Original subtitles

We are the greatest country on this planet.

We are going to defeat the barbarians

and we're going to defeat them fast.

And to our enemies...

To our enemies, we will pursue you

as only America can. You will fear us.

It is time to show the whole world

that America is back, bigger and better

and stronger than ever before.

The American narrative, the militaristic spirit is so deeply ingrained in our bones.

And I know that because I was that person for so many years,

like I know what it feels like to be so committed,

to a militaristic, destroy your enemy kind of posture while maintaining

my Christian faith. I know what that feels like.

And when you start to challenge that,

it cuts to the core of who we are, as American Christians,

or I'll say AmericanChristians.

I think it's hard for outsiders. I mean,

people not living and growing upin America

to understand how deeply that myth is woven

into the American psyche.

That America is not just the latest in a long line of superpowers.

America is raised up by God with special purposes. Generally,

they'll talk about bringing the gospel to the nations, which the gospel also includes

certain visions of democracy and things like that. And the primary

means by which America will accomplish that is either the

infliction of violence or the threat of violence. That's always there.

That's why, in the Christian mind, a trillion dollar military

is somehow also very connected to purposes of Christ in the world,

which I think is ludicrous. But, I promise you that in that particular narrative,

it makes sense.

Love God, love thy neighbor. Hey!

Because in the end, the devil and evil, they know the bottom line,

who will have the dominion of the use of force?

Will it be good, honorable young men and women?

Or will it be the wolves?

I think a lot of people in the body of Christ have a hard time

associating Jesus with making an assault weapon.

But it's right there in the Scripture, and

it's a Scripture that's not taught in churches because it kind of breaks that narrative.

He actually manufactured, he spent time to manufacture a scourge,

which is a nine tail whip for the purpose of assaulting

the money changers in the temple. So, legally,

what he did was manufacture an assault weapon

for the purpose of beating people.

You know, Luke 22:36

one of last things Jesus tells his disciples.

He said, I told you before, don't you take your cloak with you.

Now I tell you, sell your cloak and buy a sword.

What would Jesus do? One of the last things he told us to do is to arm ourselves.

Hebrews tells us David was made after God's own heart.

And Saul has killed his thousands, David has killed his tens of thousands.

Think about this, "Thou shalt not kill." It's kind of a weak translation

taken horribly out of context.

All of the Jewish translations, original Hebrew,

translate to "shall not murder."

Almost all the modern translation translate to "shall not murder."

And there's a clear difference between murder and lawful use of deadly force.

- Back! Down! - Down! Down! Down!

Lawful use of deadly force to protect the innocent is always there.

Greater love has no one than this. They lay their life down for their friends.

And who are your friends? Then we get

the parable of the Good Samaritan. Where your neighbors,

and that responsibility to try to take the world and make it safe.

We see it as practicing self defense

as the actualization oflove God and love your neighbor.

Which Jesus said, is the greatest commandments. Love God,

love the gifts that he's given and also know how to protect them,

and protect your neighbor. Even though that neighbor may not be of the faith,

or a believer in Christ.

We still have a duty to extend Christ's love upon them.

I think the picture of Christ as

this sort of pacifist is non biblical.

It's non biblical even when you look at the Old Testament as well,

through the the warrior leaders.

Moses had to become a leader of armies. Abraham had to become a leader of armies,

King David, all the kings throughout the Scripture are leading armies.

So we really see it as like a spiritual practice.

All right young man, here we go.

Tenderness inside is important,

but also, at the same time, the ability to

defend Christ's kingdom. Loving our enemies,

praying for those who persecute you.

This is something that Christ tells us to do.

He doesn't say, however, let the enemies destroy your nations,

your civilization, rape your women and children.

He does not say that.

We know that Christ is a shepherd, so he protects his flock.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you, the truth?

Jesus is not Mother Teresa.

He's William Wallace.

We have feminized this man.

We've turned him into an American male who goes to Target

and doesn't know which bathroom to use.

He was a hellraiser.

Started arguments and fights everywhere he went.

I would agree with C. S. Lewis, who said, "Though I can respect an honest pacifist,

I believe him to be entirely mistaken."

I respect him, just, you know,

step aside so I can protect you, though.

We're not wrestling against flesh and blood,

we're wresting against somebody who roams about like a roaring lion

seeking someone to devour.

He will gun you down in your sanctuary. He will rape your kids.

He'll attack you at Walmart, Target, he don't care where you at

because he is a killer, and that is his nature.

And if he can find somebody willing to carry out his plan, he will do it.

It would be wonderful if the whole world was pacifist.

But we live in a world that, according to the Epistle of First John,

the whole world lies under the power of the devil.

And Jesus said in John 8:44, he's a liar and a murderer.

We never mention the names of the killers

'cause we give these guys way too much glory.

And all they want to be is recognized.

They're in it for the glory. They feel like they're a god.

When they come into your area with a gun,

they feel like they're a God and they're gonna be in the news. But I know...

You can kill to protect others,

and there's justification for that, all through the Scriptures.

But it's not natural.

It's not natural to kill another person.

Inside most healthy members of our species is this resistance to killing.

Sociopaths don't have that resistance.

Healthy people have to be trained to kill.

There are sheep, there are wolves and there are sheepdogs.

The wolf is a predator. He will kill to satisfy his own needs,

but the psychology of a police officer or a military person,

or somebody who's a defender,

they have the propensity to kill. They have the propensity for violence,

but they have empathy for their fellow man,

which is something that a cold blooded killer doesn't have.

I've used this analogy of the sheep,

the wolf and the sheepdog for a very long time,

and it's amazing how almost every time somebody comes up and said,

"You know, I always thoughtthere's something wrong with me. I thought I was a wolf.

I would never harm the flock,

but I yearn for the opportunity to use my skills and to protect it.

All my life, I've stood up to the bully, and all my life, I've tried to protect people

and all my life I've been prepared for violence when it comes.

I'm not a wolf, I'm a sheepdog."

And I tell people, you know what,

I know who my great shepherd is.

I'm a sheepdog under the authority of the great shepherd,

and one day the sheepdog will finally rest at the feet of the great shepherd.

And we yearn to hear those words, "Well done there, good and faithful servant."

Many of the sheep don't like the sheepdog

because he looks too much like the wolf,

and he acts too much like the wolf, and he has a propensity for violence.

He can get violent. He can grab a gun and go to work.

And the sheep don't like that until the wolf is attacking.

Then they want that.

And there are people that don't even want it then.

There's always gonna be some people who will never be convinced that

you should use a tool of protection. Even to protect them. I don't get it.

I don't understand why they feel that way, but they do.

The problem is that the churchgoing people, and I say this all the time,

I know it's offensive, but religion dumbs people down.

Welcome back. We're following this breaking news out of Sutherland Springs, Texas.

A shooting taking place at the First Baptist Church...

I remember after the 26 people were massacred in Texas,

I remember a churchgoing man calling me saying,

"Jimmy, you know what's wrong with us church people?" I said, "What's that, George?"

He said, "We think everybody's like us.

We think everybody that comes to church or at the mall, or the theater,

nobody's got evil intent." And what's so odd about that is that

here you have people who teach from the Bible, who pastor churches,

they're elders, they're Sunday school teachers, they're theologians,

and they don't see the potentialfor evil in the heart of man.

How did they miss the fact that we're not even past the Book of Genesis,

when God said something he'd never said before.

"I regret that I made man. He's corrupt and violent."

People have always been terribly violent,

but people don't understand that, especially people of faith.

They give their hearts to Jesus and throw their minds in a dumpster.

If you knew anything about trust in God or faith,

you would know that faith without works is dead.

We know that Abraham had faith because he offered Isaac.

We know the woman who was bleeding internally had faith,

because she pressed her way through the crowd.

