Prayer and the Powers--A Sermon

Prayer and the Powers

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

June 17, 2012

The apostles said to the Master, “Make our trust grow!”

And the Master said, “If you had trust no bigger than a mustard seed, you could tell this mulberry tree, ‘Uproot yourself and plant yourself in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

Luke 17:5-6

Prayer is rattling God’s cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God’s hands and the manacles off God’s feet and washing the caked sweat from God’s eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes. . . .

Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, p. 303

Last night on CNN I watched a segment about belief in God. The host was interviewing people about a recent survey that said more and more young people are doubting the existence of God. The people being interviewed thought that was a pretty good thing seeing this survey as an indication that reason would eventually eclipse superstition. One of the guests implied that it is time to give up on outdated belief systems, magical thinking, and supernaturalism.

The reasons offered for this shift were many and varied. The culture wars, science, boring church services. In particular, the internet was acknowledged as having a role. The worldwide web makes available information at the touch of a finger as well as social networks of other doubters and skeptics. More and more people under 30 are calling themselves atheists or skeptics.

These surveys poke at our emotions. I can imagine different reactions from among you. People tend to think this is either good news or bad news. Others will dismiss it as youthful rebellion, reasoning that once these young people face existential angst, danger, or suffering, they will believe in God.

The announcer tried to extrapolate by saying that if these trends continue in 50 years belief in God will be a view held by a small minority. I thought about the 1960s and the theologians who announced the death of God and others who wrote that we were on the verge of creating a secular city. They seemed to predict God’s demise prematurely. Yet maybe this time God really is fading away.

What I wanted to explore further as I watched the show was what “belief in God” means. The announcer and the guests seemed to want to suggest that there are two types of people,

1. those who are religious and 
2. those who don’t believe in supernatural beings.

I kept wanting to suggest to the folks on my television screen that there might be a third type.  These are people who would agree intellectually with the atheists that there probably is not a supernatural being who exists outside of the natural world and comes to mess with it on occasion. Yet these people would also say that they have a heart for transcendent experiences such as awe, wonder, creativity, compassion and that church and God language is part of that. I think I want more definition regarding the phrase “belief in God” before I side with one camp or the other. I want some more options.

I find myself interested not so much in what God is but in what God does. What does God do exactly?

Bishop John Shelby Spong said that Copernicus and Galileo rendered God homeless. When they discovered that Earth was not the center of the universe but was like the other heavenly bodies, the planets, that moved around the sun, they messed up the medieval system of heaven “up there” where God lived.  Heaven became Earth and Earth heaven. In a few centuries along comes Darwin with his theory of natural selection. Humans are more like apes than the angels. Darwin and later the astronomers rendered God jobless. There was nothing in nature for God to do. The universe works without him.

I slightly object. I agree with Bishop Spong that this conception of God has lost out to reason and to science. Yet that isn’t the God who ignites my heart anyway. That God was an explanation for things for which we now have better explanations. Further we may not need the stories of the gods or of the god of our tradition to be literal or real. Our conception of God is changing. But that doesn’t mean that God is gone or has nothing to do.

In fact, I think, or perhaps I have faith, that the most interesting thing that God does and has always done is not to sit up in his home above the clouds and throw down balls of fire on sinners. The most interesting thing that God does is give us a sense of meaning, belonging, and vitality.

I do not insist. I have no need to defend God or my concept of God. As we know, some folks are quite evangelistic about their god. They need you to believe. I don’t intend to be one of those people. BYOG. Bring Your Own God…or none. It wouldn’t break my heart if someone explained my blather about God as a misunderstood psychological quirk or a biological brain burp.

I do think that humans have a capability to experience transcendence, that feeling of being more than who they are normally. That feeling can enable them to engage in acts of love, compassion, heroism, awe, creativity, and beauty. They can discover and offer forgiveness, find a sense of belonging and happiness, and feel at home in their own skin. That is religion for me and God is my shorthand way of expressing that action.

I said earlier that I don’t really care much about what God is, but I do care about what God does. That is what God does for me. God wakes me up. It is also true, that I wake God up. That is done in the religious setting in the experience of worship that is ultimately prayer. One of my favorite quotes is from Walter Wink, the theologian who died earlier this year and who inspired this series of sermons this Spring on the Powers. Wink writes:

Prayer is rattling God’s cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God’s hands and the manacles off God’s feet and washing the caked sweat from God’s eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes. . . .

That is a provocative paragraph. It messes with our aesthetic of theological correctness. There is something improper about waking God up, isn’t there? Yet this image is as old as the Bible. The Psalmist yells at God:

“Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?” Psalm 44

This isn’t a polite prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep….” This prayer is a call from the depths. It is a demand. It is a call to action. It is banging the pots and pans.

The rest of that particular psalm, Psalm 44, continues:

23 Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?
Awake, do not cast us off for ever!
24 Why do you hide your face?
Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?
25 For we sink down to the dust;
our bodies cling to the ground.
26 Rise up, come to our help.
Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.

You can appreciate and use that prayer even if you don’t believe in a literal being out there who hears it. What you are awakening is your own vitality. You are rousing your own strength that is also transcendent. You are finding your voice, tapping into that well-spring of energy and creativity you didn’t know you had, calling to that courage that you thought had been lost. In the words of poet, Ntozake Shange,

I found God in myself and I loved her, I loved her fiercely.

Again, I don’t insist. If God is more other, more literal or more real than what I have suggested, I don’t object. I would say that prayer is real. The reality is the passion and the openness to possibility. It is the faith that uproots and plants mulberry trees into the sea. It washes the caked sweat from God’s eyes. It makes your logical and reasoned mind connect with what really motivates you, that is your largely unconscious emotional brain and body. When worship is done in community and prayer is done with others, it can lead to feelings of love and compassion.

Most of what we think we want and what we do is not based on logic or reason. We use logic and reason to rationalize what our emotions and sense of aesthetics want and do.  Meditation and worship--or prayer--gives language to our feelings. It helps us bring to consciousness what has been unconscious. It helps us be aware of what is going on. Or to put it another way, we are waking God up while God wakes us up.

This sermon series has been about the powers that be. These forces dehumanize. I am not going to go into that anymore today except to say when the powers that be get you down, and they will, what are you going to do? How are you going to keep your sanity, your humor, your happiness and your hopefulness? Where will you find your strength and your perspective?

Wink’s response is to rattle God’s cage and wake God up. How? Lots of ways, but one I’ll offer:

Go to church. 

It isn’t totally outdated, oppressive, and hypocritical. It isn’t all about being forced to believe in dogmas or other impossible things. It can be if you want it to be, but it can also be a place that is like a deep well where you can utilize the wisdom, ritual, and practice that goes back thousands of years and touches the heart and the unconscious. Couple all of that with modern ways of knowing and we can probably wake that God up and get some stuff done.

