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by Ken Sehested

 

     Context: On 8 February 2003 Rev. Ken Sehested traveled to Iraq for three weeks as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness, calling for an end to the threat of war by the U.S.
     Prior to going, the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times newspaper published his article, “Journey to Iraq,” as a guest editorial and asked Sehested to write three weekly columns for the newspaper while in Iraq. Printed below is the initial article followed by three columns posted from Baghdad. The latter are titled “Caitlin Letters,” written as open letters to Caitlin Wood, a member of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville. Caitlin was among the more than 200 high school students in Asheville who participated in the 6 March 2003 “Books Not Bombs” nationwide school walk-out in opposition to war on Iraq.
     Sehested previously traveled to Iraq in March 2000 as part of an interfaith delegation of Jews, Christians and Muslims from the U.S.

 

Journey to Iraq: Of risk and reverence

I leave for Iraq February 8, on a three-week enlistment with the Iraq Peace Team. Seven of us will go in this weekend, to join a contingent of approximately 25 others currently in Baghdad, most from the U.S., some from Canada and the U.K. The majority stay for a month, sometimes more.

I go under the banner of Voices in the Wilderness, sponsors of the Peace Team. While there we will see and experience as much of reality on the ground as is possible in a short time. We’ll visit schools, hospitals, international humanitarian aid headquarters and cultural centers; have conversations with Islamic and Christian and government and neighborhood leaders. I hope to see again the traditional site of Abraham’s birthplace in the southern part of the country; view the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; talk with Kurdish leaders in the north.

What I don’t look forward to is the omnipresent billboards with Saddam Hussein’s picture. For that matter, neither do I relish listening again to the stories of mothers whose babies are dying from something as simple as diarrhea or as menacing as leukemia. Both ailments, among a host of others, are epidemic in scale in Iraq. And Saddam Hussein, brutal as he is, did not cause these. Tens of thousands of tons of depleted uranium—cancer-causing radioactive material—remain scattered across the landscape, leftover fragments applied to harden the casings of shells and bombs missiles fired by the U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War.

Many of those weapons were also trained on the civilian infrastructure: water supply and sewage treatment and electrical grids—a flagrant violation of international law done with the full awareness (as declassified documents prove) by U.S. war planners that doing so would lead to exaggerated levels of child mortality. The U.N. sanctions have severely hampered the reconstruction of these life-support systems. The water is Iraq is virtually poisonous, since importing chlorine is forbidden.

At least a million people—mostly the very young and the very old—have died since the end of the Gulf War for reasons directly related to the economic sanctions: a combination of impure water, poor nutrition and inadequate health care (in a country that before the Gulf War was the medical superpower of the Islamic world). These numbers come not from left-wing protestors or Iraqi propagandists but from the U.N.’s own agencies, backed up and supplemented by similar studies of other respected international aid agencies.

A million deaths seems like the result of a weapon of mass destruction. Writing in 1999, foreign affairs scholars John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote that the sanctions may have contributed to the deaths of more people ‘than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”

Communicating this reality—that the sanctions themselves, by far the longer economic embargo in human history—is what Voices in the Wilderness has devoted itself to since 1996. Kathy Kelly, a former Catholic parochial school teacher, just accompanied her 48th delegation of visitors to Iraq. Last year the organization was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m going back to Iraq this coming Saturday even though it is illegal for U.S. citizens to do so. The U.S. Treasury Department stipulates a maximum fine of $1,000,000 and 12 years in prison, plus a $250,000 administrative penalty.

My purpose is to cross, in a personal and public way, the wall of hostility between the citizens of Iraq and the U.S. And then, upon return, to report back what we have seen and heard, adding our voices to those calling for nonviolent alternatives to war and an end to the economic sanctions. I’ll add my voice to the others, including three ranking U.N. diplomats who have resigned their postings in Iraq in protest to the sheer inhumanity of the sanctions.

One of those three—Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary-General of the U.N. and humanitarian aid coordinator in Iraq—abandoned his lengthy diplomatic career to call attention to the fact that “we are destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.”

