An Eye for an Eye
Acts 9:1-9
May 3, 2019
Way back when I was in seminary, I used to worry from
time to time that there wouldn’t be enough to talk about if I ever had to
preach every Sunday. Hah.
Just take a look around: democracy under threat at home
and abroad; the rise of right wing nationalism, also at home and abroad; high
crimes and misdemeanors in the news; a frightening rise of religious violence;
climate chaos; the untimely death of a young Christian writer whose words meant
much to many. The list goes on and on and on with items both broadly global and
intimately personal.
And, into the middle of it, we get this ancient story of
transformation on the road to Damascus. Couldn’t we all use a little
transformation these days?
The question is, always, transformation from what … to
what.
What do we know about Saul, the one who is about to get a
new name in the story from Acts that we just read? We know that he’s from
Tarsus – that information comes a few verses beyond what we just read but we’ve
heard it plenty of times. We learn, along the way, that he is a citizen of the
Roman Empire. We know that he has connections such that he can go to the high
priest and get authorization to round up Jesus’ followers in the earliest days
of the fledgling Jesus movement.
Oh, and we know that he is both OK with violence and
blind to its effects. In that, he’s like a whole lot of folks since, right down
to today.
I did a great deal of my undergraduate course work in the
Center for Peaceful Change at Kent State University. The center was one of the
first undergraduate peace studies programs in the United States, and it began
as a living memorial to the four students who were killed by National Guardsmen
during an on-campus protest of President Nixon’s decision to expand the Vietnam
war into Cambodia in 1970. Those students were shot down in the middle of a
beautiful spring Monday, in the middle of a bucolic college campus, 49 years
ago yesterday.
More than a few times during my years at KSU I stood in
the spot in a parking lot where 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller was killed. To say
that I identified with the shaggy haired young man in the middle of an anti-war
protest would be accurate. It would also be accurate to say that I began taking
classes in the Center for Peaceful Change because I abhor state violence, and
the shootings at Kent were nothing if not state violence in response to
protests against state violence.
For most of human history, state-sanctioned violence has
gone hand-in-hand with religious violence, and most of the time the state, even
where it is officially separate from religion, seeks the sanction of religious
leaders for its violence. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon sought endorsement
from American religious leaders during the war in Vietnam, and some religious
leaders obliged.
As one
historian notes of the time, “The National Association of
Evangelicals, for example, met in April 1966 and passed a ‘Law and Order’
resolution that condemned an ‘unamerican mood which has invaded our society’ as
‘godless, revolutionary, and disloyal to government.’ The resolution pledged
evangelical Christians to ‘obedience to the injunctions of Scripture to respect
the authorities over us.’”[1]
In the early months of Nixon’s presidency, Billy Graham
sent the president a 13-page letter offering strategic advice on waging the war.
The advice included such tactics as bombing the dikes in the north, a tactic
that would likely have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
civilians and that would also likely have been considered a war crime.
The American story hasn’t changed that much in the past
half century, and it’s not difficult to find religious blessing of our
militarized foreign policy all along the way.
In the story from Acts we see a kind of first-century
Palestinian variation on that pattern: Paul, acting with all the privilege that
comes with being a citizen of Rome, seeking the sanction of the high priests
for the violent suppression of the nonviolent Jesus movement.
State violence is always easy enough to justify from the
perspective of the dominant culture of any given society. Religious violence is
also easy enough to justify from the perspective of the faithful. When those
two paths to violence entwine you get Wehrmacht forces marching off to war for
Hitler with the phrase “Gott mit uns” – God with us – on their belt
buckles.
How do we square that with the Jesus who said to Peter,
“put away the sword,” and who invited his followers to move from the scriptural
teaching – an eye for an eye – to a new teaching – love your enemies?
Early in my studies at the Center for Peaceful Change I
began to get to know Martin Luther King as a theologian and social critic in
addition to orator and movement leader. My own pilgrimage into nonviolence was
guided by King’s. In his essay by that name, King wrote in the early 1960s reflecting
back on the Montgomery Bus Boycott a few years earlier, “As the days unfolded,
I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence. Nonviolence
became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a
commitment to a way of life.”[2]
Similarly for me, over time, nonviolence became much more
than a tactic. Nonviolence is for me what a Mennonite friend calls “a more
perfect expression” of Christian faith and life.
