There are two kinds of people in the world: those who view the glass as half-full and those who see it as half-empty.

There are two kinds of people, said Robert Frost: some willing to work, and the rest willing to let them.

There are two kinds of people: the ones who suck the life out of every day, and the ones who let the day suck the life out of them.

There are two kinds of people, said Abigail Van Buren: those who walk into a room and say There you are! and those who say Here I am!

There are two kinds of people, said Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction: Elvis people and Beatles people.

There are two kinds of people (I like this one): takers and givers—the takers eat better; the givers sleep better.

There are two kinds of people in your church: those who agree with you, and the bigots. (I like this one even more, don’t you know?!)

Okay, so that could go on and on. But that’s also the problem—any time you go down that trail of dividing up the world into two kinds of people, it goes on and on. The underlying premise is always the same—us against them. We are the good guys, and they—whoever they are—are the bad guys.

It’s a convenient way to live your life, and sometimes it’s a way to survive. In his most recent novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a father and son on a road that leads nowhere in particular geographically. They just keep moving in order to stay alive after an apocalypse has all but destroyed the world as we have known it. Those who are left wander the earth in search of food and try to stay alive without much hope of anything more. They encounter others along the road trying to do the same. Some are kind and others vicious. The man and his boy convince themselves that they are the good guys, but whether they are or not is tested every step of the way. With the prospect of the man’s death ahead, the boy asks his father what will become of him. You need to find the good guys, the man says. The boy just wants to stay with his father, but the man tells him he can’t, that he will have to carry the fire. The boy wants to know if the fire is real. Yes, the man says. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it. … You’re the best guy. You always were.[i]

We somehow need to believe that we are the good guys. But doing so requires that we believe that others are the bad guys.

We’ve been hearing this again this week in the wake of the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and the report to Congress from General David Petraeus. The rhetoric has ramped up again about the enemy and how much they hate us and seek our harm. We are told over and over again that things are black and white, so to speak—clear-cut. We are the good; they are the bad. We are the righteous; they are the unrighteous. We are the do-gooders; they are the evildoers. In this war against terrorists, we are told that nations are either with us or with our enemies. Us against them.

Isn’t this just a mirror image of the very thinking of those who flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings? Over and over we have heard the theology of Osama bin Laden and that of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinajad. America is the Great Satan. We are godless. We say we are Christians, but we are perverse and corrupt. We say we love freedom, but we use our freedom for the sake of all kinds of immorality. We oppress the poor in our own country, and we exploit the lands and peoples of god-fearing Muslim nations in order to plunder their oil and enrich ourselves. Whatever terror is unleashed upon us is God’s retribution for our sins. We are the evildoers whom God is judging. We refuse to do justice, so God is using our enemies to do justice to us. Us against them, again.

Now some of you are already extremely uncomfortable with my bringing up anything political. But what you are really uncomfortable with is the prospect that I might take up with them instead of us. You are afraid that I will say something to give comfort to the enemy. You want me to condemn the enemies of America and say, “God bless America.” But that is not patriotism; it’s nationalism. Nationalism says, America, right or wrong. Patriotism says, America, let’s get it right. The church ought to be more interested, however, in whether the positions we take reflect the flag of Christ we hold highest.

But that doesn’t mean giving a pass to those who would terrorize us in the name of God. There is no excuse for 9/11, no defense. To use the psalmist’s language, it was an abominable deed. It was an inexcusable act of murder, and humanity cannot tolerate it or rationalize it. It was wrong. Period.

What should our response be to such a dreadful thing? Two things, I think. I will say the second thing first so that I can spend more time on the first thing second. Instead of declaring war, we should have initiated an international and global police action to hunt down the criminals and bring them to justice. Without a nation to point to that is responsible for declaring war on us, we essentially created one—Iraq. Afghanistan didn’t even declare war on us, though it harbored al Qaeda and provided them cover. We could have been defter in order to protect other innocent human lives. If a mass murder had happened in our community and we determined that the criminals might have been hiding in your neighborhood, you would be angry and resentful if the police stormed every house, killing some innocent people inadvertently and humiliating others for the larger goal of rooting out the evildoers and securing the peace. If that is what we would expect on our turf, why would we not operate that way toward others on their turf? So much death and so much generational resentment and bitterness are being built by a response that has heightened, not lessened, the violence and the threat of it.

