Sermon, Emmaus Road Mennonite Fellowship, 2nd Sunday in Lent, March 1, 2026
I’ve known Sahar Vardi for 15 years now, and ever since the first time she spoke to one of my groups, I’ve asked her to re-tell the same story, and she shared it here this past Thursday. She described how not only Israel’s economy but its culture, its everyday life, its religion, too, is militarized, it’s shaped by a “narrative of fear.” Linda Steury asked her for an example. Nisan (parts of April and May) is the first month in the Hebrew calendar; they call it the “month of miracles.” Jewish people celebrate Passover, the Exodus from Egypt – liberation, freedom of the Promised Land, welcoming the stranger. But in militarized Israel, Sahar said, they interpret it this way: “In every generation someone is out to kill them, then God saves them.”
One week later, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a national holiday. Ceremonies, names of the dead read, six candles lit for the six million; air raid sirens blare throughout the country, two minutes absolute silence, everything, traffic, too, grinds to a halt. Woven into that week, they commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto armed resistance uprising, 56,000 bravely killed. A few days later, Soldiers and Victims of Terror Memorial Day – soldiers parade in uniforms brandishing their weapons, more sirens, moments of silence; they died for freedom. And immediately following Memorial Day, Israel Independence Day – family gatherings, fireworks, military parades, air shows. For three weeks, a narrative of victimology and fear, religion and state intermingled, military power as redemptive (only weapons can save us), played out in civic rituals.
Today, in our country, a narrative of fear and victimology, too. The story perpetuated by the president and those on the political and religious Right – our way of life is under attack. The scapegoats – overseas, it’s Iran (yesterday, we attacked Iran killing its leader, Israel’s tail wagging America’s dog); Palestinians, there’s Cuba, too, drug cartels in Venezuela, Mexico; the EU, even Canada. And in this country, Somalis in Minnesota, immigrants, people of color, Democrats, trans and gay people, a host of journalists, judges, “liberal elites,” others – not just the other side, but now “enemies of the people.” And we know the pressure to gerrymander districts, purge voter rolls, demand drivers’ licenses to vote; and now his attorneys are finalizing a draft for him to declare a national emergency to nationalize elections. The president as savior.
The only answer? ICE on our streets with a license to kill, macho-ing up the military (I’m glad they changed the name from Defense to Department of War; at least now they’re telling the truth), more guns. It’s ironic, it used to be those on the Right telling us the 2nd Amendment was there to protect them from the government; now they are the government and they’re threatening the rest of us, legally, with their guns. A narrative of victimology and fear, religion and state intermingled, military power as redemptive (only weapons can save us) played out in civic rituals (military parades, sporting event flyovers, pledges of allegiance, all with flags waving – watch it all play out in July’s 250th celebration under the guise of “American values”).
What makes this American version of civic faith even more dangerous is it’s been legitimized and given divine sanction by many Christian churches, with a perverted theology, a tribal god, a warrior Jesus, and a Bible interpreted as a land deed. How much damage has been done throughout history because religion – Christianity – baptized the privilege of a powerful few, provided cover for manifest destiny, gave divine approval for prejudice, hate, bloodshed, war? Has it ever turned out well when the state and religion blessed each other? “The rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air, our flag was still there. O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave” – the anthem is offensive to me. Weapons will save us from manufactured enemies here and abroad. A nationalist, exceptionalist, militarized Christian America as god. This is our civic story, America’s civic faith.
Yet, this is not the only narrative, it’s not the only story. We here at Emmaus Road has a different story to tell.
FAITH. I was driving Sahar to Indianapolis on Friday; we discussed that while Christian churches and other groups have spent their time focusing on theology, especially Christian Zionism, its influence a drop in the bucket compared to the global arms trade and militarized economies of the US, Israel, and other countries. We agreed that’s where churches ought to be focusing their efforts, but that’s too uncomfortable, it’s safer to focus on theology, we try to keep our hands clean from politics that way. And I repeated to her what I’ve shared here – not only Christians, but Jews, Muslims, atheists, so many others followed Martin Luther King, Jr., not because they shared his Southern Baptist theology but because they were looking for – they wanted – a religious leader to speak out with a bold, clear moral voice, and that’s what’s needed today.
