Fuller’s soap was used to clean wool for weaving – it was like bleach, sometimes made from ashes and water, sometimes made from far less pleasant things. Refiners would smelt metal to make it pure, leaving behind precious silver and gold. The idea is that the one predicted to come would bring about purity, making others righteous as well. The wool bright and white, the gold and silver pure and shining.

Anyone here own a piece of white clothing? It does not always stay that way. A little dirt on the cuff – oh bother. A spot of gravy down the front – what a klutz. And forget about sitting down on the grass. Now you can always clean up, I suppose. Break out the bleach. Pour on the hot water. Go to the drycleaner. But staying pure and white, that takes work. Being careful, avoiding problem foods, skipping messy activities. And then, inevitably, heat and harsh chemicals to clean it all up.

Anyone here own something made of silver? Maybe grandma’s tea set. It tarnishes surprisingly quickly, particularly sterling silver. Bear in mind that sterling silver is not completely silver. Pure silver is quite soft so other metals like copper are added to help the shiny teapot keep its shape. The silver is not pure though. Because pure does not always mean useful.

And then there is gold. Beautiful, ageless, not subject to rust or tarnish. Pretty and desirable, but also mostly useless. Gold is generally used to make jewelry or to make wealth – meaning gold coins or gold bars. It is more rarely used when something needs an electronic conductor that will not corrode. Your cell phone mostly likely contains about 50 cents worth of gold for that reason. But no one is making hammers out of gold. It is just too weak.

None of that seems like it has much to do with our painting this morning. Before us is one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous works, entitled Guernica. It is a massive painting, about 12 by 25 feet. It is intentionally black and white, with Picasso supposedly attempting to mimic the colors of a photograph. The pattern on the horse may suggesting newsprint, a journalistic allusion.

The title, Guernica, is also the name of a town. A town that was a center for art and culture in the Basque region of Spain. A town that served as a symbol for one of the factions of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. And a town that was almost completely destroyed by aerial bombardment during that war.

Note the figures in the painting. The large bull on the left, a symbol of Spain itself, looking out over a chaotic scene. Below a woman, her eyes bent like tears, cradling a limp child. In the center, a terrified horse, twisted in many directions, over a fallen warrior, perhaps its rider. That form is cut into pieces, the hand holding a broken sword with a flower springing from the hilt. To the right, startled figures break into the scene, as if through a door into a darkened room. One bears a torch to reveal what has happened. They look high and low, not knowing what part of the horror should be examined. A raw light bulb hanging above like an unblinking, uncaring eye. And on the right, another person frightened by fire sprouting from the top of a building. All disrupted, all disjointed, and all disturbing.

Picasso was asked to paint something that could be displayed to convey the plight of one side of the war, the Republicans, and to show the atrocities being committed by the other side, the Nationalists. The painting has become quite famous, but at the time it was criticized for not clearly demonstrating what had happened. Of course, asking Picasso to paint something was not the same as hiring a photographer. The rawness and the horror of the event seem amply sketched out on a massive canvas. I saw the original in Madrid. That horse is gigantic, looming over you. The huge ghostly figures seem to swirl about. It is not a static image. The violence does not rest there silently.

I did not know much about the Spanish Civil War before this week. I vaguely knew that some guy named Franco had ruled the country when I was young. I had not realized he had been in power for almost 40 years. Or that he had authorized Nazi planes to destroy Guernica. It was a dry run for the blitzkrieg tactics that the Germans would later use across Europe.

It may also have been an experiment: what would the world do if civilians were targeted? What would the nations of the world say when the innocent were put to the sword? As it turned out, there was relatively little response.

The war was fought between two sides, the Republicans and the Nationalists. The Republicans were not the Grand Old Party of Spain, but a coalition of left leaning groups: social democrats, communists, anarchists and anti-royalists. Republic, not monarchy; republic not aristocracy; republic not capitalism. They were supported by the Soviet Union, which probably made supporting the Republicans a complicated choice for other nations.

The Nationalists were also complicated. They generally supported traditions, like the monarchy and the church. They were aristocrats and industrialists, militarists and royalists. They also included followers of fascism, in Spain called Falangism, which was a relatively new political development at that time. The Spanish fascists differed from their German counterparts because they strongly supported the Catholic Church and did not seek to overturn the aristocracy or capitalism.

Spain had seen frequent changes in government for nearly a century. There had been over a dozen coup d’états in the 19^th century. In the 1930s, a secular republic was established. The king abdicated, the church was relegated to a lesser role in society. Franco and the other traditionalists did not like that. And so in 1936, Franco and like-minded generals sought to take control of the country. They were able to seize Spanish colonies and a few cities, but the large urban centers in the east remained in Republican hands. But they had support from much of the military, particularly battle-hardened troops in North Africa. A bloody three year civil war followed.

