Sword

Sermon for Year A, Proper 18

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

September 7, 2014

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Lections Appointed

“Sword”

It falls to you, and to me, to give holy heed to these holy lessons:

 From Exodus, how a people escaped violence;

 From Romans, how love is the highest Christian virtue,

   Put to use in communities of believers to avoid the kind of violence we do to each other;

 And from Matthew, this meditation on how to repair the community of Jesus’ split followers

   After violence has been done between individuals and groups.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about human violence -- the capacity to be violent.

It has been unfortunate and inescapable, especially if you’ve been tuned in to the news.

There has been no way to avoid it -- thinking about how we treat each other,

 Praying for a cessation to our mutual hostility.

I suppose it would be easy to sit in a pew on a Sunday morning in September,

 And to imagine that we are here in part because we somehow have our act together.

You have known me long enough now to know that I harbor no such delusions;

 That I believe that such thoughts are bad religion at best, dangerous at worst.

You and I are here precisely because we are so dreadfully, incredibly far from perfect.

This is a house for saints and a house for sinners, and we play both roles.

We get nowhere in imagining that we aren’t divided within ourselves.

It was always thus.

“The Odyssey,” by Homer, discusses events that occurred around 1200 years before Jesus’ time.

In one small point, the main character, Odysseus, is talking about

 The necessity of hiding the weapons of war from a bloodthirsty crowd.

Talking about a sword, he says, “Tempered iron can magnetize a man.”

Can you imagine, being “magnetized” by a sword?

Another good translation is this: “Iron itself can draw men’s hands.”

One more translation is even better, and to the point: “The blade itself incites to violence.”

He means to say that the act of just holding a sword

 Can cause a weak-minded person to want to use it against someone.

After all, why not allow the sword to do precisely what it was forged to do?

It reminds me of Shakespeare’s famous character Macbeth, who has a vision of a bloody dagger,

 And takes it as confirmation that it’s time to go and do murder.

Yet as the people of God, there must be more than just being enticed to violence.

More than just a derelict and low vision of human nature.

How easily do we forget the vision of the prophet Isaiah, seeing the righteous judgments of God

 Making the people to beat their swords until they become plowshares?

Yet. I am afraid that even this is too simple.

The fact is that we don’t need an actual, physical sword;

 Just as Macbeth only needed to see the idea of a dagger

   To feel that he should do murder.

The fact is that we have internalized the blade.

We have internalized the cycle of violence.

The fight for justice and freedom and peace goes on inside us!

We have eaten the bread of discontent and bloodlust, and it has become us.

In our beginnings, in Genesis,

 We can read that humans eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

We buy the lie of Satan that we will become like God,

 And we take the fruit and eat it, and we fly too close to the sun.

Or is that simply something that happened long ago and far away? I can’t think so.

Then our eyes are opened and we see and understand that we are naked,

 And we are suddenly afraid because we are vulnerable -- cast out ...

And so we sew leaves against our bodies to protect ourselves,

 And we long for unattainable perfect Security at any cost.

The next rational move -- the next salient moment in our faith narrative --

 The next thing you know in the Bible, Cain is standing over the dead body of his brother,

 Because his sacrifice is less pleasing in God’s sight than Abel’s.

Violence is hard-wired.

We live now, of course. But things haven’t changed. Nothing has changed at all.

We are still prone to violence.

When we ate the fruit, we ate the blade to go with it, to cut it down,

 To cut down the search for security into little civil, bite-sized chunks.

But we are deeply vulnerable, and we’ll do just about anything to protect ourselves.

A case in point.

It was a little too easy for me to stand back and to judge what was happening in Ferguson.

I’m supposed to be an enlightened, progressive Christian pastor, or at least I play one on TV.

But sisters and brothers, when I saw the conflict in Missouri, it triggered an old, old reflex.

Because unfortunately for me to be fully known to you --

 For my whole story to get out there --

 Sooner or later you’re going to have to hear that I was brought up in a time and a place

   That was marked by deep, cutting racism.

The threat of violence was always just under the surface.

People used, and I would even say cherished, deeply racist language and ideas.

You see, the Great Plains of the United States are home to long horizons and open vistas,

 And above us in the sky we could watch as late-afternoon cloud anvils

 Slowly cooked themselves into a pale-green frenzy --

 Until just before sundown, violent storms took our towns by force and shook them down.

We lived in fear that something new was going to slowly come and strangle us off

 And violate our peaceful existence.

(Conveniently forgetting that existence is rarely peaceful.)

I am ashamed to say that I was conversant in the language of racism, and I am sorry for it;

 Even as I understood, even then, at some fundamental level, that it was not healthy.

Racist attitudes (whether being nursed in secret or worn out in the open)

  Were what was being modeled to me.

Everything I learned and later tried to unlearn

 Could be summed up by any half-hour visit to the corner café.

Powerful people in my life -- men and women --

 Civic leaders, school administrators, church people, parents of friends --

 They said, This is how it is. And they didn’t equivocate, and they didn’t say, It depends.

 They said, This is how it is.

They said, X is coming to take away our way of life, you bank on it. The writing’s on the wall.

