No One Ever Wins a Fight

Tuesday 11/19/2013 4:35 AM

The theme of my devotions this week is charity, or, to use non-King-James-Version-of-the-Bible-language, love.  Yesterday I saw a post on Facebook in which one of my Facebook friends posted a link to a website calling for the impeachment of President Obama on the grounds that he is aiding and abetting the enemy.  According to the article the US Defense Department is hiring contractors in Afghanistan that have links to terrorism.  As if that isn’t bad enough it says that the US military is training Libyan military forces in both conventional and special ops techniques with the fear being they will more than likely be training Islamic terrorists. The article merely highlights the tactics in which both conservative and liberal political factions engage to try to bolster their arguments.  Over the past few years this type of grandstanding has led to a climate in which opposing sides cannot even sit at the same table to discuss issues without being labeled traitorous by their supporters, which results in political gridlock.

Unfortunately this same type of adversarial climate has seeped into the Christian community, which, more and more, is being characterized as people that are against things instead of being for things.  Christians are against abortion, against homosexuality, against sexual promiscuity, against … you fill in the blank.  I regularly see Christian groups on campus with signs (that include graphic pictures of aborted fetuses) telling people abortion is murder, that God hates gays and lesbians, etc., and tells them they are going to hell unless they repent.  I have never seen anyone responding positively to the message they bring because their grandstanding cuts of any meaningful discussion.  Instead I hear students muttering about crazy Christians and wondering who in their right mind would become a part of such a hateful organization.

One of my devotional readings today was an excerpt from Deep Is the Hunger by Howard Thurman in which he describes a fight in which he participated as a child.  He came home bloodied and battered with clothes that were tattered and his grandmother simply said, “No one ever wins a fight.”  He goes on to explain that he didn’t understand what his grandmother meant until many years later when he had matured and discovered that there are other ways to fight and other weapons to use besides fists.  The excerpt ends with these convicting words, “Perhaps the authentic moral stature of a man is determined by his choice of weapons which he uses in his fight against the adversary.  Of all weapons, love is the most deadly and devastating, and few there be who dare trust their fate in its hands.”

Christ’s command to his disciples is for them to love God above all, to love their neighbor as they love themselves and to make disciples.  When he came to earth his weapon of choice was love, and he trusted his fate into its hands.  He associated with prostitutes and sinners so much that he was rejected by the religious leaders of his day for his actions, but the sinners found forgiveness and repentance.  He commands his disciples to engage in warfare using the same weapon.  I am not called to carry signs castigating those I perceive to be the sinners of my day, I am simply called to love them with the love I have received from God and to trust the Spirit of God to bring them to the point of repentance and faith, much like he did with me.