My decision to return to Iraq wasn’t made lightly. In the first place, I had to raise all my own travel expenses. Then there’s the threat of severe legal penalty. And also the chance the U.S. may implement its war plans while I’m there. A few folk have wondered aloud, in my presence, whether I’m crazy. Or suicidal. But my supporters are far more numerous. I’ve received the blessing of my wife, the commissioning of my local congregation (and of a local ecumenical prayer group), as well as the appointment as special envoy by the Alliance of Baptists. And I raised more money, quickly, than at any time in my life, including several donations from people I don’t even know who heard about my trip from others.

No doubt some will see this journey as treasonous, as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” I find it odd that a country as heavily churched as the U.S. can forget that among the imperatives of the New Testament is this one: “If your enemies are hungry, feed them” (Romans 12:20). Why is it that we are unfazed when well over a million U.S. military personnel are pledged to risk life and limb in service to their nation, yet think it outrageous when an occasional Christian does something similar for the Kingdom of God?

It is a risk, a calculated risk, to be sure. But the calculus of risk is always done in the context of reverence. All of us risk for the purposes and people we revere, we sacrifice for the values we hold dear. And I revere Jesus and his announced purpose. Indeed, I believe that loving enemies is the very heartbeat of the Gospel of Christ.

My journey is a statement of political dissent, even civil disobedience. But these are secondary matters. Before anything else, my journey is a spiritual discipline. Whenever I intentionally locate myself on the margins—in the places where life is battered, bruised and broken, in places far away or near at hand—I discover renewed clarity about the reality of God’s promise. And the invitation, inshallah, is extended again to be an accomplice in Heaven’s insurgency against the cycle of vengeance.

Such is the stuff of spiritual formation.

 

11 February 2003
Dear Caitlin

Monday morning. I made it to Jordan, just west of Iraq, and am about half-way to Baghdad. Not in distance, but in travel time. I spent about 12 hours in planes to this point. Tomorrow will take at least that much time to drive from Amman to Baghdad, 500 miles, much of it through some of the most barren desert anywhere.

We arrived last night to the Al Monzer Hotel, Amman, Jordan, and this morning I’ve got the jet-lagged jitters. The sun is just about to rise, and the rays of new light are in a fierce argument with the back of my eyelids on what time it really is. I’m hoping a cup of coffee will bring a truce.

As the water boiled in the help-yourself kitchen just off the hotel lobby, I happened to notice a week-old copy of the English-language Jordan Times, turned to the page with the horoscope column. I got a chuckle when reading mine: “Can you find a way to get out for a change of scenery? It would do you a world of good. Make it someplace really special.” My change of scenery, from Brevard Road to Baghdad, probably wasn’t what the planetary diviner had in mind. But as far as the earth goes, few locations are as dependent on life and death choices to be made in the coming weeks. So, yes, I think it’s special.

Wednesday morning. We made it Baghdad, safe and sound, though things got a little tense at the Iraqi border. For a while I thought I’d have to hitch-hike back to Amman, alone. In the rush to get ready, I completely forgot until it was too late that I have an Israeli visa stamped in my passport, from my spring trip to the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. And the Iraqis won’t let you in if you have that. (Remind me to tell you that story when I get home!)

I’ve already told you about Voices in the Wilderness, which sponsors the Iraq Peace Team. But there’s also a delegation from Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical group founded by Mennonites, Brethen and Quakers who train Christians and locate them in various war-torn regions of the world as advocates of nonviolent alternatives to conflict. (It’s probably the most organized and effective response I know to fulfill Jesus’ demand to love enemies.)

The two groups work hand-in-hand here. Last night, right after arriving, the entire group met in one big circle. I counted 43, most from the U.S. but with a strong Canadian contingency as well as others from The Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland and Australia. Nearly half this group is committed to staying indefinitely—“until peace breaks out,” as one said last night, or at least until the war is called off. The rest of us are here anywhere between 10 days to a month.

