Oct 8 Sermon on Violence

Violence

The sermon today is about violence.  I could go on and on for hours like a Fire and Brimstone preacher, however Father Matthew said to keep this under an hour.  So fifty-nine minutes it is.  I think I just caused a violent reaction amongst a lot of you.

Thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, many times in the last few years have we heard this phrase uttered from the lips of politicians and now-a-days, more-often-than-not tweeted.  Sandy Hook, Columbine, Las Vegas, and many more tragedies that we have watched play out on the Internet and on television.  Jesus Wept is the shortest verse in the Bible.  The New Testament was written close to two millennia ago and I am here to say that Jesus has not stopped weeping. 

Even in the Gospel we read today about the vineyard and the absent owner.  Violence abounds even to the point of killing the owner’s son.  When Jesus talks about the owner, he is referencing God.  We know that Jesus is the owner’s son and he was crucified.  We live in a violent world, a world full of trials and tribulations and peace seems but a distant dream.  Will the Lord come back to remove the tenants from the vineyard (Earth).

In one of the most famous stories of the Bible, Jonah is sent to Nineveh to proclaim the word of God and demand repentance.  The King of Nineveh took this to heart and proclaimed ”Let everyone call urgently on God.  Let them give up their evil ways and their violence.  Who knows?  God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

God was pleased and changed his mind about destroying Nineveh.  However, Jonah wasn’t pleased and became angry with God.  The ensuing conversation between God and Jonah is very good and I would encourage all of you to pick up your Bible and read and meditate on the dialogue between Jonah and God.

Violence has been a part of man since Cain slew Abel.  Wars have been almost non-stop since we were cast out of the Garden.

The United States has boasted that we are a peaceful nation.  How so?  I read an article that said we have been at war 93% of our short existence.  I found that hard to believe but when I did some research, I was dismayed to find it true.  If you take into account the major wars, it doesn’t seem like we have truly been at war that much.  But if you look at all the Indian wars, the small conflicts overseas, rebellions, and such the facts are true.

It seems we revel in war.  If you resist you are labeled unpatriotic and may be thrown in prison.  If you protest you are labeled as un-American.  Our movies and television shows are full of violence.  Video games promote violence.  Violence breeds violence!

My father was a police officer in Fort Wayne.  I was raised around guns and violence.  As far as I know he was only shot at once and when he recounted the event to me I was horrified.  When I was about nine years old, I received a BB gun for a present.  I went out in the woods with a friend and I saw a cardinal perched in a tree.  I took careful aim and with the first shot, I bagged my first and only kill. 

I approached the small bird, lying in the snow, blood oozing out of his small body and I was overcome with a feeling of utter shame.  I cried at the taking of his life and I have never been able to “hunt” again.  For my thirteenth birthday, I received a 22-caliber rifle.  I did not hunt, but I did shoot targets.  This did not stop me from trying to kill a big husky that was attacking my little hound dog late in my teenage years.  As I reflect on those episodes, I understand the difference between violence caused by anger and violence because of a lack of compassion.

During the period of my life when I lived in Miami, I was called to jury duty for a murder trial.  When twenty-eight of us were marshaled into the courtroom for our initial questioning, I was shocked.  Why?  Because the first question asked by the defense attorney was, “How many of you or how many of your family, have been victims of violent crime?”  Over half the hands went up and those people were dismissed from the jury.  Over half … think about that.

Our early church, before Constantine was pacifist.  Origen said that Christians "do not go forth as soldiers.”  Tertullian wrote "only without the sword can the Christian wage war: for the Lord has abolished the sword.”  Clement of Alexandria wrote "... he who holds the sword must cast it away and that if one of the faithful becomes a soldier he must be rejected by the Church, for he has scorned God."

This changed in the time of Constantine - the Council of Arles in 314 said that to forbid "the state the right to go to war was to condemn it to extinction,” and shortly after that, Christian philosophers began to formulate the doctrine of the Just War.  We haven’t stopped since.

Violence, most of the time, is a result of anger.  Why the anger?  I am not immune, you are not immune, we are all human and we all experience anger.  Jesus himself overturned tables and whipped the moneychangers in the temple.  That I suppose could be called righteous anger.  My anger is more the,” Did you see what that idiot just did.  He ran a red light, the moron.”  Hank taught me to say, “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” whenever I had a bout of road-rage.  I confess I have called out the Holy Trinity more times on the road than I have in church.

This though is the key to reducing violence.  The violence exists in each one of us because we are not at peace with ourselves.  So how do we become more peaceful?  WHEN we come to the realization that CHRIST, exists inside each of us.  We need to recognize the Christ in us as illustrated by  Thomas Merton.

Oh God, we are one with you.  You have made us one with you.  You have taught us that if we are open to one another, you dwell in us.  Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts.  Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection.  Oh God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is in Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit.  Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love.  Love has overcome.  Love is victorious

Now I would like us all to do a little exercise.  I promise you this won’t last long.  Please take ahold of the hand of the person on each side of you.  Then close your eyes.  Take a deep breath and hold it, feel your heart beat, feel the touch of the people around you.  Slowly exhale.  Now together say, I recognize the Christ in me.  Now open your eyes and looking around say, I recognize the Christ in you. 

That wasn’t hard was it?  How did that make you feel?  I think, I believe, that for a bit anyway, Jesus stopped weeping.

Anger management, is I think, a major factor in reducing violence.  Remember though, that there are some that would manipulate our tendency to violence for their own ends and if anyone tells you to hate, resist. 

When we stop for a second and realize that Christ is in each one of us, how can we hate.  Removing our anger is probably not entirely possible, but reducing our anger to manageable levels is.  It takes practice and it takes commitment.

