Kneading Bread

My wife said to me yesterday that she was so sick of what was going on in Israel/Lebanon and that she was going to become an antiwar protester. To this I said something wimpy like, “both sides are wrong, there isn’t a right side.” While I don’t believe the world needs any more American style antiwar protesters – not if they are going to be almost exclusively white, upper-middle class, suburban, and self-righteously educated like they were when being anti-WTO was in fashion. America needs something bigger.

I believe that under some vague mask of christianity the current US administration has caused some of the most counter-Christian actions to occur. Money is taken away from social services and the public purse and returned to the rich in the form of “tax-cuts.” The USA is directly involved in 2 military actions (Iraq and Afghanistan) while tacitly allowing an ally to pursue similarly executed insanity in the name of terror-prevention (Israel against Hezbollah.) The agendas that dominate our legislative branch are deliberately designed to distract from these things with issues such as homosexuality and immigration creating an effective smokescreen against any kind of actual progress towards dealing with major constitutional issues relating to seperation of powers, human rights, and civil rights.

Jesus says that we are to render unto Caesar what is his, and Paul says we are to respect civil authority (keep in mind he wrote that under an authoritarian regime.) In recent years the evangelical-republican agenda has created a line of thinking that figures that “good, bible-believing, ‘real’ christians” should follow our federal government’s decisions because of some bizaare concoction of the above to verses (Matthew 22, Romans 13) and the belief that because a majority of officials profess a faith in evangelical Christianity their decisions therefore must be the most Christ-like.

So, back to what my wife said… I think that bible-believing folk of all creeds and stripes need to stand up to the injustice in this world – especially if it is being perpetrated in our name! How much longer will innocents die because we have decided that we are going to conveniently respect political authority instead of respecting the authority of the greater Kingdom? The irony of this whole thing being, we are the authority — we’re in a democracy!

Being a Christian is NOT easy living, the teachings of Christ are the biggest “inconvenient truths.” I know for sure that there have been times in my life when I have not visited Christ when he was in jail or gave Him food and clothing when He had neither, but I know for sure that things are wrong here and now and people are dying because of it. To steal a phrase from Shakespeare, “Something is rotten in the state of American Christianity.”

So protest, these wars are all wrong. I pray that in your protests you would find time to petition the greatest peacemaker of them all. Pray and plead for peace – pray that we would take to heart the words of the prayer our Savior taught us, that “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” In this coming Kingdom there will be eternal peace, might we be the bringers of a foretaste of that peace to this world!