A Sermon for When the US Bombed Iran

Pacifism in a time of war

Matthew 5:43-48

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Today, on this Covenant Sunday, when we renew our commitment to God and this church, we hear again one of the most weighty and difficult teachings of Jesus’ ministry.

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

These words are part of the first teaching of Jesus as recorded by the gospel of Matthew. Jesus has returned from the wilderness, from 40 days of fasting and testing. And in those days, he is met by the devil -- a deceiver and a trickster. Three times Jesus is offered a way out of the path God has set for him. He is tested to see if he will choose power over sacrificial love, but each time he refuses the shortcut that leads to domination.

I want to read in full the last of these tests:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ”

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

“All these I give you.” The power of the nations is in the hands of the deceiver, the tempter. Jesus final refusal solidifies for us, and for him, who he will be in this world – the one who defeats death on the cross as a victim of capital punishment. Jesus will not rule through the state – he will die at the hands of the state.

Jesus is then fed by angels, attended to in his need. From there he calls and heals. He calls two working class, uneducated fisherman, the people crushed under the wheels of the Roman occupation. He says, “follow me.” Then Jesus brings the men with him to cure wounds and illness, to cast out demons and to heal those long rejected by their communities.

Only then, after all this has transpired does Jesus speak the first teaching of his public ministry. In this long sermon, putting the life he has lived into words, Jesus tells his listeners to love their enemies.

Last night, the United States inserted ourselves into another war. For the last few days, I’d been refreshing my browser, awaiting news that felt inevitable. Eventually the words materialized on my screen. The United States joined in Israel in an unprovoked attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, I was at our Central District Conference annual meeting, preaching on, of all things, apocalypse. I went back this morning and looked over my words. These lines stood out from the page: “We know this much – in the future we are going to be church in an apocalypse. The world will end over and over again in a thousand different ways.” The news last night was an escalation of the world-shattering forces haunting us.

If you are like me this all feels so big, so unruly, so impossible to confront, overwhelming to contemplate. But we are also not the first people to consider what it is like to live as followers of the crucified Jesus in a world thirsty for war. Our collective memory is short and so we live in a nearly constant cycle of wars, wars that never resolve, that we claim as righteous and just, wars we fight in the name of freedom or security or revenge. In a most gruesome and perverse turn of words, this morning the President of the United States claims that dropping bombs is an act of peace.

Of course, the President is not alone. People of God try to find a way around the command to love our enemies. “You have heard it said,” Jesus tells the skeptical crowd, “love your neighbor but hate your enemy.” That isn’t from the Torah. This phrase is found nowhere in the Old Testament. It is instead one illustration of the ways we have, in every generation, attempted to find a way around the difficult and life-shaping work of peace. We bless war, we bless violence. Just this morning the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth ended his televised remarks saying “we give glory to God.” Utter perversity.

So here we are, gathered in this place, to celebrate the body of this church that lives in a world at war. Today is Covenant Sunday. Each year we take time to remember the promises to love one another, to care for this body of the church, this living, breathing assortment of gifts that make up the body of Christ.

While we take time once a year for this particular remembering, each time we share Communion is a little Covenant Sunday. We come to the table having made a pledge of love to one another. Here is what we say: “Will you love and serve our neighbors? Will you support and challenge one another, speak and hear the truth, cease what causes harm to our neighbors, and do good to our enemies?” It is shocking that month after month many of you agree to continue to shape yourselves around these promises. They are impossible promises. We speak them into the sea of our failures, even as we float them on a raft of hope.

In the Mennonite tradition, we call this impossible promise peace. The form of life that this peace takes is called pacifism. Pacifism is the language we give to the words of Jesus’ first public teaching: love your enemies. Pacifism is also a word that gets confused and mixed up with other ideologies. It can turn to quietism and retreat and capitulation. Throughout our history as Mennonites, we’ve often seen this mixing up, as our spiritual ancestors removed themselves from the world, attempted to rid themselves of the stain of sin from the world around them.

What we often missed is that peace is not something we are able to secure through our planning or our ingenuity. Chris Huebner reminds us that peace is a gift, a gift given to us by God. People who commit themselves to churches of peace, as we are celebrating here today, are likely to discover that our attention to peace gets us into more conflict, not less. The work of peace demands an end to wars, a risky work of prophesying good news to a forgetful world.

In times of war, pacifism, the way of peace, is tested. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas was asked to write a pacifist response to the horrors that unfolded. It was a tender time of national grief. But overnight revenge roared up from the yawning gap of pain and shock. The only way to make sense of the destruction was to destroy. The only way to make sense of the killing was death. George Bush plunged the United States headfirst into a war. He would go on to perpetrate wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which the United States was responsible for over a million deaths.

Hauerwas talks about this reluctance to pacifism, how, if he wasn’t a Christian, he’d have no interest at all in the idea. “In short,” he wrotes, “Christians are not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.” We have lived so close to Jesus, to the Jesus who lays down the power of armies to go into the world and heal, that we cannot imagine anything else. We refuse the myths of this nation, the forgetfulness of generations. Instead, we choose this life – love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.

We don’t wake up one day perfected in the way of nonviolence. Instead, we test and try our experiments in peace here in the body of this church. We try out what it means to worship with people who are very different from us, who will hurt us, and we discover how to repent and repair without destroying each other. We listen for the Holy Spirit, in our worship, in each other, in the ways we see others beyond the walls of our church working and willing redemption. We say yes to the possibility of being hurt, to the possibility also of being healed.

As it is, I can imagine no better place to be on this morning, no other life I’d rather celebrate than the one we have carved out here. Peace is a way of life, a gift we receive and then learn through practice. And today is invitation, an invitation in a world of war, to continue to receive the gift of peace again.