Selected Sermons

by Jane Pritchard—

on her recent trip as part of a Christian Peacemaker Team delegation to Iraq.

Sermon: March 2, 2003.

Thanks for asking me to be here today. I don't really feel that I have any answers, and I don't rally have a sermon; I guess I have some reflections on my time on Iraq, and on the coming days.

For those of you who weren't at my talk to the Sunday School this morning, I just came back from two weeks with Christian Peacemakers Teams (CPT) in Iraq; in Baghdad and Mosul. There were fifteen of us who went, three Canadians, nine Americans, one Dutchman, and one Scotsman and that leaves us one short, I can't remember who that was.

Our purpose was to go and speak with ordinary Iraqi people and visit the places of life like hospitals, and water treatment plants, date groves, and market places, and testify to people back home on the effect that bombing would have on people there. It is our hope that we can relay that information to Canadians and Americans and convince our governments not to begin this war.

While in Iraq we were often asked why we were there. And giving the reason people would look at us and say "That's very well, but you have to realise that we have been at war for twelve years. It's good of you to come to stop the bombing, but we would like you to go home and tell your governments to stop the sanctions because that's what's killing us."

People felt that the sanctions were worse than the bombing of 1991, because the bombing had an end to it, and then you could rebuild. But because of the sanctions people haven't been able to rebuild. They've watched their life style erode, they've watched their children sicken and die. They've watched their children grow up without a proper education. They've watched their expectations turn to dust. And now they're living in fear, they are anxious, as anyone would be living, waiting,

Baghdad is a beautiful city. It wasn't as I expected. It has magnificent architecture; mosques, palaces, wide streets, a riverside walk by the Tigrés river, and art galleries. It's a beautiful place, an ancient place. The people are very hospitable. These people had every right to be hostile towards us. I know that a person who appears Arabic, or a person who wears a cassia, who appears in Chicago is likely to be greeted with downright hostility, yet there we were, for all appearances Americans walking the streets of Baghdad and people were courteous and polite and asking after us.

One thing we did, when we went into shops and bought something, we would often pull out a piece of paper we were given which explained why we were there, in English and Arabic. When that came out, often two or three people would come over and look at it and get quite excited and say "Oh thank you, thank you for coming."

One of the questions that we heard everywhere was "When we're living like this, you can see what's happened to our society – we can't drink the water because it's polluted because the water treatment plants don't work, and out kids can't get school books to go to school—it's been going on for twelve years, why do they also want to bomb us? Why does Mr. Bush hate us so much? We know it's not the American people." People are very clear about that, they said there was a great difference between the people of America and their leaders.

They knew that themselves – that there is a difference between the American people and their leader. And I think it speaks very much to their culture and their tradition of hospitality that they did not return that hate to us as representatives. Although there was one moment when we felt that.

We went to visit a hospital—the hospitals, of course, have become very basic in the services they can provide—and the first room we went into there were about six people standing around, and a little boy who was eight. He was emaciated and neurologically damaged—his eyes were wandering and his extremities were jerking. He was lying on a bed, with his very distraught mother was standing behind him with a hejab. When eight of us came in in the wake of the physician and she saw that we were Americans she almost lunged at us, and hissed something, and what she was saying, I guess, was "Why?"

Her little boy had become sick with viral meningitis at home. He was the sixth child, the only boy– the long awaited boy. They took him to one hospital and there was no antiviral medicine. By the time they got him to this hospital the damage had been done. Doctor Al Shami took me to the cupboard and opened it and said "There we are!" There were two vials of acyclovir, that's enough for two days treatment "That's all we've got! Why don't we have antibiotics to treat these children? What can you do?" and he shrugged his shoulders.

One of my colleagues was a seventy-six year old grandfather from New York State, and he was terribly struck by this. He had brought some Teddybears, and his impulse was to take one of the Teddybears and put it on the sheet. I cringed and thought "This is just too little – too late, we can't . . . don't do this." We all had a very strong reaction. The mother, however, having made her outburst, took it in good faith, as did the people in the room, although they didn't understand our English. We looked them in the eye, one by one, and said "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry", what can you say. Our governments have done this. It speaks to a collective responsibility, I guess.

I think of a scene of reflections by a pool—the Christian peacemaker team had joined with the group Voices in the Wilderness, who were also in Iraq, many of them for six years, and we went to a water filtration plant. Our purpose there was—we had a lot of media attention— our purpose was to display a sign that said "To bomb this site is a war crime under the Geneva convention, article 54" to make it perfectly clear that American policy in the first Gulf War had targeted such sites, and to do so was to put hundreds of thousands of civilians at risk.

So we went to the site with a very good banner in English and Arabic—we were probably outnumbered by the media—and as is our habit, we gathered in a circle and prayed and meditated. Walking by that pool, it looked so peaceful, the water was turquoise, there were palm trees around it, it was a perfectly clear Baghdad sky, you could see some of the minarets of the mosques around. It looked so peaceful. "What would happen if this place was bombed?" I thought.