True legitimate faith made you do something, and then you trust God.

Because faith without works is dead, and you might be too,

if you don't have a plan. And I always like to ask if faith is enough,

then tell me why are our brothers and sisters overseas being killed for their faith?

Over 3000 Christians were murdered by ISIS terrorists in 2017.

Six Christian women are raped and forced into Islam every day in the Middle East.

If faith is enough, why isn't he protecting them?

A grieving mother and son turned martyr...

I no longer struggle with, "Why do bad things happen?"

I'm way past that.

I know that God made this world and gave it to Adam and said, "This is your world."

Genesis 1:26. Rule over everything. The birds of the air,

the fish of the ocean, the animals that creep about, what have you.

This is your world. You and I will work in harmony

and we will make it work. And that

is the reason bad things happen. We're not doing our part.

It would be nice if everybody was a pacifist.

You bet. But, I'm stunned at these men and these women

who say they believe the word of God, but don't dig beneath its pages.

And who don't study the languageand see what it says.

I was Fry, the long-haired Zeppelin kid,

and I had this encounter with Jesus, and I'm carrying my Bible to school,

not to make a statement, not as some sort of badge of super spirituality,

because I wanted to read the thing.

We're gonna serve and seek the God of peace like never before.

And like Martin, we're gonna fulfill our...

I grew up in North Carolina. I was a very devout kid

and believed in God.

My father was the local newspaper publisher in the '60s.

He came out in support of the civil rights movement and President Kennedy.

Well, as my mother said in every white household in North Carolina,

in the South, had somebody in the Klan.

And the Ku Klux Klan threatened my father by threatening to kill me,

and that clarified a lot of things about life in the world.

So, at first, I was just picking up Bibles we had laying around our house.

Then I saw it under a glass case

at the Narrow Way bookstore,

a brown calfskin New American standard Bible,

with wide margins.

And so what I did was, I sold a bicycle I had. I sold it for $40

I went and bought that Bible, and I just thought it was the best

$40 I would ever spend in my life.

And I was reading it. I mean, say what you will, I know the text,

because I've just read it so much.

We were very politicized. Knew everything about the Vietnam War,

and Dr. King and the civil rights movement.

So that when Dr King was killed, I was really shaken.

And then when Bobby Kennedy was killed, like millions of us,

I thought that was the end of all hope.

And what happened was, I went into an existential crisis

and deep depression.

And then I went to Duke to get away from the Catholic Church,

it's a good Methodist school and I decided I don't believe in God anymore.

Well, I just couldn't see how that worked

because life is so beautiful.

And so, one day I decided, of course I believe in Jesus,

and I believe in God. Then my next thought was, well,

you have to give your whole life to God.

After about a year, it was worn out,

and I said, "Hey, I want to get another one of these Bibles." He said,

"Didn't you just get one?" I said, "About a year ago."

So, what's the matter? I said, "Well, it's all falling apart."

And he said, "Really? Do you have it?" "Yeah, it's out in the car."

So, I bring it in. He said, "Yeah, it is falling apart. These have a lifetime guarantee.

I'll just send this back to the manufacturer, and I'll give you a new one."

After about a year, I was back again and I said, "Looks like this one's defective, too,

'cause it's falling apart." And by this time he had got to know me a little bit.

He said, "You know, Brian, there's nothing wrong with these Bibles.

They just weren't made for people like you."

And then I decided to become a priest,

but what happened was, I went to Israel to

hitchhike through Galilee, to see where Jesus lived,

and end up walking through a war zone.

I was there in the summer of 1982 during Israel's war in Lebanon,

and instead I saw all these jet fighters

swooping down over the Sea of Galilee,

dropping bombs and killing people

at the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus gave us the beatitudes,

where he called us to love our enemies.

Mass murder in the name of God,

even at the place where Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers,"

and I decided I would consciously, actively, spend my life

working for peace and justice.

That's what the poor guy wants us to do,

even if nobody else wants to do it,

and that's what I've been doing ever since, and that's gotten me into a lot of trouble.

I've been kicked out of churches, and banned from speaking in churches

all over the country.

It's quite a way to live one's life,

to be saying Jesus is nonviolent, and

pretty much every day of my life, I've got a Christian

telling me why we need to kill

or threatening to kill me because they don't like this message.

Gung ho!

Here come the Gung Ho Commandos.

My best friend was a guy by the name of Donald,

and we did military role playing like a lot of red blooded young men do.

And he had a lot of military books,

and we would page through the books and we came across this picture.

It was a SEAL in Vietnam with a weird looking gun that I had never seen,

with, like a olive drab bandana on, and I'm like, "Who is this guy?"

So we started role playing to be SEALs.

I got more serious about it after I graduated from high school.

So I joined, it was a program that guaranteed you could go to SEAL training.

They don't guarantee you're gonna make it. That's the hard part.

And so I went. That was the start of my foray into Special Operations.

Sit up straight, and look at me right now!

- Aye aye, sir! - Our mission is to train each one of you

to become a United States Marine.

I'm third generation. So my grandfather's a Purple Heart,

my father is a Vietnam Marine veteran.

My grandfather was an Army veteran, and so

there was probably no hard work

to assume what I was going to do after high school.

Looking back now,

I would question whether or not I would have enlisted.

But at the time, I loved it. I was the quintessential Marine.

I looked the part. I felt the part.

It was one thing that I did well

and I was proud of that. I moved to the top 10% of enlisted Marines.

I was assigned to SEAL Team Five.

My first platoon was Charlie Platoon. I was a decent shot,

and I ended up becoming a sniper.

More than anything, my thinking when I entered the SEALs,

it was these phrases like "To liberate the oppressed,"

and I thought you know, "There's a good fight to be fought out there."

And at that stage,

why not violence? I mean, that gets the job done, pretty tidily,

as far as destroying the enemy.

I loved my time there. I did.

I make no apologies about that.

I hate war,

and I make no apologies about that, either.

I absolutely hate it.

Dr. King's said war is a poor chisel to carve out peace.

It's brutal, and I know there's a lot of argument

about Just War Theory, and

whole idea that people will give life to save life. I got it,

but life departs.

Not everyone comes back home,

and everyone that does come home, doesn't come back the same way they left.

Something leaves a human, I believe, when they have to take life,

even if it is in their mind to save their own or justified.

There's a horror that stays with folks.

There's a myth, a mythology of what war is,

that is almost impossible to fight against.

And that is perpetrated by Hollywood, and television

and politicians... It's an attractive myth,

and laying out the reality of war is very unpalatable

for a people because it forces them, ultimately, to question who they are.

I mean, we look towards a source of meaning because we have so little meaning.

And a consumer society where atomized, isolated individuals who are

seeking an elusive and unachievable happiness through consumption

and hedonism and status. And... war fills that void.

War gives you a noble cause,

war obliterates or seems to obliterate because it's a false obliteration.

The alienation of normal life.

The celebration of war is also a celebration of us.

So celebration of our virtues, of our prowess,

of our goodness, accompanying of course, with dehumanization,

and racist attacks against whoever it is we're fighting.

It is addictive. I mean, soldiers or Marines will call it a combat high.

It's very real. You keep coming back for that elusive high,

which becomes harder and harder to get, the longer you're in war.

Partly because your circle of fear shrinks to such an extent that

unless literally people are being shot right next to you,

I don't want to say you're blase,

but you learn to cope in extreme environments.

The U. S. economy

is being drained by wars in the Middle East.

It's why those of us who come back and speak

the truth about war are usually not very effective

in reaching the young kids who are the fodder of war.

Militarism and war promises what they so desperately want.

Many will hear the calling.

One day, your stocking shelves at Walmart,

and a few weeks later, you're at Parris Island,

part of the greatest fighting force on the face of the Earth.

