In 1983 Ronald Reagan signed into law a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At that time I was a newscaster at a radio station in northern Indiana. I remember the debate that raged—yes, raged—in America over that holiday. I would watch the AP wire feeds as politicians and pundits argued about whether or not it was appropriate to honor Dr. King in this manner. Some of the arguments seemed a little disingenuous. Some opponents said that the country could not afford another national holiday. They claimed that our economy could not withstand another day of the year in which production would shut down and the banks and post offices would close. Yeah, right.

However, the majority of the outspoken opponents were up front about the reason for their resistance. King was a radical. Most people have forgotten that. Today people tend to see his mission solely in terms of race relations, and in our day, an overwhelming number of Americans would never want to return to segregated lunch counters and “whites only” water fountains. In fact, when we see the video footage of the battles for voting rights, the opponents of civil rights strike us as ignorant, hateful or both. So, most people today feel like they are in sync with Dr. King’s message. But they are not.

Dr. King’s mission—which began as the Montgomery Bus Boycott to end segregation on city transportation—broadened significantly over the years. He focused on economic issues for all Americans—black and white. He tried to be a voice for the poor. And he took on the war in Vietnam. His most significant anti-war speech was delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York. In no uncertain terms, he stood squarely with the clergy that had gathered that day to affirm their opposition to the war. Again, by today’s standards that may not seem exceptionally controversial. But things were much different in the sixties. King was condemned as a Communist, and not just by some crazy pundits. The FBI considered him a threat to our country. He was the most hated man in America.

I’m always a little amused when I hear some people praising King or commemorating his holiday, when it is clear that they would have hated his values. I heard it again today, as leading politicians put out statements for the King holiday. But the statements I heard were coming from people who reject King’s idea of nonviolence. Those military hawks would find the real King outlandish. Consider these words…

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

“What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”

Those who preach the gospel of American Exceptionalism would also reject the real King. That day at Riverside he said…

“This is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent, based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history.”

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continue to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

He called the war an “enemy of the poor.”

Martin Luther King articulated what all advocates of justice eventually learn. Justice and peace are inseparable. When you listen to or read King’s anti-war speeches and sermons, you hear him saying that his passion for racial and economic justice compelled him to speak out against the war. He knew that his work for justice would be meaningless if he did not also work for peace.

Perhaps the message of peace is the most difficult one for us to hear. Peace does not seem possible. The methods of peace do not seem practical. And the message of peace requires us to put aside our feelings of exceptionalism and superiority. Tough stuff. People hated King for it.

Our historical amnesia helps make King a likable figure. But in 1983—a mere fifteen years after his death—his holiday was not without controversy, because many people still remembered their visceral reactions to the man who challenged their deepest values with the message of nonviolence.

As you think about Martin Luther King’s legacy, think about justice and peace. And remember that, for all of his flaws, King found that message of nonviolence in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As a child I was taught that the ends do not justify the means. Or as the New Testament says it, we don’t do evil so that good may result (Romans 3:8). But a new survey reveals that many Evangelicals either haven’t read the New Testament or have decided to scrap that rather inconvenient aspect of Christian morality.

CNN reports that “White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified—more than six in 10 supported it.” That’s right. Evangelicals—those who claim that the Spirit of Jesus Christ lives within them—are more likely to go against the teachings of Jesus (if they believe something good may come of it) than those who seldom or never attend church. In fact, according to this survey, “The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists.” It makes me wonder what is being taught in American churches. Is going to church supposed to make us less like Christ?

I know that some will accuse me of being simplistic. They say that these are complicated moral issues. I would agree that ethical arguments regarding violence can be complex. I’ve been studying the moral issues surrounding war and peace for almost thirty years. I’ve read all the arguments from the various perspectives. But there is a certain measure of simplicity in the midst of the complex theories. To justify the use of torture you must either say: a) torture isn’t evil, or b) something—some circumstance—can justify doing evil.

