Mark 15: 16The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace (that is, the Praetorium) and called together the whole company of soldiers. 17They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. 18And they began to call out to him, "Hail, king of the Jews!" 19Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. 20And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.

Holy Week and this year’s season of Lent are a time when Scripture and current events overlap, especially in the matter of torture. Whatever we may say about the theological and salvific nature of Christ’s death on the cross, we must also acknowledge that what He suffered, from the moment of His arrest, was torture. Christ died for our sins. And He died by state-sanctioned torture. The passion narratives make up major chunks of the Gospels even if the events only took up a few days in Christ’s thirty-year life among us. One reason for that is that the first generations of Christians would read or hear them knowing that they very well could face much the same trials, and would be called to stand faithfully by their confession as did Jesus.

Its pretty much an open secret that torture is now a weapon in the arsenal of our country’s "War on Terror." But now its called, "Enhaced Interrogation Techniques." I am not in any position to evaluate the efficacy of "enhanced interrogation techniques," although the rationales and scenarios used to justify it strike me as a very long logical stretch. As a human being however, I can and must say something about the moral depravity of torture as an action or a policy, and about its terrible physical, emotional and spiritual effects for the victims. Survivors of torture describe life afterward as a process of "trying to put the soul back into the body."

And as a pastor and a Christian, I can and must say something about the moral and spiritual effects of torture upon all of us, even of its presence and permission, whether we should ever find ourselves being tortured (slim chance, I hope) or not. As a character in George Orwell’s 1984 admitted, "The object of torture is torture." In other words, gathering vital information by the only means (allegedly) possible is not just a rationale or objective for torture; it serves as permission, a cover, a fig leaf for the brutality in people that finds expression in, among other things, torture. The ends and effects of torture are: 1) the sense of power derived from cruelty and domination over others; 2) the intimidation into obedience of both enemies and citizens through the overt and implied threat of torture; 3) the cheapening of public values and morals, so that independent and responsible citizens become obedient subjects, enured to the sufferings of others, and willing to carry out any policy of their government, however reprehensible and illegal. Torture thus becomes a powerful assertion of the state’s or the leader’s ultimate sense of absolute worth, above and beyond the law and the people it is supposed to serve. I can’t think of any other rationales for excusing or engaging in torture.The morally and spiritually contagious effects of torture on the wider society are evident in the growing popularity of "torture porn," the depiction and deployment of torture as a plot device, and for entertainment, in movies, books and television.

On one hand, we might say that the decision of so many governments to take up the power to destroy life as we know it through nuclear weapons makes the decision to justify and employ torture small potatoes. But recent developments around torture, in America at least, represent a political, moral and spiritual sea change. Now there is a claim to the right to act above and beyond the law (military, federal, state and local) and against the constitutional guarantee against "cruel and unusual punishment" by persons and agencies within the government. How can that not risk cheapening everyone’s respect for the rule of law? Maybe this isn’t all that new, either. Except for the degree of openness and the claims of rightness about it.

As Christians we must resist, as did Jesus, the actions and the effects of torture–or at least the threat thereof–upon all of us. We must not let ourselves be infected by the attitude that inflicting pain is real power, that might makes right and that the end justifies the means. Christ’s life and teachings permit no divorce of ends from means. We must not let the official support of violence and cruelty cheapen our values and corrupt our moral sensitivity. We must not let the implied fear of torture, which, though aimed at enemies, can’t help but frighten citizens, render us silent, passive and discouraged.

On one hand, I am very much surprised that I now live in a country that reserves the right to torture, without ever having emigrated. Especially one whose founding documents so eloquently enshrine the rule of law and human dignity. On the other hand, I should not be surprised at what human nature cooks up and justifies. But every day, when I pray, "Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me (Ps. 51)," I trust that I am reinforcing the spiritual fire wall between my spiritual and moral center, and the thickening clouds of moral confusion in the world around us. But keeping ourselves pure from the spiritually and morally contagious effects of torture is only a start. One way I have pushed back actively is by contributing to Center for Victims of Torture http://www.cvt.org/main.php. I consider the little bit I can give to them an act of atonement for the use of torture in my name, by my country. I wish I could do more.