- And it's all a lie. - Ronnie!

- Lies! - Stop it!

Go to bed, you sleep it off.

What did they do to you in that war? What happened to you?

I think many people, including veterans who come back, face an existential crisis

in that they realize that everything they've been told by their church,

by their schools, by their political leaders is a lie.

It's why so many... It's not just that they cope with trauma,

it is that they cope with that existential crisis of seeing behind the mask.

It was August, 1990.

I had a big screen TV on, we were drinking beer, and playing pool, and

there was a big aircraft carrier battle group moving into the Persian Gulf.

We were like, " What's up with this?" And then it started to scroll,

that Saddam Hussein's forces had invaded Kuwait,

and I could see right away, "Oh, here we go."

Just two hours ago,

Allied Air Forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait.

I was very excited. I mean, America is getting ready to go to war,

and I had the radio on in my study

and I was, you know, paying attention all day long.

And I couldn't wait to get home because,

though the Internet really isn't up and running yet, we now have cable news.

And so I rushed home,

ordered pizza, had a couple of friends over,

learned that America's Pastor had prayed with America's President,

and assured him that all of thiswas in keeping with God's divine purposes.

And I watched a war on TV.

I was entertained, America won.

A lot of people were killed,

hundreds of thousands, but like...

Like the video games, and like the Westerns, we didn't see that.

So that wasn't real.

We were over there for seven months from start to finish.

We did a lot of recons, which is just going out to look

kind of spying on the enemy locations, and stuff like that.

But there was one particular case where we located a group of

Iraqis on the beach.

There is an air strike coming in, and we were told to get

at least 3/4 of a mile offshore because it's gonna be big.

And I thought about the guys, the Iraqi soldiers,

they don't even know what's coming.

And I had knowledge that they're...

I was hoping we were far enough away from the beach.

When it hit, it really did a job on my head, 'cause I was thinking,

"These human beings are doing just what they think they're supposed to do.

They've been raised in Iraq,

they're serving under a knucklehead that's put 'em in this position,

and they're trying to bethe best soldiers they could be.

And they're about to be annihilated,

just gone." And it just crushed me.

It was like,"Man, I could be in their shoes.

I could have tried to be the best Iraqi I could ever be

and not had a choice and be bombed to smithereens."

I know that may sound simplistic'cause, "Yeah, well, what do you think war is about?"

But just taking that step back and just trying to

think about what was about to happen to these other human beings,

created in the image of God.

And it was... I don't like to think about it a whole lot,

still, to this day, but it was a turning point for me.

I didn't think about that again.

That was just one night of my life,

and I didn't think about it

from between 1991, and I think it was 2004.

I was praying one day,

I'm sitting, acknowledging the presence of Christ,

sitting quietly and without any anticipation,

without any really logical sequence,

that episode from that night,

it was replayed as an incriminating surveillance video.

I saw myself laughing and jokingand eating pizza with my friends,

watching a war as if it were nothing but entertainment.

And now, I'm referring to a mystical experience that I can only say

how I experienced it.

So I bear witness to it and people can believe it or not believe it.

But I sensed Jesus say to me, "That was your worst sin,"

and I wept bitterly.

I mean, I do think of Peter denying Christ, and it says

he went out and wept bitterly.

It was like that for me, I wept bitterly.

And I repented. Not just said I was sorry,

but repenser, rethink.

That, and another incident

in reading some things in Dostoyevsky caused me to almost overnight

rethink everything. It was a conversion.

We live in a violent world.

A lot of people think that we should confront violence by using more violence.

If you were to ask me, like, 10 years ago,

or tell me 10 years ago that you're gonna write a book on non-violence,

I would have thought you were absolutely insane.

I mean, my background was heavily militaristic,

and I don't really know exactly where it came from. Just kind of the air

I breathed as a Christian, as an American. I mean,

I heard about a Christian at some university I was at, and

you know, somebody said, "Oh, yeah, he's also a pacifist."

And I just thought that's impossible. That's like an atheistic Christian.

It's like you can't be one or the other. These are two incompatible categories.

Christians destroy their enemies.

I've always thought, if more good people had concealed carry permits,

then we could end those Muslims before they walk in and kill us.

Fast forward several years, and now I'm teaching at a Christian university,

and teaching a class on ethics, and we would work through various

ethical dilemmas, and violence and warfare

was one of those topics thatwe wrestled with and I remember, as a professor, thinking,

"I really want to challenge my students.

I'm wanna help them to think about both sides,

not just confirm their presuppositions."

But I remember as I did that and went back to Scripture,

and said, "What are the best scriptural arguments for

non-violence or arguments against using violence?"

And I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh,

where did these verses come from?"

I've been studying the Bible for a while now, and

I'm reading passages trying to read them through a fresh lens.

Like love your enemies and turn the other cheek,

and the ones that are fairly well known. But I'm...

I'm asking the question, "What if Jesus actually meant what he said?"

And I don't want to come at these questions with these presuppositions like,

"Of course, I'm not gonna let the guy break into my house, and rape my wife

and kill my kids." Those are good questions to ask, but those aren't...

We need to first go to the text and say, "What does the text say?"

and then go to those questions.

And when I did that, I became convinced that

the Bible does not want Christians, followers of Jesus,

to use violence to address evil.

The biggest problem that humans face is our own violence,

that we tend to risk self-destruction.

A lot of that is built into the narratives of

the ancient myths, which are a way of remembering

how the first solution to this problem of violence occurred.

The myth of redemptive violence is a term to refer to the idea that

we can bring order out of chaos through lethal force.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is, to this day, the oldest written down document

that we are aware of.

There are some cave paintings that are older,

but in terms of a written narrative, the Enuma Elish is the oldest one.

It's the creation myth of the ancient Babylonian people,

who are kind of the contemporary Iraqi people.

And in this story, the world is created when two gods get bored,

so they have children and they hang out as a kind of a cosmic family for a while.

But the parent gods get irritated by the noise that the children are making.

And because they're gods, they don't bring in a family therapist.

What they do is, they decide to kill the children.

The children overhear this plot to kill them,

and they immediately rise up and kill the father.

They can't overpower the mother. So they regroup and have a conversation.

One of the kid gods says,

"I'll kill Mother on the condition that you make me supreme ruler of the universe."

What he does is, he approaches her in space,

he kisses her on the lips. He blows a poisonous gas

into her mouth, it expands her belly. And then he stands at a distance,

with a bow and arrow, and he fires the arrow,

and her stomach... This is kind of gruesome. Her stomach then explodes.

And from her entrails,

he creates heaven and earth.

Human beings are formed out of the blood and guts of a murdered mother god.

There's lots of creation myths like this,

that have human beings coming as a result of violence.

So, something beautiful, humans, come out of something horrifying, murder.

The Judeo-Christian creation myth is the first creation myth that's totally non-violent.

God says "Let us make human beings in our own image."

And then they appear.

Nobody dies. No blood is shed.

Nothing like that is required for creation. God...

It just emerges out of God.

Of course, things go wrong

when the serpent enters, and shifting Adam and Eve's focus

from being aligned with God's desires,

to doubt.

Can they trust that God has their best interests at heart?

So it's this rivalry with God, rather than having this

wonderful relationship where God can be God,

we could be human.

We come into rivalry, and that's where

paradise gets broken.

After God had thrown Adam and Eve out of Eden,

they started living outside the garden.

There they had two sons, Cain and Abel.

Cain and Abel are two brothers who make a living differently.

One is a tiller of the soil, one's a shepherd,

and you would think that the differences would keep them from coming into rivalry.

But no, they're actually, Cain, it arouses his jealousy,

because he feels that God is more accepting of Abel's offering

than his own. Cain doesn't realize that that's available to everybody.