The proponents of torture have been busy with both arguments. White House lawyers wrote memos saying that torture isn’t torture. The arguments are hard to swallow. When other nations used these “techniques,” we called them war crimes. When our own soldiers used them in Vietnam, we court marshaled them. But now they are not torture? That’s the key—now. And that leads to the second argument. The circumstances have changed and because of those circumstances what was a crime is now acceptable. It’s called situation ethics. (See “Tortured Morals” post below.) It was exemplified in recent days by the former vice president of the United States. After the Obama administration authorized the release of torture memos, Dick Cheney called for more. Why? Because he wants the American people to know that we gained information by using these procedures. The argument is clear. If something good came of it, it was not wrong. The ends justify the means.

Now I know that we live in a fallen world. I know that the kingdoms of this world have not yet become the “kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15). I know that powerful people and powerful nations will spin the truth to justify their actions. They will do evil so that good may come. But the church—the Bride of Christ—is not supposed to share the values of those kingdoms. We are supposed to be the agent of the Kingdom of God in this world. In fact, the church is to be the manifest presence of Christ on earth. How then, can the church call evil good or say that we can do evil so that good may come?

Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way—when we act like our enemies we become like our enemies. This burned in my mind when we discovered that the very prisons that Saddam Hussein used to torture and humiliate people had become venues in which the United States tortured and humiliated. We acted like our enemy, looked like our enemy and became like our enemy.

That happens to the nations. But it should never happen to the church. In fact, St. Paul called it slander to say that Christians believe that the ends justify the means.

“Why not say—as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say—‘Let us do evil that good may result’? Their condemnation is deserved.”

If the survey is correct, it is not the world that is slandering the church. The church is doing it. But is it slander if it is true? And is it true? Will we really set aside the message of Jesus because we might get some actionable intelligence? I hope and pray that we will trust Jesus’ wisdom and not the wisdom of this world (1 Corinthians 1:20-25).

(For a more graphic view of the survey results, go to http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=156.)

The April 13, 2009 issue of Newsweek proclaims “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Editor Jon Meacham, who describes himself as “an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian,” wrote the cover story. Meacham is an intelligent, articulate Christian. While many in the media don’t seem to get religious issues, Meacham does.

His title, “The End of Christian America,” is intended to be provocative. “This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory.” He goes on to say, “While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character then they were even five years ago.”

I must confess that when I read the article my first response was, “This is good news!” It brought to my mind a darker day and a brighter day in the history of Christianity. The first century was a dark time in terms of the oppression of God’s people. The ruthless Roman Empire saw the emerging Christian church as a threat, so Rome used its vast resources to destroy the church. And yet, it was a bright day. The message of Jesus Christ was being planted in the fertile soil of the Roman Empire and it was growing at a phenomenal rate—so much so that Paul declared, “All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God's grace in all its truth” (Colossians 1:6). Imagine that! First century Christianity had no designs to influence the politics of Rome. It never entered the minds of those early believers to grasp for political power or status. Yet Rome feared them as they followed Jesus Christ.

As time passed Rome lost her fear of the Jesus followers. Constantine neutralized the threat. He did so my making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. What followed was the bastardization of the faith. Rome did not suffer from the marriage of the church and political power, but the church did. The corrupted church persecuted and killed would-be reformers. In its use of power and violence the church looked like the state, for it learned corruption, coercion and violence from the state as it became the spokesman for the state. And we have never been the same.

Constantine is alive and well. There are still those who believe that the best thing that could happen would be for this nation to become a Christian nation by the use of political power. As they have worked to this end, the results have been disastrous for Christianity. The faith of the New Testament has been confused with and co-opted by American nationalism. Instead of the powerful voice emanating from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a westernized version of Christianity that replaces love with personal freedom as the highest human value. This enables us to justify a whole range of actions that are precluded by the Great Commandment given to us by Jesus Christ.

So the new surveys saying that Americans are falling away from Christianity actually give me hope. You see, I don’t think Americans are rejecting New Testament Christianity. I think they’re rejecting something else. They are rejecting the unholy union of Christianity and nationalism. They are rejecting a faith that just doesn’t ring true. That’s good news!

But this good news comes with a huge challenge. The church is going to have to pull down some idols so that we can clearly proclaim the message of Jesus Christ. Pulling down idols is never popular. But it must be done. The red, white and blue cross will never satisfy. The cross as coercion will never satisfy. The cross as a justification for our way of life will never satisfy. That’s the problem with idols. They just can’t deliver for us.

