Wrestling With War: Part Two.
Part One of Wresling With War
This is not about political posturing for me. This is about my personal wrestling with the implications of Jesus and his life and death. This wrestling has been going on for a while. But I’ve been struggling more and more since things between Israel & Lebanon have been escalating. I find myself checking and reading CNN every 15 minutes.
Last Friday night, we spent the night over at my in-laws, after a very raucous game night. And since we don’t have cable or satellite at the Brown house, I found myself glued to the tv at 1:00 am in the guest room. I started watching Andersoon Cooper’s 360. Anderson really bothers me because he’s too hollywood for a reporter, but all that aside, he was doing a special on the Israel/Lebanon conflict. He and his fellow reporters were going back and forth between Israel & Lebanon and showing both sides and perspectives of each other’s losses. So for an hour straight, I watched how both Israel & Lebanon were both trading blows back and forth. Lebanon lobbing rockets across the border and Israel dropping them from above.
I watched as the reporters went into the hospitals on both sides. I Lebanese victims covered in blood, in tattered clothes, being operated on while Israel bombed just a couple of blocks away. I watched the infrastructure, marketplaces, and residential areas in Israel turn into nothing more than rubble, while children huddled away in bomb shelters for weeks. I listened to a young Lebanese girl (probably 10-12 years old) speak from a hospital bed with bandages wrapping her entire head and her feet in slings, in plain and perfect English say how they were not all terrorists. She was not a terrorist. She wanted nothing but peace and hope but could find neither because of the current conflict.
The interesting thing as I watched both sides of the stories give their perspectives, was that they were the exact same people, they were just on the opposite side of an imaginary line. I know things aren’t as cut and dry as this, but each group was defending and fighting for what they believed to be their God-given perspectives. I didn’t see Israelis or Lebanese people. I saw humans that eerily looked, talked, and acted the same.
I fell asleep to these thoughts sometime after 2:00 am.
The next day we went to Awesometown (our friend’s Ashley & David’s lakehouse). Sometime after lunch we got into a conversation about reformed theology of all things. But somehow in the middle of our conversation the idea of justice came up. I shared about how I think our idea and view of justice is entirely irresponsible with the biblical idea of the term. In our Western world, we tend to think of justice through the metaphor of judicial scales. With rights and wrongs being weighed against each other. Our view of justice, for the most part, is tied to the idea of having the “wrongs” done to us, “righted” by subsequent action against the “wrong-doer”. We tend to think of justice as retribution or revenge. We have been wronged. Therefore, we are owed.
In the Hebrew concept of justice, we get the idea of reconcilation. There can be no justice without the will to embrace and be reconciled with the “wrong-doer” because one carries a certain sense of being a “wrong-doer” in our own way. So went riding around on their boat while my friends skied, and I couldn’t quit thinking about justice and war and retribution and reconciliation.
Then on Sunday, Anna woke up earlier than me and started watching We Were Soldiers, which is about Vietnam. I joined in after I woke up and watched the same cycyle of violence that I had watched Friday night and talked about Saturday. Granted it was the Hollywood version of war, but if anything, it was a more glamorous and less-realistic version of what happens. Real war is so much more real than that.
Anyway, it seemed like my whole weekend was spent thinking and sitting with the ideas of war and peace.
After watching the events unfold in Israel & Lebanon before my eyes, and watching the war in Iraq over the past few years, I feel so overwhelmed, conflicted, and torn. I don’t know where to begin. Or what to do. I know more needs to be done than my occasional thoughts from my suburban home half way across the world. Again I admit that I’m teetering between apathy and oblivion.
My biggest fear is that I will turn real people and real loss and real hurt into numbers. Into politics. Into a position. This is not my hope.
My hope is for a day when war is no longer an option to resolve conflict. But mutual submission and sacrifice becomes the standard for relating to “the other” in the world.
When death is no longer a proper response to death, but when life is a response to death.
I long for nothing less than the day when swords will be beat into plowshares. And weapons will no longer have any power.
My hope is for something better than what we have right now. Where someone acts in violence and the RECEIVER of violence responds by becoming a GIVER or RETURNER of violence. Being attacked by terrorists, only to become one themselves by operating under the same framework that they do. Allowing others to dictate our responses.
My hope is for a faith that is not tied to some American vision of politics or the world but of a global community that practices the words of Jesus.
