Rev. Samuel Alexander

Preached at Old First Presbyterian Church

San Francisco, California

January 12, 2003

Sermon 341

Old Testament Reading:            Genesis 1:1-5

{1} In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, {2} the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. {3} Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. {4} And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. {5} God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

New Testament Reading:            Mark 1:4-11

{4} John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. {5} And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. {6} Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. {7} He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. {8} I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." {9} In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. {10} And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. {11} And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

I was brought up in churches where you carry a Bible around, and I’ve been missing it, so I thought I would bring this Bible up here.  For those of you who are visitors I don’t normally carry a Bible around, but I am going to this morning because we are going to do a lot of almost Bible study in this sermon, and I will be referring to passages. Don’t feel you have to look them up in your pew Bibles.

I have one other passage of scripture that I would like to read to you before we begin, and that is Romans 13, the first four verses.  Listen to the word of God.: 

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resist what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment, for rules are not a terror to good conduct but to bad conduct.  Do you wish to have no fear of the authority?  Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for it is God’s servant for your good, but if you do what is wrong you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain.  It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.”

Let us pray.  “Spirit of God, we live in a violent world, and we long to understand how you would have us act in this violent world.  In Christ’s name we pray.  Amen.”

Two weeks ago I delivered a sermon from this pulpit which wasn’t intended to be a long treatise on “War and Peace”.  It did, however, have some strong language about the way I see things working in this country as we prepare, it seems, for war.  A number of people have talked to me about that since then.  Some were disturbed by the fact that it felt as though separation of Church and State was at stake here, and that from the pulpit we shouldn’t make quite that much of a political statement.  I would be willing to admit that to make a one-sided political statement is probably not fair, at least not without examining both sides and understanding how the Scriptures might look at it. But these are theological issues - issues of war and peace, issues of violence and retribution and judgment.  These are theological issues, and I would like to take a look at them, just to talk about them and see what both sides look like. 

The discussion has ranged over these last weeks about whether or not there should be a war at all - universal ethic vs. principled ethic.  There has even been some discussion about the nature of God, whether God is a bloodthirsty God.  (For those of you who have been a part of that conversation, on April 6 I will preach directly to that particular issue, but today I won’t.)  Today we will look at war and peace, and we look at it beginning with Mark’s gospel. 

We have four gospels in our New Testament. We all know that “gospel” means “good news.” But a lot of people don’t know the origin of the word.   

This word was first used in a military sense. Kings in times past would send armies out. They would fight, and they would send messengers back to tell the king what was going on in the battlefield. When a messenger came in with good news it was called “gospel.”

So in Mark it is a good war report that we are getting. It proclaims the activity, the entrance of God into creation. God’s movements are being reported as good news, as successful news; because God is a God of strength, a God of spirit, and a God of love. And so the Gospel of Mark, this raw text without a whole lot of teaching and experts around, talks about the nature of the “good war report”, the nature of the kingdom that God is seeking to set up on earth, the nature of the Kingdom of God.  That’s what the book is written for. 

Now, always in the Bible the king shows the character of the kingdom.  Anytime Israel has a bad king, things do not go well for Israel.  When they have a good king, things do go well for Israel.  I will give you a couple of examples.  In the Book of  1 Kings we read: “Nadab, son of Jeroboam, began to reign over Israel in the second year of King Asa of Judah, and he reigned over Israel for two years.  He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, walking in the ways of his ancestors because of the sin that he caused Israel to commit.”  But - “Jehoshaphat, son of Asa, began to reign over Judah in the fourth year of King Ahab of Israel.  Jehoshaphat was 35 years old when he began to reign, and he reigned for 25 years.  His mother’s name was Azubah, daughter of Shilhi.  He walked in all the ways of his father, Asa.  He did not turn aside from it, doing what was right in the sight of the Lord.”   - - Always from the character of the king being talked about in this Book of Kings, you could tell the character of the kingdom, the direction it was going.  A good king meant that there would be flourishing times, times when God would not seek to punish or judge the nation. A bad king would bring down the wrath of God.

