Ephesians 1.11-23, Luke 6.20-31
All Saints’ Sunday 30 October 2016
West Camel, Sutton Montis
This week I came across a sermon which was given by a nine-year-old girl called Lucy. It was a short sermon but as one might expect from a nine-year-old, it refreshingly asked uncomfortable questions which most adults would prefer to bury. This is how Lucy’s sermon ended:
When I think about God I think of a person who would never murder or kill anyone. But when you think about it you wonder because wasn't it God who swept the angel of death over Egypt? It makes you think doesn't it? Is God against it or is he not? I mean what had the boys done to die? It was the Pharaoh wasn't it? Now do you realise how little we know about God? I hope this made you think, thanks for listening. [2]
For its entire chequered history Christianity has lived in this tension - between on the one hand a God who seems to be brutal, vengeful, full of wrath, and on the other, one who teaches ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you’.
And looking back in humility over these past two thousand years we have to admit that the God we have followed mostly has been that violent God, when we consider the crusades, the witch trials, the slavery, the genocidal missions of empire, the subjugation of women which Christianity has repeatedly sanctioned and supported. This is the religion which more and more people in our time are turning away from; this is the religion of which those who have kept with it are increasingly asking, Can Christianity be converted? Can Christianity be saved? [3]
More and more of us are feeling that this is the time for us to rediscover the other God - the God of love preached, taught and demonstrated by Jesus; this is the time to let that God come alive in ways which we’ve hardly ever seen enacted in our world, but who has been there from the beginning, working away at the fringes, waiting for this moment.
Young Lucy said, ‘When I think about God I think of a person who would never murder or kill anyone.’ And she thinks that because of what she’s learned of Jesus.
She is drawn to the One who taught, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.’ She has taken careful note of his teaching which says, ‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, offer the other also; if anyone takes away your coat give them your shirt as well’.
The way these words have been taught, over the centuries, have led most people to the conclusion that Christianity is for wimps, it's for people who won't stand up for themselves or for others who are being mistreated, bullied, persecuted. It opens the door to domestic violence and child exploitation. It hurts. It's humiliating. Far better to ignore these words and follow the angry God of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, instead.
And this is the tension which Lucy identified. I say to you today that the problem isn’t with Jesus’ words, the problem is with the way they’ve been mis-taught.
You could imagine young Lucy asking, ‘surely Jesus doesn't want us to be doormats - does he? The one who promised us life in all its fullness, our strength, our rock, our saviour, the one who spent his whole ministry resisting evil and who on resurrection day triumphed over evil for all time - have we mistaken his words and as a consequence completely subverted their meaning? Can we go back to them to uncover the God of love instead?’
The writer Walter Wink goes back to the original Aramaic of the Sermon on the Mount, what Jesus would have really said, Matthew’s version, where, in what is usually translated as ‘Do not resist an evildoer,’ Jesus actually says, 'Do not react violently against the one who is evil.' Do not react violently against the one who is evil - do react, do resist evil, but don't do it violently. 'Don't mirror the evil that you're attacking. Don't become the very thing you hate.’ [4]
Wink teaches that when Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is not asking for us to roll over and let them do whatever they want to us: rather, he is asking us to show our love for them by resisting the evil in them, their wrongdoing, because our resistance will challenge their behaviour and show them how different and how much better things could be between us.
Turning the other cheek and giving up your shirt now begin to look very different. They become examples of Jesus showing us how we can resist evil, without violence, but with love: and enjoy a bit of mischief, too, in the process. Because these strategies aren't what we've been led to believe, over the years. Let's take a fresh look at them.
'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.'
Now, in Jesus' society the left hand couldn't be used to touch anyone, so if you were going to hit anyone you’d have to use your right hand. And if you use your right hand to strike someone’s right cheek [demonstrate] - that would be a backhander - a gesture of insult, a symbolic blow used to humiliate the person on the receiving end. In those days people slapped their slaves in this way; Romans gave backhanders to Jews and parents kept their children in their place just like that.
'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, they’re putting you down. Turn the other also.'
Now we can see that turning the other (left) cheek gives your opponent the opportunity to land a good punch (with their right hand). But that this punch is not a put-down like the slap was. It is the punch of an equal. So if you offer your left cheek to someone to hit you, in effect you’re saying - 'I don't accept your backhander, don’t put me down, if you're going to hit me then hit me as an equal. Because I'm the same as you. I’m a person just like you.’
