SubscribeKingdom Rant
So yesterday I am at another Church and see on another church bulletin that famous category “Our Men and Women in the Military.” Sometimes they specify “in Iraq,” or “in the war;” I am pretty sure they all mean about the same thing.
Yes; I pray for the U.S. Military. I pray for soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But I cannot stop there.
It has been a long time since I was comfortable praying for “our” soldiers. I am becoming less and less willing to keep my perspective on this to myself.
For a Christian or follower of Jesus to refer to any nation’s military as his or her own is extremely troubling. We who follow Jesus render to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s: whether your Caesar or mine commands “kill and destroy,” that Caesar does so by the authority and power of Caesar, not of God.
It is, therefore, of utmost importance for Christians to speak, and request pray, clearly: do American
Christians ask for prayer only for American soldiers?
On a related topic, upon seeing that prayer list in a church bulletin yesterday, I wondered how many people that congregation has put into ministry. What is the ratio of United Methodists who have gone into the military to represent the country (read “Caesar” if you dare) to those who professionally represent God?
What dose this ratio say about our priorities?
Filed under: United Methodist Church, Youth Ministry, church | Tagged: American, christian, Iraq, military, war
Hard questions! I wrestle with many of the same ones. Does Caesar’s command to kill enemies over-rule God’s command to love them?
It’s a really steep uphill climb to convince Christians in America - normal Methodists, at least - that they’re not Americans, at least to the extent that they shouldn’t see America’s agenda, in at least a limited fashion, as their own. Western Christians have been entirely too successful in the past millennium and a half. We’re no longer persecuted. We’re longer kept out of the professions. We’re prosperous - partly, as Wesley observed, because living by Christian virtue in the area of personal economics lends itself to gaining in prosperity. We’re IN. we look at other countries or other times and see what it looks like to be OUT. It seems to make sense to prefer being IN to being OUT.
Hate the world? Well sure John said to love not the world nor the things in the world, but JESUS said God so LOVED the world. I’m not doing anything wrong.
Let’s extend it. Just as I’m not doing anything wrong - I abide by the laws and pay the consequences when I don’t - “our” troops abide by the laws and pay the consequences when they don’t. Their intention being there is to do good - for their own country and often for Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever they find themselves.
But let’s turn it around. Let’s suppose you decided to raise the issue at that church yesterday. “I am shocked to see that you pray for American soldiers. Here are some reasons you should reconsider your practice.” What would you offer as counter reasons? I can imagine someone offering the following:
- God’s will is never accomplished by warfare, so no particular outcome of any given conflict is in accord with God’s agenda. Therefore, one ought not to pray for a particular outcome in a war.
- Since no outcome can be associated with God’s will, the best we can do, if we must pray for those involved, is along the lines of our football prayers. “Lord, let them have a good clean contest, and let no one get hurt. Amen.” Unless the combatants are using nothing more deadly than spitballs, an answer to such a prayer would be a major miracle, and bring great glory to God.
- Since war is never God’s will, we might pray that our soldiers be frustrated and fail at every turn so that they will give up quickly and return home.
Or maybe, sometimes, we’re thinking that the military people on the list are simply people that we know, love, and want home safe and sound.
Time to stop rambling.
Good stuff, Richard, rambling or not.
And I couldn’t agree more with your final line - I believe that’s the most common motivation among church folk.
Which leads to my other point: wouldn’t it be nice if we as churches focused half the energy sending people into ministry as we do (it seems) sending them to serve Caesar?
One difference between sending people to the military and sending people “into ministry” is that we commonly take “into ministry” as meaning ministry as a career. People can sign up for the military, do four years - or an extra term - and then use their training or have resources for college. Those who are called to ministry go off to college for four years, then seminary - it’s at least seven years after high school before they can reach career status. Or we might send them off to one of those denominational schools where the central values are those of secular academia and Jesus is spurned, and they’re turned off the whole idea of ministry.
So what can we do?
1. Relearn the power of God in ministry. De-routinize the charisma.
2. Broaden what we mean by being “in ministry.” WE know ministry is more than a career, but they don’t. They need constant role models of ways to be in ministry.
3. Christianize a few more of our colleges.
Let me add another biggie - or we can take it as an expansion of my first point in my last comment. We need to tell a better story. Too often the story associate with “being in ministry” is the story of being nice, harmless, mild, boring. What young person in his/her right mind would want to choose that? While that might be the picture of some pastors these days, that’s NOT the picture of Jesus I see in his story.
[...] question this begs (see my most recent post) is what does one mean by “our”? Do Christians include ourselves in the larger [...]