“1910: The Healing of the Nations”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Text: Revelation 22:1-5
It was a particularly beautiful, warm and sunny September day. The days were shortening but the sun was still bright. As I walked along Bloor Street, I was thinking, “What a glorious city Toronto is.” The light was reflecting off the Royal Ontario Museum, the new building for the Conservatory of Music was resplendent with the sun shining on it.
It was a beautiful day! I was on my way to have lunch with two of our lay leaders to talk about the fall program, the Centenary, and the great days that lay ahead. I had a bounce in my step. I was looking forward to the day. Toronto was beautiful.
It was near the end of the Toronto Film Festival, and at one of the hotels along Bloor Street, there were crowds outside waiting with great anticipation to get a glimpse of a movie star. They waited by their numbers for an autograph or a photograph, or just to say they were there and saw a star. It was a festive occasion. Everyone seemed happy. It was a marvellous day in September!
As I walked along the street, for a moment, I looked down and not up. There, lying on the curb was a man in an almost comatose position. He was unkempt and unclean and next to him were two old battered crutches that had slipped off the curb and were on the road. I couldn't walk past him. I kneeled down to find out if he was okay. There wasn't much light in his eyes. He was sleeping very deeply, more deeply than I liked.
I had a closer look at him. And, while I am no doctor, I realized the symptoms he was suffering from were ones that I understood. I thought he was hypoglycaemic. He was clammy and his breath had a certain smell to it. His heart was racing as I took his pulse. He was in a state of almost unconsciousness. A young girl came up beside me. She was a student at OISE and had just come from a lecture. She looked at me and said, “Is there anything that I can do to help?”
I said, “Stay here, and look after him.”
I rushed off to Tim Hortons, picked up two big bottles of orange juice and a sandwich. Finally I came back and the two of us tried to lift this man upright so that he could eat. We leaned him against a parking meter and I asked him if he was hungry. “Yes,” he uttered, and, immediately, he started to drink the orange juice and devour the sandwich as a dog devours kibble. It was gone in an instant! Colour started to come back to his face and he looked remarkably good.
Still, I realized his legs were bent, his body had lacerations and he had a bad aroma. I looked at his arms and they were covered in tattoos, most of which were silly things that had probably been put on in a backroom parlour somewhere. There was one, more faded than the others, but nevertheless still strong and I recognized it. On his arm there was a tattoo of the insignia of a submariner. There was the crown and the maple leaf and two big fish on either side. I had seen it before. I asked him, “Have you served in the Canadian Forces?”
He said, “Yes. Yes, I did.” He paused, and then continued, “But a long, long time ago.”
I left him with the young girl. I said, “I have a lunch to go to. God bless you.”
The young girl said, “Don't worry about him. He'll be fine. I'll make sure to call for help and someone will pick him up.”
I left him. I really didn't think he was going to be fine. There are many indigent veterans in our world and in our country. This might have been a singular case and who knows what might have happened to him to cause him to be in such a state of utter disrepair. His story is probably unique, but it is not one that isn't repeated in various forms at different times over and over again.
Romeo Dallaire has said that when many come back from theatres of war, adrenalin is on high, it is a high that has carried them through for maybe two or three or even more years. But when they return and finish service, the adrenalin dissipates and life becomes ordinary again. The esprit de corps is over. The sense of being of value to society seems to evaporate once the uniform has been removed.
He said that many have a problem integrating back into society. Others have been emotionally scarred by what they had seen. Some have been physically wounded. And, while we always have the list of names of the dead, and we will often have those who have been grievously injured listed in some book, those who have been the victims of war in milder ways are often forgotten. Their names are not recorded anywhere. They are not remembered. Some of them come home to face family problems, because of years of separation. Others simply find that the meaning they found when they were representing our country in the midst of conflict has now disappeared. Some of them become indigent and are not sure of their purpose in life.
Some years ago, when I ministered in Halifax, I was privileged to go once a month to the Officers Mess Strathcona. When I was there, I would meet with chaplains from the Canadian Forces, mainly the Navy, who were members of my church in Dartmouth. I was the pastor to the padres. I was a friend that they could talk to. Not only that, it was a darn fine lunch that they gave me! We would sit and talk about the things they faced, not so much their own struggles, but how they ministered to people who had found themselves in positions of danger. I will never forget what one of them said: “Andrew, even the peacemakers know and experience a kind of war. Even peacekeeping has its price.” I agreed with him.
