“Refudiate” the hatred that created Ground Zero in the first place.

There is hubbub brewing over the building of a Mosque at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center tragedy. Should the very enemies who killed thousands of Americans be allowed to erect a religious shrine at the very place of this terrorist attack?

First, it’s not a mosque, but a large (13 story) community center that will include, among other religious places, a Muslim Worship space. Second, it’s two blocks from Ground Zero.

But flagrant lies aside, God has granted us a learnable moment, and now calls us to the possibility to rise above emotion and, yes!, racism, and a step closer to peace.

It is, after all, the extreme intolerance of Jihadism that made 9/11. It was the very notion that some religions, different religions, other religions, are enemies and therefore unworthy that led human beings to fly jet airplanes full of other human beings into buildings to kill many other human beings. It is exactly the delegitimizing of someone else’s beliefs that makes it possible for terrorists to kill others, not soldiers but innocent bystanders, women and children.

How does becoming more like the terrorists overcome their acts?

Is our intolerance not cut from the same cloth? Do we pretend that it will do anything less than continue, perhaps even increase, the worldwide hatred and violence which engulfs our planet like a deepwater oil spill?

Or can we dare the harder way, to make peace?

I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven … Matthew 5:44

There is another way, a way based not on fear but on hope, a path not of devastation but of creation. It is possible to live together as human beings, to allow space for others who are different but still neighbors.

We could build a Mosque at Ground Zero and ask our Muslim brothers and sisters to share our aspiration that what happend there once never happen anywhere again.

Let us be warned of the consequences of our words and acts. If we fail to make a space for moderate Muslims, if we fail to empower and lift up and support “peaceful Muslims,” if we desecrate and demean a whole people based on the acts of a few radicals, then we empower those very elements who would rather destroy us than exist with us. If we cannot be for a peaceful relationship with Islam, then we will surely be locked into a neverending dance of death with it.

No, I think that there must be a Mosque at Ground Zero, if there is to be any hope for the future. I believe that it is our best way forward.

This is one of those rare opportunities where we can be better than we were so our future can be more than our past. Here is a chance to grow a new world for the sake of our children and our grandchildren, one not ruled by our smallness but by the limitless grace that is our gift through our faith in Jesus Christ. This is our time to “refudiate” our hate and fear and be bigger than we really are.

I am sure that the Jesus who called us to love our enemies would lay the first stone for a new Mosque in New York.

What will you do?

Not the Independence Day I will Celebrate

There is a loud and powerful chorus in America today, a refrain that I’m sure has been heard before and will probably and unfortunately, sound again. It is a simple but sad phrase that stains our Independence Day celebrations.

Take our Country Back.

It is the song of the angry and despairing, the hopeless and helpless. It is possible, I suppose that these words are not just political posturing, opportunism, but spoken sincerely, even honestly, from true concern and heartfelt fear.

But these words are wrong. Every single one wrong. Wrong because they are against what America is and should be.

Beginning with back.

Back from what? From rightly, democratically, legitimately elected leadership? Back from anyone who disagrees with my particular viewpoint, stand, position? Validating the rights of opposing ideas to exist and daring to share power with them is exactly the point of open democracy, is it not? America has never been just one place, one thing, one idea. America is built on the very truth of many ideas and the mutual search for the common, the shared, the whole. A different direction cannot be, ipso facto, a wrong direction in America, much less an evil one. It’s just a different one, and no ground for violence, notional or actual.

America is not a favored toy to be fought over in the nursery.

Because it can never be ours.

There is no ours in America. There is a my, a personal patriotism, an ownership of citizenship, duty, responsibility. But there is no ours, no single group of any ilk to which America only belongs, no group or groups with whom it can never be shared. Ours is a great obscenity in a nation of Immigrants, founded by pilgrims unwelcomed and discarded by other nations, ours cannot be claimed by a people carrying the guilt of what was done to the only native peoples who could fairly speak the word ours. What makes this America is precisely the fact that we do not belong here, that we have created a place for all others who do not belong, anywhere, either, who seek with us the freedom to have a home and live a life as best they can.

Which leaves the ugliest word of all. Take.

It is the essential error of human philosophy that we value force above all, that we equate ferocity with strength. In response to threat, apprehension, or loss, there must be force. I cannot have, so I will take. It is the very sin that defines humanity, the very wrong that destroys good everywhere. The loss is not merely to humility or civility, though both are surely destroyed. No, our loss is the loss of Grace, of faith in the larger arc of history and in the God who surely blesses this nation and all it stands for.

For there is not one good thing, of America or of any other thing, that comes from force. What is noble and right comes only by sacrifice, by the gift of self and the hope that it conveys, whether on a green in Lexington or a cross on Calvary or a local polling place. From force comes tyranny, pain and destruction, comes death and end. From giving comes greatness, future, grace.

Those who would take America would destroy her. And that is not the Independence day which I will celebrate this July 4th.

In angry voices today I hear a demand for freedom of a wrong kind, for Independence from the very ideals and responsibilities that define this nation and everything that is good about it. If freedom only means a for-profit-free-for-all or the blind and unworthy pursuit of power at the expense of person or creation, then they have won the day. They have taken America back.

May the God who has so richly blessed this nation grant us freedom from that.