Many of us have felt rather smug over
the past fewweeks, as our television screens have shown photos of U.S.
troops with broad grins on their faces subjecting Iraqi prisoners to
various forms of degrading treatment. Progressively, more and more
admissions of torture and brutality have leaked from the Pentagon and
the White House, with allegations of Presidential approval of such
policies. Maybe a few of those tortured were involved in
terrorist gangs, but the only crime of 70-80% was that they had
difficulty in speaking English in a way that was comprehensible to
someone from the backwoods of Kentucky! How right Canada was not
to join in the war against Iraq! And how much better discipline
there is in our Canadian Armed Forces. But let us remember that
this problem is not unique to the United States. Equally horrific
stories have emerged from the prisons of Apartheid South Africa and
from British prison camps in Northern Ireland. It is not many
years since the Canadian airborne regiment was disbanded because it had
committed similar atrocities in Somalia. CSIS has recently
admitted it accepts in evidence statements obtained from countries that
practice torture. And here in BC we have the prisoners of police
beaten in the bushes of Stanley Park or dragged to die in the back
alleys of Vancouver One has only to read a few of the documents
circulated by Amnesty International to realize that almost no country
can claim an unsullied record. And the abuse of prisoners is not
confined to our current generation. When describing the
Babylonian captivity, Zechariah tells us about prisoners who were
jailed in waterless wells (Zechariah 9 11). Have you ever been
out on a summer bike ride on a day when your water supply became
exhausted? And can you imagine yourself enduring the blazing heat
of the Iraqi desert for days on end, confined to a waterless well?
Is the maltreatment of prisoners
something we could avoid by elaborating and enforcing more rigidly the
rules of the International Red Cross and the Red Crescent? In his
book “Beyond Good and Evil”, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietsche,
himself an advocate of Rumsfeldt-like warrior-aristocrats or
Übermenschen, noted:
He who fights
monsters must ensure that in the process he does not become a
monster. And when you stare into the abyss,
the abyss also stares into you”
And if we look at Paul’s letter to the
church in Rome, we find a resounding “No” to the value of law in
preventing evil. Paul points to the real problem- human weakness
and sin. In the United Church, we tend to avoid sermons on
sin. But most of us have occasionally visited churches where all
of our human problems are traced to the wickedness of Adam and Eve; we
are seen as wallowing in wretchedness and sin, and the pastor commits
the whole congregation to the fires of hell, unless they repent and
receive the salvation that comes from the shed blood of Jesus, the lamb
that takes away the sins of the world. Our Epistle reading today
offers heady material for any such pulpit-pounding preacher.
This is not my scene, and I don’t
think it is yours. Nevertheless, it is instructive to follow
Paul’s reasoning. In his case, he is thinking about the teachings
of Moses and subsequent generations of Scribes and Pharisees. He
sees the rule of law as a good thing in itself. But as Paul
testifies, and prison camps around the world show, laws do not seem to
prevent people from sinning (Rom. 2 21-27). In Paul’s day, the
scribes continued to spend much of their time fleshing out details of
behaviour that they considered as sinful; but they also worked hard at
finding ways around laws that interfered with the business of daily
living. And that hasn’t changed too much! How many
White House lawyers today spend their time finding ways around the
rules of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, rather than
using such rules as tools to encourage and maintain ethical
behaviour? Paul suggests that laws sometimes make people
sin. He goes back to the Ten Commandments, citing the Jewish law
against covetousness. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife,
his house, his servants, his building lot or his property (Deut. 5
21). But just thinking about the good fortune of your neighbour
may be enough to set your mouth watering, and bring on a severe attack
of covetousness. Why can’t I have a perfect spouse, servants who
rush to fill my very need, a large home with a beautiful view over the
estuary, a shiny new BMW in the drive and a large balance in my bank
account? As Paul studied the Jewish lawbooks and their
interpretation, he realised he was often doing something very wrong,
but this knowledge did not give him the strength to avoid doing it:
“For the good that I would do, I do not, but the evil which I would
not, that I do.” (Rom. 7 19). He saw it as the old problem faced
by Adam. He knew he shouldn’t eat the apple, but it looked pretty
good, particularly when Eve was holding it with that “come hither” look
in her eyes.
Intellectually, Paul knew just what he
ought to do. Like other scholars of his time, he recognized the
human duality of body and soul. He was a rational animal, with
one foot in the higher world of the mind, but the other in the lower
world of the senses. “I see another law in my members,
warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to
the law of sin which is in my members” (Rom. 7 23). All of us
have experienced this same feeling. Without getting too bogged
down in discussions of original sin, we might well say, “The devil made
me do it.”
My younger daughter’s dog is normally
a very gentle and friendly creature. But he has a big time
aversion to small boys on skate-boards. I can reason with him,
reward him or punish him, but if a boy on a skate board hoves into
sight, Rusty just goes beserk. He knows afterwards that he has
been a bad dog, but somehow he just can’t help himself. For good
or for ill, we all have inherited an animal element to our
nature. We may not chase boys on skate boards, but we do have
very strong biological urges to feed ourselves, to guard our territory,
to seek other forms of security, and to propagate our race.
And too often, these urges become uncontrollable, as we seek to fulfill
them at the expense of our neighbours, even when rational analysis
tells us that what we are doing is morally wrong.
What solutions can we propose for this
dilemma? One remedy with Rusty is to keep away from
skateboards. And when Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, he
had a similar suggestion: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good
report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
these things. (Phil. 4 8). If we were to follow this advice, we
would succumb much less often to our sinful nature.
