No More Payback
“No More Payback”
Luke 6:27-30
So, does anyone here know who Stanislav Petrov was? No, he wasn’t a cosmonaut. He wasn’t an Olympic gymnast. He wasn’t on that plane that “fell” from the sky in Russia this week, either. No, he’s just a guy…who saved all of our lives. In fact, he probably saved the world. I think it is worth taking a minute to meet him…
Petrov was born in 1939 and died in 2017. In 1983, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. On September 1st, 1983, Korean Air Lines flight 007 had a mechanical error while flying from Anchorage to Seoul. As a result, the plane wandered from its flight path into Soviet airspace. The Soviet Air Force treated the intruding plane as if it were a United States’ spy plane. After firing several warning shots, the Soviet Air Force attacked the plane with air-to-air missiles. The plane crashed into the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew on board were killed.
It’s not hard to imagine the international tension that was there three weeks later when Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early warning system. That day, the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by five more missiles. It wasn’t that Petrov controlled a launch button. Those buttons, its turns our are beloved in the movies but dreaded in real life. No country really wants one person making that decision. However, when Stanislav Petrov decided that this was a false alarm and he chose not to report it, he stopped a chain of decisions that very likely would have led to a full scale nuclear war in which half the citizens of the United States and the Soviet Union would have died.
A subsequent investigation confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had malfunctioned. Petrov later told the press that he was neither punished nor rewarded for his decision. Later, it would be determined that the system was triggered by a bizarre combination of sunlight on high altitude clouds over North Dakota and it’s refraction on the Soviet satellites. In other words, the system was seeing a mirage.
Petrov later spoke about what influenced his decision. First, he had been told that a U.S. attack, should it come, would be an all out attack. A hand full of missiles didn’t seem to be “all out.” Also, the launch detection system was new and he and a number of his colleagues didn’t really trust it. Third, this message was supposed to pass through 30 layers of review. He didn’t think that could have happened this quickly. Finally, the ground radar, which was much more reliable, failed to pick up any evidence of missiles, even after he delayed a decision. However, in his last interview, in 2013, he acknowledged that he was never really sure that the alarm was actually an error. He said that what allowed him to make the right decision was a significant amount of time being trained as a civilian. Almost everyone around him were career military officers. He said that he was certain that having been steeped in following orders, they would have followed the protocol that day.
Thank God for this man who disobeyed orders and broke the chain of command. However, we should be challenged by his story to also see that he overcame a drive that is inside of us all. The prevailing instinct inside of all human beings is that when we are hurt, we hurt back, that when we are hit, we hit back, that when we are attacked, we attack back. In fact, the overwhelming human tendency is not only to seek revenge but to seek disproportionate revenge. So, if you kill one of us, we will kill 100 of you. This is why most scholars consider the rise of the notion of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” to be a step forward in human history. At least this is proportionate revenge. If you do something to me, it will cost you but that cost will be proportionate to the damage you did to me.
Of course, justice systems have been developed in almost every culture where impartial judges deliver justice rather than revenge. Impartial juries make decisions, not the families of those who were killed. Laws are in place long before crimes happen. They aren’t written after the fact. While there is certainly a real discussion to have about whether everyone gets equal treatment in our legal system, there is no question that the ideal that we struggle to preserve is of a justice system in which punishments fit the crime and perpetrators are reformed and re-enter society after they have served their time.
However, nuclear weapons launch systems are not deliberative bodies. They hover right on the line between the ultimate self-defense and the clear intent to obliterate everyone on the other side, men, women and children. So, the stakes are incredibly high, the time to decide is so short, and the information gathered for making a decision is often unreliable. (And of course, as the Oppenheimer movie plays in our theaters, we should remind ourselves that we are the only nation that made the deliberate decision to use nuclear weapons—twice.)
