Yesterday, in one of the gospel readings assigned for the 2nd Sunday in Lent, Jesus asks the following questions:
What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? (Mark 8:36,37)
This question is asked not only in a spiritual, personal sense about our desire for power, position or possession, but also in Jesus’ time in the geo-political context of the Roman Empire, where the PAX ROMANA, the peace of Rome, was underpinned by regular use of State violence to quash revolts by slaves or the subjugate the newly conquered and to fight brigands, bandits, pirates, and the like. Violence had become a state monopoly and any transgressors became enemies of the State.
In what is sometimes referred to as the Pax Atomica or Nuclear peace - the argument was made that under some circumstances, nuclear weapons could induce stability and decrease the chances of crisis escalation because of the potential for mutual assured destruction as a result of retaliatory attacks following a first strike.
Yet, this Nuclear peace was not just kept on the threat of nuclear war, but on the demonstrated violence of nuclear tests, carried out largely here in the Pacific.
While superpowers played their nuclear chess to a stalemate, the first people and sacred places of our Pacific were pawns, sacrificed and discarded - in the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Maohi Nui and Australia.
Today we join our hearts as wansolwara, one people of the salt water called Pacific, which has seen the most violence humans can inflict, through atomic and nuclear tests.
The cry of our sisters and brothers from the northern pacific is echoed in the east, in the west and reverberates over the coral atolls and up to the highlands.
In the name of God, let us receive this cry, let us receive the groaning of creation poisoned and destroyed, let us lend our voice to this cry, the cry for justice, just peace.
I invite you to join hands, as we join our hearts, minds, our souls with the divine, with all creation and our sisters and brothers to let them know we are not alone.
Hear our hearts o God, as we cry unto you.
Hear our hearts o God, as we share the pain of our sisters and brothers, a legacy of suffering not their own making.
We wait o God for mercy and truth to meet together;
We wait o God for righteousness and peace to kiss.
Turn the rain of nuclear fallout, the current of nuclear waste into rolling waters of justice and ever-flowing streams
of righteousness for victims and survivors of nuclear testing across the solwara, the moana, the wasawasa.
Bind us together o God in the cords of love for one another as members of your Pacific Household.
Weave our lives, our hearts together in your peace, and by your grace, guide us one family to remember our collective history, to struggle together in our collective present, and dream and work together for our collective legacy.
We pray this in the name of your love incarnated, of peace manifested and in whose broken body we find healing and new life, Jesus the Christ. Amen.
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