Scripture: Luke 6:27-36
The sermon this morning is in a way a follow-up to last week when we were dealing with and listening to the words of Martin Luther King, and a follow-up as well to a couple of the sermons from before Christmas, which somehow seems like a long time ago now. Of course you can’t really get involved with Dr. King very much at all without confronting the question of nonviolence, it was so much a part of his life and writings, so as I was preparing for last week’s service and in the aftermath I’ve been thinking a fair amount about nonviolence, what it did and didn’t mean for Dr. King, and what it might mean for me. But also I remember saying at the end of a sermon before Christmas, where I was trying to deal with the realities of war that were surrounding our celebration of Christmas, I remember making a brief comment at the end that I thought all Christian churches needed to think of themselves as peace churches, but that this was not just a question of whether one opposes war—all wars or any particular war—but that it is a larger question of being committed to nonviolence as a way of life. I remember thinking to myself when I said that, “Hmm, I wonder what I mean by that,” and thinking that I would need to follow up on that. So I’ve been reflecting on the theme of nonviolence for some weeks now and want to say a few things in that connection this morning.
Actually, it hasn’t been some weeks that I’ve been thinking about such things. It’s been years, lots of years. For as long as I can remember I have had the feeling that our way of life is a violent way, and although that sensation is not the same thing as reflecting seriously on nonviolence as a way of life, it does lead pretty consistently to the thought that there has got to be a better way. And again, it’s not just military violence we’re talking about here. It’s also, of course, street violence, and it’s domestic violence, and it’s state violence in the form of capital punishment, and it’s the culture of guns. It’s the pervasiveness of violence in entertainment—movies, television, video games, comic books. Those are things easily and widely noticed, though of course there’s no agreement about what if anything should be done about any of those things. But the violence of our way of life is also present in things that are less easy to describe. It’s present, for instance, in the widespread spirit of combativeness that seems to be present just about everywhere. Sports, I guess, (and I’m a sports fan) are by their nature combative, people or teams of people fight it out to see who’s going to win. But it’s the importance attached to sport and the hype surrounding it that maybe makes it more violent than it needs to be. And then there’s the combativeness of politics which becomes more and more like a sport where the focus is all on who will be the winner. This culture of combat has gotten to me so much that when I run across a hymn that talks about victory, as many of them do, I am immediately turned off, even if when you look at it more closely it’s talking about maybe the victory of love, still it’s the language of victory, and it has come to the point of being offensive to me.
And speaking of offensive, there’s also the violence of talk radio and talk television, combative for sure, but that’s the best that could be said of it. I have a confession to make. I sometimes listen to these shows. I can’t take them for very long, but sometimes I turn on the car radio and maybe it’s tuned to AM1070 because I was listening to UVA basketball or the local morning show, but now there is some voice talking venomously about “liberals” or shouting down someone supposedly being interviewed, and instead of reaching immediately for a button to change the station, for whatever reason, some perverse fascination or curiosity or desire for self-punishment, I listen. Almost always to my regret, not so much because I disagree with what’s being said, but because of the violence of the language and the way people are treated. I found myself in one of these listening moments one night and the voice on the radio, the talk show host, was taking a call from a listener who disagreed with him on some point, and the host got enraged and said in his ugliest voice, “You scumbag,” and he went on to call him every name he could think of and then some. I was driving along in my car listening to this, thinking how awful it was, wishing I could say to this guy, “How dare you talk to people that way, you scumbag.”
I don’t know if those words actually went through my mind, but I do remember thinking that what was going on inside of me was not nonviolent, and in some ways was no better than what I was hearing on the radio. It was not a new thought or feeling, but it was a needed reminder, that violence as a way of life is more than a matter of doing physical harm and that it is not just something external that threatens or offends me from the outside, but that there are some forms of violence that are internal, that live inside me. Or to put it the other way, building a way of life that is nonviolent is not just a matter of bringing the troops home, working to end capital punishment, reducing the incidence of domestic violence, or convincing entertainment industries to be more restrained in the way they use violent images. It is also a matter of doing some spiritual work of my own that’s waiting to be done; it’s a matter of nurturing nonviolence from the inside out.
