All week we’ve seen people cheering and high-fiving and celebrating the fact a U.S. sailor shot a 60-ish unarmed man to death. Which is not to defend who that man was or what he has done, but to point out America should, ideally, not be in the revenge business. Christians, most assuredly, should not be in the revenge business. True followers of Christ, therefore, have likely spent much of the week awash in mixed emotions: relief at an at least symbolic national closure. But, to truly know Christ, you have to be conflicted about the lesson, reinforced yet again, of conflict resolution by an act of violence. Would Jesus cheer the death of Osama bin Laden?

I don’t believe Jesus Christ would celebrate

the murde of Osama bin Laden. I don’t believe Jesus was all that much concerned about justice. Justice was not His mission. Crime and punishment were not the measure of His ministry on earth. Jesus was wholly unconcerned about the Roman state or the actions of the government. He taught us to obey the law, to pay our taxes, to submit to those in authority over us. But He demonstrated absolutely no nationalism, no flag-waving, fist-pumping pride. It is likely that, while all of that was going on, Jesus would more likely have been in a quiet corner somewhere, engaging some stranger about the Kingdom of Heaven.

The president, a confessed born-again Christian, has made repeated statements about how justice had been done. This is a tough lesson to reconcile with our children, as we routinely teach them justice occurs in courtrooms. This is difficult for pastors to reconcile with congregants as the bible teaches us that justice is God’s business, not ours. I am quite sure pastors, black and white, across the nation struggled with the issue of the bin Laden killing and how we, as followers of Christ, should respond. My experience here in Ourtown leads me to suspect, if it was mentioned at all, black pastors here likely used it for a cheer line and did not bother grappling with the morality of the event or using it as a teaching opportunity. I sincerely hope and pray your pastor did and that I’m just being obnoxious, but more then a decade of experience here has aptly demonstrated most of our leaders here are simply not thoughtful beyond whatever Noah’s Ark homily they throw together on a napkin ten minutes before entering the pulpit.

The qualities of God include a tough one: mercy. Mercy is, for us, terribly difficult because mercy requires a denial of self. With mercy, we have to mash on the brakes just as our bloodlust is at its zenith. Just as people who have hurt us, who have wounded us, done us wrong, cheated us, lied on us, are about to get their just deserts, God requires us to forego the ecstasy and release of the death blow. Jesus asks us to show mercy that mercy might be shown to us [Matthew 5:7]. I know of almost no Church Folk who have ever, in my lifetime, shown mercy to me or anyone else. Not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m saying I myself have not personally experienced this. Mercy is one of those qualities of Jesus Christ that are best demonstrated in private. Church Folk tend to embody few if any of the qualities of Christ or the fruit of the Spirit, and, to my experience, most of these folk simply live for revenge. They sacrifice for it. Expend massive amounts of time, energy and resources to achieve it. Will sit their fat butts on committees just to spite someone else. Revenge. It’s so sweet. It’s like a drug. The Schadenfreude—reveling in the suffering of others.

Jesus, of course, was not in the revenge business. Now, I have to believe revenge was a tempting solution even to Him, Christ’s humanity making itself known at inconvenient intervals. But He never gave into it. Evil ultimately destroys itself. This isn’t to suggest we should have left bin Laden be. My own flawed humanity wrestles with the conclusion that the president’s decision to kill and not capture was, regrettably, the right one. A living bin Laden, imprisoned perhaps here in Colorado’s Ultra Max, would represent a rallying call for extremists and present a wide variety of global economic, political and security consequences, many of which could not possibly be accurately predicted or anticipated. In that light, I conclude killing bin Laden solves more problems than it creates. But it is ultimately a failure of the American esthete, a difficult choice to explain to our children, a violation of the divine example of Jesus Christ, Whom the right-wing extremists claim to follow even as they routinely and without hesitation crucify Him afresh by violating virtually everything He taught us.    CONTINUED

