Pastor Farewell Quotes

We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. We forget all of this because the disturbing truth is this—it’s hard to believe in Jesus.

We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war.

The question “What are you willing to die for?” is not the same question as “What are you willing to kill for?” Jesus was willing to die for that which he was unwilling to kill for.

It’s so hard for us to let go of the sword and take the hand of the crucified one.

In short the problem is this: far too few who believe in the risen Christ actually believe in his revolutionary ideas. There is a sense in which we create religion as a category to keep Jesus from meddling with our cherished ideas about nationalism, freedom, and war.

The cross is shock therapy for a world addicted to solving its problems through violence. The cross shocks us into the devastating realization that our system of violence murdered God!

The appropriate response to this gospel proclamation is to rethink everything in the light of the risen and ascended Christ and live accordingly. We rethink our lives (which is what it means to repent) not so we can escape a doomed planet, but in order to participate in God’s design to redeem the human person and renovate human society in Christ. Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project!

Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world.

It’s not enough to believe in Jesus; we also have to believe in the Jesus way!

Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project! Or as Thomas Merton put it, “Eschatology is not an invitation to escape into a private heaven: it is a call to transfigure the evil and stricken world.

Conscripting Jesus to a nationalistic agenda creates a grotesque caricature of Christ that the church must reject—now more than ever! Understanding Jesus as the Prince of Peace who transcends idolatrous nationalism and overcomes the archaic ways of war is an imperative the church must at last begin to take seriously.

Christianity’s first apostles evangelized, not by trying to sign people up for an apocalyptic evacuation, but by announcing the arrival of a new world order. The apostles understood the kingdom of God as a new arrangement of human society where Jesus is the world’s true King. Put simply: because Jesus is Lord, the world is to be redeemed and not left in ruin.

Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and politics.

Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.

Christian happiness is based in the conviction that because of the accomplishments of Christ, the future is a friend.

There is no them; there is only us.

If God can become human, then we must reconsider how we treat our fellow humans.

Laboring in the name of Jesus to make the world a better place does not undermine faith in the Second Coming; rather it takes seriously God’s intention to repair the world through Christ and anticipates this hope by moving even now in the direction of restoration. This is what it means to be faithful to the kingdom of God even while we await the appearing of Christ and the culmination of our hope.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed

After 1945 we lost our blind faith in the inevitability of human progress. A threshold was crossed, and something important changed when humanity gained possession of what previously only God possessed: the capacity for complete annihilation. In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of building city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, “You will be like God”?

I find it poignant and sadly apropos that the oldest human corpse was not found resting in a peaceful grave with attendant signs of reverence, but sprawled upon a bleak mountainside with an arrow in his back. It’s a distressing commentary on the origins of human civilization. It seems that human civilization is incapable of advancing without shooting brothers in the back.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed … The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us.

Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority.

We should never forget that Jesus was executed in the name of “freedom and justice” - whether it was the Roman version or the Jewish version. But the cross shames the ancient deception that freedom and justice can be attained by killing. The crowd believes this pernicious lie, but Christ never does. The Passover crowd shouted, “Hosanna!” (“ Save now!”) until it realized that Jesus wouldn’t save them by killing their enemies; then it shouted, “Crucify him!” Jesus refused to be a messiah after the model of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Judah Maccabeus, William Wallace, or George Washington - and the crowd despises him for it. The crowd loves their violent heroes. The crowd is predisposed to believe in the idea that “freedom and justice” can be achieved by violence.

If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not what the apostle John

The resurrection of Jesus is not just a happy ending to the gospel story; it is the dawn of a new creation. No one captures this idea better than G. K. Chesterton in the close of part one of his classic work, The Everlasting Man. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.

The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity’s burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!

we eventually have to ask ourselves what did Jesus intend and when do we need to turn the other cheek? If our default response to this portion of the Sermon on the Mount is to craft exemptions, we might give the impression that we really don’t believe in Jesus’s ideas of nonviolent resistance and enemy love at all.

When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to.

The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia. War is, among other things, impatience.