Could you imagine those buildings splintering? Could you imagine this provider of water, even though it's not potable—it has to be treated—being disrupted. What would happen to the population, to all of the families, all of the children who depend upon it?

There are some quiet heroes. We met the engineer who spoke to us about the difficulty of trying to repair these plants after the bombing. Under sanctions certain calibres of pipe are not allowed in—including the calibre of pipe they need to keep their water plant providing water—because they could conceivably be used for what's called dual use, or weapons of mass destruction.

So they used some of their hard earned cash, which they are able to generate by selling a certain amount of oil under the oil-for-food program, and they bought two generators that proved to be faulty. But under the terms of the sanctions are not allowed any recourse if there's a defect in equipment they buy. There's no guarantee, they're not allowed to take it back, or to demand that it be repaired. And so, for want of a few cheap parts they had two generators sitting there unused and a plant that could only run at forty percent capacity.

We asked him, "What will you do if there is bombing?" just imagining how open this place is, and it could well be a target, and he looked at us and he said "We run two shifts a day here, the whole city depends on us. We'll be here." So the engineer and the maintenance people will stay at the water filtration plant in the event of bombing.

Father Qatop, who is a Chaldean Orthodox priest, met with us. He lives and works in Basrah, in the south. Basrah is where that song we sang came from, beside the highway of death where so many retreating Iraqi soldiers were killed, where parts of the desert are cordoned off because it is so radioactive from the effects of depleted uranium, where the cancer rate among children has tripled because of those effects. He was on his way back there, he had been in Europe, he had been invited to Europe, as many church leaders had, where there is a very strong anti-war movement. He was on his way back home. We asked him "What will you do if there is bombing?" He said, "I'm going back there to help my congregation get ready, if that should happen. We're going t need to support each other, and we still have a dispensary to run, we still have lots of sick people to look after," and they in fact serve mostly the Muslim population.

So, we met lots of people who are not going to leave should there be bombing. They are going to stay with their families, stay with their people.

There was more than adequate time in this setting; we often use the word surreal to describe our experience there because here in the west you read the newspapers, you listen to the media, and there is this storm cloud hanging over Iraq. But when you are actually there it is a very peaceful place. The people celebrate and eat, living one day at a time. Sitting out in the sunshine it was hard to believe that all of this negative energy was being prepared to drop on this beautiful city.

In preparation for the bombing— there was a small chance that the bombing might start while our group was there—the reality hit one day that the only time that I felt in danger myself—I never felt in danger from the authorities, from the Iraqis, but in contemplating what would happen if bombing actually started . . .

One member of our delegation brought all kinds of letter of welcome and encouragement from the Dutch churches. He presented these to the Father, Priest, and the Father didn't look too impressed by this. Then somebody else said "There are thousand of people in churches across the world who are praying for you people here", and the Priest stopped and looked at us, and he said "You can't eat prayer."

When you've been, for twelve years, the victims of sanctions; and you've watched family members die, you've tried to provide for members of your congregation with minimum resources, and you're told that churches in North America, where they do have freedom of movement, and they can elect their governments, that they can't do anything to stop their governments from proposing to bomb these people, half-way across the world; and I felt, prayer isn't enough. What is it that we are supposed to be doing?

I felt, I had no right to say this to him, because I wasn't the one who had suffered as they had suffered. There is a time when prayer, like grace, is cheap. I guess real prayer is not, real prayer costs. When Jesus prayed, drops of blood came from his forehead. What does it mean when we pray for peace but acquiesce to war? I think it was the forth verse of the hymn that we sang today, "Save us from a weak resignation to the evil we deplore." Perhaps that's the sickness that engulfs us in North America, that we feel we can't stop the evil that somehow seems to flourish despite our half-hearted efforts to stop it.

There really are powers and principalities at work beyond the human reckoning. The propaganda war that terrifies people—and I'm one of them. I went to Iraq, but when I got there I though, "Surely it's true what they are saying, we can't stop this war." There are hundreds of thousands of troops in the Gulf who are just being bombarded with this message all the time, that this is inexorable, we're going to bring in this military might and we're to drop three-hundred
Cruise missiles on Baghdad, that's the way it's going to be. How can we stop that. And, of course, that's what they'd like us to believe. And that's the tool of the devil, if you will, to dispirit those who would resist in our society, and to terrify the population in theirs, so they won't have the energy to plan any kind of resistance.

It was very interesting; two of the church people, two of the church leaders that we met, said to us exactly, precisely, that George Bush was in the power of Satan—one says things much more graphically in that society—that would be a way of expressing it that most of us would understand, that Christians would understand. It was that simple, that Satan had gotten into George Bush and a lot of the leaders who were pushing for this.

I will share with you my own personal struggle on this; what then do you pray if you love your enemy who is wanting to bomb five-hundred-thousand people into oblivion. I really have reached a point, I think, in my own internal life where I can catch a glimpse of who George Bush is in the eyes of Jesus; that he is a person beloved by God; and regardless of his actions, he is loved by God and needs salvation, but is on the wrong track.

