Whom Would Jesus Shoot?

The scriptures referred to are Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5.

A week ago Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, an 18-year old white supremacist shot 15 people, 11 of them black, killing 10 people. That Sunday a 68 year old Chinese immigrant drove from his home in Las Vegas to shoot 6 people, killing one, at a Taiwanese Presbyterian church picnic in Laguna Woods, California. That Monday I attended a webinar about Christian Nationalism for which I had registered long before these 2 men committed hate crimes on opposite coasts of our country. The speakers at the webinar, both sociologists of religion, mentioned the 180 page screed the Buffalo shooter had posted to rationalize his deeply irrational act. They did so because, while the shooter said he was not a Christian, in describing white culture he said its religion is Christianity. There is a huge overlap of White Nationalism and Christian Nationalism, because both are about maintaining purity. The speakers said the trinity of these “us against them” ideologies are personal freedom, order and violence. They see no contradiction in supporting both order and violence, nor in being concerned only for their freedom and not for that of others. Nor in killing people in the name of Christianity.

Last week we said that one way to define evil is as the misuse, abuse or neglect of what is good. Another definition of evil is the intentional infliction of harm on others. The Buffalo shooter included in his long racist rant a hand-drawn map of the store he targeted as well as instructions on how to arm oneself and do the same. There is no other word for that but evil. But today I want to look at yet another definition of evil. Evil can be seen as having a narrow definition of goodness. It's easy to spot it when you encounter a person who defines goodness as what's good for him or her alone and to hell with everyone else. That is pure selfishness and one hallmark of a psychopath, displaying a lack of empathy for others. But there are less narrow definitions of good that are still evil. The Buffalo shooter restricts goodness to what is good for his race and to hell with everyone else. The California shooter confines goodness to what is good for the nation of his birth and to hell with others, in particular the breakaway nation of Taiwan. When you narrow the scope of goodness, you can easily justify evil.

In the case of Christian Nationalism, the irony is that it totally misses a key part of the very Bible which it purports to revere: the all-encompassing nature of God's love. While God chooses a specific people, he tells Abraham right at the outset that the purpose of this blessing is that “all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:3) The blessing is to be shared with everyone. That was God's intention from the very beginning. And so while we initially see the focus of the story of the Bible seem to narrow from Abraham to his son Isaac and to his son Jacob and from his 12 sons, to Judah, and from Judah to his descendant David, when it reaches Jesus, who brings us every spiritual blessing, the focus quickly expands to his disciples and to Jews of the Diaspora and to the Samaritans and to the Gentiles and to the world. Similarly, the Bible begins with the creation of the heavens and the earth and ends with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. What ties both together is the new Jerusalem, which comes down from heaven, as we see in our passage from Revelation. There “the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” No nation or people is barred from it for “Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.” Earlier in Revelation the elders around the throne of God sing to the Lamb, “...at the cost of your own blood you have purchased for God persons from every tribe, language, people and nation.” (Revelation 5:9) Not from some of those groups but from every one of them. Later we read “Then I saw an angel flying directly overhead, and he had an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people.” (Revelation 14:6) The gospel, the good news of what God has done and is doing in Christ, is for everyone. Christian Nationalism is a contradiction in terms—and a heresy.

When Jesus affirms that the second of the two great commandments is to love your neighbor, an expert in the law asks, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) Because if you take the word “neighbor” literally, you could restrict it to someone who lives nearby. That's what the Greek word means. The Hebrew word means “friend or companion.” In other words, someone you know or have a relationship with. This is probably what the expert in the law is going for because Luke tells us he wanted to justify himself. But in response to the question, Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan. In it, the man beaten and left for dead is not helped by a priest or a Levite, the holiest of his fellow Jews, but by a Samaritan, someone Jesus' audience would not consider to be either racially or religiously pure. To Jesus, the traditional definition of neighbor was too narrow. He expanded it to include anyone you might encounter.

And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “You have heard it said, 'Love your neighbor' and 'hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be like your Father in heaven, since he causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even tax collectors do the same, don't they? And if you only greet your brothers, what more do you do? Even the Gentiles do the same, don't they? So then, be prefect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48) The Greek word for “perfect” also means “complete.” Loving only those with whom you have a good relationship is spiritually incomplete. Only by loving all are you truly like God, in whose image you were created.

As is everyone else in the world. The idea that some people were not created in God's image came out of the Enlightenment! This 17^th and 18^th century intellectual movement not only gave rise to ideals such as liberty and progress and the use of reason and constitutional government but also the idea of racism. Scientists thought humans could be separated into races which had different abilities and dispositions. They classified some races as inferior, therefore “scientifically” justifying treating them differently and restricting what rights and privileges they were given. Some Christians even proposed that darker races belonged to a different act of creation by God and thus were not fully human. Others justified enslaving other races by linking it to Noah cursing his son Canaan, saying he would be a slave to his brothers. (Genesis 9:24-27)

But if all are created in the image of God, then all persons have inherent worth. Killing human beings is prohibited by God because he created us in his image. (Genesis 9:6; cf. Genesis 1:27) In Leviticus, just a few verses after God tells gives the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) he says, “When a foreigner resides with you in your land you must not oppress him. The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself...” (Leviticus 19:33-34) You are to love your neighbor as yourself; you are to love the foreigner as yourself; you are to love your enemy. Biblically there is no one you can hate.

Not only can't you hate anyone, you can't even neglect them. In his parable of the last judgment Jesus says that he considers what we do or don't do for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned and the foreigner as being done or not done for him. (Matthew 25:31-46) First, because he is God and we are created in the image of God. But more than that, Jesus died to save the world. (John 3:17) Everyone you encounter is someone whom God created in his image and for whom the Son of God died, whether they know it or not. God knows it, however, and holds us accountable.

So these mass murderers, and those like them, do not uphold the values of Christianity, whatever they say. Quite the contrary. I entitled this sermon “Whom Would Jesus Shoot?” and I hope people will instantly see the internal contradiction there. But you know who more closely upheld the values of Jesus? Aaron Salter Jr., the security guard and retired police officer who tried to stop the gunman in Buffalo. And John Cheng, the doctor who tried to disarm the shooter in Laguna Woods. Both gave their lives to save the lives of others. As Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this—that one lays down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) Aaron Salter Jr. and John Cheng showed that love.

So rather than add to the long list of people who have become famous for killing others, let us instead remember officer Aaron Salter Jr. and Dr. John Cheng, who died to save others. If more of us were willing to live and die as they did, then maybe—just maybe—we would become a Christian nation, one that follows in the footsteps of Jesus Christ who gave up his rights and privileges as God and took up his cross and sacrificed his life to give us undeserving sinners eternal life in the kingdom of the God who is love.