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How Not to Kill Your Neighbor (by Joe James)

How Not to Kill Your Neighbor (by Joe James)

Last updated on: October 14, 2015 at 4:31 am by Scot McKnight

How Not to Kill Your Neighbor (by Joe James) 2015-10-13T21:34:47-05:00 Scot McKnight

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

By Joe James, who is the Associate Minister at Southside Church of Christ in Rogers, AR

In the summer of 2004, I took my first ministry job, was married to my beautiful wife Shaila, and purchased my first home. Our new life was off to a great start. That same summer, the house next to us went up for sale and the man who purchased it suffered from schizophrenia and a substance abuse problem. For about 9 months, living next to him was a literal hell on earth. Here are just a few ways he tormented us:

Tied two dead snakes to our mailbox.
Dumped 40 pounds of metal screws in our yard and driveway.
Spray-painted the word “snitch” all over our house.
Spray-painted and keyed my parent’s car.
Poured gasoline all over our yard and flower bed.
Attempted to corner my wife at 11:00 pm one evening when I was away.
Left a death threat on my car.

One night we were awakened at 2 AM to the sound of music blaring through our kitchen window. Our neighbor had aimed two massive speakers toward our house and was playing a single phrase over and over, “I have the right to bear arms.” I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t trapped in one of Freddy Krueger’s nightmares. We called the police, but when they arrived he shut his doors, turned out the lights and refused to answer their knocking. The officer phoned me to say they would have to leave, but they were just a phone call away.

As soon as the Police drove away, our neighbor came storming out of his house fully armed and threatening my life. As he moved closer and closer to my front door his threats become more and more aggressive. I grabbed a 12-guage shotgun that my father gave me. I loaded the gun, took the safety off and aimed it at my front door. Just a few more steps and I was going to kill my neighbor.

Thankfully, the police showed up before something truly terrible happened.

I was 24 at the time, and those events plunged me into a 6-year long struggle with violence and pacifism. I became a militant pacifist and regularly argued in defense of Christian pacifism. Since that time my stance has softened, but I believe my experience has given me something important to say to the church.

I am deeply troubled by the reactionary posturing within Christianity that comes with every national tragedy. We are now at a place in our country where there is a mass shooting every single day (actually we average more than one), and we face a great challenge. Will the Christian church stay gridlocked in fruitless debate just like the world around us? Or will we find better and more meaningful ways to move forward? In what follows, I hope to offer us a few small ways we can do better.

1 Please take Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies seriously. I have brothers and sisters in Christ love to take the clear commands of Jesus seriously. Good! So do I! . However, I find it odd that when the commandment to “love your enemies” comes up, we suddenly start making excuses, “Well… he didn’t mean…” We need to take Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies very seriously, even if we cannot fathom the mystery of the commandment.

I once traveled to Memphis, TN to hear Shane Claiborne speak. Shane is a brilliant author and speaker, and one of the leading advocates for Christian pacifism. At one point in his lecture, a young man stands up and angrily demands he answer a question: “What would you do!?!? I want to know what you would do if some crazed maniac came into the Simple Way community and started shooting innocent people… Children! What would you do?” Shane put his hands in his pockets and bowed his head for at least a full 60 seconds. The temperature in the room literally rose by 10 degrees. After what seemed like an eternity, Shane raised his head and very calmly replied, “I don’t know what I would do. Maybe I would do violence. But I wouldn’t call it holy.” Shane was honest, and more importantly, he wrestled with what it might mean to take Jesus seriously in that moment. May we all do better.

2 Please learn to love one another. I have brothers and sisters in Christ that tend to draw a line in the sand on this issue. They paint their conservative counter-parts as harsh, unloving, gun-toting, flag-waving, neo-cons. But why can’t we assume the best in them, and honor their desire to see God’s world flooded with justice? We need to learn to love one another first. By such love the world will know we belong to Christ.

There is a powerful scene in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. Jayber is a barber in 1960’s the fictional town of Port Williams, KY. One evening Jayber is cutting hair while listening to this particularly annoying customer, Troy, drone on and on about some war-protesters that have come into Port Williams. Here is how the scene unfolds in the book:

Troy said, “They ought to round up every one of [em] and put them right in front of the damned communists, and then whoever killed who, it would be all to the good!”

There was a little pause after that. It was hard to do, but I quit cutting my hair and looked at Troy. I said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

And Troy said, “Oh.”

The next line in the novel changed me forever. Jayber Crow narrates the following:

It would have been a beautiful moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

I read that sentence at the height of my militant pacifism and wept. I realized that I was preaching “love your enemies” to everyone, but I did not love the people who disagreed with me. May we all do better.

3 Please begin with spiritual formation, not legistlation. On that terrible night that continues to haunt me a decade later, I learned something terrifying about myself: I WANTED to kill that guy. I hated him. In the years that followed I learned something about my neighbor that also bothered me: while I hated him, God did not.

When I watch national debates take place the wake of every tragedy, I wonder what would happen if the Church decided to drop out of those debates and ask ourselves some more reflective questions: “Am I currently in training to respond to horror with love? Am I currently engaged in the disciplines necessary to be like Jesus when the stakes are truly high?” May we all do better.

4 Please pray for peace. Pray for peaceful responses to violence. Pray for the restoration and renewal of all things (Luke 18:1-8). Pray for the victims of violence. Pray for the violent consciousness of American life. Pray for God to heal the violence that resides in each of our hearts. Pray for freedom from the principalities and powers that enslave us to the fear of death. Please pray for peace. May we all do better.

5 Please stop celebrating justifiable violence and allow for Confession and Forgiveness. Part of the problem with the church justifying violence, is that it ignores the soul-damaging trauma that comes with it. A close friend of mine routinely tells me that he is going to hell for what he did in Vietnam. I think he is wrong. He has since been washed in the blood of the lamb. But what his soul is crying out for is not to be patted on the back with a “That a boy! Go get em!” but rather to be met with an opportunity to confess what happened. He took human life. Whether or not it was justifiable is not the issue for him now. What matters is that he carries this overwhelming burden that he had to kill a human being created in the image of God. He needs healing. He doesn’t need a church that celebrates his violence. He needs a church that acknowledges his pain, shares his suffering, and offers forgiveness. May we all do better.

Here is why I believe this actually matters; as Dallas Willard says, the church is a curriculum in Christ-likeness. And if we really are training to become more and more like Jesus, it seems to me that the heart of Christ-likeness is the cross-shaped love of enemy that God graces to us all. “For while we were still in our sin, Christ died for the ungodly.” (Rom. 5:6). Or so it seems to me.

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