When I joined the army in 1975, I...
When I joined the army in 1975, I was taught how to read a map. “If you can’t read a map, you’ll never be a good officer”, said the Cpl who was instructing us. “You will get lost; what’s worse, you will get the whole unit lost and maybe me with you, so pay attention,” he ordered. He proceeded to teach us what every symbol on a topographical map meant. He taught us how to read contour lines- those thin squiggly lines- like wrinkles on an ancient face that represent the actual shape of the ground. He pointed to two different places on the maps in front of us, “You see the difference between the lines here; see how wide apart they are. That’s flat ground. You see over here, how the lines are real close together all bunched up and tight. That’s the ground getting steeper. “You see that flat space in the middle of those narrow lines on either side- well that’s a valley running between these two hills”. “Man”, I thought to myself, “all these lines, so what’.
A week later all of us passed the written map reading test; we were back in the classroom going over the answers. I must have looked quite bored or superior because the Cpl said to me, “are we wasting your time, Mr. Rennett”. They called us officer candidates- Mr. I was 19 and no one ever called me Mr. I think he really wanted to call me something else. “This is the easy part”, he snarled, then added, “ I can teach a monkey to do that. Let’s see how you walk the contour lines when you get on the ground- that’s when we’ll see if you got more character then a monkey!”
He was right, you know. Swamp was just a dry blue symbol on a map until you felt it sucking you down when you walked through it. And hills were just flat lines until you led people into exhaustion to places they did not want to climb. Lines were different on the ground.
I think the apostle Paul is saying, ‘so it is with the Christian life’, as he speaks about the relationship between confessing the faith and walking the actual contours of faith on the ground of life in this passage from Romans. The ground that you stand on.
Paul himself had met the risen Christ and learned to read the contours of his Jewish faith differently. Now, as he writes this letter to the Roman church, he has been walking the ground of faith for perhaps two decades. And he’s stumbled along on more rugged ground then pranced through mountain meadow. Paul has taught the contours of faith and walked between established cultures, Christians who can’t get along with each other, and who live within a Roman empire that crushes anyone who does not confess that Caesar is God. And in this passage from Romans, he says it’s not good enough for a person to say Jesus is saviour. No, a person who has been transformed by the love of Christ, lives right for Christ. Walks the ground following Christ for others. Paul calls this living right for Christ- “genuine” love. Genuine means to act without hypocrisy’. When I was about eight, I saw my parent’s smoking and asked, ‘can I try that’? My dad replied, “no its bad for you”. I pressed, ‘well why are you doing it then? He said, ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say’. I love my dad, a few years deceased now, but as an adult, I can say his answer was hypocritical.
The ground of genuine love include hating evil by not returning it, respecting others always, loving enemies, rejoicing in hope, living in harmony and peace. That’s it, Paul says, that’s the class room lecture on the contours of faith- now go out on the ground and walk faiths contours.
Well, this has got to be the most difficult teaching about love in any faith tradition in the world. Impossible. Yes, unless your mind is always looking to be transformed by the Gospel.
I read last week that Pat Robertson, a very popular Christian preacher, whose message of Christian love reaches millions of North Americans through modern media, stated that the US government should assassinate Venuzuelan President Hugo Chavez. Quote, “We simply can’t have an anti-American political leader who could raise the price of gas. So let’s just kill him.” Chavez, has indeed been highly critical of US foreign policy. He is also the democratically elected leader in no less then three internationally sanctioned votes.
The ground of Christian faith is always hard to walk even by those who claim authority to teach its contours.
It is always easier for me or ‘us’ to name hypocrisy in someone else or some other faith community; its much more challenging to name our own. So, I need to say something about my own.
In April 1990, I was ordered to go to Cornwall and set up a CP and begin reporting on the situation at the Akwasasne First Nation’s community. The army was getting ready to deploy- it was the long hot summer of the OKA stand off. I was walking down the center of a street of the Akwasasne community looking like a ninja turtle- body armour, flak jacket, helmet, C7 assault rifle, loaded. It was high noon, very still; the heat rose in shimmering waves from the asphalt beneath my feet. I glanced to my left at a house with a large porch. Standing there in bear feet, wearing a T-shirt and shorts was a pint-sized native girl with her finger in her mouth, squinting at me. When our eyes met, I was instantly humiliated by the contrast between her vulnerability and my body armour. My flak jacket could have stopped a bullet, but her gaze, at once both innocent and fearful, punched a hole through the Kevlar lining covering my heart, like a lazer slicing through human tissue. I felt embarrassed, unsure of the ground on which I stood. I realized that I was walking in a contour that I had never learned about in any military classroom. Her powerlessness disarmed me. When our eyes met, I knew that I, and any authority I represented or carried or thought I had, was a band-aid solution; a fix that would never stick.
In hindsight, I can say this experience significantly changed my thinking and feeling about the use of force to solve relationship problems whether they be between individuals in a marriage or countries with profound differences.
Just a few years later, I would see the same face in different bodies standing on the porches of bombed and burnt out houses in Bosnia. The faces of the children were angels saying, “You see that vulnerable little girl, your war games and your costumes are scaring her to death. It took me about eight years to figure out how to read the contour of this experience in the light of the gospel and to recognize the spiritual hypocrisy in my life.
Now you might be asking yourself why is he telling me this. My life is not his life. And you would be right. But my Christian faith challenge is the same as your Christian faith challenge. To walk the ground of the faith of genuine love is the challenge for everyone who confesses the faith. And it’s a greater challenge when you don’t get to choose the ground on which you walk. It’s a greater challenge when you let Christ choose the ground for you. Love your enemy, ha, he would not be your enemy if you loved her. I think that’s at least part of what Jesus is talking about when he says pick up your cross. You can’t find genuine love without it.
Sometimes the challenge means we make small changes on the ground of love that is more consistent then we have been, like not speaking about love to our kids one way, and living it ourselves differently.
Sometimes the challenge compels us to make large U turns. For me it came down to this, if the Gospel is the truth about God that is transforming my life each day, then I must strive to eliminate every semblance of violence and self-deception that still poisons my heart. I pray that I am never tempted to call anyone enemy again.
If we perceive the contours of this world, the mountains and valleys, and meadows and swamps, the whole earth, the contours of our hearts- the hate, the deception, the arrogance as well as the great potential to love- then we see ourselves as Jesus sees us. And we are ready to be empowered to walk the ground following the path he sets for us.
In his life, Jesus always moved into the crowds of his day without body armour. He’s in the middle of things, healing, preaching, teaching, angry against the evil of injustice. He is always threatened on one side by indifference, which seeks to make him irrelevant, and on the other side by abusers of power, who seek to destroy him. At the end of his life, he still is stuck in the middle, suspended between two criminals, one who seeks his forgiveness and the other who does not. We know the ‘good’ thief got to heaven, but my hope in Jesus is that God’s love is large enough to forgive the other one, anyway. By God, that’s the hope of divine love that transforms my mind.
And then he shatters the ultimate power of death on that terrible pimple of ground at Golgotha and one is left breathless. One is left knowing that the only reason to have courage to walk the ground of a shattered world full of violence is knowing that God’s love is always finding a way to come back and lead us through it.
Well, this is the nature of genuine love that inspires Paul to write to us- to tell us how to live. And this is the only love in the universe that is large enough to transform our minds and the unconverted corners of our own hearts. Thanks be to God. Amen