The Little Friar

Apparently President Obama now fears future American presidents will wage perpetual covert drone wars.  On the surface of it, such fears are well-grounded.  President Obama himself has embraced controversial covert counterterrorism programs began by George W. Bush:  The rendition and harsh interrogation (including torture) of terrorist suspects, and the use of drones to kill terrorist suspects outside of traditional battlefields. Two days after taking the oath of office Obama signed an Executive Order , which revoked the Bush-era directives authorizing torture, and reemphasized international conventions and federal laws prohibiting torture.  The following day, Obama authorized two CIA drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan, which, combined, killed an estimated one militant and 10 civilians, including between four and five children. Whereas Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 terrorists and 195 civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, ...

1.  God is the God of peace.  The Father, as the "source of good" ( fons bonorum ), is the source of peace; the Son, of course, is the Prince of Peace; and the Spirit, as the "bond of love" ( vinculum caritatis ) between the Father and the Son, is the Spirit of peace.  To re-phrase 1 John 1.5:  God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all. 2.  Is this a tendentious use of scripture?  Not at all.  Christian theology is Trinitarian precisely because it is Christocentric -- and it is incontestable that "God is Christ-like, and in him there is no un-Christ-likeness at all" (John V. Taylor).  Jesus preached and practiced non-violence -- no ifs, ands, or buts.  And Jesus is the imago Dei . 3.  And the "awkward" New Testament texts?  The "sword" in Matthew 10.34 is clearly a metaphor for the conflict that the mission of Jesus provoked; while the "sword" in Luke 22.36 is "grimly ironical (IH Marshall).  ...

Today is "Remembrance Sunday".  It's the Sunday closest to November 11th.  It's the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day -- or "Veteran's Day" in America -- that has historically been devoted to remembering the dead of war (especially that "Great War", the hundredth anniversary of which is 2014).   I hate , I despise our wars.  But I don't hate our soldiers.  The fallen dead of our wars are a stench that rises up to God.  Because of it, he does not accept our sacrifices.   Even though we bring him prayers and sacrifices of praise today, he doesn't accept them.  Away with all the noise of our patriotic anthems.  God doesn't listen to all our worshipful posturing on days like today.  Instead, let justice roll on like a river.  Let righteousness flow like a roaring stream -- until the waters of God's Kingdom's peace wash over all the earth, and destroy our wars.  See, I'm convinced engaging in armed conflict goes against every...

Christ, you walked on water and tamed chaos at your command.  But you cannot walk the streets, not in our day.  There's something deeply wrong with us.  Our bright world is so strong, with shouting powers and shouting crowds, much as on your Judgment Day.  It's an old haunting kingdom, this one we call Ours -- which, in spirit and truth, is Caesar's, or more accurately, Mars'. In You, I taste bread, with honey, a freshness, rising as if from cold, dead                concrete on our streets.  But not in our day.  We live like diagrams, drawn on a page by a power wielded, not by our hand, And we wonder why Somewhere, a door slams shut -- and emptiness and darkness spreads. Because we love our processes, our speech, our systems, more than we love You, Truth & Love.  Like parables of wrong, our days are a waste, a toxic sludge, polluted water.  But you walk on water and tame chaos, even in our day. 

Unless you've been under a rock, you've probably heard of the ongoing crisis for Christians in Iraq. Children beheaded.  Christians crucified, fleeing or forced to convert to Islam.   And now, the US has responded to that crisis by dropping bombs.  Okay, so I'm a Christian.  Which means I follow Jesus.  Because I follow Jesus, I'm a pacifist -- someone who "makes peace".  Therefore I think dropping bombs is a bad idea.   No one doubts we need to do something .  The question is, what is that something  we should do? A friend posed that question today.  So here's my response.  All violent counterterrorism-intervention policies have completely failed.  We're sowing and reaping perpetual tragedy with this violence machine and the only people benefitting are sitting on top of a mountain of cash in the conflict industry (I'm glaring at you, Lockheed Martin).  It's time for a major shift in conflict management strategies.   ...

Today is August 6th.  It's always an ambivalent day of the year.  For two reasons.  Today is Transfiguration Day .  In the Church Year, today's the day we commemorate Jesus  climbing a mountain with his closest friends.  There Jesus has a profound experience.  There's this dazzling light, a cloud that overshadowed them, and they were terrified by the cloud, and a voice.  The disciples proposed to build buildings for worship, to contain the visions they'd seen.  Fear had gripped them, so these disciples try and control the situation.  Thing is, Transfiguration Day wouldn't even be on the Church's calendar if not for violence.  On this day in 1456, news was announced in Rome that John Hunyady had overcome the Turks near Belgrade and the bells of many countries still ring at midday to commemorate the slaughter.  Pope Callistus ordered the whole Church to commemorate the victory by celebrating the feast of the Transfigura...

Is there hope for a world gone wrong? Is there hope in the midst of hatred and violence?  In his poem "God's Grandeur"(1877), Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:  the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-- Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." Hopkins was of course writing about the destructiveness of an industrialized world.  But the poem's conclusion applies eq...

