It is the end of November and we all know what that means: it is time for War.
Yes, every year at this time of year we are reminded that we are supposed to be at war. It is called the War on Christmas and we are apparently all conscripted as foot soldiers.
The first shots of this year’s battle have already been fired. The skirmish was fought over the holiday season cups at Starbucks. A few Christians took offence because the plain red and green cups being filled by the iconic café this year don’t have any explicit Christmasy words or symbols on them. But we all recognize that that is only the beginning and there will be many more fights to come. What will be next? Will we have to take offence at someone who says Happy Holidays? Will we need to be appalled by a lack of mangers in public squares? Where will it end?
I’ve got to say that in this particular war, I am pretty much ready to declare myself a conscientious objector. I’m not sure I want to fight it anymore – at least, not if it is a battle between the Christian idea of Christmas and our secular society’s idea of Christmas.
The fact of the matter is that I love both Christmases. I love the church’s Christmas with our focus of the story of the birth of the messiah, the candles, the sacred carols and prayers for peace on earth and good will to all. But I also love the secular Christmas that surrounds us with its lights and colourful decorations, the Christmas songs and the hustle and bustle of the malls. I will admit that I do get very tired of the materialism that seems evident everywhere you look, but I am not entirely certain whether the extreme consumerism belongs to the sacred or secular side of Christmas. After all, so many of the battles seem to be fought over what greetings are given to shoppers in stores.
I also happen to love the fact that I live in a multicultural society where people celebrate both Christmas and other religious and cultural festivals at this time of the year. There is a wonderful richness amid such diversity.
And so I really don’t want to think about what happens at this time of year as a war. I’d like to call for an armistice from our point of view at least.
And so this is what I’m going to do. Rather than going to the Bible first, this year I’m going to start my Advent sermons with the sacred texts of the secular Christmas. When I was growing up, there were four canonical Christmas stories that we had to hear every year. They were: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch stole Christmas. When I was growing up at least, Christmas just wasn’t Christmas unless you gathered together with your family and tuned your television to the CBC for every single one of these classic stories. So I am going to explore the meaning behind these classic stories.
This is not something that I would normally do. I have not been trained to seek inspiration in the secular stories of society but exclusively in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. I have long found that they are all I need. But somehow I am not too worried. Yes, there are perhaps some stories that are told by the world around us that we need to be wary of – that might lead us down a wrong path. But my sense is that we may just discover that, even if the people who wrote these great Christmas stories set out to be completely secular and to avoid all mention of the gospel Christmas story, there is something that would not allow them to stray too far from the ultimate Christmas message. My expectation is that there is a lot of truth—gospel truth—in these stories and I am going to find that they lead me back to Bible before I’m done.
And, perhaps by finding the gospel truth in these secular Christmas stories, we might find a way to bring peace between warring factions at this most blessed time of the year.
oday we come to the end of what I think is the longest series of sermons that I have ever preached. Since the beginning of September we have been looking at what I call the Script Out passages of the Bible – passages that we love to hate and often wish weren’t there in the Bible at all. I’m going to confess that I am kind of glad to bring this series to a close on this, the last Sunday in the church year. It can be a little bit difficult to spend all that time focusing on Bible passages that you don’t really like. Next week, the first week in Advent, I am going to be very happy to turn to some more traditional themes of the Christian gospel.
But I hope that you have picked up that, even if it is hard, I do think this kind of work is important. If we are people who believe in the Bible and take this book seriously, we have to be willing to invest the energy to struggle with those parts of the book that may make us feel uncomfortable or that we just plain don’t like. You cannot pick and choose which passages to follow.
But even more important than that, I think that we need a better general understanding of how we can approach this book that we say is so important to us. One of the reasons why I felt I had to tackle the Script Out passages of the Bible was because I was hoping to develop some basic principles that we could use to apply whenever we come across passages that challenge us or give us trouble because this
is just something that is going to keep happening and we may even find that, as times goes by, there will be more passages that we stumble over for various reasons.
A perfect example is a request that comes to us this year from the highest governing body of our denomination: the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The General Assembly has asked the congregations and sessions of our church to discuss and get back to them on a somewhat thorny social issue of our time. They want us to talk about how we include (or perhaps fail to include) LGBT people in the church. Just to be clear, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. So it is simply a reference to a group of people who for various reasons, don’t quite fit into what might be called the traditional approach to how to live out sexuality.
