J.E.S.U.S.A. (2020) Movie Script

We are the greatest

country on this planet.

We are going to

defeat the barbarians

and we're going

to defeat them fast.

And to our enemies...

To our enemies,

we will pursue you

as only America

can. You will fear us.

It is time to show

the whole world

that America is back,

bigger and better

and stronger than ever before.

The American narrative, the militaristic

spirit is so deeply ingrained in our bones.

And I know that because I was

that person for so many years,

like I know what it feels

like to be so committed,

to a militaristic, destroy your enemy

kind of posture while maintaining

my Christian faith. I

know what that feels like.

And when you start

to challenge that,

it cuts to the core of who we are,

as American Christians,

or I'll say AmericanChristians.

I think it's

hard for outsiders. I mean,

people not living and

growing upin America

to understand how

deeply that myth is woven

into the American psyche.

That America is not just the

latest in a long line of superpowers.

America is raised up by God

with special purposes. Generally,

they'll talk about bringing the gospel to

the nations, which the gospel also includes

certain visions of democracy

and things like that. And the primary

means by which America will

accomplish that is either the

infliction of violence or the threat

of violence. That's always there.

That's why, in the Christian mind,

a trillion dollar military

is somehow also very connected

to purposes of Christ in the world,

which I think is ludicrous. But, I promise

you that in that particular narrative,

it makes sense.

Love God, love thy neighbor. Hey!

Because in the end, the

devil and evil, they know the bottom line,

who will have the

dominion of the use of force?

Will it be good,

honorable young men and women?

Or will it be the wolves?

I think a lot of people in the

body of Christ have a hard time

associating Jesus with

making an assault weapon.

But it's right there in the Scripture,

and

it's a Scripture that's not taught in churches

because it kind of breaks that narrative.

He actually manufactured,

he spent time to manufacture a scourge,

which is a nine tail whip

for the purpose of assaulting

the money changers in the temple. So,

legally,

what he did was manufacture

an assault weapon

for the purpose

of beating people.

You know, Luke 22:36

one of last things

Jesus tells his disciples.

He said, I told you before,

don't you take your cloak with you.

Now I tell you,

sell your cloak and buy a sword.

What would Jesus do? One of the last things

he told us to do is to arm ourselves.

Hebrews tells us David was

made after God's own heart.

And Saul has killed his thousands,

David has killed his tens of thousands.

Think about this, "Thou shalt not

kill." It's kind of a weak translation

taken horribly out of context.

All of the Jewish translations,

original Hebrew,

translate to "shall not murder."

Almost all the modern translation

translate to "shall not murder."

And there's a clear difference between

murder and lawful use of deadly force.

- Back! Down!

- Down! Down! Down!

Lawful use of deadly force to

protect the innocent is always there.

Greater love has no one than this.

They lay their life down for their friends.

And who are your

friends? Then we get

the parable of the Good

Samaritan. Where your neighbors,

and that responsibility to try to

take the world and make it safe.

We see it

as practicing self defense

as the actualization oflove

God and love your neighbor.

Which Jesus said,

is the greatest commandments. Love God,

love the gifts that he's given and

also know how to protect them,

and protect your neighbor. Even though

that neighbor may not be of the faith,

or a believer in Christ.

We still have a duty to

extend Christ's love upon them.

I think the picture of Christ as

this sort of pacifist

is non biblical.

It's non biblical even when you

look at the Old Testament as well,

through the the warrior leaders.

Moses had to become a leader of armies.

Abraham had to become a leader of armies,

King David, all the kings throughout

the Scripture are leading armies.

So we really see it as

like a spiritual practice.

All right young man, here we go.

Tenderness inside is important,

but also, at the same time,

the ability to

defend Christ's kingdom.

Loving our enemies,

praying for those

who persecute you.

This is something that

Christ tells us to do.

He doesn't say, however,

let the enemies destroy your nations,

your civilization,

rape your women and children.

He does not say that.

We know that Christ is a shepherd,

so he protects his flock.

Ladies and gentlemen,

may I introduce to you, the truth?

Jesus is not Mother Teresa.

He's William Wallace.

We have feminized this man.

We've turned him into an

American male who goes to Target

and doesn't know

which bathroom to use.

He was a hellraiser.

Started arguments and

fights everywhere he went.

I would agree with C. S. Lewis, who said,

"Though I can respect an honest pacifist,

I believe him to be

entirely mistaken."

I respect him, just, you know,

step aside so I can protect you,

though.

We're not wrestling

against flesh and blood,

we're wresting against somebody

who roams about like a roaring lion

seeking someone to devour.

He will gun you down in your

sanctuary. He will rape your kids.

He'll attack you at Walmart,

Target, he don't care where you at

because he is a killer,

and that is his nature.

And if he can find somebody willing

to carry out his plan, he will do it.

It would be wonderful if

the whole world was pacifist.

But we live in a world that,

according to the Epistle of First John,

the whole world lies

under the power of the devil.

And Jesus said in John 8:44,

he's a liar and a murderer.

We never

mention the names of the killers

'cause we give these

guys way too much glory.

And all they want

to be is recognized.

They're in it for the glory.

They feel like they're a god.

When they come into

your area with a gun,

they feel like they're a God and they're

gonna be in the news. But I know...

You can kill to protect others,

and there's justification for that,

all through the Scriptures.

But it's not natural.

It's not natural to

kill another person.

Inside most healthy members of

our species is this resistance to killing.

Sociopaths don't

have that resistance.

Healthy people have

to be trained to kill.

There are sheep,

there are wolves and there are sheepdogs.

The wolf is a predator. He

will kill to satisfy his own needs,

but the psychology of a police

officer or a military person,

or somebody who's a defender,

they have the propensity to kill.

They have the propensity for violence,

but they have empathy

for their fellow man,

which is something that a

cold blooded killer doesn't have.

I've used

this analogy of the sheep,

the wolf and the sheepdog

for a very long time,

and it's amazing how almost every

time somebody comes up and said,

"You know, I always thoughtthere's something

wrong with me. I thought I was a wolf.

I would never harm the flock,

but I yearn for the opportunity

to use my skills and to protect it.

All my life, I've stood up to the bully, and

all my life, I've tried to protect people

and all my life I've been prepared

for violence when it comes.

I'm not a wolf, I'm a sheepdog."

And I tell people,

you know what,

I know who my great shepherd is.

I'm a sheepdog under the

authority of the great shepherd,

and one day the sheepdog will finally

rest at the feet of the great shepherd.

And we yearn to hear those words, "Well

done there, good and faithful servant."

Many of the sheep

don't like the sheepdog

because he looks

too much like the wolf,

and he acts too much like the wolf,

and he has a propensity for violence.

He can get violent. He can

grab a gun and go to work.

And the sheep don't like

that until the wolf is attacking.

Then they want that.

And there are people

that don't even want it then.

There's always gonna be some

people who will never be convinced that

you should use a tool of protection.

Even to protect them. I don't get it.

I don't understand why they feel that way,

but they do.

The problem is that the churchgoing

people, and I say this all the time,

I know it's offensive,

but religion dumbs people down.

Welcome back. We're following this breaking

news out of Sutherland Springs, Texas.

A shooting taking place at

the First Baptist Church...

I remember after the 26

people were massacred in Texas,

I remember a churchgoing

man calling me saying,

"Jimmy, you know what's wrong with us church

people?" I said, "What's that, George?"

He said,

"We think everybody's like us.

We think everybody that comes to

church or at the mall, or the theater,

nobody's got evil intent." And

what's so odd about that is that

here you have people who teach

from the Bible, who pastor churches,

they're elders, they're Sunday

school teachers, they're theologians,

and they don't see the

potentialfor evil in the heart of man.

How did they miss the fact that we're

not even past the Book of Genesis,

when God said something

he'd never said before.

"I regret that I made man.

He's corrupt and violent."

People have always

been terribly violent,

but people don't understand that,

especially people of faith.

They give their hearts to Jesus

and throw their minds in a dumpster.

If you knew anything

about trust in God or faith,

you would know that

faith without works is dead.

We know that Abraham had

faith because he offered Isaac.

