GOD’S WILL . . . HUH???

So, they invite me to deliver the benediction at this year’s citywide Veterans Day commemoration. Ironic? Let’s just say that circumstances have changed a lot in the 35 years since I raised my voice to advocate torching local draft boards as a means of ending the war in Southeast Asia. But, my dad was a veteran, and I was always fiercely proud of him, and changing times and maturity have brought me an appreciation for the men and women who fought courageously while we dodgers did our dodging.

I shared the dais with Congressman Lindsey Graham, former liberal Democrat reborn serendipitously as a conservative Republican, Bill Clinton’s impeachment nemesis, and likely successor to the zombified Senator Strom Thurmond. Lindsey is one of those genial nice-guy populists who gets wound up in vociferous political superlatives whenever you put a podium in front of him. And, God knows, at a Veterans Day celebration in the buckle of the Bible Belt two months after 9-11, he knew his audience.

What started as a pretty standard patriotic litany revved up its motor when Lindsey declared with prophetic certitude that “George W. Bush’s election by 1,000 votes was an act of miraculous Divine intervention the real magnitude of which we are only realizing a year later. Heaven help us had God not intervened on our behalf!”

Tumultuous applause and choruses of “Amen!”

As I sank in my seat, I murmured impulsively, perhaps imprudently, to my seatmate, “The Nazis also had a motto: ‘Gott bei uns! God is on our side!’”

Why the discomfort? Lindsey Graham as prophet of dubious theology? Invoking God’s will to vindicate partisan politics? The treachery that we have learned to associate with the witches’ brew of God’s name and demagoguery? Playing to a crowd’s already twisted “we’re-saints-they’re-sinners” world-view? Someone claiming with smug self-assuredness that he knows the will of God as revealed in current events?

This is a tough case for me to make, I admit. I do believe that the evil we face today is on a par with every other act of infamy that has rallied honorable, decent people to righteous indignation. And, I do believe that the designs of Osama, et al, are unambiguously in opposition to God’s divine instruction. And, I do believe that to the extent that we understand God’s revelation, the war that we are prosecuting is an honorable enterprise.

Yet, I believe that God’s hand in rooting out evil is more like an anti-virus running in the background than the operating system that calls the shots. We should be invoking God’s wisdom to zap the insidious attitudes that turn a righteous battle into a desire to simply replace one form of viciousness with another . . . insidious attitudes like self-righteousness, lock-step compliance with authority, veneration of demagogues, revelry in the kill, the inability to see and remedy one’s own faults, the impulse to meet genocide with counter-genocide.

The role of God’s will in this and every struggle, I believe, is to make us circumspect and unswervingly focused on Micah’s ideals of justice, mercy and humility, not to justify bloodlust and xenophobia.

Whose side is God on? People of faith should be neither asking nor pretending to answer that question. They instead should be humbly praying for God’s guidance, knowing that ultimate victory is granted to whomever strives to make this world safe for all who wish to be free and fail and kind.