The crusades are perhaps the most egregious example of how distorted Christianity can become when we separate Christ from his ideas.

The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia.

The spiritual experience of expressing a shared hostility can even be confused for the Holy Spirit … because of how it feels.

Because while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.

The death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord has given the world a new ultimate reality—love for God expressed as love for neighbor and enemy.

Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.

I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.

A secret (or not-so-secret) longing for the world’s violent destruction is grossly unbecoming to the followers of the Lamb.

Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.

So politically I call for my nation to prioritize caring for the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the imprisoned, and to renounce an ambition to dominate the world economically or militarily. I do this in the name of Jesus. I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb. These are my politics for the simple reason that they are clearly the politics of Jesus. Jesus says so! Are you good with that? Or do your partisan political allegiances make it hard for you to accept the politics of Jesus? If so, you have some thinking to do.

If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world.

it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior.

American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans—the privileged citizens of the world’s lone superpower—have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean peasants.

I learned that it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

on the first Palm Sunday. It happened a hundred and fifty years ago in America. It continues to happen today. If we think Jesus shares and endorses our disdain and enmity for our enemies, we don’t know the things that make for peace, and we are headed for

Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine). Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.' 'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.' 'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing. 'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.' 'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.' 'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.' 'Is it in the dictionary?' 'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?' And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. 'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously. 'Thanks, thanks.' 'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?' 'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.' Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail.

It was Jesus’s ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn’t very dangerous. It’s been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the “gospel” today—a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die—Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in the affairs of the real world. But that’s not what happened. Why? Because Pilate was smart enough to understand that what Jesus was preaching was a challenge to the philosophy of empire (or as we prefer to call it today, superpower).

This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.

War, as a legitimate means of shaping the world, died with Christ on Good Friday. Jesus refuted the war option when he told Peter to put up his sword. Killing in order to liberate Jesus and his followers from the violent injustice of Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate would have been a just war—but Jesus refused to engage in a just war. He chose instead to bear witness to the truth, forgive, and die. Jesus took the death of a world framed by war into his body and he and it both died together. Jesus was buried and with him was buried the old world devoted to sin and death. On the third day Jesus was raised and a new world was born. Of course the old world of death still lingers around us, but in the midst of it, the world to come is being born.

What Jesus did to embody the will of the Father on the cross was not just done on our behalf; it was also done as the way we are to follow. Jesus did not renounce the way of violence for the way of peace so that we could renounce the way of peace for the way of violence. The long dark night of mankind’s addiction to violence has come to an end. The new day of Messiah’s peace has dawned, and we are called to be children of the day. Do we dare?

Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.

Eventually I reached a crisis point concerning what the gospel is and how it should be preached. To a large extent, this came about when I began to seriously read the apostolic sermons found in the book of Acts. I had to admit the apostles did not preach the gospel the way I was preaching it. (“Pray the sinner’s prayer so you can go to heaven when you die.”) In fact, in the eight gospel sermons found in the book of Acts, not one of them is based on afterlife issues! Instead they proclaimed that the world now had a new emperor and his name was Jesus! Their witness was this: the Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had been executed by Roman crucifixion, but God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. The world now had a new boss: Jesus the Christ. What the world’s new Lord (think emperor) is doing is saving the world. This includes the personal forgiveness of sins and the promise of being with the Lord in the interim between death and resurrection as well as after the resurrection, but the whole project is much, much bigger than that—the world is to be repaired! Now that is a gospel I can get excited about! A gospel that isn’t reserved for the sweet by-and-by, but a gospel that is for the here and now!

We can no longer pretend that the organized, state-sponsored killing that is war is compatible with the kingdom of Christ. Jesus did not come to help us win our wars—no matter what Constantine thought. Jesus came to lead us out of the dark and demonic world of war into the light of his peaceable kingdom. Did it require seventeen centuries for us to learn this lesson? I don’t know. I do know that on August 6, 1945, the world crossed a threshold. Human capacity for killing is now totalized. We can kill the whole world if we want to. Will we continue to believe the lie that we have to kill the world in order to save it?

Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism." "I'm sorry. I don't know what that is." "I don't either," Bunny would say brokenly. "Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see." He would resume pacing. "Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it." "Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word." "Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe." "Is it in the dictionary?" "Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean" — he made a picture frame with his hands — "the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?" And so it would go on, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. "This is a nice paper, Bun — ," Charles said cautiously. "Thanks, thanks." "But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?" "Oh, Donne," Bunny had said scoffingly. "I don't want to drag him into this." Henry had refused to read it. "I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really," he said, glancing over the first page. "Say, what's wrong with this type?" "Tripled spaced it," said Bunny proudly. "These lines are about an inch apart." "Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?" Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. "Looks kind of like a menu," he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence "And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

At the very least, we ought to take a fresh look and evaluate with new eyes what Jesus of Nazareth actually taught about the dark foundations of human civilization and the alternative he offers in the kingdom of God. Instead of reading the Gospels through the lens of Constantinian Christianity, where Jesus’s prophetic critique of violent power is filtered out, we should try to refamiliarize ourselves with the revolutionary ideas that belong to “that preacher of peace.” The American church especially could benefit greatly from an unvarnished reading of Jesus liberated from the censoring lens of militaristic empire and its chaplaincy religion. This book is my attempt to do that. At

Instead they proclaimed that the world now had a new emperor and his name was Jesus! Their witness was this: the Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had been executed by Roman crucifixion, but God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. The world now had a new boss: Jesus the Christ. What the world’s new Lord (think emperor) is doing is saving the world. This includes the personal forgiveness of sins and the promise of being with the Lord in the interim between death and resurrection as well as after the resurrection, but the whole project is much, much bigger than that—the world is to be repaired! Now that is a gospel I can get excited about! A gospel that isn’t reserved for the sweet by-and-by, but a gospel that is for the here and now!

So when Jesus comes along and says to us, “Love your enemy,” we instinctively feel how radical it is. He’s not just giving individuals a personal ethic; he is striking at the very foundation of the world! The world was founded on hating enemies, and now Jesus says, “Don’t do it!” When Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” he wasn’t just trying to produce kinder, gentler people; he was trying to refound the world! Instead of retaliatory violence; the world is to be refounded on cosuffering love. Jesus understood that the world had built its societal structures upon shared hatred, scapegoating, and what René Girard calls “sacred violence.” In challenging “sacred violence” (which Israel cherished in their war stories), Jesus was challenging the world at its most basic level. We cherish, honor, and salute sacred violence. We have to! We have a dark instinct that we must honor Cain’s war against Abel—and our own wars upon our hated enemies—or our whole system will fall apart. But Jesus testified against it—that those deeds were evil. This is where the tension begins to build. What Jesus called evil are the very things our cultures and societies have honored in countless myths, memorials, and anthems. It was this deep insight into the dark foundations of the world that Jesus possessed and his brothers did not. James and the rest of Jesus’s brothers and disciples could testify against symptomatic evil of greed and immorality, but they could not testify against the systemic evil of hating national enemies. This is why the world hates Jesus in a way it could not hate his brothers. Ultimately, Jesus’s brothers belonged to the same system as Caesar, Herod, and Caiaphas—the system of hating and seeking to kill one’s national or ethnic enemy. Jesus’s call to love our enemies presents us with a problem—a problem that goes well beyond the challenge we find in trying to live out an ethic of enemy love on a personal level. How can a nation exist without hating its enemies? If nations can’t hate and scapegoat their enemies, how can they cohere? If societies can’t project blame onto a hated “other,” how can they keep from turning on themselves? Jesus’s answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: instead of an arrangement around hate and violence, the world is now to be arranged around love and forgiveness. The fear of our enemy and the pain of being wronged is not to be transferred through blame but dispelled through forgiveness.

The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death. We do this mostly unconsciously, but we do it. I’ve done it. And the result is that we reduce Jesus to being the Savior who guarantees our reservation in heaven while using him to endorse our own ideas about how to run the world. This feeds into a nationalized narrative of the gospel and leads to a state-owned Jesus. Thus, our understanding of Christ has mutated from Roman Jesus to Byzantine Jesus to German Jesus to American Jesus, etc.

