So, I was very happy at a recent Virginia Mennonite Conference delegate assembly when we affirmed the work of the Peace Committee (led by Nicholas Detweiler-Stoddard and Spencer Bradford) to print anti-war ads in our local newspapers.

I have to admit, this sort of thing makes me proud to be a Mennonite.

For those outside the Mennonite community, you should know that the Virginia Mennonite Conference is one of the more conservative conferences in our denomination (MCUSA). For Mennonites, however, to be conservative about the tradition is to be clear about our historic position of peace. Our Mennonite conference takes seriously our mission to conserve the church’s tradition of proclaiming the peace of Christ.

They played the national anthem for the first time in the school’s history this past Tuesday at a baseball game. And I found a way to preach about the event for Palm Sunday. Here’s a passage from my sermon:

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” The rejected Jesus is the chief cornerstone of a new society that welcomes those on the underside, those that the world considers ungrateful traitors, like Jesus. This new society shows hospitality to the social waste of the world, the alienated and rejected: those who are in the world, but not really of the world because they aren’t card-carrying members of society, they are unnecessary to the world’s progress.

Jesus has invited us to build a new society—the kingdom of God—that welcomes the unwelcomed, that takes the people rejected by the builders of this world and includes them as chief cornerstones in a new community, the community of Jesus, the community of the rejected One, the community of the cross.

So, to get back to Goshen… Let me leave you with two questions for our time of discussion and discernment. How would playing the national anthem help us to welcome the people rejected by our world? How would it help any Christian community be a people who witness to the cross of Christ, which is what it means to welcome God’s love in the world?

Here we are God: the same building, the same time of the week, with the same people. We are here because we can’t remember your promises on our own—that you promise new life, redeemed life, holy life, abundant life. God of life, breathe through us the life of your Holy Spirit—your comforting and forgiving Spirit. Surround us in your loving embrace, flowing through our sisters and brothers sitting next to us, in front of us, behind us, across the room from us. These are the people who show us that you, O God, will never leave us nor forget us.

As our passage this evening from Isaiah says, you are a mother who can’t forget her nursing child. And like hungry children, we will continue to cry out, because we hunger and thirst for your righteousness, for your justice, for your peace and mercy. God, may your reconciling grace flow throughout the earth.

This weekend we pray for your grace to move in people and places we aren’t used to praying for since we are a peace church. We aren’t used to praying for soldiers; we’re not used to remembering them. But, as it says in Isaiah, you are a God who remembers—and that means we should too, even if it’s confusing and strange.

God, tomorrow is Memorial Day. And when our country remembers the women and men who serve in the armed forces, we also remember them. We pray for all those people who have been taught to do things that no human being was ever meant to do: to kill. God heal them. They have wounds too—deep wounds, down to the soul. Wounds that make it difficult to return from war and love their spouses, and children, and friends; wounds that make it difficult to be loved, to receive love. When they kill, they also kill parts of themselves. Presidents and generals and recruiting officers don’t tell them that. In your great mercy, make a way for life to have the last word, not death; a way for grace and peace, for justice and forgiveness.

We pray that your Spirit would fall upon all flesh; and when your Holy Spirit falls, we ask that we will be moved toward repentance and forgiveness, toward the joy found in reconciled peoples, toward peace and mercy, toward your kingdom.

And that’s why we pray the prayer your Son taught us to pray, “Our Father…

But the crazy thing about it is the name: Divine Strake. Is the Department of Defense claiming divinity? Ok, it’s an absurd insinuation. But how in the world did they think that using a word like “divine” was an appropriate way to name a military project? If they use such language, they enter into theological (literally, “talk about the divine”) territory, and into a tradition (at least for Christians) that takes language about the divine very seriously—that’s what the Council of Nicaea, among others, is all about. So, even if the DTRA thought it was just a clever idea to use language about God for the project, it seems important to think a little bit about why such language is inappropriate, and what they may be saying implicitly (heck, why not explicitly) about their project.

The first thing that comes to mind is a passage from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). In their first chapter, they argue that after modernity war “now tends toward the absolute.” “In modernity war never had an absolute, ontological character…. War was an element of social life; it did not rule over life.” But in our age, war now rules over life—it becomes “a form of biopower” (literally, it holds the “power of life”, and that’s made evident by it’s ability to end life, to kill). Thus, as Hardt and Negri put it, “war becomes properly ontological.” At the center of the threat of global war, of weapons of mass destruction, is the claim of sovereignty—and it’s “not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself and perhaps indeed of all being” (18-19). That is why war, especially the threat of mass destruction, becomes an ontological claim—it claims to control being.

