On September 1, 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman struck a match against the kindling that was Atlanta. It’s an event seemingly far removed from our present day. Or, is it?
A little over a decade following that conflagration, my Granny was born into a state that was being occupied by a foreign army. Hatred and resentment for the occupiers was a fact of living. Granny was my great-grandmother. She and Papa lived at my grandmother’s home, where I was raised during my early years. Both Granny and Papa died when I was a small child. Yet, vague visuals still clutch my memory.
I can see Papa leading me into the chicken house to collect eggs. I can see his gnarly hand moving toward my mouth with the offering of the succulent fig he’d just plucked from the tree. My mind faintly smells that fruit and feels my toddler’s hand wiping the sweet running sticky from my chin.
The memory is a funny thing. I vividly recall days with Papa, his hands, and the dark color of his pants leg. I even remember his laugh. But I cannot bring his face to focus.
Granny is another matter. I remember her face well. But I don’t remember Granny doing anything but sit on the sofa in my grandmother’s living room. I see her in my mind’s eye paying a lot more attention to my cousin Pat than she did me. (But everybody loved Pat best.) The things I remember most about Granny are her bony fingers and her raspy voice.
There was the day she beckoned me to her with that long index finger of her left hand. As I arrived in front of her knees, she used that same index finger to hook my shirt (white and button up) and lift it to my chest. And then, slowly, she inserted the end of her right index finger into my navel. Holding it there, she said, “See where, when you were a baby, the Yankees shot you.”
Folks generally laugh when I relate that true story. And they might wonder what Granny would have thought had she been around when I married one of those Yankees. In reality, however, the story is not funny. It’s a story of passing on from one generation to another the prejudices and hatreds that have been born of misunderstanding, conflict, and violence.
On August 29, 2003, an Iraqi girl in her blog, Baghdad Burning, in reaction to Paul Bremer, Ambassador to Iraq, saying, “(Iraq) is not a country in chaos and Baghdad is not a city in chaos.” wrote:
Where is this guy living? Is he even in the same time zone??? I’m incredulous … maybe he’s from some alternative universe where shooting, looting, tanks, rape, abductions, and assignations aren’t considered chaos, but its chaos in *my* world.
In this writing, posted only five months following the American invasion, one see the growing frustration and resentment over the aftermath of Sadaam’s topple.
Reading Baghdad Burning is a sometimes painful thing. She sees, sometimes, the worst in us. Her post of July 11, 2006, includes this:
Rape. The latest American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest – it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last ….
In the news they’re estimating her age to be around twenty-five, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes ….
Do you suppose some day in some middle class home of a loving family somewhere in Baghdad a grandmother will raise the shirt of a child and stick her bony finger in the child’s navel and say, “See where the Americans shot you when you were a child.”?
On July 12, Hezbollah fighters killed three Israeli soldiers in an attack. Two other soldiers were kidnapped. Israel and Hezbollah then engaged in a bombardment of one another, the former by planes the latter by indiscriminate missiles. Israel’s escalation of the conflict was accomplished, it is clear, with the backing of the United States. In a talk at the State Department, President Bush enjoined Israel's attacks on a democratic nation in the Middle East with the War on Terror, saying, “from Baghdad to Beirut” we are in “a broader struggle between freedom and terror …”
In that broader struggle, while Secretary of State Rice was conducting discussions, the Israelis bombed the town of Qana. Twenty-six were killed; sixteen of them were children.
How long will it be until a Lebanese grandmother pokes her bony finger into her granddaughter’s navel and proclaims, “See where the Jews shot you when you were a baby using American bullets.”?
I relate these events to say: It’s time someone began acting like the adult in this world of heavily armed petulant children.
The Reverend Dr. Gregory A. Boyd, founder and senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, garnered some attention back in April, 2004. A conservative evangelical pastor, he shattered the traditional image of such folk by preaching a series of sermons on why his church should not be involved in the chorus of right-wing political activity so prevalent that year. Twenty percent of his congregation walked out.
