Sermon: Religion as a Destructive or Healing Force

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Religion as a Destructive or Healing Force

By Charles Rush

October 1, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 7Mb) ]

decided to preach on this subject, well before the Pope's speech in Germany. If you actually read the speech, it left a lot of people in the West scratching their heads, as to how the exact words could elicit the response they got. One political cartoon had the Pope sitting in the Papal throne reading a text saying, "Islam has a problem with violence". In the background a guy in an Islamic minaret is crying, "Death to the Pope".

I am no big defender of the Pope and disagree with him on just about every significant issue, however… In case you don't know, the Pope was a professor in his first life at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Tubingen has the best religion faculty in Europe. Heidelberg a close second, Bonn a close second, Basel a close second, but they are the best.

When I was in Divinity school, students paid attention to what was going on there because the most famous theologian in the world was on the faculty, Hans Kung. Kung was actively ecumenical and always close to running afoul of the Vatican. We were all very hopeful that the new face of the Church was in leadership represented by him and other kindred souls.

With some regularity, Hans Kung would give a lecture that would push the envelope and someone would be asked to give the more Orthodox Catholic response. One of those responders was a little known scholar Joseph Ratzinger. Professor Ratzinger was very careful, knew history well, and the history of doctrine even better.

None of us could have imagined in 1980 that Hans Kung would lose the debate and this scholar would become Pope. These are the bitter turns of history. There will be many legitimate criticisms of this Pope's leadership through the years. One of them will not be that he is sloppy or that he doesn't know what he is talking about. As we say in the academy, 'he is a worthy opponent.'

His actual lecture raised what I believe will be probably the most important discussion for our generation on an inter-faith basis in the next generation: Is there any place for violence in religion? Let's put it the other way around, can we collectively agree on an inter-faith dialogue that there is no place for violence in support of religion for our generation going forward?

That is the question that we are presently at an impasse over. It is a world-wide discussion that each of our regions must ultimately come to a consensus about. Can we reach such a consensus?

It would be an important start for each of the three Abrahamic faiths to admit the degree to which they were each shaped by violence and the degree to which they condoned and encouraged it. We all come by this problem honestly. It is built in to the foundations of our heritage. But that does not mean it cannot be purged.

In each of our traditions we have roots of violence, but we have bigger roots in reconciliation; we have roots in vengeance but we have bigger roots in forgiveness; we have roots in Holy War but we have deeper roots in Holy Peace.

The roots of the problem are embedded in scripture itself. There are two different strands of tradition that run side by side and have had pretty dramatic implications for not only Jews, but Christians, and Muslims as well.

The first tradition is God's address to us all. It can be symbolized by the figure of Moses at the end of his life. He knows that he is going to die shortly. He gathers all the Israelites one more time, to sum up what he hopes for them after he dies. He summarizes all they have been through, leaving Egypt and crossing the Sinai. Then he says to them, speaking for God really, "I set before you the way of Life and the way of Death". And then he says to them, "Choose Life". Symbolically, that is God's address to all of us, collectively and also individually. It is a profound Spiritual address and if you are of a certain age and have lived with any daring or profundity, you have found yourselves, at some point, living destructively for ourselves, for others, and had that moment of gravity when you realized you need to change. With God's help, you reorient.

On it's best days that is what the Church is all about. We are the Greenhouse that helps each other nourish our withered Spiritual roots and find healing and the recovery of our higher Spiritual selves together. Dietrich Bonhoffer used to say that when the Church is really the Church we meet as a collection of 'forgiven sinners' not 'righteous saints.' He used to think of the Church as a kind of Spiritual Hospital for healing and recuperation.

Then there is this other tradition where the dialectic is not Us/God but Us/Them. We know who They are, even if They are left undefined. Unfortunately, this division also is quite primordial and continuous in tradition. I would symbolize it in God's very first address to Abraham in Genesis. God appears to Abraham and says to him, "Behold, look at this Land which I will give to you… Those that bless you will I bless and those that curse you will I curse." The problem is not exactly in the address itself, it is what we have done with it.

It would be one thing if we said, we will stand for the Good, knowing that there are people around us that do not, people indeed that are genuinely evil, and we can do so partly knowing that ultimately their destructive way of living will be it's own undoing, so we will stay positively focused anyway.

But that is not the way that we've interpreted this broad spiritual approach to life historically. No, all three faith traditions have used it eventually to create a dialectic between the Godly and the ungodly, between us and them.

And a good deal of the moral problem is implied right here in this text. God gives Abraham this Land. What does that mean? Is it one of those promises that God makes so frequently in the Bible that will one day come true, a long, long, time from now in ways that you could not have predicted and quite in spite of our effort or our virtue or vice? Or does it give Abraham the right to start setting up shop? And what about the people that already live in the Land? Do they have to move? Does God promise them anything? And if they resist moving because their family has been there for 6 generations, does that mean that they don't bless Abraham and that are open to God's curse? And if they are open to God's curse, does that give us the right to add our own violence to this spiritual scourge?

