It seems to me, painting, as I like to do, in broad brush strokes, that there are two ways to run a church, or, for that matter, a country.
One is the way of power and domination, supported as need be, by force and aggression.
The other is the way of patience, commitment and perseverance, supported by love, compassion and empathy.
The first is so deeply rooted in history and so widely spread in our experience, that we think of it a normal. It seems in fact to be hard-wired into human systems, the result of our evolutionary heritage.
The second is, I believe, the gift of religion, not only of Christianity, but of many religious faiths. The problem is that religions are practiced by human beings, and religious institutions are organized and managed by human beings, so that the hard-wired responses of power, force and aggression, are manifest within religion also.
Let us take a look at our Biblical readings of today.
The story of Solomon takes up the first half of the First Book of Kings. It comes to us in a form much influenced by the work of the final editors, working some three hundred years after the death of Solomon.i It is an idealized picture emphasizing the wisdom of Solomon, the glory of his Temple, the prosperity of the kingdom and the size of the empire. But it suits the theology of the Deuteronomists also to include some of the warts as well.ii We read of the violence by which the attempt by Solomon’s brother, Adonijah, to take the throne was suppressed. We read of the forced labour which was used to construct the magnificent temple. And, of course, we read of Solomon’s predilection for foreign women, and his interest in their fertility cults, which included child-sacrifice. I always like the story of the young student who, answering an exam question on the story of Solomon, wrote that Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred porcupines.iii
From all this we can surmise that, despite his reputation for wisdom and judgment, Solomon was much like absolute rulers at any time in history, heavily dependent on power, domination, force and aggression. And yet, in the story, the alternative vision is held up as an ideal. We may care to note that the Deuteronomists were working not long after the beginning of that phase of the remarkable development of religious vision in the history of humanity, sometimes referred to, following Karl Jaspers, as the axial age.
Some six hundred fifty years later we come to the story of Jesus. Despite some attempts in recent decades to portray Jesus as a violent revolutionaryiv, the dominant picture in the Gospels is of a Jesus as wedded to the way of love and compassion as was Siddartha Gautama 450 years previously. The Gospel of John in particular presents Jesus in this light. John almost totally excludes the phrase “Kingdom of God” so prevalent in the tradition as presented by the other three canonical Gospels.v As well, twice in John’s Gospel, Jesus, by word or action, specifically denies that he is a king.vi It is in this context that I understand the saying of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel
It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.vii
The story of Jesus’ life and death points in the opposite direction to the way of power and domination, force and aggression. Jesus’ story offers us an example of commitment, perseverance, love, compassion and empathy.
The way of power and domination, force and aggression, however, seems, as I have said, to be an inescapable component of the human condition. The writer of the letter to the Ephesians, who is not Paul, and probably more contemporary with John, on the one hand says,
For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.viii
But then he or she (most probably he) goes on to use, as an image of faith, the armored uniform of the Roman legionary, the symbol in that time of the power, force and dominance of the Roman military empire.
A reading of Luke’s work will show us how, while he begins with the mighty one lifting up the lowlyix and the kingdom of God belonging to the destitutex , his story in the Acts of the Apostles shows Paul and the young church enjoying the protection and favor of the authorities of the same Roman Empire. As we continue down the story of Christianity we see time and time again, right down to the present day, how The Church and the Faith have been wedded to power, how the Gospel has been used to validate slavery, oppression, aggression and violence.
In our own time, Christianity is being co-opted to support right wing political agendas, which include denial of full humanity and freedom to women, non-whites, gays and many others. It is being used to validate military action, which is not only unsupportable under the canons of the just war, but is also held by many to violate the norms of the Geneva Convention.
As, I said earlier, however, if the way of love and compassion is shared by many religions, so is the way of power and force upheld by them as well. In a world where we have been brought close together in Marshall McLuhan’s global village, religion is tearing us apart into opposing camps.
I want to suggest that the way of power and domination, supported by force and aggression has brought us to a very perilous time in the history of humanity. We are threatened today not only by its warfare and violence. We face large scale human suffering resulting from its overpopulation, its rape of the world’s renewable and non-renewable resources, and its degradation of the environment of the biosphere, which, in the foreseeable future is the only one we have to support the life of our species.
So I believe it is high time, even if perhaps already too late, to look at and take seriously the alternative way, the way of patience, commitment and perseverance, supported by love, compassion and empathy as a means of living together in the world.
This is the way I hope we have espoused in the life of this Cathedral community, as well as in our sister communities of Grace Church and Le Rédempteur, over the last decade, despite many pressures from the other direction. But I think we have to go further than that, and begin to find ways of offering this alternative way for the life of our society and world. And I become more and more convinced that the way to do this is by seeking out people of other faith commitments and humanity-based commitments, who share this alternative orientation to the future. As we find them, we need to enter into informal conversation and more formal dialogue, and begin to form what I have previously called interfaith, countercultural alternative communities.
We may not be able to turn round centuries of history this year or next, but at least we could begin by offering an alternative way to tearing community apart by religion.
[i] The assumption here is that the framework of I and II Kings is provided by the editorial work Deuteronomic school, closely related in theology to the preaching of Jeremiah, and working just before the exile around 621BCE.
[ii] The Deuteronomists wanted to explain the hard times suffered by the people, culminating in the exile, despite the covenant with God. They do this by blaming it on the wrong doing (especially the cultic wrong doing) of king and people in their history.
[iii] For the correct story see I Kings 11:3
[iv] There is some evidence in the tradition, especially the death of Jesus by crucifixion, which prevents us from entirely ruling out this possibility.
[v] The phrase “kingdom of God” does appear in the story of Jesus with Nicodemus in chapter 3.
[vi] John 6:15, 18:33-38,
[vii] John 6:63a
[viii] Ephesians 6:12
[ix] Luke 1:52
[x] Luke 6 20