Giving, loving, forgiving, reconciling, peace-making, healing, and if need be . . . dying. Anything less from me is a violation of the image I’m made in.
part three later . . .
Tags: War, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Anderson Cooper, Emerging Church, Politics, Jesus, Justice
Kristen
Monday, 31. July 2006 um 10:43 pm Uhr
this is a little off topic, but did you hear how anderson cooper got his big break? no one would hire him so he went on his own into places like iraq, etc and started getting his own stories. i think that takes some serious guts. its one thing when you are hired in advance to get the story but when you have no clue if what you are doing is actually going to be put on air. he’s totally following his passion. hollywood or not, he has balls. i’m sorry i could have been more lady-like. probably shouldn’t have said “balls”. i’ll work on that.
Josh
Monday, 31. July 2006 um 11:39 pm Uhr
no i’ll give it to you. he goes where no one else will go. i think i just get more tired of how cnn crams him down your throat like he’s brad pitt during every commercial break. and i think he does his best to be balanced.
tank's wife...
Tuesday, 1. August 2006 um 10:28 am Uhr
These posts have inspired me to finish reading God’s Politics … I started it earlier in the year, but I have a bad habit of not finishing books. anyways, something I never thought of before I read “God’s Politics” was/is the way Jesus transcends political/moral/social/etc issues. I think what you are saying, reconciliation > revenge, sounds amazing, for one thing it feels right and secondly I think that it is what Jesus has been saying all along.
But all that aside for a second, I feel like at most I can atleast stand for reconcilation in my own life, but as for wars abroad, how the hell do I play a part in that? Oh yes, pray … okay, but seriously … not that praying isn’t serious or neccesary …
Well, I think this comment is going no where. I will keep thinking about what I am trying to think about.
Josh
Tuesday, 1. August 2006 um 11:26 am Uhr
i’ve got a couple of really small ideas on how to play a small role that i’m going to post later on in these series of posts. i think i’ve got 5 or of these. depending on how much i write on hte last one.
welcome to the story
Tuesday, 1. August 2006 um 3:02 pm Uhr
[...] Part One of Wrestling With War Part Two of Wrestling With War [...]
gentry13
Tuesday, 1. August 2006 um 5:41 pm Uhr
it’s important to note that anderson cooper’s big break was not procured via cutting edge, indy reports from afghanistan, but through his penetrating “where’s coop” pieces on the in-school news network known as channel one.* who can forget anderson’s stories about east german teens who defied the communists by painting mohawked cartoons on the berlin wall? moreover, who wasn’t touched by the story on the nigerian tribes who were allowing their adolescent boys use bungee rope instead of the traditional vines for their rite of passage leap? please note, it’s not my intention to demythologize “coop,” but to simply speak the truth.
* am i the only person who remembers this program?
words are not enough » Wrestling With War: Josh Brown…
Wednesday, 2. August 2006 um 6:30 pm Uhr
[...] Josh Brown has been wrestling with war for a few posts now, and I thought it would be a good time to send you that direction. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. Part five is next, and I’m not sure how far he’s going to go. Josh also says, “Tim LaHaye talks with an MSNBC reporter about the end times. If nothing else, read the last question and answer on page 4.” [...]
welcome to the story
Thursday, 3. August 2006 um 9:54 am Uhr
[...] Part One of Wrestling With War Part Two of Wrestling With War Part Three of Wrestling With War Part Four of Wrestling With War [...]
Zac
Thursday, 3. August 2006 um 3:18 pm Uhr
I wish that more people would be willing to have these questions, without being called a crazy hippie. I agree 100%…this has become something more than the people that it is affecting. Both sides feel really are the same. Some of what you were saying reminded me of the movie “Kingdom of Heaven”. That movie has really taught me alot about religion. In the movie both sides felt as though they had claim to Jeruselem. But in the end it was the people that were suffering. The people are the ones that Christ cared about. I have really enjoyed reading your thoughts.
welcome to the story
Thursday, 3. August 2006 um 9:30 pm Uhr
[...] Part One of Wrestling With War Part Two of Wrestling With War Part Three of Wrestling With War Part Four of Wrestling With War Part Five of Wrestling With War [...]
welcome to the story
Sunday, 10. September 2006 um 3:41 pm Uhr
[...] [...]