JESUS BRINGS A SWORD
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

June 22, 2008

Genesis 21:8-21; Matthew 10:24-39

The older I get the happier I am. I have much more satisfaction and am enjoying that which I have more than ever before. I'm even enjoying what I don't have that I used to think I just had to have. I am much more patient than was ever conceivable in my earlier years. In fact, many of those who knew me as an adolescent and much younger man are shocked at my seeming peacefulness. What intrigues me most about this getting older and occasionally wiser, is that while I am more peaceful, I now cry at the great injustices of life for those who are poor, for those who are abused by power mongering, for those who are simply born into situations that nearly guarantee suffering. Sadness follows me like a friend. And, what I am willing to fight for and stand against has become more focused than ever before.

Several of you know the history of the sword that is embedded in the tapestry that hangs in front of this pulpit. Most of us don't notice it until it is called to our attention. Biblically there are many allusions to the sword. Matthew's Jesus says in this morning's reading, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace, but a sword (10:34)."

How many heads have been cut from their bodies in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace? How many bodies thrust through with Christian crusader swords? This verse has been used viciously throughout the centuries by Christians to condone violence against Muslims, against other Christians who disagreed with each other over matters of doctrines and creeds. It has not escaped the notice of many that the cross which tortured Jesus to his untimely death can be picked up and reversed and used as a sword. Many cultures the world over spanning countless hundreds of years have complained that the cross has been so used, as a sword, not to bring peace, but punishment and death to those first nation peoples who did not want to give up their land and their rights.

(Other world religions have similarly been co-opted and used to bring native peoples and politically dissonant groups into submission and compliance to grand political imperial schemes. My place is not to be speaking for those groups, but only to recognize and hold to accountability the faith which I represent.)

I laud the efforts of this country's founding parents who managed, along with early American Baptist support, to bring to fruition the first national government in our modern world history that orchestrated what we loosely call today the Separation of Church and State. One of my faith propositions is that God created the beginning. I don't know how God did it. But whether God created in specific the great diversity that is this universe or whether God set in play the process that has evolved into the wonderful bio-diversity that is our planet alone, I prefer to believe that diversity is part of the divine dream. We seem to be instilled with the ability to all view the same occurrence and see a variety of things. Moses saw a burning bush and knew Yahweh as I am who I am. God certainly has been every bit as transparent all around this massive globe we inhabit and God is known by different peoples in different ways, and I doubt very much if God is any different in essence, just described differently using variant terms that are all culturally derived.

Religious expression by us mere mortals needs to be humble and respectful of diversity.

Which is why, incidentally, this church's famous parent, The Rev. Doug Rae, I am convinced, had this panel created as it is. The sword does not point at anyone except the one doing the proclamation from this pulpit. It behooves all who speak in the spirit of the God of Jesus Christ to first point all things said, first at us. (I feel the same way about guns. Guns should be pointed at ourselves first and we will think much harder about accidentally or intentionally firing them --- either personally or as a nation state.) If we are not comfortable pointing our words and potential weapons of mass destruction at ourselves, then quite probably we should not possess them.

I have ceased to believe in the doctrine that the strongest deterrent to war is having the most powerful weapons. The one with the loudest and most strongly used words, the one with the most missiles as a form of defense, seems only to instill fear in others and too often only invites retaliation.

There must be, there is, a better way.  The way of Jesus is my preferred path.

We have two phenomenal Scripture stories that we are being asked to ponder this morning. Our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures about Sarah and Abraham, their son Isaac, and the slave woman Hagar and her son Ishmael, both children fathered by Abraham, remains a foundational story informing our faith and the world political situation.

Let's not assume that everyone is on the same page. Biblical literacy is not at an all time high. Abraham is considered to be the faith father of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. What a dude.

Here is the awkward part of the rest of the story. Are there any children in the room whose ears are too innocent for the real story of life? Abraham and Sarah were not having success at having a son. Sarah says to her Egyptian slave, Hagar, "Have sex with my husband, Abraham, so that he might have a child with someone." It is a great drama. Abraham and Hagar have sex and produce a child named Ishmael. Of course, no sooner is Ishmael born and approaching adulthood than Sarah turns up pregnant and she delivers a son to Abraham by the name of Isaac.

The best laid plans are just mightily confused by having two sons by different women in the same family structure. In that culture the eldest son became the inheritor of all things after the death of the father. ALL THINGS. Sarah had not anticipated having this problem. She needed to get rid of the son fathered by Abraham with Hagar, the one named Ishmael. Her loyalty was to the child born from her womb, Isaac.

Sarah, who by tribal law was also the mother of Ishmael because his birth mother was a slave, convinced Abraham to put Hagar and her son, Ishmael out into the wilderness, where mother and child were nearly guaranteed to die.

Abraham and his wives were living in a non-permanent, transient neighborhood. Their tent city would resemble an RV campground around some pond of water along an interstate of today.  Abraham was a wealthy man who traveled with a caravan of tents, herds and slaves. They traveled from green grass and a watering hole to the next one when the grass turned brown and the pond ran dry. They lived in a most hostile environment and you needed your group in order to survive. What Sarah convinced Abraham to do to Hagar and Ishmael we would today consider manslaughter, if not pre-meditated murder.

And, of course, after much trauma, God steps forth miraculously to save Hagar and Ishmael. Ishmael marries an Egyptian girl and goes on have children. How many children? Twelve. Sound familiar? It should. Ishmael comes to be known as the first prophet of Islam and as the father of all Arab people. This mirrors the story of Abraham's other son: Isaac becomes father to the twelve tribes of the Jewish people. The story becomes poetically parallel with the twelve Jewish tribes and the twelve sons of Ishmael on the Muslim side.  And, of course, we end up the twelve apostles of Jesus.