We know the woman who

was bleeding internally had faith,

because she pressed

her way through the crowd.

True legitimate faith made you do

something, and then you trust God.

Because faith without works is dead,

and you might be too,

if you don't have a plan. And I

always like to ask if faith is enough,

then tell me why are our brothers and sisters

overseas being killed for their faith?

Over 3000 Christians were

murdered by ISIS terrorists in 2017.

Six Christian women are raped and forced

into Islam every day in the Middle East.

If faith is enough,

why isn't he protecting them?

A grieving

mother and son turned martyr...

I no longer struggle with,

"Why do bad things happen?"

I'm way past that.

I know that God made this world and gave

it to Adam and said, "This is your world."

Genesis 1:26. Rule over

everything. The birds of the air,

the fish of the ocean, the animals

that creep about, what have you.

This is your world. You

and I will work in harmony

and we will make

it work. And that

is the reason bad things

happen. We're not doing our part.

It would be nice if

everybody was a pacifist.

You bet. But,

I'm stunned at these men and these women

who say they believe the word of God,

but don't dig beneath its pages.

And who don't study the

languageand see what it says.

I was Fry,

the long-haired Zeppelin kid,

and I had this encounter with Jesus,

and I'm carrying my Bible to school,

not to make a statement, not as

some sort of badge of super spirituality,

because I wanted

to read the thing.

We're gonna serve and seek

the God of peace like never before.

And like Martin,

we're gonna fulfill our...

I grew up in North Carolina.

I was a very devout kid

and believed in God.

My father was the local

newspaper publisher in the '60s.

He came out in support of the civil

rights movement and President Kennedy.

Well, as my mother said in every

white household in North Carolina,

in the South,

had somebody in the Klan.

And the Ku Klux Klan threatened

my father by threatening to kill me,

and that clarified a lot of

things about life in the world.

So, at first, I was just picking up

Bibles we had laying around our house.

Then I saw it under a glass case

at the Narrow Way bookstore,

a brown calfskin New

American standard Bible,

with wide margins.

And so what I did was,

I sold a bicycle I had. I sold it for $40

I went and bought that Bible,

and I just thought it was the best

$40 I would ever

spend in my life.

And I was reading it. I mean,

say what you will, I know the text,

because I've just

read it so much.

We were very politicized.

Knew everything about the Vietnam War,

and Dr. King and the

civil rights movement.

So that when Dr King was killed,

I was really shaken.

And then when Bobby Kennedy was killed,

like millions of us,

I thought that was

the end of all hope.

And what happened was,

I went into an existential crisis

and deep depression.

And then I went to Duke to get

away from the Catholic Church,

it's a good Methodist school and I

decided I don't believe in God anymore.

Well,

I just couldn't see how that worked

because life is so beautiful.

And so, one day I decided,

of course I believe in Jesus,

and I believe in God. Then

my next thought was, well,

you have to give

your whole life to God.

After about a year,

it was worn out,

and I said, "Hey, I want to get

another one of these Bibles." He said,

"Didn't you just get one?" I said,

"About a year ago."

So, what's the matter? I said,

"Well, it's all falling apart."

And he said, "Really? Do you

have it?" "Yeah, it's out in the car."

So, I bring it in. He said, "Yeah, it is

falling apart. These have a lifetime guarantee.

I'll just send this back to the

manufacturer, and I'll give you a new one."

After about a year, I was back again and I

said, "Looks like this one's defective, too,

'cause it's falling apart." And by this

time he had got to know me a little bit.

He said, "You know, Brian,

there's nothing wrong with these Bibles.

They just weren't made

for people like you."

And then I

decided to become a priest,

but what happened was,

I went to Israel to

hitchhike through Galilee,

to see where Jesus lived,

and end up walking

through a war zone.

I was there in the summer of

1982 during Israel's war in Lebanon,

and instead I saw

all these jet fighters

swooping down over

the Sea of Galilee,

dropping bombs

and killing people

at the Sea of Galilee,

where Jesus gave us the beatitudes,

where he called us

to love our enemies.

Mass murder in the name of God,

even at the place where Jesus said,

"Blessed are the peacemakers,"

and I decided I would consciously,

actively, spend my life

working for peace and justice.

That's what the poor

guy wants us to do,

even if nobody

else wants to do it,

and that's what I've been doing ever since,

and that's gotten me into a lot of trouble.

I've been kicked out of churches,

and banned from speaking in churches

all over the country.

It's quite a way

to live one's life,

to be saying Jesus is nonviolent,

and

pretty much every day of my life,

I've got a Christian

telling me why we need to kill

or threatening to kill me because

they don't like this message.

Gung ho!

Here come the Gung Ho Commandos.

My best friend was a guy

by the name of Donald,

and we did military role playing like

a lot of red blooded young men do.

And he had a lot

of military books,

and we would page through the

books and we came across this picture.

It was a SEAL in Vietnam with a

weird looking gun that I had never seen,

with, like a olive drab bandana on,

and I'm like, "Who is this guy?"

So we started role

playing to be SEALs.

I got more serious about it after

I graduated from high school.

So I joined, it was a program that

guaranteed you could go to SEAL training.

They don't guarantee you're

gonna make it. That's the hard part.

And so I went. That was the start

of my foray into Special Operations.

Sit up straight,

and look at me right now!

- Aye aye, sir!

- Our mission is to train each one of you

to become a United

States Marine.

I'm third generation.

So my grandfather's a Purple Heart,

my father is a Vietnam

Marine veteran.

My grandfather was an Army veteran,

and so

there was probably no hard work

to assume what I was

going to do after high school.

Looking back now,

I would question whether

or not I would have enlisted.

But at the time, I loved it. I

was the quintessential Marine.

I looked the

part. I felt the part.

It was one thing that I did well

and I was proud of that. I moved

to the top 10% of enlisted Marines.

I was assigned

to SEAL Team Five.

My first platoon was Charlie

Platoon. I was a decent shot,

and I ended up

becoming a sniper.

More than anything,

my thinking when I entered the SEALs,

it was these phrases like

"To liberate the oppressed,"

and I thought you know, "There's

a good fight to be fought out there."

And at that stage,

why not violence? I mean,

that gets the job done, pretty tidily,

as far as destroying the enemy.

I loved my time there. I did.

I make no apologies about that.

I hate war,

and I make no apologies about that,

either.

I absolutely hate it.

Dr. King's said war is a poor

chisel to carve out peace.

It's brutal,

and I know there's a lot of argument

about Just War Theory, and

whole idea that people will

give life to save life. I got it,

but life departs.

Not everyone comes back home,

and everyone that does come home,

doesn't come back the same way they left.

Something leaves a human,

I believe, when they have to take life,

even if it is in their mind to

save their own or justified.

There's a horror

that stays with folks.

There's a myth,

a mythology of what war is,

that is almost

impossible to fight against.

And that is perpetrated by Hollywood,

and television

and politicians... It's

an attractive myth,

and laying out the reality

of war is very unpalatable

for a people because it forces them,

ultimately, to question who they are.

I mean, we look towards a source of

meaning because we have so little meaning.

And a consumer society where atomized,

isolated individuals who are

seeking an elusive and unachievable

happiness through consumption

and hedonism and status.

And... war fills that void.

War gives you a noble cause,

war obliterates or seems to obliterate

because it's a false obliteration.

The alienation of normal life.

The celebration of war

is also a celebration of us.

So celebration of our virtues,

of our prowess,

of our goodness, accompanying of course,

with dehumanization,

and racist attacks against

whoever it is we're fighting.

It is addictive. I mean, soldiers or

Marines will call it a combat high.

It's very real. You keep

coming back for that elusive high,

which becomes harder and harder to get,

the longer you're in war.

Partly because your circle of

fear shrinks to such an extent that

unless literally people are

being shot right next to you,

I don't want to

say you're blase,

but you learn to cope

in extreme environments.

The U. S. economy

is being drained by

wars in the Middle East.

It's why those of us who

come back and speak

the truth about war are

usually not very effective

in reaching the young kids

who are the fodder of war.

Militarism and war promises

what they so desperately want.

Many will hear the calling.

One day,

your stocking shelves at Walmart,

and a few weeks later,

you're at Parris Island,

part of the greatest fighting

force on the face of the Earth.

