I just read this report on CNN.com which found that the more Americans attended church, the more likely we are to support torture.  What a terrible witness to this world we have become.  Rather than being an appetizer for the Kingdom of God we support the violence of this world more than it does itself!  I believe this is more evidence that as Christians we have become a people of “the means justify the ends” rather than a people willing to suffer as we follow the way of Christ.

What part of “your will be done, on earth, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN” do we not understand?

I’m way behind on blogging of late, so I’ll be trying to rectify that in the run-up to the Oscars.  Several weeks ago I met up with a friend from out of town and we caught Tom Cruise’s new film, Valkyrie.  I had caught Scott Simon’s interview with Cruise and director Brian Singer a few days earlier and it had caught my interest.  I wasn’t particularly jazzed to see Valkyrie until Simon’s interview caught me up on some of the background of the film.

Valkyrie is the story of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (played by Cruise) and a band of other Nazi insiders who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.  One of my favorite films, Amen, tells the true story of SS officer and scientist Kurt Gerstein and his struggle to cripple the concentration camps from within while risking everything to reach the Pope with the truth of what was happening in Hitler’s Germany in order to alert Christians all over the world.  Valkyrie is also the story of a solider whose conscience leads him to commit treason – another theme I’m quite taken with and which reminds me of yet another of my favorite films, The Four Feathers.

I admire filmmakers who tackle historical narratives where the “end of the story” is already obvious.  Think, Titanic, for example, there is no suspense about whether or not the boat would sink.  Similarly with Valkyrie, all the trailers have made it obvious that the film is about an assassination attempt on Hitler… and we all know that Hitler wasn’t assassinated.  But Valkyrie doesn’t suffer as a film from the known outcome of the operation.  Instead what Valkyrie thrives on is suspense and tension.  We know that Stauffenberg & Co. will fail, but we don’t know when, or how, or if they’ll be caught.  What unfolds is one of the most stressful films I’ve seen.  Think of the kind of tension you felt the first time you saw Jaws.  It’s that intense.

Beyond all the tension and suspense, Valkyrie gave me pause to think about the courage it took men to put country and patriotism aside to do what they thought was right.  As a Christian pacifist I still prefer the methods of men like Kurt Gerstein to those of Stauffenberg, but I am still sympathetic with the position they found themselves in.

Another moment that gave me pause was Hitler’s response to the failed assassination attempt.  In a radio address to Germany shortly afterwards he spoke of the event as a sign that God’s providence had saved him and his survival was a sign from God that he was on the right path.  I always grimace a bit when people say that “everything happens for a reason,” and this is exactly why.  That kind of theology is just what Hitler drew on to justify his own genocidal designs.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights from Seth Brau on Vimeo.

I really appreciated this creative and important video.

Many of you have heard of the website change.org where citizens can post ideas for change in the government, the top 10 of which will be presented to President Obama on his first day in office.  One that I am particularly hopeful about is establishing a Department of Peace and appointing a Secretary of Peace.  To read more and to add your own vote to this go here. It is currently the #6 idea, and if it keeps up the momentum it will be one of the final 10 presented on day one.  Please go vote.

Brian McLaren was in town last night speaking about his new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. It was an excellent presentation, one of those “big idea” kinds of presentations that just build and build. I thought he did a great job of packing all of these concepts into a 1 1/2 hour presentation. While I felt like I was keeping up with him, tracking with where he was going, I still left with my head spinning. There was just so much that he covered and the implications are innumerable.

Later in the evening Brian joined us at the Princeton Emergent Cohort and we were also joined by the North Jersey Emergent Cohort. We packed 20+ people into a small corner of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room. It was a great time of informal conversation and we picked Brian’s brain about Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, Radical Orthodoxy, global economies and local economic practices, Wendell Barry, Plato, eschatology, N.T. Wright, Andrew Perriman, terrorism, the presidential election, pastoral care, dealing with conflict in the local church and the writing process. It was a great conversation with a great thinker.

I’ve loved all of Brian’s books that I’ve read so far but I had Everything Must Change on the backburner. No more. After last night I want to dig deeper into what Brian’s getting at in this book because I think it’s going to be incredibly important for the church as we quit playing “intramural games” as he put it, and start addressing how the Gospel frames and narrates our lives in such a way that we are sent into the world in a posture of serving, reconciling, compassion and healing.

If this stuff excites you like it does me, be sure to check out the Deep Shift tour. Brian will be in the Bronx May 2-3rd. If you can’t make it to the tour be sure to check out everythingmustchange.org where people are contributing and dreaming of ways to change the world one act at a time.

A few days ago I finished Jesus for President and I’ve already lent it out to the first person on the growing waiting list. What a magnificent book! If you went to seminary and constantly had your nose stuck in a Hauerwas or Yoder book but wished you could lend a more accessible version to someone… this is that book. It isn’t dumbed down, let me be clear about that, it’s just that this book was really written for the church. This isn’t the kind of conversation that takes place in the ethereal upper layers of academia, this is the best Kingdom-of-God theology taken to the streets. And what would we expect? Shane & Co aren’t professors, they’re subversive prophets living in the abandoned places of the empire. Making their own clothes, living with the poor, dumpster diving for food… always pointing to Jesus. They are living at the margins pointing us to Jesus. They are shouting with their lives (and this book) that the America we live in is a pitiful and fallen Kingdom not worth our allegiance.

