“Seeking the Good”
June 7, 2009
Genesis 4:1-10
Luke 6:32-36
In 1573 in Antwerp, Belgium, a woman named Maeyken Wens was arrested and tortured. She was hauled in a cart to the place where her sentence was carried out—death by fire.
Her crime? She proclaimed the Gospel as she understood it from her personal reading of the New Testament. She was found guilty of heresy, impiety, and disobedience to the Church. And for these crimes the government put her to death.
On May 31, 1660 the Puritans in Boston convicted Mary Dyer for a second time of preaching the Quaker faith. For a second time they sentenced her to death. On June 1, she was hanged on the Boston Common for the crime of being a Quaker in Massachusetts.
Some three hundred years later, in the spring of 1965, Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopalian seminarian in Cambridge, MA, traveled south along with other students and clergy, responding to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s request that they come to Selma, Alabama to take part in the march to Montgomery. Daniels remained in Alabama for several months, seeking to integrate a local Episcopal church.
In August, Daniels with three others—a white Catholic priest and two black protesters—went to get a cold soft drink at one of the few local stores that would serve nonwhites. They were met at the front by Tom Coleman, an engineer for the state highway department and unpaid special deputy, who wielded a shotgun. The man threatened the group, and finally leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales down to the ground and caught the full blast of the gun. He was killed instantly.
Last Sunday, as Christians across the country met to worship, Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed while he served as an usher at Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, in what was described as a reprehensible act of domestic terrorism directed toward the dwindling cadre of physicians who risk their safety to perform legal medical procedures.[i]
Whether executions endorsed by governments or acts of violence by individuals, these murders—and others like them—have one thing in common: they are efforts to stop people from speaking and acting out of faith and conscience. They are acts designed to send a message to others to change their speech and their behavior.
They are religiously motivated killings—perpetrated by those who feel that their devotion to a God of their imagining gives them both the right and the reason to lethally attack those who have a different faith, a different understanding of the ways of God and human beings.
Are we not right to call these acts of terror?
One physician put it this way last week: “To support abortion is a moral choice, to support abortion is a religious choice, to support abortion is a legal choice. To use violent means in order to deny anyone this right goes against the core values that America stands for.” And he asked: “Why do we allow these terrorists that dedicate their lives to deny rights, and that support murder of physicians and medical workers, the right to be identified as ‘pro-life’? They are certainly not.”[ii]
This morning we heard the story of the slaying of Abel. It is a troubling story: it not only tells of violence between siblings but also of a religiously motivated killing.
Genesis, of course, gives us story, not history. And this is a story that takes place against the backdrop of a fallen humanity, already painfully aware of the separation of the creature and the Creator. It is a story that, even in a setting of alienation from God, begins with intimacy and birth.
Eve says, “I have ‘produced’ a man with the help of the Lord,” the Hebrew word for “produce” being a play on the name “Cain.” Cain, we hear, worked the ground while his brother, Abel, tended sheep.
As time went on, Cain brought an offering to God—the first fruits of the ground. Abel, too, brought an offering—the firstborn of his flock. For reasons we are not told and will never know, God had regard Abel and his offering but had no regard for Cain and his offering.
Cain then took a course of action that has been followed with so many different twists in the millennia to follow. The faithfulness of one is not acceptable to another. The religious act of one is the cause of hatred in another. Sin lurks at the door and Cain lets it in, as have so many after him.
He walks with Abel into a field, and rises up and kills his brother.
As is often the case in Genesis, God comes into this story with a question: “Where is your brother, Abel?”
When Cain answers that question with a question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”—God, who so often seems puzzled by and dismayed with these human creatures, announces: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
While Cain seeks to avoid the judgment in God’s question, the blood of his brother answers with a fierce clarity. We hear for the first time what becomes a consistent theme in the Bible: While those who do wrong might think that they can escape unnoticed, God does hear the victims’ cries.
In response to Dr. Tiller’s slaying, President Obama said that our deep differences over issues like abortion “cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.” As people of faith, we should join in the call for a sustained focus by federal and state officials to prevent further acts of violence and intimidation. If it turns out that additional laws are needed, Congress should take action.
The United Church of Christ General Synod has repeatedly affirmed the right of women to the full range of reproductive health care services regardless of their circumstances. In the context of several Synod resolutions, it has encouraged individual members and congregations to support women in following their moral discernment and religious convictions related to their lives and decisions about the completion or termination of a pregnancy.
Sandy Sorensen, the United Church of Christ’s minister for Justice and Witness Ministries, said last week: “While the motive of Dr. Tiller's killer is not yet completely clear, there is no doubt that it sends a message of fear to health care providers and the women they serve. They stand in need of our prayers and support in this challenging time. As people of faith, we cannot remain silent in the midst of words and acts of violence.”
We will not return evil for evil. We will seek the good as we speak about and act upon those issues that are important to us—whether they be reproductive rights, equal protection extended to all people under the law, regardless of sexual orientation, racial equality, the end to torture. We will continue to speak and act even though our positions might be controversial. We will continue to boldly and publicly live out our faith. We will continue to speak up in the name of justice and human decency.
Which brings us back to Jesus.
"Love your enemies," Jesus says. We would like it if he had said something else. We would like it more if he had been less troubling and more “practical.” But as G.K. Chesterton once said of Christianity in general, this approach has not been tried and found wanting. It is still wanting to be tried.
Martin Luther King, Jr. knew as well as anybody in the last fifty years about enemies: he knew them as those who would bomb your home and threaten your children. And because he knew that he had enemies, because he would admit the presence of those who would do harm, he was also able to learn what it meant to love enemies and to show that to the rest of us. King said that love is understanding, redemptive, creative, good will for all. In loving, one seeks to defeat an unjust system rather than individuals who are caught in that system.
It is not enough to simply believe that love will prevail in the world—especially an anemic, passive love that overlooks the wrong—the evil—people do.
In sending his disciples into the world, Jesus told them—and tells us—to be as wise as serpents. We are called to actively embody a loving approach to the evil that we have encountered, not giving into it and at the same time not imitating it.
People come to worship for a variety of reasons. Some seek the peaceful presence of God in the midst of the swirling chaos of their lives. Some seek the healing and the forgiveness of God for their broken lives. Some seek the comfort of God when life is brutal.
I acknowledge that there might be little, if anything, that is peaceful, or healing, or comforting in what I said this morning. And if that is what you needed today and you feel as though you are leaving empty, I apologize.
But let me add this. You are worshipping this morning surrounded by people who each day bring to life the peace, the healing, and the comfort of God. You are worshipping with people who have themselves lived out their faith in difficult and challenging situations, who have taken unpopular stands in the face of opposition. Whether a member, a friend, or a first time visitor, this morning you came to worship God with such people. That is the special gift of this day.
Sometimes have to lift up the troubling realities of the present moment so that together we might bring our best to meet the challenges head on. Know that you are held in the care of this congregation that values the image of God in each one of us. Know that this congregation is willing to act and speak in support of what we value.
May this be our peace.
May this be our comfort.
May this be our healing that we share with each other today and take into the world in the week ahead.
[i] NY Times, editorial 6/1/09