I am reminded, as the war with Iraq unfolds, that our military is fighting on the same soil from which our spiritual ancestor Abraham came some four thousand years ago. As you may recall from the story in Genesis, God called Abraham from his home city of Ur – located right below the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Those are the same rivers we’re seeing on our television sets these days.

And in today’s Old Testament lesson, which recounts how the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 B.C. and the citizens who were not killed were taken into exile, it seems an amazing irony that the place they were taken into exile is the same place as modern day Iraq. The capital of the ancient Babylonian Empire was the city of Babylon – now just a bunch of mounds in the desert – but still located on the map some 50 miles south of Baghdad.

I think it becomes supremely important, then, that we take a good, hard look at this story we have today from the Second Book of Chronicles, given what is going on in our world today and given where it is going on.

The very first thing to consider, as we look back at this story, is that this is not a story about nation versus nation or the political desires of political leaders or even foreign policy. This, on the face of it, is a story about how God used war to accomplish his ultimate purposes. Believe me – it jars me too to say that and hear that – but I think we have to deal with the reality of what the scripture story – the whole of the scripture story – says, if we are to find the meaning that God intends for us to find.

The story of the Hebrew people is a true tale of the complete and utter faithfulness of God and the continuing and ongoing unfaithfulness of the people he has chosen, descendants from Abraham all, to be God’s light to the nations. You know from your own reading of the stories of the Old Testament that this is so. The people moan and complain in the wilderness after God has led them out of slavery in Egypt. They create a golden calf to worship instead of God while Moses is on Mt. Sinai receiving the gift of the Ten Commandments. The people want their own nation and their own leaders, desiring kings of Israel over God their king.

In essence, the Hebrew people have a continual struggle in their lives between their own desires and the desires they know God has for them. On the one hand, they want an ongoing relationship with God; they want God’s protection, love and care, but on the other hand, they want all that on their own terms.

Lest we get too carried away with condemning the Hebrew people for their ongoing unfaithfulness, perhaps we ought to remind ourselves of our own failures to live the lives that God intends for us to live. We too have difficulty in putting God first – above the desires of our hearts – above our own needs – above our own wants.

The story we hear today from 2 Chronicles recounts the history of God’s people at a particularly low point. As the scripture says, “All the leading priests and people also were exceedingly unfaithful. The Lord, the God of their ancestors, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place; but they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord against his people became so great that there was no remedy. Therefore he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans…”

What ensued was war. People of all ages were killed, the city was ruined, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and those that survived were taken as prisoners of war into exile in Babylon. And there they stayed, just as the God’s prophet Jeremiah had predicted, for a period of seventy years. But then, the story goes on to say, came a new beginning initiated by God. The scripture says: “…the Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia.” Cyrus had defeated the Babylonians and now ruled the land stretching from modern-day Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Israel. King Cyrus released the Jews from captivity, allowed them to travel home – perhaps on the same route Abraham himself had traveled – and authorized them to begin work on a new temple amid the rubble and ruins of the city of Jerusalem.

That is the story as scripture tells it. The story tells us that God caused the war. It also tells us that God brought new life out of war and devastation. But there’s another story underneath the scripture story, and that is the story of how the Jewish people understood, as they reflected back on their history, what had happened to them. They saw the loss of the temple, the loss of their homeland, and the loss of their freedom as resulting from their disobedience to God.

Nevertheless, God “causing” war as a means to ensure his people’s faithfulness doesn’t square with what I, and millions of other people, know to be true about God, despite the scripture story of how the Jews understood their history as a people. I don’t believe God causes war any more than I believe that God causes cancer. In fact, far from directing disasters to befall us, I believe God works in just the opposite fashion. Rather than willing suffering, I believe God works always to redeem suffering - bringing new initiatives to light, new possibilities to the surface, and new life out of the rubble and ruin we ourselves make of things and out of the disasters that befall us.

I believe that God continually stirs our spirits, as he stirred the spirit of Cyrus, King of Persia, to a better way, to better things, to better ends, and to a brighter future. I believe that God, as Paul says in the Letter to the Ephesians, is rich in mercy, that he continually is at work to save us from the mess we make of things by that mercy, and that in the death and resurrection of his Son lies the ultimate sign of God’s passion for new beginnings, new possibilities, new life.

I know that if we stopped - right here, right now - and just started up a discussion, we could tell each other our own stories of God bringing new beginnings and new life out of our own captivities, out of our own misguided notions, out of our own wrong actions. Paul entreats us, in his letter, to recognize the reality of God’s saving grace in Christ and to respond with “right actions for the welfare and peace of the world,” as one of our common prayers puts it.

Perhaps the best place to go from here is to remember the story told in John’s gospel today of the loaves and fishes. What sometimes gets missed in this story is that the miracle begins with the offer of a young boy of what he had to offer – a very meager five barley loaves and two fish. Out of the gift of what little the boy had, Christ made a miracle.

How different life would be today if you and I and everyone in the world took what we had – no matter how meager – and offered it to God to be used on behalf of others. Gretchen Wolff Pritchard writes: “The Savior does wonders – but he does them out of that little which we, his children, offer him in faith.”

The question for each of us to consider as we come to the altar rail this morning to receive again the miracle of the bread is what we have to offer Christ in thanksgiving. By the grace and gift of God we are saved. And in gratitude, we will come to the altar rail this morning with our saved souls and new lives; with the stirrings of our spirits, and the new beginnings he offers us. For those of us who wonder what possible difference we can make in this world, and for those of us who worry about the sheer number of people in the world today who suffer, the story of the loaves and fishes ought to come as a great relief. We aren’t going to be saved by our good works, for Christ has already saved us through his death and resurrection, but in grace-filled gratitude, we can offer whatever we have to be used for his good purposes. May our spirits be stirred to offer God what we have, knowing that with our offering, God will work wonders.

Amen.