Peace Messenger

Adventist Protests Extra-Judicial Killings & Environmental Destruction in Marathon Walk

From "Pastor to walk for an end to killings," by Eldie Aguirre and Orlando Dinoy, Inquirer.net, June 14, 2008; forwarded by Monte Sahlin:

DIGOS CITY, Davao del Sur, Philippines -- A 58-year-old Seventh Day Adventist pastor has launched a walk from his hometown in Matanao, Davao del Sur to Aparri in Cagayan Valley to dramatize his call for an end to unabated extrajudicial killings of journalists, militants, and suspected criminals, plus the massive environment destruction.

Edervin Samson of Barangay (Village) Camanchiles set off alone on Thursday and has been in contact with his family through a mobile phone....

"I wanted to stop the practice of extra-judicial killings, which is against the law of God, and to encourage people to renew their faith in Him," Samson told reporters when he passed by here on Thursday.

The trek to Aparri and back is a new endeavor according to the pastor and is the most daring walk he made in his life as marathoner. But he said his past experience in marathons would surely help him in attaining his goal....

"Humans are only stewards of this planet and we don't have any right to kill people or destroy the environment that God has entrusted to us," he said.

Samson said he would be stopping by selected areas from time to time to preach the Gospel....

The Prophetic Word

Excerpts from Pastor Trevor Kinlock's sermon, "I'm Sick of It!", preached at Calvary Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newport News, Virginia, May 10, 2008:

A fiery preacher named Jeremiah…criticized the nation and its smooth-talking pastors and they threw him in jail and burned his sermon notes (Jer. 36:37)….

Beloved, they cannot handle the message of the prophet, they cannot handle the message of truth, when it challenges the structures of power….

[The prophets'] message is universal, and its speaks to nations, social conditions, and religious institutions and orthodoxy.  “Woe,” and “repent” are the two consistent words of the prophet.

And so, church, if we have a prophetic message, we ought to speak out against the nation when the nation contravenes a “thus saith the Lord.”  Help us God!

And so I declare this afternoon, “Woe unto you, George Bush, for lying about weapons of mass destruction.  Woe unto you for invading and destroying a nation, and arrogantly trading the blood of thousands of American soldiers for oil and strategic dominance.  Woe unto you. Shame on you.  There’s a problem with that....

Repent, America, for exploiting the poor and enlarging the rich.  God is not pleased with that….

Woe unto you, America, for glorifying violence, perverting sexuality, debasing the institution of marriage, and worshipping the “almighty dollar.”  Woe! Woe! Woe!  God is not happy with you.  God is not pleased with you.  God is going to deal.  Judgment day is coming….There’s a God that sits in heaven and He deals with those who oppress His people.  So you better repent!

Last day church, don’t be afraid to preach the prophetic word. Remnant church, Seventh-day Adventist church, don’t be afraid to speak truth to power....

Listen to the sermon at PraizeVision.com.

Adventists at Envision 08

Adventist peace activists and bloggers Ryan Bell and Johnny Ramirez have both recently posted information about Envision 08, a major conference on Christian engagement in the public square, June 8-10 in Princeton, New Jersey.  The conference promises to bring together sixty leading scholars, artists, activists and pastors and offers twenty "learning tracks." One of these, "Religious Pluralism and Christian Faith," will be co-lead by Samir Selmanovic of Faith House Manhattan and the renowned Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School. (Johnny's post also includes video of a lecture by Volf on 'How Do You "Un-Do' the Culture of War?")

Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, John Perkins, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis and many, many more noteworthies will be among the speakers and learning track leaders.  This should be an exceptionally enriching experience for those dedicated to following Christ in the public square.

The Myth of American Diplomacy

The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
by Walter L. Hixson
Yale University Press / 2008

Review/Comment

In The Myth of American Diplomacy, Walter Hixson, a professor of history at the University of Akron, puts forth the disturbing thesis that we Americans are so violent because we presume ourselves to be virtuous. He argues that the roots of our current situation can be traced back to America's Puritan beginnings and are sustained through a national narrative that glorifies violence as an instrument of moral purification and divine providence. The potent and deadly mix of self-interest and religious rationalization has created an American citizenry that turns to violence quickly, naturally and with a deep sense of entitlement. Violence has become enmeshed in the very notion of who we are as a nation.

--Timothy Renick, Christian Century, May 6, 2008

Megachurch Minister Calls for Holy War on Islam

From Martin E. Marty's Sightings column for April 14, "Rod Parsley on Islam":

William Franklin Graham famously called Islam a wicked and evil religion, but I don't think he called for its extinction through violence, as in war.  Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a wild politician, did call for the bombing of Mecca to shatter the Muslim center.  Now, Parsley—as in Rod Parsley—is the flavor of the month among the controversial clergy being spotlighted in the camps of the three presidential campaigners. Parsley, pastor of Ohio's mega-est megachurch, twelve-thousand-member World Harvest Church in Columbus, calls for "destroying" Islam.

