The Violence Within, The Violence Without
Sermon
SEEK GOOD, NOT EVIL
that you may live
I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth. I will sweep away man and beast. I will sweep away the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. I will overthrow the wicked. I will cut off mankind from the face of the earth. I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. I will punish the officials and the kings' sons. And I will punish those who fill their master's house with violence and fraud.
That's hardly the kind of talk our children hear in Sunday church school. What a torrent of outrage and anger! What a volcanic eruption of vitriol! The devastation is to be complete, nothing and no one is to be spared. God will pass judgment on all that he has made. God will make a sacrifice of people. For Israel, sacrifice was no dictionary word. Vivifying it was the experience of seeing the blood of bulls and goats and calves running in gutters in the temple. There was the compelling color of red, the warmth and aroma of blood newly spilled. Sacrifice of people, therefore, is even more horrendous. It is intentional.
The bluntness of the prophet makes us want to crawl out from under in any way possible. "This goes back to the time when religion was still in its cruder developing form," we say. "Even God was in the process of maturing and developing an identity." So these shocking words take on an historical interest, but hardly a personal one, hardly a contemporary one. In a moment the volcanic rage of the text is forgotten.
The ease of crawling out from under shows how deep and elusive is our problem. Life goes on. Religion continues. Worship continues. And officially, too. The form is maintained, the substance gutted. Only the prophet noticed.
In recent years, we've been shocked by some of the stories of the crudities, not to say savagery, emerging from the resurgent Muslim faith. And it's happening right now. It should make us recall the time of the Inquisition, when in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, people were tortured, executed, burned at the stake.
"If ever that book which I am not going to write is written," says C. S. Lewis, "it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of 'the World' will not hear us until we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch."
Writes Charles Williams, "Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin. It is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the dark fruit of hell. The peacock fans of holy and austere popes drove the ashes of burning men over Christendom. The torch that had set light to the crosses in the Vatican gardens of Nero did not now pass into helpless or hesitating hands." If we did not suffer from historical amnesia, we would remember the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants, which devastated most of Europe at the time. If we did not suffer from historical amnesia, we would remember the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombing of Dresden and the bestiality of Auschwitz, crimes which were committed in the high name of nationalism and racial superiority.
So little effect has all this devastation had on most governments, that there's actual talk of a "winnable limited nuclear war." That's language for something that has no basis in fact - a "winnable" limited nuclear war! The policy of killing people in order to solve problems continues its sacred, can we say with the language of the text, idolatrous course, virtually untouched by the whole history of the futility of that policy. In one of our later ventures some fifty-seven thousand Americans died in Vietnam and countless more Vietnamese. It was not unusual for ancestors, persecuted, having fled to this country to persecute others. The persecuted soon became the persecutors.
What have the South Africans learned from the United States' experience with slavery? The answer is: little or nothing. There the subjugation of the blacks has the benediction of some churches, just as slavery had its benedictions from many churches here.
The list could go on. It is important to see that the text is not exaggerating when it speaks of violence and fraud in the name of religion. If violence and the cruder forms of murder and temple prostitution are not our problem, then the fraud and violence may appear in more subtle and even more devastating forms. The refinement of Pharisaic violence and fraud is one form. The doctrine of "What's the use? what good will it do anyhow?" is another. The plain, ordinary "giving up" is another. The fancy words for it are anomie, acidia, indifference, malaise, boredom.
"Not Pilate, not Herod, not Caiaphas, not Judas fastened on Jesus Christ the reproach of insipidity," writes Dorothy Sayers. "That was left for pious hands to inflict. To make of His story something that could neither startle, nor shock, nor terrify is to crucify the Lord of glory afresh ... Let me tell you, you good Christian people, a writer of nursery tales would be ashamed to treat a nursery tale the way you have treated the greatest story of all time."
"Nothing is so deadly as dealing with the outsides of holy things," says George MacDonald. Where is that "strong following of the Lord?" Where is "that strong seeking of the Lord, of inquiring of him?" Is it not the violence of indifference and privatism that brings on a crude kind of violence? The violence of "religion is only a private affair" often begets or permits the public disregard of the neighbor.
There is fraud when the Living Lord is not present.
There is fraud when compassion is not present.
There is fraud when the cross of Christ is not present.