This has been a discussion that I and many people have resisted not because it is unimportant but because it seems likely to be divisive. No matter what answers we come up with, we will almost certainly not all agree. And if we tend to avoid the discussion, we are also going to avoid the passages in the Bible that have anything to say on the subject.
But the reality is that, if we are going to be Christians who take the Bible seriously, we have to grapple with what the Bible says even if the discussion is uncomfortable. There are only a few passages that speak directly to these questions and I want to look at how we are going to approach them. I don’t mean to do this in order to tell you how you need to understand these passages or what you ought to think about the question in general. I just want to offer you some helpful approaches to keep in mind.
But before we look at any particular passages, I want to start with some basic Biblical assumptions. You have heard the argument made (seriously by some, ridiculed by others) that the Bible does not support same-sex marriage because, and I quote, “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” There is actually a valid point in that, at least when you understand what it is saying, and we need to take it seriously.
What it is saying is that there is a certain assumption about what is normal or common in human relationships and specifically about the relationship between men and women in the Bible. This isn’t just something that we see in the creation story but an assumption that runs through much of Scripture, that the male/female relationship in marriage is normative and that it is the kind of relationship, from the perspective of Biblical society, that everyone is simply expected to engage in. And of course that was true. Everyone in Biblical times was expected to participate in so-called traditional marriage.
Of course, what they called traditional marriage (as we saw a couple of weeks ago) was a little bit different from what we are used to. It included things like arranged marriages that had nothing to do with love, polygamy, female slavery and concubinage, rape victims who were forced to marry their rapists and all kinds of other things that we would never find acceptable. But there was an expectation that, one way or another, everyone would fit into the basic male/female marriage relationship somewhere and that was really whether they wanted to or not and whether they desired that kind of relationship or not.
So it is true that the Bible takes male/female marriage relationships for granted and, indeed, as the basic foundation of society. And I see absolutely no problem with that. Even today, such relationships represent the norm in the sense that it is the kind of relationship that the majority of people will fit into in one way or another. What’s more, such relationships are very good and even foundational to society as a whole.
But just because the Bible only sees one kind of relationship and calls that relationship good, that doesn’t mean that it is the only kind of relationship possible or the only one that can be good. I mean, just because the Bible assumes that everyone wears tunics and sandals doesn’t mean that such a mode of dress is the only one that anyone should wear today. Sandals and tunics being good doesn’t mean that a suit and tie is necessarily bad.
One of the principles that we discovered during our discussions over the last few weeks had to do with something called proof texts. Proof texts are short Biblical texts that clearly lay out some Biblical policy. We saw, for example, that there are a few verses that, in former times, were regularly used to defend the practice of slavery. But the fact that there were a few verses in the Bible that clearly declared that slavery was an acceptable practice did not stop many Christians from using the Bible to argue against it. They discovered that, despite those few proof texts and despite the fact that the Bible took the institution of slavery for granted throughout the whole text, the overwhelming narrative of the Bible was about a God who was committed to bringing his people freedom from slavery and all oppression and that that story was more important than a few proof texts.
Does that principle apply to the discussion of the place of LGBT people within the church? It is true that there are a few verses that are clear proof texts against homosexuality – six verses by most people’s count. Their meaning is not really open to a great deal of interpretation though we can look at them. Does the existence of those proof texts (assuming we are correctly understanding them) mean that any sort of conversation about how to include LGBT people is already over – that there’s nothing more to say?
Well, I would say, given where we stand on slavery, we cannot possibly say that. We can never say that a proof text is the end of a conversation. Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of what the overall narrative of the scriptures is. Is it one of including outsiders or is it one of judgment of people who don’t fit in. That is another discussion and one that you need to decide on for yourself as you read the Bible.
Now, turning to those so-called proof texts, the clearest one is found in Leviticus chapter 20: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” It is, like many proof texts, a passage that doesn’t seem to leave much room for interpretation and many would point to it as the clearest Biblical rejection of LGBT people.
But here again, another of our Script Out principles does apply. Way back when we started this series and looked at the Biblical prohibition against people getting tattoos, we noted that that law really doesn’t apply to today because it was part of a particular law code that was intended to set the people of Israel apart from their neighbours by forcing them to have a distinct culture.
