Recquiescet in pace
It is a gray, cold, rainy day, and the chill seems to have permeated right to my core. I am hardly unique. Many of us, today, are huddling in a collective deep freeze of the soul… regardless of the actual weather outside our respective windows.
Images of people pushing strollers – dragging suitcases – fleeing the tanks that are making their way into the heart of Kyiv… how can we who watch not be chilled to the bone?
Of course, some cold hearts haven’t missed a beat and some mouths haven’t stopped blabbing since Thursday. Posturing and prognosticating about the war Russia is waging against Ukraine is just the latest grist ground by world-class, callous, polemical mills. Cynical politicians spin the situation with an eye on votes; cynical academics spin the situation to score woke points.
All the while, bombs are falling and bullets are flying and the world order of the last few generations is toppling.
What does it all mean?
How will it all end?
And why is it happening – now, in our time?
C.S. Lewis, veteran of WWI and civilian survivor of WWII, opined that war was a tremendous clarifier. He said that, in war-time, virtues like courage and sacrifice – so de-valued and dismiss-able during a prosperous peace – regain their rightful place as costly treasures; while vices like self-absorbed indifference and cowardice – so widespread as to seem “normal” in a prosperous peace – are revealed for the spiritual cancers that they are.
Prosperous peace has coddled us for decades.
Will this war shake us out of our complacent vices?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and martyr to the Nazis, famously denounced Nazi accommodators with his definition of “cheap grace”:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Cheap grace is the ultimate self-absorption, really – the self-approval of morals and mores that are self-defined for selfish pleasure.
Prosperous peace has sheltered us, allowed us to wallow in cheap grace ad infinitum.
Will this war wake us up to the monstrousness of the Idol of Me?
The chaos and carnage in Kyiv give Lewis and Bonhoeffer’s words prophetic heft…
Consider this recent incident of sharp, crystalline clarity: A comedian-turned-President refuses to go into hiding, refuses to leave his capital city, tells his peers on zoom that they may never see him again alive. His readiness to die in solidarity with his people clarifies that the others’ words are just vapid noise.
Consider this recent example of tawdry, soiled “cheap grace”: Sanctions – too little, too late – that only began after the massacre was well under way. Sanctions that failed to save a single life because those who were debating them had other priorities than saving lives.
Outrage is cheap; the murdered people of Ukraine are bearing the real cost.
Another voice from World War II, Pastor Martin Niemoller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
This poem speaks specifically to the circumstances of Europe in the 1930s… but consider Solomon’s words from several millennia prior:
If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength being small;
if you hold back from rescuing those taken away to death,
those who go staggering to the slaughter;if you say, “Look, we did not know this”—
(Proverbs 24:10 – 12)
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it?
And will he not repay all according to their deeds?
God holds us accountable not just for the harms we personally inflict, but also for the harms we could prevent – and don’t.
Jesus called out the Pharisees for many things, but never with more passion than in Matthew 23, when He harangued them for their lack of care for their fellow humans.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced…
(Matthew 23:23)
Neglecting justice and mercy and faith puts us in position to faint in the day of adversity.
Failing to practice the weightier matters of the law diminishes our strength and blunts our ability to rescue anyone else – because we so urgently need rescuing ourselves (whether we know it or not).
Several big, basic things which the war in Ukraine clarifies (really, we should know them already, but we keep needing to be reminded):
- Evil exists. There is a larger war being waged, and the stakes are far greater than any lines on a map or footnotes in a history book. There is an Enemy, and that Enemy thrives on human misery. We ignore that – we forget the Enemy – to our own peril.
- Sin exists. A thug like Putin may not call it “sin” when he acts on his own thug-ish-ness, but it is sin regardless of what it is called. Sin separates people from God; sin turns people against one another; sin foments death.
- Truth exists. It is fashionable among postmodern elites to pretend that their own consensus opinions trump old belief systems. (Hence, Speaker Pelosi calling on the Taliban to put more women in leadership. Ahem.) But an up-to-the-minute, ongoing reinterpretation of “fluid reality” is completely inadequate for understanding actual reality. There are facts, and they are stubborn things. There is truth, and it doesn’t change.
We who have warm, safe beds in which to sleep tonight must pray fervently for the many thousands trekking through cold, dangerous terrain in search of safety.
And we who have the freedom to speak and to vote must speak and vote as those accountable to a God in Heaven who loves the little ones in the Ukraine (and in Afghanistan and Syria and Eritrea) just as much as He loves the little ones in Dallas and Atlanta and Boston. It’s not enough to speak and vote like a good American; our citizenship is in Heaven (Philippians 3:20) – and it is by Heaven’s standards that we will be judged.
As for Putin and his henchmen, here is wisdom for them from the prophet Isaiah:
Raise the war cry, you nations, and be shattered!
(Isaiah 8:9 – 10)
Listen, all you distant lands.
Prepare for battle, and be shattered!
Prepare for battle, and be shattered!
Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted;
propose your plan, but it will not stand,
for God is with us.
