This sermon was preached by Ginny Earnest at a Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Service hosted by Sojourners Community on August 6, 1987. For Hiroshima-Nagasaki memorial service resources, please go to Faithful Security (National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger).

Most Americans first heard about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the way our government ended the second world war. That is true whether you were alive at the time or born since 1945—we were taught and most of us believed that the choice to use the atomic bomb saved the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers—our fathers, our uncles, our husbands, our friends.

Something that happened to an unknown people, a great distance from us, a long time ago, prevented a tragedy in our own families and neighborhoods. The bombs were used as a part of military stategy by the experts who were supposed to know about such things. It was another terrible necessity in a time of war.

For many there is only the image of the mushroom cloud and the massive display of power, viewed from other cities of military planes, viewed at a safe distance.

But we know that what happened on this day, 41 years ago, was so much more than an abstract symbol of a strategic choice. We must attempt to understand the meaning of the events of those days from a different vantage point—up close and through the eyes of compassion, where it will affect us.

For many of us, commemorating the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a part of our yearly liturgical calendar and, like Good Friday, it is an evening of facing into pain, opening up old wounds, retelling a sad story because we know that it continues to hold meaning for our lives and for the world.

What is at the heart of this sad and terrible story? How do we open ourselves to listen again?

Even the numbers become barriers to our understanding. Before the end of 1945, 200,000 people died from the explosions. Many more have died since then of radiation poisioning, cancer, birth defects ... 200,000 died the first few months and thousands more since then. How do we grasp numbers like that? They are incomprehensible.

As John Hershey first wrote in 1946, the use of the atomic bomb was first of all an intimate, personal, and highly individual experience. It is from this perspective, this vantage point—the suffering of real people—that it is the most difficult. It is also the only way to compassion and real understanding. It is perhaps the only way to honestly remember.

For each person, the bomb fell at a particular moment in their personal history. It was this intimate reality much more than an event in the history of the struggle between nations. We have heard the account of the survivors—the testimony of the witnesses—and are led to see what it must have been like. We have a picture of life the moment before the flash.

There is a man riding a streetcar on his way to work. He has said good-bye to his wife and children for another day.

There is a woman walking up the street on her way to the market.

There is a school-aged child—among the thousands of school children—talking with a friend, working at a desk, playing in the school yard.

There is a clerk in a department store.

There is a doctor making rounds in a hospital.

There is an old man sitting on a front porch.

Each survivor remembers exactly what they were doing at the moment of the flash. I would imagine that many people thought immediately of a person they loved and wondered where they were and if they were safe.

I want to be clear about something. There is nothing romantic about this picture. This is not an idealized image. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not all good or kind or innocent. Many of us live in a city ourselves and know the mix of humanity that every city contains. More than that—we know the possibilities—for good and evil—present in all human beings. The people who died there were not all good people. Neither were they the heartless enemies of all war-time propaganda.

They were simply—and very much to the point—just like us.

Those who died immediately—some 190,000—died person by person, one by one. Each story constitutes an individual tragedy. The chronicles of those who lived for a time and then died are difficult to listen to. We cannot look at the films and photographs for very long. For those who survived and carry the memory with them, nothing has been the same since then. All of life changed in an instant.

How do we understand? Not only was the bomb conceived and developed, it was used. Not only used, but used against a civilian population. Not just once, but twice. That reality has changed the way human beings understand ourselves and our world. Life has changed for all of us. What had always been assumed as the basic rythmn of life—the past, the present, and the future—is no more. Prior to the development of nuclear weapons there was no possibility of death without a following season of birth and renewal. We know now that we are capable of ending all life on this planet. The poet Galway Kinnell wrote that since the day the white flash sparkled, the word future jerks tears into our eyes.

In 1986, just prior to the 40th anniversary of the bombings, the Center for Defense Information called for both the United States and the Soviet Union to stop nuclear testing, as a gesture of good will and a mutual step toward disarmament. The Soviet Union agreed to stop testing from August until December 31. The United States did not agree to stop testing. On December 31, 1986, the Soviet Union announced that they would extend the test ban till March 1987. And then in March, they extended the period again until August 1987.

The Soviet decision to stop nuclear testing for a full year—for whatever reasons—marked the first time in 40 years that either superpower had taken a step in the other direction—the direction away from an escalating arms race—toward cooperation and the opportunity for genuine negotiation.

In 1987, the United States tested nuclear bombs 14 times at the Nevada test site. A number of those tests were for the development of new and more dangerous weapons systems. While other kinds of arms control negotiations—involving numbers and kinds of weapons stockpiled—are difficult to verify, the ban on testing would be possible to verify and ensure.

A U.S. private citizens organization, in cooperation with a Soviet citizens group, has set up monitoring stations at our test site and the test site in the Soviet Union. With seismic monitors, these stations, staffed by Soviet and American personnel, can monitor and measure all underground nuclear tests. If both countries agreed to an end to nuclear testing, compliance with the terms of that agreement could be verified.

The other obvious advantage of a ban on nuclear testing is that neither side could develop new weapons systems without testing them. Such a step would be an opportunity to move toward a defense system based on cooperation and away from nuclear deterence and mutually assured destruction.

What is frightfully apparent is that as long as we continue to test our current stockpiles, and develop and test new weapons, we remain in a constant state of readiness to use them. Every time a nuclear test occurs at the Nevada test site, our government is saying that we would use the bomb again. If the right chain of events occurred, if the leaders of our country felt that the situation warrented it, we would use nuclear weapons again and repeat the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The essential nature of the nuclear bomb is the same today as it was in 1945.

We have more of them than back then. They are more accurate, faster, easier to deploy, and more powerful. Their production and development has drained off a major portion of our national resources—as well as the resources of the other nuclear nations.

The option of using nuclear weapons in the future is understood by some to be a strategic choice in a military plan. Experts talk about the numbers of acceptable human losses in a way that it is possible to talk about numbers. We are capable of detaching ourselves from 200,000. We can detach ourselves from larger numbers as well.

But if a nuclear bomb is used again—despite all of the changes in the technology these many years—the experience will be as intensely and unbearably personal as it was in 1945. Even in the nations designated as enemies, people are people.

There will be a man on a streetcar on his way to work.

There will be a woman on her way to the market.

There will be a school-aged child—among the thousands of school children—talking with a friend.

They will be going about the business of their daily and ordinary lives—when in a flash, they will be individually, person by person, effected by the horror.

And life will never be the same again.

We must remember and witness, my friends, because the unthinkable has happened, and since that time, our government has based our national security on the assurance that we are prepared to do it again.

In the pain of that reality, we pray, Holy Spirit come. Open our eyes and our ears to see and hear your word. Open our mouths and make us vessels of your word. Help us to reach out, beyond our fears and our guilt, to touch the world with your love. Holy Spirit, come to us this night. Be present among your people in this nation, in Japan, in those places designated as our enemies, and in the world. Amen.

Ginny Earnest, a member of Circle Community Church in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, and a former member of Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C., preached this sermon on August 6, 1987. She died of cancer on September 9, 1993, at the age of 41.