Maybe the Department of Defense is finally being honest about their control over weapons that have the potential to end life. Divine Strake is it’s way to explore ways to make sure others don’t share in the United State’s ability to decide when and where life should end—ontological biopower. It is the Defense Department’s desire for soveriegnty, for godlike control of the power over life and death—thus, divine. To share God’s ontological soveriegnty. To be like God: sicut deus.

In his very early work on Genesis 1-3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer engaged in a theological exegesis of the creation and fall of humanity. He has a chapter called “Sicut Deus”—like God. Bonhoffer explores what it means for the serpent to tempt humanity with the possibility of making ourselves “like God” (Gen. 3:4-5). And I think he offers some helpful ways to understand what it may mean for us to think about the use of language that seizes divinity for ourselves (projects like Divine Strake). He writes, “In what does humankind’s being sicut deus consist? It consists in its own attempt to be for God” (116). “This is disobedience in the semblance of obedience, the desire to rule in the semblance of service, the will to be creator in the semblance of being a creature, being dead in the semblance of life” (117). Those words seem to be a very appropriate warning, and it helps unmasks rulers who claim to do things in our service: the desire to rule in the semblance of service. And the last line captures the ontological biopower of threats of war and control over weapons of mass destruction: death in the semblance of life.

The last passage I want to quote from Bonhoffer’s Creation and Fall (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997) ends his chapter on the Fall (p. 120):

It is rebellion, the creature’s stepping outside of the creature’s only possible attitude, the creature’s becoming creator, the destruction of creatureliness, a defection, a falling away from being safely held as a creature. As such a defection it is a continual fall, a plunging down into a bottomless abyss, a state of being let go, a process of moving further and further away, falling deeper and deeper. And in all this it is not merely a moral lapse but the destruction of creation by the creature… From now on that world has been robbed of its creatureliness and drops blindly into infinite space, like a meteor that has torn itself away from the core to which it once belonged.

Lastly, I have to end with Karl Barth. It seems I always make my way back to him. This is from his early work on the Epistle to the Romans: page 236 of The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1963):

If, then, by the consciousness of religion we make human thought and will and act to be the thought and will and act of God, does not human behaviour become supremely impressive, significant, necessary, and inevitable?... A man may or may not act religiously; but if he does so act, it is widely supposed that he does well, and is thereby justified and established and secure. In fact, however, he merely established himself, rests upon his own competence, and treats his own ambitions as adequate and satisfactory. Religion, then, so far from dissolving men existentially, so far from rolling them out and pressing them against the wall, so far from overwhelming them and transforming them, acts upon them like a drug which has been extremely skilfully administered. Instead of counteracting human illusions, it does no more than introduce an alternative condition of pleasurable emotion. Thus it is that the possibility of religion enables the existentially godless man to attain the full maturity of his godlessness by bringing forth a rich and most conspicuous harvest of fruit unto death.

The U.S. spent a staggering $783 billion in 2005 on the military.

As a result, 42 cents out of every dollar you’re paying in taxes this year is going to the military.

Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers)

As Camassia insightfully points out the example Paul gives in dealing with Onesimus and Philemon is one of following the letter of the law while challenging the social situation that gave rise to the problem. Her point intersects with what Dr. Robert Pastor talked about on last week’s Latino USA: if we want a real, long-term solution to illegal immigration we need to address the source, not just the symptoms. If history tells us anything, fences, increased border control, deportation, and felonization are going to do little when you are unemployed or barely scraping by and you know you can make 10 times more in the U.S. Dr. Pastor suggests that the long-term, effective solution to the immigration problem would be if we invested $80 billion in economic and infrastructure development in Mexico, thereby increasing the number of jobs and average wage in one countries from which a fair number of immigrants arrive (I realize only half of illegal immigrants come from Mexico, so this would be a partial solution, but still a decent first step). That’s similar to what the E.U. did when it was formed, as there was a similar worry that there would be a massive migration from poorer countries, like Ireland, to more well-off European countries. And, surprisingly enough, it appears to have worked well enough.

Of course, the sticking point for such a proposal is that monstrous $80 billion (spread out over a number of years, of course). Such an amount seems outrageous until you realize that amount is only 10% of what we spent on war in one year!