And X was whatever they wanted it to be.

And I was a child. I didn’t understand about “X.”

I didn’t know about how people search for security at all costs.

I didn’t know about how people scapegoat each other and make enemies.

I didn’t have any comprehension that people tend to make friends the fastest

 With those who look and act and talk like they themselves already look and act and talk.

I didn’t see in shades of gray -- I saw white, and I saw black.

I saw myself and my group, and then I saw X.

Mostly X was African-Americans and gays and lesbians.

Later on, after I learned how the game was played, I watched with some distance and disgust

 As X became Communist-sympathizers and Mexicans and “political-correctors”

 And cityfolk and abortionists and Muslims and radical feminists.

Sometimes, weirdly enough, X was credit-card companies, or whatever or whoever.

More than once I heard the name Ronald Reagan listed --

 That Reagan was sending his lackeys down to take away all our guns and Bibles,

 And pretty soon it was going to be so bad we wouldn’t even be allowed to pray anymore.

Moralistic judgments heaped up like coals

 About What X Wants, or What X Is Going To Do, or What X Is Doing Even Now.

As I say, in the beginning I was a child. I thought and reasoned like a child.

I believed that the fruit the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

 Was a literal story about where I came from that told me why I was so bad

 And why I had come into the world doomed for Hell if not for the blood of Christ.

Somewhere along the way, I got a soft spot -- I got a God-shaped soft spot!

I sat on my bed and read in the Gospel of Matthew

 About how Jesus hung out with every kind of reprobate and loser,

 And I began to think that maybe I was a reprobate and a loser;

   And maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world,

   So long as I could get closer to Jesus in the process.

I knew those attitudes and those things I heard about X were wrong.

That they came out of fear.

The more accountably closer I got to Jesus, the more fear I let go.

The more violence I saw in the world, the more willing I became to be vulnerable about it.

My search for security took a radical turn,

 And I found myself one day like Peter, after Jesus has asked if they’re going to desert him.

I found myself saying, “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

I found my security in Jesus Christ and his life and death and resurrection,

 And all my hope was founded on nothing less, just as the hymn said.

It was a season of pure joy and bliss and contentment,

 Because I knew that no one could ever take that away from me.

No sword. No agenda. No hate. No prejudice. No violence.

Nietzsche said, "When we are tired, we are attacked By ideas we conquered long ago."

And then I got swallowed up in my life again.

The old cycles and the old inner dialogues about race.

Racism and violence weren’t something that could be simply thrown out with the trash,

 Even when there was a holy mission involved.

These things were deeply sewn into the marrow of my bones.

All I could do was to bring an awareness of them into the present,

 Just as a man who has not had a drop of whisky in twenty years

 Will turn to his friends and say, “My name is John, and I am an alcoholic.”

Because some diseases like racism don’t ever fall away; don’t go into remission;

 They can only be watched over, kept vigil over, prayed over.

So when Ferguson lit up like a powder keg, it all came rushing back:

 The chaos and the fear and the X and the violence

 And my own jumbled story of racism and Jesus and the search for security.

And the sense-memory of being taught very patiently to hate and be suspicious and fearful,

 And the long journey to lay it down, let it go, start over again. Every day.

How, dear God, I ask, can we listen to the words of Christ about healing violence in community,

 And not seek to put them all into play immediately?

How could we just hear this and pause for a moment and then go on to the next thing?

When it is so much of who and what we are?

When it speaks to so much of us?

Jesus says, above all, to Listen and to seek to be Listened To. Did you catch that part?

He says, “If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him -- work it out between the two of you.

 If he listens, you’ve made a friend.

 If he won’t listen, take one or two others along

   So that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest, and try again.

 If he still won’t listen, tell the church.

 If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll have to start over from scratch,

   Confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving love.”

There is no real reconciliation, no revealing of the truth, without listening.

No healing in community.

Until there is listening, there are only cuts and bruises and broken bones

 And Band-Aids and shortcuts and impatient people.

And listening takes time and energy, and it challenges our worldview.

It can take all the courage we have to say,

 “You know what -- I’m not sure I really understand that. Can we talk about this?”

But listening, done patiently, lovingly, after the style of Jesus,

 Begins to eat away at the crust of violence that lives inside of us.

It shows us that there’s another way to be -- a less violent way to be.

To listen, to seek reconciliation in community by listening.

It does not rewrite the past.

It does not undo years of hatred and violence.

It does not mean that Cain has not killed Abel.

It does not mean that our eyes are not filled with insecurity,

 Or that we are suddenly no longer dressed in the leaves of vulnerability.

It does not mean that we pretend we’re all exactly the same,

 Because thanks be to God, we’re not.

And that’s what makes life so interesting as well as so hard.

To seek reconciliation by listening only means this:

 That we have opened up a little.

That we don’t have to live in violence and in fear.

That we don’t have to judge one another based on what we see on the surface.

That we really can live just a little bit freer.

And by God’s grace, we might open up even a little bit more tomorrow.

And after that, ... and after that, ... and after that.

For this is the way we learned Christ.