Today’s Scripture Reading (October 9,
2014): Matthew 25
The reports
continue to pour out of Iraq and Syria about the brutal conditions under ISIL
and ISIS leadership. According to the United Nations last week, the allegations
against the Islamic State include mass executions, the murder of
non-combatants, the kidnapping of women and younger girls for the purpose of
using them as sex slaves (some of these women and girls will be given to the
successful soldiers as their reward for service), and the use of children as
military instruments and weapons. The U.N. maintains that these acts constitute
war crimes and need to be prosecuted. These are actions taken against the
powerless, and the powerless have no hope unless someone steps in.
I get that
it is easy to turn a blind eye and forget about these sons and daughter in a faraway
land. It is easy to say that this just isn’t my problem – that I did nothing to
put them in this position. Yet it is hard to imagine in today’s world anyone
who is more “the least of these brothers and sisters” then these innocents in
the Middle East. And the fight does not belong to the special few, it belongs
to all of us. (Although it should not matter, it must be noted that a number of
the women and girls that have been abducted are members of the Christian faith.)
I have
mentioned before that at heart I am a pacifist. I believe that this is the
instruction that Jesus left with us – to go and be instruments of peace. But he
also left us with words that speak very strongly of our responsibility toward
other people – all other people, not just the one closest to us, but those
living in danger everywhere. We are to be a people that believes that all
people matter. The commander of the ISIL armies, the child who has been
conscripted to fight in the religious battles and the girl held hostage waiting
to be given as a reward to an especially courageous soldier, they all matter –
and we should weep and be concerned for all of them.
And so we
send in the forces. Military force to gain material reward is always wrong –
but somehow military force that is spent trying to rescue the helpless from
their captors and rescue the captors from themselves seems appropriate. But
maybe only because it is the easiest course of action.
A harder
course of action (but maybe more in line with Jesus) is to stop the ISIL and
ISIS by attacking their sources of funding. The problem is that this is hard.
The Allied forces have already started to bomb oil producing facilities within
the Borders of the Islamic State, but that might not be good enough. What
really needs to happen is that we reduce our demand for oil, and with winter on
its way in the Northern Hemisphere, that is a tall order. But if climate change
has not brought us to the ecological table and made us willing to use the
resources of this planet more carefully, maybe this crisis will. We who live
far away need to make a concerted effort to reduce the world’s reliance on Middle
East Oil. We need to be careful where we drive, and lower the thermostat just a
little. At the very least it would be a symbolic gesture that says “the least
of these brothers and sisters” are on our hearts and our minds.
We have to
do something – anything - for the least of these among us, because people
matter, and because Jesus said that anything that we do for them, we have done
for him.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew
26
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