The killing of bin Laden was largely about perception. How we feel about it depends largely one who we are: what our culture is and what our life experience has been. It amazes me that, as much thought as the military and intelligence communities put into gaming out how to prevent bin Laden from achieving some larger-than-life martyr status, that more effort wasn’t employed to manage the perception surrounding his death. No matter how you spin things, elite Navy Seals kicked down a door and shot an unarmed 60-year old man. Conflicting stories emerge about whether bin Laden was facing them or whether he was lunging for a weapon or running away (reports have his eye gunshot as an exit wound). It is impossible to not conclude the Seals had been ordered to shoot bin Laden on sight, that the U.S. was not interested in capturing bin Laden or bringing him to trial, which would have been virtually unmanageable security and political position. As a thinking person, as an American citizen, I’d agree killing bin Laden was, unfortunately, the better path for America. But the unheroic circumstances are at odds with the American tradition, with a century of movies and television where John Wayne never shoots the bad guy unless the bad guy is armed and shoots first. One might argue that on many occasions, 9/11 not the least of which, bin Laden indeed shot first. But that’s a stretch. Having killed every able-bodied man in the compound, the Seals, no doubt a CIA “Wet Team,” could easily have captured bin Laden alive. There is no other rational explanation for why they did not: they’d been ordered to kill him. Asserting that these guys, the Best of The Best if not certainly the Scariest of The Scary, were actually threatened by this old man and a handful of women and children, is an insult to our intelligence.

In our parlance, bin Laden was not only an enemy combatant but a living command and control center for a terrorist organization. An organization whose strength was not in its actual acts of unimaginable cruelty and evil, but in its command of the universal language of media. This is a song I’ve been singing to local churches here for a decade: Control Your Message. Most black pastors here have no message. None whatsoever. Not even the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ. Their Sundays are unfathomable pastiches of random themes with no cohesion or organization and absolutely no synchronicity between music and sermon and remarks along thematic lines to present a unified and structured Sunday message. Each week, the music folk throw together their songs, the deacons throw together their tired devotional—usually winging it on the spot—and the pastor, as often as not, throws together his sermon, what there is of it, the night before if not the morning of in his study.

Not so al Qaeda. What makes al Qaeda seem so menacing is not anything they’d actually done—a handful of guys flying planes into buildings—but their surgical use of media to come around and poke us in the eye at unexpected intervals. Their strength is in their message, their cohesive, coordinated, well-defined, disciplined use of communications. The reality is al Qaeda isn’t worth anywhere near the two trillion (and counting) dollars and five thousand (and counting) American lives former President George W. Bush and now current President Barack Obama have invested in him and his legacy. al Qaeda is a bunch of thugs. Their strength is not in bombs, but in YouTube. In al Jazeera. I shudder to imagine how effective we, the black church, might be if we only pulled our collective head from our collective ass, came together in unity and mastered the tools of modern warfare: not guns, not bombs—perception. Perception is the new atomic bomb. Perception is all about a disciplined message and who controls it. This is why al Qaeda comes across as huge and scary when they are neither, and why the black church comes across as pathetic and weak—which it is.

For example: the president held a town hall meeting last week on the economy [LINK] where he was asked by a woman about to lose her home, “Mr. President: if you were going through this, how would you feel?” Obama meandered through a long-winded, didactic lecture about economic fundamentals, leaving both the woman and the town hall’s moderators bewildered. It was a telling and revelatory moment which reinforced my suspicion the president is simply incapable of empathy with the average man and that he is woefully out of touch. He is President Iceberg, a huge political weakness the race-obsessed Republicans seem to routinely ignore while they instead drag the gutter for more hate to use against him. “How would you feel?” this woman asked, and he just left her there.

Having himself lived through poverty and loss, former President Bill Clinton would have paused thoughtfully, his face momentarily frozen in empathy while taking the emotional hit, reflecting on a genuine experience of his own. Then, Clinton would have repeated her question: “How would I feel? I’d feel scared.” Home run. Clinton wins in a landslide. This is the brilliance of Bill Clinton and the Achilles’ Heel of Barack Obama. This is a charge the president cannot defend himself against. It amazes me that the conservatives are simply too distracted by their irrational loathing of this man to discern this obvious weakness: how lousy he is at connecting to the challenges of average Americans.

