What About Fighting Monsters

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John's Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today's edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

For the last two weeks, I've been talking about the Gospel according to Jelly Roll. First, that there's no asterisk after the word "neighbor." And second, that while we are fighting monsters, we must be careful not to become monsters ourselves.

Not long ago I was visiting a member of the parish, and a friend of hers mentioned he'd been listening to these episodes. Then he asked me a great question about what I was saying. He asked, “But what about when they're real monsters that you’re fighting?” I told him to hold on, because that was where I’d go next.

It’s an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. Because far too often, when the church has come face to face with something truly monstrous, it has stepped back and abdicated its role as the body of Christ in the world.

The theologian William Cavanaugh tells one of those stories in his masterful book, Torture and Eucharist. It's about Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, where torture worked like a kind of liturgy of the state. It made people disappear and broke apart every community that might resist. For too long, the church cared for souls while leaving the bodies to the generals. But eventually it woke up. It defended the families of the disappeared, and the bishops declared torturers cut off from communion. Cavanaugh's point is that the Eucharist itself is the answer to torture. The state disappears bodies. The church gathers them back into the Body of Christ.

We see the same failure, initially, in the church's response to Hitler. Most German Christians went along, and even the Confessing Church too often stayed silent as its Jewish neighbors were rounded up. We rightly remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the exception. But what I find most honest about Bonhoeffer is that he never pretended resistance was simple. When he joined the conspirators against Hitler, he didn't claim to be righteous. He wrote about the guilt we take on when we act responsibly in a broken world, and he threw himself on the mercy of God. He fought a monster while wrestling with how not to become one.

So how do we walk this path?

I think one of the most powerful witnesses comes from my own Anglican tradition: Desmond Tutu, who became the Archbishop of Cape Town. For decades he stood against apartheid, a system that was truly monstrous. He called it evil without flinching. He called on the world to impose sanctions. He buried the young people the police had killed and preached at their funerals with a fire that terrified the government.

But he never treated his enemies as less than human. In 1985, at a funeral for activists, an angry crowd turned on a man they believed was a police informer and were about to burn him alive. Tutu pushed into that crowd, threw himself between them and the man, and saved his life. Bishop Tutu fought apartheid with everything he had, and he would not let the movement become the very thing it was fighting.

For Tutu, the goal was never just defeating his oppressors. It was a future where oppressor and oppressed could both be free, both be human, both be reconciled. Truth told plainly. Justice demanded. And mercy held out, even to the guilty.

So here's the myth I’m trying to bust: that loving your enemy means going soft on evil. Tutu shows us the opposite. You can name the monster. You can fight the monster with everything you have. And you can still refuse to let hatred make you one, because even your enemy was made in the image of God.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.