The group is loosely but effectively organized into various task-units, everything from media work to action strategies (in and around Baghdad and beyond) to visits for conversation with Iraqi citizens in places like hospitals, cultural centers, mosques and churches. (Most in the U.S. don’t realize there are nearly one million Christians here in Iraq, including some of the oldest congregations. In the sixth century Christian missionaries from this land were traveling to India and China.)

But then, most of us know almost nothing about Iraq. And that’s partly on purpose, I believe, since it’s always harder to kill someone you know, someone who doesn’t have a name or a history or even a face but is just a target, is expendable, however remorsefully and regretfully, in the cause of “justice” and for the sake of “peace.” You remember the name of Timothy McVeigh, the homegrown terrorist who was executed for bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City and who confessed that he almost didn’t go through with it when he learned there was a daycare center in the building. But he decided that was unavoidable “collateral damage.” McVeigh was a veteran of the earlier war on Iraq, the Gulf War in 1991, and afterwards wrote in a letter to his aunt: “Killing Iraqis was hard at first, but after a while it got easier.” Or like current U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said when asked, in 1991, about the number of Iraqi casualties of that previous war: “That’s a number in which I have very little interest.”

I certainly didn’t know much until my first trip here three years ago. This region nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (my hotel room looks out on the former) is thought to be the site of the first human civilization some 6,000 years ago. The wheel was probably invented here, as well as human writing. The earliest legal code explicitly based in what we would call “justice”—protecting the weak against the strong—was discovered here. The use of zero in mathematics, time measurement, hospitals and the formal study of architecture started here.

Abraham, spiritual heir to three-fourths of the world’s people (Jews, Christians and Muslims), was born here. The Magi, first visitors at Jesus’ birth, came from here, as did other biblical figures like Noah, Jonah, Ezekiel, Nehemiah and Daniel—not to mention ol’ King Nebuchadnezzar.

My roommate’s just returned from an action in front of the United Nations compound here in Baghdad, and he wants to go get some lunch. But he said that, for the first time, a staff member in that building came and told our vigiling members that our presence there was a boost for their morale! What a delightful way to begin what could be an eventful stay.

More later. Tell your folks I say “hey.”

 

17 February 2003
Dear Caitlin

This trip is a little riskier than others I’ve taken to conflicted regions. And, yes, I’ve had moments of wondering if I fully knew what I’m getting into.

The Iraq Peace Team is split between three hotels in Baghdad—beautiful hotels, once upon a time, but a bit sad now. When I first got into my room, I noticed the windows each bore strips of clear plastic tape. At first I thought they were newly-installed and someone forgot to take off the tape. Then I realized (and later had it confirmed) that the tape was put there to retard glass shattering in case of bombing.

Then, yesterday, we got an official list of emergencies supplies to keep assembled in my small backpack in case we have to evacuate on short notice. It’s a sobering exercise, even more so for about half the group who are committed to staying indefinitely, war or no war. (The rest of us, including me, will attempt to leave if we get clear advance warning of an attack.)

So, why am I here? Is this crazy, or what?

I just stepped to my 5th floor window to watch a caravan of honking cars go by. Up front, in an old convertible, was a bride and groom sitting on the back of the back seat. A wedding party! Which is to say, life goes on here. You see soldiers occasionally, especially outside of hotels like ours during the evening hours, to make sure nothing happens to us.

This evening I took a walk to find some fresh fruit and found some at a street vendor about a mile away. Unfortunately, I didn’t have quite enough Iraqi dinari to pay him. He understood just enough English to realize what I was saying, and he asked, “Tomorrow?,” meaning, could I pay him the rest then? Given our schedule, I wasn’t sure I could get back tomorrow, so I tried to indicate that I would put back some of what I had selected.

As I tried to undo the knot in the plastic bag, he put his hand on mine, shaking his head, “No, no, no, is O.K.” Then he extended his hand, his left hand, to shake mine. His right hand was inconspicuously tucked in his coat pocket. Probably a war wound. Iraq was in a ten-year war with Iran in the ‘80s. They were a U.S. ally then. In fact, public records show that the U.S. government approved the sale to Iraq of all the components for the chemical weapons they used during that war.

