Here’s some local media coverage of our worship service and protest: “Protesters hold demonstration,” and “Taking the Cross to the streets.”

And here’s an excerpt from the short sermon I preached at the detention center as a Cary police officer kept telling me to stop preaching and leave the premises:

This chair here will remain empty as a sign of all the bodies that the department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have hidden from us, the bodies that law enforcement agents have torn from our communities and our families in the middle of the night, the bodies that they have ripped away from our churches. By refusing to let us wash the feet of the people hidden in their detention centers, the federal government has dismembered the body of Christ, they have torn apart the church, they have pierced and severed the body of Jesus.

Politics involves all the ways we tend to the common good. This happens in our neighborhoods, not just in Washington. For Coles and Hauerwas, democracy is everyday politics that turns us to the importance of “concrete practices of tending to one another.”

Coles describes the civil rights movement as a story of this kind of everyday democracy. He focuses our attention on the ordinary African-American churchwomen who gave Martin Luther King Jr. a movement to talk about. Ella Baker is the protagonist of this story. She was a political organizer who spread the civil rights movement among everyday folk. According to Coles, Baker’s politics displayed “the arts and the techniques of ‘sitting at the feet’ of the least of these.” These relationships turned into political networks that birthed life in the midst of suffering.

Baker’s democratic politics started at the kitchen table and community meals. For Coles, with whom we eat is as politically significant as what we do in the voting booth. Meals of communion fuel political imagination.

Speaking of democracy… David Fitch jotted down some great one-liners from a recent panel that Hauerwas sat on. I thought I’d pass them along, since they seem appropriate given the increasing heat among the presidential hopefuls.

National politics is like the Roman circus in first century Rome. It is entertainment to keep us distracted from the real issues.

Voting is a form of violence. You vote once, then 51% tells the 49% what to do.

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.

And then this thought: “so why am I not out there?” Why am I on the sidewalk, smiling and waving ocassionally, yes, but not actually in that pulsing river of life and movement?

Mostly it was because of fear—not fear of rejection or violence, which weren’t even remotely present, but of commitment. I’m an ambivalent person by nature, and seminary has only deepened that characteristic. The funny thing is, I want solid, straight, and unassailable answers to my questions. However, I also hold a deep conviction that my faith calls me to listen to the other—those who don’t look like, think like, or talk like me. As Miroslav Volf puts it in Exclusion & Embrace (an incredible book, BTW):

The open arms of Christ on the cross are a sign that God does not want to be a God without the other—humanity—and suffers humanity’s violence in order to embrace it (154).

Praxis brings with it forced option, one that cannot be avoided. When praxis is called for, puzzled immobility before contradiction or indifferent acceptance of plurality of options must both cease—for to exist humanly we must wager, and must enact on our wager (253).