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12.01.03    Steve         The Baptism of Christ / Reflections on Martin Luther King and non-violence
                                       as global citizenship.

The baptism of Jesus marks the beginning of a revolutionary movement – a revolution in living. All of us here, the household of the baptised are inheritors of this movement. Did you know you are a revolutionary? What this means for people, in a diversity of places and times will vary hugely, but here are some thoughts for our own times.

 This coming week there is a public holiday in the US for Martin Luther King Day. There seems to me an irony in this as the military build up continues in the Gulf.

 Over the holiday, I’ve been reading some contemporary commentary on the speeches and writings of MLK, and whilst most of us think of King in terms of the ‘official’ view of him as an advocate for the rights of African Americans, a great man with the attendant flaws of the average man, this does, I think, an injustice to the real scale of his vision.

King’s ideas were developed in an era when liberation struggles were going on all over the world, and he recognised that the time had come for a more global concept of citizenship.

To become part of this world-wide fellowship, King believed that we must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. "When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people," he warned, "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

King was a Christian revolutionary in the best sense of the word. In the wake of the youth rebellions in Northern US cities, which required a more complex solution than visions of Black and White children marching hand in hand, King began to explore a new kind of revolution. He envisioned a nonviolent revolution that would challenge all the values and institutions of our society, and combine the struggle against racism with a struggle against poverty, militarism, and materialism. King sought to conceptualise a new system that would go beyond capitalism, which he said was too "I-centred, too individualistic," and communism, which he saw as "too collective, too state-ist."

Warning that material growth had been made an end in itself and that our scientific power had outrun our spiritual power, he refused to accept the dictatorship of High Technology, which diminishes people because it eliminates their sense of participation. King's experiences of systemic racism had taught him that love of power goes hand in hand with domination and destruction of community. He developed a profoundly political concept of love (building on his theological understanding of love as the New Testament’s agape) that is based on the willingness of the oppressed to go to any lengths to restore or create community. Practicing this concept of love empowers the oppressed to overcome fear and the oppressors to transcend hate. Pursuing a way of being, characterised as non-violence, said King,  nurtures reconciliation and the creation of what he called ‘the beloved community’ – King’s term which gathers up both what the Gospels call ‘the kingdom’ and what Acts calls ‘the church’. The beloved community was for King the goal/end, but also the means – the way. A way of living, an ethic rooted in agape – that unconditional love which pours itself out for the sake of others.

Well, I wonder what King would be saying on the world stage now, 35 years after his death? As the Bush administration continues to exploit popular fears to carry out its agenda of military buildup, cutbacks on social programmes, and suppression of dissent, we need to tap into King's revolutionary spirit. Christian leaders are saying that the best way to insure our peace and security is not by warring on the "axis of evil" but through a radical revolution in our own values and practice. That revolution must include a concept of global citizenship in which the life of an Afghani, Iraqi, Iranian, North Korean, or Palestinian is as precious as the life of someone in the West.

The United States is arguably the most militarised country in history. The magnitude and global reach of U.S. militarisation are hard to contemplate. U.S. military spending is nearly $400 billion a year, approximately $750,000 per minute!

According to the Centre for Defence Information, the U.S. military budget is more than the combined military budgets of the next twenty-five nations, and more than twenty-six times the combined spending of the seven nations named as U.S. enemies (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria).

Military expenditures in the 2003 fiscal year budget are $78 billion more than when George W. Bush took office. This increase alone is larger than the entire military budget of any other nation.

The staggering scale of this amount of power in the hands of one nation is inevitably linked to maintaining policies of corporate economic domination. ‘Big Dog Diplomacy’ is the model for US foreign policy. And, as we are reminded constantly by our own government, the closest ally of the US is Britain.

If this is the context in which we find ourselves – then let us readdress the question I posed at the beginning – what does it mean to be a member of the baptised community of Jesus – the revolutionary community?

Jesus lived in a world that was unjust, violent, and dangerous like our own. Rome dominated first-century Palestine through a combination of brutal force and sophisticated propaganda. It ruled with the assistance of compliant client kings like Herod and with the help of religious leaders who controlled the people through the Jerusalem Temple.

Many Jews were oppressed within the Roman- and Temple-dominated system. They hoped for an imminent reversal of fortune based on human or divine violence. As promised in their sacred text and stories, salvation was understood as the crushing defeat of enemies within history (Exod. 14:30, 15:1-5; Ps. 18:43-48a; Isa. 25:9-12) or at the apocalyptic end time (Dan. 8:17, 10:14, 11:35, 12:13; Matt. 3:7-8,10,12). Many placed hope that the glorious reversal described by the prophet Isaiah would be realized through their own violence supplemented by God's power. God would come "with vengeance," would "save" the people and "spare no one" (Isa. 35:4; 47:3). The oppressed would receive God's favour and become oppressors.

Jesus saw these messianic and apocalyptic hopes as dangerous fantasies. In the midst of a deadly spiral of violence--oppression, rebellion, and repression--Jesus embraced nonviolent resistance. He taught love of enemies (Matt. 5:43-44) and told parables exposing the inner workings of the oppressive system, including one depicting the futility of violent rebellion (Mark 12:1-12). He blessed peacemakers (Matt. 5:9), warned that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matt. 26:52), and modelled nonviolent resistance (Matt. 5:38-42). Jesus' nonviolence was rooted in the character of the nonviolent God he embraced (Matt. 5:45).

In this context, Christians need to take the nonviolence of Jesus seriously. We must confront the West’s militarisation and challenge the complicity of our government. Our task is to offer and live out an alternative global vision, one that addresses the economic, social, political and environmental needs of all people and the planet we inhabit.

On the 4^th of April 1967 King preached a sermon at Riverside Church NY, during which he said:

“The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just’. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”

There are many avenues for creative action. We can contribute to the building of a global nonviolent peace movement. We can continue to challenge the abusive power of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organisation. We can demand that our nation develop an alternative energy policy, and work to demilitarise our nation's budget and foreign policy, as well as our own hearts and minds.

Never has the futility of violence been more evident in our world than today. Yet never has our world been more dominated by political and economic groups who benefit from militarisation. Our efforts to work for justice, to embrace nonviolence, and to build a broad-based movement for peace are of vital importance.

On the cover of New Statesman last week was the banner headline – Can God Stop the War? The lead article was about how for the first time in decades, there is a serious possibility that the church of Jesus Christ might have a meaningful influence on the international stage. This followed critical announcements by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the leader of the RC church in Britain.

How does it feel to be a member of a revolutionary movement? In the spirit of Jesus, we must rediscover our blessed roots as peacemakers.
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