- And it's all a lie. - Ronnie!

- Lies! - Stop it!

Go to bed, you sleep it off.

What did they do to you in that

war? What happened to you?

I think many people, including veterans

who come back, face an existential crisis

in that they realize that everything

they've been told by their church,

by their schools,

by their political leaders is a lie.

It's why so many... It's not

just that they cope with trauma,

it is that they cope with that existential

crisis of seeing behind the mask.

It was August, 1990.

I had a big screen TV on, we were

drinking beer, and playing pool, and

there was a big aircraft carrier battle

group moving into the Persian Gulf.

We were like, " What's up with

this?" And then it started to scroll,

that Saddam Hussein's

forces had invaded Kuwait,

and I could see right away,

"Oh, here we go."

Just two hours ago,

Allied Air Forces began an attack

on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait.

I was very excited. I mean,

America is getting ready to go to war,

and I had the

radio on in my study

and I was, you know,

paying attention all day long.

And I couldn't wait

to get home because,

though the Internet really isn't up and

running yet, we now have cable news.

And so I rushed home,

ordered pizza,

had a couple of friends over,

learned that America's Pastor

had prayed with America's President,

and assured him that all of thiswas

in keeping with God's divine purposes.

And I watched a war on TV.

I was entertained, America won.

A lot of people were killed,

hundreds of thousands,

but like...

Like the video games,

and like the Westerns, we didn't see that.

So that wasn't real.

We were over there for

seven months from start to finish.

We did a lot of recons,

which is just going out to look

kind of spying on the enemy locations,

and stuff like that.

But there was one particular

case where we located a group of

Iraqis on the beach.

There is an air strike coming in,

and we were told to get

at least 3/4 of a mile offshore

because it's gonna be big.

And I thought about the guys,

the Iraqi soldiers,

they don't even

know what's coming.

And I had knowledge

that they're...

I was hoping we were far

enough away from the beach.

When it hit, it really did a job on

my head, 'cause I was thinking,

"These human beings are doing just

what they think they're supposed to do.

They've been raised in Iraq,

they're serving under a knucklehead

that's put 'em in this position,

and they're trying to bethe

best soldiers they could be.

And they're about

to be annihilated,

just gone." And

it just crushed me.

It was like,"Man,

I could be in their shoes.

I could have tried to be

the best Iraqi I could ever be

and not had a choice and

be bombed to smithereens."

I know that may sound simplistic'cause,

"Yeah, well, what do you think war is about?"

But just taking that step

back and just trying to

think about what was about to

happen to these other human beings,

created in the image of God.

And it was... I don't like

to think about it a whole lot,

still, to this day,

but it was a turning point for me.

I didn't think about that again.

That was just one

night of my life,

and I didn't think about it

from between 1991,

and I think it was 2004.

I was praying one day,

I'm sitting,

acknowledging the presence of Christ,

sitting quietly and

without any anticipation,

without any really

logical sequence,

that episode from that night,

it was replayed as an

incriminating surveillance video.

I saw myself laughing and

jokingand eating pizza with my friends,

watching a war as if it were

nothing but entertainment.

And now, I'm referring to a mystical

experience that I can only say

how I experienced it.

So I bear witness to it and people

can believe it or not believe it.

But I sensed Jesus say to me,

"That was your worst sin,"

and I wept bitterly.

I mean, I do think of Peter denying Christ,

and it says

he went out and wept bitterly.

It was like that for me,

I wept bitterly.

And I repented. Not

just said I was sorry,

but repenser, rethink.

That, and another incident

in reading some things in Dostoyevsky

caused me to almost overnight

rethink everything.

It was a conversion.

We live in a violent world.

A lot of people think that we should

confront violence by using more violence.

If you were to ask me,

like, 10 years ago,

or tell me 10 years ago that you're

gonna write a book on non-violence,

I would have thought you

were absolutely insane.

I mean,

my background was heavily militaristic,

and I don't really know exactly

where it came from. Just kind of the air

I breathed as a Christian,

as an American. I mean,

I heard about a Christian at

some university I was at, and

you know, somebody said,

"Oh, yeah, he's also a pacifist."

And I just thought that's impossible.

That's like an atheistic Christian.

It's like you can't be one or the other.

These are two incompatible categories.

Christians destroy

their enemies.

I've always thought, if more good

people had concealed carry permits,

then we could end those Muslims

before they walk in and kill us.

Fast forward several years, and now

I'm teaching at a Christian university,

and teaching a class on ethics,

and we would work through various

ethical dilemmas,

and violence and warfare

was one of those topics thatwe wrestled with

and I remember, as a professor, thinking,

"I really want to

challenge my students.

I'm wanna help them

to think about both sides,

not just confirm their

presuppositions."

But I remember as I did that

and went back to Scripture,

and said,

"What are the best scriptural arguments for

non-violence or arguments

against using violence?"

And I remember thinking,

"Oh my gosh,

where did these

verses come from?"

I've been studying the

Bible for a while now, and

I'm reading passages trying to

read them through a fresh lens.

Like love your enemies

and turn the other cheek,

and the ones that are

fairly well known. But I'm...

I'm asking the question, "What if

Jesus actually meant what he said?"

And I don't want to come at these

questions with these presuppositions like,

"Of course, I'm not gonna let the guy

break into my house, and rape my wife

and kill my kids." Those are good

questions to ask, but those aren't...

We need to first go to the text and say,

"What does the text say?"

and then go to those questions.

And when I did that,

I became convinced that

the Bible does not want Christians,

followers of Jesus,

to use violence to address evil.

The biggest problem that

humans face is our own violence,

that we tend to

risk self-destruction.

A lot of that is built

into the narratives of

the ancient myths,

which are a way of remembering

how the first solution to this

problem of violence occurred.

The myth of redemptive violence

is a term to refer to the idea that

we can bring order out of

chaos through lethal force.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is, to

this day, the oldest written down document

that we are aware of.

There are some cave

paintings that are older,

but in terms of a written narrative,

the Enuma Elish is the oldest one.

It's the creation myth of the

ancient Babylonian people,

who are kind of the

contemporary Iraqi people.

And in this story, the world is

created when two gods get bored,

so they have children and they hang out

as a kind of a cosmic family for a while.

But the parent gods get irritated by

the noise that the children are making.

And because they're gods,

they don't bring in a family therapist.

What they do is,

they decide to kill the children.

The children overhear

this plot to kill them,

and they immediately

rise up and kill the father.

They can't overpower the mother. So

they regroup and have a conversation.

One of the kid gods says,

"I'll kill Mother on the condition that you

make me supreme ruler of the universe."

What he does is,

he approaches her in space,

he kisses her on the lips.

He blows a poisonous gas

into her mouth, it expands her belly.

And then he stands at a distance,

with a bow and arrow,

and he fires the arrow,

and her stomach... This is kind of

gruesome. Her stomach then explodes.

And from her entrails,

he creates heaven and earth.

Human beings are formed out of the

blood and guts of a murdered mother god.

There's lots of

creation myths like this,

that have human beings

coming as a result of violence.

So, something beautiful, humans,

come out of something horrifying, murder.

The Judeo-Christian creation myth is the first

creation myth that's totally non-violent.

God says "Let us make

human beings in our own image."

And then they appear.

Nobody dies. No blood is shed.

Nothing like that is

required for creation. God...

It just emerges out of God.

Of course, things go wrong

when the serpent enters,

and shifting Adam and Eve's focus

from being aligned

with God's desires,

to doubt.

Can they trust that God has

their best interests at heart?

So it's this rivalry with God,

rather than having this

wonderful relationship

where God can be God,

we could be human.

We come into rivalry,

and that's where

paradise gets broken.

After God had thrown

Adam and Eve out of Eden,

they started living

outside the garden.

There they had two sons,

Cain and Abel.

Cain and Abel are two brothers

who make a living differently.

One is a tiller of the soil,

one's a shepherd,

and you would think that the differences

would keep them from coming into rivalry.

But no, they're actually,

Cain, it arouses his jealousy,

because he feels that God is

more accepting of Abel's offering

than his own. Cain doesn't realize

that that's available to everybody.

