War Songs and Peace Songs:

God speaks peace to his people.

(Psalm 85:9)

I’m still enjoying Songs of America by Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw. The story of America moves from war to war: Revolutionary War to War of 1812 to Mexican-American war to Trail of Tears to the Civil War. Each side, as Lincoln noted “Read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” We might add, each have their songs of triumph.

The turn of the twentieth century brings America into another war. Only this time the war is to be fought “over there”:

Over there, over there,

Send the word, send the word over there

That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming

The drums rum-tumming everywhere

So prepare, say a prayer,

Send the word send the word to beware—

We’ll be over, we’re coming over,

And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

It is rousing. The problem is, it’s never over “over there”.  My father blamed Roosevelt for getting us tangled up “over there”. “If we would have stayed out of Europe,” I remember dad explaining to me, “Fascism and Communism would have destroy each other.”

Maybe that’s why dad did everything he could to keep me, and my buddies, out of the Viet Nam war. It was one of those “over there” wars. That’s why he dated Gary and Janice’s wedding certificate by the date of the rehearsal rather than their actual wedding day—it had to do with the draft.  Just as the Viet Nam war had its protest songs, like CCR singing “I ain’t no Senator’s Son”; so too the Great War (WWI), I learned, had its protest songs, like this lament:

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,

I brought him up to be my pride and joy,

Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder?

To shoot some other mother’s darling boy.

Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,

It’s time to lay the sword and gun away,

There’d be no war today,

If mothers all would say,

“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.”

If mothers can’t put a stop to it; maybe, thought Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the brink of yet another world war, the church could. He spoke of it during the morning deviational that began an Ecumenical Youth Conference in Denmark. He spoke from from Psalm 85 – “God speaks peace to his people”:

Only the Holy Church of Christ over all the world can speak out so that the world, though it gnash its teeth, will have to hear, so that the peoples will rejoice because the Church of Christ in the name of Christ has taken the weapons from the hands of their sons, forbidden war, and proclaimed the peace of Christ against the raging world.

That didn’t work either. Christians once again went to war against Christians. Nationalism prevailed over Christendom.

Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, speaking from another Psalm—Psalm 19, speaks more of tragedy than triumph: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” War, as soldiers know best, is a “mighty scourge.” We can pray that this mighty scourge of war passes away; while at the same time honoring “those who gave,” as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “their last full measure of devotion… that this nation under God… shall not perish from the earth.”