Now, the kings in the Old Testament are referred to as “sons of God.”  When the Psalms refer to the king of Israel they refer to the “son of God.”  So it is in Psalm 2, which is quoted in Mark 1 as Jesus is being baptized.  “A voice came from heaven and said, ‘You are my son, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.’”  That is a quote from Psalm 2 where Son of God is understood to be the King, so we have a war report in the Gospel of Mark.  We have the report of God moving into creation and setting up God’s Kingdom, and we have a King. 

 “Son of God” can mean a lot of other things to us as Christians, things that have developed over the centuries. But for right now the Son of God is the King of the Kingdom God is seeking to set up.  So, what is the character of this King?  Who is this King that comes into the world, of which we have good report?  No one seems to recognize him as the Son of God.  We know that he is the Son of God because Mark tells us, because we hear the voice from heaven. But no human being in the Gospel of Mark ever recognizes Jesus as the King, the Son of God.  They are looking for some other kind of king.

So he heals people, and they don’t recognize him as the King of the Kingdom.  They don’t see the character of God, the healing and intimate touch of the Kingdom of God in him.  He casts out demons.  They don’t recognize the power and the character of God as he casts out demons, as he seeks to free people from spiritual despair.  He fed 5,000 one day, and they still didn’t sense the abundance and flowing power of the Kingdom.  In fact, a few days later he ended up feeding 4,000, just to remake the point in the Gospel of Mark.  He taught, and they still didn’t get it.  The Pharisees didn’t get it, the Scribes didn’t get it, Pilate didn’t get it.  The disciples certainly never got it.  Even the women in Mark didn’t get it, and I say EVEN the women because they are the ones that are closest to hearing and seeing most clearly what Jesus is about in the world. 

Nobody gets it.  They don’t recognize the strength and the power and the quality of the power of God in Jesus -- until one man recognizes it, and he recognizes it near the end of the Gospel. When Jesus has breathed his last breath, and is dead on the Cross, the centurion from Rome looks upon him and said, “Surely this one is the Son of God!”  The Gospel of Mark wants us to understand that the nature of the power of God, the nature of this Kingdom is sacrificial. God’s power comes, and God’s power is shown in this Gospel when he lays down his life, not when he uses coercive force.  The Kingdom of God is based on a power that moves through the crucifixion towards resurrection and hope. 

My surrogate sister, a preaching professor up at the seminary in San Anselmo, can’t stand sermons on Mark Chapter 8.  As she tells all her students, these sermons are hard to preach realistically because right in the center of Mark, Chapter 8 is that verse that says, “Take up your cross and follow me.”  He meant it.  That is the nature of God’s power in the Gospel of Mark, and that should give us pause when we think about beating the drums of war.  It should give us serious pause.

Having said that, you would have to say that the Kingdom of God is not totally here yet, is it?  We do not live in a kingdom filled with the loving power of God.  We live in a kingdom that is still in conflict with that God.  There is a good report, because God has the power to change people and move things forward to establish this Kingdom, but it is not complete. And so some of us ask, and rightly so, - are there moments in human history when it is our moral responsibility to act with violence so that Kingdom of God is not destroyed by a violent world?  Are there moments when we step outside the character of the Kingdom of God and live in this world the way it is? 

People who take this point of view will often point to a passage like the one we read in 1 Kings. And I will read you another one.  Something like this:  “When Zimri began to reign as soon as he had seated himself on his throne he killed all the House of Baasha.  He did not leave him a single male of his kindred or his friends.  Thus Zimri destroyed all of the Baasha according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke against Baasha by the prophet, Jacob.” (1 Kings 16:11,12)  He killed all those people “according to the word of the Lord.”