God can accept both

their offerings equally,

but Cain is caught up

in this resentment mode.

And so, this evokes the

similar story of two brothers

who are the founding

brothers of ancient Rome,

Romulus and Remus,

and Remus taunts Romulus,

and Romulus kills him.

And how did the divine

forces react to that?

Well, with affirmation and acceptance,

Romulus is awarded

a status of a God,

and he is the founder of ancient Rome

and a beloved of the gods.

But in the Bible,

when a brother kills a brother,

God's displeasure is evident.

God takes the side of

the victim of the murder.

So we're instantly seeing this

reversal of the mythological narratives,

which reward the victor, the heroes,

the aggressors, the dominant ones,

and the biblical narrative, which is

always taking the side of the victim.

And when we say

Jesus fulfilled the law,

or came to fulfill what

God's purpose was,

it was to fulfill

that revelation

of what God's nature is.

Which is completely

without violence.

Roman society

was structured like this.

It was a pyramid. At

the top of the pyramid,

was Caesar.

It was a rigid pyramid.

You didn't move up.

You were born into

one of these places.

You carried out your role

and that's where you would die.

Only People up here

could issue dinner invitations

to lower status people.

In normal times, Zacchaeus would

have to issue a dinner invitation to Jesus.

What Jesus is doing is

upending the pyramid,

and he puts a

table in its place.

That early Christian community

that emerges around Jesus,

really the early community

that has no name at that point,

Jesus literally walks by a lake.

He says, "Follow me,"

and people look and say,

"Oh, okay!"

And so what Jesus invited

the earliest disciples to

was being part of a community.

So belonging

was the first piece.

So, Jesus said come and belong.

Sit at this table.

That's the other really strong piece of

imagery throughout the New Testament,

is that of table fellowship.

Jesus really doesn't call

people into a belief system.

He calls them to a

meal. It's no coincidence

that the last thing that Jesus

does with his community

that has gathered around him

is celebrate a meal together.

Jesus does not come back

from the dead and go to Calvary

and point to a hill with a cross on it,

and say,

"Hey, if you're going to bea Christian

person, believe thatl died on that cross.

Believe that that cross,

that blood,

covered up your sins."

Jesus didn't do that.

Jesus appears in

the same exact room.

The first ever post resurrectionappearance

to the entire group of disciples

is where Jesus goes back to the

room where they held the Last Supper.

So, the... the story

that Jesus is constantly

pointing toward

is creating a table,

inviting people to sit together,

to go past their

places of comfort,

their tribal identities and say,

be part of this tribe,

be part of God's tribe.

And God's tribe is a tribe

that gathers round the table.

The kingdom of God,

or the kingdom of the heavens,

or the kingdom of

Heaven in Christ's teaching

is clearly entirely unlike

the kingdom of Caesar.

The early Christians

created a new society.

It was the embodiment of the ideal

for how persons should live together

under the rule of the one true God,

the God most high,

and in creating such a society,

they were condemning the other model

of empire as false and damnable,

violent, cruel, diabolical,

whatever you like.

It is very much a

movement against

the sacred basis, the political basis,

the social basis of empire.

For the first

three centuries of the church,

the church was on

the margins of society.

They're a small,

often persecuted group,

viewed with suspicion

by the powers,

when they got big enough to

even be on the radar screen.

There wasn't much of a temptation

to buy into the Roman Empire.

They were very aware

that to call Jesus Lord

means that you don't

confess Caesar is Lord.

If you look at the

writings of Tertullian and Origen,

and some of these thinkers,

the early church, when Jesus said,

"Love your enemies,"

we typically say, "Yeah, but..."

And they said, "Okay."

I think they took a, what would seem

to be a really straightforward reading of

Scripture and they took passages seriously,

and they talked about

the power of suffering.

And I think a

big socio-political

point to understand is that

Christians were operating

from the perspective

of a persecuted minority.

They were suffering, they weren't

intertwined with the government.

But I think if you look at the

New Testament, that's kind of

how New Testament

ethics is designed operate.

The New Testament,

it's almost like it's not meant

to empower Christians in

places of power and authority

and governmental positions.

It's not designed that way.

The great blessing of our

birthright is that in this troubled world,

there is still a bright spot

where borders never change,

where peace reigns supreme.

The United States of

America has become...

They would not have been

patriots if there were such a thing

as the nation

state in their day.

They would not have recognized

human rule is anything other than

an unfortunate provisional reality

of a fallen world and would

not have allied themselves

with any set of national

or racial interests.

They were people set apart in every level,

I don't just mean spiritual and moral,

but economic and social as well.

And in the Empire

in the time of Christ,

the structure of power was not

considered merely a worldly reality.

It was part of a sacred order that reached

all the way up to the realm of the divine,

and then all the way down

to the chthonian realm.

And Christianity made the claim

that all of these orders of power

had been overthrown by

Christ to be placed under him,

that he might hand over the whole

cosmos to God, and God be all in all.

This is a very subversive

claim that under this new reign,

all these powers on high,

these gods of the nations have been cast down

from their high eminence and made subject

to this peasant,

whose kingdom's rule was radical charity.

The church grew mainly by its witness,

by how people lived

and by how they were

willing to sacrifice. I mean,

when plagues would hit cities,

and everyone would run for the hills,

including the doctors,

and leave the sick behind,

the Christians would run into

the city to care for those sick.

And often would get

the disease and die.

But they're willing to do

that. And people saw that,

and that's how it spread, through

love. It spread through their witness.

There were boundaries

at that table Jesus established,

and the boundary is

always around violence.

If you are willing to use

your invitation to that table

to hurt, maim, destroy,

dehumanize others

who are at that meal,

you can't come.

And,

you have to lay down whatever it is

that is destructive

before you join the meal.

So you can't bring a

sword into that room,

and the early Christianswere

perfectly clear about that.

It was about turning

swords into plowshares.

First of all, the early church was an

absolute diverse hodgepodge of views.

I mean, they were wrangling

about what books belong in the Bible,

they were arguing about Christ's

deity. They were arguing about

whether the Old

Testament was valid.

The early church

couldn't agree on anything.

When it came to the question

of should Christians ever kill,

as far as we can tell from the literature,

the answer was unanimous.

Of course not.

What about good killing? What

about killing for the military?

Can you join Romans' military? The

answer to all this was absolutely not.

They wouldn't even baptize certain people,

if they were...

If they had blood on their hands

from serving the Christian military.

Or debate about whether they should

even be allowed after repentance.

This was such a no brainer

for the early Christians.

The problem was,

of course, is the Roman army,

they were the ones whokilled Jesus. The

Roman army waspersecuting the early church.

The Roman army was the place

where you gave due to Caesar,

who was the rival to the idea

that Jesus was Lord and Savior.

So Christians thought the

Roman army was horrible.

But then, in the fourth century,

Constantine allegedly gets this vision

where he's gonna fight under

the banner of Jesus Christ.

First time Jesus is

associated with war,

and Constantine's a pagan,

and pagans assume that

if you win a battle, that's because

you're serving the right god.

Battles are about whose

god is stronger and bigger.

And so he becomes a "Christian"

but he's really serving a

pagan version of Christ,

because he's still seeing this is a power

source that's gonna get his way in this world.

So then he invites the church to

sit at the table of political power,

and unfortunately,

the church accepts that offer.

If they pick up the power of the sword, that

means youput down the power of the cross.

This creates a problem because now,

what is Jesus? Who is Jesus?

Is he Lord? Because the original

conflict was Caesar is Lord.

No, Christ is Lord.

But now that we have

a Christian emperor

and we don't wanna

have that conflict,

what happens? Well,

Christ gets demoted

to the secretary of after

affairs. Afterlife affairs. Okay,

so now the job of Jesus is to

get us into heaven when we die,

and apparently he has delegated

ruling the world to Caesar.

So then, Christians become very interested

in being able to control Caesar's sword

because it's such a pragmatic

way to shape the world.

And this is the

project of Christendom.

If you are a

persecuted minority group,

you don't necessarily want to

think about Jesus as a humble guy

who's just invited a bunch

of friends over for dinner.

