Buy Swords/Capitol Insurrection

This is about what happened on January 6, and before.

This is about the Cross and the sword.

This is about how easily we can miss the point (or be led away from the point) for self preservation or preservation of a preferred way of life.

This is about hamartia, about missing the mark, about sin.

This is a little bit about Christian Nationalism, but only a little bit… that would really require more words.

This is about Jesus, and hope for redemption for those far from the Father.

I go back to The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus. The decades encompassing the time of Christ were filled with social unrest, state violence, anti-state violence, compliance, rebellion.

Two forces would be on opposite sides of a battle, and it was recorded that both sides prayed to God for victory. They both petitioned God to be on their side. But were they on God’s?

We are afforded a certain luxury (among many luxuries) in Christ and with the gift of the Scriptures. For those who believe Christ is who He says He is, there is a clarity we are given to the character of God. And yet we can easily be deceived.

Jesus said to some of His followers that if they didn’t have a sword, they should sell their cloaks and go buy one. And that verse has been used to justify Christian gun ownership, for the potential use case of Christian gun brandishing, and potentially Christian gun trigger pulling for Christian self defense of Christian (or non Christian) life or Christian (or maybe non Christian) property, or liberty.

And I had a few in person back and forths about this, going everywhere else but the following verse to respond. Sometimes, if something seems out of character from Christ, maybe just keep reading. Otherwise we can really take things out of context.

We can make much of the exception over the rule, and this can lead us down a slippery slope.

(One can make an argument for a Christian owning or using a gun, sure, but that passage (in context) does not.)

When Christian flags and Jesus Saves signs were seen at the scene of the Capitol storming on January 6, 2021, some were not completely taken by surprise.

This was predictable. The specifics were unforseen but something like this was bound to happen. Compromising Christlikeness for personal or political power has been a cancerous staple of American Christianity for centuries. Jemar Tisby’s book The Color of Compromise covers this in depth.

I would highly recommended these podcasts that get into some specifics around what happened on January 6, and/or the history that helped to lead to that day (you can always fast-forward through the intro phases of the episodes if you want to get straight to the content:

Holy Post Podcast: “Was The Capitol Attack A Christian Insurrection?”

Southside Rabbi: “The “Gospel” of Christian Nationalism” and “Faith and Politics” (these provide a bit of backstory to the forming of the Religious Right and a certain branch of American Evangelicalism… a partial “how did we get here”.)

Southside Rabbi: “Capitol Under Siege: A Christian Distinctive”

As far as songs go, as you hear in the spoken word above, Sho Baraka’s The Narrative, Volume 2 – Pianos & Politics really came back to me, especially the song Pianos in Jericho. I appreciate that Sho is really cognizant of the danger of becoming what one is speaking out against if power dynamics are switched. His work holds up an inward looking mirror as well as an outward looking lens.

We all want to believe we would do the right thing if we got the One Ring, but we are naive if we don’t believe it will work to bend us towards unrighteousness, and that something magnet-like in us is primed to lean in that direction by default.

As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it in a 1918 [Leaf] from [His] Notebook Of A Tamed Cynic, “Like myself, they have mixed the worship of the God of love and the God of battles.”

We also have to be careful of our double standards. I hope this piece conveys that.

There are other songs and works that speak to this same or very similar topics, so there may be a follow up to this at some point in time. Hoping to maybe share those then.

Over it all, He Is Risen!