Tuesday, January 16, 2018

God Does Not Visit Violence Upon Violence; Sermon October 8, 2017

Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:7-15
Matthew 21:33-46

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seedthe kingdom of heaven is like yeastthe kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who owns a vineyard I am the vine, you are the branches

Jesus was really good at Similes and Metaphors. 

When anyone talks about a vine or vineyard, they are talking about Israel.  The Psalmist says

7 Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved. 8 You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. 9 You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land. 10 The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches; 11 it sent out its branches to the sea, and its shoots to the River. 12 Why then have you broken down its walls, so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit? 13 The boar from the forest ravages it, and all that move in the field feed on it. 14 Turn again, O God of hosts; look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine, 15 the stock that your right hand planted.

This is a Psalm that remembers the protection and prosperity of Israeli history, in a time when they are in much more crisis.  It was written during the time when the Assyrian Empire loomed large over the northern kingdom – a kingdom it would eventually come to destroy completely. It is a Psalm beseeching God to once again bestow God’ blessing on his people. And it’s an amazing example of a metaphor!

In our Old Testament scripture this morning, we hear the words of Isaiah early in his tenure, before the Assyrian Empire demolished the northern kingdom.  Isaiah recites a list of complaints against the people – all justifications for the coming storm of the Assyrian kingdom.  Through Isaiah, God says, I have protected youbut you betrayed my expectations, so I’m removing my protection, I’m removing the hedge that used to keep you safe from predators. 

We are clear, as we are with all prophets, that Israel has done something wrong.  That God’s people have disappointed God in some way.  But – truly – we rarely hear the ways we disappoint, am I right?
That’s because they are in the following verses, the ones not in our lectionary.
a.     In Isaiah 5: 8; you who adjoin house to house and field to field, until there is no room for anyone but you; greed and excessive – perhaps aggressive – perhaps predatory – hoarding practices, where the winner takes all and leaves no room for the loser to have a home.
b.    Verse 11 – you who pursue strong drink in the morning and wine at night, lying around listening to tambourine and flute but not paying attention to the work of God’s hands
c.     Verse 18 – you who draw iniquity along cords of falsehood; drag sin along with cart ropes – who decide who gets what based on errant cords of logic;
d.    Verse 20 – you who call evil good and good evil, /darkness for light/light for darkness, bitter for sweet / sweet for bitter
e.     Verse 21 – you who are wise in your own eyes and shrewd in your own sight;
f.      Verse 23 – you who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deny the innocent their rights

Nearly all of this has to do with how you treat others.  There are some of you out there who may drink too much wine and listen to too much music  But most of these transgressions focus on right relationship with others.

When Jesus speaks in the temple – this, his third parable responding to the question of the Pharisees and Scribes, “From where do you get your authority?” - Everyone in the temple would know at the mention of the vineyard, that Jesus was referencing this passage from Isaiah.  Except, In Jesus’ rendition, the landowner has a much greater status, he has more properties and responsibility in his purview, and so he has hired tenants to tend the vineyard.  If the people of Israel, God’s people, are still the vineyard, Who do you think these tenants are supposed to be?  These caretakers of the vineyard are the temple leadership.

The tenants who were supposed to plant and water, tend and nurture, reap and harvest of God’s fruit from the people of Israel; that leadership was not teaching and caretaking the Jewish population well.  They were ignoring the landowners’ servants, the people who came as a reminder, the people who had a prophetic message, the people who represented truth, the people who came to demand accountability.

But More than simply ignoring the message, they got angry.  They beat the first messenger.
More than angry, they got violent.  They killed the second.
More than violent, they got self-righteous and stoned the third messenger.
And then, more than a beating, they got Greedy.  They decided to use violence to kill the heir.

Here we are with Jesus and – for once – a pretty clear metaphor.  We can see this metaphor of Jesus the heir, and the prophets who came before him but were refused, rejected, ridiculed, and returned with deadly force.  We are able to see how God continues to hope the tenants will come around to their responsibilities.  We can see, in real time in the story, how the temple leadership that has gone astray and failed to lead their people well are now trying to figure out how to repudiate this heir, this Son of God, so they won’t be forced to relinquish their power.

The leaders of the temple are the caretakers of the vineyard.  Our leaders are the caretakers of a nation.  Have they been doing a good job?


For the past 6 days, ever since waking up to horrible, tragic news on Monday morning of the Vegas shooting where over 50 people were killed, our country has been plunged, once again, into one of our favorite unending debates.  I am not going to stand up here and rehash the gun debate.  I am not going to do it because I think that both sides are right.  I think the proliferation of these obscene episodes of apparently random, large-scale killing is a direct result of the proliferation of the amount of killing machines we have in our population, the ease of getting them, the fact that they become more and more technologically advanced in the skill of how fast they can kill things.  People, animals, robots, stone statues brought to life (according to the movie I was watching the other day.)  But I also think, paradoxically, that policies enacted would come to rest on a great number of gun owners who are trained in safety, and responsible, and have great respect for the damage their firearm can do.  I don’t think simple gun policy would prevent tragedies like the one last weekend in Vegas.

But there are two things that do sicken me about the gun debate in light of our assumed religiousness and our unconscious religiousness.   