It is interesting and a bit troubling to me that when people refer to nonviolence either as a tactic of social change or as a more general philosophy, the people it seems who most often come to mind are Martin Luther King and, of course, Gandhi. They are people we identify as apostles of nonviolence. And with good reason. They were both eloquent in advocating nonviolence and steadfast in its defense. They both saw it not just as a commitment not to do physical harm to people but also as a way of changing the world. At the same time, it was for both of them not just the most practical way of achieving their goals but a matter of deep conviction, not just a means to an end but the end itself, not just a tool in the struggle but the struggle itself. So I have no problem with Gandhi and King being identified with nonviolence. Nonviolence was certainly central to what they were about.
What troubles me is, “why so few?” Why do Gandhi and King stand out as though nonviolence were their special genius? Why is nonviolence this sort of attachment to Christianity, this minority report, this afterthought to the mainstream of Christian tradition? (I won’t speak to the Hindu tradition. I’m not qualified. David and Padmasani will have to fill us in on that.) But why should a Martin Luther King come along and have to argue for nonviolence? Why is it not a given? Why is not assumed that all disciples of Christ would be advocates of nonviolence from top to bottom, from the inside out, through and through? Was nonviolence somehow not central to what Jesus was about?
That last question, in case you didn’t recognize it, was rhetorical. There is no way I can read the gospel narratives and come to some conclusion other than that Jesus was all about nonviolence. We can quibble with the word and the ways it might be misunderstood. We can talk about what other words might help to define what Christianity is all about. But from where I sit, based on the gospels, nonviolence was very much in the heart of Jesus and at the heart of his movement. From where I sit, to be Christian is to be an apostle of nonviolence, and then we can go on to ask ourselves how that gets played out in our living, but we should assume that it is at the core of our calling to live out nonviolence, to make it our way of faith and our way of life.
For today, just one case in point: the reading from Luke. In Matthew these words are said to have been spoken from a high place and thus are part of a Sermon on the Mount. In Luke it is said he spoke from a level place, and so they are part of the Sermon on the Plain. The words have some differences but the spirit is the same. “But I say to you who listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
This, in my reading, is not a detailed manual on what to do when assaulted, robbed, or approached by a beggar. The golden rule is not, frankly, in my opinion a sufficient guide to all matters of ethics and morals. What Jesus is trying to get at here is to ask us to consider what a nonviolent way of life would look like from the inside out. He’s not about giving us instructions for every situation. He doesn’t tell me what I ought to think, feel, or do when I encounter a voice on the radio doing verbal violence to someone, calling him a scumbag. I’m pretty sure, however, that responding by calling him a scumbag would not be one of the preferred options. A small example, maybe, but the challenge is to confront our own violence, our internal, spiritual violence if you will, precisely in all those small, seemingly insignificant, ways that when you add them all up constitute a way of life.
Jesus doesn’t answer all questions, and there are lots of them, but he does say quite clearly to me that shaping a way of life that is nonviolent not just in certain opinions we hold about what goes on in the world but that is nonviolent in a way that is rooted in our spirits, that shaping a way of life that is nonviolent from the inside out is not something we do only when the people we are dealing with are nice people with good manners, is not something that depends on a good response, is not based on an assumption that if we act in a nonviolent way others will too. Shaping a way of life that is nonviolent depends only on who we want to be, and it depends as little on other people as any other part of our faith life, say whether we believe in God or choose to engage in prayer.
At the end of the passage we heard there is a statement made by Jesus which in a similar place in Matthew reads, “Be perfect, therefore, as God is perfect.” Here it reads, “Be merciful, therefore, as God is merciful.” Or in some translations, “Be compassionate, therefore, as God is compassionate.” I’m not a language scholar and I don’t know what Hebrew or Greek words are being translated or have an opinion on what the best translation is. The one that is most helpful to me is the one that says, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” How do we shape a nonviolent way of life, each of us, for ourselves? Not by being compassionate now and then, which we all are, but by doing our best to fill our spirits with compassion, fill them up entirely with compassion so that there’s no room for anything else. We all have a long way to go on that journey, but it’s a journey I believe Christ calls us to make. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 22, 2006