God can accept both their offerings equally,

but Cain is caught up in this resentment mode.

And so, this evokes the similar story of two brothers

who are the founding brothers of ancient Rome,

Romulus and Remus, and Remus taunts Romulus,

and Romulus kills him.

And how did the divine forces react to that?

Well, with affirmation and acceptance, Romulus is awarded

a status of a God, and he is the founder of ancient Rome

and a beloved of the gods.

But in the Bible, when a brother kills a brother,

God's displeasure is evident.

God takes the side of the victim of the murder.

So we're instantly seeing this reversal of the mythological narratives,

which reward the victor, the heroes, the aggressors, the dominant ones,

and the biblical narrative, which is always taking the side of the victim.

And when we say Jesus fulfilled the law,

or came to fulfill what God's purpose was,

it was to fulfill that revelation

of what God's nature is.

Which is completely without violence.

Roman society was structured like this.

It was a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid,

was Caesar.

It was a rigid pyramid.

You didn't move up.

You were born into one of these places.

You carried out your role

and that's where you would die.

Only People up here could issue dinner invitations

to lower status people.

In normal times, Zacchaeus would have to issue a dinner invitation to Jesus.

What Jesus is doing is upending the pyramid,

and he puts a table in its place.

That early Christian community that emerges around Jesus,

really the early community that has no name at that point,

Jesus literally walks by a lake.

He says, "Follow me," and people look and say,

"Oh, okay!"

And so what Jesus invited the earliest disciples to

was being part of a community.

So belonging was the first piece.

So, Jesus said come and belong.

Sit at this table.

That's the other really strong piece of imagery throughout the New Testament,

is that of table fellowship.

Jesus really doesn't call people into a belief system.

He calls them to a meal. It's no coincidence

that the last thing that Jesus does with his community

that has gathered around him is celebrate a meal together.

Jesus does not come back

from the dead and go to Calvary

and point to a hill with a cross on it, and say,

"Hey, if you're going to bea Christian person, believe thatl died on that cross.

Believe that that cross, that blood,

covered up your sins." Jesus didn't do that.

Jesus appears in the same exact room.

The first ever post resurrectionappearance to the entire group of disciples

is where Jesus goes back to the room where they held the Last Supper.

So, the... the story

that Jesus is constantly pointing toward

is creating a table,

inviting people to sit together,

to go past their places of comfort,

their tribal identities and say, be part of this tribe,

be part of God's tribe.

And God's tribe is a tribe that gathers round the table.

The kingdom of God, or the kingdom of the heavens,

or the kingdom of Heaven in Christ's teaching

is clearly entirely unlike

the kingdom of Caesar.

The early Christians created a new society.

It was the embodiment of the ideal for how persons should live together

under the rule of the one true God, the God most high,

and in creating such a society, they were condemning the other model

of empire as false and damnable,

violent, cruel, diabolical, whatever you like.

It is very much a movement against

the sacred basis, the political basis, the social basis of empire.

For the first three centuries of the church,

the church was on the margins of society.

They're a small, often persecuted group,

viewed with suspicion by the powers,

when they got big enough to even be on the radar screen.

There wasn't much of a temptation to buy into the Roman Empire.

They were very aware that to call Jesus Lord

means that you don't confess Caesar is Lord.

If you look at the writings of Tertullian and Origen,

and some of these thinkers,

the early church, when Jesus said, "Love your enemies,"

we typically say, "Yeah, but..."

And they said, "Okay."

I think they took a, what would seem to be a really straightforward reading of

Scripture and they took passages seriously, and they talked about

the power of suffering.

And I think a big socio-political

point to understand is that Christians were operating

from the perspective of a persecuted minority.

They were suffering, they weren't intertwined with the government.

But I think if you look at the New Testament, that's kind of

how New Testament ethics is designed operate.

The New Testament, it's almost like it's not meant

to empower Christians in places of power and authority

and governmental positions. It's not designed that way.

The great blessing of our birthright is that in this troubled world,

there is still a bright spot where borders never change,

where peace reigns supreme.

The United States of America has become...

They would not have been patriots if there were such a thing

as the nation state in their day.

They would not have recognized

human rule is anything other than an unfortunate provisional reality

of a fallen world and would not have allied themselves

with any set of national or racial interests.

They were people set apart in every level, I don't just mean spiritual and moral,

but economic and social as well.

And in the Empire in the time of Christ,

the structure of power was not considered merely a worldly reality.

It was part of a sacred order that reached all the way up to the realm of the divine,

and then all the way down to the chthonian realm.

And Christianity made the claim that all of these orders of power

had been overthrown by Christ to be placed under him,

that he might hand over the whole cosmos to God, and God be all in all.

This is a very subversive claim that under this new reign,

all these powers on high,

these gods of the nations have been cast down from their high eminence and made subject

to this peasant, whose kingdom's rule was radical charity.

The church grew mainly by its witness, by how people lived

and by how they were willing to sacrifice. I mean,

when plagues would hit cities, and everyone would run for the hills,

including the doctors, and leave the sick behind,

the Christians would run into the city to care for those sick.

And often would get the disease and die.

But they're willing to do that. And people saw that,

and that's how it spread, through love. It spread through their witness.

There were boundaries at that table Jesus established,

and the boundary is always around violence.

If you are willing to use your invitation to that table

to hurt, maim, destroy,

dehumanize others who are at that meal,

you can't come.

And, you have to lay down whatever it is

that is destructive before you join the meal.

So you can't bring a sword into that room,

and the early Christianswere perfectly clear about that.

It was about turning swords into plowshares.

First of all, the early church was an absolute diverse hodgepodge of views.

I mean, they were wrangling about what books belong in the Bible,

they were arguing about Christ's deity. They were arguing about

whether the Old Testament was valid.

The early church couldn't agree on anything.

When it came to the question of should Christians ever kill,

as far as we can tell from the literature, the answer was unanimous.

Of course not.

What about good killing? What about killing for the military?

Can you join Romans' military? The answer to all this was absolutely not.

They wouldn't even baptize certain people, if they were...

If they had blood on their hands from serving the Christian military.

Or debate about whether they should even be allowed after repentance.

This was such a no brainer for the early Christians.

The problem was, of course, is the Roman army,

they were the ones whokilled Jesus. The Roman army waspersecuting the early church.

The Roman army was the place where you gave due to Caesar,

who was the rival to the idea that Jesus was Lord and Savior.

So Christians thought the Roman army was horrible.

But then, in the fourth century, Constantine allegedly gets this vision

where he's gonna fight under the banner of Jesus Christ.

First time Jesus is associated with war,

and Constantine's a pagan, and pagans assume that

if you win a battle, that's because you're serving the right god.

Battles are about whose god is stronger and bigger.

And so he becomes a "Christian"

but he's really serving a pagan version of Christ,

because he's still seeing this is a power source that's gonna get his way in this world.

So then he invites the church to sit at the table of political power,

and unfortunately, the church accepts that offer.

If they pick up the power of the sword, that means youput down the power of the cross.

This creates a problem because now, what is Jesus? Who is Jesus?

Is he Lord? Because the original conflict was Caesar is Lord.

No, Christ is Lord.

But now that we have a Christian emperor

and we don't wanna have that conflict,

what happens? Well, Christ gets demoted

to the secretary of after affairs. Afterlife affairs. Okay,

so now the job of Jesus is to get us into heaven when we die,

and apparently he has delegated ruling the world to Caesar.

So then, Christians become very interested in being able to control Caesar's sword

because it's such a pragmatic way to shape the world.

And this is the project of Christendom.

If you are a persecuted minority group,

you don't necessarily want to think about Jesus as a humble guy

who's just invited a bunch of friends over for dinner.

And I think what we have there is early Christianity

setting up a sort of an aspirational Jesus,

that they wanted their Jesus to be like Caesar.