Or maybe we need a break from doing too much stuff and need to be still, draw from the well, and fill up our tank. In that case, we allow God to embrace us, smile upon us, call us his or her own. We may not even know what we need. The most important and interesting things often take us by surprise. Then we can follow God wherever God goes. That is especially important in a world where the powers that be are rough and ruthless.

I started this sermon with the survey that said that young people are doubting God’s existence in larger and larger numbers. I think we should pay attention to that and ask what that means. We don’t necessarily need to judge it, fight it, or celebrate it. I do think it is an opportunity to talk about what we mean when we use the word God. But more than that, we have is an opportunity what it means to be human and to find happiness and a sense of purpose and meaning within life.

That is the focus of my next series of sermons as we begin summer and spiral both backward and forward to the spiritual path of awe and wonder.

Amen.

A Just War is an Oxymoron: A Sermon

A Just War is an Oxymoron

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

May 13, 2012

Roman 12:1-21

I feel sadness today. I have been drawing ideas for my sermons this Spring from Walter Wink. Walter Wink died this week, Thursday, May 10th, peacefully at home at the age of 76. Part of the sadness comes from the vacancy, a looming black hole, that is left when a person who has lived a magnetic life dies. Wink was magnetic in many ways. He drew me in by the way that he was able to articulate concepts of the Bible in a modern idiom.

He showed that the wrestlings of our ancestors continue in us. The principalities and the powers or the powers that be, were as real in the time of Jesus and Paul as they are today. He ruined almost every movie for me with his analysis of the myth of redemptive violence. Every time I cheer for the hero to beat the bad guy into a bloody pulp I know I am participating in the myth that violence is good, just, and redemptive.

He calibrated the propaganda meter in me so that I’ll never be able to hear a president, congressperson, corporate executive, media pundit, religious leader or military general speak without knowing that it is more blasphemy from the Domination System. This system of rules written and unwritten, bureaucracy, public relations, power and influence seeks to delude us into thinking that its way is the eternal way, the way that is non-negotiable, the way, the truth, and the life.

He drew the connections between all forms of oppression including racism, sexism, economic exploitation, militarism, and heterosexism. These forms of domination including domination of Earth are pervasive at the corporate and individual level. We are all complicit. There is no escape into self-righteousness. We have to do the work of engaging the violence and deception within as we engage the violence and deception without. In other words his ideas were not just ideas, they were commitments to ways of living that we can choose or not choose to engage.

The larger sadness I feel is that with his passing I realize that I have not engaged the powers nearly enough. I have hesitated, hedged, sought self-justification, and have been too concerned with position and reputation to commit to giving myself fully to this domination-free order, this way of distributive justice, this way of peace. That is what happens when magnetic figures pass. You recognize your own shortcomings in light of their accomplishments.

Finally, I feel sadness because I wish I could have done better with these sermons. I haven’t done him justice in my feeble explanation of his ideas that are radical and yet simple. As he wrote in his chapter, “Beyond Pacifism and Just War” in The Powers that Be:

But the church’s own witness should be understandable by the smallest child: we oppose violence in all its forms. And we do so because we reject domination. That means, the child will recognize, no abuse or beatings. That means, women will hear, no rape or violation or battering. That means, men will come to understand, no more male supremacy or war. That means, everyone will realize, no more degradation of the environment. We can affirm nonviolence without reservation because nonviolence is the way God’s domination-free order is coming. P. 144

Walter Wink affirmed that the ways and the means must be consistent. If our hope and our goal is peace, the way to peace must be peace. If we wish to hope for and work for a domination-free order, we are invited to live it now.

Since starting these sermons I have received some good comments.

One person asked me if my sermons were directed at men more than women. While I didn’t really think about it that way, I think the questioner, who happened to be a woman, had a point. While women are capable of violence, it has been the men that have done the lion’s share. Why might that be? Is it genetic? Are males naturally more violent than females? It could be. I might defer to our evolutionary biologists for that.

Whether men are or are not biologically set up for aggression more than females, it is true that the domination system enculturates violence in men and targets men and boys for violence. It may be true that boys and men have a natural desire to blow up stuff, but that desire is reinforced, mythologized, and honored in our culture. Under the values of the Domination System, to be a man, to be masculine, is to be violent. The myth of redemptive violence is particularly targeted towards men. For men, violence is sexy. Part of our task is to sever that connection between violence and manhood. Transforming aggressive tendencies into nonviolent resistance and constructive peacebuilding needs to be a central part of the agenda of a domination-free order.

I think Julia Ward Howe put it so well in 1870 when she sought to transform Mother’s Day into a day of peace for humanity. These are powerful words of resistance:

Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.


Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy, and patience.


We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

She called for a congress of women. She was ahead of her time as is often the case with prophets. Perhaps now after 140 years of the deadliest violence Earth has witnessed, that such a congress will happen.

Another asked me to clarify whether or not violence is innate to the human species. Our brains do have aggression centers that have been necessary for survival. We have evolved for fight or flight. So, violence is natural. Some might argue that because violence is natural, nonviolence will never be effective.

Human beings have the capacity to transcend and to control biological urges at least some of the time. Even though our bodies crave and store sugar which is an important thing to do when sugar is scarce, now, knowing that, we can make decisions about diet including sugar intake and find other ways to transform those biological cravings into healthier ways of living in the present. In other words, human beings have evolved decision-making capabilities that allow us to manage to some degree what we have inherited from our ancestors and to survive changes in our environment.

Since the dawn of civilization, tendencies toward violence because of biological aggression have been exploited by the Domination System. The mythology of war, masculinity and redemptive violence rather than curb biological aggression has nurtured it. Rather than provide ridicule and shame to those engaging in violent behavior, including so-called just war, we have instead in the words of Julia Ward Howe, provided “caresses and applause” to those “reeking with carnage.” Change the myths and we can change behavior.

Those writing in biblical times knew this. Genesis chapter 4, written around 1000 BCE in the time of the height of the Israelite monarchy, the Domination System was in full swing. At that time this story was placed in the founding chapters of its mythology of the human being. The myth of Cain and Abel wrestles with the question of whether a violent end is our fate. These words were placed in the mouth of the Lord to Cain who was about to slay his brother:

“…sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

The sin is of course, violence. The key here is that the human being can master it. Cain did not. But he could have, and that is the hope that drives the entire biblical tradition. Violence does not have to be our fate. It could be. But it doesn’t have to be. The open ended question is directed at us. What will we do to stop that cycle?

Another comment I received is also insightful. Most of us don’t see ourselves as Clint Eastwood types just looking for hoodlums to make our day. We are instead more like Gregory Peck who is true and good and abhors violence, but at the last resort engages it because only a coward lacking morality wouldn’t fight for the good against evil.

The question is this: is there a way not to be cowardly and not to be violent? The myth of redemptive violence says no. That is why at the end of the day or at the end of the film, Gregory Peck has to give in to violence. That is why in every war every country convinces its people that its war is just, necessary and one that Gregory Peck (or a comparable hero) would fight.

