The Story of God in the World

Sermon for Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023
Psalm 23; Matthew 22:1-14

I find myself today in the position of preaching a sermon no one will like.  If you’re looking for me to rally us around horrific images of mutilated Israeli children, you won’t get that this morning.  If you’re looking for a historical review of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you won’t get that this morning.  If you’re looking for me to share heartbreaking stories from people I met in the Holy Land, I’m afraid you won’t get that this morning, either.  The one person whose story I felt I learned with any depth was that of our guide, a Palestinian Christian whose family has been among the tiny minority of Christians in the Holy Land for centuries … and who, I’m sure, is now keeping her head down, literally and figuratively, praying the conflict doesn’t spread to her family in the West Bank. Her name is Ranya, and I certainly pray for her.

In a God-awful moment like this, as we’re bombarded with bloody images and stories that enrage and frighten us, I think we yearn most for clear answers, especially to the question of who’s right and who’s wrong.  That’s what we want to hear, right? – clear judgment.  “Fr. John, we should be standing with Israel, right?”  “Fr. John, we should be seeing the humanity of the Palestinians, right?”

Well, if we want guidance on what’s right and what’s wrong beyond our gut reactions, we might turn to the field of ethics.  That gets complicated quickly because, of course, there’s no single way of approaching ethical decision-making, even just within the narrow framework of Western ethics.  A utilitarian ethicist might look at the war in Israel and Gaza and argue for the solution that brings the greatest good to the greatest number.  A virtue ethicist might examine the values being followed by the two sides and advocate for actions that reflect virtuous character.  A deontologist, or duty-based ethicist, might focus on the rules governing this conflict and advocate for strict adherence.

I remember the first day of ethics class in seminary.  The professor began by asking us a question: What sets Christian ethics apart from other ethical approaches?  We students mined our paltry intellectual reserves and came up with possible answers.  Maybe Christian ethics applies the rigor of philosophical investigation to religious life.  Maybe Christian ethics places love above all other values.  Maybe Christian ethics develops the rules and models for life in an explicitly Christian community.  This went on for several minutes, but finally, the professor shook her head and said, “No.  You’re trying too hard.  What sets Christian ethics apart from other ethical approaches is … Jesus.  It’s called Christian ethics because we start with Jesus.  Remember him?”

The point she was making was this: Our beliefs and actions as Christians must reflect something different from the dominant narratives of society.  Our ethics must be specific to our call to follow Christ, to live out his reign and rule in the world.

Where does that start?  Well, I think it starts with what we proclaim here all the time: Love God and love neighbor.  That’s the constitution of the kingdom of God. 

Then we learn what that looks like, primarily through Scripture.  We see Jesus in the Gospels, and we reflect on Jesus in the rest of the New Testament, and we hear the foundations of his Good News in the Hebrew Scriptures – and through all that, we get the story of God in the world.  That story forms us.  The Bible isn’t there to give us verses we can pull out to reinforce what we already think.  The Bible is there to give us a narrative by which we can pattern our lives in contrast to the forces pushing back against God’s living and active presence in the world. 

Well, all that gets especially tricky when we ask what Christian ethics might say about war, because war is maybe the ultimate example of not-the-kingdom.  Now, you can find a verse or two where Jesus’ words might seem to justify violence.  In fact, in the parable today, the king “destroyed” the people who killed the king’s messengers, and he burned their city (Matt 22:7).  But it’s a parable, a story that brings us to a surprising conclusion and makes us wrestle with what it means to pattern our lives on God’s life in the world.  You can also find a verse where Jesus says, “I have come not to bring peace but a sword” (Matt 10:34).  But would any of us really say Jesus advocated violence over peace?  Look at his life and his teaching:  Turn the other cheek.  Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.  Find the people you like least, and break bread with them.  Forgive not seven times but seventy times seven times – even the people who are crucifying you.  That’s kingdom living, the story of God in the world – and it’s the path we’re called to walk.

So, how do you apply that to war?  Again, even within Christian ethics, faithful followers of Jesus offer a wide range of answers.  Christian realists would say that, because of sin and the danger it poses, we have to be willing sometimes to use means that aren’t consistent with Jesus’ life and teaching.  That’s the basis of a theology of just war, which goes back to St. Augustine in the 400s.  To be just, the tradition says, the decision to go to war must meet several criteria:  It must be waged by a legitimate authority through a formal declaration, not just insurgent action.  Its cause must be just, in the sense of promoting justice.  The war must be a last resort.  The war plan must practice proportionality, only enough violence to defeat the evil it opposes.  The war must have a reasonable chance of success.  And the war must be fought with right intention, motivated not by hate but by the need to right a wrong.  There are criteria for the just conduct of war, too.  They come down to discrimination and proportionality:  Discrimination means only legitimate targets may be attacked, and proportionality means only the necessary destructive force may be used.¹

So, that’s what Christian realists might argue.  On the other hand, Christian pacifists would say that, regardless of a war’s purpose, a follower of Jesus simply may not use a means unworthy of Jesus’ reign and rule.  In addition to honoring his call to love the enemy and not to retaliate, Christian pacifists would say their nonviolence embodies allegiance to God as the ultimate authority, superseding allegiance to the state.