More stringent than all the stringency of the text is that of 1 Corinthians 13: "If I had the tongues of men and of angels ... if I had faith so that I could move mountains ... if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor ... if I give my body to be burned and have not charity, I am nothing." Paul was a living example of this - Pharisee of the Pharisees, Hebrew of the Hebrews, as touching the law perfect. Because his zeal did not know love, he violated the name of God Almighty in the name of God Almighty.
What shall we say to all this?
Nothing!
The first response is silence. Be silent before the Lord God. The noise of religion and solemn assemblies must cease as well as the violence of the non-religious world. So pervasive is this violence inside and outside religion that Paul Tournier calls it "our endemic disease."
It would seem that God has no other choice but to meet violence with violence, not in the manner of the text, but in a manner never dreamed of, before. It is still hard to believe, after. Can we say that God violated himself in the crucifixion? What else was that but violence of a most brutal kind? But this violence was different than the usual violence-vengeance-revenge-violence cycle. This time God would take the violence within himself, a violence not limited to megatons of TNT or Hiroshima devastations, but the violence of all time and all places for all time and for all eternity.
The magnitude of the resulting stench was such that God withdrew from God. He did to himself what we like to do to each other. In the process, he killed himself. He sought in this self-immolation to hold up before us what it is we do to ourselves and to each other, to tell us that we need be violent no more, heed it whether we will or no.
Every time someone is baptized, all the fury of the cross of Christ is released into the life of the newly baptized and by recollection of their own baptism, to the already baptized. God violated that we might violate no more. We are baptized into his death. His death means that violence and fraud need no longer be our stock in trade.
But God did not stop there. He provides a meal which is both a celebration of violence and of violence conquered, recycled so that instead of destruction, it produces life. What else do those graphic words mean? "This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you. This is the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me." Living in this violent age of potential nuclear winter, we cannot too often celebrate the feast of violence conquered, of violence prevention. This festival of violence recycled breaks the cycle which has bedeviled us ever since Cain.
Not even the wrath of a Zephaniah, as he speaks for God, even a God of violence, is up to the task. Only when God turns violence on himself, takes our endemic disease and treats it with the crucifixion and death of his Son, is there a breakthrough, a resurrection.
Each time we celebrate the festivals of contained, recycled and conquered violence - the festivals of baptism and the Lord's Supper - God affirms that there need be violence no more.
Be silent before the Lord God! Amen
In the second year of Darius the king, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet, "Speak now to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to all the remnant of the people, and say, 'Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit abides among you; fear not. For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I wills hake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts.' "
(Haggai 2:1-9)
That's hardly the kind of talk our children hear in Sunday church school. What a torrent of outrage and anger! What a volcanic eruption of vitriol! The devastation is to be complete, nothing and no one is to be spared. God will pass judgment on all that he has made. God will make a sacrifice of people. For Israel, sacrifice was no dictionary word. Vivifying it was the experience of seeing the blood of bulls and goats and calves running in gutters in the temple. There was the compelling color of red, the warmth and aroma of blood newly spilled. Sacrifice of people, therefore, is even more horrendous. It is intentional.
The bluntness of the prophet makes us want to crawl out from under in any way possible. "This goes back to the time when religion was still in its cruder developing form," we say. "Even God was in the process of maturing and developing an identity." So these shocking words take on an historical interest, but hardly a personal one, hardly a contemporary one. In a moment the volcanic rage of the text is forgotten.
The ease of crawling out from under shows how deep and elusive is our problem. Life goes on. Religion continues. Worship continues. And officially, too. The form is maintained, the substance gutted. Only the prophet noticed.
In recent years, we've been shocked by some of the stories of the crudities, not to say savagery, emerging from the resurgent Muslim faith. And it's happening right now. It should make us recall the time of the Inquisition, when in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, people were tortured, executed, burned at the stake.
"If ever that book which I am not going to write is written," says C. S. Lewis, "it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of 'the World' will not hear us until we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch."
Writes Charles Williams, "Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin. It is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the dark fruit of hell. The peacock fans of holy and austere popes drove the ashes of burning men over Christendom. The torch that had set light to the crosses in the Vatican gardens of Nero did not now pass into helpless or hesitating hands." If we did not suffer from historical amnesia, we would remember the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants, which devastated most of Europe at the time. If we did not suffer from historical amnesia, we would remember the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombing of Dresden and the bestiality of Auschwitz, crimes which were committed in the high name of nationalism and racial superiority.