First is the reverence we seem to have as a culture –and consumers - for the all-more-powerful gun model.  A pistol will kill someone as dead as a rifle as dead as an Assault Rifle. It seems to me a person who lives outside of a war zone does not own an Assault Rifle because they need to protect themselves.  They own an assault rifle because they appreciate – admire – revere the technological advances and the deadly power of the thing.  I made a friend here in Hastings several months ago, and he is a gun owner.  He owns 10, 4 of which are the type of rifle that looks like what you see in the movies.  Black. Sleek. Long. Contoured to fit your stance.  And loaded with a magazine of bullets.  I think he collects them and admires them as someone might who drives and loves classic cars, or a pilot appreciates construction of a plane.  It’s about the artistry, the design, the power and the majesty of the thing.  But between our TV and film culture of kill-the-bad-guy plotlines, our political fear-mongering that enemies could be at our door at any second, the NRA’s paranoid narrative, and the gun lobby’s hold on our politicians, that admiration of guns turns into a reverence that is hardly paralleled with anything else in our culture.

In bible study this week, a fellow pastor here in town said something profound; that whenever the beginning of a conversation gets an immediate and vehement backlash, you can be assured you’ve uncovered a sacred cow – an idol of the culture.  Our love of guns has, for some, I believe, crossed over into gun worship.  Idolatry, as Jesus or the prophets might have said.

But to me, something even more terrifying is the narrative that is used to justify this love of firearms.  Did you know that the value of gun manufacturers stock goes up every time there is a mass shooting, in anticipation of a rise in gun sales? We are told that we need to arm ourselves because at any time, a crazed or depraved or drugged out person could appear on our doorstep ready to take everything we hold dear.  We are told we have the right to stand our ground whenever we feel threatened – an idea and a law that tacitly endorses responding in violence instead of trying have a discussion and find out whatever the dispute may be.  In each of these mass shootings, we are told, again and again, that the only way to stop a ‘bad guy’ with a gun is a ‘good guy’ with a gun.  Nevermind the fact that for all intents and purposes, Stephen Craig Paddock seemed to be just another good guy who liked guns.  Nevermind the fact that in a Permit-to-Carry state of Minnesota – (well, all 50 states now allow gun owners to carry with a permit; Illinois was the last hold out) – but Nevermind that in Minnesota Philando Castile proactively and calmly informed the officer who pulled him over that he had a firearm and therefore should have been in the ‘good guy’ category but was shot and killed while reaching for his permit.  Nevermind that when John Crawford III picked up a BB gun in a Walmart in Ohio in 2014, it scared fellow shoppers so that they called the police and he was fatally shot for considering a purchase of a toy gun in a place where people purchase real guns – legally. 

Which all begs the question - Who decides who is a good guy with a gun and who is bad?  How do we make those decisions in the split second we feel we have to protect ourselves?  If we accept the mantra that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun, how often will we get that split-second decision wrong?  And on whose authority do we have the right to take a life?

Because it’s certainly not a Christian authority.  If we were following Christ, if we were following our professed Christian beliefs, we would see that neither Jesus our Christ nor his disciples nor the Apostle Paul ever suggest that the way to solve violence is with violence.  In fact, in every instance, it’s the opposite.  Let’s look at this parable again;

You would expect, after the first servant came back beaten, the second killed, that would be enough for the landowner to respond with wrath and violence.  Right?  Human intuition is, if you don’t learn the first time, you certainly learn the true nature of someone with a second instance.  Cross me once, shame on you cross me twice, shame on me as the saying goes?

But God, in the form of the landowner, sends a third peaceful messenger to the tenants to remind them of their responsibilities.  And when, again, he is greeted with violence, the landowner sends his own Son. 

Does he respond with an eye for an eye?  Does he show up with assault rifles or whatever weapons were appropriate to the time?  No.  Again and again, God brings grace and vulnerability and love in lieu of retribution or violence.  

Indeed, we follow a teacher who sacrificed himself that we might know a different pathway to human life rather than war and violent retribution.  Our parable ends with another metaphor about the stone that the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone.  The Pharisees, aware that Jesus is speaking of himself, turn away disgusted.  Because Jesus says, those who fall on this stone, those who try to break Christ, will become broken themselves.  The way of love and generosity and vulnerability inherently breaks down evil.  Jesus is the cornerstone, building for us the foundation of a new way of life.  Because Jesus never answered violence with violence. Jesus lays out a life that rejects violence and vengeance for radical vulnerability, radical generosity, radical love – even for enemies and those who appear evil.

And so I ask a question that has been debated for centuries; Is there any room in the Christian Worldview for a Christian to say, “I am going to kill to protect life?” 


Sadly, I don’t think simple gun policy would prevent tragedies like the one last weekend in Las Vegas – but neither is more guns an answer to our culture’s problems.  There was no way a ‘good guy with a gun’ could have stopped the shooter faster than the security and police did.  Rather, an end to these horrible incidences of mass murder will require a whole-scale change in our lives; in our TV and film plots that exaggerate violence, simplify evil and exalt righteous vengeance without any presence of doubt; in our tending and nurturing of relationships in the face of an ever-more disconnected and bullying culture; in our own diminished human capacity for compassion and empathy; in our regard and respect for the lives of others; in our sense of safety, protection and ideas of who to fear, and finally, in our approach to how much of a firearm is necessary to fulfill those things.  We would have to build these things on the cornerstone, on the teachings and example of Jesus, his disciples and in the words of the Apostle Paul.  We will have to build them by holding fast to God’s love, grace, and vulnerability – not more guns.  

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