Since the time of Augustine, coincidentally when Christianity and the Roman Empire united, a theory of just war was needed. Among these criteria are:

• The war must have a just cause.
• It must be waged by a legitimate authority.
• It must be formally declared.
• It must be fought with a peaceful intention.
• It must be a last resort.
• There must be reasonable hope of success.
• The means used must possess proportionality to the end sought.
Also, three conditions must be met...
• Noncombatants must be given immunity.
• Prisoners must be treated humanely.
• International treaties and conventions must be honored.

We might ask if recent wars initiated by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan meet these criteria. Those who like these wars will say yes and those who don’t will say no. The Just War criteria is embedded with the myth of redemptive violence. Because of that, virtually any war can be excused as just.

That said, the Just War criteria can and should be used to evaluate, mitigate and reduce levels of violence. I quote Walter Wink: 

“I propose that we terminate all talk of ‘just wars.’ Even as the word ‘pacifism’ sounds too much like ‘passivity,’ ‘just war’ sounds too much like ‘war is justifiable.’ The very term is saturated will illusions about the rightness of war that are no longer acceptable. Those who regard all wars as criminal can scarcely use these helpful criteria when they are forced to discuss them within a framework that is basically inadequate.”

“…Instead, I suggest we rename the just-war criteria ‘violence-reduction criteria.’ that is, after all, what most of us are after. We are not seeking a rationale for legitimating particular wars, but ways of stopping warfare before it starts, and of decreasing its horrors once it begins. Perhaps both just-war theorists and advocates of nonviolence can find common ground for attempting to restrain bellicosity in the phrase violence-reduction criteria.” P p. 139-140

From Wink’s perspective which is a good third way, we can use the just war criteria not to justify whatever skirmish the Powers want us to fight, but as violence reduction criteria before and during the wars themselves.

There is a reason those in power, the powers that be, lead us into wars, and spend our capital on so-called defense.  That reason is connected with national political and economic interests.   The reason for war is not because our enemies are bad and evil and we have to kill them with our weapons and our sons and daughters bodies as a last resort.  That is the myth that justifies our violence.   The glorification of violence and war perpetuates that myth.  The so-called morality of war, the "just war" perpetuates that myth.

Wink put it clearly:

Violence is contrary to the gospel. But we are not always able to live up to the gospel. I am embarrassed at how easily I can lash out at anyone who makes me angry (it is the lashing out, not the anger, that disturbs me). Even so, when as individuals or nations we are unable to act nonviolently, we are not excused for our actions, nor may we attempt to justify them. P. 140

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe also put it clearly:

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”

Happy Mother’s Day.

A Nonviolent Army--A Sermon

A Nonviolent Army

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

May 6, 2012

Pluralism Sunday

Ephesians 6:10-20

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of God’s power. 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 rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints. Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.

The questions that I am asking during this series of sermons are these:

Is it possible for human beings to be nonviolent at all levels of interaction?
Is violence a permanent and fated condition of our nature?
Are we able to outgrow or transcend violence?

The goal of this series of sermons is to provoke thought and conversation on these matters. More than that, I personally hope that these sermons will inspire a heartfelt commitment to nonviolence. I have an answer to those questions. It is an answer that comes from my personal faith, meaning that I hope and trust in the possibility even as it might seem to push the limits of credibility.

A source of inspiration for these sermons comes from biblical scholar, Walter Wink. We are reading his book, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium in our Thursday reading group. The reason for a number of sermons on one person’s thought is again personal. For me, Wink is one of those people who provided challenge and change for me. Phrases and concepts that he coined and defined such as engaging the powers, the domination system, and the myth of redemptive violence helped me see things I hadn’t seen before in society and in the faith tradition. With Wink and others, the Bible took on a new relevance.

The Bible is the product of and is embedded in western civilization.  At the same time it is a critique of western civilization. If we want to know who we are, a good place to start is the Bible. It grew up with us. Everything we think of as normal, perhaps even natural or indispensable such as literacy, government, law, money, standing armies, religion, science, a concept of God, patriotism, family and all of our institutions are all rather recent in terms of the human species. Civilization has been around for only a few thousand years. Thanks to agriculture and the domestication of animals between 8,000 and 5,000 BCE we drive cars to church today.

Compared to when homo sapiens came on the scene around 250,000 years ago and our ancestors of the homo genus about 2.5 million years ago, the start of civilization, 10,000 years ago, is a recent development.

It is with the rise of civilization and agriculture that we get all the good stuff, plus the inequities and the institutions required to protect those inequities including myths of and rationalizations for violence as both redemptive and necessary. I am not saying that prior to civilization our ancestors lived in a non-violent Eden like state or that they didn’t need to fight for their survival.

I am suggesting that civilization brought with it a level of violence and a rationale for it, including myth and religion, that made it seem like violence at an organized level was natural and inevitable to the human experience. In its simplest form, the surpluses brought on by agriculture, led to inequities that led to the evolution of domination systems that needed to keep these inequities in place.

Eventually you get kings, priests, gods, and myths and rituals that justify the order of things. The myth of redemptive violence justified the domination system by stating that humans are naturally violent and must be controlled by violence. Therefore violence is good and redemptive when used by the one who is divinely appointed to rule. When the good guys use violence, violence is good. We learn it. We teach it. It is everywhere.

It is the reason we might answer the questions with which I began this sermon…

no, human beings cannot be nonviolent at all levels of interaction,
yes, violence is a permanent and fated part of our nature, and
no, we will never outgrow or transcend violence.

That is the legacy of the myth of redemptive violence. This is why otherwise good, peace-loving people allow our leaders to talk us into one war after another. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the myth of redemptive violence.

Maybe we can learn and teach something else.

I think we must.

Throughout the Bible including in the teachings of Jesus, the possibility and hope of nonviolence is offered as a possibility if human beings will take it. In one of the earliest stories of the Bible, in Genesis, Cain is about to seek vengeance on his brother. The Lord speaks to him,

“…sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

This is the first use of the word 'sin" in the Bible. You don’t find the word “sin” in the Adam and Eve story. You find it here. For this author, violence is the “original sin.” Whoever wrote this believed that violence could be mastered. It wasn’t inevitable or natural. It crouched at the door as an outsider.

As we know from the story, Cain did not master it. He killed his brother. The implication is that he could have mastered it. The possibility is held out for the human species that it can master violence.

The prophets held out the possibility that we could forget how to learn war. From Isaiah 2:4

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more…

Jesus held out the possibility that people might love enemies and not return evil for evil.

Other authors such as whoever wrote this letter to the Ephesians also held out the possibility of turning the energy of war to peace. It is disputed whether or not the author was Paul, probably not. Regardless, this author created a metaphor of the nonviolent soldier. This passage is a spoof of military imagery.

