Speaking up in such a time might mean the death of Esther. To come into the presence of the king without first having been invited was automatic grounds for summary execution – the only “out” for such a person was if the king held out his golden scepter. Yet Esther courageously accepted that risk in order to save her people, to stave off a war which would have wiped out the Jews.

We, also, live in a time when military might is threatened to be unleashed on defenseless people – indeed, more than threatened, when it has been and continues to be unleashed. The world is haunted by the specter of Osama bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist who has proclaimed a mission of destruction of the United States – and indeed, of the entire West – and who has made good on his threats not only on September 11, 2001, but in other acts of terrorism both before and since. And yet military threats to the world’s people are by no means limited to bid Laden and Islamic fundamentalists: rival militias tear apart Iraq; Iran and North Korea pose potential nuclear threats; Hezbollah and Hamas continue to struggle with Israel; Tamil militants and Sri Lankan armed forces steadily chip away at that country’s tattered cease-fire agreement; the Sudan and Somalia continue under the sway of murdering war-lords.

And once again, what is lacking, it seems, are people of courage like Esther, people who might step forward in a time such as this and call us back from unleashing armies of destruction. People of courage, who might open our eyes to see how we have unconsciously slid into thinking that war is the answer to our problems, the solution to the difficult challenges that confront us. People of courage, who might alert us once again to war’s ancient power of seduction, to how we have been dulled in our capacity to think critically about the actual limits of military power.

For we have been lulled into thinking, like Haman long ago, that it is in the realm of military affairs that will be found the solution to vexing problems – whether it be that of unstability in the Middle East, which threatens access to the oil we need; whether it be that of rival tribes in Darfur, using famine and terror as a weapon against each other; whether it be the problem of drug manufacturing in South America, fueling drug use on American streets.

It has not always been this way, at least not in this country. Prior to 9/11, American presidents routinely insisted the United States went to war only as a last resort. As James Madison wrote in 1795, “of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” There was a widespread consensus that war is inherently poisonous, with all sorts of problematic consequences, and that military power is something that democracies ought to treat gingerly.

According to many, 9/11 rendered this mindset obsolete, made that history of wariness of military power and foreign entanglements outdated; now we must shoot first, even if going to war is based on inconclusive or fragmentary evidence -- as Condoleeza Rice remarked, “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” But the depth to which this is a new, shared national consensus is evidenced by the fact that Mr. Bush’s Democratic rivals for the presidency in 2004 framed their differences with him in terms of tactics rather than on principles: John Kerry faulted Bush not for his embrace of a unilateral, generations long, open-ended “war on terror”, but for his tactical errors in that war, for using too few troops, and poorly equipped ones at that. The truth of the matter is that this country’s growing emphasis on the use of war as the preferred tool to solve problems is embraced by both the Right and the Left – in fact, it is from the Left, from “liberal do-gooders”, that come the most strident calls for the deployment of military troops in such places as Darfur.

Our national addiction to war can be measured not just anecdotally, but in other ways as well. I think it was Billy Graham who once said, “Give me five minutes with a person’s check book, and I will tell you where their heart is.” It works the same way with national budgets. In 2005, annual military spending, combined, for Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Sudan was $14 billion; for Russia, $62 billion; for China, $63 billion; for the United States, $522 billion. (International Institute for Strategic Studies, Department of Defense, cited in Christian Century 9/5/06 p.7). Prior to the invasion of Iraq, proponents of the war refused to tell the America what the tab would run, eventually conceding that the whole shooting match would come in around $60-$90 billion. We are now spending $2 billion per week, with a total cost to date – with no end in sight – of $318 billion dollars. (I don’t know about you, but I cannot even imagine a number that big – another way to look at that is to ask what portion of that is attributable to the Town of Barnstable – currently, that figure stands at $61 million.)

And yet the problem with this slide to an increasing militarism is that war has unintended consequences. War, once unleashed, has a momentum all its own. This has always been the case, and yet, in modern times, with the advent of the so-called “smart bombs”, with the “cutting edge” technology that fill our tanks and jet fighters and warships, we tend to forget this. To the modern mind, dulled by promises of “surgical strikes” and easy “shock and awe” victories, war can be as antiseptic and detached as a videogame, as predictable in outcome as a mathematical algorithm.

But is war such a good bet, such a sure thing, so predictable and certain? Two recent experiences call this assumption into question.

Over the last 50 years the Israeli Army has been considered to set the gold-standard for an elite, focussed, precision and unstoppable fighting machine. This past summer, two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by Lebanon-based Hezbollah; in a pre-planned response, Israel launched a massive bombing campaign on Lebanon, bombing targets throughout the country. And yet Hezbollah resistance surprised Israel and it allies; to their surprise, the massive bombing campaign, with its killing of thousands of civilians and destruction of their homes and villages, not only failed to defeat Hezbollah, it strengthened it. As former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzenzinski warned, “The radicalization of the Arab masses is going to become more pervasive, the sympathy for Hezbollah more extensive and, as a consequence, the prospects for a favorable outcome beyond some sort of ad hoc solution will be reduced.” (Cited in Christian Century, Sept. 5, 2006, p.61). Israel miscalculated: -instead of eliminating the terrorist threat, war enhanced it.

