Here is our most recent Monday Night Live discussion of the new collection of Stanley Hauerwas’ work, Jesus Changes Everything.
Seeing as how we discussed Stanley’s work on the Sermon on the Mount, here is a sermon delivered by him on Matthew 5 from 2017:
The image of the saints robed in white, surrounding the throne of the Lamb in the book of Revelation, is a powerful depiction of the significant place of the martyred saints in the Christian faith. Put as simply as I can, I think it true that if there were no martyrs there would be no Christianity. That the doors of many churches are painted red is to remind us that we are only able to be Christians by the sacrifice of the martyrs. That the martyrs play such an important role in our faith is a reminder that to be a Christian is to enter a way of life that trains us in how to die. It is not an empty gesture that in the baptismal liturgy we say “We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death.”296 For the Christian, death is always a possibility given the presumption that as Christians we would die before we betrayed the one who has given us life. Thus Herbert McCabe’s observation that for Christians, “there is no casual death, there is only a choice between martyrdom and betrayal.” Martyrdom, so understood, is a reminder that the willingness of Christians through the centuries to be killed because of who they worshiped represents an intense form of the politics of Jesus. That politics—the politics of Jesus—means we never as Christians live in a time or place where martyrdom is not a continuing possibility. Training in how we should die is the heart of every politics, just to the extent politics is always about that for which it is worth dying. That for which it is worth dying means some draw the conclusion that you must also be willing to kill to sustain that which is so valuable. We, that is we Americans, are quite good at hiding the significance of death for our politics. We tell ourselves that politics is fundamentally about the satisfaction of interests, but it nonetheless remains the case that politics even in liberal societies is but another name for the distribution of risks that are intrinsic to an economy of death. The political character of martyrdom was strikingly evident in the struggle between Christians and Rome. It took some time for the Romans to even notice that a small band of people called Christians existed. From a Roman perspective the Christians did not seem to be a threat so there was little reason to kill them. Pliny thought they were but another burial society. He was not wrong about that, but he did not have a clue about the significance of how the way Christians died raised questions about the pride that was at the heart of the project called Rome. The Romans were not completely without insight about these matters. It did not take them long to understand that the Christians were anything but just another religious association. The Christians worshiped Jesus. They thought it was only in that name that you could live a life that you might lose early. Accordingly, Christians called into question the Roman worship of the gods that legitimated the decisions Rome made about who should be killed and who should be tolerated. The Christians, therefore, had a story about the way things are that was fundamentally at odds with the stories on which Rome depended. As a result, Christians refused to be tolerant because they were anything but ambivalent about who had made their lives free. Confronted by such a people there is only one thing you can do if you are Rome. You must kill them and in the process show that their willingness to die makes clear that the narrative that shapes their deaths cannot be true. Yet there was an unpleasant discovery that awaited Rome. Rome discovered that they could kill the Christians, but they could not determine the meaning of their death. Rome would even put those who were to die through degrading forms of torture in the hope of making their deaths meaningless. But the Christian refusal to let Rome determine the meaning of the death of martyrs made clear that the church was an alternative politics to the violent politics of glory that made Rome Rome. The citizens of Rome desperately fought to insure Rome was eternal, so no memory would be lost. If Rome fell, who would remember them? Christians had a quite different polity because they knew God would remember. The white-robed army that surrounds the throne makes the church here and now actual. They have been identified as those who have been made who they are by the blood of the Lamb. They have been told by God who they are. They are not “heroes” or “heroines.” They are martyrs. They are witnesses to the inauguration of a new time by a man named Jesus. He has defeated the violence of a politics that tries to sustain itself by killing those who threaten the presumption that it is eternal. These reflections on martyrdom as a politics may seem quite foreign for American Christians. We do not think of ourselves as living in a country in which our lives as Christians are threatened because we are Christians. So we do not think of ourselves as a church of the martyrs. Yet we do have this prayer in The Book of Common Prayer: “Almighty God, who gave to your servant N. a boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for the faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” We are a people who celebrate and thus remember the martyrs. Let us not forget that this is dangerous business, but let us not fail to remember that those who have triumphed—that is, those called martyrs—have made us members in a fellowship inaugurated by Jesus, so that the world may know a people exist who are willing to die, yet who refuse to kill. To be part of such a people is what it means to be saved.
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