A good Caesar, but nevertheless Caesar.

Because it was the image they had at hand, for power.

It was the image they had it at hand for safety.

It was the image they had at hand for provision.

What good was a Jewish peasant going to do them

in a world where they were persecuted?

Looking back, it would be unreasonable to imagine

that anyone would have had the foresight or even the moral resources to resist this.

Or be able to think back over the course of generations,

especially in a culture in whicheven access to the texts is going to be limited.

It's just what you hear in church. Most people aren't even going to be literate.

So what happened? Well, imagine that you're a Christian presbyter

in Milan in the early fourth century, and you get news

that the new Augustus has just won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

Seems to be some kind of Christian.

Your first reaction isn't going to be, "We've got to put an end to this."

I mean, historically speaking,

you're going to see this as a work of God.

Christians throughout church history just do that.

You take what is at hand,

and then Jesus emerges

out of that in in new ways.

And that was...

That shift from the family tableto the imperial banqueting table

was clearly one of the most dramatic shifts in early Christianity,

and it was also the one that set up the most trouble in the longer run.

And now you have this blending of church and state,

and the Roman state still has barbarians out there.

They still have people to the east, to the west,

that are trying to destroy them, and so they have to ward them off by

using physical force. And so, now you have Christian thinkers operating

from the assumption that the church is the state, the state is the church,

and now they have to explore, "Well, we've got to defend the nation.

We gotta defend Rome through violence.

Which is kinda what you do as politician, as a government.

So, how can we Christianize this?"

Christianity was an illegal religion.

It's hard for us to grasp, but it was an underground movement of non-violence,

and overnight we all joined the Roman military.

And in effect, what Constantine did was,

he said, "Let's throw out the Sermon on the Mount,

and return to the pagan Cicero

to begin to come up with some kind of justification

for complicity with empire.

You have Augustine, and Ambrose and other Christian thinkers of that time

operating from these assumptions of church and state wedded together as one,

and they came up with... Well, they kind of refined what had been

what we now refer to as Just War Theory

that maybe there's unjust ways of waging war,

but maybe there's just, righteous ways of waging war.

By the eighth and ninth century,

you had really cutting edge Christian things called monasteries. They had armies.

And then you got the Middle Ages and poor St. Francis and St. Clare,

the church leaders are leading the Crusades.

Not just staying home. They're actually out there with the sword.

The person who will spell out a new theology

that will in some ways also empower the new policy is Augustine.

He is a person who writes the first justification for coercing people,

for making them change their beliefs by force.

And that basically became the dominant view

for the next 1500 years. I say dominant view, but

you still have throughout church history, you always have pockets of resistance.

People that says, man, I don't think this wedding of church and state is

helpful for a Christian ethic that seems to be

separated from the politics and powers of the day.

You could be Manichaean about this and simply say, "Well, how horrible."

On the other hand, there was always a tension between

the Gospel and the Empire that never disappeared.

The moral language of Christianity, more and more,

even if at times it proved impotent, really, to change things on a large scale,

more and more it saturated, it permeated the culture.

It became the moral grammar that we today

spontaneously recognize as having a claim upon us.

So, we can lament what happened to Christianity

as a result of its alliance with empire.

But in doing that, we also shouldn't forget

that Christianity also had a corrosive effect

upon some of the cruelest aspects of ancient society.

And in the centuries and generations,

by the quiet persistence of this moral language, of this conscience

that Christianity bred into the language, at least

of the Western world, did bear fruit.

The Jewish religious system had a very complex sacrificial system.

Absolutely.

So how do we make sense of that?

If God is revealing himself as a god that doesn't need sacrifices,

why do we see this elaborate sacrificial system in the Old Testament?

God is leading the people out of the sacrificial world

through a series of substitutions.

The call to Abraham, the call to Abram

is a call to leave behind his gods,

to worship a new God in a new way.

Now, humans learn slowly, over time.

So, you have to remember that to change your culture

and to change your way of thinking and doing things,

you're changing your habits and it's slow.

So the Bible is this record of this slow awakening and emerging,

out of the sacrificial world.

So first Abraham is called out.

God gives Abraham a lesson in what it's like to sacrifice to him.

The story I heard about that when I was growing up,

and I think the story that most people who have some affinity with that story think,

is the one that says God did say, "Abraham, go kill your son

because I need you to prove to me that you love me more than you love your son."

And that God needed Abraham to get to the point

of literally having the knife above little Isaac's face,

and I think it's important to go into detail about this, because this is

absolutely horrifying.

And then, God is convinced.

Oh, actually, Abraham does love me more than Abraham loves Isaac.

So, here's a magic sheep.

Can I say "bullshit" in your film?

Can I say psychopathy?

Can I say any God that required

a human to threaten to murder their child

in order to prove that their love

for God was greater than their love for a child,

that God's a psychopath.

I don't think that's what that story means.

Abraham just assumes

that this new God who's speaking to him is gonna want a child sacrifice.

That's what a good religious person did in those days.

You file your papers with the IRS when you're starting a business today.

You can't start a business without filing your papers.

Well, the way you filed your papers at that time was people believed you gotta kill

a human, and often it's a firstborn child.

So, if Abraham's already living in this,

he's got this sense that I'm supposed to start a religion,

it makes complete sense to him that what he has to do

is kill his firstborn child. It's just what you did.

It's terrible, but it's also the only way you can get through that door.

And so, Abraham's taking Isaac

to sacrifice him, but what does God do?

Gives him a substitute.

A ram is a ritual substitution for a human victim.

An animal can be sacrificed, a grain offering, all these other things,

but it has to be ritually constructed

so it's just as effective for the community.

And I think what the story means is that Abraham is up on the mountain

ready to do this because he thinks that's what God wants.

And God wants to let him get that far,

in order to prove to him, "This is horror.

You don't need to do this to start a religion."

And Abraham's brain, and his mind,

and the mind of the people who were around his time

weren't yet ready to have no scapegoat.

And that's why there's a sheep.

I don't think we need a scapegoat at all.

Destruction is not a creative act. It would have been fine

for Abraham to just say, "We're going to start a religion and the way we're gonna do it

is by getting some friends together and figuring out what it means to love,"

but in the evolution of the human mind,

and a culture that hadn't happened, yeah.

So, what we have is someone like Abram then,

is in a culture of ritual sacrifice

and what you're saying, maybe it's a way of looking at the ram that's supplied.

It's not God saying, "Well, I need something. Here's a ram."

It's more like saying to Abram, "You feel the need to sacrifice something,

- here's a ram." - Exactly.

- "But I'm not taking your child, because that's not who I am." - Right?

You know, Hosea says it really succinctly.

"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

The whole prophetic tradition is about that.

You know your sacrifices are a stench in my nostrils.

I can't stand the smell of it. Why are you doing it?

God is saying, "Stop thinking that I demand violence from you."

I see the Old Testament as the inspired telling

of Israel's story as they are on the journey

of discovering the living God.

But along the way, assumptions were made,

and you have to stay on the story until you get to Jesus.

What you certainly cannot do with the Old Testament

is use certain texts to argue with Jesus,

as I had a church member do.

I was preaching through the Sermon on the Mount.

I'm in Matthew 5, talking about what Jesus says about violence

and a well-educated church member said to me afterwards,

"Yeah, but the Bible says, an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth."

Despite the fact that Jesus actually even brings that up

in the Sermon on the Mount.

So you can't use Joshua to save you from Jesus.

I think that's how a lot of Christians think, it's like,

"Yeah, Jesus is the best revelation of God,

but all these other portraits we've got are just as accurate.

If that's your approach,

you smush it all together and you have this kind of montage of

beautiful and ugly, and I think a lot of folks have this

understanding of God. In fact,

throughout church history, you can see various theologians like Luther

who just have a schizophrenic understanding of God.