Now, this is the anniversary year of our church. We were formed as a congregation in 1910, the same year, so it happens, that the Royal Canadian Navy was created in May. And, in honour of that submariner who lay on the side of the street, I think there is a word 100 years later from our church. The words from our church are that we will not forget those who have given their lives and have suffered, nor will we forget those in our midst who need healing.
In the passage that Effie McCombe read, and it was, I remind you, her father that helped bring this church through the Second World War, in that great passage from the Book of Revelation, there is a vision. John has a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, that in the eschaton, the end-time, there will be peace on earth and there will be a tree, and the branches of the tree will be for the healing of the nations. The Greek word for healing, therapeia, in classical Greek means “to serve” but in New Testament Greek means “to heal.” Thus, it is for the therapy of the nations, the healing of the nations and the service of the nation. For John, all of this is bound up in the reign of Christ, in the glorious way humanity is drawn into the presence of Christ, where there will be no more fighting and no more war, no more sin and anger and intolerance. There will be peace, but there will be Christ in all his fullness.
I asked myself, “How do we bring this great vision of John to bear to the issues that face our day 100 years after we were created as a congregation?” I think there are two things that are desperately needed. The first is the healing of the warriors. In 1910, two very significant people died. I often think that they left this church and us now with a legacy to follow. In their death, they have passed a torch to us. I shared this at the Homecoming Service a few weeks ago, because I wanted them to know how important these two individuals were, for in many ways they have the example of healing broken warriors.
The first was Florence Nightingale. Born to a wealthy, diplomatic British family who was residing in Italy in the 1820s, Florence grew up in a privileged home, but laid on her heart the desire to heal and to restore the broken. More than anything else, she wanted to be a healer, a restorer, a nurse. While she was a Christian Universalist and not a Trinitarian, the Spirit had moved in her life and had moved her heart greatly.
Her family tried to discourage her work with the poor and the ill and the needy. “This is below you!” they said. Looking for inspiration, Florence met a German Lutheran pastor, Pastor Fleischer. He convinced her in 1850 that what she was doing was God's will, that it was in accordance with the Scriptures and that her life and her mission could well be to serve her fellow human beings by caring for them.
Eventually, Florence found herself in the midst of the war in Crimea, and there she saw many wounded soldiers and warriors, but she realized that many died not as a result of an immediate accident or conflict, but afterwards because of cholera and diphtheria and infections. She tried to nurse them, to keep them alive, to save them - a messy job! She did not understand fully at the time that part of the problem was sanitation, and only later in her life did she come to that realization, but nevertheless she cared for those who had been wounded on the battlefield.
Her passion was to bring love and compassion and concern for them, so much so as many of you who nurse realize, Florence would actually write a guide to nursing. Hospitals were eventually named after her, and Longfellow described this Lady of the Lamp who cared for the warriors with the following phrase: “Lo, in that house of misery, a lady with a lamp they see pass through the glimmering gloom and flit from room to room.” Florence was called by God to heal the warriors, to heal the wounded, to restore the broken, and she died the year this church was born.
The other one, much less known, is Henri Dunant, who was also born in the 1820s in Switzerland to a Calvinist family, who believed very much in the Bible and the Word of God. Dunant studied this. He met, as a young man, with other young men to discuss how the Bible could address the social issues of the day. He was passionate to bring the Word of God and make it applicable to those who were broken.
Dunant continued his desire for this, and in a moment of spiritual uplift called “un reve” he was so moved by the Spirit that he wanted to go where the broken were, and so he went to the Battle of Solferino. There, he witnessed something that was to change his life: Thirty-eight thousand bodies left on the ground, most of them still alive! He looked upon these suffering men and he wanted to do something. He got a group of men together, and in the next 13 years after Solferino, created a new organization. The organization was called The Red Cross. In 1864, with those five men, Dunant created The Geneva Convention that got 12 soldiers to sign on, and twelve nations to follow suit. Remarkable!