From that experience, Dr. Boyd has written a book, The Myth of A Christian Nation, How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church. It is a timely work. He states his thesis in the Introduction.
My thesis, which caused such an uproar, is this: I believe a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry. To a frightful degree, I think, evangelicals fuse the kingdom of God with a preferred version of the kingdom on the world (whether it’s our national interests, a particular form of government, a particular political program, or so on). Rather than focusing our understanding of God’s kingdom in the person of Jesus – who, incidentally, never allowed himself to get pulled into the political disputes of his day – I believe many of us American evangelicals have allowed our understanding of the kingdom of God to be polluted with political ideals, agendas, and issues.
I will argue that this perspective is misguided, that fusing together the kingdom of God with this or any other version of the kingdom of the world is idolatrous and that this fusion is having serious negative consequences for Christ’s church and for the advancement of God’s kingdom.
Dr. Boyd points out that: “Historians estimate that in the twentieth century alone over 200 million people died as a result of war and political conflict. The history of the world is a massive river of blood, and this waste of life testifies not only to the violent tendencies of the fallen human heart but to the destructive nature of the ruler of the kingdom on this world.”
He describes what is going on in the world today as “The Tit-For-Tat Kingdom”. He points to the 2004 revelation of the abuses taking place in the Abu Gharib prison. Only days later there was the recorded on video beheading of John Berg by Iraqi terrorist. Tit-for-Tat. “You can begin to understand why,” he says, “given our passionate convictions and given their passionate convictions, this bloody tit-for-tat game is almost inevitable.
There is a myth of “redemptive violence” points out Dr. Boyd. When President Bush says, following the bringing down of the World Trade Center, “the ‘good’ (our tribe) must extinguish the ‘evil’ (their tribe), using all means necessary, including violence. This is the age-old myth of redemptive violence.”
And it gets us nowhere. One more quote from Dr. Boyd: “Any peace achieved by violence is forever threatened by violence.”
In a previous posting on the 108th Armored National Guard troops returning to my town from Iraq, I wrote of Major Chaplain John Morris. He served two tours with the Minnesota National Guard, and talked with Krista Tippett on the American Public Media show Speaking of Faith. The show was titled, “The Soul of War.” In this program, Major Morris relates:
There’s a spiritual dynamic that I think often we, and I’m speaking of American military forces, fail to take into account and it’s to our demise … in this fight we call the Global War on Terrorism. We say we understand that the people we’re fighting are motivated by an ideology that’s an aberrant view of religion. That’s a great line, but I’ve often had to really be forceful with commanders that “You don’t understand. These people are tapping into something in the spiritual realm and if you fail to take it seriously it doesn’t matter how long we fight we will not defeat them.
I’m going to be blunt. And I don’t say this for effect; it’s just reality. We’re in a war, but this is a war where you cannot kill enough people to win. … We have to take seriously religious leaders; we have to take seriously the religious worldview of people. We have to think that when we fire that weapon and we miss, that round goes somewhere, and when it hits somebody else that’s innocent, it has a ripple effect of a culture that takes seriously life and death, clan and family. . . .
The Iraqi girl writing in Baghdad Burning again:
I woke up this morning to scenes of carnage and destruction on the television and for the briefest of moments, I thought it was footage of Iraq. It took me a few seconds to realize it was actually Qana in Lebanon. . . . .
I’m so frustrated I can’t think straight. I’m full of rage against Israel, the US, Britain, Iran and most of Europe. The world is going to go to hell for standing by and allowing the massacre of innocents. For God’s sake, 34 children??? The UN is beyond useless. They’ve gone from a union of nations working for the good of the world (if they ever were even that), to a bunch of gravediggers. They’re only good for digging mangled bodies out of the ruins of buildings and helping to identify and put them into mass graves. They won’t stop a massacre – they won’t even speak out against it – they’ll just come by and help clean up the mess. Are the lives of Arabs worth so little? If this had happened in the US or UK or France or China, somebody would already have dropped a nuclear bomb … How is this happening?
I think I know how this is happening. “Come here, child, pull up your shirt. Look here where, when you were a baby, you were shot by the ….
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