There’s a new wind blowing. There are a number of Christians, particularly younger Christians, who want to make a difference. They’re rejecting the marriage of Christianity and __________ (fill in the blank). They want a faith that is genuine. That genuine faith—the faith of primitive Christianity—will be a threat to the right and the left. (You won’t hear it proclaimed on Fox News or Air America!) That pure faith will not be co-opted by those who use religious language but still bow down to the idols of power and ideology.

What if…(dream with me for a moment)…what if a new generation is rejecting the perversion of New Testament Christianity? And what if this allowed them to see Jesus? Wouldn’t that be good news? But a huge question remains. Can the church rise to the challenge of proclaiming the good news in a world that still loves Constantine more than Jesus?

It is difficult for me to convey what Christmas means to me. The joy and hope that it brings to me is beyond what I can put into words. And the older I get, the better it gets. The meaning of the birth of Jesus Christ gets richer and more full the more I attempt to comprehend it. Yes, I go a little crazy on the traditions, songs and “feelings” of the season. (I’ve got quite a reputation among my friends as being a Christmas freak.) But that is just the result of a lifelong growing awareness of the meaning of the incarnation.

I have the privilege each year of preaching and teaching on the incarnation. It is an honor and it is a frustration. Have you ever tried to explain something that is too wonderful to explain? You want so badly for your listeners to feel and experience something that you yourself cannot comprehend, much less explain.

Last Christmas my wife bought me a devotional book comprised of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. All year long I’ve looked forward to reading his insights on Advent. I knew this brilliant theologian and Christian martyr would have plenty to say. I skimmed his topics, but waited for the Advent season to take in his words. I have not been disappointed.

I lit a candle, put on some soft instrumental Christmas music and opened the book to December. Here is the first thing I read…

               Who will celebrate Christmas correctly?

               Whoever finally lays down

               all power, all honor,

               all reputation, all vanity,

               all arrogance, all individualism

               beside the manger.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Christmas is hard to comprehend. God became a man. This is not a fable. This is not a story that ends with a good moral lesson. This is something different. And it’s not just that God put on our humanity, it’s how He did it and why He did it.

What I’ve discovered is that most of us don’t really want to understand it. It’s too compelling and too demanding. We want to celebrate what happened in the manger, but we don’t want it to happen to us. If we fully embraced the manger we would have to fully embrace the cross. If we embraced God becoming fully human it would force us to become fully human—the kind of human He created us to be.

So instead, we tend to go for the trappings rather than the substance. We want to celebrate the “Prince of Peace” but we still want to justify the use of violence. We sing about the “poor baby” in the manger, but we love the prosperity preachers who teach us that He came so we could be rich. We commemorate the powerless child whose parents had to flee to Egypt because they had no recourse against a corrupt government, but we want to demand our rights in a “Christian nation.” (We’ll even threaten the use of our economic power to make sure you say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.”)

All of these are ways of saying that it really is just a kid’s story. These are ways of saying that it’s just a fable. These are ways of saying that it’s a beautiful story, but it has little to do with life today—real life.

We grow frustrated when the ideals and teachings of Christmas—the teachings of Jesus Christ—butt heads with reality. But that is precisely the point. Jesus came to butt heads with reality and to lead us into a new reality. If you want working for peace on earth, loving your enemies, and laying down your life to be practical, you’ve missed the whole point. What is “practical” by this world’s standards, in the end, makes no sense at all. Instead of trying to explain away the Sermon on the Mount and make Jesus’ words more palatable, we should ask God to explain it to us. Do we believe Jesus’ message? Or is it akin to a bearded man coming down the chimney. Fun for December, but not worth much in January.

When I say that Christmas is hard to comprehend I’m not talking about our intellectual capacity to understand the story. I’m agreeing with John when he said, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (John 1:5). The darkness has a terribly difficult time comprehending—embracing—the light that has invaded it.

It is difficult for me to comprehend the new reality. I know that the manger changed everything. But how do I live every day in the truth of the incarnation? I do agree with Bonhoeffer’s starting point. We must lay down “all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism.” That’s what Jesus did. I wish I could say I’ve done the same, but I’m still in process.

