On the Stump!

On this page we will be featuring excerpts from blogs and other pieces which speak to core issues of theology. It's not a systematic treatment, just provocative thoughts and words, and perhaps a little commentary. As we go we hope that some kind of shape and coherence will emerge. Even a new paradigm! 
 

Drones or Donkeys

So now I know why I came to Syracuse N.Y. It wasn’t to pursue a degree at the University. Nor to bring up a family among the crisp snows and lush summers south of a great lake. No, it was because the industrial-military complex would place its most hi-tech robotic command center right here at Hancock airfield, 9.6 miles from my door, a place where, as the Sunday newspaper (Post Standard 12.6.09) said, crews from the 174th Fighter Wing “commute to war.” It is because people go to work in the Syracuse area to control armed “Reaper” drones in flight 7000 miles away in South Afghanistan and Pakistan. In anticipation God would, I guess, guide us to form Wood Hath Hope: “a small group discovering the message of Jesus as peace and hope for our world.” These words are from the first paragraph on the homepage. They continue: “We believe Jesus’ life and teaching are shifting the human landscape toward nonviolence and forgiveness, even as the crisis of our times continues to build.” Yep, it’s about human landscape.

Right off the bat what I want to know is whether anyone is thinking about the children, about the way it feels for them to see and experience the sky as imminent death. I remember how pants-down, trembling terrified I was when my mother and her sister mistook the reverberations of a nearby firework display for a V2 rocket attack from Germany. Growing up in late-forties England there was a constant undertow of fear and rumor that Hitler hadn’t died or that unrepentant Nazis were still at large and prepared to begin hostilities all over. My mother and aunt fell victim to this collective PTSD and I don’t think I’ve ever been so viscerally afraid. It lasted about half-an-hour and then safe postwar reality asserted itself. So what’s it like for kids for whom there is no mistake but from any corner of a fixed sky—not even arriving from some far off place, these drones “loiter’ as they say—at any moment can erupt fiery hell and death? And for years and years? For most kids the sky is where God is, and when you pollute that they’re going to retreat to some terrible inner place from which one day, certain sure, monsters will emerge. So much for defeating terrorism.

In October this year the New America Foundation estimated that up to a third (320) of the near thousand people who have been killed since 2006 by U.S. drones in Pakistan were just bystanders (http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/revengeofthedrones). According to an April report of The News of Pakistan only 14 (fourteen) of those killed were militants, the rest (687 persons according to their numbers) were “innocent Pakistani civilians.” This claim was endorsed a month later in the New York Times by counterinsurgency experts David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, who wrote that drone strikes had "killed some 700 civilians.” The figures will depend on perspective—is a man who gives a bed to his militant brother therefore a militant? But you can be sure that in the murk—or is it blaze?—of battle from on high our “side” is not keeping too careful a count and the figures we get from anonymous government officials are as a matter of form revised down. The same New America Foundation report told us the notorious Pakistan Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was the target of no less than 15 drone strikes until he was killed at last along with one of his wives and her father. Well, who were the people killed by the first 14?

Let’s look at this for a moment from a Syracuse point of view. You live somewhere in our Salt City and each day you climb into your car and drive to work at the command center. You take over the real-time computers from the previous watch and you monitor activities around army posts and transports in the rugged valleys of South Afghanistan. Then you switch to South Waziristan across the border. Suddenly another computer warns you that a suspected target is traveling along a certain dirt road and the drone is taking pictures for a match. Suddenly an alert sounds, the screen freezes on the profile of a man and a superimposed message reads “Digital Imaging Match, 75% Confirmed.” Your intelligence officer is already on the phone to a CIA manager and relays the information. The manager says the truck is vouched for as the enemy’s, so “Execute!” You switch to a computer that has continued to follow this figure and touch screen to place a cross-hairs on him just before he disappears into a house. You now have about two seconds to decide before he possibly escapes into a back alley or a neighboring house. Your finger is on a red trigger that will release a missile from the drone capable of destroying the building and everyone in it. Something inside your head says that even if you have received direct orders you still have to decide. What do you do?

Remember this is an assassination. No war has been declared. And are you confident of the intelligence? We can’t catch Bin Laden up in those hills and we’ve been looking (apparently) for eight years! Yet an operator at Hancock can feel confident about pulling the trigger, while also knowing one thing for certain: regardless of whether the target is correct or not s/he will kill a lot of other people in those houses, men, women and children.

I describe this not to blame the operators while the rest of us are in the clear, far from it. (And of course I have imagined this scenario, but something close to it must happen, for if not why are the operators’ identities shielded?) My point is to make explicit what is taking place on our local patch of land. In a not-too-far-fetched virtual way it is as if they were rounding up Jews just down the road. But it’s precisely the virtual way that makes everyone complacent and complicit. The huge distance from the “enemy,” both horizontal and vertically, contributes to an Olympian sense of status in which we don’t have to answer to anybody. This has been the goal of air-power from the beginning, a godlike violence before which the little people on the earth have no choice but submit. But this power has never lived up to its expectations: in fact the power of the gods has always produced an equal and opposite anger, a Promethean rebellion. Air war has never subdued a population. It did not subdue the British during the Blitz, neither did it subdue North Vietnam, neither did it overwhelm the opposition in Iraq with “shock and awe.” Instead in all these instances it acted to provoke resistance.

