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January 17, 2010

Week 1: Our Christian History of Nonviolence

Practicing Peace: The Call for a Nonviolent Witness in the 21st Century
Week One: Our Christian History of Nonviolence
January 17, 2010: Luke 6:17-26

I recall a conversation with a pastoral colleague a month ago about President Obama’s decision to send the surge of American troops into Afghanistan. She was lamenting the decision and I said, “It’s a mess over there. In order to stabilize the country, the President needs to deploy the extra military personnel.” She stopped eating and looked at me as if she couldn’t believe what had just come out of my mouth. Then the look faded and she smiled…and the conversation turned to other subjects. But her look, and the brief interlude, stayed with me throughout the coming weeks.

During the four Sundays in Advent, I asked everyone to look for signs of God’s presence in the world. And the signs we were looking for were Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. Now, mind you, I didn’t get as many responses as I’d wished up front to incorporate into the worship service. But when it came to our time of corporate prayer, you all did a good job of expressing signs of God’s presence in the world… except on the Sunday we talked about peace.

And so, today begins a five-week sermon series entitled, “Practicing Peace: The Call for a Nonviolent Witness in the 21st Century.” Before you begin to squirm in your seat too much, let me tell you what this sermon series will NOT be about. I am not going to stand up here and tell you which political party to support because they espouse our Christian values. And I am not going to ask you to help me organize a peace demonstration.

What I hope this sermon series will do is encourage you will reflect on your witness of faith as a Christian in the 21st century—specifically in the area of practicing peace. This way, if asked about something that is happening in the world, in our neighborhood that involves violence of any kind, you might not just spout political rhetoric or dismiss it as something that can’t be changed. I hope you will make a statement of faith that reflects a thoughtful Christ-like worldview.

Maybe you are already doing this, and if so, that’s great. I hope you’ll help me as we journey together in these next five weeks to a place we seldom see—the practice of peacemaking. We’ll spend five weeks, because usually when we see the practice of peace, we all too quickly dismiss it as not possible or irrelevant for our lives.
My sermons will be posted on the webpage by Monday morning. And I’d love to discuss any and all of this with you. So let us start at the beginning with the one for whom Christians are named—Jesus Christ.

When presented with various opportunities throughout his life, Jesus practiced peace. When the Pharisees and Scribes wanted to engage him in bitter debate about the Jewish laws, Jesus chose instead to respond with probing questions or parables (stories) to make the opposition think. When he was seized in the garden of Gethsemane, and one of his disciples grabbed a soldier’s sword and got violent, Jesus demanded that his disciple put the sword down. Then Jesus healed the person who was injured by his disciple.

Jesus was no doormat! Far from it. But neither was he violent in his interactions with people. Of all his teachings, healings, and miracles, it is the way Jesus conducted himself that reminds us of the love of God. He always engaged people in a way that kept the door of conversation and relationship open. Jesus never shut the door on anyone. He always left it open just a crack in case they wanted to revisit with him. His witness was one of nonviolence, compassion, and love.

And what of the witness of the Christian faith? As the story of the Christian faith has been told (and I am speaking of Western Christianity right now), the main emphasis has been placed on the triumphal history of Christianity. It stretches from Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America. This is often referred to as Big C-Christianity.

For the most part, it is a militant history; an us-versus-them tale of winning and losing. This retelling of Christianity tolerates schisms and violence in all kinds of forms (crusades, inquisitions, warfare) as a means to the righteous end—that end being to establish God’s will on earth. And Big C Christianity has been primarily written by Anglo-Saxon males. In recent years, other voices have come to the table, but most of them are still on the fringes and only some (underlying some!) seminarians read these “fringe” historical theologians.

The result of this reading of Christian history has caused many in the 21st century to turn their back on Christianity all together. You’ve heard people say, “I like Jesus. It’s Christianity I can’t stand.” Some Christians have tried to practice the faith while minimizing our history or not even studying it. There is another option.

