What does victory look like? (A prayer for peace.)

My last post about How to Train Your Dragon got me thinking about the problems of war. Christianity sadly has a long tradition of war and imagery associated with it. One of the best known Lutheran hymns called "A Mighty Fortress" envisions life as a spiritual battle and God as our defender. It conjures images of a castle, a strong arm, a shield and defender. These are wonderful images in the right context, but when juxtaposed on the often bloody history of the Christian faith, from Constantine's forced conversions to the Crusades and the Salem witch trials, it leaves a lot of us anxiously trying to distance ourselves from such images, and sometimes from the faith itself--with good reason. As I mentioned, we have plenty to atone for on a global scale, and those terrible events don't even consider the daily violence of hypocrisy and judgment that many people suffer at the hands of Christians.

At the same time, images of conflict are sort of central to the faith, whether that be in the form of an external conflict between people or internal ones. In the Old Testament we see Egypt against Moses & the Israelites, Israel against its various neighbors, Assyria, Babylonia, or even Israel against a prophet like Elijah. In the New Testament, it's Jesus and the Pharisees, and the young church in conflict with the surrounding Pagan society and those who would persecute them or give them false teachings. Spiritually, there is the cosmic conflict of good against evil--God vs. Satan, or the holy against the demonic. Our lives are set up this way too, with faith meeting a world which largely dismisses belief as a fairy tale, or one belief system against another. In human terms, conflict usually ends badly, with one side winning and one side losing. That's what happens in war, right? Two sides fight, one of them wins and one loses. Except in the kinds of battles we have, both in war and among ourselves, the winner has usually faced such a cost that they have lost, too.

Think about a marriage. Every couple fights, and in my experience, usually both sides are a little bit wrong. One person did something inconsiderate or hurtful, and the other person becomes disproportionately upset about it (usually stemming from some personal insecurity and not actually because of their spouse). Say the couple has a huge blow-out fight and one person storms out of the house and refuses to come back until the other apologizes. Desperate to keep their spouse from leaving, the other side apologizes, but secretly still feels very hurt. The fight may end with an apology and apparent forgiveness, but it doesn't really end there. It will pop up again, because ultimately this kind of battle without true reconciliation leads to another fight or resentment bubbling under the surface. Ultimately, no marriage can survive unresolved fight after fight or slow burning aggression bubbling under the surface for long. Words were spoken, the battle was brought to a close, but neither party won. War is the same way--one side is victorious, but both sides have suffered atrocious loss. What is the cost of that kind of victory?

For God, victory is not the aftermath of a bloody battlefield, with lost limbs and lost lives and post-traumatic stress disorder and scorched earth and tenuous peace. We are a violent, selfish people as we see again and again in scripture and in our own lives. David, one of our great heroes of the faith, set up a man to die in battle so that he could steal his wife. We do things just as nefarious to one another all the time, and even if we win in the short term, we are ultimately all losing because we have left a torn up battlefield in our wake. I think much of the atrocities in Christian history can be attributed to a misunderstanding of what it looks like to be victorious. For us, it looks like getting our way at any cost. The cross shows us that real victory is not "living by the sword" and forcefully converting people or imposing our culture and values on others, but instead real victory is self-sacrifice which leads to reconciliation.

When this happens, the result is not a bloody body left to rot, but an empty grave. True victory looks like two partners crying with each other, both acknowledging their wrongdoing and asking forgiveness in humility. That kind of vulnerability mends broken hearts and rebuilds lost trust. True victory looks like Christians protecting Muslims during a revolution so that they can pray safely. True victory looks like humbly offering apology for past wrongs perpetrated against GLBT people, and it looks like forgiveness in return. True victory is a message of love that speaks louder than a mob of hate. Real victory involves reconciliation, and reconciliation involves truly understanding the other.

That's why, despite our biggest failures and best efforts to twist the gospel, this faith has endured so long: because ultimately the message of the gospel is about the calm after the storm. The good news of God's love is about picking up the pieces of our broken lives, and it calls us again and again to the kind of justice that restores rather than subjugates. Christianity has been responsible for a lot of evil in the world, and we need to humbly ask forgiveness for the wrongs we have committed and continue to commit. But we also need to remember that we boldly proclaim this message because it has also sown a seed for real freedom, justice, and shalom (wholeness) that continues to bloom in spite of all our sin and tragedy. Victory is not an empty, bloody battlefield, but about the promise of what can come after: enemies embracing, lions laying down with lambs, and trees whose fruit is a balm to heal the nations (Rev. 22:2).

When we understand what real victory looks like, we can once again sing of God our fortress and shield knowing we harken to images of life rather than death. That message of hope endures because we so badly need it in a world with dictators and violence against women and environmental abuse and all sorts of evil. As a body of Christ, we must hold tightly to that message and try to live according to its truth in a world that so often pulls us towards conflict and rewards power. Glory be to God who promises to transform our blood splattered battlefields into a holy city of peace, and let us live our lives striving for God's victory. Amen.