Rip Up 2

Up until that point in time that Billy Sunday began actively deriding Christians that believed in peace and not war Christians would go to war with a heavy heart. They knew that they were doing wrong but they knew they had a job to do that had to be done. When those soldiers and sailors returned from some such duties, their churches and their neighbors would open their arms and doors to them and welcome them back.
They would be congratulated and loved and honored for what they had done –what they had given up and sacrificed in order to preserve our union, our strength and our gallant nation.
When Billy Sunday began his vicious oratory and actually had military recruiting stations set up outside his tabernacles where he was preaching the line between church and state was crossed.
Billy Sunday once had a 16 year old Billy Graham in his audience – Sunday’s shrieking paranoia frightened the young Billy Graham – frightened him so much that the scared young boy has turned into a frightened old man. He is churning out the same message of hatred and anger and militarism disguised as faith that Sunday did.
It is time to rip up the line of hatred that was sown during World War I. It is time to rip up the clinging and grasping association of evangelical churches to our government. It is time to rip up the regimentation provided by the military which turns men into killing machines but is not able to turn them back into men.
A Christian can never be a soldier first.
Sometimes a Christian needs to suspend Christian beliefs and take up soldierly duties – but a Christian will never do those things willingly that a soldier needs to do.
When a man or woman returns to home – and this has happened more often since Korea and Vietnam – they never really come home. They are always in battle. There is no harbor for them to find shelter from the blasting winds of guilt or from the raging fires of fear.
They were sent off from their churches – who ‘remember’ them, and who ‘support’ them and who pretend they never really left and that all is well in the world.
It is time to rip up the paranoia and the shrill hatred that sends these men off to war and has no means of bringing them back.
The way things are now these men and women in Iraq will come back with their minds and souls shredded and many Christians will want to help them but they will find it to be impossible – because after all – they are Christian soldiers and can take care of themselves – all they need do is accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Men and women that joined the National Guard to find something interesting to do in their boring lives or to earn money for school were sent into the military and accepted there as doing their Christian duty.
Your Christian duty is to be a good Christian – not to earn money for school or fill in your spare time playing with guns.
So – there is a big job ahead of us.
This field of ours is filled with weeds – the weeds of hatred, and neglect, and sorrow, deceit and lies.
We must clear this field in the manner that we know in our hearts is the correct way.
We must clear out these noxious weeds and plant and let grow kindness, sincerity, forgiveness, patience, charity and love.
Else we shall all die of starvation and our churches will fall to the earth like so much powder – to be taken up by the mighty and the violent and stuffed into cannons that they will turn upon us in our homes.
There is a great work to do.