To Speak Rightly of God, Part 1, On God

I recently gave a three part sermon series on the language we use for God.  Its first two parts lead up to part 3 that addresses the necessity of our beginning, at long last, to use female images for God.  Here's the first of those three sermons.  The other two follow below this one on the blog.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 1:

On God

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 15, 2012

Scripture:  Genesis 1:26-27; Isaiah 55:6-9

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

There is a question that I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time, that I’ve wanted to preach about and not only to discuss in an adult ed. group.  It is the question of our language for God.  Now, I know that “our language for God” probably doesn’t sound like a question to you.  After all, we speak of God all the time without worrying much about the nature of the language we use.  But trust me on this one, it’s a question.  It’s a question for two primary reasons.  The first is the way in which Christians always have and still do understand the words we use for God literally.  The second is the tragic consequences of the Christian tradition’s historic exclusive use of male titles and images for God.  I am convinced that both of these aspects of traditional Christian God talk need to be deconstructed and replaced.  So I am going to preach a three part sermon series, beginning today, on the question of our language for God. 

In this sermon series I want first to share with you some thoughts on the nature of God.  God is after all what we’re talking about when we speak of God.  God, whatever God means, is the object of our God talk, and it turns out that a proper understanding of what we mean when we say God determines how we must understand the nature of our God language.  Then, in the second part of this series next week I will address the question of what a proper understanding of the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God means for a proper understanding of the nature of the language we use when we speak of God.  Finally, in the third part of this series in two weeks, I will turn to the question of the exclusively male language that our tradition has used for God and suggest why we must change that usage to include female images.  I will suggest some appropriate female images for God that we can then start using.

To begin:  Of what do we speak when we speak of God?  A simpler if less theologically precise way of putting that question is Who or What is God?  Philosophers and theologians have grappled with that question for millennia.  They’ve give lots of different answers.  Aristotle called God “the uncaused cause.”  For the ancient Israelites God had a name—Yahweh.  For Hindus God is the ultimate oneness of all being, far beyond anything that can be named.  For Jesus God was Abba, Father.  For the Christians of the Ecumenical Councils from the fourth century CE on God was the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons.  For Muslims God is Allah, which isn’t actually a name but a contraction of Arabic words that mean “the God.”  For theologians of the High Middle Ages in Europe God was that greater than which nothing can be imagined.  For us today God is mostly just God, or the word God with some other word that names some attribute or characteristic of God—God the Father, the Almighty, the Creator, etc.  Islam actually has 99 names for God of this sort.  One of the most commonly used is Allah the Most Merciful.  Actually, Islam has 100 such names for God, but only the camel knows the 100^th.  That’s why camels look so smug and superior.  Theologians often resort to abstractions when speaking of God.   In the twentieth century God became ultimate concern, being itself, and the ground of being.  Theologians speak of the ultimate, the absolute, the infinite.  Or they use words that point to God as something beyond the physical—the spiritual or the numinous, or the transcendent for example.

Pretty obviously God is a difficult concept for us humans to get a handle on.  There is one thing about God, however, that most of these attempts to get a handle on God have in common.  They all point in one way or another to God as other.  To God as different.  To God as beyond that which we normally perceive.  Indeed, one famous definition of God from the twentieth century is “totally other,” although of course theologians insist on saying it in Latin, as if that added anything.  That, I think, is one thing that we can say about God with confidence.  God is other.  God is different.

In the end, when we try to speak of God, we are left with one abiding truth, one abiding aspect of God that remains forever.  God is mystery.  God is ultimate mystery.  Not the kind of mystery Agatha Christie wrote.  Not the kind of mystery that we are to try to figure out but a mystery that we humans can never solve.  A mystery that we should never try to resolve.  A mystery that we are to live with and within, not a puzzle to be figured out with a triumphant Ta Da at our great mental achievement.