Here’s the thing: Jesus wanted us to see how “hair triggered” and vengeful we, ourselves, can be. In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of Jesus’ most important teachings, Jesus says this: “Love you enemies.” Not… “Obliterate your enemies.” Not, “If your enemies hit you, hit them back twice as hard.” Not even, “If your enemy hits you, only hit them in the exact same way.” Nope…Jesus instructs us to love our enemies and, in the words of today’s translation, “Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst.”
In order to really hear this, we have to be honest and own our instincts. Most people would adhere to the notion that I should treat you the way you treat me. If you’re nice to me, I’ll follow suit. If you mistreat me, all bets are off. Payback is just fair play in our world. To not pay someone back, particularly if you are a leader, is perceived as weak. For most people, such thinking is a given.
Jesus fundamentally challenges this “payback” system. Remember, I’ve been saying to you for a few weeks now that there are things that we can decide to do—be hospitable and welcoming to others; control our breathing, get some exercise, be patient—that allow us to choose who we will be in this life. Payback—if we buy into it—cancels all that freedom of choice. If payback is the rule, then I have no choice but to be whoever the other person tells me I should be. Payback is the ultimate surrender. If someone if being mean, do I have to reward them by being mean back? Jesus says that there is a better way.
How can an enemy make you better? Maybe the guy on the other team who flat out cheated the last time you played them becomes the inspiration for you to work harder, not so that you can get revenge but so that you prevail by a big enough margin that the game won’t we be decided by who cheats. Maybe the person who publicly wronged you should have to know that everyone saw what they did. Everyone also saw how you made the decision to not go there and walked away. Maybe the person who said that really hurtful thing to you in front of everyone needs to be forced to live with that experience rather than being allowed to hide behind the wrong that you did next. Hate begets hate. It takes a big person—it takes integrity- to take a punch and choose not to hit back.
However, what real alternative do we have? If we aren’t willing to allow someone else to tell us who we have to be, if life isn’t about matching the worst behavior from someone else with our own worst behavior, then we have to take responsibility for our own choices. Our job isn’t to be like everyone else. Our job is to show the world that we are following a higher calling, that there’s a better way to live.
There’s a quote that I’ve always liked that says that our lives might be the only Gospel that some people ever read. We live the Gospel when we live differently, when we live beyond our instincts, when we live in such a way that someone might actually ask, “What’s up with you?” “Why are you who you are?” “How come you don’t do what everyone else does?” Jesus isn’t calling us to be like everyone else. Jesus also isn’t calling us to be weak. Jesus is inviting us to disrupt the chain reaction that happens when human being after human being seeks revenge.
That’s the thing. Thank God for Stanislav Petrov and his willingness to make his own choices! However, let’s not kid ourselves. In our homes every day, in the parking lot of the grocery store, at the intersection uptown, in our work lives or when we play, situation after situation arises in which we have to make our own choices. My wife, my child, my friend, my pharmacist, my neighbor may have just done something that hurt me. They said something or did something or didn’t say something—whatever! My alarm system is sounding. The message is that incoming fire has been detected. The system instructs me that I do not have time. It tells me that I must fire back. And I know, as surely as I know anything, that if I fire back, things will escalate.
We have to decide, “Am I going to follow Jesus or not?” This question isn’t a “churchy” question, at all. The question is, “What can I do to disarm this moment, to turn the tide?” Sometimes, we need to let the other person know that we need a few minutes. We walk away and collect ourselves and what follows is a better conversation. Maybe the person who has offended us is someone we don’t even know and may never see again. Maybe we just let things go. Maybe we recognize that what’s happened isn’t the other person at their best. Maybe we give them the benefit of the doubt and move on.
To stand in a moment in life and hear the alarms go off inside you that signal an attack and choose not to fire back every “missile” in your arsenal in a counter attack isn’t an act of weakness. It is an act of defiance, an expression of faith, an assertion of the power to choose. In that moment, Jesus’ words should haunt us and inspire us: “Love your enemies. No more payback. Liver generously.” In that moment, what is at stake may not be the fate of the whole world, but the faith that we say we believe and the relationships that we claim are what matter most to us. “No more payback…”