Originally given on February 25, 2018 and can be found here.

A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy, receives my admission and points the way, writes Jane Kenyon in her poem “At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina.”

Here are gray jackets with holes in them,
red sashes with individual flourishes,
things soft as flesh.
Someone sewed the gold silk cord onto the gray sleeve as if embellishments could keep a man alive.

I have been reading War and Peace,
and so the particulars of combat are on my mind—the shouts and groans of men and boys,
and the horses’ cries as they fall,
astonished at what has happened to them.
Blood on the leaves, blood on grass, on snow;
extravagant beauty of red.
Smoke, dust of disturbed earth; parch and burn.

Who would choose this for himself?
And yet the terrible machinery waited in place.
With psalters in their breast pockets,
and gloves knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,
the men in gray hurled themselves out of the trenches, and rushed against blue.

It was what both sides agreed to do.

When I first preached this, Kate and I were on a war movie kick. Hacksaw Ridge, Dunkirk and more. These movies show shell-shocked troops. Blood and gore. There’s a fog of war, sides aren’t neatly lined up. This is the reality of war. Of trying to survive. It’s visceral and real.

I’ve never seen combat. This isn’t a rare thing in my generation. In older generations, they say 10% of the population saw combat in WWII. That’s a lot of combat veterans. My grandpa was one of them. I don’t remember him ever watching war movies. He would speak of the war, he would tell me about combat, but he would talk about how he was scared and how he trusted his men and how they trusted him. How he tried to do whatever was best to keep them alive and advocate for what he thought would keep them rested and alive.

In the years since WWII, those who have seen active combat have dwindled to about 1% of the population.[1] More of us have seen war through a movie than by living through one.

I think that’s affecting us. Add to the fact that many people my age and younger play war games like Call of Duty and Fortnite, I see that it’s affecting us. I’m watching memes and images online supporting violence crop up. I’m hearing not just more division, but confrontation. I think war images and combat images are coming back in a big way because my generation haven’t experienced the real horrors of war.

Any combat veteran will tell you how they will never wish war on anyone. How they wish that their service would be the last active combat duty in our history. It hasn’t worked out like that, but that’s the hope.

Yet it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Christ crucified is a stumbling block.

Before the cross was jewelry and wall art, it was a weapon. A weapon used by the greatest military might in its day and age to command and conquer entire nations of people. We can miss this. The cross today could be an electric chair. Imagine having that on your wall or hanging from your neck. People would stop in their tracks. I’m uncomfortable with that image.

The cross is uncomfortable. It’s a weapon used against disturbers of the peace, enemies of the state. New Testament Scholar Paula Frederickson says that “Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement: Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar. The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching. Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.”[2]

Ryan Collins on our Cross and the Lynching Tree discussion reminded me that bodies weren’t removed. The birds and the dogs would pick the bodies clean. There would be no burial, and thus no memorial for your family and followers to visit. You were effectively erased from history.

Yet Paul is writing today that here is the wisdom of God. God’s foolishness to use such a symbol is wiser than our wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than all of our strength. God comes to us in Jesus and says, “Love your neighbor as yourself. And love something greater than yourself, namely the God you claim to follow. On this rests all your preachers and holy scriptures.” And we kill him for it. And God comes back and says, “As I was saying, love your neighbor as yourself, and love something greater than yourself…”

And this changed the whole world. It sparked a movement that’s still going on. We tell time differently because of this event! There’s Before Christ and AD, Anno Domini, The Year of Our Lord. We have built cathedrals, we have opened orphanages and hospitals, we have started schools and universities because of this man. Everything has changed, and yet… We’re still tempted by that old way of thinking. That violence is our solution and our wisdom.

The terrible machinery still waits in place. We still send our military men and women off with psalters and reminders of home… sometimes not in the interest of our people, but in the interest of the military industrial complex. And there’s a big difference between the military, those brave, service-minded men and women who serve, and the military industrial complex, faceless corporations that may or may not have the best interest of our military, but through policy and lobbyists and amazing amounts of money, they get their way.

The difference is my half-sister Bobbi who is in Kuwait in a little room for 6 months to a year in her deployment. I can see her and talk with her on Facebook. Thank God for Bobbi. Who the industrial complex is… I can’t say. I picture a spacious skyscraper.