The Spanish Civil War essentially was the rehearsal space for the Second World War. Italy ached to begin the Second Roman Empire. Japan learned that strong nations were not terribly interested in running to the aid of weaker nations. Germany honed its tactics and tested out its equipment. France and Great Britain fretted and the United States stayed out of it all.

The war in Spain, however, was a civil war. A war within a country even though forces from outside joined the conflict. The Second World War was about expansion of borders. The Spanish Civil War was a clash of ideas, of ideologies. It was a debate that got out of hand. I do not mean to dismiss the tragic nature of these wars. But each of them arise from an argument between fellow citizens.

Most civil wars are about philosophy. Can you imagine? To kill one another over ideas.

In the English Civil Wars, Parliament toppled the British king. In the French Revolution, the aristocracy was overthrown followed by a chaotic series of secular governments that became more and more authoritarian until Napoleon Bonaparte stepped into history. The American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in our nation’s history fought over the institution of slavery. All three conflicts were respectively about who was in charge, who had to listen to whom, who got to own what (or own whom).

Essentially, that is every civil war. Cuba, Korea, Vietnam: those were disputes about the expansion of Communism inspired by the civil war in Russia. Wars about who was in charge and who owned what. Kings or dictators, peasants or the proletariat, capitalists or communes.

And if civil wars are fought because of ideas, the winners of those wars become the arbiters of ideas. After the Spanish Civil War, Franco moved to eradicate all left leaning people and institutions. Communists and anarchists of course did not fare terribly well, but neither did anyone else on the Republican side including Protestants, intellectuals, and Free Masons. Franco passed the Law of Political Responsibilities, which made it retroactively illegal to have followed the laws of the prior elected government. A crime after the fact.

This desire to eliminate ideological enemies is at the root of war. In some instances, it is religious, such as in France when Catholics persecuted Protestants and in England when Protestants persecuted Catholics. It can be right wing groups over the left, as in Spain, or left wing over the right, as in Communist Russia or China. The problem in each such case is that it is not merely a crime to act in illegal ways but to think in illegal ways. You believe in the wrong form of Christianity, you adhere to an improper type of economics, you think bad thoughts.

And having determined that something is exactly right, religiously or philosophically, every other way of thinking must stop. Why? Because the lucky winner has discovered the ultimate truth, the highest mode of enlightenment. God is this way, not that. Society should be all about this and nothing else. You are not only wrong in your ideas, opposing side, you are in fact evil. Evil that must be cut away like a cancer.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with such efforts. It is hard to root out an idea. Ideas are like viruses. You can bombard them with drugs, you can scrub with soap, you can cover yourself from head to toe, but even then the virus can survive.

And, unlike even the hardiest microorganism, an idea never has to die. One person can keep it going. One book can hold it quietly on a shelf for decades, for centuries. And yet you can metaphorically keep taking penicillin, which can make that idea resistant.  You can keep scrubbing like mad, leaving your society red and raw. You can wear gowns and gloves, cutting yourself off from feeling and seeing and knowing the world around you. All that effort, all that suffering, and it will still not work.

Think about the fuller’s soap and the refiner’s fire. They are about cleaning and purifying. But soap is not permanent, one scrub and your clothes stay sparkling white forever. And the refiner’s fire makes metal pure, but at the same time makes it weak. Pure silver and gold are desirable but also impractical.

Think of steel. There is no such thing as pure steel. Iron is mixed with other metals to make various alloys. Stainless steel which does not rust. Carbon steel which has great strength. The value of steel comes from understanding the best way to mix things together to achieve the desired result. Purity is in many ways the enemy of utility.

The same is true for the world of ideas. What happens to these countries that seek to eradicate the other side of a political divide? They divide and conquer, yes, but then they divide and falter. Think North Korea. People are split into differing groups, leading to political oppression, stifled growth, and simmering resentments. This oppression happens from the left and the right, from the Soviet Union to Franco’s Spain, from Castro’s Cuba to Hitler’s Germany. Repress the ideas, imprison the dissidents, burn the books. Purify the society in the hope of making it righteous but actually making it weak.

Modernism is a philosophical and artistic period in history. It grew out of urban areas and industrial innovations. It rejected traditions as being unscientific and, by the way, as the primary catalyst for the horrors of the First World War. Better to improve, better to make new, better to cast aside old superstitions. It was this secular turn that brought about the Republicans of Spain and which enraged the Spanish Nationalists. It was also the reason for the counter movement in right wing politics, including 20^th century fascism and arguably the Second World War.

