Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 22, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I have said many times from this pulpit, and I have written in various places, that Jesus taught nonviolence. He didn’t teach pacifism exactly. Rather, he taught what Walter Wink, the great contemporary theologian of nonviolence, calls “third way” between violence and pacifism. He taught neither violent resistance nor meek pacifism in the face of evil but rather creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil. There really is no doubt about that assertion. Jesus taught nonviolence, and any contention that he didn’t, be it either a reference to supposed sayings of Jesus that seem to support the use of violence or a resort to classical Christian just war theory, is a departure from Jesus’ actual teachings on the subject.

So what are we to make of the line from our Gospel reading this morning that I put at the top of your bulletin? “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34 Matthew attributes the words to Jesus, and they say that he came to bring a sword, which is, of course, an instrument of violence. So how can I so confidently assert that Jesus taught nonviolence?

Quite easily, actually. When you look closely at this passage, or at any of the handful of other passages that Christian advocates of violence use to convince themselves and others that Jesus didn’t really mean don’t kill them when he said “love your enemies,” it’s really clear that the passages do not in fact contradict Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. In our passage this morning it is perfectly clear that the word “sword” is not to be taken literally. We clearly are to take it as a metaphor for the divisive effect that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was having in some families near the end of the first century CE when the Gospel of Matthew was written. Christ’s “sword” is not a weapon of war, it is the way he and his message divided families between those who accepted him and his message and those who did not. Matthew used the language of intention: “I have come to….” But it seems obvious to me that what he’s really talking about is effect not intention. Certainly there is no justification for violence here. None at all.

So if this passage is not a justification of violence, what is it? Does it have any meaning for us. If so, what is that meaning? To get at what that meaning might be, let’s first take a look at our reading from Jeremiah, that 8th century BCE prophet of doom, gloom, and destruction who can be so difficult to read. There Jeremiah complains of the effect that his preaching the word of God is having on his social life, among other things. God, here called “LORD,” that is, Yahweh, has called him to be a prophet, a call he could not resist. And what happened? “I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.” Jeremiah 20:7 Why all the derision heaped upon him? Because people don’t want to hear what he has to say. He says: “Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’” Jeremiah 20:8 He’s referring here to the fact that the word that the Lord gave him to preach was a word of the coming destruction that would befall Judah because of its faithlessness. No one wanted to hear it. So they did what people always do when a prophet preaches a word from God that they don’t want to hear. They attacked the messenger. He says: “I hear many whispering:….Denounce him!....All my close friends are watching for me to stumble….Perhaps…we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him.” Jeremiah 20:10 That’s what so often happens when someone proclaims God’s truth. People don’t want to hear it, and they turn against the prophet. Jesus knew it. He even called Jerusalem “the city that kills the prophets.” Matthew 23:27 So why didn’t Jeremiah just stop preaching that word that the people didn’t want to hear and that was causing him so much trouble?

He answers the question himself. He didn’t stop because he couldn’t. He says: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” Jeremiah 20:9 That’s the problem when God calls you to be a prophet. The word you proclaim gets you in trouble, but you can’t stop proclaiming it. After all, it wasn’t just your decision to become a prophet. If you truly are a prophet, God has called you to be one; and God doesn’t let go or give up all that easily. God puts a zeal for God’s truth in your soul. You can’t help but proclaim it, come what may.

That’s the reality Matthew’s Jesus is talking about when he says he has come to bring not peace but a sword. He immediately describes a situation in which the Gospel that he preached was having the same kind of effect Jeremiah had been dealing with something like 750 years earlier. People who reject the word turn against those who accept it, even when they are members of the same family. That’s what happens whenever a true, prophetic word is preached. Many people—most people, actually, most of the time—don’t want to hear it; and conflict, sometimes violent conflict, results.

It’s no different in our time. I know that at least some of you are experiencing that very thing in your own families. Some of you have a great deal of trouble getting along with very conservative Christian relatives because you proclaim a different, a better, a truer Christianity; and they don’t want to hear it. I have experienced it here in Monroe, where I have been called “apostate” and denied opportunities for public service because of my, and our, commitment to being Open and Affirming. Preaching a prophetic word of God’s love for all people makes us rather unpopular, but we do it anyway.

So I think we need to ask: Just what is it about the Gospel of Jesus Christ that meets such resistance, even among Christians? I think it is several things. Jesus preached radical inclusion. He taught that no one is outside God’s grace. That’s why he was always eating with those “tax collectors and sinners,” a practice that got him into so much trouble in his day. Radical inclusion is never a popular idea. It seems that we humans have a natural tendency to build barriers between people, to separate people into us and them, those who are in and those who are out. If you doubt that, just remember you days in high school, when just about the most important thing in the world was to be in; and it was really painful to be out. Beyond that, Jesus told those who considered themselves righteous that they really weren’t righteous at all. He told them that God’s favorite ones were the ones they called sinners, the ones they were so sure were outside of God’s grace and to whom they felt so self-righteously superior. They didn’t like that message at all. That message was a big part of what got him killed.

And he taught nonviolence, to return to the theme of the first part of this sermon. Jesus message of nonviolence has never been popular. It wasn’t popular with his disciples, one of whom—in all four Gospels—pulled out a literal sword and cut off the ear of one of the men who came to arrest him. We humans resort so easily to violence. We so glibly interpret verses like our “I came not to bring peace but a sword” to justify violence because we don’t want to hear Jesus’ message of nonviolence. We are so sure that violence “works” and nonviolence doesn’t. That’s not true, as the history of India, of South Africa, of Soviet Eastern Europe, and of the Civil Rights movement our own country in our own lifetime demonstrates. There seems to be something in us humans, or more probably just in our human cultures for the last five or six thousand years or so—a very short time, actually—that tells that us we need to be violent. Jesus tells us we don’t, and that we don’t get to. And we don’t want to hear it.

Jesus brought a sword all right. He brought the metaphorical sword of the Gospel, a figurative sword that cuts through human society, human culture, and human hearts as sharply as a surgeon’s scalpel, dividing those who accept it from those who don’t. Dividing even our own hearts and souls as we struggle with it and all of its implications. It is a sword that we are called to wield, even when it makes us unpopular; or rather, especially when it makes us unpopular. Once that Gospel gets inside you, you know what Jeremiah meant by that “burning fire shut up in my bones.” Once the Gospel of Jesus Christ gets inside you, you have to preach it. You have to proclaim it. You can’t hold it in. You know that it is a sword. You know that it will meet resistance, maybe even in your own family. But you proclaim it any way because you have to. You can’t not proclaim it.

So. Let us continue to wield the sword of Christ, that is, let us continue to proclaim the Gospel as the Spirit has led us to understand it. Let us always speak the truth in love, as St. Paul called on us to do. Ephesians 4:15 After all, we don’t want to fall into the trap of excluding some from God’s love simply because they believe differently than we do, a trap into which Christians fall far too easily. But let us speak the truth as we know it. It is a sword, a metaphorical sword of course, but it is the sword that Christ brought to the world and to us. May we wield it faithfully and in peace. Amen.