Month: September 2021

Give Peace a Chance

‘We prepare for war, and we get it’ – Stanley Hauerwas

Over a month has passed since the Kabul bombing that took place as American forces withdrew from Afghanistan.  169 Afghani’s died in the attack, as well as 13 American service members.  It was an emblematic, if horrific, exclamation point to a mostly neglected twenty-year war.  President Biden responded as national leaders often do in such circumstances, promising swift and decisive retaliation.[1]  While many cheered, my immediate thought was: ‘have we learned anything?’

Retaliation is what got us into the mess in Afghanistan in the first place. If you were alive at the time, you certainly remember 9/11.  It was a day that is impossible to forget.  I remember it well, as I do the rush to retaliation that took place in its wake.  In Congress, only one member of the House of Representatives counseled forbearance, and was viciously attacked for doing so.  Even in the Church, the desire to strike back, to get even, ran high.  ‘An eye for an eye’ was the typical response of Americans, including American Christians, in those days.  It seemed so right to so many. 

Twenty years later, some at least are reconsidering.  America has pulled out of Afghanistan.  The war is lost, the Taliban back in control, and the Afghani people once again face a bleak and oppressive future.  The futility of the ‘war on terror’ is more apparent than ever.  The world isn’t any safer now than it was on September 11, 2001.  Indeed, one could make a convincing argument that America, and the global community, is less safe.  One could even argue that the desire for retaliation and revenge has fueled movements of hate right here at home; movements that threaten the very existence of the American experiment.  Our lust for retaliation didn’t, after all, help us in the wake of 9/11; and folks, it isn’t going to help us now.  

It certainly didn’t help in the aftermath of the airport bombing.  America delivered on Biden’s promise with a drone strike aimed at what was believed to be a car bomb.  It was not.  It was the car of an aide worker, Zemarey Ahmadi, who was trying to get his family out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took control.  The strike killed 10 civilians, including Zemarey and seven children (four boys and three girls) aged 2-10 years old.  Their names, if anyone cares to know, were Faisel, Farzad, Binyamin, Armin, Haya, Sumaya, and Malika.  Retaliation, in both the case of 9/11 and in the case of the Kabul airport bombing, didn’t exactly deliver what it promised, did it? 

There simply has to be a better way. 

Two Sundays ago, I preached on Jesus words in Matthew 5:38-42.  It’s a passage about nonretaliation.  Instead of striking back at your enemies, Jesus teaches, his followers are to, ‘turn the other cheek,’ ‘hand over their cloaks,’ and ‘go the extra mile.’  I won’t spend time fully exegeting those examples here (you can listen to the sermon on the Facebook page of the First Baptist Church of Collingswood; it includes an exploration of how we might have responded nonviolently to 9/11), but essentially, Jesus was telling his disciples and would-be disciples that when wronged, even egregiously so, they should respond, not by retaliating in kind, but by employing nonviolent strategies that assert one’s dignity, surprise and disarm evil, witness to the way of the kingdom, and extend the possibility of friendship.  Rejecting the notion of an eye for an eye, Jesus called his followers to seek more creative solutions to the problem of evil.  Jesus understood what Gandhi would say many centuries later as he himself creatively employed Jesus’ strategy, that ‘an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’

Alas, most of the world scoffs at such advice. 

I recently read an article about the National Peace Museum in Washington D.C.  Never heard of it?  Well, that’s because it doesn’t exist.  Originally chartered in 1984 as an extension of the U.S. Institute of Peace, it was to have borne witness to the possibility of creative peacemaking and peacebuilding.  It would have championed the efforts of those who had, whether they realized it or not, heeded the advice of Jesus; those who sought, and often found, creative and nonviolent solutions to seemingly intractable problems.  Sadly, to this day, the museum remains but a dream.  It has never received the needed funding or support from the United States government. 

Big surprise.    

Wendell Berry, in his essay, The Failure of War, offers words that help explain why such a museum has never come to be.  Berry writes:

‘Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great – and successful – advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples.  The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.  But so far as our government is concerned, these men and their great and authenticating accomplishments might as well never have existed.  To achieve peace by peaceable means is not yet our goal.  We cling to the hopeless paradox of making peace by making war.’