So little effect has all this devastation had on most governments, that there's actual talk of a "winnable limited nuclear war." That's language for something that has no basis in fact - a "winnable" limited nuclear war! The policy of killing people in order to solve problems continues its sacred, can we say with the language of the text, idolatrous course, virtually untouched by the whole history of the futility of that policy. In one of our later ventures some fifty-seven thousand Americans died in Vietnam and countless more Vietnamese. It was not unusual for ancestors, persecuted, having fled to this country to persecute others. The persecuted soon became the persecutors.
What have the South Africans learned from the United States' experience with slavery? The answer is: little or nothing. There the subjugation of the blacks has the benediction of some churches, just as slavery had its benedictions from many churches here.
The list could go on. It is important to see that the text is not exaggerating when it speaks of violence and fraud in the name of religion. If violence and the cruder forms of murder and temple prostitution are not our problem, then the fraud and violence may appear in more subtle and even more devastating forms. The refinement of Pharisaic violence and fraud is one form. The doctrine of "What's the use? what good will it do anyhow?" is another. The plain, ordinary "giving up" is another. The fancy words for it are anomie, acidia, indifference, malaise, boredom.
"Not Pilate, not Herod, not Caiaphas, not Judas fastened on Jesus Christ the reproach of insipidity," writes Dorothy Sayers. "That was left for pious hands to inflict. To make of His story something that could neither startle, nor shock, nor terrify is to crucify the Lord of glory afresh ... Let me tell you, you good Christian people, a writer of nursery tales would be ashamed to treat a nursery tale the way you have treated the greatest story of all time."
"Nothing is so deadly as dealing with the outsides of holy things," says George MacDonald. Where is that "strong following of the Lord?" Where is "that strong seeking of the Lord, of inquiring of him?" Is it not the violence of indifference and privatism that brings on a crude kind of violence? The violence of "religion is only a private affair" often begets or permits the public disregard of the neighbor.
There is fraud when the Living Lord is not present.
There is fraud when compassion is not present.
There is fraud when the cross of Christ is not present.
More stringent than all the stringency of the text is that of 1 Corinthians 13: "If I had the tongues of men and of angels ... if I had faith so that I could move mountains ... if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor ... if I give my body to be burned and have not charity, I am nothing." Paul was a living example of this - Pharisee of the Pharisees, Hebrew of the Hebrews, as touching the law perfect. Because his zeal did not know love, he violated the name of God Almighty in the name of God Almighty.
What shall we say to all this?
Nothing!
The first response is silence. Be silent before the Lord God. The noise of religion and solemn assemblies must cease as well as the violence of the non-religious world. So pervasive is this violence inside and outside religion that Paul Tournier calls it "our endemic disease."
It would seem that God has no other choice but to meet violence with violence, not in the manner of the text, but in a manner never dreamed of, before. It is still hard to believe, after. Can we say that God violated himself in the crucifixion? What else was that but violence of a most brutal kind? But this violence was different than the usual violence-vengeance-revenge-violence cycle. This time God would take the violence within himself, a violence not limited to megatons of TNT or Hiroshima devastations, but the violence of all time and all places for all time and for all eternity.
The magnitude of the resulting stench was such that God withdrew from God. He did to himself what we like to do to each other. In the process, he killed himself. He sought in this self-immolation to hold up before us what it is we do to ourselves and to each other, to tell us that we need be violent no more, heed it whether we will or no.
Every time someone is baptized, all the fury of the cross of Christ is released into the life of the newly baptized and by recollection of their own baptism, to the already baptized. God violated that we might violate no more. We are baptized into his death. His death means that violence and fraud need no longer be our stock in trade.
But God did not stop there. He provides a meal which is both a celebration of violence and of violence conquered, recycled so that instead of destruction, it produces life. What else do those graphic words mean? "This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you. This is the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me." Living in this violent age of potential nuclear winter, we cannot too often celebrate the feast of violence conquered, of violence prevention. This festival of violence recycled breaks the cycle which has bedeviled us ever since Cain.
Not even the wrath of a Zephaniah, as he speaks for God, even a God of violence, is up to the task. Only when God turns violence on himself, takes our endemic disease and treats it with the crucifixion and death of his Son, is there a breakthrough, a resurrection.
Each time we celebrate the festivals of contained, recycled and conquered violence - the festivals of baptism and the Lord's Supper - God affirms that there need be violence no more.
Be silent before the Lord God! Amen
In the second year of Darius the king, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet, "Speak now to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to all the remnant of the people, and say, 'Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit abides among you; fear not. For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I wills hake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts.' "
(Haggai 2:1-9)