You and I are most aware of these stories from our Jewish/Christian heritage. Interestingly, the Muslim side of these traditions presents another take on the story line. For instance, one of my favorite alternatives reframes the story of Abraham's feeling called by God to take his by then only son, Isaac, up to the top of Mt. Moriah where he is to sacrifice his son at God's command. God then, as the story concludes, provides a ram or a sheep as a substitutionary replacement for Isaac.

Our Muslim friends know a different take on this very same story which might have even greater historical validity. Muslim scholars tell this traditional tale of Abraham and Isaac's sacrifice as Abraham sacrificing Ishmael, which, we know from this morning's reading, he actually did. And in the Islamic version, God also steps in, saves Ishmael from Abraham's willingness to kill his son. You know the rest of the story as Ishmael giving birth to the Arab people and the Islamic faith as a result.

My dear wife and were I discussing this biblical passage, as clergy husband and wife are apt to do, and she said, "No matter which side you fall on, Abraham was not a very good father." In fact, in all the ancient stories, while Abraham is faithful to follow God's lure into a new land, Abraham is pathetically weak-kneed and chases after his slave and then willingly and perhaps repeatedly is willing to sacrifice his offspring.

I disagree with the way these stories are told and the point they seek to instill. God does not ever request that we sacrifice our sons or our daughters either on altars or into the desert. In my lifetime and before it was the tradition in many Italian and Irish Catholic homes for a family's first born son to be given in holy sacrifice to be a priest. We understand this better today as a horrible intrusion on a child's sense of self determination. We need to guide our children, but they must always retain the sense of self that allows them to know that they are in charge of their life destinies. (I say that all the while knowing that my wife's psychological counseling practice benefits tremendously from overbearing parents.)

We really must extend this idea into a few more areas of concern. Our countries and our politicians talk about parents sacrificing our children to fight in wars. The Abraham and Isaac/Ishmael motif dominates in the presuppositions being made in such statements. Further, this gets easily extended into the traditional substitutionary atonement beliefs that exhort that God demanded the sacrifice of God's son to atone for the sins of humanity. These are not moral beliefs, and we can do better and be more faithful to the God of Jesus who is the God of love, not forced or demanded sacrifice.

It is an ancient fable, predating Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that the gods have, it seems, always demanded bodily sacrifices on multiple bloody altars. It is past time to grow up and mature in our thinking and belief systems. It was and is a cruel and unusual belief system that has perpetrated multiple centuries of cruel and unusual behaviors and treatment of God's creatures. The death penalty in murder cases continues this barbaric belief that a death can atone in some way for another's death. I understand and have felt the desire and the rage to kill, especially in the face of innocent loss. But love and decency calls us to recognize that one death can not redeem another, ever. In fact, the death of a guilty person may be the kindest gift we can hand them. My more punitive self rather likes seeing lifelong imprisonment. Death sets them free.

I would repeat what you may say, "Oh, pastor, you've been down this road before, enough already."   In the world of theology and biblical interpretation there have been and are volumes upon volumes being written and published by incredibly spiritual and somewhat orthodox persons who love Jesus, if you will, but bemoan atonement-by-death beliefs.  It is not just our post-modern world that is questioning what many would call the most fundamental belief about God and Jesus.  Early Christianity was ripe with a plethora of belief systems about why Jesus came and why Jesus died and how Jesus lived and what meaning it all has.  Eventually, by the 4th century, some 350 years after Jesus, the Roman Church created orthodoxy and told everyone what God meant in Jesus.  The rule was acquiesce to this orthodox faith or die, be expelled like Ishmael and Hagar were.  

We live, you and I, in a unique time in Christian history.  For the first time since the Roman Church named orthodoxy and demanded adherence, there is an openness to the movement of the Spirit as has seldom been experienced.  No religious groups hold the reins of power so tightly over the population of the earth.  Truly, the internet has allowed for the easy spread of ideas and the safe questioning of dogmas.  It is the best of times, the worst of times.  It is our time and God is calling us to be faithful to it.

God does not call us to die for our faith.  God does not expect us to sacrifice our lives.  God expects us to live faithfully what we believe and like Jesus, like Dr. King, sometimes you die living faithfully.

Most of us have paid close attention in recent years to the area of Pakistan that the media calls lawless and without government control from Islamabad.  It is not lawless, it is not uncontrolled.  It is run by very traditional laws of family and clan loyalty.  It may be one of the most controlled areas on the planet.  These folks are living in 2008 much like Jesus' people were in Palestine 2000 years ago. The Jews were a national clan and family tribes reinforced all the clan's rules and faith.  You did what you were supposed to do and if you didn't your very life was at risk of either expulsion or death.  You did not want to be expelled; because everyone who lived around you was living by the same rules and would honor the expulsion or risk serious community censure.

Jesus is very radical in this morning's Hebrew text and in our lives today.  In the midst of that tightly controlled world, as in rural Pakistan today, where loyalty to God is expressed most completely by loyalty to family and the clan, Jesus said, "NO, not necessarily." If you follow my way, the way of Jesus, then family loyalty, clan loyalty, national loyalty -- no matter if to Israel, Rome or the United States or Canada, eh -- loyalty is to what we believe, to what Jesus taught, to loving our enemies like we love our clan.

That is why Jesus says in Matthew 10:34ff, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man's enemies will be the members of his own household."

What we are called to struggle to acknowledge with our lives is loyalty to the ways of Jesus, to the preferences of God which are often not the way our families work, the way our narcissism wants the world to be, and more often than we care to admit, the way of our nation is not the way of Jesus.  In the world of Jesus where family and clan reigned supreme, Jesus was cutting into tradition with a sword, believing that the way things have always been done before has not always created a world the way God is envisioning.

We are servants of the dreams, the ways of God, to known other.  Who do you serve?