The belt of truth.
Breastplate of righteousness. A better word for that is justice.
Shoes of peace.
Helmet of salvation.
Shield of faith.
Sword of spirit which is the word of God.

The point of the text is that this is how you fight the powers. How do you fight the powers that be, such as say the Roman army that has real soldiers with real weapons? You don’t put on weapons at all. The armor of God are all the tools of nonviolent resistance. Truth, justice, peace, salvation (another word for that is wholeness or healing), faith or trust.

Those are all the defensive things. What is the one offensive weapon? The sword of Spirit or Word of God. You confront the powers of violence with trust in the Divine Presence. You resist. You stand firm. You don’t give in. You don’t acquiesce. But you don’t use violence.

Illustrations of this would be black and white students who sat at segregated lunch counters resisting non-violently to violent attacks and therefore exposing the violence and injustice of segregation. In a calculated way they used their bodies to communicate justice, peace, truth, and healing, and a faith that this would work. They were nonviolent soldiers.

Nonviolence is not weakness or cowardice. It taking the anger that wants to lash out violently, (the sin that crouches at the door and desires us is the lashing out), and instead turns that energy toward creative nonviolent resistance that ultimately leads to reconciliation.

Ghandi said that he didn’t want anyone in his nonviolent army who wasn’t able or willing to use violence but saw nonviolence as a better way. Ghandi didn’t want people to simply act nonviolently out of passivity or weakness.

This is not easy. There is no question that this is difficult. If we aren’t careful and vigilant we can project our own violence onto others with words and deeds thinking we are acting on behalf of peace. This is the occupational hazard for those of us involved in various social justice struggles. I find myself building up my defenses and they aren’t necessarily truth, justice, and peace. Nonviolence requires inner work. It requires brutal honesty about our own violence, our own vulnerabilities, and woundedness.

Nonviolence requires training. It requires the humility to take correction from someone you can trust to see your shadow better than you do. It also requires you to forgive yourself when you give in to the violence crouching at the door, and keep at it. Don’t give up on nonviolence.

I hold out the hope of nonviolence and peacebuilding because I see people doing it. At all levels of human interaction I see people learning the skills of assertive communication and attentive listening. I see people developing skills to be self-aware of their feelings, observations, thoughts, and wants and being able to communicate these in peaceful ways.

We are also learning and teaching ways to build peaceful and just communities and societies. I see people learning and teaching about living sustainable lifestyles, about distributive justice, about living equitably. We are learning this and teaching this.

I celebrate movements for liberation and courageous people who put themselves out there for others. Think of the movements we have seen in the last century regarding race, gender, and sexual orientation. We have dreams of possibility.

These efforts to achieve these dreams are often small and sporadic. But it is really just a matter of degree. As more and more people learn these skills, the more these dreams will become reality.

Those questions I asked at the beginning are

Is it possible for human beings to be nonviolent at all levels of interaction?
My answer is yes.


Is violence a permanent and fated condition of our nature?
My answer is no.


Are we able to outgrow or transcend violence?
Yes. Of course.

The real question is will we? Will you? Will I?

Will we join a movement that has been active long before we were born?

As I look around this congregation, I think we have already joined.

Let us live it and watch it grow.

Amen.

A Cheeky Response--A Sermon

A Cheeky Response

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

April 29, 2012

As you know, we once were told, ‘An eye for an eye’ and ‘A tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, don’t react violently against the one who is evil; when someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well. If someone is determined to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat along with it. Further, when anyone conscripts you for one mile, go along an extra mile.

Matthew 5:38-41

When the Jesus Seminar searched through the Jesus tradition to determine what deeds and words might be part of the voice print of the original historical Jesus, they decided that witty aphorisms and parables were more likely to belong to Jesus than long speeches. What was remembered from Jesus was more likely to be little nuggets of wisdom rather than long theological discourses.

These three “case studies” (turn the cheek, give your coat, go the second mile) are found in Matthew with a parallel in Luke. The theory is that they go back to an earlier source, scholars call Q, the first letter of the German word Quelle, which means source. That is material is common to Matthew and Luke not found in Mark.

These three “case studies” turn the cheek, give your coat, and go the second mile, seem to belong to Jesus. They were all voted “red” as in “Yep, sounds like Jesus.” They are non-literal, comic, surprising, and transformative for those with ears to hear.

It is also likely to be true that the primary audience for Jesus would have been peasants. These would be people who would know first-hand the indignities of being in debt, of losing land and livelihood, of being occupied by a foreign army, humiliated by superiors, and having nothing more than the shirts on their backs.

It is likely that Christianity was not at its beginning a movement of the rich and famous. It was of the poor and infamous. In the second century a man named Celsus criticized Christianity. He ridiculed it because of the company it kept. We know of Celsus’ writings because early Church father, Origin wrote a treatise called Against Celsus. He quotes Celsus remarks about the early Christian movement. Celsus is speaking sarcastically from the first person as if he were a Christian inviting people to join:

Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils. But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly. By the fact that they themselves admit that these people are worthy of their God, they show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid, and only slaves, women, and little children.

Later he says:

In private houses also we see wool-workers, cobblers, laundry-workers, and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels, who would not dare to say anything at all in front of their elders and more intelligent masters. But whenever they get hold of children in private and some stupid women with them, they let out some astounding statements as, for example, that they must not pay attention to their father's and school-teachers, but must obey them; they say that these talk nonsense and have no understanding, and that in reality they neither know nor are able to say anything good, but are taken up with mere empty chatter.

What Celsus noticed is that these early Christians upset the social order. Slaves, women, and children are worthy of the Christian god. That is not a good thing from the point of view of Celsus. The Jesus’ movement earliest appeal was to those who had been left out and marginalized by the dominant social order.

We should remember that the founding narrative of Christianity is that its hero, Jesus, was executed and tortured as a common criminal by established, legitimate authority. In elevating this person to son of god like Caesar, the earliest communicators of the Jesus’ message were making radical statements about life, life’s meaning, the meaning of justice and peace, and whose side they thought God was really on.

“Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near,” said Celsus.

From the point of view of the slaves, women, children, and day-laborers who did draw near, the educated, wise and sensible of Celsus’ class were part of the problem. It was that class who were backhanding them on the cheek, taking their coats in payment of debt, and conscripting them to carry their military packs.

These three case studies of Jesus that were preserved could have been just a snippet, headlines of longer teachings and conversations that Jesus would have had with people about dignity and resistance. One could imagine all kinds of arguments, a lot of back and forth with Jesus and others about what to do and how to respond to the oppression and humiliation. One can imagine the arguments would have been heated and passionate:

“What do we do with these Romans? What do we do about these landowners? What do we do about these priests and accountants who side with them over us? Do we have an armed revolution? Do we just take it and let them abuse us, starve us, and kill us?”