And we offered no complaint after they did.

That’s the crazy thing about who’s a terrorist and who’s not. We usually refer to the latter as “freedom fighters.” Back when Afghanistan was aligned with the former Soviet Union—and when Moscow was declared by former President Reagan to be the center of a “global terror network”—our government poured tons of money into supporting Afghan “freedom fighters” at war with the Soviet army. Since then links have been made between those same people (including people like Osama bin Laden) and terrorist attacks in Algeria, Egypt, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the more recent suicide attack against the USS Cole.

Now a freedom fighter. Now a terrorist. It reminds me of the story about Alexander the Great, when he confronted a captured pirate ship captain. Alexander asked the man, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” To which the pirate asked back, “The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate. Because you do it with a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.”

Back to my earlier question, about why I’m here. I’m here because (as one of my friends recently wrote) I believe that if Iraq’s economy, and that of its neighbors, were based on soy beans—instead of oil—we would not be threatening war.

I believe greed is the real reason for this conflict—a conflict between the leaders of two greedy nations, one large and powerful, one small and weak. I believe the Bible is exactly right when it says: Where do these conflicts come from? You want something and cannot have it, so you wage war (James 4:1-2).

I also believe that peace, like war, is waged. And that if you believe in something, really believe, you will be willing to take risks on its behalf.

Being here is risky. But it gives me a vantage point to see things more clearly. And what I see I’m able to communicate to people like you who have the hard job of convincing people there that war is not the answer to this conflict—in fact, that war will make things much, much worse.

Tomorrow I’m going to find that street vendor and pay him the rest of the money I owe.

 

25 February 2003
Dear Caitlin

I returned this evening from the infamous border between Iraq and Kuwait, marked by a 25-foot high wall of sand stretching as far as the eye could see. Our Iraq Peace Team set up an encampment in the demilitarized zone which separates the two countries, about 50 yards from the U.N.-monitored checkpoint. Bangladesh currently supplies the soldiers serving under the U.N. flag at this flashpoint. They waived at us several times during the day, and officers from France and Russia came out to chat at different times.

Somewhere beyond that horizon half of the 180,000 U.S. troops now ringing Iraq will come pouring in. They will cross the very place where we prayed and sang, displayed banners and enlarged photos of ordinary Iraqi citizens who will bear the blood payment for this showdown between a dictatorial regime and an empire addicted to oil.

If it comes, it will not be a battle. It will be a slaughter. As one ancient historian, documenting the earlier, Roman empire, wrote: “They create desolation and call it peace.”

Our group began a four-day, water-only fast following our Sunday evening news conference at the press center in Baghdad, where we released a statement to a gaggle of journalists and camera crews explaining this border initiative. The statement notes that “decisions [made by the U.S.] in the next few weeks will forever change the lives of millions of people.” It calls on people everywhere, but especially in the U.S., to conduct a massive, preemptive sit-down for peace, saying “Peace can still be preserved. Devastation can still be avoided. But you must go beyond what you think you can do. You must up the ante. With cataclysm hanging over our heads you must refuse to conduct business as usual.”

The writer of Proverbs said: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:17). Sometimes, to see the center clearly, you have to go to the boundary; because what you see depends on where you stand.

The southern-most area of Iraq, to where we traveled Monday morning, is a most unusual bioregion. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a “desert marshland,” but this is what my untrained eye sees: minimal vegetation yet high humidity and an even higher water table, with frequent plots of standing water. Eons ago the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (among other smaller rivers) created a massive marshland emptying into the Persian Gulf. The area birthed a distinctive culture, now virtually extinct, sometimes referred to as “the Venice of the Middle East.”

This area where we encamped, about an hour’s drive southwest of Basra, is now toxic. Cancer rates are five times higher than before the ’91 Gulf War. No doubt there are multiple causes. But the leading suspect is the 300 tons of depleted uranium deposited here during “Operation Desert Storm,” in the form of armor-piercing coatings on munitions fired by the U.S.-led coalition forces expelling the Iraqi military from Kuwait. Tuck away this story in your mind, Caitlin. I am convinced that by the time you reach adulthood the documented story of this form of biological warfare will finally be exposed.