He was so passionate about how brutal war was and how the healers needed to restore the broken that he wanted his word to be heard, but as time went on conflicts ensued. Different people walked away and left him. This man who had the courage to create great organizations was forgotten until in 1901 when he was finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Do you know what happened when he received it? Some people felt that he shouldn't, because he had made war more humane, because the Geneva Convention had sets of rules and some felt that by setting rules to war and making sure there wasn't torture and that people on the battlefield were cared for, he wasn't an activist for peace.
What utter nonsense! Dunant wanted the warriors to be healed. He wanted some sanity where there was insanity. What is fascinating is that this man eventually died in penury, penniless, with a broken spirit, still holding on to his Calvinist principles, but still questioning his faith in humanity. “What has humanity become?” He declared on his deathbed in 1910.
A hundred years later, I ask the same question, “What has humanity become?” For all our advances, for all our greatness in technology, for all the things we have been able to do, still there is inhumanity and violence. Now the Geneva Convention is as if it is nothing. The people who fight use terror, they use bombs, land mines, and missiles that kill from a distance. They practice torture. They remove limbs. The modern warrior often has no idea where the enemy will appear next.
I ask myself, “What should we be doing?” We should be caring for those warriors. If we do nothing else as a society, we must be compassionate and faithful to them. We must ensure that they do not live lives of degradation when they have served, that they are not forgotten about when their function is completed, that they are men of God and women of God often wounded by humanity who need the love of society. Someone needs to continue the tradition of Dunant and Nightingale and heal the warrior.
There is also a need for the healing of the Spirit. It is not enough to say that we heal the warrior if as a society and as a world we do not change our ways. In 1910, to the Empire Club here in Toronto, Lord Baden Powell gave a speech. In it, he said that he did not want to create young men who joined his new scouting movement just to become military or paramilitary figures; he wanted them to become instruments of peace. He wanted them to learn about nature and the world and goodness. He wanted them to practice hospitality. He wanted them to be lights in the world. In this speech, almost prescient about what was going to come upon the world in the next four years, Lord Baden Powell made a case for peace.
Likewise, during the First World War, there was a speech given at the Empire Club by a young private. His name was Peat and he was wounded, having lost an arm and having been wounded in body and soul. His message stated that those who are involved in war suffer greatly. He told this story:
A soldier boy not more than seventeen or eighteen years of age came in, exhibiting a dreadful shrapnel wound, a badly shattered jaw, and a broken arm. He had no overcoat on, and was shivering with the cold. Evidently he had limped a long distance to get to this field station, and as he stumbled inside, the nursing sister in charge looked at him and said, “Why, where is your overcoat? You should have had it on. You may get pneumonia,” and he replied “The reason I have not got it on, sister, is because my mate was killed out there and he looked so cold that I just covered him up, and it doesn't make any difference if I do die; that is a very little thing.”
In the midst of conflict there is sometimes a light of humanity, a great coat placed on those who have suffered.
I think that the Lord Jesus Christ wants to put a great coat over a broken humanity. I think he wants men and women who are committed to the cause of peace. He wants to take that which is broken by conflict and restore it. The vision of the Book of Revelation is for the healing of the nations. But, who heals nations? God does!
In all our sinfulness and brokenness and inhumanity, with all the temptations, the power and avarice and revenge, if we do not have a commitment to God and his Son, Jesus Christ where do we find a light, a lamp, a star to guide us? If we walk away from the God whose desire is to mend this broken world, if we move away from that God, what do we have as a foundation for our lives? It seems to me that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a self-suffering, self-giving, peaceful and loving God, and the world in all its brokenness needs that more than anything else.
Henri Dunant said, and it is often repeated at Solferino in Italian and he said that it needs to reverberate around the world: “tutti fratelli,” the brotherhood of man. The brotherhood and the sisterhood of humanity finds its formation, finds its roots and its inspiration in Jesus Christ. May we as a society be committed to the healing of our warriors in our concern for them! May we be committed to the healing of the nations and the power of the Word of God! May we have tutti fratelli in 2010! Amen.