Now how do we look at a passage?  What kind of sense can we make of a passage like this, over against what we read about the strength and the power of God being seen on the Cross, the nature of the King in the Kingdom being seen on the Cross.  I can tell you how I do it.  I read the Old Testament through the lens of the Cross and the Resurrection. I recognize that these Old Testament stories are about a people that is yearning to find out and understand who God is. They live in a violent world, and so they describe God’s actions in these ways. They recognize and talk about God within the cultural and world view setting in which they live. 

I have to tell you that when I read these stories I do not see them promoting violence.  The Cross and the Resurrection are too powerful for that to be allowed, in my view.  They have something else to offer us; discussions of purity, of the seriousness of the situation, the seriousness of worshiping the one God, and the seriousness of making sure that those who are less fortunate are given what they need.  Still, you would have to say that that is my opinion, something I think, and you would have to say when you read those scriptures that there is a window there.  There is some possibility that the Lord has used violence in the past; and that opens the door to the possibility that at some point in today’s world it may be our moral responsibility to act with violence for the sake of a greater good.

Then there’s Paul.  I read to you that passage in Paul in Chapter 13 of Romans where he talks about the State being instituted by God to keep order, and that it is the instrument of the wrath of God.  The problem with this passage is that Paul is writing at a time when Christians, those who are formed by the Cross and the Resurrection, have no power at all.  He wasn’t trying to describe the way the Christian church or a Christian nation should act once they get hold of the power.  Still it has got to give you pause, if you are a pacifist.  Paul seems to have some understanding that the State can act with violence and carry the wrath of God. 

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What do we do with it all?  It’s tricky, and as a result we have been arguing about it for centuries.  Should we never pick up a sword?  Should we sometimes pick up a sword?  How do we hold on to the tension?  There is one thing Christians cannot do.  Christians cannot ever say to themselves, “Well, we’re good!  We are right!  They are bad!  They are wrong!  We have the right to destroy them!”  That is something Christians can never say.  But that aside, there are those who argue that there is a sense in which we can talk about just war and just cause.  We can open ourselves to the possibility that war can be justified at given moments.  Just War theory has been worked out over the years time and time again.  It needs to be proportional, the war that you wage.  You need to care for the people, the civilians that are in the war torn territory.  There are principles that we can use to look at a war and ask if it has been a just war. But - other people say that the Cross and the Resurrection is simply too powerful an image, too powerful a message from God to allow walking away from the self-sacrificial nature of the Kingdom of God. 

On these two points, just war and pacifism, I think you know where I stand as a man of peace.  I make no apology for it.  I have some sense that this is where God is leading us. I don’t want to make fun of another position, but I still want to take seriously this passage, the one in Mark, where Jesus is baptized into this life of self-sacrificing love.  It brings us all up short because it takes enormous courage to live the way Jesus lived. 

The disciples couldn’t do it.  There is a piece of irony at the end of Mark.  After Jesus has been raised he tells Mary Magdalene to go tell Peter to meet him back in Galilee, as if to say, “Well, you didn’t get it right the first time, so let’s do this over again.”  We don’t get how to live in that way.  It gives us pause.  If we think we need to go to war we need to recognize that human beings have a drive and a push, and they are always tending to move in that direction, and come up with that excuse, “Well this time we have to eradicate evil for the greater good!”  As we see in the Gospel of Mark, everybody, all of the characters want to go that way.  It is a human tendency which this Gospel challenges.

Great courage is required to be a Christian, to live in the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom that is founded on sacrificial power; a Kingdom where we must trust God to bring the outcome that heals and loves.  This is the word of the Lord, and we need to have courage from the Spirit of God to open our hearts and allow ourselves to recognize that there can be times when dying for the Kingdom is a greater good than killing for it.

Let us pray.

“Spirit of God, many people who call you God differ and disagree on these issues.  We long to be faithful to you, every one of us, and we ask that you will give us the courage and give us the wisdom to see our way through these confusing issues and know which way you want us to turn.  In Christ’s name we pray.  Amen"

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