Another important step is to clarify
and simplify the rulebook. Ignorance may be no excuse in the eyes
of the law, but in Paul’s time, the Jewish laws had become so
complicated that the only way to avoid sinning was to get a Ph.D. from
law school. Christ warned the Pharisees: “Woe unto
you, lawyers! For ye have taken away the key of knowledge.” (Luke
11 52). When one of the lawyers tried to trick him by asking him
to rank the laws in order of importance, Jesus boiled it all down to
two simple requirements “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and
with all thy mind and with all thy strength,” and Love thy neighbour as
thyself.” (Mark 12 30-31). Churches often have difficulty
with this simple injunction. They like to focus on details of
behaviour and lifestyle. In our gospel reading, Christ likened
his public to idle gossipers in the market place: John came wearing
just some simple camel skin; he neither ate nor drank, and they said he
must be some sort of a weirdo: “He hath a devil” . Then Son of
Man appeared, eating and drinking, and they said Look at this chap-
he’s gluttonous and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners-
he’s just some sort of a party animal.” (Matt. 11 18-19). How
easy it was for people to make disparaging judgments on the personal
lifestyle of others, rather than focus on the messages that John and
Jesus were bringing, and their radical implications for the lives of
the critics.
The reference to winebibbers strikes a
resonant chord for me. When I was a boy, we used to attend a
Wesleyan Methodist church in North Wales. I heard many long
sermons preached against the sinfulness of having a glass of beer after
a game of golf, while each night Bomber Harris was winning great
applause as he directed the killing of thousands of innocent women and
children by the saturation fire bombing of crowded cities such as
Dresden. More recently, most churches seem to have pushed
winebibbing onto the back burner, but there are still plenty of places
where you can hear violent diatribes against the wickedness of a
homosexual lifestyle. Organized religion is a tad more reluctant
to speak out about sins that should be higher in our rank-ordering-
situations where we are manifestly failing to love our neighbour as
ourselves. It is easy to cite some specific global examples: the
billionaires who wallow in luxury in Russia, the U.S. or Canada while
millions of their fellow-citizens live and work below the poverty line;
the international cartels that maintain the price of medications
preventing the shipment of treatments that could cure HIV/AIDS in the
unborn children of developing nations; the trillions of dollars our
world spends on armaments in the face of grinding poverty; the farms
that are converted to golf courses and the butter mountains that
continue to grow and people starve for lack of nourishment. Here
are real, flagrant sins for the organised church to get its teeth
into. And, good neighbours as so many in this congregation
are, I am sure that with a little reflection, we can still think
of ways in which you and I fail to love our neighbours as ourselves.
Having recognised the major sins of
our 21st century, we still face Paul’s problem of how to avoid
committing them. Our reading from Zechariah paints a quick sketch
of the Jewish people after their return from the Babylonian
captivity. They had no real king or leader, and were still a
beleaguered people, at the mercy of a bunch of false teachers.
Some looked for the return of a warrior king. But the writer of
this section of Zechariah points elsewhere. It would be futile to
send in 300,000 heavily armed troops to quell the Imans and conquer
some imaginary Axis of Evil. Rather, the search should be for the
gentle Messiah of Palm Sunday, a person “just and having salvation,
lowly and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.
He shall speak peace to the heathen” (Zech. 9 9-10). Not only
would he release prisoners from the physical pit where there was no
water (Zech. 9 11), but in a metaphorical sense he would lift those
imprisoned from the pit of their evil desires and passions.
We have now reached the fifth Sunday
after Pentecost. But still, the message of the gospel is that if
we are to match the actions of our bodies to the wishes of our
spiritual natures, we need whole-hearted penitence and an admission of
our wrong-doing. This alone can turn our lives around, opening
our hearts to the warming, strengthening and enabling action of the
Holy Spirit. Our New Testament tells us how that Spirit
transformed the first bunch of disciples. How Peter, the
braggard, the liar and the weakling became a staunch spokesperson for
Christ, one who was ultimately prepared to die on a cross. And
the good word for today is that Christ can work this same
transformation in us. “Ye are not in the flesh, but in the
spirit, if so be that the spirit of God dwells in you.” (Rom. 8 9).
What will be our recompense? The
Psalm that we read (Psalm 145) might suggest that God gives special
favours to those who are righteous. There are still some churches
that see material prosperity as a direct consequence of Christian
faith. Others promise “Pie in the Sky, by and by”. I
cannot tell you that the Christian life will always be easy. But
you will know the true reward of an inner happiness- “to be spiritually
minded is life and peace.” (Rom 8 6). How many of us today feel
hassled, lacking inner peace and a deep serenity of the
soul. We covet ever more material things, which in a finite
world can only be obtained at the expense of our neighbours. But
whatever riches we accumulate, we cannot buy the peace that we
seek. We are bound, not for some mysterious future hell of
sulphur and brimstone, but for a hell right here in Squamish, a hell of
our own creation, where, Scrooge-like, we will be as “miserable as sin.”
So, let us today commit ourselves to
an earnest search for the gift of the holy spirit, a force that will
strengthen our erring wills and enable us to find the joy and peace
that comes from “Loving the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy mind and with all thy strength,” and “Loving thy neighbour as
thyself.” (Mark 12 30-31).
O God, may your spirit work in our
weakness, until we are filled with your love and empowered to spread
your message of reconciliation and peace. We ask this through
Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the holy spirit be all honour and
praise, now and forever, AMEN.