a friend just sent me this quote from astronomer Carl Sagan:
It's curious...that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden Rule as a basis for foreign policy...Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn’t say that you should vaporize his children.
I've always wondered what would happen if, instead of overcoming injustice by military strategy, we responded to situations like the one in Darfur by organizing a physical non-violent "storming" of a country or region. imagine millions of Christians hopping onto boats and planes to march into a place of oppression to physically stand between oppressor and oppressed, literally risking our lives for peace and change... what could the oppressors do? kill us all? killing anyone would only draw international attention to their intolerance and cruelty. it's the reason clergy, particularly Western clergy, can often move about safely in violent regions--because oppressors don't want to draw the wrong kind of attention to themselves.
it's Christian Peacemaker Teams on a much larger scale. of course, we'd all have to agree where to go next...and would there ever be an end to the list?
Why is moving from theory to practice so difficult? What a beautiful idea. Thanks for sharing.