God as mystery isn’t a new concept.  We have always somehow dimly perceived that God is ultimately beyond us.  In the Bible, for example, Isaiah has God say “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”  Isaiah 55:8  Yet we have always had reservations about God as pure mystery.  As we have sensed the ultimate unknowability of God we have nonetheless spoken a great deal about God.  We have named God.  We have spoken of God’s will and God’s grace.  We claim to know things about God even as we acknowledge the God is ultimately unknowable.  What’s up with that?  Are we stupid?  Are we nuts to hold to two things both as true when both of them cannot be true?

Well no, we’re neither stupid nor nuts when we do that.  Rather, we are holding onto both sides of a paradox.  A paradox is when two things that cannot both be true are both true.  God is ultimate paradox.  God is known and unknowable.  God is transcendent and immanent.  God is personal and beyond all the limitations of personhood.  It’s not possible for God to be all of those things at once.  It’s not possible, it’s just true.  God is paradox because paradox preserves the ultimate mystery of God.  Paradox points precisely to the way that God is totally other, beyond the bounds of our usual human knowing.

And you may hear the truth that God is ultimately mystery as bad news.  You may well be asking:  If God is so mysterious, so unknowable, what use is God to  me?  It’s a legitimate question, but I think that God as ultimate mystery is actually very good news.  It’s very good news because anything that wasn’t ultimate mystery couldn’t truly be God.  Elizabeth Johnson addresses this truth by saying that rather than signify divine absence, God’s unknowability “fills the world to its depths and then overflows….”  (From The Quest for the Living God.)  God as mystery means that God is truly God.  Anything that we could finally know, could accurately name, could precisely define could not truly be God.  That’s because anything that we can know, name, and define has limits.  It has boundaries that mark it off from everything that it is not.  Yet as the Absolute, the Infinite, the Transcendent, God has no limits.  God has no boundaries.  God’s lack of boundaries and limits, God’s ultimate unknowability, means that God is not something less than God.  That we can in some sense imagine a reality without limits, a reality that we experience but which we can never pin down with our human words and concepts means that we can, however dimly, imagine that which is truly God.  The good news of God as mystery is that we can imagine and connect with a reality that is not less than God, that is indeed God.

The first step then in speaking rightly of God is precisely to realize that whatever we say about God cannot contain the fullness of God.  God transcends our words and our ideas absolutely, and that truth has profound consequences for the nature of our language about God.  To give you just a hint of where this is going, if our language cannot capture or even truly name God, then God is not male.  Which means that if male metaphors or symbols for God, like Father for example, are appropriate, and they are, female metaphors or symbols for God, like Mother for example, are also appropriate.  More about the consequences of God as mystery for our language about God is the subject of next week’s sermon.  Stay tuned.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 2, On God Language

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 2:

On God Language

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 22, 2012

Scripture:  Exodus 3:13-15

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Welcome to the second part of our three part sermon series on the language we use for God.  I want to thank Jane for stepping in for me last Sunday and reading the first sermon in the series for me.  And I want to apologize to her too.  As she said to me after the service last Sunday when we spoke on the phone, that was a very heady sermon.  I know, and I know that this whole series is pretty heady.  In other words this sermon series is very me.  It’s not very Jane, not that she disagrees with the points it makes.  In reading it she was definitely giving you me, not herself.  So Jane, thank you; and I’m sorry I couldn’t be here to give that sermon myself.

In that first sermon in this series I stressed the point that God is and always remains ultimate mystery.  Not a mystery we are to solve but an eternal mystery because God, who on the one hand is always present with us, is also and paradoxically always infinitely beyond us and our human conceptions and understandings.  I said that the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God turns out to have consequences for the nature of the language that we use when we speak of God.  Those consequences of the nature of God, and specifically of God as transcendent mystery, for the nature of our God talk are the subject of this second sermon in this series.

The human desire, indeed the human need, to speak of God is universal.  All human cultures have spoken of God.  Perhaps they have spoken of gods rather than God.  Perhaps they have spoken of Brahman or the Tao, concepts for ultimate reality that are utterly impersonal and without any human characteristics at all.  However they’ve done it, all human cultures have spoken of God.  Our does too.

