Text — Luke 16:19-31

Our gospel lesson is about the huge chasm that separates a rich man and a poor man.  Another chasm that’s been in the news a lot lately is the chasm between Islamist terrorists and us.  I want to be very careful here to distinguish between Islam, the world religion as a whole, and this most extreme, anti-west, and violent movement that is called “Islam-ist.”  That one syllable on the end is very important.

After the September 11 attacks, I remember being very hopeful that suddenly there was a great interest in Islam in general, but especially in these Islamist terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, Ansar al Islam, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and so on.  Everyone was asking, “Why do these Islamists hate us?”

This is actually a very Christian question — not that you need to be a Christian to ask it, but all of Jesus’ teachings about reconciling enemies, being peacemakers, loving our enemies, recognizing that God loves our enemies too — all of this requires, as a bare minimum, that we try to know our enemies.  What do they want?  Why are they so angry?  How do they see the world?  How do they see us?

I want to say right up front: I don’t know exactly why the terrorists hate us, or what we’ve done, or what they imagine we’ve done, to make them so angry.  Before speculating about that, it’s worth saying that we, the people of the United States, haven’t always cared about the well-being of people in the Middle East.  In our self-defense, it’s also very convenient for leaders of other nations, and this is especially true in nations with a lot of problems and inner turmoil, to blame the United States for all their misery.  The countries that breed the most terrorists are countries that have failed their own people in the worst ways.

These are countries with the most authoritarian, corrupt regimes.  These are countries that neglect or mistreat women.  A society that won’t let girls go to school and that keeps half of its adult population out of the workforce is not going to compete very well economically.  It’s no accident that that these countries have a lot of unhappy people. 

Back in the fall of 2001, some of us went up to Wesleyan to hear Lamen Saneh, a Yale scholar who was born a Muslim.  He called Islamic terrorism the last, violent gasp of a badly failed system.

The point I’m making is this: By asking “Why do the terrorists hate us?” we’re not saying that they are completely justified in hating us as they do.  For angry young men with not much else to do, we are a very big, inviting target for their rage.

The second major point I’d make is that a lot of this hatred toward the U.S. in Arab countries has to do with the creation of the state of Israel and our support for Israel.  In the Arab world there’s a lot of bigoted, hatred of Jews.   This goes back hundreds, even thousands of years. 

There are many reasons why we support Israel.  Some are better than others.  We helped create Israel after WWII to make up for the horrible treatment of Jews in Germany, including our refusing to allow many Jewish refugees escaping Germany to enter the U.S.  We also wanted a democratic ally in the middle east because of all the oil in the Middle East.  Let’s just say that our support of Israel complicates our relationship with the whole Arab world. 

A third point:  When President Bush was asked, “Why do the terrorists hate us?” he said, “Because we’re free.”  That’s not a very adequate answer but there’s a grain of truth in it, although this probably isn’t exactly what George Bush means by “freedom.”  The pluralism and permissiveness in the west, the fact that we let everyone believe what they want to believe, the movies that come out of the west — these things don’t sit well with leaders who want everyone to believe the same thing and to act the same way.  Freedom to us means having choices.  To Muslims (so I am told) freedom means freedom from choices, freedom from distractions, freedom from temptation.

So we can think of many reasons the terrorists might hate us.  I don’t know that anyone can say which of these reasons is most important.  Some people say that Osama bin Laden is just evil, that it’s silly to try to understand him.  We should just find him and kill him.  I’m actually worried that finding and killing bin Laden would make him even more of a hero and fuel hatred toward us even more.

But even if Osama bin Laden is just evil, what about the millions of people in Pakistan and Indonesia who buy T-shirts with Osama bin Laden’s picture on the front?  Are they just evil?  Should we just kill them too?  Or is there something they experience, or see, or feel, that we should pay attention to?

Terrorism grows out of countries with brutal governments, or corrupt or inept governments that don’t do much for their people.  Many of these bad governments are ones that we’ve supported.  In Iran, up until 1979, it was the Shah of Iran we propped up — not a kind, gentle leader.  In some cases, we support these governments because they have a lot of oil.  In other cases, we’ve given these governments a lot of aid, much of it so they could buy our weapons and so they wouldn’t be on the side of the Soviet Union. 

Most of you probably know by now that we used to be good friends with Saddam Hussein.  There are film clips of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein on his trip to provide Saddam with chemical weapons he used in the war against Iran.

We support authoritarian leaders like President Mubarak of Egypt and un-elected leaders like President Musharaff of Pakistan who became President by a military coup.  We support him without pushing hard for elections because we’re afraid that, if there were elections, the people might pick someone worse.  Pakistan has nuclear weapons.  If Pakistan held elections and the Islamist fundamentalists won, which is a very real possibility, then the terrorists would have those weapons.  This is very serious business.

We even supported Osama bin Laden himself when his goal was the same as our goal, to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan.   We didn’t call him a terrorist then.  He was a freedom fighter.  We gave him Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.  When the Soviets left, we tried to buy back those Stinger missiles at a premium price, but we didn’t get very far with the repurchase program. 

This isn’t to say we’re to blame for the menace of Osama bin Laden.  But it seems to me that as Christians, in a spirit of sober honesty, we need to look back into the history of this mess and admit, and confess, at least among ourselves, how we contributed to it over many decades.

Even the borders of the countries of the Middle East were drawn after WWI by Great Britain and the United States, the winners of that war, when the Ottoman, or Turkish Empire, fell.  We didn’t draw those borders along geographic or ethnic boundaries to make stable nations.  We drew them according to where the oil was underground.  Oil lies at the heart of our involvement in the Middle East.  We all buy that oil.  We want it.  We feel we need it.  We want the supply high and the price low, and any president we elect will do whatever is necessary to keep that oil flowing. 

We tend not to think very much about ordinary people in the Middle East who see us living in luxury, using what they consider “their oil” while they live in poverty or under tyranny.  We need to think about them more.  We need to care about their well-being more than we have.  And we need to turn away from oil as our primary source of energy.

The real crux of our scripture lesson about the rich man and Lazarus is this.  The fate of all humans on this planet is tied together.  This is what Jesus taught.  We’re all God’s children. 

It’s not easy to care about people on the other side of the world.  It’s not convenient.  It takes a lot of hard work.  Part of being a Christian, at the very least, is being willing to face these chasms, to recognize them, to name them, and to do something, even if it feels like a very small thing, to cross over them so we can all live together on this planet.