These are serious questions. I can imagine that Jesus was in the thick of it. The choice as we know was armed revolution in 66 CE that was crushed by the Romans. It resulted in the destruction of the temple and the burning of Jerusalem. This is the context of Mark’s Gospel.

Historical Jesus scholar, Dominic Crossan, thinks that Mark’s gospel account of the execution of Jesus is a parable not about Jesus’ own time and life, but about the destruction of Jerusalem in 66-70. The choice of the people to release Barabbas the revolutionary rather than Jesus was the choice the Jews made to choose armed revolt rather than non-violent revolt. It was a choice that the author of Mark’s gospel thought was a bad idea.

It is after this failure of the Jewish War from 66-70 that the gospels are written. It is as though the gospels are written looking back and through the revolt and war of 66-70 to Jesus 40 years on the other side and saying, “What if we had listened to him? What was he saying again?”

What was Jesus saying? Was he saying, “Armed revolt! Take up the righteous cause of God!”

Or was he saying, “Be passive. Just take it. Your reward is in heaven. God will take care of all of it.”

Or was he saying something else?

These three case studies provide the clue. Jesus offered a third way. These case studies, these three sayings are remembered not by any means as his complete teaching but the briefest of outlines for a program of resistance to oppression that is non-violent with the emphasis on non-violent and resistance.

According to Dominic Crossan, the kingdom of God is participatory. We can’t do it without God. God won’t do it without us. It isn’t a violent intervention by supernatural power. It is non-violent and takes over like leaven in bread and a mustard weed in a field. It transforms all, including enemy, to friend. The evil is the violence. You are simply not going to get peace through violent means. Peace comes through justice not through victory. The way to peace is not violence. Peace is the way.

Jesus is speaking to people who are humiliated. His first lesson to them is:

You are a human being.
You are the light of the world.
You are the salt of the earth.
You are a child of God.
Do not participate or cooperate in your own humiliation.

Jesus is not to be interpreted as saying, “Allow yourself to be a punching bag. If your spouse hits you just go back and submit. Turn the other cheek.” That is a misreading. That is what happens when bullies get control of the Bible. The Bible does not belong to the bullies.

Notice the detail. “When someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other.” The setting here is a backhanded slap from the superior’s right hand to the right side of the face. What do you do when that happens to you? When a slave-owner, a person in authority, a father, or a husband does that, what do you do? Do you hit back? That would result in death, a severe beating, or imprisonment? Do you cower? That is what the superior wants. The bully wants you to be humiliated.

No, says Jesus. You neither hit back nor cower. You stand there and turn the other cheek. You are making a communication that you are a human being. It is an act of defiance. You might get whipped for it. But you are showing yourself and the other that you are a human being. The invitation is for the other to recognize you as a human being as well. It is not an aggressive act. It is assertive.

If someone takes you to court and takes one of your garments, give them your other garment. To survive people had two garments. The outer garment served as a blanket at night. The law was that in payment for a debt you could take a person’s garment but you had to give it back to them at night. It is a setting of humiliation in which people lost everything to burdensome debts. The owners have nothing left to take from you except your coat. What do you do?

The first principle is that you do not participate or cooperate in your own humiliation. You make a public spectacle. You not only give them your coat, but you take off your undergarment too. You stand before them naked. Rather than receive this injustice passively and cower with humiliation, you stand up and act. Your nakedness shames the oppressor.

This has become a technique in modern non-violent movements. This is from ABC News:

Nigerian villagers who have long clashed with oil companies doing business in their backyards are trying a creative protest tactic. They've dropped their guns, and some have even threatened to drop their clothes.

Hundreds of unarmed women from local tribes in the oil-rich but desperately poor Niger Delta region brought production to a halt recently at pipeline facilities owned by ChevronTexaco by merely occupying the sites. Several dozen village women are still holed-up today.

To make their point, the women threatened to disrobe — a strong local shaming symbol — and managed to strike a deal with ChevronTexaco that will bring jobs and funding for schools, hospitals and other services into their struggling community.

Check out The Righteous Mothers and their song “Old Fat Naked Women for Peace” as they sing about this non-violent resistance tactic.

The inspiration for Ghandi and King for non-violent resistance came from Jesus. Jesus was not about passivity. He was about transformation.

The third test case is if “someone conscripts you for a mile, go a second mile.”

This isn’t just someone. This is a Roman soldier. Soldiers were allowed to grab civilians and force them to carry their gear. In a similar vein, in the gospel of Mark, the story is that Simon of Cyrene was conscripted to carry Jesus’ cross.

The law was that Roman soldiers could only force someone to carry their pack for one mile. Jesus says, “So when this happens to you, don’t give the pack back. Offer to continue to carry it. Force the soldier to break the law and see what happens!” Imagine the soldier and the peasant fighting over the pack. Rather than be humiliated, you take the upper hand.

Some of the principles of non-violent resistance are found in the gospels and in these case studies of Jesus. Thanks to Walter Wink, author of The Powers That Be for interpreting these sayings in the light of non-violent resistance. These principles are in general:

1. You are a human being with dignity and so is your opponent.
2. Do not cooperate with your own oppression or humiliation.
3. Do not return violence with violence.
4. Find creative ways to assert to transform relationships from “power over to power with”.

These are principles that can be used in interpersonal relationships, at work, at home, in communities, perhaps even between nations.

It is the third way.

The way of transformative peace.

Amen.

Breaking the Spiral of Violence--A Sermon

Breaking the Spiral of Violence

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

April 22, 2012

Earth Day

Luke 22:24-27

Then they got into an argument over which of them should be considered the greatest. He said to them, “Among the foreigners, it’s the kings who lord it over everyone, and those in power are addressed as ‘benefactors.’ But not so with you; rather, the greatest among you must behave as a beginner, and the leader as one who serves. Who is the greater, after all: the one reclining at a banquet or the one doing the serving? Isn’t it the one who reclines? But here among you I am the one doing the serving.

As we move through the season of Spring, we are walking the path, or dancing the spiral of the via transformativa, the way of compassion and justice-making. This is the path of naming, unmasking, and engaging The Powers That Be.

The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium is a book by Walter Wink. Walter Wink is an interesting guy. He wrote a book on Jesus and Nonviolence and had it delivered in secret to clergy in South Africa. He snuck into to South Africa illegally and led workshops on non-violence. He thus exerted influence in helping the movement against Apartheid be non-violent and have the basis for that non-violence based in the teachings and life of Jesus.

Walter Wink has not backed away from walking with those who are most oppressed by The Powers That Be. He knows Empire’s cruelty and violence. Yet he firmly holds out hope and participates in a way of living and being that is transformative. He really does believe in non-violence and trusts that the human race will get it. He writes:

“The reign of God means the elimination of every form of violence between individuals and nations. This is a realm and a possibility of which the imprisoned by their trust in violence cannot even conceive.” P. 89

We can, from Wink’s perspective, conceive that the human race could move beyond violence as a program of solving conflicts even at the level of nation-states. He believes that believing that humans will always solve conflicts violently and always have is part of the socialization we have received from the Domination System. For Wink, violence is not innate and inevitable. It is learned. It can be unlearned.

