Homily for Easter 6, 2007 [i]
The Very Rev Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
Acts 16:9-15
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 14:23-29We live in a violent world, and I do not think I need to offer examples of recent acts of violence to make my point. The problem is that the media so focus our attention on acts of individual violence and terrorism that we fail to see the matrix of violence in society and civilization. Our failure to see this and our failure to realize that violence begets violence leads us to false assumptions, both about our gestalt, and about possible remedies. To make war as a means to end terrorism makes as much sense as improving life by standing on our heads. The attack which happened this time last week outside the Cathedral happened in the context of a society which does little to assuage poverty and homelessness, little to offer hope and meaning in the lives of those who are born into hopelessness and who have little chance of escaping.
But the corporate and structural violence of society and civilization is not something new in our generation. Civilization, of course, in geological and even biological timeframes frames is quite a recent phenomenon, some six thousand years old. It has always been built on the force, violence and inequality needed to create the wealth to sustain it. 90% of the wealth being controlled by 10% of the people is a fairly static statistic, and always requires structural violence to maintain it.
Religions in general and our Jewish-Christian tradition in particular, have been born and developed in this violent civilization. So it is not surprising that our religious texts contain lots of violence. The Bible is a book of violence, with its wars and revolutions, its seizures of land, and its violent treatment of those who fell outside the norms of its social understanding. Just think of those violent stories beloved in our Sunday schools – David and Goliath or Samson destroying the temple of Dagon and killing thousands. Need I say more?
The question is: Is there anything else in our scripture and tradition, anything which offers an alternative view of society and civilization?
With that question in mind I want to look at our readings of today’s Eucharist. I will deal briefly with the reading from the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel, as I wish to concentrate on that strange book Revelation. But first some further introductory comments.
At the heart of our gospel is an act of violence, the death of Jesus on the Cross. I do not believe in a violent God, and so I cannot subscribe to that theology which sees the death of Jesus as the requirement by God of the death of his son to remove from us the just rewards of our sins, namely our death inflicted on us by God. Rather I see the death of Jesus as the inevitable result of the conflict between a violent civilization and one who challenged the powerful of that society to think differently. The historical life of Jesus was set in a in a particularly violent time. Following the death of Julius Caesar, there had been decades of destructive civil war throughout the Roman Empire. The civil war finally came to an end when Octavian, the adopted son of Julius, defeated or wore out the last of the opposition, and assumed supreme power. He became Augustus, in Greek Sebastos, the one to be worshipped and he inaugurated the Pax Romana. Notice in passing some of the titles and understandings of Augustus found on coins and monuments. He was divine, son of God, born of a virgin, saviour of the world and bringer of peace. They sound familiar, don’t they? The story of Augustus bore the name in Greek texts of euaggellion, or gospel.
The peace which Augustus and his successors brought was a military peace, sustained by the enormous and powerful legions of the Roman army. By means of the roads which the army built across the empire, revolt could be squashed at any time and in any place, and it was. The army needed feeding, and huge farms were required to grow grain. Throughout the empire peasants were dispossessed, and their land taken over. One of those peasants was called Jesus of Nazareth. He taught his followers about a different kind of society and civilization, which he called the Kingdom of God, in which there was radical equality. He acted it out by holding enormous pot-luck suppers, to which all were invited, and especially those who had no place in the society of his time. He bypassed the religious political authorities by offering a way of forgiveness and new life which was outside the religious law and sacrificial system. It seems his message and action offered new life and new hope to the hopeless, and so brought healing. But his teachings and actions so challenged both the Jewish authorities of his homeland, and the representatives of the Empire, that they did what civilization always does with those who challenge it: they killed him.
The Christian scriptures all took their form and were written on the far side of that event and of a profound experience shared by those who had known him, and those to whom they told the story, that Christ was alive. Very quickly he became known as divine, son of God, born of a virgin, saviour of the world and bringer of peace. The story of Jesus bore the name in Greek texts of euaggellion, or gospel. The early Gospel offered precisely a radical alternative to the violence of society and civilization displayed in the Roman Empire.
One aspect of the violence of civilization was the subordination of women, and so it is not surprising that in our first reading we hear Luke telling a story about Paul recruiting Lydia into the Christian community. She was one of the many women who played a role of first importance both on the life of Jesus and in the early church, a role which was quite at variance with normal social expectations.
Next, notice in the gospel how John tells us of the Risen Jesus’ instructions to his followers:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. [ii]
Remember as I said two weeks ago that peace in the Bible means well-being, health, sufficiency and distributive justice in society.
However this voice of peace and of a radically alternative style of civilization is not the only voice we hear in Christian Scripture. As we move from earlier to later writings, we find the role of women being brought into line with society’s expectations. We see more and more concern with accepting the authority of the empire, and the male leadership of church, society and family. When we come to the last book of the Bible, and probably the latest written, we find a text almost replete with violence. The Revelation of St John the Divine is a work which matches the violence of the Roman Empire with the violence of God. God will revenge the violence done to the martyrs of the faith with a destructive violence wrought on the empire, so great that the steams of blood on the earth are waist deep. This is the book from which many fundamentalist Christians today give advice to right wing politicians. But look with me at the passage we read today, almost from the end of the book. The warfare is over. God’s violence has destroyed the iniquity of the world. The new civilization is here, with the 144,000 sealed from the twelve tribes. All others are excluded.
…Nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life. [iii]
But then suddenly the tone changes, and the alternative vision comes back:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. [iv]
All who were accursed, unclean, unwanted are healed. Because of that wholeness, there is nothing accursed.
I want to suggest that aside from the introductory stories of creation, our canonical scriptures are framed by two similar stories. The closing frame we have just seen. The opening frame is the story of Noah and the flood. Like the closing frame it is a story of divine violence. In the Noah story, not just the Romans and the Gentiles are destroyed, but the entirety of civilization is drowned. Violence is answered with violence. Only Noah and his family are allowed to escape. And then as they emerge from the arc, they see the rainbow, the symbol of God’s peace and covenant with the whole of humanity. That, by the way is why the rainbow banner is seen in this Cathedral.
These two themes of creation, peace and inclusion on the one hand, and violence destruction and exclusion on the other, dance together in a pas de deux across the pages of our scriptural story. Perhaps both are needed, for it would be a strange pas de deux in which both dancers danced the same steps. But count me among those who take inspiration for their life and message from the texts which speak of peace, justice, equality and inclusion. And count me among those who object profoundly to being asked to commit the church to one interpretation only of the scriptures, an interpretation which is blind to the diversity and pluralism of the texts themselves.
[i] The inspiration for this sermon comes from the works of John Dominic Crossan and especially from his recent work, God and Empire, Jesus against Rome, Then and Now, HarpurSanFrancisco, 2007
[ii] John 14:27
[iii] Revelation 21:27
[iv] Revelation 22:1-3