Good Catch, Murr: Clearer Thinking on Israel and Gaza

 

Sometimes your kids point you in the right direction. 

The following is from a text exchange with a thoughtful middle daughter who wanted to make sure I'm reminding good church folks to pray for the entire Israel/Gaza situation, and not just part of it. Her comments (not published but answered here) helped to clarify a few things for me. Good catch, Murr.

Here's the thing: people aren’t grasping that, this time, there won’t be any winners.  Still, they insistently choose a side and get rabidly, predictably angry when others choose differently. For all concerned, especially Jesus' followers, it's another adventure in missing the point.

What’s also missed is how destructive it can become here. The anti-Semitism on display around the country and at a prominent intersection in our fair city is starting to look like Kristallnacht to me and Jews are justifiably scared. Some homegrown gutter savages, aping Hamas gutter savages, have concluded they’ve been anointed and empowered to attack and kill Middle Eastern looking Americans. Little ones even. I say ‘savage’ because I don’t believe they’re deranged kooks. They are Eric Hoffer’s truest True Believers with a twist of old-style godless nationalism or the new and less improved Christian nationalism. The banality of evil is running our streets with a high-powered weapon under its jacket.

Currently, both political parties are in almost complete disarray and appear to be nearly non-functional and unequal to the hour. I can foresee the Chicago convention next summer being a much uglier replay of the 1968 convention with the summer of 2020 as dress rehearsal. I’m listening to smart people on all sides saying pretty stupid things and I’m really getting worried.

Iran, Russia and China are watching - all very bad actors - and the likelihood of international blundering hasn’t been this high since the lead up to the War to End All Wars that ended nothing and unleashed decades of suffering. I’m telling anybody who will listen that prayer - extraordinary prayer - is the only way out because I see a high likelihood of a demonic element in all of it. The confusion level is a leading indicator.

 "Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down!"  Isaiah 64:1

Christians who can’t see the need or won’t pray Isaiah-like prayers and prefer to jump on a meme team are lazy and beyond reprehensible. They are in gross dereliction of duty and rival gods have replaced their first love.

Christian nationalism, tribalism, maniacal Islamic terrorism and some strains even of Israeli grievance revenge are all motivated by a hidden but very nasty brand of evil. Without playing the equivalence game, I’m strongly convinced there are doses of spiritual darkness in all of it. With delight, the principalities and powers fiends, who are very real, are working overtime.

When people take strong, exclusive, my-side-is-the-right-side stands, it’s always informative to notice what they won’t talk about. To varying degrees, this time around, everyone has a reason to hang their heads. Again, no winners and plenty of losers who didn’t ask to be included. In Thomas Merton’s phrase, most of us are guilty by-standers with much to confess.

The whole thing is a horror show and I’m having trouble seeing Jesus in any of it: women and girls of all ages anally raped while tied to trees or their own beds, babies crushed under buildings, thousands on both sides of the barrier forced to leave home. Dozens of hungry, frightened old people in suffocating confinement as bombs collapse their tunnel prison. Intentional targeting and regrettable accidents makes for a slaughter of innocents even Herod couldn’t have envisioned. The weeping agony of thousands of fellow image bearers is tough to process. If Christians, Arabs, Jews, protesters, counter protesters and at least ten thousand apologists, columnists and talking heads could once see it for the unwinnable horror show it is, they’d realize picking sides is pointless because no one will win. Just stop it. I keep thinking of Mark Twain’s War Prayer.

Thanks again, Murr. After all this texting my thinking is a lot clearer. But I don't feel better.