...As reported in Mother Jones (March 12), Parsley says there is a war and he wants bigger war, as America can only "fulfill its divine purpose" by seeing to it that Islam, "this false religion, is destroyed."  Though he spells out no specific strategy, he writes things like, "We find now we have no choice.  The time has come" to destroy "this anti-Christ religion," inspired by demons who spoke to Allah.

Shall some Muslims be spared—the moderates down the street or anywhere else, for example?  No:  "mainstream believers" in the "1,209 mosques" in America drink from the same well as do the extremists whom all citizens condemn....

... Rather than accuse Parsley of calling for genocide, it is in place to ask him to spell out alternatives.  Does "destroy" Islam mean winning a debate until every last targeted Muslim cries uncle and says, "I give up, you win"?  He may mean that.  Does the "destruction of Islam" mean the deconversion of a billion people and, preferably, conversion to Parsley's "Christian civilization"?  Try converting as many as one in your town, and then take on the millions more in Indonesia.  Does "destroy" mean bombing the 1,209 mosques in America, which number includes only a few of the world-wide total?  As of now, Parsley simply calls for "war."  By most definitions, doesn't "war" mean "killing"?...

The Military-Entertainment Complex

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives
by Nick Turse
Metropolitan Books/2008

Hollywood and the Pentagon have been in an intricate dance of support and cross-promotion for almost a century, from a time when the Department of Defense was still quaintly -- if more accurately -- known as the War Department. Today, however, without leaving Hollywood behind, the Pentagon has branched out into the larger universe of entertainment. Video games, TV, NASCAR racing, social networking, professional bull riding, toys, professional wrestling, you name it and the military-entertainment complex has a hand in it -- and don't forget about the Pentagon's links to Starbucks, Apple Computer, Oakley sunglasses, and well, gosh… in one way or another, directly or indirectly, just about everything that looks civilian in (or out of) your house.

In fact, there's a remarkable new book that looks into all of this, while doing the best job around of updating the old military-industrial complex, a term whose hard-edged simplicity an ever-expanding Pentagon long ago left in the dust. Whatever you do, don't miss Nick Turse's The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. It's an eye-opener on the degree to which we are, without realizing it, a militarized society; it is, as well, the latest spin-off book from Tomdispatch.com, where some of its parts were initially tested out. But let me just quote Chalmers Johnson on The Complex: "Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. The gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and enlist gullible 18 to 24 year olds make signing up anything but voluntary. Nick Turse has produced a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon's pervasive influence in our lives."

--Tom Englehardt, "Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon Goes Hollywood," March 20, 2008.

Available at 32% discount in Peace Pursuits, the APF online store.

"They Create Desolation and Call it Peace"

A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.

David Bromwich opens his essay "Euphemism and American Violence" (New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008) with this second-century critique of Rome in Tacitus' Agricola. "Euphemism has been the leading quality of American discussions of the war in Iraq," Bromwich contends.  An excerpt:

"Baghdad is calmer now; the surge is working." The temporary partial peace is an effect of accomplished desolation, a state of things in which the Shiite "cleansing" of the city has achieved the dignity of the status quo, and been ratified by the walls and checkpoints of General Petraeus. "The surge is working" is a fiction that blends several facts indistinguishably. For example: that Iraq is a land of militias and (as Nir Rosen has put it) the US Army is the largest militia; that in 2007 we paid 80,000 "Sunni extremists" to switch sides and then call themselves The Awakening. Americans have suggested that the members of this militia make up neighborhood watch groups, and have assigned them euphemistic cover-names such as Concerned Local Citizens and Critical Infrastructure Security. In fact, many of them are "increasingly frustrated with the American military," according to Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit R. Paley in a Washington Post story that ran on February 28.

Patriotism, Sports, and the Imperialization of Early Christian Imagery

From "The Private Art of Early Christians" by Peter Brown (New York Review of Books, 20 March 2008, 49-53), which describes the exhibition "Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art" at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas:

...[O]ne of the revelations of the catacombs is the extent to which Christians participated, with little sense of incongruity, in the one feature of urban life which their clergy had always condemned as irremediably profane. They frequently went to the games at the Circus Maximus and in the Colosseum.... In the fourth century, Christians were pulled into those moments of high excitement. Grooms and their circus horses appear on many Christian tombs....

