Rarely has a film captured my attention as did Hotel Rwanda. I recommended it to the congregation this past Sunday (1/30/05), something I’ve not done previously, and even declared that it should be required viewing in every school and college, beginning with Middle School. Hotel has no gratuitous violence or language. It is based on a true story, and those who wrote and directed it are to be commended, not only for making an excellent, suspenseful film, but also for bringing public attention in a mass market to the horrors of continuing genocide. In three months Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis, a horror that began immediately after a peace accord signed under the watchful eyes of Western powers. The Rwandan government, in the hands of a Hutu general following the president’s flight into exile, did nothing to prevent the slaughter.
Hotel is a story of courage, faith, peacemaking, meekness, self-effacement, and survival. Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) is a hotel manager who with wit and good instinct (as wise as a serpent, as gentle as a dove) saved a multitude of Tutsi refugees. One leaves the theater uplifted, able to thank God that the purpose of the human creature is to glorify and enjoy (and serve) the Creator, even in the face of evil, hatred, and death. Viewers are reminded, seeing the film with the eyes of faith, of the sacrificial risk (taking up one’s cross) to which Jesus calls all believers.
Almost immediately after watching Hotel I preached on The Beatitudes and on Paul’s wonderful words in I Cor. 1 about God’s choosing what is weak and despised in the world to shame the wise and strong. The film so powerfully demonstrates the apostle’s claim that as I read the Corinthian passage in worship, I had to stop in the midst of a verse to regain composure before I could finish the lection.
The film also recalls what the apostle wrote the Ephesians: “Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against . . . the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” (6:11 — 12). The church needs to listen to that admonition now that the President’s gospel of ‘liberty to the captives’ has been let loose on the world, courtesy of American leaders who have never fired a shot in battle, and with your and my tax dollars under girding American military might. We Christians would do well to reflect upon what military power can and cannot do, and what it dare not fail to do. The Rwandan genocide occurred because self-determination had come to a nation created in Africa by a colonial power. When the killing began after the peace was signed between the Hutu rebels and the Rwandan government, no government (nor the United Nations) was willing to use the power of the sword to prevent the massacre that ensued.
What Christian reflection reveals in 2005, immediately after Iraqi elections, is that we, who have changed a regime and led people to polling places in the hope of political liberty, must now be willing to speak of stability and of the power a government requires to enforce a constitution. Freedom and self-determination turn into anarchy and death unless secured by the power of the sword. Until a decent transition is made, America will use military power to secure the internal peace of Iraq. If we do not; if we move on to some other nation too soon, or take up another foreign policy adventure, then we will have betrayed those whom we have liberated just as the Western powers betrayed the Tutsis.
Opponents of this war, of whom I was one, and Christians who believe humanity was created in the image of God, need to pull together to support a secure peace for Iraq. That nation may evolve (or rapidly transform itself) into a form of government we will not admire, even into a theocratic dictatorship. But it will be theirs, and we will have no choice but to secure it.
Anarchy and killing are enemies of freedom, and the powers of darkness must not be underestimated. If divine providence is on the side of liberty in this world, then pray without ceasing that the President has faced the consequences — for Iraq, for the family of nations, and even for our beloved land.
