Poor Choices and Costly Alternatives

When I was stationed at Letterman Hospital, San Francisco, I served in the Neurology Department.  There I was trained as an encephalograph tech, the brain wave test. Initially we had an NCO in the EEG lab, an E-5 Specialist Monroe, who was senor to both of us two trainees.

Shortly after my arrival, specialist Monroe was court martialed and busted down to corporal.  This wasn’t the first time he had been demoted.  When we asked him what happened, from the bruises on his face it should have been evident.

Over the weekend he had been in another bar fight.  The word that came back through the scuttlebutt was not good.  Apparently, he and his combatants had pretty well torn the place up – furniture broken, shattered windows, broken beer bottles everywhere – the place was trashed.  Hundreds of dollars in damages.  What a weekend.  Finally, the MPs arrived to break it up and Monroe ended up in the stockade for a spell.

Monroe had little recollection of what had happened, but word came back that the more he drank, the more belligerent, the mouthier he got.  And from there, it was off to the races as chaos ensued while fists flew, along with chairs, ash trays and glasses.

This was the second or third time he had been busted in rank.  The colonel, chief of our neurology service, had had enough.  Monroe was out of there. Assigned to the worst job possible, laundry duty.

I was promoted to E-5 and became senior enlisted staff. 

I had seen Monroe at our barracks after work and asked him, why did he frequent these bars which were just trouble for him.  He really had no answer, except that he had been barred from the enlisted officer’s club.  I didn’t have to ask the reason.

Poor choices, but there were alternatives – like maybe dealing with his drinking problem, like staying in the barracks and watching TV – oodles of alternatives come to mind.  But no – poor choices was all he seemed capable of.

Amos tells the story of poor choices.  His prophecy is a warning, much like my mother’s, “Johnny, look both ways before running out into the street.”

“This is what the Lord God showed me:  the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.  And the Lord said to me.  ‘Amos what do you see?’  And I said, ‘A plumb line.’  Then the Lord said, ‘See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.’”

A plumb line is used to determine if a wall is 90 degrees vertical to the ground or a people morally straight by Amos’ reckoning.  The plumb line never lies.

Apparently, Jeroboam’s sin was the revolt he led against Solomon’s son Rehoboam which split the Davidic kingdom in two – Judah in the south and Israel in the north with Jeroboam as it’s king.  Further, he designed a religion to cater to his whims, building two temples with golden calves.  Idolatry, in other words.  He chose poorly.  There was an alternative — the God of the Torah, the plumb line of righteousness and equity.

Today, out of nowhere, in Mark we get the story of Herod having had John the Baptist beheaded at the whim of his wife.  John had railed against Herodias, for she had been his brother Philip’s wife, and it was not lawful to have one’s brother’s wife.  It was score-settling time.

One commentator avers that there is not a word of grace to be found in this story, which seems like an incidental one-off.

Herod, like too many guys basking in their power, thought he had to play the big man, testosterone-fueled.  Yet, there was an alternative tugging at his soul.  He knew John was a righteous and holy man.  While greatly perplexed by John’s utterances, he liked to listen to him. 

This request by his step-daughter he could have refused, but it would have cost him dearly in the esteem of his guests.  So, John’s head was served up on a platter as the trophy for her dancing.  Poor choice, even though he knew in his heart that this was wrong.  As Dieterich Bonhoeffer would call the alternative, “Costly Grace.”  Requiring a huge helping of humble pie.

That is the grace I see in Amos’ prophecy and Herod’s dilemma.  There is a choice, an alternative – as difficult as that may have been — Costly Grace in the form of repentance.

Of course, Amos’ desire is to warn the people of Israel of the destructive path they are on, his purpose is exactly to get repentance.  The path they were following as a society would implode upon itself.  Out of their weakness, they would have no resources or wisdom to deal with outside threats such as the Babylonian army, soon to be at their gates.

The forced exile to follow, the prophet attributed as their just deserts for their debauchery and crushing the poor in their midst.  My Buddhist friends would chalk it up to Bad Karma.  What goes around comes around.  The logical results for violating the moral structure of the universe and Torah ethics.  As my junior high coach would warn, “You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

Amos’ purpose?  To get his hearers to amend their ways.  To turn from self-destruction – to turn around, a complete change of mind — the meaning of metanoia, repentance. It’s all about changing behavior, not about feeling sorry or remorseful.  As the hymn puts it, “Turn back, O mortal, quit thy foolish ways.”

And as one verse of “How Firm a Foundation” puts it, “When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, my grace all sufficient, shall be thy supply; the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.”

Unfortunately, how often we grasp for the easy solution, not the costly alternative.  American foreign policy is littered with such poor choices.

I’ve been recently reading of one the worst episodes of our venture into the Philippines after we seized them as a result of the Spanish American War, 1898, Massacre in the Clouds by Kim A. Wagner.

The story opens with a photograph of a gristly massacre received by W. E. Du Bois.  It depicts an open pit filled with the bodies of defenseless men, women and children – some one thousand in all.  On the rim of the killing grounds, American soldiers are shown standing nonchalantly by.  No evidence at all of shame.

This tragedy was the result of an expedition up a dormant volcano by Major General Leonard Wood and his men on March 1906, who for hours would fire indiscriminately upon those who had taken refuge in the crater of that volcano, the so-called Moros, American slang for the Muslims of the southern islands of that nation.

The incident became know as the “Battle of Bud Dajo.”  Not a battle at all but the wanton killing of trapped unarmed men, women and children.  This atrocity was bigger than either Wounded Knee or My Lai and would have slipped into the mists of history except for that one photograph.[1]

U.S. military authorities tried to bury the story.  When that became impossible, it was claimed as “a brilliant feat of arms,” according to President Theodore Roosevelt.                                

We have little or no recollection of that horrific day.  But they do!  They remember as if it were yesterday.

The only three of note who spoke against the atrocity were W. E. B. Du Bois, Mark Twain and Moorfield Story, president of the Anti-Imperialist League.  Virtually every American paper heralded it as a courageous action.  Medals were to be passed out to those participating in the tragedy, many participants promoted for what now would be called a “war crime.”

Fortunately, through the diligent efforts of Kim Wagner over years, the story has come to light.

There was never any expression of remorse from the killers because the victims had been completely dehumanized – just vermin, savages.  General Wood summed up the operating ethic in a report from Manila, “They will probably have to be exterminated.”[2]

Why must we remember such sordid and ghastly events of the past?  Because there is no healing possible without telling the truth of these events.  That is the only path to healing.  In our remembrance is the grace of costly alternatives.

Incidentally, I wondered as I made my way through this book, did any of these soldiers ever learn a counter narrative from their Sunday school teachers or the sermons they might have heard?  They certainly would not have found such in their history books, which to this day glorify American expansionism and whitewash its crimes.  I wonder, did ever an inkling of a costly alternative cross those soldier’s minds as they fired upon those hapless victims?

That we have this story is sheer unbounded grace, for its truth may someday set us free – get us to reconsider our role as a nation.  As my friend Ed Bacon was wont to say, “The truth will set you free, but first it will hurt like hell.”

As Amos concludes his short book of dire prophecy on a note of hope, “On that day I will raise up a booth for David that is fallen and repair its branches, and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old; in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name, says the Lord who does this.”

 With repentance, this is “that day.”  With repentance, costly and saving alternatives spring to mind and heart.

“The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.”  Amen

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[1] Kim A. Wagne, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2024)/

[2] Op. cit., 86.

July 14, 2024
Proper 10

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13;
Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14:29

“Poor Choices and Costly Alternatives”