The Central Issue of the War on Terror

 Sermon Delivered at All Souls Community Church
Grand Rapids, Michigan Sunday, August 17, 2003

© The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

Reading

Mark 12:13-17

And they send some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to him to trap him with a riddle.  They come and say to him, “Teacher, we know that you are honest and impartial, because you pay no attention to appearances, but instead you teach god’s way forthrightly.  Is it permissible to pay the poll tax to the Roman emperor or not?  Should we pay or should we not pay?

But he saw through their trap, and said to them, “Why do you provoke me like this?  Let me have a look at a coin.”

They handed him a silver coin, and he says to them, “Whose picture is this?  Whose name is on it?”

They replied, “The emperor’s.”

Jesus said to them: “Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and God what belongs to God!”  And they were dumbfounded at him.

Sermon

One or two hundred years from now the conflict we call the war on terror will be interpreted as a religious war.  Just because it is hard for us today in this country to understand what a religious war is, and dismiss our participation in it as being not religious but economic, does not mean that those with the wider perspective time gives won’t see something obvious to them and hidden from us.  This is a religious war.

It is not a religious war as Al-Quida and other Islamist groups conceive it to be.  Historians will not analyze it as a jihad, regardless of whether the historian is a Western Christian, Jew, or Middle Easter Islamist.  To a Moslem jihad means “to strive or to struggle,” and even within the Islamic community there is deep disagreement as to whether that striving is internal to the self, struggling against unholy desires, or whether that struggle is a call for a military campaign against Islam’s unholy enemies.

But that is not the kind of war this one is.  That is not the reason it is, and will be interpreted as, a religious war.  The central issue of the conflict between Islamist groups, fundamentalist Islam and modern states, democracies like the United States, and the plurality of faiths it houses, is at root a religious one.  The central issue is about power.

One way to interpret religion is to say that religion is about power.  Power is like the wind.  You can’t see it, but it wields force.  Power is like silence.  It makes no sound but deeply affects the senses and emotions.  Power is like a thought which you can analyze, interpret, break it down into its presuppositions and extend it out to conclusions.  But like thought power is a force that is evanescent, disappearing in a moment.  Like thought it is something whose original spark of genesis is elusive.  Power is not something you can hold in your hand like a pencil, but power is something you can get a hold of!

The Old and New Testaments, and all other sacred scriptures from other religious traditions, can be interpreted as perspectives on ultimate power.  Sin is what works against the unfolding of ultimate power and salvation is what works for it.  God blesses this person and we want to know what it is that he did or did not do to warrant the power he has been given; or curses another and we want to know why.  Blessed are the poor is a way of saying that we may think ultimate power is favorable to one group when it really is favorable to another: The first shall be last and the last first.  The Ten Commandments can be understood to be rules designed for men and women to wield the power that moves among us in such a way that it doesn’t destroy us.

An additional way to interpret religion is to say that religion is about the organization of power; how it moves in existence and us to devour, destroy, and desecrate life; or, bless, exalt, and fulfill life.  The power that moves in existence, the spirit of life that we feel but do not understand and does not originate with us, is still something intimately involved in us.  We wield power.  We hit baseballs, declare human rights to be universal, split the atom, and water our gardens to cultivate little incarnations of beauty.   We wield and organize power. Physics has a religious dimension to it because it is the study of existence’s organization of power.  Cosmology has a religious dimension to it because it is the study of the natural origin of organizational power.  Sociology has a religious dimension to it because it is the study of the power as it is organized in groups, and psychology has a religious dimension to it because it is the study of how power organizes the self.  Art wields power to create organized forms which themselves wield the awesome power of beauty.  Religion can be understood to be the study and practice concerning the ultimate form of organizing power.

Twentieth century Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams called God “the community forming power.”  Community is organized power.  In other words, this ultimate power as it moves among men and women in the world of human affairs does so such that we form communities; churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, cults, denominations, religions, and nations.  So, the real religious question might be, “What form of community organizes ultimate power in such a way as to fulfill creation?”  That would be godly fellowship, a holy way of living and being.

That is the central issue of what many Americans call the war on terror and the Islamist groups call jihad against the West: “What form of community organizes ultimate power in such a way as to fulfill creation?”  It is this issue that divides Islamist Islam from the West, and even divides Islamist Moslems from fellow Moslems in the West.

To the Islamist Moslem of Al Quida and other fundamentalist Islamic groups, as well as to Christian fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists, the organization of political power and the organization of religious power must be one and the same.  They are the same community and, thus, the power they organize must be understood as the same.  The power of the political community is organized as an extension of the organized power of the religious community.  Allah or God is the source of both government and religious communities.  To serve God and to serve the emperor are one and the same.

In the West we call this a theocracy, and in a democracy identify it as the enemy of freedom.  In the West we advocate a separation, an independence between the organizing power of the political community and the organizing power of the religious community.  The organizing power of politics, the community called the state or the government, and ultimate power are different.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that because it is a form of community that grew out of the West that we, too, can’t destroy it.  Under the name of freedom the state can take on coercive powers far beyond its legitimacy to do so, like unto a god.  But because the church and the state are different we can hold our government accountable for not extending rights to everyone regardless of of their religion or irreligion.  Likewise, the organizing power of religion, the community of church or synagogue or mosque, extends only to those within that particular community of faith.  When the believer enters the democratic public square, the way political power is organized into our national community requires the believer to allow the differing ultimate beliefs of others to exist.  You can’t kill someone because of what you deem to be the idolatry or untruth of their faith.  You can’t even silence them!

In other words we have attempted to put into practice Jesus’ distinction between the emperor and God.  They are two different kinds of power.  One affords the government its sphere of influence, while the other insures that God and the individual can be as immediately connected as possible, without the interference of state or even religion itself!  When they yield organizations, they are two separate forms of organized power, two separate communities.  Church and state, sanctuary and senate, separate though related.  One takes one’s religion into public life by voting one’s conscience.  One takes the public life of a democracy back into religious community by reminding fellow adherents of the freedom of all to believe as each conscience dictates.  To conceive of them as to different forms of power as Jesus did is to see that their independence of one another is aimed towards freedom.  If religion and government are the same form of community, are the same organization of power, there is no possibility that the individual will possess the personal liberty to disagree with either.  If religion and government are the same form of community, as they were in the Roman empire of Jesus’ day, there is no possibility that God may whisper something into the conscience of the individual that contradicts the edict of Senate or sanctuary, and that is to put human limitations upon God’s power!  If religion and government are the same form of community, then it has been declared that ultimate power is completely understood and incarnated by human forms of organization.  The Tower of Babel has been completed.  The emperor’s face on the coin is the face of God.  There is no freedom in evidence and creation’s fulfillment is thwarted.

This is a religious war, although it does not need to be fought as religious wars in the past have been fought.  Blood does not need to be shed, and one emerge victorious, although peaceful co-existence will probably be the best one can surmise.  And to the extent we think it is not a religious war, we may not understand fully what is at stake.  The separation of church and state is the yield of holding as sacred what God says to you in the depths of your own conscience.  The separation of church and state is the yield of declaring that human rights are not given either by Senate or sanctuary, but are given every individual at birth by the God who created him.  The separation of church and state is the yield of believing that freedom is the most sacred gift humanity has been given.  And, that it is possible for human beings to organize ultimate power in such a way that the freedom that comes from God, and is holy, can unfold and multiply until every soul is fulfilled and all souls are free.

 AMEN