Abu Ghraib and the Mind of the Trinity

Duke University Chapel

ABU GHRAIB AND THE MIND OF THE TRINITY

Sermon by Fleming Rutledge                                            Trinity Sunday, June 6, 2003

 

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth...He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.   (John 16:12-15)

 

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Two Sundays ago, Dr. Willimon, the formidable preacher who usually occupies this pulpit, delivered a sermon (somewhere on the road) dealing with the question, Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? He and I talked on the phone about this last week. He told me that in the course of the sermon he said that he did not really understand the God of the Muslims very well, so he was not going to speak about that. What was far more important, he thought, was whether we American Christians understand our own God.

 

Dr. Willimon was thinking about recently disclosed events in Iraq when he said that. Today, your visiting preacher is still thinking about recent events in Iraq. It is known that many, if not most, of the American soldiers involved in the abuse at the prison of Abu Ghraib define themselves as Christians. A few days ago a news article reported that one of the most notorious of these soldiers, Charles Graner, told a comrade that “the Christian in me says it’s wrong [to treat the prisoners this way],” but then he added that as a corrections officer he enjoyed it.[1] It seemed that he had two selves, the Christian self and the MP self, and the two selves were not speaking to one another.

 

            Here is another story from the news last week. “An Iraqi police officer named Ameed Saeed al-Sheikh said that guards [at Abu Ghraib] forced him to eat pork and drink liquor...A hostility toward Islam coursed through much of the abuse. ‘They ordered me to curse Islam, and because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion...they ordered me to thank Jesus that I’m alive. And I did what they ordered me.’”[2]

 

Anyone who knows and loves our Lord Jesus must be deeply, painfully grieved and distressed by this. Anyone here today who is a Christian believer must feel this as almost a physical blow against everything that our Christian faith stands for. And yet this is an old, old story, isn’t it? This is the sort of thing that happened in centuries past, when so-called “Christian” armies overran populations and forced them to convert at sword’s point. When Ottoman soldiers marched north into Romania in 1476, a horrific sight met their eyes; scores of their comrades were spiked on poles along the roadside on the orders of a “Christian” prince, Vlad the Impaler.[3]

 

I preach all around the United States, even more than Dr. Willimon does, so I am present at worship services every week in every kind of mainline church, large and small. Ever since the war started I have noticed that whereas almost all these parish churches have prayers for the American armed forces, few have prayers for Iraqi civilians, and almost none for Iraqi enemies. What does this say about our knowledge of our own God? Was it not Jesus who said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you...Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:27-8, 36, emphasis added). I wonder if things would be different if more churches in West Virginia and Pennsylvania had been praying for the Iraqi civilians, and praying that the hearts and minds of our enemies would be turned, and praying that God would deliver America not only from evil without but from evil within.

 

Maj. Gen. George W. Fay and a 29-member team have been conducting an internal Army investigation of Abu Ghraib, and some of their preliminary findings were released a few days ago. They focused on specific Army units that had served not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan. Most people, when interviewed about misconduct involving themselves or their group, will be defensive, truculent or evasive, but there were at least a few who were willing to talk to Gen. Fay’s team. One MP, a member of the 377^th Military Police Unit based in Cincinnati, testified that the Afghan prison where he was posted was operating outside the Geneva Conventions and that this had created an unhealthy attitude in the detention center. He said, “We were pretty much told that they [the prisoners] were nobodies, that they were just enemy combatants...a lot of it was based on racism, really. We called them hajis, and that psychology was really important.”[4].

 

How familiar this is. It begins on the playground at elementary school. The “popular” kids assign cruel names to the unpopular ones, and it goes downhill from there as the “nerds” and “dorks” (and whatever is the nasty name of the moment) become targets for ridicule, ostracism and bullying. It is only a short distance from there to calling Vietnamese “geeks” and “slopes,” and from there to “ragheads” and “hajis.” The way you give yourself permission to mistreat another person is to call him or her a nobody. That psychology is really important.

 

Today is Trinity Sunday. The Three Persons of the blessed Trinity work together as one, for they are One. There is no split within the Trinity. When our Lord says, “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful,” he links himself to the Father and the Father to us, so that the Christian takes on the character of the Father just as he himself is the presence of the Father with us. The descent of the Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, upon the Church at Pentecost (last Sunday) is the great final manifestation that completes the earthly work of the Second Person, the Son of the Father. Here is something that Jesus said about that. Notice how all three Persons are woven together in this saying:

 

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth...He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you.   (John 16:12-15)

 

The Holy Spirit will glorify the Son. What belongs to the Father belongs also to the Son, and the Spirit will take what belongs to the Father and the Son and make it come alive in us, we who are the community that confesses faith in the name of Jesus Christ. “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” We reflect the character of our three-personed God into the world.

 

In view of some of the things that have been going on in the name of this Christian country¾or, at the least, this country that is perceived as Christian by the Muslim world¾in view of these things, it would seem that the Spirit has not been very active lately in making the merciful Father known among us. In Ephesians there is a passage urging us, Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption (Ephesians 4:5). Well, as soon as a human being is called a nobody and treated as a nobody, the Holy Spirit of God has been grieved.

