Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48
Those of you who have been listening to me preach for a while know that it’s not uncommon for me to commit myself to preaching on a subject without knowing ahead of time what I intend to say about that subject. This morning is one of those occasions.
Knowing that Martin Luther King’s birthday was at the center of the month of January, I promised myself that I would not give a brief nod to Dr. King on one Sunday and then move on to something else. I decided I would take my cues for preaching throughout the month from Dr. King. And certainly one of the things Dr. King is well known for, in addition to the effort to correct the injustices of racial discrimination, is his commitment to the philosophy and practice of non-violence. In my reading of the gospels, that theme is also very much rooted in the words and life of Jesus. So it wasn’t so much that I “decided” to preach on nonviolence. The subject came to me as a kind of a call. But I didn’t know what I was going to say.
And then, as I began to think about what I was going to say, I found myself (as happens so often) saying “uh-oh”, maybe I shouldn’t have committed myself to this because the thoughts that were most clear to me were more what I don’t want to say than what I do want to say. But sometimes there’s a purpose in saying what you don’t want to say, so let me begin with some of those things that became clear to me early on.
Our world is filled with violence. There’s violence in Afghanistan, the West Bank and Gaza, Columbia, Chiapas, Rwanda, and a hundred other trouble spots that at any given time could suddenly horrify us with some new report. There’s violence in the streets of Charlottesville. There’s violence in some of the homes in Charlottesville. Some people in this room have experienced domestic violence first hand. Violence is captured, reflected, portrayed on television and movie screens, and in music lyrics, giving off subtle or not-so-subtle messages. We may not agree on what the messages are. Does media violence say that violence is exciting or thrilling, that it’s an acceptable way to fight evil, to express anger, to settle disputes, that it’s a normal part of our life and not a violation of what human life should be, that it’s just an inevitable part of life, unfortunate, useful, necessary. The messages may not be clear. They may differ some from one instance to
another. We may not agree on exactly what they are. But they are there and they are probably not good.
Given the real violence and the images of violence that are all around us, one option would be to complain. Or to put it more positively, to notice, at least. To say ain’t it awful, how hard and hurtful the world is. That is, it seems to me, a typical churchly response. And I don’t say that sarcastically or in any negative way. Sometimes that is what we do, we church people. We gather to register an objection, to pray for an end or a lessening of the violence, to cry out, or sometimes just to cry. Those are legitimate things for a faith community to do. But it’s not where I wanted to go this morning. As I thought about what I wanted or needed to say it was something different from just a kind of gut-level cry of woe about the level of violence we live with.
Also what I realized this sermon was not going to be about was any of the very serious issues that might fall under the broad heading of non-violence. Our attitudes toward war, for instance. Dr. King’s commitment to non-violence led him to be outspoken in his opposition to the war in Vietnam. He believed that in an era of nuclear weapons war was not an option as a tool of foreign policy. He could not urge nonviolent sit-ins without urging nonviolence in international relations. Clearly those issues are connected. So too nonviolence raises for me the issue of the death penalty. And the question of media violence and what we do about it, and toys and cartoons and books and the words of hymns and parts of the scriptures themselves. There are a whole lot of things to confront if we are to ask how we go about creating a nonviolent or less violent world, or how we go about being and becoming nonviolent people.
But it’s also easy to be moralistic about such things. It’s easy to fall into self-righteousness. It’s easy to make pronouncements. It’s easy to pretend to solve or bypass the moral ambiguities of the world we live in by casting out words and pretending our thinking is done. Let’s see now. Violence…sounds like a bad word. Nonviolence…sounds like a good word. At least those words sound that way when you’re in church at Sojourners. So we’re in favor of nonviolence and that must mean that we’re against war, and that we’re against the death penalty, and so forth. There are many serious issues that require our faith-full attention. But I early decided that I didn’t want to carry on a one-sided debate on any of those issues where we sort of assumed what the right position is because the topic for the morning is nonviolence. We need to address specific issues related to nonviolence, but not briefly or casually or as a subtopic of something else.
We can’t just say the word nonviolence or invoke the names of King and Gandhi and somehow think that this will resolve troubling moral dilemmas or release us from the need to think further about difficult moral questions. But at the same time—and here’s what I do want to say this morning—I believe the call of Jesus is unequivocally a call to non-violence and that call, though it doesn’t answer all questions, that call is not easily reconciled with the ways of the world.
The center of Jesus’ preaching and teaching was the kingdom of God, the reign of God. In Mark Jesus begins his public ministry by announcing that reign of God, which was a shorthand way of referring to those visions that come from the Hebrew scriptures and that surround the birth of Jesus: the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, swords shall turn to ploughshares, everyone shall sit under vine and fig tree and live in peace and without fear. There will be a time and place where people will no longer hurt or destroy. Prophets dreamed of it. Jesus made it the cornerstone of his ministry. Some have called it the peaceable kingdom. King often called it the beloved community. The end of human life is to be a realm that will be characterized among other things by nonviolence. Jesus’ call is for us to turn, body and soul, toward that realm.
But not only that. Nonviolence is not only the end but the way. The scripture reading for this morning came from what we know as the Sermon on the Mount, which in Matthew is the sort of keynote address that Jesus gives as he begins his ministry. It sets the tone for all that follows. “Do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other also…Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.” He begins his ministry with nonviolence. He ends, on the cross, with nonviolence.
One of my favorite contemporary writers, Barbara Brown Taylor, puts it this way (referring to the crucifixion): “ Meanwhile, (while the violence of the world continues) Jesus hangs on the cross, stubbornly refusing to fight at all. He has taken into himself all the violence flung against him and he will not give it back. Abused, he will not abuse. Condemned, he will not condemn…The violence stopped with him. It caused his death, but it got none of his life.”
You may recognize that this is quite a different view of the crucifixion from that of those who see it as a satisfaction of the violent sacrifice that God required to account for and atone for the sins of humanity. In Barbara Brown Taylor’s view, and in mine, the cross has nothing to do with justifying violence, especially God-ordained violence, and everything to do with nonviolence as a way of life and faith that Jesus lived to the end and calls us into as well. The reign of God, the peaceable kingdom, the beloved community will not be ushered in by violence. Perhaps, perhaps, violence will accomplish lesser ends, but a nonviolent end will not be achieved by violent means. Again, the centrality of non-violence in Jesus’ life and preaching may not dictate that, for instance, pacifism is the only possible Christian position. Neither is nonviolence something we can just put aside and pretend is not central to what Jesus was about and what he calls us to.
But Christians do, and have. You can read dozens, hundreds of books of theology, sermons, biblical commentaries and not find as much as a reference in the index to nonviolence. If you don’t know what books to read or what authors to look for, you might think that Gandhi and King made up the idea. I realize I’m being pretty basic this morning, but all I really feel called to say this morning is that nonviolence ought to be as much a part of our Christian vocabulary as salvation, incarnation, reconciliation, trinity, love, hope, faith, or forgiveness. It is as basic and goes to the core of our faith quite as much as any of those things I just mentioned. For as every apostle of nonviolence, no matter what religious tradition, has made clear, nonviolence is not simply a question of refraining from some external action; it is something that is lived from the inside out. We can be violent with thoughts as well as guns. We can be violent with our souls as well as our bodies. The call to nonviolence is a call that goes to the core of our faith. It’s a call to pray, read scripture, seek justice, speak, listen, hope, and sing with nonviolence on our minds and in our spirits. It is Christ’s call to us. What we do with that call remains to be seen. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 27. 2002