And the war of ideas, or against them, marched across Europe. Paintings were removed from museums. In all likelihood, Picasso’s Guernica would have been put to the torch as degenerate art – art that was elitist, morally suspect, and not readily understood. Of course, if no one could understand it, why bother? No one painting would cripple a society. No one copy of a book can bring about the end of the world. It is the ideas they represent which are feared and hated.

I have no great love for Picasso, honestly. My likes and dislikes are my own, and generally irrelevant. But the capacity of art to convey ideas is considerable. Supporters of the Republican cause turned to Picasso to paint Guernica because people would pay attention to him. Art can obviously be about beauty, but it is often about message and meaning. Art can tell a story, it might shine light on a problem, it could even criticize the very society which serves as its audience. Art has power. And with power comes enemies. Enemies of the art perhaps, but more so, enemies of what the art is trying to show.

This made me think about purity again. Someone wanting to fight an idea because it is decadent or corrupt. Both of those words have to do with rotting, the breaking down of something. A dead tree, eaten away by termites. An old house toppled by weather and age.

An idea cannot rot away, but that does not mean they always stand the test of time. Because times change. One aspect of ideas that makes them strong, and keeps them strong, is testing them against other ideas. Sometimes that will be a straight up comparison – this versus that to see who wins. Democracy versus totalitarianism, capitalism versus communism. But it is rarely that simple. These ideas are not sitting around in black boxes, perfectly formed and calibrated waiting to be deployed. These ideas shift and grow. And, importantly, these ideas affect each other.

Americans have historically embrace capitalism. Which version? Robber barons or Teddy Roosevelt? Capitalism in its late 19^th century allowed workers to be maimed in factories and then fired without compensation for being unable to work. No sick time allowed for any reason. No vacations, no weekends, no minimum wages. Not hiring people because of race or religion. Firing women who get pregnant. Rejecting anyone discovered to be gay or lesbian. Much of what we take for granted as obvious aspects of working life have barely been around in my lifetime.

Then there is our system of government. American democracy originally allowed you to vote if you were white, male, and owned property – a large majority of current citizens would not qualify. And our current democracy does not guarantee women the same rights as men – the Equal Rights Amendment never passed.

Civil wars are often a battle over ideas by those who benefit from those ideas. One problem with these conflicts is that they rely upon a fundamental assumption about the nature of ideas. If an idea needs the society around it to be purified of every competing idea, how is it possible that such an idea can be True? Capital “T” true. Because if it is true, true in the deepest sense, true on its face, true to its core, then wouldn’t it easily stand up against that which is false, that which is decadent or corrupt?

No one ever needs to protect the truth, but I do need to protect that which I prefer. Get rid of those pesky traditions because those traditions do not help me. Keep the sacred traditions because, well, they do help me. Much of this struggle over ideas is in the negative. I may not know what I want, but I certainly prefer not that. And “not that” is entirely unrelated to “not true.” My preferences do not define righteousness or goodness.

There is a civil war that seems to be ending in Syria. There is a civil war boiling over in Yemen. There is a civil war brewing in Venezuela. Wars about who is in charge, about how one should pray, and about who gets to own what.

These wars are about ideas. Someone will win, eventually. Someone will lose for now. The ideas won’t die, but people will. All the effort of winning a war, all that work trying to eradicate an idea, all for nothing.

The ultimate goal of a democracy is for the people to rule themselves through an interchange of ideas leading to collective judgments. In a large and complex society, this often defaults to the selection of a small group of leaders. Those leaders theoretically continue the interchange of ideas – I know, hilarious. They then hammer out policies consistent with those ideas and in support of the collective good of the country. On a good day – on a very good day.

Strangely, democracy is not supposed to be about who shouts the loudest. It is not about who has the most money. It is not about traditions or religion, progress or change. It is about doing what is best for the people, right now and for the long haul. We do not often see that last part because the loud voices get all the attention. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, while the rest of the machine grinds to a halt.

And because the ultimate goal of democracy is to find a way to work together, the truest discipline at the root of democracy is the ability to listen and then to compromise. I know, what mythical beast is this. If that discipline is lacking, the system falters. If that discipline is nonexistent, that system at some point stops being a democracy.

Then what has it become? What has it become?

A metaphoric war of ideas is by no means pleasant. But it far superior to an actual war over ideas. Discussions are never a waste of time with that as an alternative. Endless talk is far, far better. Better a little dirt on our sparkling white shirts, better a bit of tarnish on the old silver. Peace is far better than the finest gold. Far better.

God grant us the patience to be citizens. Give us the wisdom to keep talking. May our hearts be always open and our anger forever stilled. Amen.