Bobby Joe phoned yesterday. Bobby Joe (spelled J-o-e) is a woman -- one of Maggie’s cousins in Virginia. She was named after her great uncle, Robert Joseph Lyon. I answered the phone. “Bruce, this is Bobby Joe. I have wonderful news to share. Is Margaret Lewis there?” Margaret Lewis, you might guess, is my wife, Maggie. She was named after her mother, Margaret, and her father, Lewis Lyon. (To some, Kentucky is still a western county of Virginia, even if it did remain officially neutral during the Civil War.)

Now, since this was supposed to be wonderful news, Maggie asked if she could turn on the speaker phone so I could hear it, too. Bobby Joe, age seventy-nine, married a week ago yesterday! I then listened for ten delightful minutes as the two Southern belles repeatedly addressed each other as Bobby Joe and Margaret Lewis. “Oh, Bobby Joe! That’s wonderful!” “Oh, isn’t it, Margaret Lewis?!”  Margaret Lewis asked if Bobby Joe had our email address: “Just a minute,” Bobby Joe replied, “while I get a pe-en.”

Southerners usually talk that way, you know: they make one syllable into two. When I first got to Kentucky, I was in my secretary’s office when her sister entered and they began talking about a parishioner they called Joey. “Look,” I said. “I’ve only been here a couple of weeks, but I’ve gone over the parish directory several times and we don’t have a Joey.” “Sure we do,” they answered in unison. “Joey Breckenridge!” “Oh, you mean Joy!” “Right! Joey! As in ‘Joey to the world’!”

By now, you can guess my dirty little secret: I’m a Southern sympathizer. But I’m also a Son of Union Veterans: my Great-great Uncle Thomas Manning Burnham was mortally wounded on Kennesaw Mountain. Furthermore, as you begin to wonder where my loyalties lie, I was the Chaplain of the Louisville Civil War Round Table, where some of my dearest friends were Sons of Confederate Veterans. My loyalties lie, I hope you believe, with Jesus Christ, whose ambassadors we are for reconciliation. “…this is from God,” says St. Paul. God “reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” And then Paul elaborates: “…in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” (2 Cor 5:18-19 passim) 

You must wonder what I’m doing, talking about the Civil War so close to the Fourth of July. I ought to be talking about the War for Independence! Well, maybe. But this sermon was suggested by the choir’s desire to sing something patriotic today, and they chose the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I’m not sure why. Maybe because God plays a more prominent role in it than in so much other patriotic music we might sing.

At any rate, I don’t fault the choir for their choice. Whether that matters to them or not, this  might: Anne McConney, the music columnist for Episcopal Life, wrote in this month’s issue, “I love the grand old songs that get dusted off once a year. Maybe I’ll even get to hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Well, at least we will. But let’s hear it with reference to today’s Gospel. It begins, “When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” By “taken up,” Luke of course means Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. However, this first means his self-sacrifice on the cross. It first means his anguish in Gethsemane, where Luke says Jesus’ “sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” When Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem, he knows this will likely entail drinking the cup he prays his Father might remove from him.

With that in mind, picture the November, 1861 setting in which Julia Ward Howe was moved to compose her text. A Boston Abolitionist, she was with the Rev. James Freeman Clarke at a Union encampment in northern Virginia. They heard the soldiers singing John Brown’s Body, their marching song, and Clarke challenged her to write patriotic verse for the stirring tune. Up to the challenge and inspired by the sight of “the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,” Howe penned the words so many of us know by heart:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the

    grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His

    terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

Julia Ward Howe, besides being an Abolitionist, was an ardent Unitarian. In fact, she was an Abolitionist because she was a Unitarian. Her faith informed her sense of justice. Slavery was assuredly unjust in the mind of one who believed Christ died not only to make men holy, but also to make them free.

Justice. This is what Anne McConney sees to be the Battle Hymn’s theme. “The Battle Hymn,” she writes, “isn’t about warfare. It’s about justice.” But this is putting a very positive spin on a hymn that includes the line, “I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel…” The “burnished rows of steel” are cannons and muskets and bayonets and swords. That’s one fiery Gospel, all right! Howe, when she wrote the Battle Hymn, believed the Union Army to be God’s chosen instrument of wrath – the agent of “his righteous sentence” upon the Slave States. The hymn is not about justice so much as it is about judgment executed by military might: “Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel, since God is marching on…”

So there they are, heroes camped alongside the Potomac. God’s chosen soldiers, clad in blue, their faces set to go to Richmond. The Battle of First Manassas, a Confederate victory, has disabused these men and boys of the notion that the road to Richmond will be a cakewalk. It will be sweat and blood. Glory, glory?  Doubtless, Howe’s lyrics will inspire and sustain some soldiers as they move on Richmond with her new text for their marching song. But their “Hallelujahs” will catch in their throat every time Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson confound them. More and more, each soldier realizes he might drink a cup that will not be removed from him. Many will die to “make men free” – though this is well before the Emancipation Proclamation and most are more concerned to preserve the Union.

Of course, one substantial difference between my Uncle Tom Burnham and Jesus is that Tom killed a number of “enemies” before they killed him, and Jesus killed none. The one who taught us to love our enemies, when arrested by his, told a militant disciple, “Put your sword back into its place…” (Mt 26:52). Julia Ward Howe contrarily tells us God “hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.” Vivid lyrics, maybe, but poor theology.

But if Julia Ward Howe had set her own face set to go to Richmond, that face took on a different demeanor in a few short years. She saw some of the worst effects of the war -- not only the death and disease which killed and maimed the soldiers, but their widows and orphans on both sides. Moreover, she realized that the effects of war reach far beyond the battlefield: she saw the economic devastation it wrought in both North and South.

So in 1870, she took on a new cause. Distressed by the not-so-glorious realities of war, she determined that peace and equality were the two most important causes of the world. Seeing war loom again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called in 1870 for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and to commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration, hoping to obtain formal recognition of a “Mother's Day for Peace.”

That failed, but she undertook and never stopped working for the reconciliation of Union and Confederate neighbors. I’m glad she and others succeeded in that endeavor, or else I might never have heard Bobby Joe and Margaret Lewis yesterday.

Oh, but I’ll sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I’ll enjoy it. The hair will rise on the nape of my neck and a lump will swell my throat as I remember my Uncle Tom. And I hope that you, too, will enjoy the Battle Hymn, but that you will hear and sing it in the light of a Gospel that’s not so “fiery” as Julia Ward Howe imagined.