Jump forward a few generations in the Bible and that is pretty close to how they interpreted the meaning. I refer to the Book of Joshua, when the Israelites actually try to enter the Promised Land and find it not only populated but populated with cities and patrolled by armies. Moses is dead. Joshua assumes leadership. What is the first thing he does, he calls a meeting of just the Men. Women and children are to stay behind and the Men are to bring weapons.

Joshua prays… a good thing to do. But the situation has changed with God. God is not an undifferentiated Other, a kind of transcendent conscience. God is much more talkative. God's message gets much more specific. This is what Joshua hears God saying to him, "My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I will give them, to the Israelites. Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses. From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory. No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous…" (Joshua 1:2-6) It goes on but that is enough for now.

Sounds like this promise just got concrete with one generation. Sounds like the time of fulfillment is now. Sounds like God has also taken sides, with us against them. Sounds like we will know that God is with us by our victory over them. Sounds like the virtues of courage and strength are about to be interpreted in the service of military valor rather than spiritual integrity. Sounds like the people that actually already live in this land don't have many or any rights and that God is okay with that.

The Lion's share of moral problems that secular people have with the Bible can be found right here and they are not entirely wrong to raise them. What follows is chapter after chapter of the Israelites driving out their enemies, with the Ark of God going before them, and the army of little Israel destroying hundreds of thousands of enemies. The numbers are staggering, prompting a little incredulity among those of us who have studied the ancient world. You get 25,000 here, 30,000 there, etc.. etc. The ancient world was sparsely populated and that is a lot of people.

I know I was glad to learn at Divinity school that there is not much archeological evidence to support a conquest of this nature. If you come in a raze town after town in a rampage, it is generally reflected in the archeological record. You dig down and suddenly find one layer of toppled stones, all the other signs that civilization came to an abrupt end, but we don't find this in the period that is generally recognized as the Exodus, certainly not to the extent that is claimed in the Book of Joshua.

What actually happened is a matter of academic debate, but roughly it appears that some cities were taken by force, though far fewer than the book of Joshua would suggest. It appears that other areas were moved into gradually. It also appears that these areas were characterized by assimilation, meaning that the people intermarried to some extent, adopted some of the religion of the pagans to some extent, carried on commerce, probably pretty much like the West Bank today.

Let us remember that the Book of Joshua is not a straight historical reporting of what happened. This book was written several hundred years after the fact. Some pious scribe is remembering what God said to Joshua and what Joshua did with that information.

Why would they remember it like this? Again, this is the subject of learned scholarship. But I like Jack Miles' explanation. Professor Miles says that the Book of Joshua is what the Israelites, several centuries later, wished they had done way back when but they never did. They wished that they had just completely conquered the land. They wished they had been completely genuine spiritually and militarily. Why?

This is important. Because there is a streak, particularly among very religious people, that wishes the world were more black and white than it is. It is very tiring to live in the midst of ambiguity. It is tiring to lead a compromised people, and here I sadly speak from bitter experience.

This crowd would like to go back to an earlier era when things were less complicated, back to a time when people had substantial values, back to a time when things weren't so complicated -back before we had terrorism, back before we had commies, back to a time when gays were in the closet and women were in the kitchen, back, back, back already. I understand this impulse entirely.

And the book of Joshua is helpful to us in this way. It is a reminder that you know what, things weren't so great back then, they were just different. Anyway, we can't go back and we can't get out of the ambiguity and compromise that we have to slog through. As I like to say to my family when they call and ask me what I am going to do next week. If I'm tired, I'll say, "I'm going to pick up the broken pieces of my life and find a way to go on." That is our ambiguous life.

No, religiously speaking, it is much easier, much simpler, if evil is just out there with them and if I am just righteous here. Then we have one ethic for us, another for them. And all three of our traditions are rife with people who have thought just like that.

For centuries, we Christians had one standard for ourselves, quite another for Jews who had rejected Christ, worse who killed the Messiah. Pogroms were never sanctioned by the Church but we didn't do a whole lot to discourage them either. The Inquisition, the Conquistadors in the New World, the 30 years wars where Orthodox Christians were killing the Unorthodox Christians, we have many, many examples of substantial violence that we did not stop because it was inflicted upon 'Them'.

Jews have a quite similar problem as anyone knows who has lived in Crown Heights or read a poignant novel like Chaim Potok's reflections on his own life in 'The Chosen'. There is one life inside the Orthdox community, another ethic altogether for the Goyim. And if you've seen any of those settlers in the West Bank or Gaza interviewed about their spiritual beliefs and how they understand their Palestinian neighbors, you know exactly what I mean. Bill Moyers asked one of them if the Palestinians deserved a homeland. He answered, 'They already have one… It's called Jordan.' There you go. Much simpler. We are here, they are over there… Much more clear cut.