And I think what we have

there is early Christianity

setting up a sort of

an aspirational Jesus,

that they wanted their

Jesus to be like Caesar.

A good Caesar,

but nevertheless Caesar.

Because it was the image they had at hand,

for power.

It was the image they

had it at hand for safety.

It was the image they

had at hand for provision.

What good was a Jewish

peasant going to do them

in a world where

they were persecuted?

Looking back,

it would be unreasonable to imagine

that anyone would have had the foresight

or even the moral resources to resist this.

Or be able to think back

over the course of generations,

especially in a culture in whicheven

access to the texts is going to be limited.

It's just what you hear in church. Most

people aren't even going to be literate.

So what happened? Well,

imagine that you're a Christian presbyter

in Milan in the early fourth century,

and you get news

that the new Augustus has just

won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

Seems to be some

kind of Christian.

Your first reaction isn't going to be,

"We've got to put an end to this."

I mean, historically speaking,

you're going to see

this as a work of God.

Christians throughout

church history just do that.

You take what is at hand,

and then Jesus emerges

out of that in in new ways.

And that was...

That shift from the family tableto

the imperial banqueting table

was clearly one of the most

dramatic shifts in early Christianity,

and it was also the one that set

up the most trouble in the longer run.

And now you have this

blending of church and state,

and the Roman state still

has barbarians out there.

They still have people to the east,

to the west,

that are trying to destroy them,

and so they have to ward them off by

using physical force. And so,

now you have Christian thinkers operating

from the assumption that the church

is the state, the state is the church,

and now they have to explore, "Well,

we've got to defend the nation.

We gotta defend

Rome through violence.

Which is kinda what you do as politician,

as a government.

So,

how can we Christianize this?"

Christianity

was an illegal religion.

It's hard for us to grasp, but it was an

underground movement of non-violence,

and overnight we all

joined the Roman military.

And in effect,

what Constantine did was,

he said,

"Let's throw out the Sermon on the Mount,

and return to the pagan Cicero

to begin to come up with

some kind of justification

for complicity with empire.

You have Augustine, and Ambrose

and other Christian thinkers of that time

operating from these assumptions of

church and state wedded together as one,

and they came up with... Well,

they kind of refined what had been

what we now refer

to as Just War Theory

that maybe there's

unjust ways of waging war,

but maybe there's just,

righteous ways of waging war.

By the eighth and ninth century,

you had really cutting edge Christian

things called monasteries. They had armies.

And then you got the Middle Ages

and poor St. Francis and St. Clare,

the church leaders are

leading the Crusades.

Not just staying home. They're

actually out there with the sword.

The person who will

spell out a new theology

that will in some ways also

empower the new policy is Augustine.

He is a person who writes the

first justification for coercing people,

for making them change

their beliefs by force.

And that basically

became the dominant view

for the next 1500 years.

I say dominant view, but

you still have throughout church history,

you always have pockets of resistance.

People that says, man, I don't think

this wedding of church and state is

helpful for a Christian

ethic that seems to be

separated from the politics

and powers of the day.

You could be Manichaean about this

and simply say, "Well, how horrible."

On the other hand,

there was always a tension between

the Gospel and the Empire

that never disappeared.

The moral language of Christianity,

more and more,

even if at times it proved impotent,

really, to change things on a large scale,

more and more it saturated,

it permeated the culture.

It became the moral

grammar that we today

spontaneously recognize

as having a claim upon us.

So,

we can lament what happened to Christianity

as a result of its

alliance with empire.

But in doing that,

we also shouldn't forget

that Christianity also

had a corrosive effect

upon some of the cruelest

aspects of ancient society.

And in the centuries

and generations,

by the quiet persistence of this

moral language, of this conscience

that Christianity bred into the language,

at least

of the Western world,

did bear fruit.

The Jewish religious system

had a very complex sacrificial system.

Absolutely.

So how do we make sense of that?

If God is revealing himself as a

god that doesn't need sacrifices,

why do we see this elaborate

sacrificial system in the Old Testament?

God is leading the people

out of the sacrificial world

through a series

of substitutions.

The call to Abraham,

the call to Abram

is a call to leave

behind his gods,

to worship a new

God in a new way.

Now, humans learn slowly,

over time.

So, you have to remember

that to change your culture

and to change your way

of thinking and doing things,

you're changing your

habits and it's slow.

So the Bible is this record of

this slow awakening and emerging,

out of the sacrificial world.

So first Abraham is called out.

God gives Abraham a lesson

in what it's like to sacrifice to him.

The story I heard about

that when I was growing up,

and I think the story that most people who

have some affinity with that story think,

is the one that says God did say,

"Abraham, go kill your son

because I need you to prove to me that

you love me more than you love your son."

And that God needed

Abraham to get to the point

of literally having the knife

above little Isaac's face,

and I think it's important to go

into detail about this, because this is

absolutely horrifying.

And then, God is convinced.

Oh, actually, Abraham does love

me more than Abraham loves Isaac.

So, here's a magic sheep.

Can I say "bullshit"

in your film?

Can I say psychopathy?

Can I say any God that required

a human to threaten

to murder their child

in order to prove

that their love

for God was greater

than their love for a child,

that God's a psychopath.

I don't think that's

what that story means.

Abraham just assumes

that this new God who's speaking

to him is gonna want a child sacrifice.

That's what a good religious

person did in those days.

You file your papers with the IRS

when you're starting a business today.

You can't start a business

without filing your papers.

Well, the way you filed your papers at that

time was people believed you gotta kill

a human,

and often it's a firstborn child.

So,

if Abraham's already living in this,

he's got this sense that I'm

supposed to start a religion,

it makes complete sense

to him that what he has to do

is kill his firstborn child.

It's just what you did.

It's terrible, but it's also the only

way you can get through that door.

And so, Abraham's taking Isaac

to sacrifice him,

but what does God do?

Gives him a substitute.

A ram is a ritual substitution

for a human victim.

An animal can be sacrificed,

a grain offering, all these other things,

but it has to be

ritually constructed

so it's just as effective

for the community.

And I think what the story

means is that Abraham is up on the mountain

ready to do this because he

thinks that's what God wants.

And God wants to

let him get that far,

in order to prove to him,

"This is horror.

You don't need to do

this to start a religion."

And Abraham's brain,

and his mind,

and the mind of the people

who were around his time

weren't yet ready to

have no scapegoat.

And that's why there's a sheep.

I don't think we need

a scapegoat at all.

Destruction is not a creative

act. It would have been fine

for Abraham to just say, "We're going to

start a religion and the way we're gonna do it

is by getting some friends together

and figuring out what it means to love,"

but in the evolution

of the human mind,

and a culture that hadn't happened,

yeah.

So,

what we have is someone like Abram then,

is in a culture

of ritual sacrifice

and what you're saying, maybe it's a

way of looking at the ram that's supplied.

It's not God saying, "Well,

I need something. Here's a ram."

It's more like saying to Abram,

"You feel the need to sacrifice something,

- here's a ram." - Exactly.

- "But I'm not taking your child, because that's not who I am."

- Right?

You know,

Hosea says it really succinctly.

"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

The whole prophetic

tradition is about that.

You know your sacrifices

are a stench in my nostrils.

I can't stand the smell of

it. Why are you doing it?

God is saying, "Stop thinking

that I demand violence from you."

I see the Old

Testament as the inspired telling

of Israel's story as

they are on the journey

of discovering the living God.

But along the way,

assumptions were made,

and you have to stay on the

story until you get to Jesus.

What you certainly cannot

do with the Old Testament

is use certain texts

to argue with Jesus,

as I had a church member do.

I was preaching through

the Sermon on the Mount.

I'm in Matthew 5, talking about

what Jesus says about violence

and a well-educated church

member said to me afterwards,

"Yeah, but the Bible says,

an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth."

Despite the fact that Jesus

actually even brings that up

in the Sermon on the Mount.

So you can't use Joshua

to save you from Jesus.

I think that's how a

lot of Christians think, it's like,

"Yeah,

Jesus is the best revelation of God,

but all these other portraits

we've got are just as accurate.

