My terror attacks anniversary sermon Today is my 47th birthday and I am spending it with my family. So this is the only posting for today. It is an advance look at my sermon for tomorrow. like most United Methodist churches, we will commemorate the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks tomorrow. Here is what I will preach:
John 8:3-7
3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group
4 and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?"
6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.
7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."
The Miss Universe pageant is to be held in November in Nigeria. Nigeria is a country riven with violence between radical Muslims and more moderate ones. The government is not wholly in charge of the country. Last week, Miss France and Miss Belgium withdrew from the competition, joining contestants from Denmark, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Norway and Togo, who have already announced that they will not go to Nigeria.
All the ladies have withdrawn to protest the case of a Nigerian woman named Amina Lawal, 30, who was sentenced in March by an Islamic court to be stoned to death for giving birth out of wedlock. The court insisted that stoning was required by the dictates of Sharia, the name for Islamic law based on the Quran. Islamic law is enforced by some northern Nigerian states, where radical Islamism flourishes. Miss Lawal's appeal was rejected last month, but the court ruled that her execution would not take place until January, 2004, when the baby will be two.
I hope we will not sugarcoat what happened last September 11. I hope we will not turn this anniversary recognition into some saccharine, syrupy time where Americans compete with each other over how bad they feel. Canadian author Mark Steyn wrote that we must not "Dianafy" this anniversary, referring to the weepy moroseness surrounding the Princess' death. I agree. I am afraid that anyone looking for nothing but a time to sniffle and feel sad here today will be disappointed. We can never honor the memory of our dead by simply feeling bad. We must remember those who died, yes, but also remember that they did not die for no reason. They were deliberately and coldly murdered for reasons most foul, by Arab Islamists who still say they wish to do even worse.
What is at stake in the outcome of the war that was thrust upon us a year ago?
Obviously, lives are at stake, perhaps your lives or mine, since we do not whether or when or where the al Qaeda terrorists may strike next. But that's not all. Our freedom is at stake, including our freedom to follow Christ (or not).
Last June 21 the chief spokesman for al Qaeda, Suleiman Abu Gheith published a three-part article that delineated their reasons for the attacks and their intentions regarding the United States. Al Qaeda considers itself the bearer of the only true Islam. So, wrote Gheith, referring to the true Muslim man:
How can [a true Muslim] possibly [accept humiliation and inferiority] when he knows that his nation was created to stand at the center of leadership, at the center of hegemony and rule, at the center of ability and sacrifice? How can [he] possibly [accept humiliation and inferiority] when he knows that the [divine] rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of Allah - not to the East, not to the West - to no ideology and to no path except for the path of Allah?
We have the right to kill four million Americans - two million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons.
The war we are in is literally a religious war, at least on one side. Our enemy is not Islam as a whole, because Islam as a whole does not oppose us. Our foes are violent radical Islamists, almost all of whom are Arabs. However, the majority of Muslims are neither Arabs nor radical. Our foes want to turn the entire world into what Afghanistan was before America liberated it this year.
In Islamic states the secular and the religious are indistinguishable. But the distinction between secular and religious are essential for the way the West works and for the freedoms Westerners enjoy, including our freedom of religion.
Nowhere is this difference between Islamism and the West more profound than in the concept of law and society, the very point of contention between Nigeria and the beauty pageant. Sharia law intends to compel everyone to think and act the same. Sharia attempts to eliminate differences among people by enforcing uniformity of lifestyle and conduct.
Western law, despite its adversarial nature, is structured to ensure that contending parties can have their differences accommodated rather than eliminated. That is why compromise is such an important part of Western law and politics.
Christianity strongly influenced this facet of Western culture. Human freedom has always been a central characteristic of Jewish and Christian faiths. The religious endorsement of freedom restrained the formation of unrestrained political power among the West's political rulers. Even the most dictatorial Western monarch did not achieve the ruthless absolutism of kings and emperors in most of the rest of the world.
Europeans of four hundred years ago were not politically free in the sense that we now think of freedom. But by then the distinction between the authority of the secular state and the authority of religious leaders had become well defined. Civil law ceased to make religious demands on its subjects. The separation of church and state was also driven by the fact that Christianity was beset by denominationalism and schisms that were deeper than any in the political arena.
The result was that Christian leaders and political leaders came to have separate arenas of responsibility and authority. This process took centuries but its achievement was made certain by the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, the chief figure of the European Reformation, developed a theology of "Two Kingdoms," in which he delineated the roles of political and spiritual authority. He held them to be complementary, not competitive, but with separate responsibilities and authority.
