QUARANTINE BLOG # 252

December 7, 2020

“Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:

YESTERDAY, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

“I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

The speaker was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, less than 24 hours after the receipt of the first news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, drove to the Capitol to deliver the message to a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Congress approved President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war on Japan with only one dissenter.  The vote was 82–0 in the Senate and 388–1 in the House.  

Jeannette Rankin (R), Representative from Montana, was the only member of either house of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan.  Representative  (later Senator) Everett Dirksen, asked her to change it to make the resolution unanimous – or at very least, to abstain – but she refused.  “As a woman I can’t go to war,” she said, “and I refuse to send anyone else ... I voted as the mothers would have had me vote.”

View from a Japanese plane as USS West Virginia is hit by a bomb

USS West Virginia hit by 6 torpedoes and 2 bombs during the attack

USS Arizona hit – 1,177 sailors and Marines died instantly

All eight of the U.S. Navy battleships were damaged.  Four were sunk.  All but USS Arizona were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war.  The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer.  A total of 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded.  

Oil still seeps up from the Arizona, as if the ship is crying

USS Arizona exploding after forward ammunition magazine hit

Since 1982, the U.S. Navy has allowed survivors of USS Arizona to be interred in the ship’s wreckage upon their deaths.  Following a full military funeral at the Arizona memorial, the cremated remains are placed in an urn and then deposited by divers beneath one of the Arizona’s gun turrets.  To date, more than 30 Arizona crewmen who survived Pearl Harbor have chosen the ship as their final resting place.

👉  Today’s sermon, from the Crawfordville Pulpit is, “The Grace of Repentance.”

👉  Second Monday in Advent

The New Song

“Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the end of the earth!  Let the sea roar and all that fills it, the coastlands and their inhabitants.  Let the desert and its towns lift up their voice, the villages that Kedar inhabits; let the inhabitants of Sela sing for joy, let them shout from the tops of the mountains” (Isaiah 42:10-11).

Can you imagine writing this poem and singing this song in exile?  Can you imagine defying the empire by sketching out this daring alternative?  Can you dare to sing this song under the very nose of Babylonian soldiers, about a new reality that counters the empire?  Think of it, new reality conjured in worship, by the choir, inviting to new courage, new faith, new energy, new obedience, new joy.

You see, the song is as subversive as is the new reality.  The new song never describes the world the way it now is.  The new song imagines how the world will be in God’s good time to come.  The new song is a protest against the way the world now is.  The new song is a refusal to accept the present world as it is, a refusal to believe this is right or that the present will last.  The church is always at its most daring and risking and dangerous and free when it sings a new song.  Because then it sings that the power of the gospel will not let the world finally stay as it is.

We are not unlike those ancient exiles, scattered where we do not have much impact, sensing that the world is resistant to change, aware that the policies and practices all around us are aimed at death.  We are close to despair in our weakness and futility.

About many things, it appears that not much can be done.  When this community of faith could do very little, however, it did not resign itself to playing it safe.  Instead, it sang new songs, counter songs that refused to let the promise of the gospel sink into the landscape of the empire.  The new song is a protest.  The new song is also a bold assertion, innocently declaring that the God of the gospel has plans and purposes and a will to reorder the world, to bring wholeness and health to the blind, the poor, the needy, to the nations so fearful, and to the entire creation now so under killing assault.  The song asserts God’s future against our present tense.

It is no wonder, once the singing begins, that all creation sings and dances and claps with us.  The whole of creation sings a new song about God’s new world.  Heaven and nature sing and earth repeats the loud amen.  We sing the song, even in exile, then we live the new reality.  The Babylonians cannot stop us, because the song is true and more powerful than the tearfulness of the world.  The exiles are indeed on their way – rejoicing.

In this Advent season, teach us the new song, which heralds the new world that is coming, the new reality that is taking shape before our eyes.  May we rejoice in its truth and power and join all creation in its loud amen!  Amen!

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