So I guess my prayer for him is that Jesus would bind the power that would be so destructive. And I encourage you to pray that way, if that is the way that you feel inclined. It is the power of evil that grips people in societies, and systems, and governments. Pray that that evil will be bound; that evil entity behind George Bush will be wrestled to the ground and that the man himself will be spared. And that the people who are his target will be spared. And through all this—and the story isn't over yet—we have to maintain this attitude of love towards the enemy, towards the perpetrators of violence, and yet work physically for peace.

In CPT we say, we quote Jesus and say we have to be "as wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves." I've had a few hostile media interviews. They say "One of the major accusations against people like you is that you're a naive, and therefore dangerous." Or, as somebody else said to another CPTer, "Lenin used to refer to those he co-opted as "useful idiots". Well, we believe you have to be as wise as serpents as to what's really happening, wise to all angles of truth, the supposed truth and propaganda, that it doesn't stop your actions. That's no small task.

So, can we be in this situation of seeming inevitability of war; can we still be overwhelmed with wonder, as the disciples were when Jesus appeared in the crowd and was about to cast the spirit out of this little boy. He said, sardonically, didn't he, quoting the Father, "you can do anything". Do we believe that Jesus can do this thing, can stop this war, can even bring healing in this situation. I find myself saying, many times a day, "help my unbelief."

And this kind can only be driven out by prayer and fasting; every Wednesday Mennonite women are having a day of fasting. I think the Eastern Christian churches better understand the power of fasting and prayer than we do; although it's something that those in Christian Peacemaker Teams do frequently and often. And I have done a lot in the past month just getting ready for this trip, and during it. There's something about fasting that helps you disengage from the present in order to concentrate on the eternal, and perhaps the needful. So I would recommend it, that in the time that's left, those of you who feel so inclined, pray and fast and contemplate the nature of evil and love of enemy. And work with all you have in you to convince our leaders to stop the bombing.

Practical suggestions; I have written a letter that would be suitable for sending to Mr. Chretien. It's out at the front. Use it, adapt it, it has some of the key points in it, but basically say under no circumstance, even with UN approval, would bombing Baghdad be a just option. That for the misdeeds of a leader who doesn't destroy his weapons of mass destruction—if he has them—should civilians ever be targeted. I think that our leader is swaying like a read in the wind, but perhaps this week he is becoming more resolute and seeing that it would be a bad thing to actually bomb.

I think we have only a few days left. In another couple of weeks the weather will be on the side of peace because it will be difficult to launch a land invasion when dust storms start. And so there really is a chance that, if some time can be bought, the war can be avoided. Once the bad weather has been gotten through there is a chance that a lot of the heat can be decreased, and a lot of light can increase in this dispute.

I guess for myself, I feel I have more to do since I came back that when I was there. I laugh at myself. I slept very well in Baghdad, I had no trouble at all. I got caught up on all the sleep I missed getting ready, and got the sleep I needed for all the sleep I would miss when I got back.

Before we left to return home five of our members decided to stay indefinitely. And there were about twenty other peace team members who were staying indefinitely—and "indefinitely" is a code word which means "through the bombing", and that's a very high risk decision to make.

We all released ourselves to what we had to do in conscience. Of course, my team mates are very much on my heart should they be there if bombing should start because they are very much at risk. And they will probably put themselves at risk in order try to protect other people, or perhaps civilian institutions, like water treatment plants. And I pray for their protection, but it was equally clear to all of us that we had to come back.

It was really even more important for some of us to come back and try to influence our governments to stop this while it can be stopped—perhaps for the Americans even more than for the others. The Americans that were with me were all very courageous people who had a lot of opposition for their views. However, they are also encouraged by the way the tide is turning, and the number of Americans who say they are not for this war.

My husband has some family in the States, in New York State, and his two 81 year old aunts, who have always been unthinking patriots, supporters of whoever was in power, are utterly livid with George Bush, and have been sending him letters stating so. That's quite remarkable. That shows there are a lot of people who are looking seriously at the effects of what this policy might have.

So there is a movement afoot, but we can't be lulled into a false sense of security, not even by the hundreds of thousands, of millions who came out in the last day-of-action; that was fine for a day, and I'm sure that the American Administration was saying "Good, they've had their day in the streets, now let's continue our work towards war." So we have to continue to work towards peace.

And I guess I will close by saying what is now clear to me; peace can never become a leisure time activity, because war-making is constantly going on. We, if not personally involved in training in the military, are constantly building up a military with our tax dollars, and if those of us who believe that non-violence is the answer aren't constantly working at it we will be caught unable to respond. When there are cutbacks to institutions, why are the cutbacks in the areas of peacemaking and justice, that's perhaps the last place that we should cut. So for all of us who consider ourselves to be called by Jesus to be peace makers I would say lets redouble our efforts, and pray, and fast, and speak to your friends, and to the Prime Minister, and maybe the course of history will be changed.

Amen.