As it was for Lebanon, so it has been for Iraq. The invasion of Iraq – an invasion supported by both major political parties in this country, by both Republican and Democrat leaders alike – was touted as a necessary step in the war on terror. In a post-9/11 world, we were told, we had to wage war against dictators and terrorists “over there” lest they strike us over here, we had to depose a brutal dictator lest he cooperate with and arm terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. And yet according to the intelligence estimate released this past week, the Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat. The Iraq war, instead of eliminating the terrorist threat, has increased it. All at the cost to date of more U.S. military personnel deaths than civilian deaths on 9/11, all at the cost of over 20,000 wounded men and women of our armed services, all at the cost of $318 billion dollars.

And all that is only on the American side of the ledger. Over this past summer, more Iraqi civilians died violent deaths each month – deaths from car-bombings and kidnappings, many involving gruesome torture involving acid and power drills – more Iraqi civilians died each month this summer than American civilians were killed on 9/11.

If the purpose of the war was to bring stability and democracy to Iraq, it has been a failure. If the purpose of the war was to endear ourselves to the Iraqi people through our overthrowing of a dictator – remember all that talk about being greeted as liberators? – again, it has been a failure, a failure reinforced every time an American soldier is targeted by a roadside bomb, every time Iraqis hide a sniper.

In each case, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Afghanistan before them, war has not been the promised panacea; indeed, war has created conditions that threaten even more grievous catastrophes to follow. This is not to say that in each case the option to go to war was misguided – what it is to say is that each case has proven the truth of the ancient dictum, honored for centuries by the people of this nation and its leaders, that war is always a chancy affair, a messy business, far from the guarantee of the successful outcome we might wish for, something to be avoided except as a last resort. The columnist James Carroll puts it this way: We “have been at the mercy of the same illusion, that the hammer of military force is the tool to use against every threat. To oppose the rush to war is not to the deny that threats are real, but only to insist that war is as likely to exacerbate the threat as to eliminate it.” (Boston Globe 2006, date uncertain).

Friends, Karl Rove for the Republicans and Nancy Pelosi for the Democrats would be happy to place the blame for wars’ debacles on each other, and in fact they spend a lot of time and money, together with their national organizations, doing just that. But I would argue that the problem goes much deeper than partisan politics, much deeper than who is sitting in the White House or on Capitol Hill. To paraphrase the Bard of Avon, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not with them and not with the stars, but with us, with a people and with a nation and with a world seduced by war and its false promises.

“In a time such as this”, in a time when her people were faced with the gravest of threats, with destruction, murder and annihilation, Esther was called out of her anonymity and reticence to boldly and publicly act, to risk even her life, that her people might be saved. “In a time such as this”, in a time when we face threats from without and from within, from Islamic fundamentalists who would strike us again and from a creeping militarism which convinces us that our salvation lies only in a war without end, that our redemption consists only of the use of military force, that abundant life consists of finding better ways at sowing death, we too are called out of our placidity, our comfort, our security, to find a new and better way forward.

What is that way forward? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I believe that you likely have some inklings of what may be involved. We know, for instance, that we have a rich tradition to draw from in this country that views war as a last resort.

We know that our dependency on oil, and particularly on foreign oil, is at the heart of the current conflict, that without that dependence we would not be so entangled in the Middle East, that without our oil revenues the terrorists’ revenue stream would dry up.

We know that conservation is not a four-letter word, that we as a nation might have to sacrifice some of our motoring freewheeling ways to end that dependency – and we know that in the past the American people have demonstrated the willingness to make such sacrifices if called upon to do so.

We know that our military spending is out of control, while at the same time our giving of foreign aid to developing countries is lagging – on a per-capita basis, the United States trails almost every other developed nation in terms of assistance to developing countries.

We know that our support of non-democratic regimes in the Middle East (such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt), and our refusal to encourage them to modernize and share the wealth with their peoples, fuels resentment of the United States and furnishes a fertile breeding ground for bin Laden and his ilk. We know, deep in our hearts, that it is unjust and unfair that a subset of the American public, drawn primarily from the least educated and most economically disadvantaged among us, are the ones who bear the burden of military service and the consequent loss of life and limb. And we know, as people called to follow the Prince of Peace, that even as we might properly look after the safety and security of ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors and our country, we also are called to love of neighbor, and yes, even love of our enemy.

Friends, because of the courageous acts of Esther, Esther and her people were turned from sorrow into gladness and from mourning into a holiday, enjoying a day of feasting and gladness. This morning, we anticipate such a day not only for ourselves, but for all peoples all around the world, as we gather around this table to celebrate World Communion Sunday. May we come to this table not in resignation and not in fear, but in the confidence that God’s will shall be done, on earth as it is heaven; may we come to this table in the hope that the God who defeated death itself on the cross shall defeat our warring madness; may we come to this table in the faith that God will pour out God’s abundant power upon us, granting us wisdom and the courage for a time such as this. -------