Dear friend:

I remember where I was. In the kitchen of our house at Allegheny Street, in Michigan. It did not rock my world, because my world was absurdly small and absorbed with small and large problems on a personal scale. I was still a kid, and sheltered from the world; it would be a long time until I went back to watch news coverage and view footage. It would be years before I went to NYC and saw Ground Zero. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon when I found out the towers had fallen.

I'd heard all my life that the world and all in it were going to burn anyway, and I deduced that it wasn’t worth caring for the world. To a child's view it's scary when things like 9/11 happen, but you kind of expect them when your understanding is literal and normal is being shaped. Everything is new to children.

But now.

Remembering with everyone else this 9/11/20 and finding my understanding is vastly different, has made me think of something somewhat unconnected with that date: church. I didn't use to have any confidence in saying "my church." It was a place of dysfunction for me for a long time. Then I grew up, moved, and started to serve my church and something strange happened. I began to love the people so much it was scary to me. I began to heal alongside them in this love and suddenly my whole "ownership" of belonging in church changed. The physical church I've chosen to attend has been through much as a group of people. I've touched on it before, but we've walked through scandals, tragedies and darkness and you just don't come out of these things unscathed. Some things we did wrong. One thing we did right: pursuing God at the cost of reputation and safety.

And Jesus, who is faithful, has been raising up fire out of this place. To my surprise I'm learning to say, "my church" with familial pride. Not as the whole Body of Christ, but as part of its growth in my corner of the world.

This church, as representative of a group of people, is a name I identify to the world as a place which means something to me. A place where I put in a stake, flew a flag against the powers of darkness and said, "I'll die on this hill." Not because of the church, but for the church.

In this time I also began to serve my community, and the healing which was happening spiritually started happening on a civic level as well. I began to love the people I was getting to know, and the town, state, and country which are representative of us. Again, I've been finding a love so powerful that is worth giving my life toward. It's worth fighting corruption and darkness, and getting in and among the people to get to know them and eat together. At a time when I am more different from this world than I have ever been in mind and heart, I am no longer indifferent to it.

It's different from when I was growing up when there wasn't much of anything worth putting that much love and time into. We kept ourselves rigidly separate from the world, and passive in the bubble. We forgot much we ought to have remembered, including that the true distinction between the world and the church is in the heart and not in what you can touch, taste, or handle. In our effort to keep ourselves pure and righteous, we missed love. We thought purity was separation, we did not see that it is sacrifice for the sake of connection. That there is a love so profound it will die for the world.

I didn't know what it meant to step into a world of darkness and become part of it for love. Jesus did, but of course I wasn't looking for him in that way. I thought he was going to reform, not transform.

Thank God, his love and healing has transformed the passivity and division of my heart, and now I know I can bring light to the darkness without fear. Enter into the world of people and eat with them, work with them, and stand or die with them. For the first time in my life I have the courage to say, "it is not in my own righteousness I stand, but in Jesus. Therefore, my love is not at peril of being stained, because the blood and Love of God have already taken care of those rags.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Friends, we do not wait for America to come to God to love it sacrificially, we love it now. Without reserve. Giving ourselves to Jesus, as he gave himself to the world, so that the world might be saved.

Most things in this world try to mirror the Gospel in some way or another. My country is no different. Godless, it will fail. That is why I cannot afford to stay quiet. It is the people which hold the image of God, and it is the people who must speak, who must act, who must love, love mercy, and do justly.

I can't save my country, but I can give my life in service to them so they might know Jesus. A Christian parent wants this same thing for children. They don't ignore the physical needs of their children so that they be saved. They take care of them in every way so that they may grow to know Jesus. We take care of the whole, so that the heart may be saved. I am passionate about this in my local and national community. We dare not neglect the physical and civic needs and justice of the nation, in our Christian passion to see people saved. If we truly love, we will care for the whole.

…and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?

We grieve, lament, and rejoice with others, because we love.

So today I remember the terror of darkness and death, the wound which slashed our country of the United States of America, and say, "I love my country."

Not from misguided patriotism, nor even yet because I look to my country to be God, but because I believe in the power of God to heal our hearts, and consequently the land in which we live. I can humble myself today, and pray for this place which is riddled with division and problems.

"Dying is easy, young man, living is harder." -Hamilton

It's easy to condemn. It's easy to wash our hands and consign Jesus over to the mobs to be crucified. But planting our stake in the ground because of love, that is probably the hardest and most powerful thing we can ever do. A few years ago I read a quote by one of the Revolutionaries of the 18th century, and it went something like this.

"We fall, so others may stand."

It was a picture of the Gospel, and one I'll never forget. Y'all. Don't just wash your hands of this world. Jesus died for it. He's restoring it, and he's asking us to participate in his work. I know that the USA is a government of man, but man is a work of God.

Honor those who have given their life. Get out of the ivory tower in which you live and get down and start working in the dirt like God does. For the Christian there is no option but to love the people, as we love God. If you can't say you are doing that, what are you doing?

I choose to stand this next moment in silence, for my countrymen who were subjected to the violence of burning death. Of the terror of thousands of feet of structure collapsing below their feet. Of smoke asphyxiating them, albeit mercifully. Of ashes spreading over the city. Of people who, that moment, knew they would not see their family that night. Those waiting to hear if they would see their person that night. Those who rushed into the fire to save.

I choose to remember.

Because even though the Prince of Darkness reigns now, "the earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him."

L.Raine

P.S. Because it will come up, even though I deem it less necessary to talk about, the title will lead my friends to think of my position about nonresistance. I wrote it as I did because I have laid aside the passivity which so easily besets Anabaptists, but is not limited to them. I have laid aside a previous understanding of the kingdoms of God and world. This doesn’t mean that I have taken up a one of the world. Far from it, I just don’t choose to discuss it inside that frame, here. This post is merely to challenge the way we think about the world in which we live. For anyone who wants to know more, I exhort you to watch this movie. L.E.

Photo by Courtney Hedger