 

One of the things of Christ (“what is mine”) that the Spirit teaches is a clear view of human nature. You will remember, perhaps, the Time magazine “Person of the Year,” January 2004¾only five months ago. How long ago it seems. The Person of the Year was the American soldier. Inside the issue, there are many pages of photographs and paintings showing young military men and women doing admirable things. One painting in particular shows a young woman soldier. She is looking out at the viewer with a clear, direct gaze. She is wearing a helmet, but she is beautiful. She looks calm and determined, resolute and trustworthy. Now, only five months later, that picture has morphed into the new face of American female soldierhood, and I don’t just mean Private Lynddie England. There are three¾three!¾female officers who are involved in tolerating or encouraging the abuse of prisoners, ranking from Captain to Brigadier General.[5]

 

The person who wrote the cover story about the American soldier as Person of the Year is Nancy Gibbs, an excellent writer whom I admire. She is also a practicing Christian. I wonder what she thinks about her article now. I went back and scrutinized it carefully. It is a highly idealized view of the soldiers, depicting them as virtuous, loyal and brave¾a breed apart. She writes, “They are the face of America, its might and good will.”[6] The face of America looks quite different now. Not even the wall-to-wall coverage of the 60^th anniversary of D-Day, not even the stream of sunny, upbeat clips of Ronald Reagan making us feel good about ourselves[7] can blot out the images from Abu Ghraib¾and we have yet to see the worst of them.

 

Only four months after the Person of the Year cover story, this same Time magazine writer was required to put out another article, entitled, “Their Humiliation (meaning the prisoners’ humiliation) and Ours.” It is a very hard-hitting piece, with particular emphasis on the women soldiers and officers who were involved. The two articles combined and contrasted make quite a picture. One line in the first article caught my attention the second time around. She wrote, “It may be that idealism requires naïveté to survive, because no war ever goes as planned.” In a sense, with that sentence, she has covered herself. It’s almost as though she knew that a lot of what she was writing was too good to be true.

 

As Christians we need to be realists about human nature, not idealists. We need to renounce naïveté. Human nature crucified the Son of God. That is what human nature is capable of. As the romantic portraits of the soldiers were being painted for Time last December, at that very moment the worst abuses were taking place at Abu Ghraib, some of it on Christmas Eve.

 

Of course, most of us think of ourselves and our friends as beyond or above such things. We prefer to stick with the argument that it was just a few bad apples. But the Christian view of human nature is that we are all bad apples; that is why Jesus was tortured to death, a victim of the worst we could do. We must recognize that there is not one among us who can say for sure what we would do in a similar situation. Here is what one social scientist said: “People have a natural need to express dominance but few of us ever get the opportunity. There is often a wild rush and the person perpetrating the act gets a high. People who do this sort of thing would normally be reasonably civilized. You can’t dismiss them as psychopaths. They are like you and me.”[8]

 

There have been a significant number of articles examining the fact that so few soldiers protested or reported the terrible events. Over and over we hear the same refrain: “I was afraid that I would lose my job.” “I was afraid that my buddies would turn against me.” Those are very reasonable fears. We can understand them. It takes more bravery sometimes to be a whistle-blower than it does to run across a minefield. One young man who was brave like that was Specialist Joseph M. Darby, 24 years old, from Maryland, who was the one that finally alerted investigators. Two months after the episodes he came forward to testify. “I knew I had to do something. I didn’t want to see any more prisoners being abused because I knew it was wrong.”[9]

 

I assume that there are a lot of parents and grandparents here today, and if you aren’t a parent you may have nephews and nieces, or godchildren, or students. One of the most important responsibilities in our lives is the formation of young people’s character. Surely we can all rededicate ourselves to this basic Christian truth: Nobody is “a nobody.” Jesus Christ was crucified as a nobody for the precise purpose of bringing the nobodies of the world into the embrace of the Father. If Christians do not embody that, the name of Christian becomes meaningless. There is no child who cannot understand that nobody is a nobody. Christian habits begin early in life; Christian habits teach us that just because someone is not like you and your friends does not make it all right to treat them as your inferior, let alone as your punching bag. There will be times when we, and our children, and our grandchildren, and our students will be in a position like that of Specialist Darby, a position to step forward and help to protect someone else, or refuse to go along with the crowd that has put its Christian identity in a box somewhere so they can abuse someone else. It can be the hardest thing in the world to go against the crowd, but that kind of courage is what makes disciples of Christ.

 

It is better not to have heroes, because every hero who ever lived¾except One¾was flawed and sinful just like the rest of us; but it is good, very good, to have someone to admire and emulate, and that person’s example gives you courage. And there is not one of us here today who cannot serve as an example for some one else. This is what the Holy Spirit does, because he is the Spirit of truth, and when someone stands up and says, this is wrong, that glorifies Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

A realistic view of human nature requires us to see that there is a split within us. St. Paul calls that split the Flesh and the Spirit, “the old Adam” and “the new man,” the “new person.” You may have heard old-timers say if someone behaved badly, “That’s the old Adam in him.” When the Spirit is at work within us that split begins to recede. We begin to become integrated persons, so that we begin to see the split within ourselves becoming reconciled with the Spirit of truth.

 

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth...He will glorify me...the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you....” Let us be confident that the Lord meant what he said. He is glorified when anyone who believes in him renounces the ways of evil. There are things we cannot do for ourselves, like loving our enemies, but the Spirit can do that in us. Let us have confidence in what he will do with us, with you, and with your children and with your students, and with your grandchildren and your friends and even with your enemies and my enemies, because the Son who prayed for his enemies is the same Son who promises that the Spirit will take what is his, the Father’s mercy, and give it to us. The Spirit will guide us into the truth and will glorify Christ in our common life. And may the knowledge of his love for you give you gladness today and into the life of the eternal age, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

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A prayer:

 

O Lord, we pray for the soul of the United States, known all around the world for freedom and opportunity. We beseech you, strengthen what is right and true, reform what is false and wrong, purify what is cruel and heartless and give us the grace to know when we are in error. Give moral courage to all Christians serving in the armed forces. Help us to see what is good in those who are presently our enemies, and turn the hearts of those who plan evil. Grant wisdom and insight to our leaders and do not let us fall away from the ideals that would make America not only mighty, but good. In the power of the Holy Spirit, who together with you and our Lord Jesus Christ reigns for ever and ever, Amen.