Author, historian, and practicing Christian, Diana Butler Bass suggests this option in her book, A People’s History of Christianity. (1)

Butler Bass invites those struggling with the Big C reading of Christianity not to turn their back on Christian history. For Christians, when we do this we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If we don’t know our history, our traditions, what are we standing on? Butler Bass invites us to look back at the history of Christianity and visit some of the stories of ordinary people, some well-known, some not so well-known, who have exhibited the characteristics of Jesus. They have something to teach us about practicing our faith today.

So with this in mind, let’s take a couple minutes and look at our Christian history.
After Jesus’ resurrection, came Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit anointed Peter and the disciples. Christianity was born. It was born into a primitive, chaotic, brutal Roman culture that occupied the entire Mediterranean region and beyond. People of unrelated languages, cultures, religions and were “forced into political unity by a brutal (Roman) military.” (2)

Most of the people who lived under Roman rule were subjected to cruel and unfair practices and did not benefit from any social or economic structures. As it did when Jesus was alive, Christianity flourished. In fact, the name for Christianity in the first four centuries was “The Way” and early Christians were called “People of the Way.”

Once you became a person of The Way you had to make some dramatic changes to your life. Some people were martyred. There are accounts of women who were executed in the Roman coliseum because they would not recant their faith. Likewise, some early Christian bishops were martyred. But for the most part, being a person of The Way was to follow the counter cultural teachings Jesus Christ. As they did this, people found their lives were transformed. As a result, the people of The Way were not willing to give up their faith in Jesus for anything, even in the extreme situations where it would cost them their lives.

One of Jesus’ primary teaching is that of peacemaking or nonviolence. The early church leaders were adamant that to be a disciple of Jesus was to closely adhere to Jesus’ own example of nonviolence.
One early Christian theologian (Origen) put it this way. “Jesus forbids any kind of violence or vengeance against another…through Jesus Christ we have become children of peace…and reject all forms of violence.” (3) In fact, if you were in the Roman army and then became a Christian, you had to resign your post. Serving in the Roman army, an organization that persecuted, oppressed, and killed innocent people was not in keeping with Jesus’ practice of nonviolence.

This historical information is confirmed by the witness of St. Martin, born early in the 4th century. His story is depicted in a large stained glass window in an Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. While still studying to be a Christian (back then it could take one to two years to become a Christian), Martin’s regiment was on duty when he met a naked beggar on the road. Martin took of his cloak, tore it in half, and gave half to the man. After he was baptized, Martin resigned his post in the Roman army. He went on to become a monk and later a bishop of the city of Tours. The stained glass window depicts a soldier using his cloak to shelter a man. (4)

This practice of nonviolence lasted until the fourth century. In 313 c.e. when emperor Constantine became a convert, he provided for The Way to become the Roman Empire’s official religion. He labeled it Christianity. It stuck. Christianity was the official religion of Rome. The persecutions stopped and people rejoiced. The church went from being poor and persecuted to being the ones with the power to persecute.

Here’s an example of how quickly becoming part of the establishment can change your core values. Now in order to serve in the Roman Army you were required to become a Christian. As far as practicing peace was concerned, this was the beginning of a long and dark road.

During Constantine’s reign, as the religion of the empire, it was the duty of church leaders to speak theologically to the political realities of war since Constantine continued to acquire more by conquering other peoples. It was reasoned, since God had brought the church out from under persecution, and because God’s kingdom was not yet at hand, they needed to support the emperor and protect the church.

Augustine of Hippo was the first to develop the just war rationale for the Church. Later Rome fell to “Germanic peoples who lived in societies based on blood warrior bonds.” It was the beginning of what we call the Dark Ages—three hundred years of unspeakable violence against anyone and everyone. (5)

(ust before the first millennium, Christianity had spread into these Germanic people and they had finally come to some agreements about just war. One agreement was about who absolutely could not be killed--for example women and children. A second agreement was about when battles could not take place. For example, there was to be no fighting during the holy seasons of Lent and Advent.