During my brief borderline vigil several questions formed in my mind, in response to the Bush Administration’s fervent insistence—always coated in references to moral virtue—that justice in Iraq can only be bargained with the barrel of a gun.

     •If war is justified, why have most Christian denominations in the U.S., and many in other nations, spoken publicly against such a war? (This includes President Bush’s own pastor.)

     •If war is justified, why do all of Iraq’s neighbors oppose war at least without explicit U.N. approval. (Turkey, a traditional ally in the region, asked for twice the $18,000,000,000 U.S. offer for troop deployment along their border with Iraq. How is this different from bribery?)

     •If war is justified, why do most U.S. allies, the vast majority of the family of nations and a simple majority of U.S. citizens also object to unilateral action? And if war is launched anyway, will our democratic political tradition also be a casualty?

     •In World War I, it is estimated that 80% of the casualties were soldiers; in World War II, that number had dropped to 50 percent. Given the technology of modern warfare, the percentage of civilian casualties is up to 90%, and for every combatant fatality seven children die. Can any war be just? (Or is it JUST war?)

I, for one, believe such moral appeals (like depleted uranium-tipped shells) are designed to pierce the consciences of people here and everywhere who share an elementary commitment to justice, fairness and truth-telling.

I, for one, believe that such a war will merely scatter the germinating seeds of future wars.

I, for one, believe that we as a people are caught in a history we do not understand and could very well suffer the consequence of all who forfeit vision, who barter justice for security.

Think about these questions, and make your own list. We’ll talk when I get home in a few days. For now, the muezzin is just now issuing the call to prayer from the nearby mosque. Jews, Christians and Muslims agree that the call to prayer is a call to spiritual vision; but also that such spirituality transforms political vision as well: “Thy kingdom come, on earth. . . .” (Matthew 6:10).

Hope to see you soon!

###

by Ken Sehested

      Working for peace and justice isn't easy. We live in a world predicated by greed and violence. Swimming against that stream isn't easy. It can be unpopular and lonely. Flannery O'Connor, paraphrasing a verse from John's Gospel, wrote: "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd!"Sometimes we wonder if we're crazy. Sometimes even prophets need pastoral care.

      All of us have known people who have attempted to "win the world" only to have their own spirits wither, their vision blurred. Maybe not with such tragic drama—maybe they've simply stopped speaking out . Something has come undone in their lives. Maybe it's happened to you.

      In the Bible, prophets people arose from the most unlikeliest of places. They were often "ordinary" people, without special training, and often protested, saying they didn't have enough talent for the job. Much like people in our congregations.

      How do we resist that withering of the spirit? And how do we effectively work with and develop a corps of justice and peace advocates? What follows is a series of 10 pastoral principles for nurturing prophetic impulses in your congregation.

1. Decide where to start, not where to finish.

      One of our dilemmas is the inability to act on what they already know. It's as if we refuse to do anything if we can't do everything. Edmund Burke noted that nobody made a greater mistake than those who did nothing because they could only do a little. Sometimes we suffer from "the paralysis of analysis."

      Developmental psychology teaches us that most people grow into maturity one step at a time. Most children learn to crawl before they walk, and walk before they run. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself once said: "If you can't fly, run; if you can't run, walk; if you can't walk, crawl. But by all means keep moving forward."

      People tend to start modestly, tend to make small steps and changes and choices and commitments. Don't disparage such modesty. It is on the basis of such concrete involvements that deeper commitment and analysis can grow. There's an old proverb that says: "I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember; I do, and I understand." We live our way into new forms of thinking more often than we think our way into new forms of living.

      Well-educated people have a tendency, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to "replace simple action with complex thought." It's so much easier to take a position than to take action. Pay more attention to where you're going to be concretely invested and worry less about where you'll eventually end up. The directional road signs come into focus only as you begin to move toward them.