What do you think?

Mathew Swora, pastor

Emmanuel Mennonite Church

MALENESS, MASCULINITY AND VIOLENCE

It hit me so fast my knees almost buckled. As it was, I had to find somewhere safe, alone, to sit down, trembling, wanting to cry. Hearing her statement, it was as though a rock fell from my head down to my feet, taking my heart with it. She (not my wife) said it in all innocence, not knowing how it would hit me, as she looked up from the newspaper account about the latest outbreak of gun violence at a major university, in which victims were shot at random before the perpetrator turned his gun upon himself. "This trend gives us one more thing to worry about," she said. "And what they all have in common is the male gender."

Precisely the thought which I had been fighting to hold at bay. Not just because of the latest killings at Northern Illinois State University, but at Virginia Tech, in other schools, and through a sordid world history of warfare, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Its hard to argue with the sheer weight of numbers. We men grow up with great expectations about being able to protect our loved ones. But deep down, doesn’t it ever bother us that we’re almost always supposed to be protecting them from other men?

Hearing someone else verbalize this broke the last thin line of my defenses against the monstrous logic lurking in my unconscious mind: that since physical violence is overwhelmingly (yes, not exclusively) done by males, violence must therefore be inherently a male trait; I am male; therefore, I am violent, even guilty of violence perpetrated (mostly) by other males, by reason of our shared maleness. Every such assault is not just an assault against women (though it often is); it is an assault against all human beings, including men, especially those of us guys who don’t like being feared for the simple fact of our maleness.

Good thing I took a logic class in college. Now that I have recovered from that momentary wave of despair over my maleness, I can peel open that statement and pick it apart the way I would a tamale (my favorite food). I started to feel better when I also realized that the woman who had made that blanket observation about men and violence obviously felt safe enough around me–a guy– to verbalize it.

But it took me a while to get my head and heart back on straight. Should men despair over their maleness? That’s probably where a lot of male violence comes from in the first place. And it would only lead to more violence. But I don’t know how I wouldn’t despair, except for the fact that Jesus was male. And he wasn’t violent. He was powerful, forceful, assertive and authoritative, as when he threw over the money-changers’ tables and drove the sacrificial animals out of the temple. But never was he coercive nor violent toward other people. Not that maleness is closer to, or more reflective of, God. It isn’t. Both sexes are necessary to each other and to reflect the image of God (Genesis 1: 27), especially through their mutuality and harmony. But if I didn’t believe that, how would I avoid either affirming the (statistical) male propensity to violence, or despairing over ever changing it?

I also find it helpful to draw a distinction between biological maleness, which is a God-given gift (like femaleness) and the many different social and spiritual constructions of masculinity, many of which make violence central and important. I define masculinity as what we and others tell us our maleness is about.

Violence is not a disease of maleness. Prostate cancer is, but not violence. Violence is a disease of fallen human nature, whose most overt and physical aspects have found their expression more often in socially-constructed masculinity than in femininity, ever since the Fall into sin and the resulting estrangement between the complimentary parts of God’s image in the flesh: men and women. Not long after Adam had hidden himself from God and blamed everything on God and Eve, we read that his male descendants, like Lamech, were taking multiple wives and boasting of their homicidal prowess (Genesis 4: 19-24). The gulf of estrangement between men and women that sin brought into the world runs through our very selves, estranging men from the traits and experiences we typically define as female or feminine. I am hardly in any position to say how this estrangement affects women, not being one myself.

While Christians are rightfully struggling over their theological, pastoral and missional responses to homosexuality, we have been relatively blind to the biggest and most destructive issue of sexuality, what I call the unholy trinity of mainstream masculinity:

• misogyny, the fear and contempt of women and all things female, including those things we typically consider feminine within our selves as guys, like tenderness, connection, receptivity and nurture

• machismo, the act of basing our value as persons upon our ability to attract, command, control and dominate women, and

• militarism, our tendency to project our fears and insecurities onto others, and to try to resolve them by means of destructive and dominating power and technology. Militarism is not only a response to enemies; it requires enemies, and will seek them, find them, make them and try to destroy them, even where none might otherwise be found.

