Asymmetric Spiritual Warfare

     While I was growing up I was introduced to Christian Rock by some friends at church. There were quite a few different styles all equivalent to some of the mainstream artists of the day to include Steve Taylor (Weird Al), D.C. Talk (Beastie Boys), Amy Grant (Belinda Carlisle/Tiffany), Michael W. Smith (Peter Cetera), Carmen (Henry Rollins post Rollins Band), Tourniquet (death-metal) and my all-time favorite Petra (pick your hair band). My dad (who reads this blog and will either chuckle at this or shake his head and sigh deeply) still referred to all of Christian Rock as “the screams of Satan” even though it was Christian because electric guitars and hair band metal were not the way he was raised to praise Jesus – but I digress. I had a couple favorite albums by Petra but the one that I automatically think about when I hear “Petra” is the Album “This Means War.” In fact in a fit of inspirational genius I just purchased the album from iTunes and am currently rocking out to it. It is so fantastically hair band awesome I know why I liked it so much. The whole album is about, you guessed it, spiritual warfare in quite the literal sense.  That album sings and plays on numerous different themes we hear in church on a regular basis: Put on the full armor of God; be prayer warriors; be available to God’s call; we each fight the good fight in our own ways; etc. So I grew up wanting to be a warrior for the Lord, in fact I had the t-shirt and everything. Somewhere along the way I must have gotten my wires crossed because I ended up enlisting in the U.S. Army as opposed to God’s Army and in 2005 I found myself in Iraq… yes folks, it’s time for some war stories.

Very important qualification that I want to make up front: This post is not about Lieutenant Galstad. This is an allegory. The fact that I am in this story is completely inconsequential to the message I’m trying to convey. I am DEFINITELY not trying to put myself on a pedestal because as you will see this post is quite self-deprecating. As my friend most eloquently stated once: Jesus Saves. I’m no Jesus. On with the war story…

     When we arrived in Ad Dawr, our first area, one of the first things we did was go for a little area-familiarization tour. And of course that tour was interrupted by excitement so I spent my first day on the ground doing exciting things like shooting locks off houses with shotguns, clearing rooms, and running over donkeys with armored Humvees. The unit as a whole started off driving around in tanks, setting up checkpoints, and generally trying to keep the peace. Since I was one of two assistant intelligence officers it was my job to identify and find the bad guys and then send our Soldiers out to get them. After a couple weeks of getting acquainted with the area our intelligence shop got pretty good at finding the bad guys. Meanwhile the Squadron Commander started to change things up a bit. He started to really truly engage with our local hosts. He started to invite them onto the FOB, talk to them, find out what they needed, go visit them at their houses, and promise and deliver money to them for projects. There was a distinct lack of talk of finding bad guys and I also took issue with giving money to the local leaders because they were all corrupt and that money would them be used to fund operations against us… and me. But I was very junior and was not in any position to argue with the boss so I saluted, moved out, and continued to find the bad guys while the boss was out dealing with the local sheiks and civic leaders.

     Eventually our unit, due in no small part to the excellent intelligence section, had calmed our first area of operations. We had found our #1 bad guy, attacks were way down compared to the rest of the theater, the local Iraqi Army unit was getting better, and there were other places to use our expertise. Our unit was ordered to move and as a farewell gift my boss put together one last project for the local leaders: he turned our entire base over to them and gave plans and money to turn it into a factory to create jobs for the local community. I thought that was a pretty decent going away gift. We said goodbye to everyone in Ad Dawr and headed to our new assignment, Muqdadiyah, one of the most unstable and violent areas in all of Iraq at the time. Muqdadiyah had it all, Sunni on Shia on Kurd violence; lots of attacks against the Iraqi Army; regular mortar attacks; corrupt government; areas that if entered would guarantee a firefight; basically Iraq 2006 in a nutshell. There was also, as we would discover, a then-quiet minority who were actively seeking to stop the violence.

     Once again we took a little time to learn the area but right away I noticed that the Squadron Commander took no time to start getting to know the leaders. From the beginning there was a shift far less “find the bad guys” and a lot more “let’s work on building this area back up,” despite the fact that there was roughly 1000% more attacks and violence in this area than in our previous area. I was still working the “find the bad guys” angle of all of this and we were EXTREMELY busy with ongoing operations so the boss consorting with the enemy (as I saw it) was of even less concern to me than before. However, one morning I was providing intel support to one of the units out rolling around the battlefield.