Yet that human desire, that human need to speak of God presents us humans with an enormous dilemma, or at least it does if we have a proper understanding of that of which we speak when we speak of God.  God is mystery.  God is transcendent.  God is other than and beyond the created world in which we live.  That’s one prong of the dilemma.  The other is this:  We desire to speak of God, yet the only tool we have with which to do it is human language.  We wish to speak, but we can speak only in human words.  That’s the other prong of our dilemma because the human language that is the only tool we have with which to speak of God arises within and is part of the created world that God so utterly transcends.  Because God transcends creation, and because our language is part of creation, God transcends our language.  God is “totally other” than creation (to use a phrase from last week’s sermon), and God is totally other than our language.

Let me use an example to illustrate our dilemma when we try to speak of God.  Behind the house that was my parents’ in Eugene is a great tree.  It’s a tulip tree, and I have always loved that tree.  I call it my tree.  It has grown from a little sapling that we planted many years ago into a large, magnificent tree today.  I can speak with precision and accuracy about that tree.  I can speak precisely of its height, the color and shape of its leaves, the circumference of its trunk.  With a little more investigation I could describe its roots and measure their length and depth.  With more investigation and a microscope to aid my observation I could describe my tree’s cellular structure.  Well maybe I couldn’t.  I flunked plants in high school, but somebody could.  These and many more things about my tree I can observe with my human senses and describe most adequately using human language.  There is nothing about my tree and nothing about human language that means my language cannot adequately describe my tree.  It can.

It is not so with God.  God and human language are of essentially different natures.  Human language is created, God is not created.  Human language is finite, God is infinite.  Human language is a human creation, God (our friendly local atheists to the contrary notwithstanding) is not a human creation.  Human language arises out of and is part of human life within creation.  God is beyond creation.  Human language is a tool humans have the capacity to create and have created to facilitate their existence within creation.  God creates creation, is immanent in it, but ultimately remains beyond it and is different from it.

So we’re left with a big question:  If God is so transcendent of and different from our created human existence with its human language, and if human language is all we have with which to speak of God, how can we speak of God at all?  Isn’t our language, which is the only tool we have, completely inadequate for the task of speaking of God?

The answer, or at least the beginning of an answer, to that question is that indeed we cannot speak of God, indeed our language is completely inadequate for speaking of God, if we understand the statements we make about God to be the same kind of statements that I can make about my tree.  That is, we cannot speak of God, and our language is completely inadequate to speak of God, if we understand our statements about God literally, that is, if we understand them to be stating facts about God the same way my statements about my tree state facts about that tree.  If we understand our statements about God that way we are saying that God and my tree are on the same order of existence, that they exist on the same level of creation and we can talk about them the same way.  In other words, when we understand our statements about God literally, when we understand them to be stating facts about God, we bring God down to the level of my tree.  In other words, we make God a thing.  Yet of course God is not a thing.  Things are created.  There was a time when they were not.  God is not created.  There never was a time when God was not.  We cannot make literal, factual statements about God with our human language without making God less than God.

So is there no legitimate way we can make statements about God at all?  Well yes, actually, there is a legitimate way we can make statements about God.  We can make legitimate statements about God in our human language without making God less than God if we understand our language about God not literally, that is, not factually, but symbolically. 

OK, our language about God has to be symbolic.  Our words for God are symbols, but what’s a symbol?  For our purposes here a symbol is a word.  It can also be an object, like the cross, but for now we’ll consider a symbol to be a word.  A symbol is a word that isn’t taken literally but that points beyond itself to something else, something beyond itself, something transcendent, something to which the symbol can connect us but that it cannot capture, define, or fully and accurately encompass.[1] 

Again, perhaps, an example will help.  One of the most common words for God in the Christian tradition is Father.  Christians call God Father all the time—Our Father, who art in heaven; Heavenly Father; the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so on.  When we call God Father we are probably already using the word symbolically even perhaps without knowing it.  You can see the symbolic nature of the word Father for God if you will consider all of the ways that God is not your father.  God didn’t beget you biologically, a human male did.  God didn’t raise you in any human sense.  Human beings did; and probably, although not necessarily, one of those people was a man.  Ancient Israel may have thought of the god Yahweh as a male person of sorts, but I doubt that any of us really thinks God is a male person or anything much like a male person.  We call God Father all the time, but we can recognize the limitations of that word for God.  There are lots of ways in which God is not father.