This unholy trinity of misogyny, machismo and militarism is such a feature of so many social constructs of masculinity (not of God-given maleness), that it is almost invisible, especially to us guys, as water is to a fish. We men have hard work untangling our sense of ourselves, and the gifts of our maleness, from the thicket of mainstream masculinity in which we live.

So, I’ve started wearing a white ribbon around town. A few people have asked me about it. I got the idea from The White Ribbon Campaign, a men’s movement, based in Canada, which advocates against violence toward women, by men. And if you’ll listen to me long enough, I ‘ll tell you about the church to which I belong, which supports me in my commitment to nonviolence. I wear it as a way of publicly declaring my nonviolence toward all people, as a way of saying that I am unarmed and not dangerous. Just maybe a little scary, with the occasional spastic outburst of ideas like the one you just read, which may be taken as a challenge to so much of what we’re taught about the value and reason for being guys. But what a relief it is to learn that the gifts of being male are about loving, just sometimes in different ways from those in which women love.

What do you think?

Mathew Swora, pastor

Emmanuel Mennonite Church

Which does us more harm? In this age of terrorism, winner-takes-all politics, and growing scarcities, which are more destructive, the things we fear, or our fear of them? The following story, which I heard in Burkina Faso several years ago, may shed some light. I’ll begin relating it the way Jula-speaking griots (story-tellers and singers) of Burkina Faso typically begin a story: 

“Nsirin, nsirin: m’ben’a bla Siriki ani sama kan.”

A story, a story; I shall put it on Siriki and the elephant.

A herd of elephants can be dangerous enough, but most dangerous of all is a young rogue bull elephant who wanders off on his own. No other elephants are around to make him mind his manners and respect his elders. Such a rogue bull elephant once broke from the herd in the neighborhood of Boromo, Burkina Faso, and wandered south toward the sugar cane fields of Banfora.

About this time, in a little village along the winding road to the market city of Banfora, lived a young man named Siriki. Like other young men, Siriki had a field of yams, some of which he sold, and some of which he cut up and planted at the beginning of every rainy season. In just three or four years, the few yams his uncle had once given him had grown in number to where he could take some every market day to Banfora and sell them for money to buy gifts for his family and gas for his moped

Though Siriki lived more than a few miles from Banfora, he could always get to the market early by taking a narrow trail, a winding footpath really, through the forests and the cane fields. He got better prices when he set out his yams early, and by taking this short cut, he didn’t have to contend with the big trucks full of fruits and rice and cloth coming into town for the market.

One market day morning , Siriki loaded a large burlap bag with yams, each one with black, prickly skin, as long as a man’s forearm and as thick as his leg. He wrapped the mouth of the bag closed with string, hoisted it onto the rack on the back of his moped, and tied it down with rubber straps cut from the worn-out inner tubes of truck tires. Keeping the moped and its heavy cargo barely balanced, Siriki began pedaling and cranking the starter on the right handle bar until the moped roared into life and sped off toward Banfora.

Just a mile to the west, by a small village under a baobab tree to the left, Siriki turned off the road, zoomed past a courtyard, scattering chickens and a few goats, waved to the old men sitting in the shade of the big baobab tree, and wound his way through the corn fields toward the trail that would take him directly through the forests and the cane fields to the market of Banfora.

After passing through fields of millet and sorghum, and negotiating his way through two muddy ravines, Siriki was more than halfway to Banfora when he rounded a bend in the trail and saw, standing between walls of tall grass, blocking the path just a stone’s throw ahead, a mountain. Strange: there’d never been a mountain here before. Or was it a big, gray rock? Or the wall of large, concrete block building? That’s new.

And then Siriki saw the rock, or the wall, or the mountain move. When an ear flapped, Siriki suddenly understood, with a shiver going up his spine, that it was an elephant standing broadside across the trail. It was the young rogue bull from the herd near Boromo! Siriki squeezed the brakes of his moped for all he was worth, and the moped slid to a halt. The motor died, leaving Sirki straddling the bike, trying to keep it upright against the weight of his sack of yams, which was now leaning to one side.

