Introduction: Bill O'Reilly begins every broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor" with a warning: "Warning: You are about to enter a No-Spin Zone."

I begin the sermon this morning with a warning: You are about to enter a No-Spin Zone where you will hear words like sin, Satan, and evil.

And we don't like to talk about evil or sin or the Devil. We prefer the language of "mitigating circumstances" or the psychotherapeutic vocabulary of "dysfunction" or "antisocial behavior" or "anger disorder." Mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin have even been described as suffering from "mental disorders" (see Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan [1995]). The Houston woman who murdered her five children is a victim of "post partum depression."

To talk about sin any more is about as welcome as a pork chop at Passover. But no matter how smart out technology is getting, we're still capable of killing 200 million people-and that's just the wars of the 20th century that did that.

You can't repeal the spiritual law of gravity--sin.

The Bible teaches us that sin is a biological and sociological category. Or in the words of Peanuts theologian Charlie Brown, "No matter how hard I try, there is always a flag on the play."

So I warn you: You're about to enter a no-spin zone. We're talking about sin this morning.

When our kids are rampaging through the house, fighting, yelling, name-calling, crying...what words do we shout them down with?

"You're behaving like a pack of wild animals."

When someone treats you badly--what words do you accuse them with?

"You are brutish! How beastly can you get?"

When we brand behavior as exceptionally cruel and vicious, we say...

"They are inhumane."

We moan and decry...

"Man's inhumanity to man."

Among all the injustices humans perpetrate upon planet Earth and our fellow creatures, these insults are among the most degrading and undeserved. Equating bad behavior, brutality and violence with the normal behavior of animals is a typical human attempt to "pass-the-buck."

Animals kill to eat. Many live in highly structured societies that enforce hierarchies or "pecking orders" with physical violence. But wolf packs are never malicious. Lion prides eat their kills so they may survive. Mother crocodiles carefully guard and protect their babies, never abusing them or injuring them on purpose.

In short, inhumanity is perhaps the most human of all the characteristics of homo sapiens. The highest order in the so called animal kingdom is the only one capable of the lowest forms of behavior.

Only people go to war. In biblical terms this dubious distinction is found at the beginning of our story. Cain killed Abel. Brother killed brother. We are all descendants of Cain. We are the species that likes to kill. In fact, we kill everything. We are a killing race of yahoos. Our "thirst for life" is in reality a thirst for blood.

Again, the biblical explanation of this blood-lust is clear and concise. When the first human beings in direct disobedience to divine orders ate the fruit of the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil," their eyes and hearts were opened. Knowing evil, knowing how to act in ways that fly in the face of God's intended creation, became a part of the human spirit. It's knowledge we have acted on ever since that moment. I like how a new book by Michael Howard begins--with Sir Henry Maine's dictum: "War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention." (The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order [Profile, 2000]).

Maybe it's not so much that peace is a modern "invention" as it's that modernity has contrived to create a few oases of peace for the price of unbelievable "crimes of violence" over the majority of the globe. In actuality these "hate crimes" are "peace crimes"-a category ("Crimes against Peace") introduced at the Nuremberg trials.

Peace has become the most costly of luxuries while murder and mayhem, homicide, infanticide, and whole-sale genocide have become the experience of the poorest of the poor and the least developed countries of the world.

Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado, who some say is the most brilliant photographer alive in the world today, lived on the road for six years, taking pictures of "humanity on the move"--exiles, refugees, migrants, etc. Before this project, Salgado confessed, "I truly believed that humanity was evolving in a positive direction." But "what I learned about human nature and the world we live in made me deeply apprehensive about the future" and about "whether humans will ever tame their darkest instincts."

I also came to understand, as never before, how everything that happens on earth is connected. We are all affected by the widening gap between rich and poor, by the availability of information, by population growth in the Third World, by the mechanization of agriculture, by rampant urbanization, by destruction of the environment, by nationalistic, ethnic, and religious bigotry. The people wrenched from their homes are simply the most visible victims of a global convulsion entirely of our own making." (Migrations: Humanity in Transition [New York: Aperture, 2000\), 7, 8]).

