reflection on war. Much of what I am telling you today is based on that event. Itani read the account of the trench war in Flanders and along that line. She told me that this was nothing compared to the many first hand accounts that she had to read as she did her research for her book.

WW I or the Great War was certainly a horrendous experience of carnage. Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian, visited the battle field and came away as a pacifist. He didn’t remain a pacifist but called himself a Christian Realist. He came to believe in what is called the Just War.

The Just War Theory has a long history, probably going back to Micah. The first to think systematically and write about it was the Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Others have thought and written about it since. The Just War criterion can be summed up in four points. For a war to be just it must

1. Be declared by a democratically elected authority, that is not by some dictator or demagogue.



2. Have clearly defined goals such as self defense or the liberation of enslaved people.



3. It can only be just if all other means of resolving the conflict have been exhausted. And finally,



4. A just war must protect non combatants, the young and the elderly.

It is this last point that is the most difficult. The term “Collateral Damage” has been devised to name those victims who were not the target. In the W.W.I most casualties by far were the soldiers. In the W.W.II everything changed. The German air force bombed Britain with great loss of civilian life. Later in the war the tables were turned and the Allies bombed Hamburg, Dresden , the Ruhr industrial area. And finally of course, the U.S. bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima with huge loss of non combatants.

I still believe in a Just War, I just haven’t seen any.

History has placed nations and leaders in difficult positions and often it seems that war is unavoidable and inevitable. It is important that we remember the price of war. The cost is unimaginable loss and suffering. Remembrance Sunday is not a time to swagger or to glory in war but to remember. The image of Mica’s hope, of turning swords into ploughshares and that of the Prince of Peace needs to be topmost in our minds.

To Remember is to end all war.