If that's your approach,

you smush it all together and

you have this kind of montage of

beautiful and ugly,

and I think a lot of folks have this

understanding of God. In fact,

throughout church history,

you can see various theologians like Luther

who just have a schizophrenic

understanding of God.

That's why Luther, he loved Jesus,

but he was terrified by God the father.

The problem isn't to just try

to put the best possible spin

on the Old Testament

violent portraits of God.

The real issue is that

Jesus himself teaches us

that all of this is

supposed to point to him.

So the challenge is,

how do you read an account of God saying,

"Show no mercy. Go slaughterevery man,

woman, child, infant,

and even the animals, but spare the trees,"

it says in Deuteronomy.

How does it point tothe self-sacrificial

love of Godthat's revealed on the cross?

We're quite used to

fundamentalists who believe that

the Bible should be read as

a literal documentary account

and that it's internally

free of any contradiction

and so on and so forth.

It's very strange when you compare

that to the practices of the early church.

For instance, Gregory of Nyssa, when he reads

these tales, they have a spiritual value

to the degree that they're

allegorized as stories of slaying the sins

that take rise in

the city of the soul.

But taken as literal

historical narratives,

he has no use for them,

and he says that if you...

If you think that that's the kind of

truth you're going to find in Scripture,

if you read it without, what he calls

without thephilosophical method of reading,

which is what... Then

you're just reading silly myths.

God never commanded

the slaying of peoples,

the extermination of cities,

the killing of children.

Those were the interests of

these warrior peoples of old,

and Yahweh or El or

Elyon or Elohim was invoked

as the author of these crimes,

because that's what people do.

It's what it's what

nations and empires do.

...you to the Apostle Paul and his

clear and wise command in Romans 13

to obey the laws

of the government

because God has ordainedthe

government for his purposes.

The turning point for me came when I asked

a question that I'd never asked before,

and I've never heard

anyone ask before,

but the minute I asked it, it seemed

like most obvious question in the world.

And the question is this.

How does this first century

Jewish crucified criminal

become the definitive

revelation of God?

And the answer is that it's not

anything we see on the surface

of the crucifixion that

reveals what God is like.

In fact, on the surface,

the cross is hideous, it's grotesque

because it reveals

the ugliness of our sin.

The cross becomes the revelation

of God for us, when we, by faith,

look through the surface

of the cross and we see that

it was the almighty,

all holy God who stepped into this.

That God out of love was

willing to become this for us.

So if this is the same God

who breathes Scripture,

it seems to me to make sense to

ask the question, where else might God

be revealing his beauty

by becoming our ugliness?

I call these violent portraits

of God literary crucifixes,

because we see there on a literary level,

the same thing we see in a historical way

when we look at the

historical crucifixion.

The humble God,

stooping to meet his people bear their sin,

and thereby taking on an appearance

that reflects the ugliness of sin.

I think there's a poetic resonance

between the death of Jesus

and the attempted

murder of Isaac.

The way a lot of people conceive

of this is that God sent his son

and had him killed in

order to satisfy his wrath.

Well, if you believe in

the kind of God that causes

parents to kill their

children to prove their love,

well,

that would be consistent with that God's

cosmology,

or the way God thinks about things.

But if Jesus is a person who

somehow comes to understand

that there is no

higher rule than love,

there's no higher law than love,

and that love is extending

yourself for the benefit of another.

And if he teaches

that in a context

where the ruling authorities think devoting

yourself to Rome is the way life works,

and where there are

revolutionaries who think

devoting yourself to the violent

overthrow of Rome is how life works,

well, I would have been surprised

if they hadn't executed him.

The chief priests and the rulers are

concerned about the political situation.

They're trying to keep the peace.

That's their job, peace and security.

And Jesus is instigating crowds,

he's making them think that they

have more power than they should.

He's just raised

Lazarus from the dead.

He's creating all kinds of

trouble for the authorities,

so they're trying to decide what to do

with him, and when they come up with

the decision that he has to die,

the high priest says,

"You know nothing at all.

You do not understand

that it is better for you

to have one man

die for the people

than to have the

whole nation perish."

Succinct statement of

the sacrificial formula.

But the early Christians understood

what Jesus was doing was

inverting the

meaning of sacrifice.

So, on the altar we

sacrifice unwilling victims.

Jesus was a willing victim.

In other words,

it was a self-sacrifice,

instead of sacrificing others,

now the ethic is

to endure suffering,

rather than inflict it.

One of the the

staples of pagan religion

going back to the

beginnings of human history

is the conviction that we

need to appease the gods.

And you appease the

gods by making sacrifices.

And pagan religions always had

this kind of quid pro quo deal where

we make sacrifices,

and we feed the gods, and please them,

so that when we need to call on them,

they'll help us win our battles

and things of that sort.

And I think it was a tragedy

when that understanding of God

became the interpretive grid through

which you understand the cross.

So,

God has to take out his wrath on his son

in order to love us.

What kind of love is that?

It's almost like

God's a rage-aholic.

"I'm so mad at these humans.

Someone's gotta pay,

I don't care who it is,

but someone's gonna pay.

It could either be humans

who are gonna pay eternally,

or Jesus, my son,

I'll kill you instead."

And Jesus said,

"Okay, I'll do it."

And if that's the case,

there's no forgiveness.

Look, if you owe me $100

and your son pays it instead,

I never really forgive the debt,

I just collected from somebody else.

So the question becomes,

does God really forgive?

'Cause if he's paid in full by Jesus,

well then, he didn't forgive anything.

He just transferred the guilt. However

that's supposed to work, I don't know.

You know, when you go to a fairground

attraction and you buy the tokens

because they don't take cash and

you hand your token in at the booth,

and then you can go

on the roller coaster.

The notion that God

needed Jesus to be executed

so that the token could be bought,

that I could then give to the carny

who would allow me

on the roller coaster.

Like, that has...

The reason people believe that

is because somebody

told them that.

Not because it makes sense.

It fundamentally contradicts

the notion of a loving God,

if love is to extend yourself

for the benefit of another.

It also contradicts even

the narratives and Scripture.

So you could be someone

who's a biblical fundamentalist,

someone who believes that

every story in it is literally true.

Well, Jesus forgives loads of

people before he gets crucified.

He doesn't have to be

crucified before the...

And he tells the disciples,

"Go out and preach the forgiveness of sin."

The notion that the

cross represents an offering

to the father to appease his wrath is

a late and rather disgusting distortion

of the language of

the New Testament.

The very word that's translated "ransom,"

lytron orante lytron,

doesn't refer to a

price paid to the father.

It's a term used for

the manumission fee that one paid

in order to free slaves from bondage.

That's the price paid to death,

to hell,

hell in the sense of Hades,

the realm of the dead,

to set the captives free. It's not

appeasing the wrath of God against sin.

Nor is the cross an act of God.

Paul is quite clear in the New

Testament that this is a human act.

The cross is where human violence

is revealed to be unspeakably evil.

We see that we are

capable of murdering God.

So the cross is not where

Jesus saves us from God.

The cross is where Jesus

reveals God as savior.

The cross is not what God inflicts

upon Jesus in order to forgive.

The cross is what God in

Christ endures as he forgives.

If we see that it is God that

requires the violence of the cross,

then we exonerate the

principalities and powers

that the cross is

intended to shame.

No, I see the violence of

the cross as entirely human,

the love and forgiveness seen

at the cross as entirely divine.

And there is an

allusion here to Genesis,

to the serpent in

the garden of Eden,

who is now the

father of the lie.

And what is the lie? Well,

the lie is that God is not a giving person.

God is more interested in

prohibition then in freedom.

God is withholding

good from you.

God might even be selfish, as the

Satan says in his conversation with Job.

So,

now Jesus is going to come into this world

to settle accounts

with the father of the lie.

The death of Jesus, then,

it belongs in the category of revelation

that sets the record straight.

What makes it a triumph

of God is that Christ remains

faithful to the father,

to the very end.

His triumph lies in his faithfulness,

not in the butchery of illegal execution.

When we pin that on God,

that God required a sacrifice,

it's really the way we reconcile

ourselves to one another.

We often sacrifice others in order

to build community, and so forth.

I think what Jesus was

doing was taking the place

of our victims in these

scapegoating scenarios

in which communities

get reconciled.