2.  Look for a community of conviction.

      One of our culture's most enduring myths is represented by the fictional character known as the Lone Ranger. It is the myth of the solitary, heroic figure who single-handedly confronts and overcomes the power of evil. That myth saturates Christian peacemakers as well.

      The most consistent problem we face is the sense of isolation felt by those committed to justice and peace issues. Being a part of a community of conviction functions like a "hothouse" does for plants, providing in much larger doses the kinds of elements necessary for growth in both our understanding and our commitment.

      There is also a rhythm to our lives, not unlike the rhythm of seasons. There are times when we are at full operating capacity, running at peak performance. But there are other times when we're not so fuel-efficient: times when we're more tired, less enthusiastic, less focused. It's at these points when a community of conviction can mean the difference between a slowdown and a breakdown.

3. Think globally, act locally.

      Thinking globally gives a fuller picture of cause-and-effect relations. Especially in an increasingly globalized economy, what happens a long way off has an impact close to home. But global analysis serves little purpose without some corresponding local action. It's more comfortable for some of us to think globally than it is to act locally.

      G.K. Chesterton once said: "Nothing is real until it is local." In saying that, he wasn't blessing or justifying this tendency in human nature. He was simply pointing out that that's the way most of us do operate. We usually don't react until something touches us personally.

      Thinking globally actually gives us the permission to do "small" things. We don't really have to tackle everything in the world, because we know there are lots of people out there doing their part, too. Acting locally keeps us grounded in reality, helps us "keep the rubber on the road."

4. Learn to name the poor.

      "Naming the poor" was the title of a sermon preached when a congregation opened a shelter in its facilities for homeless people. These guests are not just "street people," the pastor said. They each have names and unique personal histories. He urged members to "name" each person individually. Otherwise they would only remain faceless "objects" and abstractions.

      Care for and presence with the poor, the socially unacceptable, may involve charity work but is more than that. It also means speaking out for justice, attempting to shift the basic power dynamics which keep the poor in their condition. But even beyond the work of charity and the demands of justice, there is yet another reason for our involvement.

      We are to be with the poor to listen as well as to speak; to receive, as well as to give; to learn, as well as to teach. Those who suffer do need resources and advocates; but more than anything, they need relationship, friendship, built on mutual respect.

      Mohandas Gandhi wrote that "if you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason. You must move the heart also." Our relationships are what will keep us going when the way forward appears dark.

5. Prepare for the long haul.

      Violence, and the injustice on which it is built, will never give way to a brief flurry of activity and enthusiasm. We need to prepare for a lifetime of conviction—along with a commitment to rear and shape the lives and generations that follow behind us.

      We have a great need to develop what the German theologian Dorothee Soelle calls "revolutionary patience." Such patience does not lull us to sleep. We stay engaged; but our barometer readings don't come from the daily paper and the evening news; nor are they dependent on the relative successes or failures of current political forces. We need to learn to plant dates and not just pumpkins, say the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves. The latter can be planted and harvested in a single season; the former may not bear fruit in our lifetime.

6. Beware of compassion fatigue.

      The old-fashioned word is burnout. It comes from working too hard for too long with too little rest. It's important to keep in mind that compassion fatigue doesn't happen overnight. It builds over a long period, and it usually has at least two advance symptoms.

      The first is a loss of a sense of humor. If you find it harder to laugh, to play and to relax, then you may be headed for a breakdown. A volunteer in a Third World country got this warning from her colleague, a national in that country: "We are suspicious of those who have no sense of humor," her co-worker said. "If you cannot take time to laugh, even in the midst of all this misery, then we doubt that you have the patience to stay here very long."

      A second advance symptom of compassion fatigue is a growing sense of resentment. If you find yourself frequently complaining that other people aren't doing their part, that you're the only one that really cares, then watch out! If after every event you're more concerned with who didn't show up than overjoyed at who did, beware!