"[God] knows the Nothingness.  He knows that which he did not elect or will as the creator.  He know Chaos and its terror.  He knows its advantage over his creature.  He knows how inevitably it imperils his creature.  Yet he is Lord over that which imperils his creature.  Against him, the Nothingness has no power of its own.  And he has sworn faithfulness to his threatened creature.  In creating it he has covenanted himself with it in solidarity.  He would rather let himself be injured and humiliated in making the assault and repulse of Nothingness his own concern than leave his creature alone in this affliction.  He deploys all his glory in the work of his deepest condescension.  He intervenes in the struggle between Nothingness and the creature as if he were not God but himself a weak and threatened and vulnerable creature.  This is how God himself comes on the scene." -- Karl Barth,  Church Dogmatics  III/3, p. 358...

The idea pervades our nation mythos  about Memorial Day:  These "sainted dead" soldiers "gave their lives" as a sacrifice for "our freedom".  And we often hear this in connection to Jesus' sacrifice.  "Greater love has no one than that they lay down a life for a friend."  Or, in the more blatant bumper sticker that I see on occasion:   Thing is, at least from the perspective of the New Testament, that's a false analogy .  Or, to put the terms more starkly:  It's a lie .   Jesus made the final sacrifice for all.  No other "sacrifice" -- even that of an American solider -- can come close to offering the freedom of the cross.  "For by the death of Christ we are set free ..." (Ephesians 1.7).   At issue here is what we mean by freedom. Stopping folks on the street, if I asked, "What is freedom ?", I'm pretty sure of get a standard answer:  "It's the ability to do anything you want without anyone ...

Several years ago now, I was asked to pray a prayer as part of a community service for Memorial Day.  Standing on the county courthouse steps, in front of that county's war memorial, I mourned the dead and prayed for peace.  I confessed the sins that lead to the deaths of so many.  Once I'd finished praying, someone read the line from John's Gospel (15.13):  "Greater love has no man than this".  I'm always moved when I stand at war memorials.  And yet the awe I feel when I stand at any  war memorial is just as quickly disturbed by another realization:   The brilliant Great War poet Wilfred Owen, in "Dulce Et Decorum Est",  bitterly called it "the old lie" (the translation is "It is sweet and right / To die for your country").  Nor should it be overlooked that Owen took his famous line from an ode by Horace, the Latin poet, the Laureate of Rome -- Rome, the great pagan empire and war machine, one of whose procurators, known as Pont...

There are two numbers etched into the American psyche that have forever changed how we think about public policy (foreign and  domestic):  9/11.   In fact, that Tuesday was such an apocalyptic event that Christians in America have never been able to ignore that the only real equivalent in Christian memory is Good Friday.  In the days after 9/11/2001, we were just like the disciples on that Good Friday:  Dazed, confused, disbelieving, grieving, angry.  We were all  afraid of the terror.  The disciples were sure that the Roman terror unleashed on Jesus would be unleashed on them.  And we Christians in America were afraid that the terror of that day would become "business as usual". For the followers of Jesus, there were two days of eclipse then -- resurrection!  An even more apocalyptic event for them than Jesus' crucifixion.  Why? The resurrection of Jesus in the Jewish mindset made them think it was the end-times.  God would no...

A few years ago, I participated in a panel discussion on sexuality in the Church at Emory & Henry College.  At that time, I tried to point out that using human sexuality as the criteria for defining who we are is rather flawed.  Perhaps, I tried to demonstrate, there's a way of being sexual that is also compatible with being Christian. The problem, of course, is that Christians are far from a unified mind about human relationships generally, and sexual relationships specifically.  Sure, we have a base-line (what I called yesterday "righteous relationships"), but that base-line requires a lot of working in order to arrive at a biblical understanding of being human. Which set me to thinking. I'm aware that certain moral, doctrinal and theological accommodations may create too much of a rupture for the interpreting community.  But does my claim that human sexuality is too thin a category for defining who we are meet that standard?  You'd think so, based o...

The problem of the pledge of allegiance.  It's been a problem for me for years.  I always stand -- out of respect for those who are reciting -- but I am compelled to remain silent.  And every time I stand but remain silent, there are looks, questions, even social pressure to conform.  I usually offer a brief response, thanking them for their loyalty and for their faithfulness to a nation-state that provides so many "freedoms".  But that's hardly consolation. Tonight, I've seen this picture making its rounds on Facebook. This is the sort of social pressure I'm talking about.  I can't know why "Kevin" refuses to stand or pledge, but I sympathize with him.  It's rough not pledging allegiance.  I blame all this on Dietrich Bonhoeffer .  It was he who made me begin to think about issues of faithfulness to God and how that faithfulness relates to the State.  So, I want to lay out, again, as clearly as I can, why I don't say the pled...

I can understand why I see it more often.  With shootings happening at such a regular pace in American culture, the question of gun control laws and Constitutional "the right to bear arms", the cultural war over guns is more than a skirmish or two, here and there.  It's an all-out battle.  More and more, I'm seeing quotes or comments about Adolf Hitler's drive to keep guns out of the hands of Germans. The implication is clear:  If gun control laws are passed in the US, we'll effectively be living in the same sort of society as Nazi Germany.  The Nazis will have control of our guns.  Such tyranny is evil.  So don't support gun control. What bothers me about this meme is its "guilt by association".  To many (certainly in the US), Hitler is the very epitome of evil.  Therefore, anything associated with him is evil. So, anyone that agrees with anything associated with him is evil.  The emphasis is that if you support gun contro...