So is it inappropriate to call God Father?  No, calling God Father is perfectly appropriate as long as we recognize the symbolic nature of the word father when we apply it to God.  Calling God Father is appropriate if, as many of us have, we have experienced God as present in our lives in a way that we experience as fatherly.  There is nothing wrong with calling God Father if you also recognize that God isn’t literally father but is symbolically father.  Father doesn’t pin God down.  Father isn’t God’s essence.  God as Father is a symbol not a fact.  The word father can point to something about God.  It may truly express something about our experience of God.  In that sense calling God Father may be true, but it is also necessarily false.   God may be like a father to you, but at the same time God is not a father to you.  That’s how you know that the word Father as applied to God is a symbol not a fact.

It cannot be otherwise.  Our words for God must be symbols not facts because God transcends our words absolutely.  If God did not transcend our words God would not truly be God.  God would be just another fact, and God is surely not just another fact.

Now, in preparation for next week’s final sermon in this series, I invite you to consider briefly what the symbolic nature of our language for God means for the Christian tradition’s historic exclusive use of male images for God.  Is God male?  No, God transcends such biological distinctions as male and female.  Do our male images for God, like Father, define, capture, or fully characterize God?  No, God transcends those images absolutely.  So if we may experience God as Father but God is also not Father, are male images like Father the only appropriate images for God?  Stay tuned.

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[1] For a fuller discussion of symbols see my book Liberating Christianity, Chapter 3.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 3 She Who Is

This is the third sermon in my sermon series on our language for God.  The other two appear above.

To Speak Rightly of God, Part 3:  She Who Is

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 29, 2012

Scripture:  Genesis 1:26-27; Luke 15:8-10

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

So here we are.  We’ve come to the third and final sermon in this three part series on the language we use for God.  In the first two sermons we looked at the nature of that of which we speak when we speak of God and found that God, while always paradoxically present with us in the world, is ultimate mystery, transcendent, beyond, totally other.  In the second sermon we looked at what that understanding of God means for language for God and found that our God language is necessarily symbolic not factual.  Now we come to the third and final sermon, and I understand perfectly if you’re saying to yourself, or even out loud to others, Why in heaven’s name has Sorenson subjected us to these sermons that are more like theology lectures than sermons?  I freely admit that these sermons are more like theology lectures than like real sermons; but today I ask you to bear with me one more Sunday, because as heady as the subject of this series has been, this stuff is really important.  Today we turn to the necessity of using feminine images for God, and that’s really, really important.

It’s really important because the language that we use for God matters.  It matters a lot.  As Elizabeth Johnson, one of my teachers, one of my favorite theologians, and a real hero to people of faith today because of the outrageous and unfounded attacks on her work by the Catholic hierarchy, says:

“The symbol of God functions as the primary symbol of the whole religious system, the ultimate point of reference for understanding experience, life, and the world.  Hence, the way in which a faith community shapes language about God implicitly represents what it takes to be the highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty.  She Who Is

What we say about God both reflects and shapes what we take to be good, true, and beautiful; and that really matters.  Our tradition’s history of using exclusively male images for God matters.

I hear women say that they do not feel excluded by male language for God.  Some of you have said that to me.  Good.  I’m glad you don’t feel excluded.  But I have to tell you that the issue we’re addressing of the use of feminine images for God is larger than whether individual women do or do not feel excluded by exclusively male language for God.  Like all true symbols, the symbols we use for God function, as Elizabeth Johnson says; and they function in the psyche of people and of whole cultures whether individual people are aware of their functioning or not.  The Christian tradition’s exclusive use of male language for God has cultural consequences even if on the individual level we are not conscious of those consequences.  That’s why the issue of the language we use for God is so important.