And when we looked at that ancient law against tattooing, I made this note: “We have to be consistent. If we don’t worry about one verse that we don’t like for a good reason, but then find another verse that we maybe do like that has a lot in common from the verse we rejected, be can’t just choose to dump one and keep the other. We have to think it all through critically.”
The law against tattooing and the law against men lying with men are only one chapter apart in the Book of Leviticus. The two laws have a great deal in common and seem to have the intention of setting the people of Israel apart from their neighbours culturally. The tattooing law seems to reject the funerary practice of the Israelite’s neighbours and the law against men lying with men is likely rejecting the cultic prostitution practices of their neighbours but neither one is really reacting to cultural practices that are part of the world today. This leaves the question of whether either one really applies today at all open.
There are only a few passages in the New Testament that touch on the question at hand. There is nothing at all in the Gospels. Jesus himself never said anything on the subject, possibly because the issue just never came up for him. At the very least, this seems to indicate that the matter wasn’t really a big concern for him. We have said before, in connection with some of the other Script Out passages, that Christian doctrine teaches us that God’s ultimate revelation of Godself to the world is not in a book like the Bible but is to be found in the living person of Jesus the Christ. Jesus’ lack of attention to this issue may be an indication of where it lies on God’s priorities. Something to keep in mind.
The issue does come up in the letters of the New Testament: in Romans, in 1 Corinthians, in 1 Timothy and in Jude. We don’t have the time to go through those passages one by one now. People have certainly differed down through the centuries over exactly what they mean. And I am not going to tell you what you ought to do with them. You are smart people. You have seen some of the various principles that I have been talking about that help us to deal with those parts of the Bible that we don’t like or that we often avoid. I would like you to encourage you to apply them for yourself. We will also offer an opportunity in the New Year to study these passages and the larger issues in discussion.
But I want to be clear here – I’m not trying to tell you what you should think of these passages. I’m trusting you to come to your own conclusions and understandings. I do expect that, though we will agree on some things, we will not agree about it all. But I think that is okay. In the history of the church it has happened too often that a majority (or sometimes a powerful minority) have imposed their thinking or their Biblical interpretations on everyone else. It is past time for that to stop.
I don’t know exactly where this whole discussion will lead us in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. My hope and prayer, though, is that we find a way to create an environment where everyone feels the freedom to act according to their understanding and convictions and where we can respect the understandings and convictions of each other.
In the Second Letter to Timothy, we are told that “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” If we really believe that – that all scripture (both the parts that we like and the parts that we don’t like) are given to us by God for our good, we will not be afraid to struggle with the scriptures, to question them and find some way to embrace them. What is at stake in these discussions and in other difficult discussions that may come is that we are a people who take all scriptures as a gift of God – sometimes especially the parts that we struggle with.
Passages referred to in the sermon: Leviticus 18:22, 29; 20:13 Romans 1:26-27 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:10; Jude 7.
Script Out principles:
Be consistent. You can’t just pick and choose which verses you like. Apply the same critical thinking to them all.
Pay attention to what is actually being said.
God never intended for us to turn our minds off and just take our moral truths from proof texts. You must never take your eyes off of the overall narrative of scripture.
God knew that the Bible would always be limited by the humans who transmitted it. So God chose to reveal himself in a way that could not be corrupted by human transmission. God revealed himself in a person: in Jesus the Christ. The living revelation of God in Christ always comes first.
Is this God’s final word on this subject or does the Bible have more to say elsewhere?
Understand the intentions of the people who first used this story.
On Thursday, December 3rd our Hope Clothing Coordinator would like to hand out care packages to all of the men & women clients of Hope Clothing and the Cambridge Self Help Foodbank. Won't you please help us? Pictured below is a sample of what will be contained in a woman's pack. If you could contribute one of these bags (and perhaps a toonie to help with the cost of the nice bags) it would be very much appreciated. You may drop off these bags at Hope Clothing or to the office weekdays, 9:00 am - 3:00 pm or on Sunday mornings Thank you for helping make Christmas a little easier for those in our community who need a llittle extra help.