Tragically, Berry is right.  Our government clings to such a hopeless paradox.  I suppose we can’t expect them to change overnight, but certainly among the followers of Jesus, it should be different.  Jesus’ disciples should respond to evil with creativity and generosity, and in so doing, provide witness to another way.  We should advocate for creative, nonviolent responses that encourage even the government in the direction of peace.  Perhaps we will never fully persuade those whose default response is to wield the sword, but we might get them to at take a few positive steps in the direction of peacemaking, and exchange at least some of their swords for plowshares. 

I hope America eventually builds that peace museum.  I hope that more people come to understand the power of creative nonviolence.  I hope that more people discover the creative way of Jesus. 

And I hope that the next time a terrible attack happens, at home or abroad, Christians might, whatever else the government may do, consider spreading love instead of bombs.  That instead of rushing to support a policy of retaliation in kind, as many did in the wake of 9/11, we might, as the old song goes, give peace a chance. 

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

[1] In the aftermath of the attack, the President further invoked the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘Here am I, send me,’ and applied them to the soldiers of the United States military.  While one can admire the bravery of those who put their lives on the line for others, the comparison is extremely dangerous, as it advances an insidious Christian Nationalist theology that equates military action with the work of the Kingdom of God.  But that’s for another post.

The God Who Stays

‘If I were you, I would have labeled me a lost cause.’ – Matthew West, from his song, ‘The God Who Stays’

I’ve been thinking about Abraham lately.  Reading through his story in Genesis, I am struck, not only by his great faith, but by his more than occasional lack thereof.[1]  I am struck by how the great father of nations, the one through whom God began salvation history in earnest, was at times capable of behaving like a first-class jerk. 

That may sound shocking to Christian ears trained to handle Abraham with almost God-like reverence.  But if so, it’s because we tend to forget the downsides in his story, or, if we remember them at all, come up with excuses for his despicable behavior.  There’s the time when Abraham (then Abram) told his wife Sarah (then Sarai) to pose as his sister while sojourning in Egypt.  Well, we say, Abram was afraid that Pharaoh would find her beautiful and kill him to take Sarah as his wife, so what choice did he have?  Besides, she was in fact his half-sister (I know, yuck; things were different back then), so he wasn’t really lying.  Never mind that Abraham should have trusted God to take care of both himself and wife, or that the plan he undertook resulted in her captivity for a time in the household of Pharoah, during which all sorts of terrible things might have happened.  Sugar coat it as you will, the bottom line is that Abraham failed to trust God and threw his wife under the bus to save his own skin.  And he didn’t just do it once; a bit later in his story he threw Sarah under the bus a second time in an encounter with King Abimelech of Gerar. 

And that’s not even the worst of Abraham’s offenses.  Although God promised that he would have children as numerous as the grains of dust on the earth, his doubt grew to the point of unfaithfulness.  As the years ticked by, and his patience wore thin, he jumped at the chance offered by his wife to take matters into his own hands.  ‘Honey,’ Sarah suggested, ‘why don’t you sleep with my servant Hagar and have a child with her?’  We can rationalize that this sort of surrogacy was common in Abraham’s day, but it was still wrong.  For starters, it was wrong because he failed to wait on God.  Then there’s his eagerness to sleep with a younger woman not his wife (Sarah didn’t have to ask twice).  And finally, and this is downright horrific, there is the fact that Hagar may not have had much choice in the matter.  She was a slave for crying out loud; she had no choice but to obey her master.  Some today might consider what happened between them nothing less than rape.  I don’t personally believe it was that bad; the relationship between Hagar and Abraham seems to have been at least somewhat consensual, but the power inequities in the situation should nonetheless trouble us deeply.

And then there is the fact that when trouble arose between Hagar and Sarah (and who didn’t see that coming?) Abraham sent Hagar and his son Ishmael away into the wilderness, where, but for the grace of God, they both would have died.  And yeah, I know the Bible says God told him to do it.  Still.  If a man behaved in this fashion today, throwing his wife under the bus, impregnating his servant, then sending her along with his child into the wilderness, he would be labeled a monster, not an exalted father.  In today’s culture, there is little doubt that Abraham would be ‘canceled.’ 

