An oil that will never run out

Where do we get our oil? How do we keep our batteries charged? When the wait gets long, how do we sustain ourselves and keep going?

There’s something about Remembrance Day that feels to me like waiting. Every year, we wear poppies and do ceremonies like this morning; and while it is an act of remembering the fallen and honouring those who served, it’s also a promise we make to them and to ourselves to make sure their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. We commit ourselves to the cause of peace and the end of all war. At least, that’s what I’m doing in my heart, and it’s what the poppy means to me.

But it feels like I’m holding my breath. Like every year, I wait for the world to listen; wait for our leaders to take the Remembrance Day promises seriously; wondering, “Is this the year when there will finally be peace?” As the generations go by, and we are more and more removed from the horrors of the First and Second World Wars, I worry that our commitment to peace wanes, that the oil is burning out. When Departments of Defence are renamed Departments of War, it seems apparent that the idea of war is losing its repugnancy. Simply being afraid of war wasn’t enough to keep us from repeating wars. In this struggle for peace, it looks like we’re running out of oil.

In his book On Consolation, Michael Ignatieff wonders a similar thing. Reviewing some of the poet philosophers who emerged from the wars, he writes:

“We were their consolation. When they compared verses on death marches, when they remembered poetry in the camps, when they memorialized all those who had kept vigil in the cold, they were sustained by the hope that we — the succeeding generations — would ensure that they had not spoken truth in vain. They were consoled by the thought that we would remember them. But have we?”

Ignatieff is really just saying, if perhaps in a few more words, the same thing John McCrae says when he writes,

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.

Wanting to inspire us today, wanting to reinvigorate our arms so we hold the torch higher, I turned to a book on my shelf about the experience of Indigenous women in the Second World War. It’s called Our Women in Uniform, written here in Alberta. I don’t know where or when I got this book, but I’ve saved it for just this sort of Sunday: a Sunday where I’ll want to share stories of how terrible war is so that you’ll take up arms to prevent it. Surely this group of local Indigenous veterans would have some powerfully sad and tragic tales to tell us about war?

However… a lot of these women had a blast. The way they talk and reminisce about the war, you’d think they were at a party. They’re not making light of the struggles and pain, but for many of them, the war opened up new opportunities. They left their communities and made new friends; some found husbands, some travelled the world. They faced racism and misogyny in the army, yes, but that’s no different from any other day in their lives. At least here, they were paid and respected. As it did for many women, Indigenous or not, the war forced society to challenge the gender and racial stereotypes that boxed them in. Those barriers would soon be restored once the war was over, but these women had a taste that the world could be different. And in this book about Indigenous women veterans of Alberta, they recount most this moment of freedom.

The same phenomenon is documented, by the way, in Allan Bérubé’s classic book, Coming Out Under Fire. In the Second World War, the military was particularly obsessed with weeding out any homosexual recruits. But ironically, their invasive questioning would be the first time that many young men heard the word “homosexual” and realized that there were others out there who felt just like them. Instead of stamping out homosexuality, the Second World War became a major reason it flourished, and naval ports in New York and San Francisco became cultural meccas. The war was bad, yes, but I suppose it had, for some, a silver lining.

Ah. This is where it’s more complicated, and why I think the oil of resisting war is burning out. I think we got focused on the wrong thing. Simply saying “war is awful” doesn’t capture what really happened and doesn’t inspire us to behave differently. Instead of looking at the negative side of it, what if we captured the essence of that “silver lining”?

Think back to the pandemic. It was dreadful. I would never wish for that to happen again. Our hospitals were overwhelmed, millions died, and we couldn’t even be at their bedside. As awful as that all was, though, do you remember also the stillness and quiet? The way it made people re-evaluate what’s important in life? There were times in that dreadful pandemic when we got little glimpses of a world that could be different. Some of us dared to dream that, when life went back to normal, society could be better. That perhaps we could care for each other, perhaps we could operate differently? It gave us a different vision of the world.

This is what Indigenous women veterans felt, this is what gay military service members felt — a small glimpse that the world could be different. It was as short-lived a spark as our pandemic dreaming, but it lit a fire that never stopped burning. For people marginalized by society, they now had a vision of what life could be for future generations; it’s a hope lit on an oil that never runs out.

In Jesus’ parable today, he warns us to keep our lamps burning, keep our hopes up. But to do that, we need oil. We don’t get that metaphoric oil by focusing on the negative. You don’t inspire anyone by telling them what not to do. And we know from experience that you don’t prevent war by saying war is bad. There’s not oil enough in those approaches.

It’s kind of like training your dog not to bark. For a lot of us, when the dog starts barking, so do we. We yell at it to be quiet, and the dog simply thinks you’re joining along in the fun, and the shouting match gets louder and louder. Have you been trapped in that cycle? The trick is not to yell at your dog to stop barking, but instead to gently redirect it. Teach your dog to do something positive instead, like coming to you. (The same trick works on kids, by the way, which is why spanking is completely unnecessary.)

Oil that sustains, oil that keeps us going in the long run, will not come from negativity; it doesn’t come from being yelled at. Instead, it comes from hope. It comes by pointing our vision towards something we hope for.

Let me give you a few examples. If you have a student in your life, you might know the stresses of getting assignments done, papers in, tests studied for. Perhaps you’ve yelled at them for not finishing work on time, or grounded them when they get bad reports from school, and you’re at your wits’ end. You’ve been using a stick to push them over the finish line of graduation, and it’s exhausting, isn’t it? But then, your student finds something they love, and suddenly they find endless energy to do it. If they get a vision of what they want to do in life, the motivation flows effortlessly. They can jump any hurdle, if they know and can see what it is they are racing towards.

The same goes for you. If we’re in a job just because we need a paycheque, then that energy burns out fast. But if you cast a vision for what God wants your life to be, that sends you down different paths. You might still be doing the same job, but you’re reminded that your life — God’s life for you — is bigger than your job. The job is just the way God is providing, but God’s vision for you is bigger. That’s where your real energy will come from.

Weight-loss programs that focus on how fat you are last for as long as your New Year’s resolutions. The negativity will shame you, but the effectiveness of shame is short-lived. For real change, we need visions of our lives that go beyond our looks. Visions of what our life can be when we move more freely and do the activities that inspire us. Visions like dancing the tango for your 60th wedding anniversary.

The oil that sustains us, the energy that inspires real change, needs a wick that’s soaked in hope. This is the vision Jesus is giving. He inspired his disciples, both then and now, with a dream of what the world could be: a place where people are healed, where swords are turned into ploughshares, where enemies and strangers are loved as friends, where mistakes are forgiven seventy times seven, where no one goes hungry or thirsty, where we are all one household of God. This isn’t just a vision of the afterlife; this is a vision for this life, this world. Jesus’ disciples are called to preach this Good News and to make it happen, to be a community where these visions are lived out, a light for the world burning from an oil that won’t go out. If there is to be peace in this world, it comes from us casting that vision of hope.

Remembrance Day needs to be not just remembering the horrors of war, or simply promising that we will never let it happen again, but remembering why we light this candle of peace. We are shining an example of what the world could be: a place where no one knows the sound of bombs, where no one ever needs to flee their homes; a place where we all are given life in fullness. The torch has been thrown to us, but its light will be sustained by our faith in the vision cast by Jesus, a vision of a new heaven and earth and a home for all. That is an oil that will never run out.

Amen.