This song, adapted from the Beatles' classic, was performed this past Sunday by Corey Cotter Linforth. Thank you to Corey for sharing your passion for a better world with us:
I heard the news today, oh boy About a city torn apart again And though the news was rather sad Well I just had to laugh I've heard this song before
They shot them inside Bataclan They didn't notice that the times have changed A crowd of people opened doors Faces never seen before Everybody is so sure that we should go to war
I read the news today, oh boy Beirut reeling from the acts of war A crowd of people turned away It didn't stir our hearts They don't look like us They'd love to make us see
Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head Found my way downstairs and drank a cup And looking up, I noticed I was late Found my coat and grabbed my hat, made the bus in seconds flat Found my way upstairs to get some air Somebody spoke and I couldn't breath
Ahhh....
I saw the news today, oh boy A child face down in the sand And though he was so very small We have to count them all Now we know we don't have enough to share “We'd love to take you in, but...”
On Sunday our Sunday School classes prepared some table decorations for the Senior's Tea on November 22nd, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm, at St. Luke's (in the auditorium).
And sometimes we just get silly! Sorry we are missing one person.
We would like to say a very BIG thank you to the Cambridge & North Dumfries Community Fund
& the D. H. Falle Family Foundation Fund
for supporting Hope Clothing!
Community support for Hope Clothing is very much appreciated and enables us to continue to reach out to members of our community who need some extra help making their budget stretch. We provide clothing for the entire family.
n late August, 2005, as we all remember, a powerful hurricane named Katrina made landfall on the southern coast of Louisiana. Katrina did a whole lot of damage, but no place was hit harder than the City of New Orleans. Many who surveyed the damage at the time gave the opinion that a great American city had simply been wiped off of the map. It was positively apocalyptic.
As always happens in the face of that kind of tragedy, there was a great deal of soul searching and people asking why. Why did this happen? And there were lots of answers that were offered. Climate change and weather, the failure of the levees was blamed on the army corps of engineers, the failings of disaster assistance were blamed on the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But by far the clearest answer to the whyquestion was given by a Christian evangelist by the name of John Hagee. Hagee declared that the cause of the disaster was obvious. It was God’s judgement. In particular, he stated, it had happened because some sort of Gay Pride parade had been planned in the French Quarter of the city. The hurricane had been sent by God to stop it.
And what was the proof that Hagee offered for his explanation. He pointed to an announcement of such a parade that apparently was not really known to anybody else and appeared in no major newspapers. And he pointed to the Book of Genesis and the story of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. That, as far as he was concerned, was proof enough.
Lots of people disagreed with him, of course. But everyone knew exactly what he was talking about. It has long been taken for granted by many that the meaning of that story is perfectly clear and that the Bible clearly says that God destroyed those two cities on purpose and that he did it specifically because of homosexuality. Because of that association, the story has become a rather uncomfortable story for many of us which means that we tend to ignore it and not think about it too mu
ch and that is not a good thing. It is a powerful and deeply meaningful story and it is a shame to lose that power and leave it in the hands of those who would use it to advance their own agendas.
It is a story about consequences and it is important to talk about the consequences of our actions and choices. But in the hands of people like Hagee, only a small minority of people is singled out for blame – only they have to be responsible for their actions. Is that how the Bible really intended for us to read this story?
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is mentioned often in the Scriptures and is generally held up in the Bible as an example of the kind of consequences we may have to deal with if we make bad choices. As such, the story is applied to many different situations. One excellent example is a passage in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. The prophet is criticizing the city of Jerusalem and does so by saying that it is like a sister to the doomed city of Sodom. “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom:” he says, “she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.” (Ezekiel 16:49-50)
So clearly, as far as Ezekiel was concerned, Sodom’s problems were about how food was shared and about the growing gaps between the rich and the poor. And it was also clear to him that Sodom’s problems were not unique to Sodom and certainly not to some sort of minority in the city that they tolerated. He is warning the people of Jerusalem that they are like Sodom. That suggests to me that any interpretation of this story that limits its application to other people, to people not like us, is just not going to be good enough.
The only real indication of what was wrong in Sodom that is given in the Book of Genesis is the way that the city treats a couple of angelic visitors. They arrive as strangers in the city and seem to be fully intent on spending the night sleeping in the town square. But one citizen, a man named Lot, doesn’t want them to do that and insists that they come to his house to stay instead.
In ancient Mediterranean society, it was generally believed that, if a stranger appeared at your door or in your village, you had a moral obligation to offer them a place to stay. It was a divineobligation and there were many stories told in many different religions about people who welcomed strangers and discovered, to their surprise, that they were actually hosting gods or other heavenly beings. There are stories like that in the Bible too and this story of Lot and the angels is one such story (though this one certainly has a less happy ending than some of the others).