This is foolishness. We think it’s wise, but it’s not. We think it is making us safer, but it’s doing the opposite.

We’re being tempted to head that direction again.

Once someone saw a neighbor with a stick. So they went out and got a bigger stick. That neighbor saw the stick and they got one and put a spike on it. Then someone invented the knife. And then someone invented the sword. And so on. And we think we’re wise, but are we? Are we any safer?

We live in a culture soaked in violence.  Blood on the leaves, blood on grass, on snow; extravagant beauty of red. Blood in our schools, blood on our military bases. Blood in the streets of our cities. Blood on our screens.

This is what we have decided to do. Yet there is another way. We don’t have to live like this, someone has come before and taught us what God desires for us. For those of us who stand under the political symbol of the cross, we see the folly of violence. We see how it’s a never-ending cycle. We confess that violence doesn’t solve our problems, it creates new problems.

There is a way out! There is hope! There is Good News! But it will require us giving up our ways of thinking. It will require us thinking and seeking peace as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. And I know it sounds completely foolish.

I spent a lot of time training for the military. I read up on military tactics. I loved our family vacation to Gettysburg. I spent a lot of time at the gun range. I love war movies. Yet I have never seen war. Nor have I served. Yet I have seen the effects of war on family, especially my grandfather. I have seen my childhood friend who fought in Iraq changed because of his time there. I have prayed with veterans at their hospital beds as they confessed things they have never told their families.

In all this, the cross stands as a reminder of our foolishness and how it only amounts to more death and not the abundant life God has promised in Christ.

I see the wisdom of the cross as I’m reading about the events in Kenosha, WI. My heart breaks. A perfect storm of awful. It shows us the limits of our own sinful thoughts and actions. I watched the shooting of Jacob Blake. I am dumbfounded.

Then there were protests. As there have been. And I’m all about a peaceful protest. It’s so important, it’s our first Amendment. The freedom of speech. The right to assemble peacefully. I of course condemn the violence and property discussion, no doubt! Here me ten-times I condemn the violence.

Yet when I see the young man of Kyle Rittenhouse, who lives 15 miles away. A 17-year-old who isn’t old enough to own a gun, walk around a town that isn’t his, to defend businesses he doesn’t own or shop at… I know why he’s there. He got into a confrontation with some protestors and he was attacked and he killed two and wounded one. And some folks celebrate that, like one of my childhood friends. Many in my hometown. Someone wrote to me, “Celebrate a victory for once.”

A victory for whom?

What scares me most about Kyle Rittenhouse is that I used to be him. What scares me most is that he is still in me. In my thinking. In my language. He is there when I’m spoiling for a fight. Only thinking in binary, us vs. them. Unable to hear any story but my own. Ready to take a gun to a protest 15 miles away, knowing that I’ll be safe to do so because I’m a white male.

“Those who live by the sword, die by the sword” Jesus said at his arrest. The cross exposes the foolishness of redemptive violence.  God knows our hunger for a pound of flesh and our thirst for blood knows no limit. Which is why Christ said, “You need a pound of flesh, take my body. You need blood, take mine.” Offered with no resistance, to show the folly in this thinking.

Maybe if we spent as much time or more on training for peace than we do in training for war… writing poems about it, watching movies about it, studying the tactics of peace and how it can be achieved and maintained… we might be closer to the kingdom of God. Peace is WAY harder than violence. I can punch you or say an unkind word way easier than letting something slide. I can load violence into a gun and shoot it at you. You can’t do that with peace.

When you look upon the cross, know you look upon a paradox. A violent weapon that now stands for peace. The cross is the end of our human wisdom and all we think we know. And the foolishness of God is wiser than we can ever hope to be. May we listen to Paul. May we seek this foolishness of God, for it’s wiser than anything we’ve currently got or we have ever tried. While many of us wear crosses on our neck, or hang them from our wall… Christ wore it on his back and hung from a cross and it has made all the difference. To use such a symbol, and point it to peace… well that’s just divine. May we be foolish enough to heed the lesson, and follow the path of Christ. Amen.

Works Cited

^[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-percentage-of-americans-have-served-in-the-military/

^[2] Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Page 31.