The War Wages On

A father comforted his 11-year-old daughter, who was wounded by a suicide bombing in Amerli, Iraq

As I listen to fireworks outside my window tonight over Philadelphia, I wonder what the appeal is of a medium that celebrates the sounds and sights of warfare. The photo above was taken after a suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle in a town north of Baghdad today, killing over 100 people. I honestly still haven't made up my mind about the war in Iraq. Half of me thinks we should be there, half that we shouldn't. But all of me has come to believe that war is a terrible, terrible thing.

I am not a pacifist, but I feel that responsibility demands action in the face of evil, and sometimes this means taking up arms. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in his Ethics that a man who tries to maintain his innocence by not taking up arms incurs upon himself a greater guilt. He says, "He [the man who seeks to maintain his innocence] sets his own innocence above his responsibility for men, an he is blind to the more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely in this; he is blind also to the fact that real innocence shows itself precisely in a man's entering into the fellowship of guilt for the sake of other men." Bonhoeffer's belief in action would take his life, but his conviction to enter into the sufferings of the world remained resolute to his grave.

When I look at the picture of that little girl above, I want to feel Bonhoeffer's conviction. The war in Iraq, right or wrong, is lousy. I want to stare long and hard at that photo just to be reminded that the war wages on even as we in America celebrate our independence. I want to share in the suffering in hope of in some way alleviating it. Stuck in prison shortly before he was led to the hangman's noose, Bonhoeffer wrote an interpretation of Christ's call to the Christian in the secular world. "Jesus asks in Gethsemane, 'Could you not watch with me one hour?'...Man is summoned to share in God's sufferings at the hands of a godless world. He must therefore really live in the godless world, without attempting to gloss over or explain its ungodliness in some religious way or other...It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life."

When God heard the screams of the little girl above I believe he felt pain. Thankfully, because he called Christ to suffer and Christ obeyed, she, I, and you can be free from the pains of this life. Yet as a participant in this secular world, I want to hear her screams myself, suffering with her that I may bring the peace that is Christ crucified and raised again.

Friends, remember that there is a war going on. Remember that children are suffering. Pray that there may be peace and tears of suffering turned to tears of joy, joy in the risen Christ Jesus.