So Lot takes the strangers home as his guests. As their host he owes them certain things under the hospitality laws of that time and place. Above all he owes them protection and security – he must protect them with his own life if necessary. This part quickly becomes very important because the men of the town soon hear of the strangers among them and gather to attack them.
The threat that these men pose to the strangers is the source of the connection that has historically been made between this story and things like gay pride parades. The men of Sodom come to Lot’s door and say, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.”
That doesn’t sound too bad. “We just want to get to know them.” But you need to realize that that verb, to know, had a very particular meaning in ancient Hebrew. It meant to know someone reallyintimately. It was, in fact, a term that was commonly used for sexual relations.
So, no, when these men ask to “know” the guests in Lot’s house, it is no idle or innocent request. They are seeking to rape them. Because they are men and the angels they want to rape are male, that is where the whole association with homosexuality came from. But you do need to understand that the kind of rape that is threatened in this passage doesn’t actually have anything to do with sexual desire.
We have come to understand that rape in general is not a crime of sexual desire but rather a crime of power, violence and domination. Not everyone realizes this, but men usually do not rape women because they are driven mad with sexual desire but rather because they want to impose dominance or power over them. So really, any discussion about rape is quite separate from any discussion about consensual sex.
But this story is not even just about common rape. When a large group of people overpower a few weaker victims (either of the same sex or the opposite sex), that is called gang rape. And gang rape is and has long been a terrible feature of life in this world. It is particularly common in times of war and, as such, it has been extensively studied by historians and sociologists. They conclude that this kind of rape, in particular, is primarily a tactic – and sometimes a conscious military tactic – of domination, intimidation, dehumanization and control. It very clearly doesn’t have anything to do with sexual desire and those who participate in it do so entirely without reference to their own sexual orientation.
And I think that is quite clearly what these men of Sodom are doing – they are seeking to dominate these strangers who have come to Lot’s house. They are, of course, quite despicable, abominable and immoral to seek to do this and deserve all sorts of condemnation for it (as do all rapists and gang rapists).
But their intended actions in this story do not tell us anything about what we would refer to today as their “sexual orientation.” Indeed, the concept of sexual orientation is a very modern one that would not have made any sense to ancient people. And while you could very well use this story to criticize people for engaging in rape or gang rape, this story doesn’t really have anything at all to say (either positive or negative) about adults who engage consensually in sex.
That is why I say that people who use this passage to lay the blame for Katrina or for any other disaster or misfortune at the feet of people because of their orientation or because of anything they engage in consensually are totally misusing the passage. In fact, to use this passage to challenge anyone but ourselves as readers of this passage is a very unbiblical reading. The prophet Ezekiel used the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to challenge the Jews of his own time to think about how the people of Jerusalem, his own people, failed to take care of the weakest and poorest people among them – that is how the Bible teaches us to use this passage.
I also find the ways that Jesus used the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to be rather informative. I went looking through the gospels and was kind of surprised at how often Jesus did bring the story up. But, as often as he brought it up, it was never about singling out some group who were different from his own group. It was always about what was wrong with the entire generation.
The passage that we read from the Gospel of Matthew this morning is a great example. It comes as Jesus is sending his disciples out to the various towns and villages of Galilee and he has been careful to send them out in pretty much the same condition as the two angels arrived in Sodom, as poor beggars who arrive with nothing – no gold, or silver, or copper, no bag, or change of clothes, or sandals, or staff.
He is sending them out to share the good news and to bring healing and hope to the people, but he is also sending them out as a test of the whole generation. As they arrive, poor strangers in these Galilean towns, how they are received will reveal the true nature of the generation. If they are received as honoured guests according to the laws of hospitality that is a sign that the kingdom of God has indeed drawn near. If however they are received without hospitality, it will be a sign that this generation has reentered the evil age of Sodom: “it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.”
That is how we need to be using this story. It is meant to help us look at the society of which we are part. In particular, it is supposed to help us look critically at how we personally contribute to how our society treats outsiders, people who don’t fit into our neat little notions of what is acceptable and not acceptable. And it is especially about how we treat the poor and the strangers.
It is a shame that, because this particular story of Sodom and Gomorrah makes us feel uncomfortable, that we have been unwilling to give it our attention. By failing to deal with the story we have essentially left it to those who are only too happy to use it to advance their own agenda and attack whichever particular groups they have wanted to.
