2 before Advent Year C
Remembrance Sunday - 14th November 2004

Malachi 4.1-2a;
Luke 21.5-19

Martin Jackson,
Vicar of St. Cuthbert's

There are two exhibitions running concurrently at the moment at the Side Gallery in Newcastle – at the bottom of Dean Street, almost under the Tyne Bridge. Downstairs in the Gallery there are photographs collected under the title “Into the Asylum” – a record of what it’s like to be a refugee: trying to flee your country; seeking safety in another land, but so often instead encountering hostility; attempting to return home in the aftermath of war, often to find that home has been destroyed by those you fled. If you feel that many asylum seekers want to get into this country simply as an opportunity to better themselves economically, then this exhibition will show that the journey they make to get here is one that few people would undertake lightly.

Upstairs in the Gallery there’s another exhibition – and none of the subjects of these pictures has left their homeland; they’re still there. This exhibition is entitled “Agent Orange: ‘Collateral Damage’ in Vietnam.” There’s a warning by the door that the images are disturbing and may not be suitable for viewing by children. That said, all the people in the photographs are children or not much older. They are the victims of chemical warfare during the Vietnam War. They weren’t themselves around at the time of the War. It was their parents and grandparents who were exposed to “Agent Orange,” a defoliant that was used to remove ground cover which might hide those who were fighting American forces and the South Vietnamese government. It was sprayed over the jungle to kill not people but broadleaf vegetation. But of course those who were sheltering under the trees – guerillas and enemy forces – as well as government and US troops fighting them, and people in nearby villages, and people who loaded the chemicals onto the aircraft were all exposed to it. The intention was not to kill with the chemical – it was to clear the way for the battle to commence.

What was not known was that Agent Orange would have side-effects for people who came into contact with it. Its producers did not reckon on dioxin, a toxic waste created in the process of production. An amazingly small amount of dioxin is harmful – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency puts the hazard level at one part per million. And its effects are to be seen in the pictures in the Side Gallery’s exhibition… in the children born to those who were exposed to the chemical. For some the birth disorders are comparatively slight, such as darkened scaly skin. Others were born with spina bifida, or without limbs, or with deformed arms and legs (there’s a picture of a group of three children each with double elbows and knee joints). Still others are blind – born without lenses in their eyes – or with hydrocephalus or mentally retarded. And as well as Siamese twins there are jars and jars of deformed foetuses – one horrifically with two faces on one head. No wonder there’s a warning that people might find the images disturbing.

But if they don’t disturb, then there’s something wrong with us. The introduction to the exhibition admits that it can’t be proved that all these deformities were due to Agent Orange. Only that all have exposure to the chemical in common.

The point of all this is not to point a finger over the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War. It’s to say that we can’t fight wars without consequences. And so often those consequences are unintended. No one (it seems) knew that Agent Orange would do any more than kill plants and trees to remove enemy cover. But the challenge is to see what the outcome was in the suffering of those children and to ask, “Can you walk away from it?” No reparations have been paid by the government which used that chemical. When compensation was paid to American families who were affected by it, the payments were made without any admission of liability. And in some ways that is distressingly understandable. The American government had done what it thought right in deploying its forces in Vietnam. The enduring problem was largely the unforeseen consequence.

There are connections to be made between those pictures and the millions of lives lost through war which we remember today. This isn’t a pointless exercise, and it’s not intended to bring any dishonour to those who have given their lives for their country in active service. But we need to join up our thinking between our intentions when decisions are taken that armed force should be deployed and the consequences which arise from that deployment. The war memorials in this church record the names of those people from our own community who gave their lives in the two great wars of the 20th Century. Those who answered the call to oppose the tyranny of Nazism and fascism in Europe and beyond. But also those who went off to the Great War in 1914 with the intention of ending all war, and believing it would all be over by Christmas – only to be sucked ever deeper into the mud of trenches where millions were to die. These are for us the victims of unintended consequence, and with them so many bereaved families.

If the decisions to go to war in that century were difficult, it must be still more complicated now. Governments which take up arms to oppose a tyrant known to have deployed chemical weapons - and reckoned to have the fearful potential to create still more - need to be honest about their motives,.. and to remember the consequences of their own past action, however innocent it might have been. We’re right to be proud of those British forces who in southern Iraq have been so sensitive in seeking to bring order to the lives of the local population. But now that we hear in the news of the Black Watch regiment under such vicious attack, we can’t help but see that our forces are being drawn into a much more ferocious situation as they cover for others who have gone on to fight over Falluja. For a time western nations seem to have believed that wars could be fought with a minimum of casualties – “intelligent warfare” in which cruise missiles can glide down Iraqi streets past reporters’ hotel windows to take out their intended targets with precision. We’ve heard how the U.S. forces themselves are taking care to minimise the damage done to mosques in the battle zone. But there can’t be an avoidance of casualties when the method used to root out insurgents is to draw fire by exposing one’s own troops and then to return fire with thousands of rounds until nothing could possibly survive.

And the saddest thing is to ask, Is there an alternative? What we see is that the decision to take up arms requires a readiness to see those weapons used – and the consequences are human suffering and loss of life: our own forces, the insurgents, the civilians caught in the middle.

What does God think of it all? Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel reading are:

'When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.’ Then he said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…’

It sounds almost like acceptance of the inevitability that human beings will continue on the path of destruction. Which is why we need to value all the more those we remember today who have lost their lives through war.

It is in the thick of war that so much great poetry has been produced – and so much of it touches on what we may believe in the face of its devastating effect… even to ask does God offer us any hope which we may take up? That’s what Wilfred Owen does in his great poem “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young":

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

There is that choice – to offer the Ram of Pride instead. To ask what we may learn. To look beyond our prejudices and even our right intentions. To learn from past consequences. To value those lives which war has destroyed. And to work to protect and guard human lives for the future.