As the Christian church moved into the medieval period, warfare was the assumed practice. And now it moved from protecting the church from the Germanic tribes of Europe to protecting it from people who practiced a different religion—i.e. Jews and Muslims. One hundred years after the first crusade, which took place in Jerusalem, killing Jews and Muslims, Thomas Aquinas wrote his just war theory. It is this just war theory, written in the 13th century, that is the basis for the just war theory that we use today.

Referring back to the Big C list—Christ, Constantine, the dark ages and medieval period was Christendom. Next is Calvin. John Calvin is the founder of the Presbyterian Church and one of the major figures in the Reformation. At this time in Christian history the Western Christian church based in Europe splintered into Catholic and Protestant. I say splintered because many of our Protestant denominations came about in that three hundred year period between 1450 and 1750.

And the last C, Christian America needs little explanation. America was built on the separation of church and state because our ancestors saw how the church can infect the government and how government can infect the church. In our American Christian history, this separation between church and state has had its ups and downs—depending on who you ask…

According to Butler Bass, the modern age ended when we dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan to end WWII. She writes, “Modernity had opened with the hope that wars could be ended; it closed with the fear that war could end everything.” (6)

In our time, no one embodied Jesus’ call to nonviolence more than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is on my short list of people I hope to meet in heaven. Dr. King’s Christian witness changed our country and innumerable lives. Here’s a story of one such life that was changed by Dr. King’s witness of practicing peace.

His name was Father George Zabelka. He was a Catholic U.S. army chaplain. His nickname while he served in the military was “General George.” He served as the chaplain for the personnel of the 509th Composite Group, the atomic bomb team. He was the one who literally blessed their missions. Afterwards, Father George was assigned to serve in Japan during the occupation.

What Father George saw in the hospitals was the beginning of his transformation from violence to nonviolence. The affects of the atomic bombs were impossible to get out of his mind. He knew that just war theory prohibited doing the harm he saw inflicted on innocent women and children. Yet he loved his country and believed they did the right thing. He couldn’t make sense of it all. Discharged from the Army in 1946, he returned to life as a parish priest.

In the early 1960’s Father George was working with Martin Luther King Jr. He was deeply inspired by Dr. King’s words and nonviolent actions. For the first time in his life, Father George realized he was face to face with Christian nonviolent resistance to evil. He realized that not only was Dr. King was preaching the Sermon on the Mount. He was living it too!! At one point after he was released from the Montgomery Alabama jail, Dr. King turned to the people and said,

“Blood may flow in the streets of Montgomery before we receive our freedom, but it must be our blood that flows, and not that of the white man. We must not harm a single hair on the head of our white brothers.” (7)

Dr. King’s words convicted and convinced Father Zabelka. He did an “about face” similar to the conversion of Saul in the Bible, and worked for nonviolence solutions for the rest of his life.

St. Martin, Father George and Martin Luther King Jr. are some Christian witnesses from our history. We will be sharing stories and examples of how to practice peace in the coming weeks. In the meantime, ask yourself these questions?

How would Jesus feel about the last 1,600 years of violent defense of the Christian church?

Did Jesus come to give us a church or a way of life?

Here we are in the beginning the second decade of the 21st century. In a couple minutes we will baptize a young child and commit to help his parents raise him in the Christian faith. What will our witness look like?

Footnotes:
Footnotes:
(1) A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. ©2009 by Diana Butler Bass. Published by Harper Collins.
(2) Ibid, page 25
(3) Ibid, page 72
(4) Ibid, page 73
(5) Ibid, page 133
(6) Ibid, page 279
(7) The Vision of Peace: Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland. © 1999 by Mairead Corrigan Maguire. Published by Orbis Books. (pg. 87)

Posted by vickie at 10:00 AM