In the extreme case, this is the kind of thinking that makes religious terrorists (such as those who claim responsibility for Friday’s attacks in Paris) feel that they are justified – that they are God’s hand of judgement against the immorality of a city or a nation. The whole world sees today the disgusting place such thinking leads us to.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not about whatever annoys us about other people. It is about what we need to do to welcome and give a place to those who we may struggle with because they are different from us. If this story isn’t doing that for you, you might just be reading it wrong.
bout our Psalm reading this morning, I just wanted to let you know that I saw your reaction. In fact, we actually read this same Psalm in the same way a few weeks ago. I chose to have us read it responsively even though, at the time, I was not intending to preach on it as a part of my Script Out series. And then we read the closing words of the Psalm together: “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
When we all read that, I saw it. There was this little, “Wait, what?” moment. “Did we just read what I thought we read? How can there be people in the Bible who are congratulating themselves for dashing little Babylonian babies against the rocks? I thought that the Bible was supposed to be a nice book!”
It is an awful couple of verses – the kind of passage makes you wish it were just taken out of the Bible altogether. I mean, I think we can appreciate, in this Psalm, that the Jews were rather mad at the Babylonians. The Babylonians had attacked them. They had destroyed their whole country and reduced the city of Jerusalem and the temple of the Lord within it to so much rubble. The Babylonians had taken the Jews as slaves and captives and removed them from their land and made them live by the rivers of Babylon far from home.
So, yes, they hated the Babylonians and saw them as their enemies and it is hard to blame them for that. I’m sure that we would all understand if they cursed and swore at the Babylonians all they wanted or even if they fought against them if given the chance. But, at the same time, I’m pretty sure that most of us would draw the line at rounding up little Babylonian babies and dashing them against the rocks as a way of getting back at the nation of Babylon for what it had done to them.
So, yes, we squirm when we read it and would just as soon pretend that the verses weren’t there at a
ll. But, I’ll tell you, I think we need those verses in our Bibles and I’m going to tell you why.
Today we are observing Remembrance Sunday. It is a day on which we honour the service of those who went and gave of themselves for the sake of their country in wars, conflicts and peacekeeping missions. We honour those who fought and defended. We honour those wounded in body and in spirit and we especially remember those who gave their very lives in service. This is a worthy thing to do. It does us all good, both as Christians and as Canadians, that we set aside time each year to do this.
It doesn’t mean, of course, that we love war or glorify the violence that comes with war. On the contrary, we also see this time as an opportunity to pray for peace and to support those who work for peace. It’s just that most of us recognize that, as bad as it is, sometimes war cannot be avoided. There is a time to fight. If you look at the case of the Jews and the Babylonians, we can sympathize. We can understand the enmity that the Jews held for the Babylonians and can support the idea that they might have resisted them.
And that is what the greater part of the psalm we read this morning is about: the Jews grieving and mourning for what has been done to them. Their captors, the Babylonians, make fun of them. They mockingly tell him to sing some of their songs of Zion – to sing the songs that used to be sung in the temple that was built on the top of Mount Zion in the city of Jerusalem before the Babylonians destroyed it. They are rubbing it in and it is just plain mean. For the Jews to chafe and complain and even to seek to fight their way out of their situation is at least understandable.
But the whole thing about bashing out baby’s brains crosses a line. That’s not about defending yourself or even about fighting back. That is about hate, pure and simple. It is about treating Babylonians as something other than human beings – as objects that can be bashed against the rocks with impunity.
The reason why I am glad that it is actually there in the Psalm is because it is human. It is a reaction that is natural and all too common in times of war and civil strife. I don’t think that there has ever been a war where people didn’t speak of those that they were fighting against as somewhat less than human. Just think of all the slang terms that have been used for Germans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Iranians, Somalis and the list goes on and on. You can understand why soldiers do it. It is just so much easier to kill an enemy if you don’t think of them as human anymore – if they are just a Hun or a Jap or a Raghead.