Now, what is the biblical model?

After His resurrection, did Jesus hunt down and kill Judas Iscariot? Did God punish Judas? Did Satan? The record leads us to conclude Satan abandoned Judas once Judas had done his bidding. In that moment of clarity, realizing the unparalleled horror of what h had done, Judas first desperately tried to fix things, to save Jesus. Failing that, Judas was overcome with remorse and committed suicide. Did Satan kill him? Did God kill him? Our conscience, our sense of right and wrong, is perhaps the most divine part of ourselves: our self-awareness. Combined with our God-given freedom of choice, we ourselves can choose greatness or shame, to follow godly influences or indulge in evil,

Once resurrected, did Jesus go after the governor? After Caiaphas, the high priest? Did He kill the centurions who’d tortured Him one by one? Did the Gospels have a rousing, Hollywood ending where all of those evil people received their come uppance? Was “justice” done?

So far as Hollywood stories go, the Gospels have terrible third act. The hero dies, but, like in an awful B-movie, miraculously comes back to life. Then, instead of getting their just deserts, the bad guys live to ripe old ages, retaining political power and killing many of Jesus’ followers along the way. Queue music, roll credits, fade out. A lousy, unsatisfying ending. And it makes us wonder what this Christian experience is all about, that people can mistreat and abuse and malign us and, not only get away with it, but prosper and live pretty decent lives. What kind of religion is this? Where’s the justice?

The biblical model is Jesus choosing to forego justice. Justice would have not served His purpose. Were it for justice, none of us would be here. None of us would be eligible to live our lives on the same plane of awareness as Jesus Christ. Justice buys us nothing. Justice does not connect us with The Divine. It satisfies our belly for the moment, but in the end justice is a terribly limited quality. It is ultimately subjective. Justice often if not usually means “Just Us,” as in, “We are the only ones who are just—everybody else is evil/wrong/whatever.” It is righteousness by exclusion. So much so that now we have more killing, more evil, perpetrated in the name of justice. Evil men and evil women committing heinous crimes to avenge a man who committed heinous crimes because, as he saw it, the United States had committed the heinous crime of setting foot on what he considered holy ground (U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War). Justice is cyclical. It ultimately achieves nothing. Which isn’t to say justice plays no role in our lives, but that our primary concern should be growing closer to God and becoming more like Jesus, who left justice to other hands.

The greater good that could
possibly come from this episode

is a national mourning rather than a national gloating, but America will have none of that. It’s all flag waving and talking heads and, incredulously, giving George W. Bush—the man ho ignored the 9/11 warnings, who allowed bin Laden to escape for Torah Borah, and who, at a 2002 press conference, arrogantly and infamously claimed, “I don’t know where he is. I’m not all that concerned about him.” —the credit for bin Laden’s capture. That’s the most evil thing about this: white, allegedly “Christian” conservatives’ penchant for mixing racism with absolutely everything, up to and including denying the current president credit for achieving, in 41 minutes with around eighteen guys, what Bush failed to do in nine years, 200,000 troops and $2 trillion. Barack Hussein Obama Is a Black Man And They Hate Him. Bush's $2 trillon (and counting) obsession for revenge was not with bin Laden but Saddam Hussein. He deposed Hussein but destroyed the American economy and ruined key relationships with America's allies.

The greater tragedy, for me, as a Christian, as a pastor, is that, in our black Baptist culture, we learn nothing. We are, to my observation, running around like the rest of them, fists in the air, “We got him!” Which misses, entirely, the purpose, mission, and theme of the divine example of Jesus Christ and the redemptive work of the cross—both things we, as black Church Folk, routinely dismiss. If you look with better eyes, you’ll see lessons to be learned, to be taught, in most every headline. That there is in our church no apparent struggle, no perceptible conflict of conviction, is an indictment of our own purposelessness as we wander about calling ourselves Christians while routinely demonstrating we have no idea what that actually means.

Christopher J. Priest
14 March 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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