We hear a lot of questioning about whether Islam is a religion of peace; we ought to be asking ourselves if others can believe by our witness whether Christianity is a religion of peace.

Most important, in the wake of 9/11 we should have returned to God and repented. We should have asked whether we had been fools who had acted as if there were no God and behaved in ways that made us vulnerable to such a thing happening. Now, some tried to do just that wrongly. Jerry Falwell, for instance, immediately pointed the finger at America and oddly enough agreed with Osama about God’s judgment. On his TV program he claimed that the wickedness of pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and People for the American Way were one reason God had punished America. I point the finger in their face, said Falwell, and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ Pat Robertson, a guest on the show, nodded in agreement, saying, Well, I totally concur.[ii]

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have done more good than many, including me, give them credit for often enough. But all I can say about this is, Well, I do not concur. We never know the mind of God perfectly enough to know when something is divine judgment. I prefer in moments like these to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln, who faced the horrors of war over the scourge of slavery by calling upon all to examine themselves. The Almighty has His own purposes, he said in his Second Inaugural Address. And then he reminded us of Jesus’ words: Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh (Matt. 18:8).

This is the kind of finger-pointing we need in times like these—the kind that aims the finger at ourselves instead of our enemies. As Dan Clendenin puts it: We should not wish divine judgment on anyone or any nation; we should wish them God’s shalom. When you imagine that God hates all the people you hate, then you can be sure you’ve created him in your own image. … German pastor Martin Niemoeller, who was imprisoned by Hitler for eight years (1937–1945), [said it well]: ‘God is not the enemy of my enemies; he’s not even the enemy of his own enemies.’[iii]

Psalm 14 makes a point we miss at our own peril: The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one. And here we have the proper attitude. Rather than pointing our finger at our enemies—whether Muslim extremists or Americans who live in ways we deem sinful—we should remember that we too are evil. We are none of us righteous altogether. Every human being is good and evil both. We want to be more good than evil, but God sees that we are all in this mixed state. Which means that when we act to bring judgment against evildoers, we can never be sure we are doing something totally good and righteous ourselves.

This is the same logic that St. Paul adopts in Romans, when he says that none are righteous, no not one (3:23), and therefore we all need a savior. God must be the judge, for God alone can judge the hearts and the deeds of all righteously. As Martin Luther said, our position before God is always simul iustus et peccator—at the same time both justified and sinner. We are never just one or the other. Every saint is also at the same time a sinner.

For our part then, we must put ourselves in the best position to receive God’s favorable judgment. And the psalmist says that to do so we must not side with those who would take food from the mouths of the poor or oppress the weak or frustrate those longing for dignity as children of God. These are the ones God is coming to save and deliver and defend. If, in other words, you want to be more confident of God’s favor, you must look out for the weak and vulnerable. You must do unto others as you would have the do unto you; thus, love your neighbor as yourself.

If a man leaves his wife for another woman and then fails to provide for her the security she would lack without him by taking his assets and leaving her with little, he is asking for God to come to her aid against him. If we systematically use public funds by our property tax structure to strengthen schools in wealthier white neighborhoods—which keeps those schools in poorer neighborhoods weak—we are asking for judgment that might come in the form of never-ending racial strife.

As a nation we must examine whether our policies and practices toward neighbor nations of the world contribute to their wellbeing as well as ours or whether they believe we are only trying to enrich ourselves at their expense. We will never have peace and friendship with other nations, with other religions, with other churches, with other family members, or with other neighbors unless and until both parties are convinced of mutual respect and good will. As long as they or we are committed to the use of endless violence to secure the future, the future will remain endlessly violent and insecure. And that is true whether the ammunition we use is bullets or words, with the intent to kill the body or wound the soul.

My favorite one of those two kinds of people slogans is this: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who want to divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. If the psalmist is right, God sees us all as sinners in need of redemption. So instead of the motto “us against them,” maybe it’s time for us and them to begin to think of “us and them.”

 

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