So I understand where it comes from, but there is also so much that is wrong with it. When we dehumanize anyone, even an enemy, we are ultimately devaluing our own humanity and that is a big problem. And of course, it becomes even worse when the fortunes of war put us in a position where we can actually act on our belief that our enemies are somewhat less than human. Fortunately, the Ancient Israelites were never put in the position where they could actually dash Babylonian babies against the rocks, but unfortunately Canadians, Americans and others have been in that kind of position. The Canadian Airborne Division found itself in that kind of position in Somalia in 1993 and the result was what we know of as the Somalia Affair, one of the worst chapters in Canadian military history. The Americans found themselves in that position at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war. The results were very disturbing to say the least.
Enemies can be very useful, of course. They have a way of uniting people together and focusing their efforts towards a clear purpose. And of course, if you can persuade the people in general to treat their enemies as somewhat less than human, it allows you to manipulate people in some very scary ways. I don’t know about you, but I have felt like there has been a lot of that going on recently.
Look, for example, at the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. With huge numbers of people on the move through Europe and spilling over into the whole world – people fleeing for their lives – of course there are a number of difficult issues that are arising. There are concerns about the economic impact, about security and about what such a large number of outsiders can do to a society. Of course these concerns are there and there is nothing wrong with being concerned about such things.
But what is a problem is a growing tendency to see the strangers involved in this global disaster as somewhat less than human – to see them as barbarians or terrorists or to focus on the niqab that some women wear. These are all terms that have been freely thrown around in our political discourse and it is worrying to say the least. Some people have been using this kind of language in an attempt to direct the Canadian population in some dangerous directions.
As I say, I think it is important that this kind of dehumanizing attitude is found in the scriptures. It teaches us that, if the Ancient Israelites had to deal with such attitudes, we have to be prepared to as well. But it would not be good if Psalm 137 were the final word on the attitude we should have towards our enemies. Fortunately, it is not.
We get another point of view, ironically enough, from one of the most violent and war-minded books of the Bible: the Book of Joshua. In that book, Joshua, the great commander of the forces that are about to sweep through the land of Canaan and to conquer it for the children of Israel has an amazing encounter. He is out walking through his army’s camp when he comes across a soldier – a man he does not know, standing there fully armed with a drawn sword.
Joshua responds to this, like any of us would, by saying, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?” – “Are you a friend or an enemy.” What he doesn’t realize, however, is that he is not confronting just any soldier but a heavenly warrior – the commander of God’s own army. In fact, the suggestion is, he is in the very presence of God. So this ordinary battlefield question – “friend or foe” – actually turns into the great question that people ask in war: is God on our side. And usually the answer to that question is an unqualified yes, of course God is on our side. We almost have to believe that.
But God has a very different answer for Joshua: “Neither;” he says, “I’m neither on your side nor on the other but as commander of the army of the LordI have now come.” God doesn’t take sides. God certainly doesn’t see your enemies as dehumanized monsters as much as you might like him too. God won’t approve of bashing the little ones against the rocks just because their parents are Babylonians. I wish we could all learn the lesson that Joshua gained that day in his camp.
Jesus took that kind of approach even further. He felt it wasn’t enough to just see your enemy as a fellow human. “You have heard that it was said,” Jesus challenged his followers, “‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” That saying of Jesus is, in its own way, almost as hard for us to hear as that passage from the Psalm about bashing babies against the rocks. In many ways, loving enemies is much more objectionable than is treating them as somehow less than human.
Of course, in this saying, Jesus was acknowledging that we do have enemies – that, in this dark world, there are people who will be out to get us, to destroy our way of life and even all the good that is in the world. He was being utterly realistic and he was speaking to people who knew very well who their enemies were.
But it was out of that very realistic view of the world that Jesus brought the command to love your enemies. He said that you had to love them, not for the sake of those enemies who, realistically probably couldn’t care less about your love for them. He said that you had to love them for your own sake – so that you could be all that you were created to be, so that you could be like God, in fact, who could never hate even those who hate him.
The world is a dark place where there are people who will hate us, threaten us and attack us. That hasn’t changed and that is why we can and must honour the memory of those heroes who put their lives on the line for the sake of all that is good about our country.
But at the same time, we must never forget that God calls us to see more in the world than just that. He calls us to understand that even those who would destroy us are humans made in God’s image. We cannot rob them of their humanity without robbing ourselves of our own. Are we always going to live up to what Jesus calls us to do – will we always be able to love those enemies? I suspect not. But what Jesus asked for must ever be before us. That is our challenge. Whatever we do, however, we must not give into hatred and treating people as less than human. That is a very dangerous path to go down.
