Sermon preached by the Rev. John Kirkley, November 17, 2013 at The First Mennonite Church of San Francisco.
Good morning. I want to thank Pastor Sheri for her generous
hospitality in allowing me to be with you today. I look forward to returning the favor when we
welcome her to St. James in January.
I’m a priest of the
Episcopal Church but I was raised a Southern Baptist and have always had great
respect for the Anabaptist tradition; especially, those heirs of the tradition
who embrace the renunciation of violence as central to following the way of
Jesus. Mennonites are, no doubt, right about a great many things, but you’ve
got one really big thing right: the conviction that religion, as a legitimation
of sacred violence, is a betrayal of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The good news of
Jesus is, of course, the good news of what God is like and what life is like in
the kingdom of God.[1] Jesus is calling into being a new social
reality, a community of people committed to being fully alive in God. But what is God like, and what does it look
like to be bearers of the aliveness of God?
Jesus’ ministry of
healing, feeding, and forgiving gives us a vivid picture of the liveliness of
God, as do the rich imagery found in his parables and teaching. I want to recall an earlier teaching moment in
Jesus’ ministry that is particularly pertinent to the strange and troubling
warning we heard read this morning. It
is a familiar teaching from Luke’s version of the “sermon on the mount.”
But I say to you that 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.
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?
For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good
to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend
to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even
sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do
good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you
will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the
wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.[2]
What is God like? God
is like a kind parent, whose mercy is unrestricted in its scope, who loves
unconditionally without regard for merit.
To be children of God is to imitate God in this respect: to refuse to
mirror violence, instead finding creative responses to evil that leave open the
possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Please notice that God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. This is what God is like.
Now, that doesn’t sound very much like the god of religion
that I heard about growing up! That god
had it in for the ungrateful and the wicked! The god of religion is deeply
implicated in violence used to maintain justice and order, sorting out the good
guys and the bad guys. Isn’t that what
religion is for? Religion serves to legitimate
sacred violence.
Twice in Luke’s
Gospel, Jesus is quoted saying, “nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed,
nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.”[3] Jesus is here to tell us what is really going
on, what God is really like. The secret
is that God has nothing to do with violence.
Religion is a purely human construct to sanctify and mystify the
violence upon which civilization is built.
The god of religion is not the God manifest in Jesus.
That, it seems to me, is the main point of the strange teaching of Jesus
known as the “little apocalypse” that we heard today. “Apocalypse” simply means, “unveiling.” Apocalyptic literature is aimed at revealing
what is hidden, making available to our perception what is normally opaque to
us. Jesus is unmasking the god of
religion and warning us that we have to lose our religion to gain our souls.
Jesus’ disciples were
a bit gaga about religion, especially the Temple, the symbolic center of the
world where ritual sacrifices were offered.
The Temple in Jerusalem was, among other things, a religious monument to
sacred violence: the notion that God requires sacrifice, the making of
victims. It served, as all religion
does, to sanctify the veiled violence upon which all civilization rests: the violence against women, the poor, the
vulnerable and the subversive, and the violence wrought on creation itself;
all, of course, in the name of justice, order, prosperity, and progress.
When Jesus
announces that the Temple will be destroyed, that not one stone will be left on
another, he is not simply talking about the foundation of a building being
undone. He is talking about the
ideological foundation of civilization being unveiled. The Gospel accounts tells us that at the very
moment Jesus died on the cross, the veil of the Temple was torn in two.[4] We can now peek behind the curtain of sacred violence
and see that there is only humanity; not God.
The resurrection of Jesus is God’s vindication of the sacrificial
victim’s innocence, forever undermining the ideological attempts of religion to
sanctify violence.
The destruction of
the Temple as symbolic center of the world is the loss of religion as sacred
violence. Ultimately, this is a
liberating event, allowing us to receive God as God for us, the God of life,
not the god of death. Human violence in
the name of god is unveiled for what it is: the evil of the lynch mob, the
creation of community on the back of scapegoats. We can no longer justify our making victims
of one another.
But penultimately,
the loss of religion can be terrifying.
This is the tragic truth behind Jesus exhortation, “By your endurance
you will gain your souls.”[5] The loss of religion is a hard thing to
endure because it confronts us with the full reality of our culture’s violence. For Jesus, the destruction of the Temple
signifies the time of the nations, the rising and falling of empires, wars and
revolutions, and ecological destruction on a vast scale.