One hesitates to coax monsters from the memory, and to revisit the ideological intemperance of the 20th century-and its untold devastations like the 6 million killed in the holocaust, a million of them children. In the First World War, civilians accounted for 5 percent of the casualties. In Mozambique, they accounted for 95%. In Sudan, they accounted for 97%.

This is not progress!

And this depressing growth trend isn't just happening "far and away" in distant countries of the world. There are boom populations of violence within our own neighborhoods and towns.

America's prisons currently house 1.8 million people. A further 3 million are under the surveillance of probation and parole departments, and related organizations. This amounts to a 300% increase in the US prison population since 1980. (Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis [1999]).

This is not progress!

Want to know the most offensive commonality among the most heinous of recent atrocities? Religion is cited as a primary incendiary factor among these explosions of hate and violence. We have become well versed in the language of "final solutions," "ethnic cleansing," "racial purity." And in each of these dialects the convicting grammar is the element of religion.

Secretary General Kofi Annan presented some UN reports to religious leaders in Bosnia in 1998. He revealed that since the end of WWII, military battles have killed some 27 million people of whom 85% were civilians. Shamefully, in most of these conflicts, religion was a "contributing factor." (Deirdre Taylor, "Religions at War," Spirituality & Health, 3 [Summer 2000], 38.)

In the incomprehensibly bloody history of the 20th century, we have become fairly conversant with the obscenities of the Holocaust, the Bosnian-Serb violence, the destruction of the Kurds. But one of the most devastating acts of genocidal blood lust hardly made a blip on the radar of our moral outrage. I want to spend a few minutes telling you about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda this morning because I think it unpacks our text in ways that only truth can.

In what has been called "the most disgraceful episode of the 1990s" or even "of the second half of the 20th century" (The Economist, 13 May 2000), the 1994 genocide in Rwanda yielded a daily killing rate five times that of the Nazi death camps 50 years earlier" (calculation cited by Mr. Shawcross [William Shawcross, Deliver Us From Evil (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000)].

The Rwandan population was primarily made up of two tribes. The Hutus, the toilers of the soil; and the Tutsis, the herdsmen (only 15% of Rwanda's population). In a classic Cain and Abel story (which also shows also the destructive power of Hamitic ideology), in 1994 about 100,000 Hutus rose up to slay their Tutsi neighbors - at least one million of them.

By the early 1990s Rwanda had become the most Christian nation in Africa. 85% of the population claimed to be Christian. It was one of the greatest missionary success stories in the history of Christianity.

What happened?

What made someone get up from their couch, take a machete, go next door and slice the limbs off their neighbor's bodies, behead the men in front of the women, who were then raped, and killed, with any pregnant women having their babies scooped out of their bodies and crushed?

*333 1/3 Tutsis murdered every hour.

*5 people killed every minute.

*This doesn't include those whom the machetes didn't fully kill, or those who were raped and maimed.

Among the thousands of gruesome, all-too-human-inhumanities committed in this frenzy of blood-letting, three examples point up the depth, width, and height of the sin that made this blood-bath possible.

Here's the Depth: The depth of the sin was demonstrated by the involvement of the supposedly Christian churches themselves. Just last month some Roman Catholic nuns were arrested for their involvement in the genocide. But here's one incident that brings it home even more pointedly.

Seven Seventh-Day Adventist Tutsi Pastors gathered their flock and sought refuge at a hospital and church in Mugonero. When the police who they paid to protect them suddenly deserted, they saw the handwriting on the wall and wrote to their supervisor, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana. The pastor's son replied in person: "Saturday, the sixteenth, at exactly nine o'clock in the morning, you will be attacked." And just to make sure they got the message, the pastoral supervisor himself wrote this letter: "Your problem has already found a solution. You must die."