But that’s why Christmas gets better every year. Every year I’m reminded of the unbelievable thing the God of the cosmos did for us. And every year I’m reminded that He calls us to do the same. He became human so that we could become the humans He created us to be. And if He would ask that of us, there is hope that it can happen.

Well…just a few days to go. Election 2008 will be over. The longest and most expensive campaign season in U.S. history will come to an end. (At least we hope it will. We hope we don’t have a repeat of 2000 when the Supreme Court had to figure out who had been elected.)

Most people will lay it down. Oh sure, there will be a few more heated discussions among friends, but not many. But most ordinary people will leave the analysis and second guessing to the professional pundits. We’ll just go back to life as we knew it before.

Some Christians will approach things a little differently. In their intellectual/emotional/spiritual debriefing of the election they will try to fit their theology into the results. Some will look to Paul’s letter to the Romans where he said, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1). By that they’ll conclude that the right people were elected to the right positions. Others will determine that our nation disobeyed God and that we will pay for our sins. It probably depends on how they voted.

But beyond that, most Christians will respond the way the rest of the nation does—by laying it down. “Go back to your lives, citizens! There’s nothing here to see.” They may even conclude that God doesn’t care about politics. After all, it’s a dirty business, isn’t it?

Does God care about politics? Did Jesus ever say anything that could be interpreted politically? Let me say emphatically, yes and yes! But in order to understand our responsibility as political Christians we’re going to have to expand our definition of politics. The term is derived from the Greek word, polis—city. Polity and politics concern the good of the city, state, nation and world. Jesus cares deeply about politics because “God so loved the world” (John 3:16).

But Americans have come to think about politics simply in terms of a two-party system—a system centered as much on gaining power and keeping power as it is on using power to do good. When power is the motivating factor everything crumbles. Many Christians have been sucked into this two-party power play and have convinced themselves that this is the hope of America. I’ve actually heard people say that if we elect the right president or if we get the right Supreme Court justices we can turn this country around for God.

This secular mindset disguised as Christianity wreaks all kinds of havoc. When Christians and Christian organizations elevate political power as the answer to our problems, they begin to compromise their ethics in promoting people to power. Everyone decries the sleaze of this campaign. But, truth be told, the sleaziest stuff I’ve heard has come from Christians. Get on the internet, go to YouTube and you’ll see Christians using half-truths, innuendo, things taken out of context, shabby use of scripture, and outright lies to bring our country “back to God.” Yes, power (and the will to power) corrupts.

Martin Luther King used to say that the church should not be the power of the state; it should be the conscience of the state. I agree. But we can’t be the conscience of the state if we have no conscience when it comes to the pursuit of political power.

Yes, Jesus cares about politics. And he cares about how we do politics. We’re supposed to be imitators of Jesus (that’s what it means to be a disciple), so maybe we should consider how he did politics.

First of all, he never sought power. His life was a life of laying aside his power in order to serve. This is epitomized in the fact that he wouldn’t kill (no matter how noble the cause), but he would willingly die for us. The cross is the symbol of Christianity, but have we lost the meaning of it? It means that there was one who “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing” (Philippians 2:6-7). And the cross not only defines our faith, it gives us a job description. As Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). No two-party power play there. 

This laying aside of power, motivated by love and the desire to do the will of the Father, gave Jesus’ words incredible power—power of another kind. Jesus boldly took on the Roman Empire, the local magistrates and the entrenched, corrupted religious system. He was never afraid to speak out, and because theology and politics were inseparable in the Caesar-worshipping empire, everything he said had political overtones. But his political words were not like those of the Romans or the priests. Rather, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority” (Matthew 7:28-29).

There are so many political issues we need to address—war, genocide, hunger at home and abroad, poverty, healthcare, the worldwide AIDS epidemic, human trafficking, abortion, care for the environment, and so many others. But it should be obvious to us by now that Republican or Democratic power have not, and will not, solve these problems. So it seems to me that we are going to have to figure out a third way.

Perhaps this third way can begin by humbly asking Jesus how we can lay down our lives—like he did—for the polis.