Yet, nowhere does
Jesus implicate God as the source or justification of this violence. It is not interpreted as divine punishment or
cleansing. It is simply the cycle of
violence unwinding through history. It
is, in a sense, the triumph of secularism, but it brings with it no paradise of
humanistic progress. What this means is
that the aura of religious justification no longer surrounds “legitimate”
violence in such a way as to contain “illegitimate” violence. As Gil Bailie points out,
Unveiled
violence is apocalyptic violence precisely because, once shorn of its religious
and historical justifications, it cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from
the counter-violence it opposes. Without benefit of religious and cultural
privilege, violence simply does what unveiled violence always does: it incites
more violence. In such situations, the scope of violence grows while the
ability of its perpetrators to reclaim that religious and moral privilege
diminishes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin
completely out of control.[6]
So,
this is where we are, in what Jesus refers to as the “time of the nations.” It will get worse, before it gets better. But it will get better. In the meantime, we find ourselves caught
between a rock and a hard place. On the
one hand, there are those secularists for whom god is bunk; and if they are
talking about the god of religion, they are right. Yet it is these same secularists who have led
us into the nightmare of genocide and ecocide, to a world in which man is the
measure of all things, which means reducing the world to what we can measure,
control, and dominate. They’ve lost their
religion and their soul.
On the
other hand, there are those who still cling to the god of religion, who rejoice
in the destruction reigning down around us as god’s justice. For them, the apocalypse is not an unveiling
of human violence but the final denouement of divine violence, the sacrifice of
the earth as final restitution to god. They aren’t too worried about it though,
because they believe that god will rapture them off to heaven at the last
minute, that faith is somehow a “get out of suffering free card.” They kept their religion and lost their soul.
Jesus
invites us to see this time, caught between the secularists and the
religionists, as an opportunity to testify, to bear witness to the God beyond
the god of religion. That God, glimpsed,
however ambivalently, by the prophets, is making a new heaven and a new earth,
even as the things of old are passing away.
It is a heaven and earth in which violence and hunger and exploitation
are forgotten, in which people grow old in harmony with one another and with
nature. It is a world in which God’s
promise to bring the whole creation to its fulfillment is realized.[7]
This is
God’s dream. We are called to be a
people who bear witness to that dream, who live the dream, who are fully alive
in God, even as we persevere through the nightmare of violence. During this time of the nations, being fully
alive in this way, living into this dream will seem foolish and even
threatening. And nothing will be more
threatening than our refusal to mirror violence, our commitment to being
merciful as God is merciful. We will be
betrayed, arrested and imprisoned. But
by our endurance we will gain our souls, even though we must lose our religion
in the process.
Here, I
think of one of our local saints, Fr. Louie Vitale. Fr. Louie is a Franciscan friar, one of the founders
of Pace e Bene, an organization
dedicated to nonviolence training, and of the Nevada Desert Experience, a group
dedicated to nonviolent protest of U.S. nuclear weapons. Fr. Louie was for many years the pastor of
St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin, a well-known center of
hospitality for the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized.
Fr.
Louie has been arrested hundreds of times, and has served several Federal
prison sentences for his nonviolent protests against the School of the Americas
at Fort Benning, Georgia, the U.S. military’s center for training personnel in
methods of torture, and various nuclear facilities. He was an early civil rights advocate and has
protested every U.S. war since Vietnam.
Now more than 80 years old, he remains a tireless witness to the God of
life; warm, generous, joyful, usually with a twinkle in his eye, especially
when he is mirroring God’s mercy for his enemies.
Fr.
Louis is full of soul. He is in touch
with the deep and wide current of divine compassion that runs through all
created things. He is sustained in his
witness by that current, which carries him into sometimes dangerous places, but
also into experiences of deep communion.
He isn’t waiting to be raptured.
He is testifying to the God of life, who is creating a new heaven and
earth here and now.
Once
Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he
answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;
nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the
kingdom of
God
is among you.”[8]
God is
creating the new heaven and earth. The
kingdom is not our achievement. It is
God’s gift to us. But we have to be
willing to lose our religion, the false security of sacred violence, to realize
the abundant life prepared for us. That
life, that kingdom is already here.
Don’t be mesmerized by glittering Temples or Crystal Cathedrals.
And
don’t be disillusioned by the violence raging around us. Jesus tells a parable to help us put it in
perspective. “Look
at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see
for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see
these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I
tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”[9]
Jesus has spoken of terrible things: war, earthquakes,
famine, disaster, and persecution. And
then he likens the whole thing to leaves coming out in the spring, bearing
signs of new life to come. It is an
amazing parable. Unless we are in touch
with what God is really like, it will be difficult to perceive the signs of
God’s kingdom breaking out, like the tiniest buds on bare branches, in spite of
all the efforts of our culture to contain it.
If we see the signs, we can relax into the invitation to bear witness as
we participate in the unfolding of the new creation.
As Mennonites you are part of a community that lost its
religion a long time ago – the religion of sacred violence – and gained its
soul through an enduring witness to the peace of God that passes all
understanding. The rest of us are still
catching up to you. I am so grateful for
your witness and your patient endurance.
Amen.
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