Then she added, “And they want faith, too.” She surprised me, this secular Jewish woman, “They want faith.” I asked her what she meant: “We all want some deeper, some transcendent meaning; religious people give us that. It’s why most leaders of resistance movements throughout history have been religious in one way or another.” “They want faith,” she said, faith in something beyond themselves they can hold to, that can give them hope. We have a story of faith to share, that, no matter who they are, the world wants to hear.
HOPE. She also spoke to us of hope, she reframed hope for us. We in the West see a problem and our first inclination is we want to fix it, we want to fix it now. It’s completely understandable, the problem is urgent, the need great. But there are problems that defy a quick fix. Hope, based in faith, does what it can in the moment trusting the seeds we plant will in the long run bear fruit. She said, “I live in a city 3000 years old. What’s a hundred years?” I noted the Roman Empire was to last forever, Hitler’s 1000-year Reich, so also Zionist Israel, every empire, and such is the chutzpah of our nationalist Christian American Empire. Then she said, “But the civil rights movement, all human rights movements defeated those forever plans.” And then I added, “So also the Kingdom of God, Sahar. We plant trees under whose shade we’ll never sit. So also the Kingdom of God.” She smiled. Planting seeds of hope, who knows if we’ll be successful, but we can remain faithful. We have a story of hope to share.
LOVE. Faith. Hope. And Love, too. I’ve spoken about love to all kinds of individuals and groups, in counseling and classrooms, in community centers, churches, temples, mosques, in cities here and in cities overseas. And I’ve never once spoken about love without quoting Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, … . People will even give their lives if only the ordeal doesn’t last long and is soon over. … But active love is work and takes guts.
Dostoevsky chose as the epigraph for his book, John 12.24, “I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” It’s the key that unlocks the whole book. It’s about a dysfunctional family, a crisis of national identity and the struggle with the cost of freedom – sound familiar? It’s also how one of the brothers becomes an atheist; he rejects the old God who allows suffering and instead embraces compassion as his creed, compassion for the suffering, what he calls, “the true heart of Christianity,” what he also calls, “the chief and only law of human existence.” But mostly it’s about love, the cost of love, dying to self. I’ve been thinking about that and Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, being “born again”; what it means for me, for Mike, to “die to self,” to be “born again.” “Dying to ego,” rolls so easily off the tongue, but to contemplate what it really means – we don’t want to die to self, so to be born again. What will it take?
So what would it mean, not just for each of us, but what would it mean for us here “to die to self” as a Fellowship? What does love look like for us collectively? I know full well the pain principled action can cause in families, frayed friendships, reputation, loss of job, the personal cost. Love can mean compassion; it can also mean confrontation, even separating yourself, demonstrating the consequences of actions. “God is not neutral, God takes sides,” Archbishop Tutu said; it’s always for the oppressed. Sometimes protecting oneself, standing guard over the abused takes precedence over loving the abuser.
Sometimes money is too expensive; sometimes community acceptance, even friendship, too expensive; sometimes silence is too expensive. All I know is it’s all hard, very hard, and only you, in the privacy of your own conscience, no one else, only you can decide where your line is, the price you’re willing to pay, and if, when, how to make your stand. But – and we know this, too – not to decide is to decide, there’s a price to pay for our speaking out, and there’s a price to pay for our silence.
Faith … Hope … and Love. That’s our story. I’ll close with the entire Father Zosima quote:
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action … . People will even give their lives if only the ordeal doesn’t last long and is soon over. … But active love is work and takes guts.
And here’s the rest:
I predict that just when you see with horror that, in spite of all your efforts, you’re getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it – that very moment is when you’ll reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who’s all the time been loving and mysteriously guiding you.
The world has a militarized, weaponized, power-hungry story to tell, all with divine approval. But we have a story, too, a story of faith, hope, love to share, a story the world wants, needs to hear. Let’s be bold in telling our story, no matter the cost.