Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

March 9, 2003

St. Luke's, Jamestown

by The Rev. Dr. J.A. Ross Mackenzie

 

 

Into the Wilderness

Mark 1:9-15

 

The temptation story that we find in Mark's Gospel is as stinging as a blow in the face.  It is also as consoling as the first warm breath of Spring that we feel on our cheeks.

 

First, the sting that comes on the first Sunday of the penitential season.

 

When it comes to war with Iraq, are you a realist or a pacifist?  The realist says that war is at times the last resort and a Christian in good conscience can participate.  The pacifist says that war is never a valid way of responding to social or political conflicts.

 

The Gospel evidence is clear.   Whatever the wilderness experience meant for Jesus, it was a time of pondering the nature of the ministry to which he was committing himself.  And if there was a central temptation for Jesus, it was this.  "My country is occupied by brutal and tyrannical Roman power.   Shall I be part of the resistance and identify with those who are looking for a military liberator and savior?"  Perhaps that's what Judas later wanted him to be.   Jesus choose another way.  We can find it everywhere in the Gospels: "Blessed are the peacemakers," "Do not resist evil."  For two centuries at least the Christian Church was resolutely pacifist.

 

Move three centuries to the time of Constantine.  The church was now both beneficiary of and ally of the state.  So necessity diluted the older intense witness of refusing to bear arms.  Constantine's soldiers marched to war with the cross of Jesus on their standards.  Pacifism became literally the eccentric witness of the church, off-centered, the commitment only of the few.  And St.  Augustine of Africa put his seal on the bargain by arguing what became the doctrine of the just war: military action might be justified but only in defense of civilized values.

 

So, entering this season when we must ponder the Christian way in the modern world, we have these two legitimately Christian approaches to war for 1,600 years.  Hence my opening question: are you a realist or a pacifist?

 

Last week we heard the letter of Bishop Garrison being read before worship.   

    "Jesus calls peacemakers blessed, and so I write to ask all of us to take seriously our Savior's invitation to be peacemakers. I join my voice with the many who, more eloquently than I am able, have called upon our nation and people to resist thoughts that a war with Iraq will solve the problems identified with the regime of Saddam Hussein."

 

Something stirred me in that.  It seemed right.  But listening to the words, I had a nagging question.  Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran theologian, right or wrong to be drawn into the resistance movement against Hitler and to be an accomplice in a plot that would involve violence against the Führer?  And if he did not, would he not be an accomplice in the unspeakable death of millions of innocents, above all the Jews? 

 

This is the stinging ethical question for Christians today.  Do we take the way of Jesus (the way of Gandhi, too, the way of Martin Luther King, Jr., the way of our bishop's letter) that is, the way of non-resistance to evil?  Or do we choose the realistic way of Dietrich Bonhoeffer?  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I think, was right.

For most of us American citizens, we have had to make the stinging decision that if we accept the blessings of free citizenship, then we must also accept the responsibilities that go with that.  And the wall of this church is a testimony that one of us, Gavin Scott, born in 1891 and killed in France, weeks before the end of World War I, was one of the many who made that decision at the cost of their lives.

 

So here we are struggling with the issue of a Christian response to war.  This Lent, we are between the devil and the deep blue sea.  We are in our own moral and ethical turmoil, metaphorically struggling between the wild beasts of war and violence and the attendant angels whose message (whether in the heavens at the nativity or in the wilderness beyond Jordan) is always peace.  How do we Christians make the massive, even terrifying, ethical decisions that we have to make today?  And not only decisions about war, whether with Iraq or North Korea, but also about stem cell research, about cloning, about the death penalty and so on?

 

As always, the Gospel of Jesus gives us everything we need.  This is the warm breath of a Spring when we feel chilled in the winter of war.

 

Jesus went to the Jordan to be baptized.  There he took upon himself the role and task that God had given him.  I don't know any better way of knowing how to decide for ourselves whether we support this impending war or oppose it than to

remember that in our baptism we were named as God's and commissioned to live a process of growth and transformation.  We were given also an inquiring and discerning heart.

 

So for some of us (like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, like those named on war memorials throughout the nation) it is accepting the reality that I will realistically assent to war as the lesser of two evils, and as a Christian I will accept whatever civic or military duties that implies. 

 

For myself, I'm convinced we have to go another way.  Emmanuel Mounier, a French philosopher, said something I find illuminating: "One does not free human beings by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them; one frees them by attaching them to their destiny."   It's time for the churches to end 1,600 years of ethical paralysis and start saying loud and clear that since Christ achieved victory over violence, sin and death, we must hold up peace-making as an achievable ideal, in contradiction to the world's fixation on power, wealth and force.  That can be the next destiny of the church.  The church will be free to be the church when it insists that if the state puts on its stamps,  "pray for peace," then the state must reverse the constantly increasing spending of fabulous amounts of money, planning and energy in the production of weapons.  This is not naivete.  I lived in the terror or war for six years.  There is no winner in any war.  The winner is war itself. 

 

Two last notes.  The first is one of consolation.  The wild beasts of war may be around us.  But the angels that waited on Jesus have left their ancient places and are with us still.  We are never, never, never beyond the protection of God.  The men and women poised at the edge of Iraq can know that, and we, with the smoke of the World Trade Center burned in memory can know that.  In the valley of the shadow of death we will fear no evil.

 

Second, just before we approach the altar today, we will pray, "Thy kingdom come."  Thy kingdom come in ugly, pained and tortured Iraq.  Bring your kingdom, Lord, to  menacing North Korea.  And to tyrannized Zimbabwe.  And may George Bush do thy will.  May the US Congress do thy will.  May Ross Mackenzie do thy will.  And may Bob and Pete and Caroline and Pat and every mother's child in this place also do thy will.