     The unit called in on the radio that they were at a Sheik’s house and that the Sheik’s name matched that of a name on their target list. I tried to find the target packet for the Sheik but I couldn’t find it. The Intelligence Officer (remember, I was only one of two assistants) was out of the headquarters and my counterpart had just gone to bed after an 18 hour shift and none of my Soldiers knew the answer to the question, “should we arrest this Sheik?”. The leader on the ground was losing patience and I made the “safe” decision to have the unit arrest the Sheik and bring him in. Wrong answer, Lieutenant. Not only was the Sheik not the same guy as the name on the list, but this particular Sheik had been working with the Squadron Commander on the “calming the violence” campaign. We now call that campaign “The Sunni Awakening” and it was that initiative that I, single-handedly, almost aborted. And I almost aborted it because I was stuck with the “kill or capture the bad guy” mindset while my boss was desperately trying to get the unit into a true counter-insurgency mindset. It was only after my boss apologized profusely and ate a lot of humble pie that the Sunni Awakening continued in Muqdadiyah.

     Welcome back from Iraq. We’re here in 2013 and now I’m going to talk about the Christian church and our propensity to go to war against sin – and consequently against sinners. Our boss Jesus is desperately trying to get the message of his love and forgiveness of sins out to people and a lot of Christians, to include me, get stuck on eradicating sin and seem to miss the fact that for most of his ministry Jesus was focused on healing, loving, teaching, and preaching about how Pharisaical Law (there he goes with the Pharisee thing again) was not the way to God. We preach to and teach our kids that the way to be a good Christian is to be abstinent, stay away from drugs and alcohol, and try to live a good life instead of focusing on helping others and loving the unlovable. There is nothing wrong with encouraging our children to abstain from sex because sex has the remarkable power to make a young person lose their ever-loving mind and make some bad bad life choices. An easy goal to identify (yet very unreasonable) is to wait for marriage but at a bare minimum we should make them aware of the real and life-altering consequences of unprotected sex and even sex using protection. We should encourage our kids to be EXTREMELY cognizant of the addictive power of drugs and alcohol and make sure they understand the types of possible negative outcomes that they are dealing with. But we fail miserably teaching these things because it’s HARD to get all that info in a 90 minute youth-group session. And there are a lot of hard questions and awkward silences and maybe even some terrible revelations that might get out like, “Mr. Galstad didn’t wait until he was married to have sex! O. M. Goodness.” And so we simplify things.

     But during the simplification process the message is getting lost and we’re teaching our Christian youth that they are better than the other kids because they are Christian. We don’t mean to do this but we’re giving them an attitude of superiority and we are setting them up to go to war against sin and the sinner. And then those youth grow up to be adults who teach their own kids those same terrible terrible lessons. As Christians we tend to look at other people like single parents, drug addicts, the poor, and other less fortunate folks as sinners caught by sin. “You see, that’s the consequence of bad decisions, right there. Now be more like Jesus or you too could end up pregnant at 17/addicted/poor/whatever.” Everything becomes a morality play and a lesson and a modern-day Christian fable and the idea of compassion is relegated to the potential chance-encounter on the road like the Good Samaritan.

     And meanwhile Jesus weeps because that’s not what he came to do. Jesus was a counter-insurgent against sin. He went to the people of the world and even though they were tainted with sin he gave them his love, his hope, his healing, and his everlasting life. He did not separate himself from the people and drive around in his armored tank of holiness. Instead he walked amongst the people, ate with them, loved them, showed compassion to them and pissed off the Pharisees to no end. Jesus did not call on us to put on the full armor of God in order to attack our neighbors. No, in Ephesians 6:12 we are told specifically that we wear that armor not against our flesh and blood neighbors but as spiritual protection. Our war is not with our neighbors our war is with sin and we defeat sin by acting like Christ which is by loving our neighbors; doing nice things for them; helping them in their time of need; wrapping our arms around them when they are sad and offering solace; rejoicing with them when they are joyful; and being there to answer their hard questions with a spirit of gentleness, love, and care. Leave the eradication of sin to the Holy Spirit because that is its war.

     Our war is one of compassion on a daily basis. Our daily prayer as Christians should be to live with compassion and love and understanding. Because here is the reality: we are all saved by faith and by grace. That’s it. We are all one bad decision/moment of weakness away from tragedy. I grew up relatively poor in small town in Minnesota and I turned out OK but only by the grace of God. I was one moment of passion too long; one drink too many; one credit card charge too much; one choice of the wrong drug away from terrible life consequences. So I encourage you all to remember that Jesus came not to condemn the sinners but to save them and I encourage you to do the same. Jesus waged war on sin and saved the sinners through compassion, healing, love, and sacrifice and we are called to do the same. That sounds like an Army into which I would enlist.