The artillery forces of the recently secceeded state of South Carolina fired at Fort Sumpter in the Harbor of Charleston for two days until the Union held fort finally surrendered. Almost exactly four years later, on April 9, 1865—Palm Sunday, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appamatox courthouse in Virginia marking the war’s end. In those four years, at least 618,000 Americans died in the conflict; one-third in battle and the other two-thirds of disease. More soldiers died in that conflict than in all others from the Revolution through Vietnam. It was an unspeakable tragedy, an organized and ideologically charged case of fratricide.

Why bring this up? Oddly enough, there are a lot of reasons to talk about the Civil War that are surprisingly relevent to our lives in 2011. Race is still a polarizing issue in our society. Big business can still exploit the poor and powerless for the sake of prosperity or the “greater good,” even if the key commodities have changed from King Cotton to Petroleum. We can blame the rich southern planters all we want, but northern factory owners depended on the cheap labor in the cotton fields for their profits. And by the way, slavery was not made illegal in Connecticut until 1848. The fact is, almost every one was complicit in the causes for the war—even the founding fathers who decided not to deal with the slavery issue in order to keep the new country together. Can you think of any issues that our recent and current national leaders have tried to sweep under the rug, only for it to come back and bite them? I thought so.

The lessons from those tragic four years are legion. I’d say that they are a testament to war’s ultimate uselessness. The great evil of slavery was abolished, even as its root—racism—remained  deeply entrenched. The other contributing wrongs are doing just fine as well.

Scroll back to the first Palm Sunday. It wasn’t a day of surrender like that day in Appomatox. Jesus rode into Jerusalem with crowds of followers hailing Him as Messiah. He would be the one who would kick out the lousy pagan Roman occupiers and set up the Kingdom of Israel again, so they thought. But no forts were bombarded that week—at least none that could be seen. A battle was faught, but it was a battle against what lay underneath both the cruelty and oppression of the Romans and the self-righteous oppression of the religious people, not to mention the complicity of the crowds and the cowardice of the disciples. The battle seemed to end in surrender before it even started. Jesus surrendered to the authorities and was executed without resistance.

But as the story unfolds, the layers of sin and self-will, the hypocrisy of religion, and the duplicity of politics are exposed and unmasked. In his surrender, Jesus takes on all their cruelty and absorbs them into himself on the cross without fighting back. We realize three days later that he wins.

We live in fractious times. As the rhetoric heats up and as the slings and arrows, verbal or literal begin to fly and before you take sides, remember Jesus and how he won.

Yours for the Journey,
Pastor Tom