I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don’t care. I’ve grown immune to their strain of unbelief. I’ve turned a corner. I believe that what Isaiah dreamed of, Jesus died for. I believe that what Isaiah said would come to pass in the last days, Jesus inaugurated in his resurrection. I’ve caught a glimpse of the better world that can be—a world that Jesus came to give and continues to offer us. I believe the world of peace is possible in Christ. I won’t let the doomsday preppers with their Armageddon obsession talk me out of it. Jesus has already spoken the first word of a new world—the word peace. So things have changed. I have changed. I’ve prayed my last war prayer and preached my last war sermon. I’ve given up bellicose flag waving and singing lustily about bombs bursting in air. I’ve bid a final farewell to Mars. From now on I follow the Prince of Peace. I know others will come with me. Maybe you will be one of them. I hope so.

Tikkun olam. Repairing the world. Healing wastelands. Laboring to make a dying world livable again. This is the vision of the apostles and prophets. This is the prophetic paradigm the people of God are to coordinate their theology and lives with. We are not to be macabre Christians lusting for destruction and rejoicing at the latest rumor of war. It’s high time that a morbid fascination with a supposed unalterable script of God-sanctioned–end-time–hyperviolence be once and for all left behind. A secret (or not-so-secret) longing for the world’s violent destruction is grossly unbecoming to the followers of the Lamb. We are not hoping for Armageddon; we are helping build New Jerusalem. We will not complete it without the return of the King, but we will move in that direction all the same. We refuse to conspire with the beasts of empire who keep the world confined to the death culture of Babylon. There’s always another Armageddon looming on the horizon, threatening to perpetuate the bloody ways of Cain and throw more Abels in a mass grave. But we are not to cooperate with that vision. We are to resist it. We are to anticipate a future created by the Prince of Peace through the very lives we live. We are to work in concert with Jesus Christ

I well believe, dear Mother, that it is somewhat painful for you that I have travelled so far away from you and was not even able to bid you farewell. Indeed, do not think as though I had no filial love for you or else I would not have accepted this call or at least would have asked for your advice. I could not possibly refuse the call, otherwise I would have been disobedient to the heavenly Father who has sufficiently assured me of His will. Time did not permit me to bid you farewell in person. I had to hurry with my dear colleague to my congregation that was already underway. . . . My congregation, to which the wonderful God has led me, is indeed still small but consists mainly of such people who already have suffered much for Christ's sake and therefore have their Christianity not in the mouth but in the heart and demonstrate it in deed. For that reason I not only have love for these upright people with my heart and with joy want to live and die with them in America, but they also love me more than I am worthy and would share their heart with me if they could. . . . [I]f the wind remains good, we will arrive with God's help in 5 or 6 weeks to the place and location for which we rather earnestly yearn because it is said to be a good, fruitful, and blessed land.

Consider, too, that slavery, totalitarianism, and apartheid have been challenged, and in places overcome, not by Christians who sat back and blithely said, “It’s all going to burn,” but by Christians who believed that Jesus is Lord here and now. Such Christians believe that the program of restoration is already underway. Laboring in the name of Jesus to make the world a better place does not undermine faith in the Second Coming; rather it takes seriously God’s intention to repair the world through Christ and anticipates this hope by moving even now in the direction of restoration. This is what it means to be faithful to the kingdom of God even while we await the appearing of Christ and the culmination of our hope. Tikkun olam. Repairing the world. Healing wastelands. Laboring to make a dying world livable again. This is the vision of the apostles and prophets. This is the prophetic paradigm the people of God are to coordinate their theology and lives with. We are not to be macabre Christians lusting for destruction and rejoicing at the latest rumor of war. It’s high time that a morbid fascination with a supposed unalterable script of God-sanctioned–end-time–hyperviolence be once and for all left behind. A secret (or not-so-secret) longing for the world’s violent destruction is grossly unbecoming to the followers of the Lamb.