We must always remember that fourth-century Christians went to the games not because they were incurably frivolous. The opposite was true. They went because they were patriots. In Rome, the games had always been the emperor's games. They were now laid on by Christian emperors. For a Christian to attend them was a gesture of loyalty. It was on the crowded seats of the Circus Maximus, surrounded by their fellow members of the proud Roman people, that the average Roman—Christian, Jew, or pagan—would have felt, at high moments of procession, that they were truly "One Nation under God." They did not necessarily feel this as intensely in the churches. Indeed, none other than Pope Leo I (440–461) was shocked to learn that many members of his congregation believed that it was the circus games, still celebrated with due pomp and ceremony, and not the supernatural protection of Saints Peter and Paul that had kept Rome safe in an age of barbarian invasion....

It is well known that in 312, the year of his conversion, the emperor Constantine hit on the chi-rho monogram as his own very special image of power. He was convinced that he had seen a vision of the Cross in the sky. But what he promoted for use in his army, as a standard and an emblem on shields, was this "logo" of Christ that was deemed all the more powerful for being a little mysterious, although any Christian would have recognized what it meant. It had brought Constantine's troops victory outside Rome. It continued to do so in a series of bloodthirsty civil wars that probably killed more Roman professional soldiers, in the conflicting armies, than ever perished at the hands of barbarians. Thus the peace of the Church and the subsequent Christianizing of the Roman world were ushered in under the protection of a symbol of good fortune and victory that had as little to do with the Bible (except, of course, for its play on the name of Christ) as a circus horse.

In a masterly contribution, Johannes Deckers spells out the implications of Constantine's decision. In architecture, in coinage, in large-scale representations as in small, we can follow Constantine and his successors as they groped toward forms of visual expression that seemed to be worthy of the emperors' new god: "Christ had to be of imperial stature."...

Two rooms later, in the last part of the exhibition, we see the ultimate symbol of Christ's power at its fullest development—a fragment of the Cross itself placed in a cross of gold studded with gems, given to Rome by the emperor Justin II sometime between 568 and 574 [pictured above].... Glowing in the dark with barbaric splendor, this was still a Cross of victory. As the inscription made clear, this was the Cross on which Christ had "subdued [death] the enemy of mankind." It was also a Cross calculated to keep human enemies (of which there were all too many by that time) away from the walls of Rome.

Inscription for a War

Stranger, go tell the Spartans
we died here obedient to their commands.
Inscription at Thermopylae

Linger not, stranger, shed no tear;

Go back to those who sent us here.

We are the young they drafted out

To wars their folly brought about.

Go tell those old men, safe in bed,

We took their orders and are dead.

--A.D. Hope

Charles Scriven, who forwarded this poem, writes that A.D. Hope (b. 1907) was an Australian author, and that the poem takes off from the famous battle of 480 B.C. in which the Greeks, led by the Spartans, failed to stave off the invading Persians under Xerxes.

Christian Leaders Seek Mediation With Adventist-linked Burundi Rebel Group

From a news item forwarded by the Adventist Press Press Service APD in Basel, also reported by the Ekklesia news agency in the U.K.:

Christian leaders in Burundi have called on a church-sponsored group led by former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano to reach out to the rebel Palipehutu-Forces for National Liberation (FNL), the last remaining insurgent group in the Central African country.

The FNL's continuing insurgency is seen as the final barrier for lasting stability in the central African nation, where more than 300,000 people are reported to have died as a result of more than a decade of conflict, much of it ascribed to ethnic differences.

An internationally brokered power-sharing agreement between the Tutsi-dominated government and Hutu rebels in 2003 paved the way for a transition process and a new constitution, leading to the election of a Hutu-led government in 2005.

The FNL, led by dissident Hutus, signed a peace agreement with the new government in 2006 but pulled out of talks the following year, halting implementation of the peace process (photo above: Burundi's President Nkurunziza (L) with FNL leader Agathon Rwasa after the signing of the peace accord; Yahoo! News Group photo). Burundi's church leaders say they hope the Chissano-led delegation can help bring to the FNL to the negotiating table.

Chissano is leading a delegation of representatives of the World Council of Churches, the All Africa Conference of Churches and the Fellowship of Christian Councils and Churches in the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, each representing a large global or regional Christian grouping.

He told reporters he would deliver a "message of peace, unity, fraternity and encouragement to the people of Burundi who are trying hard to break free of more than a decade of civil war," which has also spilled over into neighboring countries.

Press reports over the past few years have ocassionally referred to Adventists as predominant in the FNL. For example, a report last October on FNL concerns about participation in the truce monitoring commission stated:

No FNL leaders are expected to participate in the truce monitoring commission meeting of this Saturday 20 October as most are Adventist Christians who would never lead an attack on Saturday during wartime and so are not considered to be likely to attend in a truce commission with no security guaranties this Saturday. (link to the article at allAfrica.com)

Ronald Osborn comments reports of Adventist prominence in his 2004 essay, "No Sanctuary at Mugonero" (Adventist Peace Fellowship Essay #1). Details of an Adventist role in the FNL remain murky. And, it should be noted the the FNL itself appears to be divided. Comments from anyone with more information welcome.