So, in a different setting that where we are here this morning, we could have a great conversation about how all this applies in the war between Israel and Hamas, the extent to which Hamas’ attacks on Israelis and Israel’s attacks on Gaza meet those criteria for just war.  I’m working on putting that conversation together, actually, so stay tuned.  But for now – in this past week, as appalling attacks on children came to our devices and TVs – I had to decide what we should do in the moment.  So, in the spirit of narrative theology, I want to tell you a story.

The week’s news and images have hit me as hard as they’ve hit you.  A few months ago, my pilgrimage group was driving along the highway from Jerusalem to Jaffa, the ancient port city next to Tel Aviv.  Jaffa is 40 miles from Gaza, the distance from Belton to KCI.  Now, some of you may remember that on that same day, I wrote on Facebook about how I was cutting my trip short.  I’d planned to stay two days on my own once the pilgrimage ended, but Hamas had started firing rockets into Israel, not far from the road we were traveling that day to get to Jaffa.  It all felt a little too close.  Well, rocket attacks are scary enough.  I never even imagined hand-to-hand killing of people at music festivals or schools.  Clearly, last weekend, Hamas was slaughtering noncombatants; and just as clearly, this would be only the beginning.

Early in the week, Rabbi Alan Londy at New Reform Temple emailed me.  He and I have met for coffee before, though we hadn’t taken it to the next step of figuring out some way our congregations could collaborate on something.  But now, Rabbi Londy was asking for help – simply the blessing of pastoral presence in the midst of deep grief and fear.  He invited us to join their congregation for Shabbat prayers that Friday, a service of solidarity with Israel.  Now, I knew there would be folks at St. Andrew’s who would see this as taking sides – people who would cheer that we were supporting Israel and people who would point to the moral evil of 75 years of Israeli governments taking Palestinians’ land.  And the last thing I wanted to do was divide us here over a conflict thousands of miles away.

So, I know it sounds trite, but I found myself wondering, “What would Jesus do?”  If Jesus had a church, and a nearby synagogue asked his disciples to come and stand alongside them in their grief and fear, what would Jesus do?

So, Friday night, about 25 St. Andrew’s people showed up at New Reform Temple for Shabbat worship.  Now, I don’t know what each of those 25 people believes about the morality of the Israelis or the Palestinians.  I didn’t ask just for Israel’s allies to gather at New Reform Temple.  I asked anyone who wanted to stand with a neighbor in pain to come out and pray – to pray for them and to pray for peace.  As Queen Elizabeth the First once said about whether her English subjects needed to believe the same things in order to worship together, “I would not open windows into men’s souls.”²  I don’t know what our members who came out on Friday think about the war.  I do know they showed up for their neighbors who needed love and support in a horrifying moment.

To be clear: I’m not arguing for moral equivalence in the war between Israel and Hamas.  I’m not even arguing for immoral equivalence between Israel and Hamas.  If you want to know how I see the conflict, I’d be happy to share a coffee or a beer, but what I think isn’t what matters.  Instead, I’m saying that our need to argue about who’s right reflects our own brokenness, our need to see “my” side as virtuous and “their” side as sinful.  

For followers of Jesus, I’d argue that what matters most is that our actions reflect the example and the sovereignty of the one we call Lord.  After all, that title is the same one that the Roman emperor claimed, Kyrios; so when we use it for Jesus, we’re saying something specific about where our allegiance lies.  In that beautiful, familiar psalm we prayed today, we named the Lord as our “shepherd” (23:1) – which, for the ancient Israelites, implied not just tender care but political authority: The kings of Israel were known as the people’s “shepherds.” 

So, if we’re following our Lord and our royal Shepherd, what might be a faithful response?  In the face of war in the Holy Land, what would Jesus do?  First, I think he would grieve, because if we’re grieving the atrocities of the past week, imagine how they break the heart of pure Love.  Then, he might ask us to look to God, to the Trinity of Love, as the model for human behavior.  Then, he might ask us not “whose side are you on?” but “which ruler are you following?”  And then, he might ask, “What neighbors need you to come alongside them in love?”

1.     https://iep.utm.edu/justwar/

2.     https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00004114