That is why I am spending quite a bit of sermon time with his ideas. I think that radical statement that violence is learned needs a hearing. I am spending valuable sermon time on his book because his ideas have been influential to me and because I think they are important. That doesn’t mean of course that I say, “Yes, yes, yes,” to everything he writes. But I say “Yes” often enough.

When I first read about his analysis of the myth of redemptive violence that I spoke about last week, it changed my way of thinking. I can’t see anything now, whether they be cartoons, movies, advertising, propaganda, orchestrated patriotic spectacles, and so called news reports, without seeing that myth playing itself out before my eyes time and time again. That myth is in short: violence saves. Only by violent means can the good guys beat the bad guys. Our salvation is to identify with the violent--yet good--hero.

His understanding of the Domination System as a translation for the word kosmos in many places in the New Testament helped me make more sense of the Gospels and Paul. It brought the scriptures down to Earth in the struggles that we face everyday with the powers. The Powers are not individual people, for people are interchangeable and expendable within these institutions. The Powers That Be are those personalities, commitments, rules, and forces that lie behind and within institutions.

Wink sees the historical Jesus as enacting a program of non-violent resistance with the emphasis both on non-violent and resistance, not passivity on one hand nor becoming the very evil we deplore on the other. Wink sees this message not just in the historical Jesus but as a thread that weaves itself through the whole witness of scripture.

The myth of redemptive violence is presented to us by the powers as part of our socialization into the Domination System. Whenever a conflict rises, we consistently give in to the argument that is offered as the clincher: the only way to save the world is to stop these bad people with force of arms. It is the only way. The Powers have to do one thing. Repeat the myth and insert the enemy of the day as the bad guy.

The myth is necessary to keep the inequity in place between the wealthy and powerful and those without wealth and power. That inequity is as much within a nation as between nations. As inequities increase within a nation, it becomes by necessity more violent both to people within the nation as well as to those outside of it. Stories of domestic spying and harsh crackdowns on protestors are some examples of this.

One of the ways a violent society keeps the lid on things, is to let out its violence in a ritualized, orderly way by way of scapegoating. French philosopher, Rene Girard, saw this by analyzing myths. Collective violence from the perspective of the persecutor against a particular group served to focus the violence of a society on a scapegoat. Blame the troubles on this person or group of persons and focus ritual, programmatic violence upon them.

Girard in analyzing the New Testament saw that that scapegoating mechanism was turned upside down. The gospels were written from the point of the persecuted. Jesus is the scapegoat. But, his violent death showed that the scapegoating mechanism was wrong. An innocent person was tortured and killed. The powers were wrong to do this. The powers were not keeping order and peace by executing bad guys. Jesus’ death unmasked and exposed The Powers That Be as wrong and needing overthrow.

Jesus’ death did not show that he was the last scapegoat. It showed the end of scapegoating. Throughout Western history, Jesus’s torture and execution has been used successfully to show that scapegoating is wrong.

On the other hand, The Powers That Be have had success in getting us to reinterpret Jesus’ death as some kind of transaction to satisfy a violent God. God kills Jesus instead of killing you and sending you to hell and whatever. That is the interpretation of Empire. When Christianity and Empire are in bed together, that is what you get.

But the original and powerful and liberating interpretation is that Jesus’ violent death exposed the violence of the powers and thus defeated them.

One modern illustration of how this was used was during the civil rights movement. In Nashville students, black and white together, sat illegally at all-white lunch counters. They brought their cameras and the news media. They were treated violently but did not retaliate to violence with violence. They resisted. They were not passive. They didn’t leave. They didn’t acquiesce. They received violence but did not back down. The purpose was to expose the violence inherent in segregation.

To see young students beaten and mistreated by The Powers That Be or the Law, exposed to the rest of the country that the Law was wrong. Eventually, enough people could see that blacks were being scapegoated so that the laws would change. These laws, such as segregated lunch counters, were part of the larger systemic violence against black people.

The students used the symbol of Jesus on the cross, the innocent victim, to expose the powers of inequity and violence. The death of Jesus when interpreted as exposing scapegoating and domination as unjust is liberating. This is a way in which the spiral of violence is named, exposed, and defeated.

The Powers That Be don’t want Jesus’ death interpreted in that way. They want it to be seen as Jesus receiving the torture and death you should get because you deserve God’s wrath. That is an incredibly abusive interpretation. It lets the powers off the hook. In this scheme Church and Empire work together to keep people passive and to continue to scapegoat whoever it is they want to direct violence upon whether they be “heretics” or enemies of the state.

Jesus was a Capricorn, he ate organic foods.
He believed in love and peace and never wore no shoes.
Long hair, beard and sandals and a funky bunch of friends.
Reckon they'd just nail him up if He come down again.


'Cos everybody's got to have somebody to look down on.
Who they can feel better than at anytime they please.
Someone doin' somethin' dirty, decent folks can frown on.
If you can't find nobody else, then help yourself to me.

Kris Kristofferson’s Jesus Was a Capricorn is a great song about the scapegoat mechanism. The song itself shows how Jesus’ death exposed the scapegoat mechanism as unjust and exposed the violence of the powers. The song also demonstrates how the powers continually want to turn it back on more scapegoats. “Everybody’s got to have somebody to look down on…”

The reason we call this a spiral of violence is that everyone thinks they are on the good side. Only in cartoons and in silly movies do people think of themselves as an “evil genius.” Everyone thinks that he is the good guy. Whether these guys live in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Washington DC., each one operates from the myth of redemptive violence.

It is no surprise that weapons and militarization are increasing. It is no surprise that individuals are amassing as many personal guns as they can. There are bad guys out there. We are good guys. We have to stand our ground. If we don’t have a scapegoat, “someone to look down on,” what do we do with our violence?

We need to learn a new plan. As Walter Wink writes:

Either we learn to stop the spiral of violence and scapegoating, or, having been stripped of the scapegoating mechanism as an outlet for our violence, we will consume ourselves in an apocalypse of fire. P. 93

We have to die to the Powers. That is we have to die to the socialization and the values we have received by the Domination System. As Wink writes:

“…we have been socialized into patterns of injustice…[we have] become complicit in our own alienation and that of others…we grew to love our bondage, to rationalize, justify, and even champion it.” P. 94

This dying and rebirth is a part of the symbolism of transformation. But it also must include a social dimension. It is not simply private peace. Wink says:

Many North American Christians die to their privatized egos, but not to the arrogance of American imperialism. Thus, dying to one’s ego can be just another false spirituality unless it involves dying to the Powers. P. 96

So when Jesus' disciples debate among themselves who is the greatest, who is the good guy, who is the one on top, he scolds them. Those are the values of the powers. They lord it over others. That is the foundation of the Domination System. Violence is built on that foundation. This is seen in violence and exploitation against people and Earth. This task of dying to the Powers does not happen once and it is over. It is a lifelong process. Writes Wink:

This means our abandoning egocentricity not only as individuals, but as cultures, as nations, even as a species, and voluntarily subordinating our desires to the needs of the total life system. P. 97

The reason we have Earth Day is because of the violence against Earth by The Powers and our complicity with them. On Earth Day celebrations all over the world today, people are resisting the powers of domination and violence to Earth and to all Earthlings.

