Sunday, June 16, 2013: 1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a; 2 Samuel 11:26-12:10,
13-15

"Get up, eat some food, and be cheerful,” Jezebel said to Ahab. “I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.” Using letters with forged signatures, she commanded leaders to dispatch thugs to murder Naboth. Meanwhile Ahab feasted. He trusted Jezebel to give him his heart’s desire. Jezebel killed without having to see her victim, and Ahab benefited without knowing about the plot.

This is a story about engaging in violence while staying far away from the conflict zone, murdering enemies without having to watch them die. Our world echoes the world of Ahab and Jezebel. In theirs, they kill from a distance with a letter. In our computerized wars fought by weaponized drones, a president can kill from his house with a telephone call. “You just point and click,” Conor Oberst sings with the band Desaparecidos. “In the computer’s blue glare the bombs burst in the air. There was a city once, now nothing’s there.” The U.S. administration commands pilots in New Mexico, North Dakota, New York and Georgia, pilots hidden away in trailers that serve as cockpits for drones that fly over villages in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen and fire missiles at human targets. “We’ve killed 4,700,” confessed Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). In defense of the drone program, he added, “Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war.”

When Senator Graham says that “we” are at war, that “we” have killed thousands, I want to distance myself from his “we” and the president’s war machine. I am, after all, a child of Latin American immigrants with familial commitments that shift my identity south of the U.S. border. And I’m a Mennonite, a member of a historic peace church whose people conscientiously object to killing enemies. I have good reason not to consider myself part of the “we.”