But that is not the worst of it. What is most terrible is the corruption of mind and spirit that this video-game warfare brings to all of us, the insidious callous pride it instills in us. It is the opposite spirit to Jesus, the one who entered Jerusalem “humble, and mounted on a donkey.” Because of that humility, as the rest of the prophesy tells, he will be the one to “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations.” For the sake of this Messiah the presence of the drones must be answered by a conscious, confessional, redoubled compassion and forgiveness. As high as they fly in Olympian violence so deep must be our commitment to Jesus’ humility and gentleness.

And so I make this call, directed to all the churches of Syracuse and surrounding counties, that they save our landscape and that of South Waziristan for the humble Messiah of nonviolence. Pastors and ministers please commit never to holding a service again unless it is prefaced with an apology to the children of South Afghanistan and South Waziristan for the terror we’ve put in their skies. And furthermore let no sermon be preached unless it contains an exposition to live in and by peace with as much intention, dedication and allocation of resources as has gone in to creating the machine of death on our doorstep. Only in this way can the people of this landscape reap the Messiah’s harvest rather than terror’s whirlwind.


Tony Bartlett







Take n' Eat


I’m not much good at cooking but I can fix a spirited salsa verde. Like a little trip to Juarez, somewhere warm and south of the border. If anybody says “That’s good!” then I feel the pleasure. I feel the flow of what’s good from me to them. In Jesus’ time a Passover meal is the greatest of all story meals, a trip backwards and forwards in time to somewhere else, always from slavery to liberation. Passover tasted of memory and hope. It was the flow of good from God to his people.

Jesus mixed his own special sauce for the Passover. Nothing before ever tasted like this. So many things came down to that last meal, Jesus packed them all in: his other meals of loving and forgiving, his virtual abolition of the Jerusalem temple, the fact that he knew the authorities were after him and the fact he wasn’t going to run away. He put them all at the end of the Passover story, adding a new startling twist in the final frames of that familiar movie. “This is my body for you. This is my blood for you.”

So potent was this story-telling that
trouble quickly brewed around it. Jesus wasn’t working a miracle. He used this meal to tell a story for all time. A simple device to re-run the tape of what he was doing, and meaning, again and again and again. After his death and resurrection they re-ran that tape and everything became abundantly clear. But simply re-running it can become an end in itself, as Paul discovered at Corinth. And the gospel of John did too. In John’s gospel there is definitely a reaction against running the tape as a ritual repeat of an old familiar episode.

In John’s version of the story meal he omits the last bit of the tape, the bit with the words about the bread and wine. Instead he cuts and splices these remarks back much earlier in the story. And in the meal instead there’s a foot washing. What happened to all that tasty and evocative eating and drinking? It’s evident that John wants to tell the whole story and just that to be the meal. He’s such a story teller that he wants people simply to eat the story up and not come for refreshments. Also in Luke’s gospel there is a hint that this meal had already become associated with hierarchy and power.

In the Middle Ages that’s about all there was. The meal became a miracle and a sacrifice all at once, and only specially selected officials could host the event or even eat. The story telling meal had become a court ritual and procession which affirmed the medieval power structures. The Protestant Reformation democratized the meal somewhat but they kept the sacrifice meaning and forgot the radical story-telling of Jesus.

Hey, there’s still some salsa left! You want to try some?

In a world of media and stories this is one you can do anytime anywhere. Just remember to tell the whole story, of where this food came from and where it’s going. The sweet peppers and the hot ones, the onion, the cilantro, the tomatoes and the lime. Take and eat! It’s all so south of the border!





Guns n' Jesus

There are 280 million guns in the U.S, almost enough for everybody to have one. Here in the North East applications for gun permits have gone up over 50%, and many more seniors are now applying. To have a gun is a matter of self-affirmation over against a riot of signs that are threatening and negative. The gun is the semiotics of last recourse here in the U.S. It is individual divine sanction, sure and certain transcendence within a second’s reach

The sign of Christ is coming to greater and greater clarity and visibility as a true and radical alternative to the gun. If you want Christian meaning then observe the crisis of violence all around and then see Jesus as its true and generative other way. Where is the sense of Christ most powerfully to be found? Here in the U.S. it’s over against the growing crisis of violence. Exactly over against it. It is not a focusing on life-hereafter, or justification, or moral rightness, or 
anything like that. It’s the astonishing, wonderful, loving, creative, restorative, life-giving and forgiving new humanity of Jesus in the midst of a world where humanity is an endangered species.

It is a question of semiotics, of where and how meaning comes to you. Combining the gun and Jesus is weaving the crown of thorns. A sign that says humanity is free to live without the sanction of the gun, that is resurrection. We always choose our signs. Will we not choose the forgivness and peace of Jesus in place of the gun?