Here is the take home:

We can do this.
Violence is not inevitable.

Human beings can and do solve virtually all of their conflicts without violence. In fact, in virtually all of our interactions, violence is not allowed as an option. Violence is not the way to solve conflicts in the home, at school, and at the workplace. The members of the Elizabethton City Council do not bring their six guns to work out budget issues. Violence is not an option. We learn violence.  We learn nonviolence.

We don’t believe and act as if our family members are so evil and vile that they must be controlled by violence. I am not saying there is not violence in homes. I am saying that we know that is wrong.
We call on our educators, social workers, and counselors and teach people skills to solve conflicts non-violently so that we can live equitably. We teach people to solve conflicts without violence. We help people leave violent situations. Violence is not an option. At almost every level of our individual and collective lives we know that and live that.

If we can do this at the level of personal interaction, we can do it at all levels of interaction if we want to do so. We could declare and live into the reality that violence is not an option. To do that we have to make commitments for justice and equity. We may have to take risks and make sacrifices because The Powers That Be do wish to keep the violence and the inequity gong.

But we could do this.
We can engage the powers and transform them.
We could decide that violence at any level is not an option.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

I think Earth Day is a fine day to make that commitment.
One Earth.
One beautiful blue ball.
One home.
One family of Earthlings.
Living in peace.
Living in equity.
Living sustainably.
Imagine it.

What a beautiful world.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence--A Sermon

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

April 15th, 2012

On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.
--Isaiah 27:1


All of a sudden one of those with Jesus lifted his hand, drew his sword, struck the chief priest’s slave, and cut off his ear.  Then Jesus says to him, “Put your sword back where it belongs. For everyone who takes up the sword will be destroyed by the sword.
--Matthew 26:51-52

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man,
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.
I'm strong to the finich
Cause I eats me spinach.
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.


I'm one tough Gazookus
Which hates all Palookas
Wot ain't on the up and square.
I biffs 'em and buffs 'em
And always out roughs 'em
But none of 'em gets nowhere.


If anyone dares to risk my "Fisk",
It's "Boff" an' it's "Wham" un'erstan'?
So keep "Good Be-hav-or"
That's your one life saver
With Popeye the Sailor Man.

It is clear by the calendar and the leaves on the trees that we are in the season of Spring. At First Presbyterian we have structured our worship services around the four seasons. Each season corresponds with a spiritual path in theologian Matthew Fox’s typology of Creation Spirituality. The spiritual path associated with Spring is the via transformativa, or the way of compassion and justice-making.

The spiritual life is an earthy life. Creation Spirituality is not ethereal. It is not about escaping the body or transcending the body, the earthly, or the material, but recognizing, celebrating, and an engaging the sacred nature of the body, the earthly, and the material.

These four paths
celebrate with awe and wonder the universe in all its vitality and mystery,
honor mortality, limits, struggle, and the need to let go,
welcome creativity as the vital force of change,
and engage Earth and all of life with compassion and justice.

An image for working through these spiritual paths is a spiral danced rather than a ladder climbed.

Creation Spirituality is neither fluffy or spooky in my opinion. It is not about denying reality and substituting pipe dreams in its place. At least as I have adopted and adapted it, Creation Spirituality is a way to engage the contingencies and the mystery of life with awareness, commitment, and possibility. It isn’t about believing dogmatic theologies that control, punish, and reward. There is nothing you have “to believe.” There is no orthodoxy.

There is an acknowledgement that religion is a human product. The stories that we have created regarding God are our stories. They are the stories of our ancestors as they used their creativity to find meaning in this strange mystery of existence. Since our religion is a human product, so are the religions of others. We approach them as we do our own, with curiosity, respect, critique, and engagement.

The fourth path, the via transformativa, or the way of compassion and justice-making is taking that creativity (path 3) which arises from the intersection of wonder (path 1) and struggle (path 2), and directing that creativity toward justice for all earthlings, including our more than human earthlings and Earth itself.

Creation Spirituality embraces science of course. The rise of science is the icon of human creativity. Creation Spirituality also invites humanity to direct that creativity, that scientific and technical knowledge, toward sustainability and justice. Creativity is not a good in and of itself. Not all ideas, not all creativity leads to justice, fairness, and sustainability. Our creativity has created the most destructive weapons imaginable. The challenge of our time is place our creativity in service to humanity and to all earthlings and to Earth, for present generations and to the thousandth generation into the future. No small order.

It is critical that each of us consciously takes up that challenge. The path of compassion and justice is the path of engagement and it is a spiritual path. This path involves awareness and critique. That critique exposes destructive mythologies and values. This fourth path of Creation Spirituality is the path of exposing, naming, unmasking, and engaging those forces that are certainly creative but behaving in ways that diminish the goodness of life.

We can call these forces “The Powers That Be”. “The Powers That Be” are not particular people. They are the unseen forces that determine how the world works. “The Powers That Be” make up the personality of institutions. They consist of the ideology, the mythology, the structures and the rules. I talked about this last week. I’ll repeat it here.

When we speak of things like the “mainstream media” or “Wall Street” or “corporations” or “the government” or “the church” we are not speaking of particular individuals, except as those individuals participate in their role as agents for “The Powers That Be” of the institution in question. The individuals, the managers, the executives, and so forth are interchangeable. Sometimes when speaking of “The Powers That Be” we use the phrase “they”. That is what “they” say. That is what “they” do.

These “Powers That Be” lose sight of their intended purpose and instead become self-serving. Theologian Walter Wink says that the powers are good, fallen, and redeemable, all at once. When they are “fallen” they do not act on behalf of what is good for human beings or for Earth, but for their own self-interest or their own profits or power.

This is not hard to see. The resources of Earth, whether it be fresh water or forests or fossil fuels and minerals, that have been formed from deep time, hundreds of millions, even billions of years, are being processed and used within a few human lifetimes, two centuries perhaps, with an ever-increasing gap between those who have access to these resources and those who do not.

“The Powers That Be” the personalities of our institutions that include, government, corporations, education, media, and religion, act as though this is perfectly normal, that there is no other way to live. We are told that there is this “economy” that must grow indefinitely. Whatever it takes to feed it must be done. It is as though it is alive, like a monster.