In the chapter entitled “You Can’t Pray a Lie” in Twain’s beloved novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn has helped hide Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim. But Huck thought he was committing a sin in helping a runaway slave. Huck had learned in Sunday school “that people that acts as I’d been acting … goes to everlasting fire.” So in an act of repentance in order to save his soul, Huck wrote a note to Miss Watson and told her where she could find her runaway slave. Now Huck was ready to pray his “sinner’s prayer” and “get saved.” I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see the paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.1 Huck Finn had been shaped by the Christianity he’d found in his Missouri Sunday school—a Christianity focused on heaven in the afterlife while preserving the status quo of the here and now. Huck thought that helping Jim escape from slavery was a sin, because that’s what he had been taught. He knew he couldn’t ask God to forgive him until he was ready to “repent” and betray Jim. Huck didn’t want to go to hell; he wanted to be saved. But Huck loved his friend more, so he was willing to go to hell in order to save his friend from slavery.

Not long ago I was in Istanbul, Turkey. While there I toured the Topkapi Palace—the former royal palace of the Ottoman sultans and center of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many artifacts collected throughout the centuries and on display was an item I found quite remarkable—the sword of the prophet Muhammad. There, under protective glass and illuminated by high-tech lighting, was the fourteen-hundred-year-old sword of the founder of Islam. As I looked at the sword with its curved handle and jeweled scabbard, I thought how significant it is that no one will ever visit a museum and be shown a weapon that belonged to Jesus. Jesus brings freedom to the world in a way different from Pharaoh, Alexander, Caesar, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Patton. Jesus sets us free not by killing enemies but by being killed by enemies and forgiving them … by whom I mean us. Forgiveness and cosuffering love is the truth that sets us free—free from the false freedom inflicted by swords ancient and modern. Muhammad could fight a war in the name of freedom to liberate his followers from Meccan oppression, but Jesus had a radically different understanding of freedom. And lest this sound like crass Christian triumphalism, my real question is this: Do we Christians secretly wish that Jesus were more like Muhammad? It’s not an idle question. The moment the church took to the Crusades in order to fight Muslims, it had already surrendered its vision of Jesus to the model of Muhammad. Muhammad may have thought freedom could be found at the end of a sword, but Jesus never did. So are Christians who most enthusiastically support US-led wars against Muslim nations actually trying to turn Jesus into some version of Muhammad? It’s a serious question.

We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.

When your city is built upon violence, freedom is just another word for killing your brother. But when your city is built upon love, freedom is just another word for being your brother’s keeper.

Yes, Christ has abolished war. The King of Kings won his kingdom without war. Jesus proved there is another way. Jesus is the other way. The question “What are you willing to die for?” is not the same question as “What are you willing to kill for?” Jesus was willing to die for that which he was unwilling to kill for. Jesus won his kingdom by dying, not killing. Ruling the world by killing was buried with Christ. When Christ was raised on the third day, he did not resurrect war. With his resurrection the world is given a new trajectory, an eschatology toward peace.

Jesus doesn’t call us to give a prophetic interpretation to the latest war and rumor of war. Jesus calls us to be peacemakers and lead the way out of the darkness of retributive violence into the light of Christian reconciliation.

Us and Them There is no them; there is only us.

What I’m trying to say is that Jesus is Lord. Today. Right now. For real. Jesus will appear for the final judgment, but he is already ruling and judging the nations in righteousness. We may prefer to opt for one of the dualistic options of either liberal utopianism or conservative dispensationalism, but the truth is we must live in the tension of the now and not yet. Jesus is now reigning over the nations, but we do not yet see the fullness of a world made right.