When the elephant heard the sound of Siriki’s moped, and smelled Siriki and his yams, it lifted its trunk, flapped its ears and trumpeted an ear-splitting, blood-curdling challenge. Trembling and terrified, Siriki began walking his moped backwards. But the elephant decided that he wanted yams for breakfast and began stamping its feet and shuffling toward him.

Siriki briefly considered abandoning the moped, but then he knew he’d never outrun the elephant on foot. Only on motorized wheels could he possibly outrun the rapidly approaching mountain of a beast. With the elephant getting closer, Siriki turned the moped around and began pedaling as fast as he could, while cranking the starter with his right hand. He could feel the sheer weight of the elephant causing the earth to tremble as it closed in on him. The engine barely began coughing to life when he felt the tug of the elephant’s trunk on his bag of yams, causing him to lose speed for an instant. Then the rear wheel began to spin under the engine’s power, and after a second of resistance from the elephant’s grasp on the bag of yams, Siriki’s moped shot forward, breaking free of the elephant’s hold.

But the elephant was just as determined to eat those yams as Siriki was to escape, and as he sped through the walls of grass on either side of the trail, Siriki could hear the elephant trumpeting in rage and crashing through the weeds in hot pursuit, raising clouds of dust, flattening bushes and breaking through overhanging branches as he came. He could even feel the ground shaking through the spinning wheels of his moped.

Never had Siriki slid so recklessly and so quickly through a muddy ravine as he did with the elephant behind him. The loud thumping and splashing sounds he heard in the trickle of muddy water at the bottom of the ravine convinced him that the elephant was still in hot pursuit.

But while speeding down the trail toward the next ravine, Siriki noticed that he no longer heard the elephant trumpeting, nor did he feel the ground quaking. He wanted to glance behind himself to see if the elephant was still in pursuit, but to do that safely, he would have to slow down. Just as he loosened his grip on the accelerator, he heard more loud banging and the sound of something crashing through the brush. With a quick turn of the wrist, Siriki accelerated and zoomed through the next ravine more quickly than he ever knew he could, weaving and sliding through the mud and the water, with the heavy bag of yams rocking back and forth. More banging and splashing sounds convinced him that he was still being chased.

Soon he began to see the tall baobab tree rising over the village by the road, and the cone-shaped thatch roofs of houses standing guard over the patches of corn that tell you that you are approaching a village. Surely the elephant must be afraid to follow him this far, Siriki thought to himself. But some more thumping, rolling, and crashing sounds made his heart leap up into his throat.

As he passed, at break-neck speed, children and women out hoeing their corn, they looked up at him, frightened that anyone should be driving so recklessly through places where people live and work. “Run; an elephant is after me!” Siriki yelled, and they fled the fields, grabbing the littlest children and running toward their homes. The old men under the baobab tree heard him and scattered, too.

As he regained the paved road, Siriki thought that surely the elephant would never follow him this far. But another loud thump and more crashing sounds in the brush at the edge of the road scared him into fleeing toward his village at top speed. Perhaps a hunter along the road would shoot the raging rogue elephant, he thought. If he ever got home alive, Siriki told himself, he would wait for the next market day to go to Banfora, and by the main road that time.

People were still coming down the road, some in trucks and cars, some on bicycles, some on foot, carrying firewood or charcoal or sacks of fruit or grain on their heads, to sell in Banfora. As he raced up the road toward them, yelling about a pursuing elephant, people scattered left and right, which only further convinced Siriki that the elephant was indeed still behind him. More thumping and crashing sounds in the brush along the road kept him racing ahead at full throttle, until he saw a woman drop her load of firewood from her head and yell, “Yams! You’re dropping yams from your moped!”

Siriki slowed down, glanced behind himself, and saw a young boy running from the road toward the woods with a big black yam under his arm. He stopped and, turning around, saw, almost beyond sight, another girl stooping to pick up a yam from the side of the road. Looking behind himself, at the moped’s rack, he saw that the burlap sack was open and nearly empty, except for one last yam. No raging elephant was anywhere to be seen.

Then Siriki knew: the elephant must have opened the sack when he pulled on it with his trunk. When, he wondered, did the elephant stop chasing him, and when did he start confusing the sound of falling yams with the sound of the world’s largest land animal in hot pursuit? And the question I leave with us is this: Which did Siriki more harm in the end, the elephant, or his fear of the elephant?