Christ is the cornerstone upon which our church is built.  Christ is about love, peace, and even righteous anger.  But I am here to tell you if your anger is based on greed, envy, pride, hate, and racism, it is not righteous.  If you want to get into a fight because someone cut in line at the movie theater … it is not righteous.  If you want to fire photon torpedoes at the guy in front of you who is driving to slow, it is not righteous.

John 16:33 “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.  In the world, you will have tribulation.  But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

Today, when we pass the peace, I would like us to say Shalom to each other.  Mean it, own it, and let the Shalom of Jesus pass from us and through us.  Let the Shalom of Jesus reside in us and radiate from us.

Sermon given at St Michael and All Angels Church on 4/23/2017

Doubt

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

How many of us would have said the same thing?  How many of us have doubts about our faith?  In his book Jesus, the Son of Man, Kahlil Gibran has a brief chapter on Thomas and he describes doubt as this, “Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”

Think about that for a minute, “doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”  When I read the passage it spoke to me about my own pain, my own doubts, whether it is about my faith or me.  Doubt is indeed painful and lonely.  How does your own doubt make you feel? 

Do you doubt your abilities, do you doubt the direction of your life, or do you doubt you will be forgiven for your sins.  Doubt is a powerful and debilitating emotion or paradoxically it can be good if it changes our path in life.  Doubt can keep us from realizing our potential, our God given gifts.  Doubt can also be good, when it makes us question the direction or meaning in our life.

I have my own doubts, one of them being the doubt that if I made this sermon twenty minutes long any of you would remain awake.  Be still and know that I am God is great for meditation but not so great for preachers. 

I don’t want you to be still.  I want you to fidget in your pews, to question, to think, to doubt.  Because if you doubt, then you will ask questions, and if you are asking then you are seeking, and Jesus tells us, “seek and you shall find.”

Doubt can lead us into despair and despair can lead us to make drastic decisions that affect not only ourselves but others as well.  But if we embrace our doubt and acknowledge it as part of our shadow self, then we can see that it is a natural part of our existence.

When we are children we want to believe, we take everything at face value and believe everything our parents tell us.  That is faith.  I think we are born with open and loving hearts, then the world instills doubt, and we lose our innocence.  Once again I will quote from Gibran, “Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.”

Yet, if faith resides in us as some secret knowledge then why do we have doubt?  Is doubt really the lonely twin of faith?  Perhaps, and let me throw this out there, perhaps God wants us to have doubt.  Now Jesus admonished Thomas to believe, but he did not punish him for his doubt.  Indeed, he showed him the truth. 

And I believe that doubt drives us forward.  With doubt comes a choice.  Without doubt, I believe we become complacent.  Jesus said seek and you shall find.  However, Jesus did not say that the truth would be easy to find.  I don’t think we can ever stop seeking God.  God wants to be found. 

The journey to find him can be a lifetime experience of pain and joy, of gladness and sorrow, of doubt and of faith.  All are part of the puzzle, all are pieces of God, and when we realize that God is all things, and that we are part of God, and God is part of us, the journey becomes more exciting, more meaningful, and we come to the realization that the truth is there, waiting and wanting to be found.

Last year the Pope, a man I admire, had this to say about doubt,” Everyone experiences doubts about the faith at times - “I have” many times, but such doubts can be a sign that we want to know God better and more deeply.”

“We do not need to be afraid of questions and doubts because they are the beginning of a path of knowledge and going deeper; one who does not ask questions cannot progress either in knowledge or in faith.”

Faith can be exhilarating, freeing, and comforting.  Now Thomas had faith in Jesus long before this.  In fact, earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples he is going to Lazarus.  The disciples were afraid because the people had been ready to stone Jesus when he previously visited Lazarus and his sisters.   But Thomas, alone amongst the disciples showed his devotion by saying to the others, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Now if you have a questioning mind you might ask, “Where was Thomas during the crucifixion?  I have no answer for that.  Perhaps when encountering the real thing Thomas, as well as all the disciples but the beloved one fled and hid.  Certainly, later in his life Thomas lived up to his pledge, as he died a martyr in India.

The Apostle Thomas ventured to India to preach to the Jews who had small colonies on the east coast.  Eventually he converted many High Caste Hindus and was martyred with a spear.  The story is very interesting and I would ask you to do some investigations of your own.  The Mar Thoma Syrian Church in India claims as its heritage that is was started by Thomas the Apostle of Christ in the year 52 and the church is part of the Anglican Communion.

So, what caused Thomas to change his mind and believe?  Jesus came back and did as Thomas asked.  When he showed Thomas the wounds he said, “Put your finger here; see my hands.  Reach out your hand and put it into my side.  Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas replied, “My Lord and my God.”

Then Jesus says, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Those passages pretty much sum up the relationship between faith and doubt.  Thomas wanted to believe, but desired proof; perhaps because he loved Jesus so much he wanted to see him again.  When Herod, the Priest and Scribes, and others demanded that Jesus prove he was the Son of God, he would offer no proof.  But when his apostle asked, he freely gave proof.

Ask and you shall receive, demand and you may be met with silence.  Ask with love and you shall receive, demand with wickedness and you shall probably receive nothing.

Poem by the Reverend Ted Loder, a Methodist Minister, and a man who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.

God … are you there?

I’ve been taught,

And told I ought

To pray.

But the doubt

Won’t go away.

Yet neither

Will my longing to be heard.

My soul sighs

Too deep for words.

Do you hear me?

God … are you there?

I will leave you with this collect from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer.

Living God,

For whom no door is closed.

No heart is locked,

Draw us beyond our doubts,

Till we see your Christ

And touch his wounds

Where they bleed in others