We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness! But it’s a pervasive and beloved madness. And I know from experience that it’s hard to oppose a crowd fuming for war. When we have identified a hated enemy, we want to be assured that God is on our side as we go to war with our enemy. And we believe that surely God is on our side, because we feel so unified in the moment. Everyone knows the nation is most unified in times of war. Nothing unites a nation like war. But what’s so tragic is when Christian leaders pretend that a rally around the war god is compatible with worshipping the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We refuse to face the truth that waging war is incompatible with following Jesus. We forget that God is most clearly revealed, not in the nascent understanding of the ancient Hebrews but in the Word made flesh. We forget that “being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christform upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.”6 We forget that “the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God’s own Son.”7 We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. We forget all of this because the disturbing truth is this—it’s hard to believe in Jesus. When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to. Which is why, I suspect, for so long, the Gospels have been treated as mere narratives and have not been taken seriously as theological documents in their own right. We want to hear how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, and rose again on the third day. We use these historical bits as the raw material for our theology that we mostly shape from a particular misreading of Paul. In doing this we conveniently screen out Jesus’s own teachings about the kingdom of God and especially his ideas about nonviolence and enemy love.

In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled upon a 5,300-year-old corpse that would later be dubbed “Ötzi the Iceman.” Preserved for more than five millennia in the ice and dry mountain air, Ötzi is the oldest intact corpse ever found. Forensic investigation revealed that Ötzi was most likely a shepherd. Ötzi was also a murder victim. He had been shot in the back with an arrow. As a Bronze Age shepherd who became a murder victim, we might think of Ötzi as the Abel of the Alps. I find it poignant and sadly apropos that the oldest human corpse was not found resting in a peaceful grave with attendant signs of reverence, but sprawled upon a bleak mountainside with an arrow in his back. It’s a distressing commentary on the origins of human civilization. It seems that human civilization is incapable of advancing without shooting brothers in the back. From the lonely death of Ötzi in the Italian Alps to Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, whose violent death in Tehran during the 2009 election protests was captured on a cell-phone camera and witnessed around the world, the number of Abels who lay slain by a Cain are incalculable. In a world that spills the blood of the innocent, it’s easy to despair. But it’s the world Abel, Ötzi, and Neda were slain in that Jesus came to save.

Finally, on June 22, 1750, the Council, convened to advise on the matter, recommended, by a vote of 10 to 9, the minority protesting, that the pastoral relations should be dissolved. The concurrent sentiment of the church was expressed by the overwhelming vote of about 200 to 20 of the male members. The next Sunday but one Edwards preached his Farewell Sermon.

Let us be clear on this: Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority. Jesus hides from the triumphalistic crowd that tries to force him to be their war-waging king. Jesus weeps over the nationalistic crowd whose hosannas are meant to egg him into violent revolution. The crowd is antichrist.

Crowds never think they are doing evil. But then, crowds are easily duped. Crowds are not wise. Crowds don’t think. Crowds only react … usually to fear. That’s when bad things happen. We don’t need more lynch mobs, even if their noose is only rhetorical. We need more peacemakers. It’s the peacemakers who save the world from the unthinking mob.

Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good though tragically mistaken man, but because we are not much better. We may believe in Jesus, but we do not believe in his ideas, at least not his ideas about violence, truth, and justice.2

Peace be with you” (John 20:19–21). Peace is the first word of a new world. Having absorbed the sin and death of Cain’s violent civilization into his own body, Jesus carried it away to Hades and on the third day rose again to speak a fresh new word to the world of humankind—the word peace!

What has happened over the ensuing two millennia is that we who confess Christ have deftly (and mostly unconsciously) crafted a religion that neatly separates the Jesus who died on the cross for the radical ideas he preached—ideas that Jesus foresaw would lead to his crucifixion.

Our responsibility is not to chaplain the state but to call the state to repentance and to surrender to the King who is Lord. Our responsibility is to be an alternative to the state. Christians would do far more good for our country by learning not to look to DC for solutions but to the glorious Son of God, who loves us and gave himself for us and, in doing so, gave us a whole new way of life—one not shaped by the power of force but the force of the gospel.

As Kierkegaard said, “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.

Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical. Divorcing Jesus from his ideas—especially divorcing Jesus from his political ideas—has been a huge problem that’s plagued the church from the fourth century onward. The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement.

