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MLK day and the need for enemies
I’m off to our MLK day world cafe at church, then a blues concert at the Ark in A2 this evening. So I’ve got MLK on my mind today. Great op-ed piece in the NYT this morning with a wonderful quote from the man himself: “So this morning as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than kill you.’The love of enemies is the pressing concern of the Spirit, the challenge, the demand of the Spirit to the church in the 21st Century. We’ll be judged on this one, so I’m thinking we better bore down into it.
Here’s the dilemma: to be vibrant as a religious movement you need to have a clear enemy, or at least a clear sense of insider and outsider. This at least is the conclusion of Christian Smith, a sociologist who has studied the vibrancy of the American Evangelical movement and considers it to be the most vibrant religious movement in America, partly because it has a strong sense of insider-outsider.
That’s the nub of it: the very thing that contributes to the vibrancy of the evangelical movement is also what seems to be poisoning it. I refer to the trademark infringement on the Jesus brand that has come with American Evangelicalism’s willingness to hop in bed with the powers and principalities of political conservatism [just as in other times the church has been enamored of political liberalism and naively exchanged intimacies with the powers and principalities in that camp; the P & P's hang out wherever two or three are gathered, I expect.] But the current sleepover is keeping anyone who can’t successfully ingest political conservatism away from faith in Jesus, and keeping them away in droves.
We do have enemies. It’s part of being human, to have foes. The cohesion of human communities seems to depend on having some sense of a common foe. Much as we’d like it to be otherwise. It does seem to be an inevitability. So this idea that we can declare everyone a non-enemy, seems to be an exercise in fooling ourselves.But according to Jesus in the sermon on the Mount, the reason his community needs enemies is to love them and to love them in the radical way the King expressed: I’d rather die than hate you. So this is what we’ve got to dig into and deeply and urgently. What does it mean to live that way in the world? Surely it means something other than the current end around the sermon on the mount practiced by many in my evangelical tribe: say you love ‘em but keep snarling at ‘em. But knowing what it doesn’t mean is not the same as knowing what it does. I’m thinking that’s for all of us to find out, and pronto.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am
have been recently reading and meditating (lectio divina) thru the Sermon on the Mount, this has caused me to seriously reflect on Jesus message…in fact, it now haunts me.
“You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
can I read these words of Jesus now the same way i used to skim over them before the ‘war on terror’? i can’t seem to…they haunt me now. and i just hope someone is telling Muslim people around the world that the actions/bombs the U.S. has dropped and may continue to drop on their brothers and sisters have nothing to do with the true teachings of Christ. i talked a little about some of the implications in this at the beginning of advent
http://verveandverse.blogspot.com/2007/12/christ-is-leader-of-free-world.html
too often as Christians seek to bring all things under Christ we “Christian-ize” the principalities and powers instead of subverting/redeeming the powers that be (admssion: it’s much harder)…i think Dr. King could have been speaking to us today when he warned: “If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”
and still Jesus’ words haunt me: Love Your Enemies
January 21st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
that quote by dr. king is amazing, brings to mind the interfaith dialogue (A Common Word Between Us and You, issued by a muslim adherents and the christian response issued by the yale center for faith and culture) that happened earlier this year. pretty encouraging stuff.
quotes like that could form the basis for a new branch of christian study, echtrology, the theology of enemies. or maybe i should just get to work loving people…
January 22nd, 2008 at 7:31 am
steve and garrett,
more on this, please! garrett, what’s origin of term “echtrology”–from Greek for enemies? Did you coin it or is it something others are using? Whatever it is, keep working it….
ken
January 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
This love your enemies stuff is where the true dangerousness–the true subversiveness–of Jesus shines through. Christianity is fundamentally unsafe. Fundamentally at odds with self-interest.
A self-centered understanding of the world is the upside down picture of the world. It is the evil one’s picture of the world.
Politics is the art of the aggregation of power. To whom? To the self.
Jesus is subversive without being political. He shrugs off political power. He hides from those who try to thrust political power on him.
The kind of power Jesus exercises is spiritual power. And at the heart of all God-breathed spiritual power is love.