And not only is he going willingly,

but he's innocent from the beginning.

And he's divine

from the beginning.

So Jesus is trying to switch that

whole way of thinking about our violence,

and he will now create unity,

not around creating victims,

but around awareness of a victim

who will come

back and forgive us.

This is what the

communion ritual is.

The communion sacrament.

We gather around an altar,

but it's not to

create a new victim.

It's to remember that we are all

victimizers who have been forgiven.

To me,

that's the best definition of a Christian,

is a repentant victimizer,

or recovering scapegoater,

or however you want. We're all in recovery.

And we're all

susceptible to relapse.

Now to the latest

on Harvey Weinstein.

The New York Timesreporting allegations by

numerous women who say the Hollywood mogul

sexually harassed them.

His alleged victims...

When I'm faced with somebody

who is obviously doing things,

who is using their power to hurt,

and especially for me as a woman,

Harvey Weinstein is

somebody that I want to vilify,

and I'm actually really given

permission by the world to vilify.

I think that,

for me is always the first red flag

as a disciple of Jesus.

If everybody else is so down

with calling someone names

and stripping them of the dignity

that they have just

because they're human,

then as a follower of Jesus,

who is who desires to live into

the alternative society

of the Kingdom of God,

who has a desire to seek the shalom of God,

which looks so different than the world.

Than I have to step back and say,

"I can't participate with that."

People don't get to a place

where they make hurtful decisions,

where they hurt other people,

where they are actively

creating brokenness and

pain in other people's lives,

they don't get to that place

without a back story of pain

about something happening to

them that maybe stripped them

of their sense of dignity and worth,

which then makes them

want to strip others of that.

And so, one of the things that

I do to remind myself of that,

to kind of condition my

heart for that empathy,

as I go back and look at

pictures of them as kids.

And then I remember,

something had to happen.

I tell myself, something had to happen

between this innocence and this guilt.

Hurting

people hurt other people.

There's something that that person

is suffering from to cause them to

want to hurt and

oppress someone else.

That doesn't make it right.

But there's something

in that person where

it's important for me to at

least extend some compassion,

so that I can hear what it

is and why it is that they are

acting in certain ways.

And it's not my job to

judge them in their guilty.

As a peacemaker,

my job is to speak beauty and speak truth,

and say,

"This thing that this person did was bad,

but people are not the

things that they did."

And I think that is the

calling of a peacemaker.

We're always looking for ways to

remind people that there is good in you

and give the Holy Spirit a chance

to woo them back to their wholeness.

We extend compassion,

but we also stand firm against the

injustice and lack of humanity against

certain populations within our country.

I want you to sit down and

watch this because it is shocking.

He's licensed,

he's licensed to carry.

He was trying to get out his ID,

his wallet out...

I have been pulled over,

and particularly if it has been a long day,

I try to center myself first, because you

already know they're coming to the car with

hand on weapon,

a flashlight in your face,

and you try to keep your

hands where they're visible,

and all these kind things

that goes through your mind,

almost unconsciously

for certain populations.

You do it because it's

been ingrained to do,

and you're trying to come home.

But you know, when they ask me,

"Do you have a weapon in the car?"

I started laughing.

I said, "No, I actually leaving my church.

I'm a pastor right around the corner.

It's not my policy to

carry weapons to church."

And this is my

uniform of the day.

I'm a third generation

combat veteran,

so I've always been in a uniform,

a jacket and a tie.

This is me. I'll get

stopped with this.

And the first thing I'm asked, "Do you

have a weapon in the car? Or drugs?"

And I'm leaving my congregation.

How do you

feel in those moments?

How do you deal

with that in your head?

It's exhausting.

And so when people say,

"If they just pulled up their pants,

or got a different haircut,

if they didn't look

like they fit the bill,

then maybe they

wouldn't get pulled over."

It's exhausting. It's depleting.

It's infuriating,

to not to be seen

as fully citizen.

And in this case, fully human.

If we as Christians believe in

Paul's letter, the Pauline epistles,

the talk about warfare

and spiritual warfare is real.

That these things are principalities,

they're strongholds,

and one has to assume the responsibility

of pushing back against those things.

To take the necessary stands

and to be fully human when

they are inhumane themselves.

And I think that's

what Christianity does.

It gives us a source of strengththat

we would not have without it,

because it takes unimaginable strength

to stand up against some of the stuff

that individuals are

facing in our communities

and the legacy of

violence and terror

against blacks and

others in this country.

It takes a spiritual

armament to deal with that

and not project out on others.

To still be a loving individual

without having to be guarded.

That you can still

fight a good fight and

not have to fight everyone.

Even though we're in this world,

we do not make war

the same way this world does.

That is something

we have to hold on to.

What does it even mean to say,

"Taking America back for God"?

Because I honestly

don't have a clue.

Presumably, there was a time

when this was a godly nation,

when we glorified God,

one nation under God.

God was glorified and the

culture was just Christian,

and it was the good old days,

the golden age of America.

And if we could

just pass some laws

then we'll get back to that golden age.

When was that golden age? I'm really...

That's the assumption

that fuels Christendom.

If we just get more

power then we can...

We who are more righteous than others,

and we're smarter than others,

we can impose our will on others

and further the cause of Christ that way.

Fire now. Fire.

But that means, then,

if you're gonna run an empire,

you have to be willing to use a sword,

to keep law and

order on the inside,

and to protect from

enemies on the outside.

And now,

Jesus' teachings about loving your enemies

and blessing those

who persecute you

and praying for those who spitefully

use you, and doing good to your enemies,

all those go out the door because

you have to kill your enemies

if you're gonna have

that kind of power.

I wanna drive a

much more sharper wedge

between our earthly citizenship

and our kingdom citizenship.

I do think that the Kingdom of

Christ and all other earthly kingdoms

are fundamentally incompatible.

Again, that doesn't mean

we revolt or disobey the laws.

We need to be good citizens,

keep our heads down, but never, never...

I don't think mixing

these two is even possible.

I find it helpful not to think of

myself as a citizen of any particular land.

I'm an ambassador,

right? And ambassadors aren't citizen.

I'm here to represent

a different kingdom.

We're called to exercise a

fundamentally different kind of power.

I think it's the

most powerful...

It's the greatest

power in the universe.

It's the power of the cross.

The power of self-sacrificial love.

Changing people by

showing what they're worth,

by what you're willing

to sacrifice for them,

that's the power that Jesus displayed.

That's the power that runs the kingdom.

It's fundamentally anti-thethical

to the power of this world,

where you try to control and

manipulate and kill, if necessary.

The problem

to me when you get into the

logic and the practicality

of non-violence

is that it breaks down very fast,

because as far as I can tell,

the teachings of Jesus in

terms of non-violence are not a

promise of safety in

any sense of the word.

In fact, if you look at the

record of active practitioners

of non-violence in church history,

even in the New Testament,

it often doesn't work in terms

of maintaining human safety.

The apostles died. Jesus himself,

practicing non-violence,

was executed by the state.

Even the great figures of

non-violence in church history,

someone like

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,

died as a result of violence.

When the conversation kind of

moves in the direction of, will this work?

I often immediately go to like,

probably not.

At least not in the grand sense.

The payout of Non-violence is

disrupting the cycle of violence.

Violence begets violence,

and nothing else.

Until someone creatively steps in,

empowered by the spirit of God, to say,

I just won't do it,

and then it stops.

While we're

talking about his death,

and very few Christians have

gotten over their fear of death.

In fact,

we support the culture of death,

and the metaphors of death,

and the means of death.

My main concern is with

the deep-seated, militaristic spirit

that celebrates our military might that

puts our faith in America's military power

in order to ward off all the

refugees and terrorists or whatever.

Like I think it's that deep seated

spirit that's the fundamental problem,

and even now I want to say, "Look,

you can go to the New Testament

or the Old Testament and say that

is not characteristic of God's people."

I think American

Christianity has missed that,

and I think that is really the fundamental

problem that we're dealing with.

We are kind of in the

position of the bad guys

from the perspective

of the New Testament.

You know, we're the ones in kind of,

oppressive power

over other people that

we're hurting in our privilege.