Like the phrase “a more perfect union” the idea captured
in “a more perfect expression” of Christian faith is aspirational and
unrealizable. After all, as Nietzsche almost said, “the only fully realized
Christian died on the cross.”[3]
What would it mean to claim nonviolence not merely as a
tactic, or even as an aspiration, but, instead, as a central tenant of Christian
commitment? Moreover, for the moment, why bring up any of this right now, on a
Sunday when we commission a new staff member and, in doing so, affirm a bold
new commitment for mission?
Well, for one thing, our world is, if anything, more
awash in violence than was Dr. King’s. Violence done in the name of religious
conviction has struck houses of worship of the three Abrahamic traditions in
the past six weeks alone, and resulted in the deaths of scores of Christians,
Jews, and Muslims who were simply engaged in the act of praising God.
In other words, fanatics acting in the name of God in
2019 in the U.S., New Zealand, and Sri Lanka, among other places, have done,
well, basically exactly what Paul was doing to the followers of Jesus as the
book of Acts begins in first-century Palestine.
It took losing his sight for Paul’s eyes to be opened. It
took being blinded on the road to Damascus for Paul to see that one eye traded
for another is a dead-end street. It took being cast into darkness for Paul to
see the light of love.
And that, after all, is the real point here. As the first
letter from John puts it so clearly and succinctly, “God is love.” As Jesus put
it, also clearly and succinctly, “love one another.” As he similarly summarized
the entirety of Jewish law and the prophets: love God and love your neighbor.
The Christian response to violence is, simply put, love.
Now that’s obviously both incredibly simple to say, and
incredibly difficult and complicated to do.
But for us, in this moment, as we begin to live together
into the new thing that God is doing in our midst, I believe love looks a lot
like the parable of the nations in Matthew 25. You know it by the shorthand:
whatever you did to the least of these my siblings, you did it to me.
When, a year ago, we began the self-study that brought us
to where we are today, what the discernment group noted, over and over again,
was the deeply felt desire of this congregation to be more compassionately connected
with marginalized members of the broader community. People wind up on the
margins because of violence – economic violence, the violence of racism and
homophobia, the violence of sexism, and all kinds of other manifestations of
violence that acts to protect the privileged and push to the margins all those
who can be thought of as “other.”
You can interpret that through various lenses –
progressive values, liberal activism, and so on. I look at it first through
theological lenses, and, in particular, the lens of Matthew 25. When I look
through that lens I see a people who want to know Jesus more deeply, and who
understand that the way to get there is by way of the margins.
But the best lenses in the world will not help you see
more clearly if you have no sight to begin with. If my eyes have been blinded
by violence then I will not see the poor one, the immigrant, the GLBTQIA youth,
the hungry family, the asylum seeker standing right in front of me.
On the road to Damascus, Saul came to see that he could
not see, and he came to know what he was missing: opportunities to get to know
Jesus in the person of the oppressed.
I’m going to stop here, for now, even though there is so
much more that needs to be said by way of theology and praxis regarding
nonviolence. For now, having begun with a memory of May 4th I’ll end
with the theology of Star Wars – you know, because May the 4th be
with you. But, seriously, Yoda’s deep insight that fear is the path to the dark
side is incredibly important.
Because when we act out of fear we turn – we turn away
from the marginalized almost like we are afraid that their condition of
powerlessness might be contagious, and, in our fear, we often turn also quickly
to violence. When that happens, we are blinded to Jesus standing right in front
of us. It does not have to happen that way.
Along the road to what’s next, if we are ever to be
blinded, may it be by the bright light of love shining through the darkness of
these days. May we reflect that light in all that we do. Amen.
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Strength to Love (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2010) 160.
[3] The actual
quote – “there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross” –
comes from Nietzsche’s 1895 work, The Antichrist.
posted by David Ensign at
9:36 AM
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