That's why Luther, he loved Jesus, but he was terrified by God the father.

The problem isn't to just try to put the best possible spin

on the Old Testament violent portraits of God.

The real issue is that Jesus himself teaches us

that all of this is supposed to point to him.

So the challenge is, how do you read an account of God saying,

"Show no mercy. Go slaughterevery man, woman, child, infant,

and even the animals, but spare the trees," it says in Deuteronomy.

How does it point tothe self-sacrificial love of Godthat's revealed on the cross?

We're quite used to fundamentalists who believe that

the Bible should be read as a literal documentary account

and that it's internally free of any contradiction

and so on and so forth.

It's very strange when you compare that to the practices of the early church.

For instance, Gregory of Nyssa, when he reads these tales, they have a spiritual value

to the degree that they're allegorized as stories of slaying the sins

that take rise in the city of the soul.

But taken as literal historical narratives,

he has no use for them, and he says that if you...

If you think that that's the kind of truth you're going to find in Scripture,

if you read it without, what he calls without thephilosophical method of reading,

which is what... Then you're just reading silly myths.

God never commanded the slaying of peoples,

the extermination of cities, the killing of children.

Those were the interests of these warrior peoples of old,

and Yahweh or El or Elyon or Elohim was invoked

as the author of these crimes, because that's what people do.

It's what it's what nations and empires do.

...you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13

to obey the laws of the government

because God has ordainedthe government for his purposes.

The turning point for me came when I asked a question that I'd never asked before,

and I've never heard anyone ask before,

but the minute I asked it, it seemed like most obvious question in the world.

And the question is this.

How does this first century Jewish crucified criminal

become the definitive revelation of God?

And the answer is that it's not anything we see on the surface

of the crucifixion that reveals what God is like.

In fact, on the surface, the cross is hideous, it's grotesque

because it reveals the ugliness of our sin.

The cross becomes the revelation of God for us, when we, by faith,

look through the surface of the cross and we see that

it was the almighty, all holy God who stepped into this.

That God out of love was willing to become this for us.

So if this is the same God who breathes Scripture,

it seems to me to make sense to ask the question, where else might God

be revealing his beauty by becoming our ugliness?

I call these violent portraits of God literary crucifixes,

because we see there on a literary level, the same thing we see in a historical way

when we look at the historical crucifixion.

The humble God, stooping to meet his people bear their sin,

and thereby taking on an appearance that reflects the ugliness of sin.

I think there's a poetic resonance between the death of Jesus

and the attempted murder of Isaac.

The way a lot of people conceive of this is that God sent his son

and had him killed in order to satisfy his wrath.

Well, if you believe in the kind of God that causes

parents to kill their children to prove their love,

well, that would be consistent with that God's

cosmology, or the way God thinks about things.

But if Jesus is a person who

somehow comes to understand

that there is no higher rule than love,

there's no higher law than love,

and that love is extending yourself for the benefit of another.

And if he teaches that in a context

where the ruling authorities think devoting yourself to Rome is the way life works,

and where there are revolutionaries who think

devoting yourself to the violent overthrow of Rome is how life works,

well, I would have been surprised if they hadn't executed him.

The chief priests and the rulers are concerned about the political situation.

They're trying to keep the peace. That's their job, peace and security.

And Jesus is instigating crowds,

he's making them think that they have more power than they should.

He's just raised Lazarus from the dead.

He's creating all kinds of trouble for the authorities,

so they're trying to decide what to do with him, and when they come up with

the decision that he has to die,

the high priest says, "You know nothing at all.

You do not understand that it is better for you

to have one man die for the people

than to have the whole nation perish."

Succinct statement of the sacrificial formula.

But the early Christians understood what Jesus was doing was

inverting the meaning of sacrifice.

So, on the altar we sacrifice unwilling victims.

Jesus was a willing victim.

In other words, it was a self-sacrifice,

instead of sacrificing others, now the ethic is

to endure suffering, rather than inflict it.

One of the the staples of pagan religion

going back to the beginnings of human history

is the conviction that we need to appease the gods.

And you appease the gods by making sacrifices.

And pagan religions always had this kind of quid pro quo deal where

we make sacrifices, and we feed the gods, and please them,

so that when we need to call on them, they'll help us win our battles

and things of that sort.

And I think it was a tragedy when that understanding of God

became the interpretive grid through which you understand the cross.

So, God has to take out his wrath on his son

in order to love us.

What kind of love is that?

It's almost like God's a rage-aholic.

"I'm so mad at these humans.

Someone's gotta pay, I don't care who it is,

but someone's gonna pay.

It could either be humans who are gonna pay eternally,

or Jesus, my son, I'll kill you instead."

And Jesus said, "Okay, I'll do it."

And if that's the case, there's no forgiveness.

Look, if you owe me $100 and your son pays it instead,

I never really forgive the debt, I just collected from somebody else.

So the question becomes, does God really forgive?

'Cause if he's paid in full by Jesus, well then, he didn't forgive anything.

He just transferred the guilt. However that's supposed to work, I don't know.

You know, when you go to a fairground attraction and you buy the tokens

because they don't take cash and you hand your token in at the booth,

and then you can go on the roller coaster.

The notion that God needed Jesus to be executed

so that the token could be bought, that I could then give to the carny

who would allow me on the roller coaster.

Like, that has...

The reason people believe that

is because somebody told them that.

Not because it makes sense.

It fundamentally contradicts the notion of a loving God,

if love is to extend yourself for the benefit of another.

It also contradicts even the narratives and Scripture.

So you could be someone who's a biblical fundamentalist,

someone who believes that every story in it is literally true.

Well, Jesus forgives loads of people before he gets crucified.

He doesn't have to be crucified before the...

And he tells the disciples, "Go out and preach the forgiveness of sin."

The notion that the cross represents an offering

to the father to appease his wrath is a late and rather disgusting distortion

of the language of the New Testament.

The very word that's translated "ransom," lytron orante lytron,

doesn't refer to a price paid to the father.

It's a term used for

the manumission fee that one paid in order to free slaves from bondage.

That's the price paid to death, to hell,

hell in the sense of Hades, the realm of the dead,

to set the captives free. It's not appeasing the wrath of God against sin.

Nor is the cross an act of God.

Paul is quite clear in the New Testament that this is a human act.

The cross is where human violence is revealed to be unspeakably evil.

We see that we are capable of murdering God.

So the cross is not where Jesus saves us from God.

The cross is where Jesus reveals God as savior.

The cross is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive.

The cross is what God in Christ endures as he forgives.

If we see that it is God that requires the violence of the cross,

then we exonerate the principalities and powers

that the cross is intended to shame.

No, I see the violence of the cross as entirely human,

the love and forgiveness seen at the cross as entirely divine.

And there is an allusion here to Genesis,

to the serpent in the garden of Eden,

who is now the father of the lie.

And what is the lie? Well, the lie is that God is not a giving person.

God is more interested in prohibition then in freedom.

God is withholding good from you.

God might even be selfish, as the Satan says in his conversation with Job.

So, now Jesus is going to come into this world

to settle accounts with the father of the lie.

The death of Jesus, then, it belongs in the category of revelation

that sets the record straight.

What makes it a triumph of God is that Christ remains

faithful to the father, to the very end.

His triumph lies in his faithfulness, not in the butchery of illegal execution.

When we pin that on God, that God required a sacrifice,

it's really the way we reconcile ourselves to one another.

We often sacrifice others in order to build community, and so forth.

I think what Jesus was doing was taking the place

of our victims in these scapegoating scenarios

in which communities get reconciled.

And not only is he going willingly, but he's innocent from the beginning.

And he's divine from the beginning.