We are that empire, bigger and

better than Rome ever did big and bad.

- They're coming from Syria, they're coming from Iraq.

- President denies this.

- They're coming from Iran.

- President denies this.

No, we're there,

Sean, we see it.

Every Sunday, we're having fear preached

to us, and then we go to watch news

where there's more fear

preached to us. It's all about

them out there,

we're afraid of them.

How can we protect

our good thing?

Evil is externalized.

We represent the good.

As soon as you externalize

evil you become evil yourself.

I think on the whole,

if you're raised American,

you've been raised with a

religion that's deeply anti-Christian.

You've been inoculated

against the Gospel.

We have completely

rejected the Sermon on the Mount,

and the non-violence of Jesus.

Just for the record,

none of this is working.

The God who expresses

himself in the form of a suffering slave

is not the God who shapes the

American religious experience.

The only real religion in America

has always been America.

The shining city on a hill that has

created a new constitutional order,

a new nation, a new people...

And some of that is

quite innocent at first,

but the more that you realize that what

backs up these claims is a gigantic military,

one that spends a great deal of time

striding around the world, spreading

sheer terror of its presence as a kind

of benign influence on historical events.

When you see how easy it is for people

who profess Christianity, to confuse

their loyalty to Christ

with loyalty to America,

what's actually happening is,

the Christian America is really

just the religion of

America in Christian garb.

And not very convincing Christian garb,

too.

It keeps dropping off the shoulders,

and showing its seams,

and unfortunately, America and

Christianity are two antithetical values.

They don't just exist in different

spheres. They're more or less

entirely opposed to one another.

You know, not everybody

is gonna get on board with this message.

- No.

- If we decide to forego violence,

and organize our lives differently,

what happens?

How do we do that?

Well, first of all, Jesus is upfront.

Martyrdom is always on the table.

The seminal call to discipleship is,

"Take up your cross and follow me."

I have to recognize

that my ancestors,

while part of them are

the Christians who so

glibly gave in to

imperial violence,

my deeper ancestors in the

Christian tradition are the saints

of the early church, who

were surrounded constantly by violence,

and were under threat

and said that their

own lives did not matter.

I actually hate

saying that because

I live in a culture where I

want to live a really long time,

and our lives do matter. Our

individual lives do really matter.

No one wants to die.

And sometimes when we look

back at the earliest Christians,

we say, "Oh,

they all had martyr complexes."

Well, no.

They literally had this priority

of non-violence straight.

And that is,

they were never to participate in violence.

And if violence

was done to them,

so be it.

And I have to stand there and

look at that and say, "Whoa!"

I would at the very least hope I

had the capacity to make the same...

The same choice.

I'm not all bleak about it. I'm

not saying we're all gonna...

I actually do believe in the

transforming power of co-suffering love.

I mean,

there is a reason why the

gladiatorial games

finally came to an end.

And that is the power

of co-suffering love,

embodied in Christians

that were willing to die,

rather than to capitulate,

eventually awakened a higher consciousness

in the Roman Empire, and they said,

"Yeah, we're gonna stop doing that."

Non-violence is actually

how the world works.

Anytime you're not acting violently,

you're acting non-violently,

and most of us are not acting

violently most of the time.

And so when the world works,

it's because of that,

and I don't think the

onus is on me to prove it.

I just think,

look outside your window.

I think about

the Civil Rights Movement,

the non-violent direct

actions that took place

and people literally

being spat on

and water hosed down and beat.

But the non-violence that

actually helped to change policy.

They were standing against

injustice in such a powerful way,

extending that compassion. Many

people were hurt, many people died.

But that's literally what helped

to change our society in America,

and it's continuing to

help bring about change.

I do make a distinction between

police function and waging war.

Consider the difference. Waging war,

you go forth and you kill.

Here in St. Joseph, if an Officer

discharges his weapon in the line of duty

there'll be an inquiry

and an investigation.

I understand that in

dysfunctional societies,

the line can be blurred,

or almost entirely erased.

But in healthy societies,

there is a distinction.

I'm not a complete

Christian anarchist.

I, as a kingdom person,

I don't believe I'm called to,

or even allowed to carry

arms or kill for any reason.

But I don't judge

other people for whom

that's what they want to do,

or they feel comfortable with that.

And I think Paul takes

this attitude in Romans 13.

God uses a sword wielding

government to keep law and order,

and to punish wrongdoers

and things of that sort.

It doesn't mean

that God likes that.

But given that this world is going to

have sword-wielding governments,

God is going to be at work to use it to

carry about as much justice as possible.

So, I don't feel guilty about calling on

them to do what they feel called to do.

And that is to stop wrongdoers

by the use of the sword.

So this is going to be five

guns for home defense.

What I don't do, though, is I don't

sit around and plan for these things.

That would never cross my mind.

"I need to own a handgun

for personal protection."

That is...

From a very long distance,

that's premeditated killing.

If you want a nice small rig, this is

something that can just ride next to the bed.

If I've got a person who's gonna

harm me and possibly my wife and kids,

it looks foolish not to kill himif I have

to, to prevent that from happening.

But then again,

we're called to follow

the one who died...

God, he's all powerful, and yet

the way he expresses that

poweris by getting himself crucified.

That looks pretty foolish. The

cross looks foolish to the world.

So, if we look foolish, I think that's an

indication that we're on the right track.

I often tell people that unless your

God is a foolish looking God, you're not...

You're not following the

God that Jesus revealed.

- Good morning, everyone.

- Good morning.

All right! We're

gonna go ahead and get started.

What a special,

special day. This moment of truth

in front of the King

Memorial on this beautiful day.

I didn't get up at 3:30 in the morning, in

Philadelphia, for a monument film, right?

We got out for a movement.

At 16,

I was 10 feet from Dr. King

when he gave his "I

have a dream" speech.

The problem today is that too

much of America is still dreaming.

We must put our bodies onthe line. We

must put out bodiesagainst the machine

to grind it to a halt.

We need to build a movement

and take a public stand.

Martin Luther King said the choice

is no longer violence or non-violence.

It's non-violence,

or non-existence.

That where we are today,

on the brink of non-existence.

But we are gathering here in this culture,

stuck in violence,

saying, "Okay, Martin,

we take up your challenge."

So today, brothers and sisters,

say with me now

- we march...

- We march...

For a non-violent world.

- We repent...

...of the ways

that we have used power...

...of the ways

that we have used power...

- ...to dominate...

- ...for conquest...

- ...to warn...

...for the supremacy...

- ...of this world.

I think we have to

look at ourselves as

not quite done yet.

God is still in the

process of creating us

through the influence

of the Holy Spirit,

and trying to separate us

from this addiction to violence.

Every line on

the map tells a bloody tale

of war that has been fought,

and people that have been killed,

and that's how we

arranged the world.

It's Jesus that gives us the

capacity to imagine something other.

But we're gonna have to decide

whether we want to embrace that or not.

Right now, the question is,

what is the best cultural work we can do?

And finding images of

Jesus that are lifegiving

and allow for flourishing,

and don't segregate and

demean and create more violence.

Any jackass

can tear down a barn,

but it takes a

carpenter to build one.

It takes a lot more effort,

creativity,

energy, love,

all of those things that are hard...

There's things

you can do right now

to be engaged in preventing

and reducing violence.

One of those things has

got to include asking yourself,

"Where am I complicit in perpetuating

injustice against other people."

The kingdom begins in

your life with your first drop of blood.

Where does it pinch you?

Where does it inconvenience you?

What are you willing

to sacrifice for others?

We're supposed to be

able to die for our old self,

which is to die to... That self

that wants our best life now,

that wants power now,

wants to get my way now,

die to that. There's

no life in that.

When we think about it,

when you stand somewhere

knowing that you will be beat, spat on,

possibly arrested. Is

that cowardly or passive?

Jesus, at his very last moment,

chose to heal and not hurt.

Jesus modelled for

us self-giving love,

even in the face of horrible,

terrific torture

and pain and betrayal.

And so, when we're faced

with the violence in the world,

emotionally or physically,

my hope is that I always start with

"Love is my only strategy."

J.E.S.U.S.A. (2020) - full transcript