I don’t know about anyone else, but this has really irked me the last couple days…
I read a chapter of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change and I can’t decide if I should throw the book across the room in disgust or quit working and join an anti-war protest. This suicidal machine he’s talked about is out of hand! Seriously – EVERYTHING must change.
Religion: Armed and Dangerous
McLaren paints a chilling comparison between suicide bombers in the Middle East and “religious leaders” in the U.S. in chp. 19 of his book.
Suicide bombers in the Middle East cry, “God is great!” as they blow their bodies – and those of innocent neighbors – to pieces. Religious leaders in the United States encourage presidents to “blow [enemies] away in the name of the Lord.”
After checking the book notes and reading further, I’m not sure I would call the U.S. leader a religious leader, but many people may say/argue that she is.
McLaren refers to Sam Harris, America’s leading atheist several times in his discussion on Armed Religion. Harris wrote a column after Sept. 11 that called religious leaders to task for the ways religion aids and abets the violent turn in human nature and society.
We have become, “increasingly deranged by our own religious certainty. We have a society in which 44 percent of the people claim to be either certain or confident that Jesus is going to come back out of the clouds and judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years. It just seems transparently obvious that this is a belief that will do nothing to create a durable civilization.” … (if) the future is determined by God and predicted in a book, and it’s going to get worse and worse, so why try to work against the destruction that is predestined? As one famous evangelist put it, if the Titanic is destined to sink, why rearrange the deck chairs on it? Far better to man the lifeboats.
Is that the attitude we as Christians have taken? Are we so bent on Jesus coming back and “ridding the world of evil” that we simply don’t care to fight for what’s good and holy in the world any more? Are we more like the doomsday profits who are more interested in scaring everyone than the musicians on the Titanic who played their music until they went down with the ship?
The Jesus approach
Jesus seems to take a different approach to the war and doomsday framing story of His day – as well as the similar doomsday framing story of our day.
His cross doesn’t represent a “shock and awe” display of power as Roman crucifixions were intended to do, but rather represents a “reverence and awe” display of God’s willingness to accept rejections and mistreatment, and then to respond with forgiveness, reconciliation, and resurrection. In this kingdom, peace is not made and kept through the shedding of the blood of enemies, but the king himself sacrifices his blood to make a new kind of peace, offering amnesty to repentant rebels and open borders to needy immigrants.
This may have been the punch in the gut…
If, as Domnic Crossan says, the Roman motto is peace through victory, or peace through the destruction of enemies, or peace through domination… then for Jesus the motto is peace through nonviolent justice, peace through the forgiveness of enemies, peace through reconciliation, peace through embrace and grace. If in the violent narratives of Rome the victorious are blessed – which means that the most heavily armed, the most willing to kill, and the most aggressive ad dominant are blessed – then in the framing story of the kingdom of God, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, blessed are the peacemakers, and blessed are the those who are willing to suffer for doing good. In this light, these aren’t simply greeting card sentiments, but rather ways of starkly contrasting Jesus’ framing story with the narratives and counter narratives of His day… Following Jesus instead means forming communities that seek peace through justice, generosity and mutual concern, and a willingness to suffer persecution but refusal to inflict it on others.
McLaren goes on to talk about the U.S. and the Western war machine that we’ve created… but I’ll let you all mull on these thoughts for a while as I had to.