7. Be bold about the demands of the Gospel, but patient with people.

      Most of us find it difficult to live with the chasm separating the expectations we have of ourselves (and of others) and the recurring experiences we have of not living up to those expectations. Ours is truly a high calling; but also a low success rate. So we're tempted to either give up on the calling or on the results. That is, we begin to tone down the Bible's radical challenge to our ways of living, adjusting it to prevailing cultural standards, to more manageable expectations. Or, on the other hand, we become so alienated from people (and sometimes ourselves)—living lives overflowing with accusation, judgment and intimidation—that we lack any capacity to engage people in genuine dialogue.

      In your pastoral work be sure you don't confuse the integrity of the Gospel with your own agenda. Obviously you will have strong convictions. But always leave room for slippage. Never be too quick to assume that if someone disagrees with you they're disagreeing with the truth. Sometimes people with relatively equal levels of commitment, intelligence and courage disagree on how to solve a given problem. Remember: In the end we are saved not by our merits but only by grace.

8. The Gospel is still a scandal, but not every scandal is the Gospel.

      Just because the Gospel is indeed a scandal, liable to provoke controversy, not every scandal and controversy is Gospel-inspired. Controversy and confrontation can be the occasion for transformation, for dialogue. Sometimes it can make a bad situation worse. Learning to distinguish the difference takes wisdom.

      Generally, we tend to be quite fearful of controversy. When controversy occurs, your ability to use pastoral authority depends a lot on whether you've earned the respect which authorizes your leadership.

      Some years ago I attended a workshop led by the pastor of a Baptist church in a small North Carolina town. He had recently convinced his congregation to join him in a march one Sunday in August, from his church's sanctuary to the downtown courthouse, to commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The group wanted to know how he was able to get his people to do this—an out-of-the-ordinary thing for a traditional Baptist congregation. "Probably a number of reasons," he said. "But I think it boiled down to the fact that for seven years I've been present with these people in their births, their weddings, their sicknesses and their deaths." His congregation knew he loved them, knew he saw them as more than objects in need of adjustment. As a result, he had been invested with leadership authority—in this case, to lead many on a path they had not previously traveled.

9. Expect miracles, or at least surprises!

      Don't assign too much weight to labels like "conservative" or "liberal." They tell you more about people's self-perceptions and culture than anything else. And don't "write off" certain groups, certain churches, certain parts of your city, region or country. Politically progressive people have an enormous bias toward cosmopolitan, urban and well-educated constituencies. Ours is an enormously class- and culture-bound movement.

      Do you remember the story in Luke's Gospel when Andrew came running up to his brother Nathaniel and said, "Nat, we've found the Messiah! He's from Nazareth." And do you recall Nathaniel's incredulous question: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" In first century Palestine, Nazareth was the stick, the boondocks, where parochial, uneducated, unsophisticated, narrow-minded and uninteresting people lived, unlike liberal-minded, cosmopolitan, well-educated Jerusalem. Ever since Jesus came from Nazareth, there's no such thing as the boondocks any more.

10. Finally, remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.

      What is it about "sabbath time" that God cautions us not to forget? First, remembering the sabbath is a regular, habitual reminder that everything isn't up to us. Prophetic types tend to get too serious about their work, have a hard time taking a break. There's so much left to do!

      Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist pastor and theologian most associated with the early 20th century "Social Gospel Movement," once wrote to a Methodist colleague who had confided that he was thinking about leaving the ministry because of his denomination's resistance to change: "It is not sin," Rauschenbusch chided, "to leave some things to our children, and to God."

      Sabbath time is when we slow the hands and the mind in order to do a different kind of work: that of opening ourselves to a renewal of vision regarding the deepest character of life. "The paranoid and the mystic share much in common," said Matthew Fox. "Paranoid persons believe there is a conspiracy in the universe against them; mystics believe there is a conspiracy in the universe on their behalf."

      In the midst of sabbath discipline we have our imaginations reshaped; we rediscover and reaffirm Who, finally, is in charge around here! More than at any other time, this is when we are finally able to say with conviction: No, that's not the way things are; no, I won't get used to it; and no, I won't live my life accordingly.

Ken Sehested @prayerandpolitiks.org. This article was originally printed in PeaceWork, newsletter of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, #4,6, 1997, then reprinted in The Other Side magazine, May 2004.