(At this point some readers are quite likely to close this book and never open it again … but I hope you will press on.) The

Freedom remains a euphemism for the power to kill.

I thought of you when I read this quote from "A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace" by Brian Zahnd - "Jesus is introduced. (Standing ovation.) He stands before Congress and begins to deliver his speech. “Blessed are the poor …the mourners … the meek.” “Love your enemies.” “Turn the other cheek.” After a few perfunctory applauses early on, I’m pretty sure there would be a lot of squirming senators and uncomfortable congressmen. The room would sink into a tense silence. And when Jesus concluded his speech with a prophecy of the inevitable fall of the house that would not act upon his words (Matt. 7:26–27), what would Congress do? Nothing. They would not act. They could not act. To act on Jesus’s words would undo their system. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t work in Cain’s system—no matter how noble or sophisticated. In the end, the US Congress would no more adopt the policies Jesus set out in the Sermon on the Mount than they were adopted by the Jewish Sanhedrin or the Roman Senate.

we worship Jesus as Savior while dismissing his ideas about peace. For seventeen centuries Christianity has offered a gospel where we can accept Jesus as our personal Savior while largely ignoring his ideas about peace, violence, and human society.

There are no “Christian nations” in the political sense. The risen Christ does have a “nation” (see Matt. 21:43), but it’s not a nationalized body politic, rather it’s the baptized body of Messiah!

Framed by this kind of world-despairing eschatology, evangelism comes to resemble something like trying to push people onto the last chopper out of Saigon.

Kierkegaard was right when he said, “When you label me, you negate me.

We forget that God is most clearly revealed, not in the nascent understanding of the ancient Hebrews but in the Word made flesh.

War is, among other things, impatience.

There is a sense in which we create religion as a category to keep Jesus from meddling with our cherished ideas about nationalism, freedom, and war.

In short the problem is this: far too few who believe in the risen Christ actually believe in his revolutionary ideas.

Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism." "I'm sorry. I don't know what that is." "I don't either," Bunny would say brokenly. "Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see." He would resume pacing. "Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it." "Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word." "Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe." "Is it in the dictionary?" "Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean" — he made a picture frame with his hands — "the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?" And so it would go on, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. "This is a nice paper, Bun — ," Charles said cautiously. "Thanks, thanks." "But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?" "Oh, Donne," Bunny had said scoffingly. "I don't want to drag him into this." Henry had refused to read it. "I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really," he said, glancing over the first page. "Say, what's wrong with this type?" "Tripled spaced it," said Bunny proudly. "These lines are about an inch apart." "Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?" Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. "Looks kind of like a menu," he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence "And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

This begs the question of why Christians get so worked up over which side has the most representatives in Congress when the entire system is incapable of implementing what Jesus taught.

Fear has no place in the new world that Jesus inaugurates in his resurrection. We’re called to be peacemakers, and peacemakers cannot be fearmongers. The biggest difference between a peacemaker and a fearmonger is whether or not they really believe in the unconditional love of God.

The catastrophe of church as vassal to the state would find its most grotesque expression in the medieval crusades when, under the banner of the cross, Christians killed in the name of Christ. The crusades are perhaps the most egregious example of how distorted Christianity can become when we separate Christ from his ideas. Yet we continue to do this—we worship Jesus as Savior while dismissing his ideas about peace. For seventeen centuries Christianity has offered a gospel where we can accept Jesus as our personal Savior while largely ignoring his ideas about peace, violence, and human society. We have embraced a privatized, postmortem gospel that stresses Jesus dying for our sins but at the same time ignores his political ideas. This leaves us free to run the world the way it has always been run: by the power of the sword.

Under pressure from the ideology of empire, concepts like freedom and truth gain radically different meanings than those intended by Christ. Freedom becomes a euphemism for vanquishing (instead of loving) enemies; truth finds its ultimate form in the will to power (expressed in the willingness to kill). This is a long way from the ideas of peace, love, and forgiveness set forth by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

the cross shames the ancient deception that freedom and justice can be attained by killing.