This injustice which is another name for unsustainability, against future generations and against those who lose out in this resource race in this generation, is held together by organized violence. Weaponry and militarization on behalf of the powers are needed to keep this inequity and this injustice going. You cannot have inequality without violence. When the media report a violent outbreak among the Palestinians or in Greece, what they are not reporting is the systemic, organized violence that has been present there all along. Just because there is quiet that does not mean there is peace.

Underlying the violence itself is the myth of violence. That is what I want to speak about today.

This myth of violence, or as Walter Wink calls it, this “myth of redemptive violence” is what needs to be addressed at an intellectual and spiritual level. This is part of the work of the fourth spiritual path.

What is the myth of redemptive violence?

Let me put it this way. If everyone on Earth consumed at the rate of the average North American, we would need five planets of resources. Or another statistic. The world currently produces 78-80 million barrels of oil each day. The United States consumes about 18 million barrels of oil each day. The U.S. consumes about 25% of the world’s oil. We are about 5% of the world’s population. That is an inequity. I am not making a judgment, just stating facts.

Here is another fact. The United States spends more on its military than the next 17 nations combined. The U.S. spends six times more than the next big spender, China. We have military bases and a military presence all over the world, especially in those places with prized resources.

Is there a correlation or a connection between those facts? Is there any connection between being the biggest military on the planet by a factor of six and the consumer of resources vs. the rest of the world by a factor of five? Anyone who might look at those facts objectively would say, yes. The military-industrial complex keeps this inequality in place. But, it would not be polite to say that, nor patriotic. More than that, for most Americans it is impossible to see. You are squirming in your pews right now and you are the liberal bunch. “He can’t talk about that. That isn’t spiritual.”

The reason we cannot see it is because we have been trained from childhood with the myth of redemptive violence. Everywhere we look, from movies, cartoons, national celebrations, media editorials, and media reports, reinforce the belief that there are bad guys out there and they can only be stopped by good guys with weapons. We have to defeat terrorism. The enemy used to be communists, and we will use them again if we need to do so. Muslim fundamentalists are the latest incarnation of bad guys.

The myth of redemptive violence is the myth that violence saves as long as it is in the hands of the good guys and not the bad guys. Popeye is good. Bluto is bad. Superman is good. Lex Luthor is bad. The Terminator is good. The Terminated were bad. This myth is as old as civilization itself.

How does good defeat evil?

By recognizing that we all have good and evil within us and if we honestly talk about our feelings, wants , observations, and thoughts, and work together with negotiation and collaboration, we can come to solutions on shared problems?

Ppppssshhh. What kind of movie is that? What kind of entertainment is that? Popeye doesn’t have a conversation with Bluto and work out their problems by using “I” statements and acknowledging feelings. No, after 25 minutes of being pounded by Bluto, Popeye, miraculously finds his spinach, and at last minute biffs him and buffs him and always out roughs him. This continues episode after episode after episode. Neither of them ever learn a thing.

This plot, this myth, is played out in every cartoon. Our children know this myth simply by breathing the air. It doesn’t end with children. It is provided in adult formula as well in movies, television and in the news reports about war heroes. We are the good guys. We are fighting the bad guys. If you ever have a lingering doubt and have a fleeting heretical thought that connects consumption with war, just calm yourself and say, “We are the good guys. We are fighting the bad guys.” Then go shopping.

When “The Powers That Be” decided that Iraq wanted a regime change, they obliged by pounding the American and British populace with the message that Saddam Hussein was evil, had weapons of mass destruction, and the only way to deal with him was to bomb and invade the country. The heretics said things like, “You don’t think this might need more conversation? You don’t think there might be other ways of engaging this than war? Do you think your own geopolitical interests might be coloring your judgment?”

The answer was, “Of course not. Why do you hate America?”

Why do you hate America? If you question the myth of redemptive violence, that is the answer. What you are hating is the myth that has taken on spiritual depth in our psyches. Violence saves. We are saved by identifying with the hero who God has blessed with victory by his glorious sword. To say anything else is blasphemy.

The answer is from my perspective that I love America. I want it to do right. When it is uncritical of its violence and consumption it isn’t doing right. We need a better guiding myth than the myth of redemptive violence.

This isn’t just about the United States. This myth is as old as civilization.

The Ancient Near Eastern Babylonian version is the Enuma Elish. In this ancient myth, Marduk slew Tiamat the sea monster with an arrow. He took his sword, and cut her carcass in two parts. From her carcass he created the heavens above and the earth below. Her blood became the blood of the gods who in turn created human beings to be their slaves. This myth gave license for the king to control the people with violence because it is believed they were created by violence and that is all they understand.

In the 5th century BCE, the ancient Hebrews were in captivity to the Babylonians. They learned their myths. They took this story of Marduk and Tiamat and rewrote it. I t became Genesis chapter one. They demythologized the story. Tiamat became the deep, or the unordered waters. Same root word. The sun god became the greater light that God turned on. And so forth. The creation itself was not an act of violence but of creativity. God called to be and it was. Humans were created not as slaves but as good and in God’s image. Violence is not part of the created order but an aberration. It could be conquered as YHWH said to Cain, “Sin is crouching at the door, but you must master it.”

There are earlier more violent versions of creation in the Bible. In the Psalms and in Isaiah, YHWH creates by destroying Leviathan or Rahab the sea monster. Those are leftovers from the earlier mythology. The Bible is ambiguous about the myth of redemptive violence. At times it is critical as in the teachings and parables of Jesus and in some of the literature of the Hebrew Scriptures. Sometimes it uncritically embraces it as in the violent stories of Joshua and in Revelation when Jesus is seen as the conqueror at the end of time. We should read the Bible critically as well.

The fourth spiritual path of Creation Spirituality is to engage the powers and challenge them to do justice. Yes it is spiritual work. I am going to be spending the next several weeks talking about this work. Walter Wink and his book, The Powers That Be, will be a conversation partner.

What I want you to take away today is this. Organized violence that we see in the empires of civilization is taught. It has become mythologized. The myth reinforces a lie that humans are either good or evil and that the good must overcome the evil by violence. By violence we are saved and redeemed. This myth of redemptive violence is used to justify inequity. It is legitimated by religion.

I invite you this week simply to observe. Watch the cartoons, the video games, the news reports, the movies, and see if you can identify the myth of redemptive violence.

We can break this cycle. We can embrace a theology that says human beings are not inherently violent. We are a mix of motives. We can do the important work of being self-aware. Maturity and salvation comes from recognizing that the evil is not the other. The evil is the violence. What we do on an everyday level, solving conflicts by conversation, sharing feelings, separating observations from our evaluations, can be done at all levels. Religion does not have to legitimate violence. We have resources within our Christian tradition, traditions about Jesus that can empower us toward a non-violent and sustainable future.

Amen.