And yet, God didn’t cancel Abraham.  He continued to work with him.  He proceeded, in spite of it all, to weave the beginnings of the story of salvation through the broken pieces of his life. 

Just what kind of story is this?  What kind of God sticks by a guy as bad as Abraham?

In considering such questions, my mind wandered to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I know, just bear with me.  If I asked you what that story is about, you might tell me it’s a horror tale, or a fable about scientific hubris.  You would be right, of course, but the primary theme of that classic novel is parental irresponsibility.  Dr. Frankenstein creates life, but when it doesn’t match his expectations for it, he abandons his creation utterly.  Shelley was first and foremost writing a morality tale about parents who failed to stick by and love their children when they failed to meet parental expectations and dreams.

God is the opposite of Dr. Frankenstein.  When God created the universe, making human beings, male and female, his crowning achievement, he had great plans for us.  We were to serve as the stewards of creation, co-regents under his rule, serving, protecting, and reigning over the earth.  We didn’t exactly live up to our calling.  This was not, on the one hand, surprising; God, who exists in what C.S. Lewis termed ‘an eternal now,’ knew we would disappoint.  But on the other, it seems to have shaken him, nonetheless.  It grieved God’s heart to see his children fall short of the glory he intended for them.  It grieved his heart even more as he witnessed the wickedness of humankind spiraling out of control, spreading over the face of the earth, contaminating every aspect of creation.  Had God been like Dr. Frankenstein, dare I say, if he had been like any one of us, he would have abandoned his creation there and then.  He would have thrown us on the rubbish heap and started over. 

But so committed is God to his creation, to us, that he did not.  He stuck by us.  Even as we did terrible things.  He was willing to get his hands dirty, to carry the shame of his creation’s sin, as he worked alongside of us, meeting us where we were, down in the muck and mire of our wickedness and selfishness.  We would have run from ourselves.  God, being God, stuck by us, even as we failed to meet his parental expectations and dreams. 

So God worked with a man like Abraham, a man who would throw his wife under the bus, sleep with his slave, and send her away with his own son.  God worked with him until he was transformed into something more akin to the image he was meant to bear.  Then, when Abraham’s time passed, God continued to work with his descendants, who frankly did worse than Abraham, sinning in ways that would have caused Dr. Frankenstein to walk away a thousand times.  God stuck by them too, shaping them into an instrument he could use, biding his time until, in the fullness thereof, he himself entered the world in the person of his Son, to bear our sin and show us how to live, hoping to transform us, each and every one of us, into something more akin to the image we are meant to bear.

And so it has remained even to this very day.  When we fail to get things right, when we fall and fail and struggle like Abraham, God continues to stand by us.  For he is Emmanuel.  God with us.  That is who he is, was, and always will be.  He is, as Matthew West sings in the song noted in this post’s title and epigraph, ‘The God who stays.  The God who runs in our direction when the whole world walks away.’[2] 

Talk about a committed God. 

There is a line in the Gospels that used to confuse me.  Jesus, who obviously loves us unconditionally, cries out, ‘Oh unbelieving and perverse generation!  How long must I stay with you!  How long must I put up with you!’ (Matthew 17:17).  It sounds so un-Jesus like.  But it’s actually a cry from the very heart of God.  God grieves our sin.  It rends his heart.  Today, no less than when God wept over Abraham’s conduct.  But God, in the course of his work with Abraham, in the course of his work throughout salvation history, in the course of the Incarnation, and in the course of our lives, repeatedly answers his own question, ‘How long must I stay with you?  How long must I put up with you?’

His answer is: forever.  He really doesn’t have a choice.  Because, you see, he is by his very nature the God who stays. 

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

[1] Abraham’s full story can be found in Genesis 12-25.

[2] If you get a chance, listen to West’s song.  It captures wonderfully what I am trying to say here about the constancy and commitment of God.  Click here for a link to the official video.