All Jula stories end this way: “N’y'a soro yoro minna, m’ben’a bla yen.” And now I shall put this story back where I found it.

Mathew Swora, pastor

You’d think that that is what we are, according to some people, even us pacifist Mennonites, because we believe in God. In the words of a rising chorus of writers, bloggers and even a few preachers, belief in God is either a necessary prerequisite for violence, or constitutes a kind of violence itself. A November issue of The Economist suggests this with a cover picture of God handing down a grenade from a dark cloud, in a caricature of the Sistine Chapel painting by Michaelangelo. I understand that much of this is in reaction to militant Islam and the terrorist attacks of September 11, which were labeled by some wags as “the supreme faith-based initiative.” It doesn’t help that some of the Christian language supporting America’s War on Terror mirrors the Islamist language of the terrorists.

The charge, outlined by “evangelical” atheists such as Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith), is that if anyone would believe in the outrageous tenets of any religion, then they would be capable of believing and doing anything, no matter how outrageous. And when the stakes are so high (eternity) and so absolute (God, right and wrong, heaven or hell), then the true believer can allegedly only prove his or her faith worthy of God’s approval by the ultimate act, the willingness to kill infidels, and even to die in the act of killing. The claim is also made that there is nothing inherent within any religion, especially not among the Abrahamic ones, that would moderate or restrain any murderous impulse. Quite the opposite, some say. Even before the events of September 11, 2001, I was repeatedly told by some who had lived through the Second World War that to claim belief in anything or anyone implies an unavoidable next step: that I must kill anyone who believes differently. So they strongly believe that you should never believe anything strongly. Granted: that is indeed how they experienced belief in pre-war Europe, of either the religious, fascist or Marxist sort. This may explain, in part, the great degree of secularism in post-war Europe. Karen Armstrong effectively declared, in her book Holy War, that warfare and violence are inherent and inevitable aspects of monotheism. I look in vain for any mention of Christian pacifists and of Christian pacifism among these assertions about religiously-inspired violence.

But they do exist.

So, if violence and monotheism are inherent and necessary to each other, how does anyone explain the Amish? Or the Mennonites? Or Quakers, Hutterites, the early Franciscans and other Christian pacifists, as were most of the first Christians of the first three centuries before Constantine? They are and have long been staunchly pacifist, yet not because their faith was weak, relativistic, universalistic and tolerant of all things. Many of them would qualify as fundamentalists, evangelicals and true believers of a type that would have Dawkins or Armstrong scanning them nervously for weapons or suicide bomber belts. In vain, of course.

Its not that we necessarily believe any less strongly than would a suicide bomber or an armed Christian crusader. Its that our belief system insists that the ultimate proof of our faith is not in the depth of our hatred for anyone, nor in our willingness to kill, but in the depth and extent of our love for friend and foe alike, to the point that we would rather die for our enemy than kill him or her. The world saw evidence of this stance in the response of the Amish community to the killer of the schoolgirls at Nickel Mines, PA., and to his family.

For the Christian pacifist, the proof of our faith is not in the urgency wth which we seize the levers of history with weapons of terror and acts of violence, but in the love and patience with which we work for the eternal and the temporal welfare of all, indiscriminate of whether they agree with us or like us or even wish to kill us. Because this is what we see in the nature of God, “who makes his sun to shine and his rain to fall upon the just and the unjust,” and “whose kindness is meant to move us to repentance.” And we know this because of Jesus, who demonstrated such love to the end, and who calls for the same from his followers. He is the definitive self-expression of God, and the key by which we read and interpret the Bible.

Nor is it that our willingness to coexist and even to serve and love people who disagree with us is based on any warm and fluffy universalism or moral relativism. Peace of the sort I’ve just described requires a cold, realistic eye to the nature of human stubbornness and sinfulness, beginning with our own, so that we know ourselves to be in need of at least as much forgiveness as any foe or persecutor. Peace of this sort requires a moral absolutism even stronger than that of the suicide bomber or the Christian crusader, because it applies to the means as well as to the ends. We’d rather fail by virtuous means than succeed by evil ones, because we trust God to vindicate his means by the end he brings to history. Its not that we lack absolutes; its that peaceful, positive, merciful coexistence with even our enemies and detractors is as much a moral absolute to us as is any other value in the realm of sex, wealth or truth-telling. But our job is to apply these absolutes to ourselves. That is all for which God will hold us accountable.