Sure enough, as promised, at the appointed time, all Seventh Day Adventists huddled in the church for protection were killed-man, woman, child. And the policemen who had protected them led the attack. (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda [New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998], 28).

Here's the Width: The width of the sin was demonstrated by the cultural acceptance of the practice of "selling cabbages" - the Hutu reference to the offer of fifty Rwandan francs a piece (about 30 cents) for severed Tutsi heads.

Here's the Height: The height of the sin was demonstrated by the apparent lobotomizing of all human compassion and conscience. "The scale of the horror seemed to numb people to the very idea of death. I saw one man walking with a bundle in his arms, chatting to another man. When he arrived at the mass grave, he tossed the inert body of his baby onto the pile and walked away, still chatting." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You..., 14).

In the words of the journalist who has studied the Rwandan genocide the most, "Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews, and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You...170).

How can we escape this mark of Cain, this geyser of blood and violence, destruction and depravity that erupts like Old Faithful throughout human history?

Jesus sent out his missionaries with one message on their lips.

Peace.

The peace they were proclaiming was the arrival of the kingdom of God, ushered in by the person of Jesus himself.

Jesus is the kingdom. The kingdom is present in him and through him. The watch-word of this kingdom of God is "peace." The Jesus story has no place for violence upon others. If when Jesus' disciples uttered this password of peace upon entering a household and hearts and spirits were responsive to this shibboleth of "shalom," the kingdom was present.

But "presence" was not enough. In today's text Jesus specifically counsels his envoys to stay and live with the households they entered, teaching and preaching and healing and thereby incarnating the peaceable ways of the kingdom. They were not simply to evangelize (stop people on the street). They were to make disciples of this peace they offered. They were to stay and teach peace, bring peace, until the peace of the Rock became an indistinguishable part of the household they shared.

When you divorce evangelism from discipleship, you get Rwanda. Here you have one of the greatest missionary success stories in Christian history. 85% of Rwandans called themselves "Christian." Yet over a million Rwandans were killed by their so-called "Christian" neighbors, even those who were seeking shelter in churches.

Numbers of "converts" mean nothing. Only "disciples" who can keep the peace and pass on the peace of the Rock among those who truly know the kingdom of God, the presence of Jesus.

One final story from the Rwandan horror demonstrates how defining what you are can change your life. Once again, the words are from journalist Philip Gourevitch:

On April 30, 1997, Rwandan television showed footage of a man who had confessed to having been among a party of genocidaires who had killed seventeen schoolgirls and a sixty-two-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school in Gisenyi two nights earlier. It was the second such attack on a school in a month; the first time, sixteen students were killed and twenty injured in Kibuye.

The prisoner on television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power "liberation" campaign. His band of 150 militants was composed largely of ex-FAR and interahamwe. During their attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves--Hutus from Tutsis. But the students refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That..., 352-353).

At least some of these girls could have chosen to live. But instead they chose to call themselves Rwandans.

The church must likewise look our bloody history in the face and decide what we are? Are we converts or are we disciples of the Christ and Christ's kingdom. Jesus preached that the greatest honor comes to those who are known as "peacemakers"--for they will be called the "sons and daughters of God." How awful to realize that in the minds of the world, "religion" now is identified more with hate and "hate crimes" than with peace and peace-making.

Would that this church, Christ's church, were known for people who are "peace-makers," true disciples of the kingdom of God, people known for peace offerings of justice and love, people who can face the dangers of life without violence or threats, people who offer the world the "fruit of the Spirit" which is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control" (Galatians 5:22-23). The greatest honor God gives comes to those who are peacemakers. For only peacemakers get called "sons and daughters of God" (Mt. 5:9).

If you're a piece of the Rock, you've got the peace of the Rock. But it's no private peace of that Rock you've got a hold of. It's only a shared peace.