That the last line I read last night in bed before I turned out the lights. It’s how D.M. MacKinnon ends his essay “Order and Evil in the Gospel” (Borderlands of Theology, p.96).

“Violence rages in Iraq; 58 killed.”

That’s the headline I read first thing this morning as I sat down at the table with my cup of coffee and the newspaper. When will it ever end? Tomorrow it always gets worse. Of course, I’m grateful that the folks from the Christian Peacemaking Team were rescued. But there’s always still more violence, more death. The escalating violence of this month makes Fr. Richard John Neuhaus look a bit naive, when we read his defense of the war back in October, 2004 (First Things):

Leading up to the invasion and even after its rapid military success, critics were predicting a quagmire, a Somalia-like debacle, a rising of the Arab ‘street’ that would be ‘a storm from hell,’ and, of course, another Vietnam. With reference to civilian casualties, some protesters spoke about a ‘Middle East holocaust.’ None of that happened.

But who cares about hindsight? So people are wrong sometimes, even powerful conservatives like Father Neuhaus. I’m just trying to make sense of the deaths and the apocalyptic yellows and reds exploding on the streets of Baghdad, leaving charred houses and bodies. So I pick MacKinnon from my shelf and see if his words can open up a passage, just a crack, through this present darkness that invites the wonder-working power of Christ’s redemption. But MacKinnon refuses easy, sentimental answers. There’s no fluff in his gospel; there’s no escape from the angoy of Jesus on the cross.

It’s so easy to escape to an image of Jesus as victor, seated at the right hand of the Father directing the course of history, working out the finishing touches on the redemption accomplished in the resurrection. But, as the writer of Hebrews says, “at present we do not yet see everything made subject to him” (2:8). And MacKinnon knows this, and calls us to the cross and to remember that Jesus still bears the marks of death, of pain, of human suffering. There’s no easy way out from under the scandal of the cross. And when MacKinnon takes me to the foot of the cross and grabs my head with both hands and forces my gaze at Jesus’ body smeared with his own blood, I am left with unsettling questions: How does the hope of Christ’s redemption transfigure those dark figures into the life of resurrection? How does Jesus explode the cross into new life? What is the link between the cross and resurrection? How do those two contradictions reconcile?

I don’t know how to answer. And I think the danger of easy answers is that they render the particular suffering of others redundant; we are tempted to shift our eyes, to look away, to turn our gaze, because we already have an answer for that, a way to put that issue to rest, to bury them without listening for the whispers of life breaking through the cries of pain. The last thing we want is for the painful gaze of the suffering ones to catch our eyes and hold them captive. But maybe, just maybe, that gaze may offer us the eyes of our Christ… Can Christ’s redemptive hope speak through death?

All I can do is echo Maximus the Confessor: “The one who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb, knows the reasons of things. The one who is initiated into the infinite power of the Resurrection, knows the purpose for which God knowingly created all.” (see the end of this sermon). And I know that this sort of answer doesn’t satisfy. At least it doesn’t settle anything for me. But I don’t know where else to turn than to that mystery.

I’ll let D.M. MacKinnon lead us further into the mysteries of our Paschal lamb. His text speaks of human suffering and the mysterious agony of Christ more honestly than most people I read. The quote I started with is at the bottom of the selection:

It is fashionable nowadays to speak of Christ as victor, as if the agony and disillusion, the sheer monstrous reality of physical and spiritual suffering which he bore were a mere charade… But the gospels, including that of John which does not chronicle the episode of Gethsemane, recall our imaginations to a figure prostrate on the earth, afraid and desolate, bidding men and women see in him the ground of all creation. (92)

Christianity takes the history of Jesus and urges the believer to find, in the endurance of the ultimate contradictions of human existence that belongs to its very substance, the assurance that in the worst that can befall his creatures, the creative Word keeps company with thsoe whom he has called his own. (93)

‘Come down from the cross and we will believe.’ Many Christians have joined in this cry; many continue indeed to make it their own, even when they pay lip service to the gospel of the Resurrection. But it is only in the light of the resurrection that those Christians can learn rather to say with understanding the profound words of Pascal, that Christ will indeed be in agony unto the end of the world. (96)

You must imagine prayer as something other than the singing in the Christian church; instead there is screaming, groaning, and the heavens are stormy when people pray… This is how Paul experiences the praying congregation.

Is that what my Savior looks like?

...in agony untill the end of the world.