So Jesus is trying to switch that whole way of thinking about our violence,

and he will now create unity, not around creating victims,

but around awareness of a victim

who will come back and forgive us.

This is what the communion ritual is.

The communion sacrament. We gather around an altar,

but it's not to create a new victim.

It's to remember that we are all victimizers who have been forgiven.

To me, that's the best definition of a Christian,

is a repentant victimizer,

or recovering scapegoater, or however you want. We're all in recovery.

And we're all susceptible to relapse.

Now to the latest on Harvey Weinstein.

The New York Timesreporting allegations by numerous women who say the Hollywood mogul

sexually harassed them. His alleged victims...

When I'm faced with somebody who is obviously doing things,

who is using their power to hurt, and especially for me as a woman,

Harvey Weinstein is somebody that I want to vilify,

and I'm actually really given permission by the world to vilify.

I think that, for me is always the first red flag

as a disciple of Jesus.

If everybody else is so down

with calling someone names and stripping them of the dignity

that they have just because they're human,

then as a follower of Jesus, who is who desires to live into

the alternative society of the Kingdom of God,

who has a desire to seek the shalom of God, which looks so different than the world.

Than I have to step back and say, "I can't participate with that."

People don't get to a place where they make hurtful decisions,

where they hurt other people, where they are actively

creating brokenness and pain in other people's lives,

they don't get to that place without a back story of pain

about something happening to them that maybe stripped them

of their sense of dignity and worth, which then makes them

want to strip others of that.

And so, one of the things that I do to remind myself of that,

to kind of condition my heart for that empathy,

as I go back and look at pictures of them as kids.

And then I remember, something had to happen.

I tell myself, something had to happen between this innocence and this guilt.

Hurting people hurt other people.

There's something that that person is suffering from to cause them to

want to hurt and oppress someone else.

That doesn't make it right.

But there's something in that person where

it's important for me to at least extend some compassion,

so that I can hear what it is and why it is that they are

acting in certain ways.

And it's not my job to judge them in their guilty.

As a peacemaker, my job is to speak beauty and speak truth,

and say, "This thing that this person did was bad,

but people are not the things that they did."

And I think that is the calling of a peacemaker.

We're always looking for ways to remind people that there is good in you

and give the Holy Spirit a chance to woo them back to their wholeness.

We extend compassion, but we also stand firm against the

injustice and lack of humanity against certain populations within our country.

I want you to sit down and watch this because it is shocking.

He's licensed, he's licensed to carry.

He was trying to get out his ID, his wallet out...

I have been pulled over, and particularly if it has been a long day,

I try to center myself first, because you already know they're coming to the car with

hand on weapon, a flashlight in your face,

and you try to keep your hands where they're visible,

and all these kind things that goes through your mind,

almost unconsciously for certain populations.

You do it because it's been ingrained to do,

and you're trying to come home.

But you know, when they ask me, "Do you have a weapon in the car?"

I started laughing.

I said, "No, I actually leaving my church. I'm a pastor right around the corner.

It's not my policy to carry weapons to church."

And this is my uniform of the day.

I'm a third generation combat veteran,

so I've always been in a uniform, a jacket and a tie.

This is me. I'll get stopped with this.

And the first thing I'm asked, "Do you have a weapon in the car? Or drugs?"

And I'm leaving my congregation.

How do you feel in those moments?

How do you deal with that in your head?

It's exhausting.

And so when people say, "If they just pulled up their pants,

or got a different haircut,

if they didn't look like they fit the bill,

then maybe they wouldn't get pulled over."

It's exhausting. It's depleting.

It's infuriating,

to not to be seen as fully citizen.

And in this case, fully human.

If we as Christians believe in Paul's letter, the Pauline epistles,

the talk about warfare and spiritual warfare is real.

That these things are principalities, they're strongholds,

and one has to assume the responsibility of pushing back against those things.

To take the necessary stands

and to be fully human when they are inhumane themselves.

And I think that's what Christianity does.

It gives us a source of strengththat we would not have without it,

because it takes unimaginable strength to stand up against some of the stuff

that individuals are facing in our communities

and the legacy of violence and terror

against blacks and others in this country.

It takes a spiritual armament to deal with that

and not project out on others.

To still be a loving individual without having to be guarded.

That you can still

fight a good fight and not have to fight everyone.

Even though we're in this world, we do not make war

the same way this world does.

That is something we have to hold on to.

What does it even mean to say,

"Taking America back for God"?

Because I honestly don't have a clue.

Presumably, there was a time when this was a godly nation,

when we glorified God, one nation under God.

God was glorified and the culture was just Christian,

and it was the good old days, the golden age of America.

And if we could just pass some laws

then we'll get back to that golden age. When was that golden age? I'm really...

That's the assumption that fuels Christendom.

If we just get more power then we can...

We who are more righteous than others, and we're smarter than others,

we can impose our will on others and further the cause of Christ that way.

Fire now. Fire.

But that means, then,

if you're gonna run an empire, you have to be willing to use a sword,

to keep law and order on the inside,

and to protect from enemies on the outside.

And now, Jesus' teachings about loving your enemies

and blessing those who persecute you

and praying for those who spitefully use you, and doing good to your enemies,

all those go out the door because you have to kill your enemies

if you're gonna have that kind of power.

I wanna drive a much more sharper wedge

between our earthly citizenship and our kingdom citizenship.

I do think that the Kingdom of Christ and all other earthly kingdoms

are fundamentally incompatible.

Again, that doesn't mean we revolt or disobey the laws.

We need to be good citizens, keep our heads down, but never, never...

I don't think mixing these two is even possible.

I find it helpful not to think of myself as a citizen of any particular land.

I'm an ambassador, right? And ambassadors aren't citizen.

I'm here to represent a different kingdom.

We're called to exercise a fundamentally different kind of power.

I think it's the most powerful...

It's the greatest power in the universe.

It's the power of the cross. The power of self-sacrificial love.

Changing people by showing what they're worth,

by what you're willing to sacrifice for them,

that's the power that Jesus displayed. That's the power that runs the kingdom.

It's fundamentally anti-thethical to the power of this world,

where you try to control and manipulate and kill, if necessary.

The problem to me when you get into the

logic and the practicality of non-violence

is that it breaks down very fast, because as far as I can tell,

the teachings of Jesus in terms of non-violence are not a

promise of safety in any sense of the word.

In fact, if you look at the record of active practitioners

of non-violence in church history, even in the New Testament,

it often doesn't work in terms of maintaining human safety.

The apostles died. Jesus himself, practicing non-violence,

was executed by the state.

Even the great figures of non-violence in church history,

someone like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,

died as a result of violence.

When the conversation kind of moves in the direction of, will this work?

I often immediately go to like, probably not.

At least not in the grand sense.

The payout of Non-violence is disrupting the cycle of violence.

Violence begets violence, and nothing else.

Until someone creatively steps in, empowered by the spirit of God, to say,

I just won't do it, and then it stops.

While we're talking about his death,

and very few Christians have gotten over their fear of death.

In fact, we support the culture of death,

and the metaphors of death, and the means of death.

My main concern is with the deep-seated, militaristic spirit

that celebrates our military might that puts our faith in America's military power

in order to ward off all the refugees and terrorists or whatever.

Like I think it's that deep seated spirit that's the fundamental problem,

and even now I want to say, "Look, you can go to the New Testament

or the Old Testament and say that is not characteristic of God's people."

I think American Christianity has missed that,

and I think that is really the fundamental problem that we're dealing with.

We are kind of in the position of the bad guys

from the perspective of the New Testament.

You know, we're the ones in kind of, oppressive power

over other people that we're hurting in our privilege.

We are that empire, bigger and better than Rome ever did big and bad.

