Discipline is for the sake of building and maintaining appropriate relationships with those around us, and with God.

And discipline is not just for the easy times, but especially for the difficult times, the times of crisis.

When orders are given at the critical moment, those with a healthy sense of discipline will know what to do and how to accomplish it.

The training to get to that point may be painful, but ultimately beneficial.

Would anyone like to share a remembrance of a time when appropriate discipline made a difference in religious or military life?

II. WHOLENESS

Shalom: now there is an interesting word.

We most often translate it “peace”,

and what we usually mean by that is an absence of armed conflict.

But the term is considerably larger than that.

It is heading toward “wholeness”

where everything and everyone is in its proper relationship with one another.

That's perhaps closer to what shalom means.

What is the purpose of things military?

One working definition is...to kill people and break things.

But that is true only when the mission has already gone wrong.

A better image would be to say that those in uniform are the ones standing at the border in order to make room for wholeness, shalom, to flourish and bloom.

Until God's kingdom comes fully and completely, there will always be that border, there will always be forces that try to set us an enmity with one another.

We need the ones with foresight and thoughtfulness to fend off the things that try to drive us apart.

A unit's leader is always on the lookout for things that disturb wholeness.

--there can be propaganda from ones foes to be stopped,

--there are long-distance marriages to be tended,

--there are families to be supported financially and emotionally,

--there are things to be practiced and studied and learned how that particular unit fits into the whole scheme of the uniformed service.

We've seen our soldiers in Iraq not only to kill and break,

but also soldiers who cradle an injured children,

soldiers who help to build a water system or a hundred other things,

soldiers who train a police force to help maintain order,

and then the soldiers pack up without carrying away booty when their part of the job is done.

What stories do you have about a military person working toward wholeness, shalom?

I remember reading about a unit that was put together at the end of WWII whose job it was to return art works to those from whom they had been stolen.

Thousands of treasures were returned, one of the few times that the victors in a war didn't make off with as much loot as they could carry.

At the downfall of Saddam Hussein and the breakdown of society in Iraq, many treasures were stolen from the national museum there.

A few US soldiers were detailed to track them down on the antiquities market or wherever.

Many, but not all, have been found.

It is one small step in the building of wholeness of that troubled country.

It would be easy to become depressed when what we see around us is so far away from shalom.

God's intention is for us to be in conversation with him, in shalom, peacefulness, wholeness.

Our Lord Jesus came among us as a real person to demonstrate to what lengths God is willing to go in order to invite us into shalom with him.

Therefore, anything that connects us with God and each other is a little sample of the shalom that will be ours when the kingdom is complete. 

Let's give thanks to God for those who have demonstrated it.

 AMEN.