Revenge
The Church's Response To The Death of bin Laden
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.
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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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