Now clearly, turning the other cheek is a high-risk strategy; but whatever the outcome - whether you still end up getting slugged or not - it makes a very clear point. You may want to put me down, you may continue to hurt me - but understand this, you and I are equals, I am the same as you.
Now the second piece of teaching: 'If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your shirt as well’. The scene before us is a debtor's court. A common scene in the Roman-occupied land of Jesus' time as the Romans taxed the peasant farmers highly so as to be able to foreclose on them and take possession of their land.
And so Jesus invites us to imagine a man who has secured himself a loan using his cattle or moveable property and, not being able to keep up repayments has lost that, and then given his land as security and lost that too, and become a landless peasant. He may well have lost his home and family as well. And now, standing in court opposite his enemy all he has is the clothing on his back - actually two items of clothing, his coat and his underclothes.
The law said that the creditor could sue a man for his coat, leaving him with just the shirt underneath, but Jesus advises the man to strip off completely in court: 'If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your shirt as well’.
Now, if you give them the shirt off your back, that means you are stark naked. In court. How shameful. But notice this - in Jewish society, such shame reflected not just on the naked person, but on the person who saw their nakedness. Remember the story of Noah, drunk and naked? His son who saw him was cursed for looking on his father's nakedness. So following Jesus’ advice, someone already shamed for being a debtor, standing in the court starkers, brings shame on their creditor - and on the whole court system itself - for having put him in that situation.
Think of where the power lies in that courtroom now? Jesus has turned things round again. The shame has been shared; and perhaps neutralised, by this astonishing act of protest. The accused man’s enemy has been playfully, lovingly, challenged, and you could imagine that the creditor’s first instinct would be to take off his own coat to cover up the naked man - restoring equality, bringing a form of reconciliation, albeit grudgingly, to them all.
Young Lucy said, ‘When I think about God I think of a person who would never murder or kill anyone.’ She thinks that because of what she’s learned of Jesus. And she is right.
For Jesus teaches ways to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, without being weak and feeble, without losing our integrity or self-esteem. Jesus shows us ways to resist evil without becoming evil.
Of course these strategies carry risks: we might still get thumped or sued. But in showing us how we can love our enemies without either rolling over and doing nothing, or falling back on retaliatory violence, they can strengthen us, and our community. Maybe they even contain the seeds by which, in our time, Christianity can be saved.
We are surrounded with reasons for hope. Again and again over recent decades and in place after place around the world, people have begun to put Jesus’ teachings into action - and to great effect.
Courageous Christian leaders in South Africa put bodies and livelihoods on the line to resist and overcome an apartheid system which many churches had supported. Others in Nigeria supported Ken Saro-Wiwa in his non-violent struggle against Shell Oil’s brutal exploitation of the natural resources of Ogoniland. [5]
- Martin Luther King Jr once said,
- I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.... But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory. [6]
Fifty years ago in the United States, leaders of the civil rights movement, inspired by their Christian faith, dared to challenge the dominant view of a segregationist God who upheld white privilege. They faced not only the opposition of white religious and political institutions, but also the misgivings of many African Americans who feared they were pushing too hard and too fast. But now virtually all Christians agree, at least in theory, that Dr King’s dream was God’s dream, and that God was imaged more truly by the marchers being beaten on the Edmund Petrus Bridge in Selma than by those swinging the clubs in the name of tradition, law and order.
In word and deed, with their words and with their feet, courageous demonstrators have literally embodied for us the way of a God who resists evil, without violence, but with imagination, and love. [7]
Notes
[1] A rewrite of Loving your enemies - by turning cheeky, preached at Bratton Clovelly and Sourton, 2011, referencing Matthew 5.38-48 and the teachings of Walter Wink (see [4])
[2] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian, p.120-121.
[3] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian, p.8, from the Introduction, which deserves to be read in its entirety on this point.
[4] The following section of this sermon borrows heavily from Walter Wink, Jesus’ Third Way, also in Wink, The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium, pp.98-111.
[5] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian, p.114, altered. Ken Saro-Wiwa reference: Wikipedia.
[6] Martin Luther King Jr., A Christmas Sermon for Peace on Dec 24, 1967, quoted in Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian, p.204
[7] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian, p.114, altered.
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