What The Crusades Got Right

6th Sunday of Easter
1 John 5: 1-6

Do we have any Elon University Alumni here today? Now, the next question is what was Elon’s mascot when you were studying there? (This may expose your age). Today, Elon are the Fighting Pheonix, but until 1999, they were the Fightin’ Christians. The Fightin’ Christians! Honestly! This could be on the top ten stupidest mascot names of all times (right next to the Stormy Petrels of Ogethorpe University or the Banana Slugs of UC Santa Cruz)! I mean really. The Fightin’ Christians! Could there be a more obvious oxy-moron? Christians are not fighters. By our very name, we are people who follow Christ, the One who did not choose to fight, but would rather die than resort to violence. Christians are people who choose rather than fight, to believe in the One who chose to give up his life, to love his enemies, to turn the other cheek. We seek to do likewise.
At least that’s the way I see it. Which makes me right at home in the Methodist Church. I mean if there were ever a group of people who are comfortable not fighting it’s us Methodists. We don’t want to rock the boat, we don’t want to cause a fuss, we don’t want to upset anyone or, God forbid, get in a fight!
Which may explain what I ran across this week while I was thumbing through my copy of The Christian Century. “Methodists Ranks Drop for 36th Straight year.” 36 straight years of decline?! 36 straight years of having people decide that there are other things that they would rather be doing with their time, other places they would rather spend their energies. 36 years of people being won over by everything else that is fighting for their attention and loyalty. It seems we are losing the fight.
I’m sorry if you came here this morning thinking that you were coming for a palatable, relaxing way to end the weekend. But this is church. The home of the Meek, who just get dumped on and have to fight with everything else that the world just easily slumps off. Home of the peacemakers, who are constantly fighting for peace. This is church, and being so this is a fight. Simply by virtue of being Church, we are initiated into an ancient fight that God’s people have been a part of since this whole creation experiment started going wrong and God started making it right.
Talking about a Christian fight is dangerous, I know, especially in today’s Jihad and Pre-Emptive strike world. After all, we tried that in the Crusades, and that didn’t really work out all that well. But you know, for all the Crusaders did wrong, at least the Crusaders understood that they were in a fight. Sure, their methods were anything but Christian. As they blazoned the cross on their shield and killed infidels in the name of the Peaceful Lamb, they betrayed everything that the Gospel calls us to be, but at least they realized that they were in the middle of a fight. And they realized that it mattered. I will be the first to admit that the crusades were some of the darkest times in our collective history, but I can’t help but envy their vigor. Now, instead of the term Fightin’ Christians being a dangerous oxy-moron, it is more wishful thinking.
Which almost makes me think that John wrote his Epistle lesson today for us. This morning, John seems to be trying to stir up in his church a fighting spirit. He wants to provoke us to action, to get us out there slugging it out with the world. Now this kind of a surprise coming from John. John is the Evangelist of love, after all. We could expect this sort of call to fight from Mark, but John is the “God so loved the world” guy. He has spent his entire pastoral career telling us that it is all about love and mercy and grace, and then, almost out of nowhere, in the fifth chapter of his first letter and we find him calling us to fight, to conquer, to overcome.
Don’t mistake John’s call to love as a call to passivity. The pacifistic love of God as described by John is nothing short of a fight. It is not idle lethargy, not sideline holiness, but active, fighting, conquering love. It’s not the absence of fighting that makes us Christian, but how we fight that makes us followers of God.
Christians have this outrageous claim that love actually wins, that good actually does triumph over evil, all without having to resort to the evil ways of the world. You remember John’s prologue, Light overcoming Darkness, Love overcoming Hate. That’s what he’s getting at. God’s people are not people who don’t fight, but those who engage in the Godly struggle of overcoming the evil of the world with good. Actually trusting that in the end, love wins. John puts it this way. “For whatever is born of God, conquers the world.”
I know it is hard to believe in a world where we are told that our only hopes are the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Illegal Immigrants. But according to John, those things don’t stand a chance. The world is not conquered with pre-emptive strikes or a stronger economy or a better healthcare system but with the undying love of God embodied by God’s people. After all, every empire will fall, healthcare reform will never be complete, drugs will always find a way and terrorism is too vague a term to define, much less prevent. But love, the love of God that is so strong that even death could not hold it back, now that is a force to be reckoned with.
For example take this place called the Bakery of Love that is dominating the world around it. In the middle of a slum (a Fevela) in Londrina Brazil, there is a fight going on. The people who live in this area literally have to fight everyday to stay alive. HIV/AIDS runs rampant through the population there, food is scarce and housing is, too. Needless to say, the educational system is abysmal, if not non-existent. Crime is high, spirits are down and life is a fight. And yet, smack dab in the middle of this violent existence are a group of Christians. They go into the Favelas every day to teach the children there and to give them a safe place to learn, to eat, to rest. They also have a bakery that is opened twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening, where people from the Favela come to be fed. If you ask Angelica, one of the workers in the slum why she is there (I mean, she’s not getting paid, she’s not getting tax breaks, she’s not getting anything) she is the first one to tell you because she loves them. She loves those children and those hungry people because God loves them. Through that love, children who would otherwise be on the streets, or taking drugs, or worse, are safe, filled, learning. Because of their love, twice a day all fighting stops, all hunger ceases as an orderly line forms outside the bakery of love and the homeless, the hungry, come to be fed the bread of life. We have partnered with them in buying an oven and I have seen it. I have seen this place and let me tell you, we are conquering that favela with love. An otherwise hopeless, dying favela is being conquered with the love of God. You know, “For whatever is born of God, conquers the world.”
Which shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, that’s how we got into this fight in the first place. While we were hopeless, hurting, yearning for life, God sent his Son into the world to fight for our lives. When we were far off, God reached down, grabbed us, won us back. We tried to kill him, hung him on a cross, God came back. Don’t mistake the cross as a whimpy wishy-washy, feeble answer to violence. On the cross, and in the grave, there’s a fight going on, A fight between life and death, violence and peace, hope and hopelessness. Don’t mistake this resurrection story that we are a part of as being a fuzzy story about bunnies and chicks and pretty dresses. This is Easter. This is a fight. And let me tell you, love wins; God wins, and so do we.