March
27, 2016 Easter, Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “Faith in the face of
terrorism”
In the parlance of religion, we
talk about redemptive suffering. The beatings that Martin Luther King, Jr. took
at the hands of the police in Alabama, his times in jail, and his eventual
murder were redemptive in the sense that the suffering he endured helped to
birth the Civil Rights movement that changed the fate of the world. The
beatings, imprisonment, and finally the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, were
not meaningless. His willingness to suffer on behalf of the poor of El Salvador
helped to alleviate the oppression of the poor in Central America.
Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa,
chose to live in abject poverty in order to suffering meaningfully to lift the plight
of the suffering of the poor in New York and in Calcutta. Gandhi’s hunger
strikes, the salt march, his many beatings and imprisonments at the hands of
the British military and finally his martyrdom helped to liberate the entire
subcontinent of India.
Today, on Easter, if we are
able to draw back the curtain of centuries of manipulative mythology and
wishful thinking, we can see the arrest, torture, and death of Jesus of
Nazareth, as having been similarly redemptive.
Not because he paid some theological price to a demonic God that
demanded blood, but that he stood up to the power of an empire on behalf of an
impoverished and occupied nation. I think that the event of the cross was a
historical fact although almost everything that has been said to us about that
event in our lives in Sunday School and church has been not simply false and
misleading, but possibly dangerous to our well-being.
As dated as many people would
think that the lyrics to the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, may be, the
writers had a more clear grasp on the theology of the Jesus story than most
pastors and even most seminary professors do today.
The torture and execution of
Jesus of Nazareth was sad, it was wrong, it was an example of state sponsored
terrorism but thankfully his death was also redemptive in the inspiration that
his martyrdom was to millions who have stood up to repressive governments,
corporations, employers, slave owners, and, if I may say, repressive religions,
ever since.
Unfortunately, redemptive
suffering is only the thinnest slice of the over all horizon of human
suffering. Earlier this week, 34 people
were killed in Brussels in three Isis coordinated bombings that left another
200 people injured. This was senseless. These were not people who were
challenging oppression, they were not marching in a civil rights protest… they
were on their way to work, or school… they were people on vacation, visiting
family or just going to the grocery store.
This was not martyrdom. This was murder.
It has been a year since Graeme
Wood’s much-heralded article, “What Isis Really Wants?” was published in the
Atlantic Monthly. In light of this recent terrorist attack in Europe, I think
we might want to review some of the myths that Wood’s article exposed.
Terrorists are not angry, unemployed, thrill seekers. They are not greedy
materialists who are simply hijacking a religion to mask their thievery.
Isis is led by people who are
sincerely religious and who are devoted to a very specific form of Islam that
has accepted a lethal “them and us” world view. The are seeking to reverse the
world order from a western dominated world with either secularism, or Judaism
and Christianity in charge to a Muslim Caliphate that would put an extremist
version of Islam at the top of the world’s power pyramid.
When they attack western
targets, they are seeking to ignite a war between the west and Islam. They want
to provoke isolationist responses from Americans and Europeans that would make
them turn on Muslim immigrants, closing our borders and deporting Muslims in
our midst, or, as Ted Cruz has suggested, add policing and monitoring to their
houses of prayer and ethnic neighborhoods to send the message that you are not
one of us… you are they.
I have to say that Wednesday
morning, watching the news, it looked to me like Joe Scarborough and Mika
Brzezinski were on the Isis payroll. They were promoting the kind of fear that
Isis wants to provoke. They were giving Isis credit for power and influence
that they clearly do not have but that they want to trick the West into
believing that they have. In short, if Isis had written a script for them to
read, it couldn’t have been more effective in supporting the terrorist goals
than what Joe and Mika did say. MSNBC executives, if you are watching, consider
this to be my last warning.
What they didn’t report on
March 22nd when Isis killed 34 people in Brussels was that the week
before Isis had killed 35 people in Ankara.
And the week before that, they
had killed 47 in Bagdad, and in January there were 50 killed in Libya. And
there was another lethal suicide bombing in Iraq after the horror in Brussels.
The majority of the victims of
Isis are not western Christians but rather they are Middle Eastern Muslims who
are peace loving, hard working people who are just trying to go about the
business of their lives in the same way that the victims in Brussels were.
The hundreds of thousands of
refugees streaming out of Syria are not bringing jihad with them, they are
running from the same people that we are worried about. They are victims, just
like the people in Paris and in Belgium.
And, to be honest, Isis has a
point. We do not make Muslims a part of our society the way we do immigrants
from Europe. When 130 people were killed in Paris last fall, we flew French
flags and “Je suis Paris” was on all
our lips but when 137 were killed in Yemen earlier in the year, no one was
saying, “anna Yemeni.”
They are not wrong in their
belief that we have not accepted them as equals among the peoples of the
world. Our news reporting leaves no
doubt that we value the lives of white northern Europeans a thousand times more
than we value to the lives of the dark skinned people of the Middle East and Africa.
I wish that it wasn’t so indisputably true, but there is no other way to see
it.
But if the reaction of the
corporate media was wrong… and if, if I may quickly add, the manipulation of
our Homeland Security Agency that always uses terrorism to tell us that we have
to give up more and more of our privacy, more and more of our civil rights, so
that Big Brother can protect us from the scary scary brown people, if that is
wrong, what is right? Oh, and Tim Cook, if you are watching from your office at
Apple, don’t you dare create a backdoor for the CIA into our phones. The
government overreach is manipulative and fear based and don’t you dare give up
my privacy to them.
If you want to see what the
right reaction to terrorism is, I think that the people of Brussels and the
people of Paris have shown us a lot.
They are holding marches against fear. They are refusing to change their
daily lives, they are refusing to surrender the pluralistic society, their free
Europe, their joy, to the fear of murderous criminals.
And let me throw some roses at
our president, since I rarely seem to get to praise our elected officials. President Obama was in Cuba trying to
peacefully and mercifully bring an end to a cold war that has made no sense for
at least 30 years and has caused the suffering of millions of people in Cuba.
He was right to not change his
itinerary, to refuse to run back to Washington and act scared because some
misguided lunatics had blown themselves up in Brussels. I was glad that he went to a baseball game
and showed the world that we are made of sterner stuff than his critics who
were at least verbally soiling their pants.
However, the staff member that
allowed him to be led to the dance floor to tango in Argentina, I would like to
have the honor of firing that person myself…. That was a bridge too far.
And President Obama, if you are
listening, we really don’t want to see that again.
You have heard me say this
before but on this Easter Sunday, in the wake of these recent terrorist acts,
it deserves to be said again: The word
“faith” does not mean assassinating your brains to believe in childish myths
that are clearly false. Faith, in Greek, pistis,
means courage.
In the early decades of the
church, the tradition was that when a person was being baptized, they were
lowered under the water and when they were brought up, they shouted, “pistis”, that is that they had made a
courageous decision not to be afraid of the power of the Roman empire or the
threats of their indigenous organized religion. They had the courage to embrace
a way of living a resurrected life that lived without fear.
If I could give you anything on
earth in the face of the them-and-us violently divided world we live in, it
would be that you could stop being afraid. Sure, be smart about border
security. Use the best of intelligence technology and information sharing. Stop
every bad guy that you can but what will ultimately stop the bad guys is if
their technique of trying to incite wars, divisions, and suspicion simply
fails.
If we have the courage to not
hate, even when we are hated. To not try to bomb the Middle East until they
decide to like us better. If we can
learn to include rather than exclude, to love rather than hate, and to embrace
rather than fear then, my friends, the whole world gets to experience an Easter
resurrection.
