A Genuine Alternative--September 12, 2025

 A Genuine Alternative--September 12, 2025

"Live in harmony with one another; do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." (Romans 12:16-18)

The eruption of violence in our country in the past forty-eight hours, along with the anniversary of horrific violence in our country twenty-four years ago, has brought these ancient words of the apostle back to the forefront of my mind today. On Wednesday, we reeled at the news of what appears to be political violence in the form of an assassination of a young speaker with many followers, as well as the news of a mass shooting at a school in Colorado, where two students were put in critical condition beyond the shooter who took his own life.  And on Thursday, we recalled the memory of terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers using passenger jets as weapons, along with two others that crashed into the Pentagon and a field in Somerset, Pennsylvania.  The air is thick with the heaviness of both, like the black smoke of death.  We might as well name that reality today, rather than pretend we can move on unchanged. 

And yet, here is this other vision, this alternative way of being in the world, one which runs counter to the old repetitive scripts of violence that begets more violence and animosity that begets more animosity.  Here are these words from an open letter written twenty centuries ago by a man who knew what it was like to be driven by violence that thinks it is righteous; here is this passage from Paul's letter to the Romans, the same Paul who had hounded the early Christian church seeking to destroy it, who had blood on his hands and had been determined to round up disciples of Jesus for imprisonment, torture, or death, and yet who had been transformed through an encounter with the risen Christ to become one of the church's greatest missionaries and theologians.  Here is Paul, who knew what it was like to be convinced that killing and violence were tools to be used in God's service, and then who also learned that he had been wrong.  Here is the same man, now turned 180-degrees away from the myth of redemptive violence, giving us in the rest of the community an alternative to that mindset which had held him captive.

And interestingly enough, in the space of these few sentences from Romans, Paul calls us out to the margins in different directions--first, to direct us to associate with "the lowly," the people regarded as unimportant, of no influence, and with no status or prestige; and second, to direct us toward those who have shown evil to us and not to respond with evil in return.  Paul leads us outward from our comfort zones, both to the people regarded as "nobodies" and the people we would label our "enemies," and he instructs us to be decent, humble, and peaceable toward all of them.  And of course, this former enemy of the church who was often treated as a nobody as he went from town to town knew what he was talking about. He knows the transforming power of meeting evil with good, hatred with love, and violence with peace.  He is living proof that such strategies can change the world, as well as changing your enemy.

So here is Paul's counsel, spoken first to a fragile early Christian community living right under the nose of the very hostile Roman Empire in its capital, and also to us: "Go find the people who are being treated even worse than you and make friends with them, and then commit yourselves not to seek revenge when someone goes after you. Instead, look for ways to be at peace with everybody."  It is downright revolutionary, if you think about it, but just not the kind of violent revolution that folks usually think of when they hear that word.  Paul is advocating a refusal to play by the world's rules, whether by rejecting the world's categories of status and importance or rejecting the world's impulse to get even.  A church that actually sought to befriend the people who have been dismissed as nobodies and that refused to seek revenge against those who harmed them would get some attention, and it would change the world. Like Dr. King once put it, "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.... Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."  Here, in Romans, nearly two millennia before Dr. King's words, Paul was already charting out that course for the Christian community to bring a genuine alternative to the empire's (and the world at large's) seemingly endless cycles of violence and retribution.

So it's not that we have no clear voices pointing us to a different way of life. It is rather that we have often decided that such voices are not practical, not popular, or not easy for us to do in real life. As G.K. Chesterton observed, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."  All too often, when we have been wronged, we have given into the mindset that we need to hit back, to "show them" and make an example out of the ones who have wronged us, and that we need to recover the loss of our status and reputation by getting even.  All too often, we have decided that Paul's directions do not apply to us, because they are "unreasonable," "impractical," or make us look like we are "weak" in the eyes of the world.  All too often, we have said that the church cannot spend its resources befriending the folks dismissed as "nobodies" by the world, because that won't bring in more members, more money, or more prestige.  All too often, we have heard or read Paul's words and just decided they weren't really for us.  So we just fuel the monstrous machine created by hatred, rather than depriving it of power.  The last twenty centuries of history, replete with violence, war, revenge, and estrangement, reveals how much the world has been longing for something different.

I won't pretend that these verses offer us a magic spell to end all violence out there in the wide world. But I do think that these words--or rather, a community that dares to embody them--will have the capacity to stop feeding the beast, and at least offering the world the alternative we are desperate for. That, I believe, is the precipice on which we sit right now.  The violence reverberating through the past two days in our society can either fester, grow worse, and metastasize into more and more violence, justifying itself with each new cycle that "The other side did it first!" or "They do it more!", or the cycle can be broken.  We have the ability to choose in our own circles, our own spheres of influence, and our own relationships, to answer evil with good, hatred with love, and animosity with peace.  We can only be responsible for our own lives and the points at which our lives touch others, but we can at least do that.  "So far as it depends on you," Paul notes, "live at peace with all."  In other words, we aren't commanded to fix, scold, zap, or smite other people who do not share our commitment to Christ, to force them to follow our lead.  But we can offer them an alternative way of being in the world, one which genuinely feels like something different--something utterly new in contrast to the same old "They-hit-us-so-we-get-to-hit-them-back" thinking that we know doesn't work.

Today, you and I have the ability--and the responsibility--to embody the alternative to the world's inhumanity.  We can be the ones who remind our neighbors, friends, and social media acquaintances that we are not doomed to keep repeating the patterns of the past, because Jesus has made it possible to move in a new direction.  The One whom we follow is the One who refused to call angel armies to get revenge against his executioners, but instead prayed for their forgiveness and loved us all even "when we were enemies" of God (Romans 5).

What could that look like today, in your and my day... in the rest of this year... or in the rest of our lives?

Lord Jesus, enable us to break out of the old cycles of seeking status and revenge, to go in the new way you are charting for us.