In Islam, there are those that submit to the will of God, Muslims, and there are those who do not, the dhimmis. At best, these people are second class citizens in Muslim countries -- excluded from public office, from the military, subject to special taxation, not able to marry Muslim women, though Muslim men may marry their women (don't ask me about that one). To a certain extent, the 'people of the book' -- Christians and Jews -- are given a little more leeway, but they cannot propagate their religion, build churches as high as mosques. As anyone knows who has lived in Saudi Arabia, you cannot have a bible and you are effectively segregated into the European ghetto with very limited legal rights.

As you know, this whole division of the world is being exploited by the jihadists around the world giving them wide latitude to terror bomb innocents with impunity… why? Because it is not 'us' it is 'them'… Even if they are Muslims, they are not our kind of Muslims. In each of these traditions, we have plenty of examples that the word 'religious' (as in More Religious) is coming to mean not only means more committed to the Orthodox cause, it also means 'less able to live in a world of compromise and ambiguity.'

Each of our traditions needs to recover the resources within our own tradition that mitigate this sense of us versus them, a certain humility that we all stand before the Almighty in need of redemption.

In our Christian tradition, we retell the story every year about how Jesus stood with authentic integrity, endured unjust suffering and torture, while all of the disciples, having pledged to be there with him, fall away one after the other after the other. All of us fall away. And it is the risen Christ that breathes the blessing of the Spirit on them and turns them from frightened, dispirited loneliness to this great force full of mission, hope, and promise. As a friend of mine once said, 'it is the greatest story of redemption ever told.' And there is a power in mercy, forgiveness, reorientation.

In the movie 'The Mission', Robert De Niro plays the role of a Slave trader in South America 250 years ago. He would snare the native tribes in nets and sell them. He would catch them in traps, just like you would catch an animal, chain them up, haul them away and sell them. He was a tough guy, a bad guy, and very successful and very rich.

Same way in his personal life. He and his brother are courting the same woman. Where he usually wins, this time he loses. She tells him that she doesn't love him the way she loves his brother. He does a slow burn and one day he sees them kissing, goes ballistic. His brother comes running after him to make amends, but he starts a fight, and in a rash moment, stabs his brother and kills him. Huge mistake. Cannot rewind the tape.

Now, there is no real justice system but he is eaten up with guilt and remorse, decides to just stop eating and die. He goes to a monastery and this is what he does, no one can dissuade him.

One day, a missionary priest comes to see him, from the tribe up above the falls that works with the people he used to capture and sell into slavery. The priest says to him, 'there is another way if you are courageous enough to do penance.' Reluctantly, he agrees, and he makes his own penance. He collects all of his old armor for battle and that of the guys that worked for him, bundles it in rope and starts carrying it back to the tribe. Through the jungle they go, him hauling this huge bundle behind him, across rivers, up one hill after another for days. Finally, one day they get near the tribe and they are looking up, straight up at this enormous falls. All of the other missionaries want to help him, they want this to be over, but he carries this bundle straight up the cliff. He keeps falling, dropping the bundle back down the hill, going back down, collecting it together again, and up and up and up this several hundred foot cliff.

All the while the tribe is watching this from above. Hour after hour. All the missionaries get to the top and greet the leaders of the tribe and a long time later, this guy appears on the top of the fall with this bundle still hanging over the cliff. He is struggling to hold it and not fall over the edge. The chief sends one of his lead warriors over to him with a knife. The warrior puts the knife to his throat and goes 'raaah' in anger in his face.

There is this long silence. No one moves. The warrior looks him dead in the eye for a long time. He is perfectly still in submission. The warrior cuts the rope and this huge bundle falls hundreds of feet into the mists of the waterfall. Whoosh!

Forgiveness, real forgiveness, is more powerful than violence. Redemption and reconciliation, the real thing, are about as profound a spiritual reality as we are given to live.

And that opens a new chapter in his life. Tough guy, not an intellectual, so the priest gives him one thing to meditate on every day. It is from St. Paul. "If I speak in the tongues of Angels but have not love, I am just a noisy gong. If I have all powers and understand all mysteries, if I have all knowledge and all faith, and have not love I am nothing. If I give away all that I have but have not love, I've gained nothing.

"Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice when others falter, but rejoices in even small good things. Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

"Love never ends. Prophecies will end; knowledge will pass away. What we know right now is imperfect. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned childishly; but now that I am a man, I put away childishness. Now, we understand only in part but when we come face to face with God, we shall see clearly, even as God perfectly sees us. So faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love."

This is the higher way, we must all recover in each of our traditions and make this our way of being. We would all do well to meditate on that each day. Why don't you try it this week? Amen.