I hope that reassures any reader that they would be safe to visit Emmanuel Mennonite Church, no matter what they believed, or not. But then, some people in history have feared us precisely because we wouldn’t kill people. That’s one reason why the pacifist Anabaptists were so fiercely persecuted in 16^th Century Europe, in part, because they wouldn’t join the Wars of Religion. This was Eduard Gibbons’ accusation against the early church in his 18^th Century classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: that the Roman Empire was overrun by the barbarians because there were so many Christians who wouldn’t fight them. If I could choose, I would prefer this older criticism over the more contemporary one; its fairer, and its just galling to be constantly accused of something you stand so strongly against.

Let’s see: Gibbons slammed Christianity because of its pacifism, while others slam Christianity because of its allegedly inherent violence. Which is it? I guess it only proves that moral discernment around matters of war and peace shouldn’t be based on public opinion polls or approval ratings.

Falling from a supersonic bomber, or fired from a cannon or a self-propelled artillery piece, the shell splits open, releasing a cloud of bomblets that explode in bright orange bursts of sharp and molten shrapnel. Indiscriminately, each fragment burns as easily through tank armor as it cuts through clothing and human skin. More often than not, the skin is not covered with a military uniform. Bomblets that fail to explode will remain, perhaps for years, hidden in the soil, hanging from trees, or embedded in roofs and walls until a child or a sudden shift sets them off.

“How do these cluster weapons square with the just war theory?” David Sperry asked the presenters at last Tuesday night’s presentation (October 30, 2007) at Luther Seminary. The criteria of a just war, by which we reassure ourselves of the rightness of our causes and conduct in war, include the stipulation that only the duly appointed soldiers of duly appointed armies are to be targets of other duly appointed soldiers of other duly appointed armies. No answer was given to David’s question, and frankly, I see no good answer to it. The practice and technology of warfare has long left the just war theory in the dust. Some estimates now put the proportion of civilian to military casualties at nine to one.

The presenters included Titus Peachey, U.S. Peace Educator of the Mennonite Central Committee, and four visitors with intimate personal experience with cluster bombs: two from Laos and two from Lebanon. Their stories included:

• Ahmad, who, on the day of his fifth birthday, found and played with a cluster bomb dropped or fired by Israeli forces over his home in Lebanon. His father, Raet, travels and speaks in the memory of his son, and in advocacy against these weapons.

• Phounsy Phasavaeng, of Laos, who, in childhood played in the forest with her nephew, only to lose him when he found a cluster bomblet, thought it was a toy, threw it against a tree and was killed in the ensuing explosion.

• Sida Douangtasivilai, whose Laotian village was bombed during the Vietnam War, and whose husband was killed and whose son was injured when he accidentally struck a hidden cluster bomb with his hoe while farming.

• Bassam Chamoun, of Lebanon, who has directly experienced all the conflicts in South Lebanon since he was five years old, and who works with Mennonite Central Committee as country representative.

We learned about the work of these resource persons as educators and advocates in their own countries. But as important as education and de-mining are, the more important thing is that no more cluster bombs be sent and used. Their use has been so extensive in this last decade (Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, to name a few recent places) that demining is not keeping up with “remining.” This year, eighty-one countries agreed to sign a treaty banning cluster bomb use by 2008. The list does not include the United States, but bills are in process in both houses of the U.S. Congress, about which you can write or call your representative http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200709/090707.html

For more information, check out the MCC website at http://www.mcc.org/clusterbombs/

Our thanks for the Tuesday night presentation (and other events around the cluster bomb tour) to Virgil Wiebe, law professor at the University of St. Thomas, and activist and advocate against mines and cluster bombs, as well as the UST students who helped with the resources, maps and logistics, and to all the others at Emmanuel Mennonite Church and Faith Mennonite Church who helped with lodging, food, transportation, etc, during the visit of our friends from MCC.

Mathew Swora, pastor