- They're coming from Syria, they're coming from Iraq. - President denies this.

- They're coming from Iran. - President denies this.

No, we're there, Sean, we see it.

Every Sunday, we're having fear preached to us, and then we go to watch news

where there's more fear preached to us. It's all about

them out there, we're afraid of them.

How can we protect our good thing?

Evil is externalized. We represent the good.

As soon as you externalize evil you become evil yourself.

I think on the whole, if you're raised American,

you've been raised with a religion that's deeply anti-Christian.

You've been inoculated against the Gospel.

We have completely rejected the Sermon on the Mount,

and the non-violence of Jesus.

Just for the record, none of this is working.

The God who expresses himself in the form of a suffering slave

is not the God who shapes the American religious experience.

The only real religion in America has always been America.

The shining city on a hill that has created a new constitutional order,

a new nation, a new people...

And some of that is quite innocent at first,

but the more that you realize that what backs up these claims is a gigantic military,

one that spends a great deal of time striding around the world, spreading

sheer terror of its presence as a kind of benign influence on historical events.

When you see how easy it is for people who profess Christianity, to confuse

their loyalty to Christ with loyalty to America,

what's actually happening is, the Christian America is really

just the religion of America in Christian garb.

And not very convincing Christian garb, too.

It keeps dropping off the shoulders, and showing its seams,

and unfortunately, America and Christianity are two antithetical values.

They don't just exist in different spheres. They're more or less

entirely opposed to one another.

You know, not everybody is gonna get on board with this message.

- No. - If we decide to forego violence,

and organize our lives differently, what happens?

How do we do that?

Well, first of all, Jesus is upfront. Martyrdom is always on the table.

The seminal call to discipleship is, "Take up your cross and follow me."

I have to recognize that my ancestors,

while part of them are the Christians who so

glibly gave in to imperial violence,

my deeper ancestors in the Christian tradition are the saints

of the early church, who

were surrounded constantly by violence, and were under threat

and said that their own lives did not matter.

I actually hate saying that because

I live in a culture where I want to live a really long time,

and our lives do matter. Our individual lives do really matter.

No one wants to die.

And sometimes when we look back at the earliest Christians,

we say, "Oh, they all had martyr complexes."

Well, no.

They literally had this priority of non-violence straight.

And that is, they were never to participate in violence.

And if violence was done to them,

so be it.

And I have to stand there and look at that and say, "Whoa!"

I would at the very least hope I had the capacity to make the same...

The same choice.

I'm not all bleak about it. I'm not saying we're all gonna...

I actually do believe in the transforming power of co-suffering love.

I mean, there is a reason why the

gladiatorial games finally came to an end.

And that is the power of co-suffering love,

embodied in Christians that were willing to die,

rather than to capitulate, eventually awakened a higher consciousness

in the Roman Empire, and they said, "Yeah, we're gonna stop doing that."

Non-violence is actually how the world works.

Anytime you're not acting violently, you're acting non-violently,

and most of us are not acting violently most of the time.

And so when the world works, it's because of that,

and I don't think the onus is on me to prove it.

I just think, look outside your window.

I think about the Civil Rights Movement,

the non-violent direct actions that took place

and people literally being spat on

and water hosed down and beat.

But the non-violence that actually helped to change policy.

They were standing against injustice in such a powerful way,

extending that compassion. Many people were hurt, many people died.

But that's literally what helped to change our society in America,

and it's continuing to help bring about change.

I do make a distinction between police function and waging war.

Consider the difference. Waging war, you go forth and you kill.

Here in St. Joseph, if an Officer discharges his weapon in the line of duty

there'll be an inquiry and an investigation.

I understand that in dysfunctional societies,

the line can be blurred, or almost entirely erased.

But in healthy societies, there is a distinction.

I'm not a complete Christian anarchist.

I, as a kingdom person, I don't believe I'm called to,

or even allowed to carry arms or kill for any reason.

But I don't judge other people for whom

that's what they want to do, or they feel comfortable with that.

And I think Paul takes this attitude in Romans 13.

God uses a sword wielding government to keep law and order,

and to punish wrongdoers and things of that sort.

It doesn't mean that God likes that.

But given that this world is going to have sword-wielding governments,

God is going to be at work to use it to carry about as much justice as possible.

So, I don't feel guilty about calling on them to do what they feel called to do.

And that is to stop wrongdoers by the use of the sword.

So this is going to be five guns for home defense.

What I don't do, though, is I don't sit around and plan for these things.

That would never cross my mind.

"I need to own a handgun for personal protection."

That is...

From a very long distance, that's premeditated killing.

If you want a nice small rig, this is something that can just ride next to the bed.

If I've got a person who's gonna harm me and possibly my wife and kids,

it looks foolish not to kill himif I have to, to prevent that from happening.

But then again,

we're called to follow the one who died...

God, he's all powerful, and yet

the way he expresses that poweris by getting himself crucified.

That looks pretty foolish. The cross looks foolish to the world.

So, if we look foolish, I think that's an indication that we're on the right track.

I often tell people that unless your God is a foolish looking God, you're not...

You're not following the God that Jesus revealed.

- Good morning, everyone. - Good morning.

All right! We're gonna go ahead and get started.

What a special, special day. This moment of truth

in front of the King Memorial on this beautiful day.

I didn't get up at 3:30 in the morning, in Philadelphia, for a monument film, right?

We got out for a movement.

At 16, I was 10 feet from Dr. King

when he gave his "I have a dream" speech.

The problem today is that too much of America is still dreaming.

We must put our bodies onthe line. We must put out bodiesagainst the machine

to grind it to a halt.

We need to build a movement and take a public stand.

Martin Luther King said the choice is no longer violence or non-violence.

It's non-violence, or non-existence.

That where we are today, on the brink of non-existence.

But we are gathering here in this culture, stuck in violence,

saying, "Okay, Martin, we take up your challenge."

So today, brothers and sisters, say with me now

- we march... - We march...

For a non-violent world.

For a non-violent world.

- We repent... - We repent...

...of the ways that we have used power...

...of the ways that we have used power...

- ...to dominate... - ...to dominate...

- ...for conquest... - ...for conquest...

- ...to warn... - ...to warn...

...for the supremacy...

...for the supremacy...

- ...of this world. - ...of this world.

I think we have to look at ourselves as

not quite done yet.

God is still in the process of creating us

through the influence of the Holy Spirit,

and trying to separate us from this addiction to violence.

Every line on the map tells a bloody tale

of war that has been fought, and people that have been killed,

and that's how we arranged the world.

It's Jesus that gives us the capacity to imagine something other.

But we're gonna have to decide whether we want to embrace that or not.

Right now, the question is, what is the best cultural work we can do?

And finding images of Jesus that are lifegiving

and allow for flourishing,

and don't segregate and demean and create more violence.

Any jackass can tear down a barn,

but it takes a carpenter to build one.

It takes a lot more effort, creativity,

energy, love, all of those things that are hard...

There's things you can do right now

to be engaged in preventing and reducing violence.

One of those things has got to include asking yourself,

"Where am I complicit in perpetuating injustice against other people."

The kingdom begins in your life with your first drop of blood.

Where does it pinch you? Where does it inconvenience you?

What are you willing to sacrifice for others?

We're supposed to be able to die for our old self,

which is to die to... That self that wants our best life now,

that wants power now, wants to get my way now,

die to that. There's no life in that.

When we think about it,

when you stand somewhere knowing that you will be beat, spat on,

possibly arrested. Is that cowardly or passive?

Jesus, at his very last moment, chose to heal and not hurt.

Jesus modelled for us self-giving love,

even in the face of horrible, terrific torture

and pain and betrayal.

And so, when we're faced with the violence in the world,

emotionally or physically, my hope is that I always start with

"Love is my only strategy."

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