The Eagle is fake, the Eagle is dead.

Follow the Lamb!

Last week I picked up a book that I’ve been looking forward to reading for several months now. I didn’t even know that it had been released until I was wondering the isles of my local Barnes & Noble and bumped into the display for Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw’s new book Jesus For President. I’m about a third of the way through it now and it’s everything I was hoping it would be. Claiborne & Co have taken theologians and biblical scholars close to my own heart and made them scandalously accessible to an general audience. The book (so far) is tackling our own ideas about empire by taking a look at God and the people of God and their relationship to empire. The book is a creative mish-mash of art and prose and Kingdom Propaganda. This book provokes us towards a Christian imagination of politics and calls us to seriously rethink where our hope and allegiance really lay. Go pick it up now!

Kara and other PTS students were invited to visit the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. a while back and she signed us up. Earlier this month we got on a bus with other PTS students and took the trip down to D.C.

The Holocaust museum experience was very different than what I was expecting. On the first hand I thought that it would be a lot more macabre than it actually was, but either way I thought that being faced with the horror of it all that I wouldn’t be able to make it out without breaking down and crying. This was not the case, indeed I didn’t see a tear shed by anyone there. Instead the overwhelming brutality and evil you see in the museum for hours and hours on end just seemed to cause us all to shut down. I for one went into a kind of emotional turtle-shell, being so shocked by an all-day exposure to the Holocaust. The museum takes you through the rise of the Nazi party on the top floor, down into the persecution of Jews and removal to ghettos on the next floor down and finally to the “final solution” on the lower floor. You literally spiral downward as you follow the time line of the Holocaust. The transition from the middle floor to the last floor is a transition of “How could people be so racist and oppressive” to “How could human beings do these unspeakable things to other human beings.” It is silent. It is intensely horrifying. Kara and I sat in a room listening to audio recordings of survivors telling about their experiences during the Holocaust. Part way through one of our guides came in to sit and listen as well. He was a Holocaust survivor. I can only describe that moment as being a mix of the most reverent sacredness and the a gut-wrenching disgust.

The second (and I think regrettable) thing I wasn’t expecting were the several instances in which I overheard conversations about the current violence in Israel between Israelis and Palestinians, conversation that was itself tinted with racism. In one conversation in particular a woman even shamed “the liberal media” for ever taking pictures of Israeli soldiers shooting at kids with rocks. All the while I’m thinking, “those journalists are being a witness to the lopsided violence happening in Israel, how can you honor people who had the courage to be a witnesses and tell the world of the Holocaust but demean the people who would be witnesses against your own tribe.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As I looked around at this museum full of the testimony of some of the worst racism and suppression ever directed at one people and saw the consequences of that I was saddened to learn that not everyone there had apparently learned the same lesson.

Having heard some high praise for the recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, I trekked off to the theatre a few weekends ago to catch it myself. What followed was an interesting mix of emotions for me. I am usually easily able to suspend disbelief and enter into the world of a film, and it is indeed almost always my goal to do so when watching a film. But some films make that really really hard to do. Or maybe to put it more accurately; sometimes John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas make that really hard to do.

300 lacks nothing in stylistic cinematography or art direction. Every single frame lives in a creative land somewhere between Miller’s original comic book and modern day Photoshop art. The texture and style of the film exude a larger-than-life mythical quality that enhance the tale of 300 Spartans fighting off Xerxes’ vast armies. It is a story that can only be told in paintings and campfire tales, and in that regard 300 does exceedingly well.

Some have called 300 one-part Art Film one-part Action-Adventure war movie. I would agree, and the first part is done masterfully. But it’s that nagging issue of content that kept irking me about the second part of 300. While I was continually drawn into this Spartan world by the artistic beauty I was constantly ejected from it as I heard Yoder, Hauerwas and especially Jesus ringing in my ears.

The overtones of what Walter Wink calls “redemptive violence” are nowhere more pronounced than in 300. The Spartan culture while shown as a somewhat barbaric solider society is nonetheless glorified in perhaps every barbaric trait other than their systematic killing of “less than ideal” babies. While this is shown in a horrific light, the rest of their violent ways are glorified as essential parts of a “rational” and “democratic” society. The overtones connecting American culture and military (especially American Marines) to the Spartan warriors are obvious. King Leonidas’ wife, Gorgo lectures the politicians about the necessity for violence using today’s popular phrase “freedom isn’t free.” All these themes kept me from truly entering the movie. Instead I held it at arms length, thinking to myself, this is exactly what Jesus subverts in the Roman empire. This society built on violence, the culture that disciples its people in warfare no matter the personal cost to children and wives. The Roman empire Jesus lived under and was crucified by was heavily influenced by the Spartan legends and ethos. This is the same warrior-culture that the Gospel has a harsh judgment for, and while we have tended to privatize our war-making, we Americans buy into many of the same illusions that the Spartans did.

I kept trying to see where Christians would fit into this whole story (had they been around back then). I think that the Jesus people wouldn’t be caught dead on the side of Xerxes, the Persian emperor who called himself a God. The followers of Jesus wouldn’t march with the Persian army in it’s goal to conquer the world. But neither would the Jesus people devote their lives to being discipled as killing machines in the city of Sparta. The Spartan story of redemptive violence would be in direct conflict with the followers of Jesus who practiced redemptive suffering.