By the time of the American revolution, religion was so legally marginalized from the regulation of daily civil affairs that when speaking of the canons of the faith, one had to say, "church law" to distinguish it from secular law. One's religion ceased to have serious sway over treatment before civil magistrates. The common object of loyalty of a Western nation's citizens was not a religion, but the nation. The law bound the citizens together into a common political heritage that protected their rights. None of this was absolutely true anywhere, and the effect was not uniform across all the nations of the West, but it was sufficiently true everywhere in the West to make a distinctive kind of society and politics replicated nowhere else on earth, save where Westerners spread it. Freedom and the entire concept of human rights are Western inventions, fueled by Christianity.
However, in Islamic states, meaning most Arab states, this kind of arrangement is not true to a meaningful degree. Arab nations' law, with few exceptions, is Sharia, which does not recognize that there could be any law apart from Islam. Sharia is universal and binds all Muslims everywhere. Sharia admits of no theoretical limits in regulating human affairs and denies that any secular law can limit it. Hence, a Muslim cleric in Holland recently called upon Muslims there to rebel against Dutch authority, and some Muslim clerics in Britain declared that no British Muslim, even if an actual British subject, could in faith obey British law when it conflicted with Sharia, and that British Muslims in the armed forces were obligated to mutiny rather than fight in Afghanistan.
Under Sharia, the state is not an independent object of loyalty. Submission is first obligated to Allah and then to individuals or groups depending on how closely one if affiliated or related with them. Moreover, Sharia is verbal, not written. Sharia rulings are made by applying the teachings of the Quran to particular situations. Sharia usually is claimed to be identical to the will of Allah. To disobey the edicts of the Sharia is to risk the wrath of Allah.
Sharia thus makes no accommodation of differences as does Western law. The discipline of the Quran is considered binding upon all people everywhere, including non-Muslims. But creativity and invention result from differences, not similarities ? thus, most Arab lands have been marked by intellectual stagnation and non-creativity for several hundred years. That is not the fault of Islam per se because for the first few hundred years that Islam sway over what is now modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, Muslim intellectualism and civilization was the highest in the world.
Western law intends to keep civil peace over all the territory where it holds sway. Personal religious beliefs are not relevant to the workings of the law, because religious beliefs are not the point of the law. In Islam, though, religion is the only point of the law. Compromise is not a feature of Sharia because you cannot compromise with Allah; you can only submit or disobey. Only when everyone submits to Allah can there be peace, but until then conflict is both inevitable and desirable between Muslims and non-Muslims. This is what the radical Islamists say.
When one's world view thus shuts out compromise, negotiation as a means of settling disputes is ruled out. After all, the enemy of Islam is an enemy of Allah, which no one has the right to be. Sharia denies that the another way of ordering society can possibly be valid. We believe that the state has no business in what religion, if any, citizens follow. But our enemies say that the state's basic function is to ensure that everyone submits to Islam. Freedom is impermissible on its face. So they deny that we have a right to maintain our system, we may only have, at the moment, the power to maintain it.
For those men (they are all men), negotiating with non-Muslims only admits of weakness; if one is stronger, one simply prevails. Therefore negotiation is done only when there is no alternative, and then only to bide time for resumption of the struggle later.
Now, what exactly to make of all this I am not sure. But I do think that we really, really need to think outside the box about our present struggle. I am increasingly concluding that long-term peaceful co-existence between most of the Arab world and the West is not possible as long as each side is ordered its current way. Wrenching social, legal and perhaps religious transformations of the most fundamental kind are in order for one of us. And I want it to be them, not us.
The Jews stoned adulteresses to death from time to time two thousand years ago, and Christianity sprang from Judaism. Yet Christians have never done it, nor have Jews for many centuries. Why not? The answer is that rigid legalism to the letter of the law has never been central to Christianity or Judaism. Hence, law did not become instruments of oppression, even though some religious and secular authorities tried to make it so at various times. Some men confronted Jesus with an undeniably guilty woman but they dropped their rocks without protest when Jesus spoke a single sentence. Jesus made them remember that the heart of Jewish law was not judicial rigidity, but mercy and reconciliation. Jesus was known more than once to have quoted the prophet Hosea, who said, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings" (Hosea 6:6 NIV).
We long ago came to understand that right relationship with God is chiefly a matter of the heart, an inward transformation, rather than matter of the hand, outward conduct. God is love, and right relationship with both God and other people depends on making the love of God our own.
In Leviticus God told the Hebrews, "‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev 19:18 NIV).
Jesus taught, "‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’"(Matt 22:37-39 NIV).
Love requires freedom. Love cannot be mandated or required; it can only be encouraged. The risk of human freedom is that some people will never accept the love of God and therefore will not share godly love with others. Even so, the obligation of God’s people is to enhance human freedom and multiply God’s love, an obligation we extend even toward our enemies.
St. Paul gets the last word on this:
19 Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.
20 On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."
21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
(Rom 12:19_21)