The tragic but undeniable truth is that throughout Christian history women have been and still are dismissed, diminished, and disparaged by sexist cultures in church and society.  Patrimony—rule by men, excludes them.  Androcentrism—the centrality of the male—diminishes them.  Misogyny—hatred of women—degrades and even dehumanizes them.  The sexism of the Christian tradition cannot be overemphasized.  It appears even in the later writings of the New Testament, especially in the letters known as the pastoral letters, which seek to limit the role of women in the church.  In the high middle ages St. Thomas Aquinas, still a towering figure and unavoidable authority in Catholic theology, taught that women are inferior to men in every way, that they are essentially misbegotten men.  Martin Luther, the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation, agreed, saying that women were created only to serve men and to bear children.  Our Congregationalist forbears in New England branded independent women as witches and even killed some of them.  Today by far most Christians belong to churches that will not ordain women to the full ministry of Jesus Christ, a fact we in the progressive UCC would do well to remember.  Even in our secular American society sexism persists.  Women still don’t earn equal pay for equal work, for example.  Christianity has a miserable record on its treatment of women both in the past and today.

Exclusively male language for God not only expresses Christian sexism, it is a ground of Christian sexism.  It perpetuates Christian sexism.  Over and over Christianity says God is Father.  It calls God He.  It doesn’t say God is Mother.  It doesn’t call God She.  We hear it over and over, and we learn, subconsciously perhaps but all the more powerfully for that, that God is male.  That men are more like God than women are, that God is more like men than God is like women.  Because, as Elizabeth says, our language for God reflects what we take to be the highest good and greatest beauty we learn that male is the human norm.  We learn that women somehow deviate from the human norm, are somehow less than the human norm.

Let me give you an example of how unconscious sexism works.  Have you ever noticed how our young girls, our daughters and granddaughters, call all of their stuffed animals “he”?  They do, or at least until very recently they did.  They learn very young that male is the norm.  I was pleased recently when I heard my five year old grandson call his favorite stuffed animal, called Baby Bear, she; but surely that’s an exception among us.  In our society and in our faith tradition male is the norm, and our exclusively male language for God is both a source and a buttress of that sexist conception.

We have learned that God is beyond all gender distinctions.  We have learned that our language for God is symbolic.  We have learned, I hope, that our exclusively male symbols for God are destructive.  They diminish women, whom Genesis says are made in the image and likeness of God every bit as much as men are.

So if all of that is true, and I am convinced that it is, why don’t we use female images for God?  We call God Father.  Why don’t we call God Mother?  We call God He.  Why don’t we call God She?  Some Christians do.  Elizabeth Johnson’s  primary symbol for God is “She Who Is.”  I am convinced that it is imperative that we too start using female words and images for God.

Throughout my ten and a half years here as your pastor I have actually avoided male images for God.  I have tried to use gender neutral ones; but, as Elizabeth Johnson taught me long ago, it’s not enough.  Gender neutral images aren’t enough because they don’t do enough to correct the destructive imbalance in our God image that our centuries of exclusively male language have created.  Our hymnal, the New Century Hymnal, also avoids male images for God, but it has only a few female ones.  I’ve managed to find a couple of hymns that do, and we’ll sing them in this service.  I wish there were more of them.

My friends, I intend to start using female images for God in our worship.  Not exclusively, for God isn’t female any more than God is male.  I will however continue to avoid male images because of the crying need for a corrective to all of those male images that we’ve all heard for so long.  My purpose in this whole, heady three part sermon series has been to explain the rationale, the justification, and the necessity for us to start using female words and images for God.  I didn’t want to spring them on you unawares.  So you will hear me call God Mother.  You will hear me call God She.  You will hear me start the Lord’s Prayer the way they do at University Congregational UCC in Seattle, my home church before I got the call here as your pastor, namely “Our Father, Our Mother who art in heaven….”  I hope you will understand.  More than that, I hope you will join me as we reject a harmful part of our tradition and move into new, broader, healthier, truer images of God. 

It won’t be easy.  I know that.  We are all products of a faith tradition that has never used female images for God.  We’ve never, or at best have only rarely, heard them.  They sound strange.  They grate even.  I know that.  I also know that it’s time, indeed it’s way past time, for us to take corrective action.  The symbol of God functions.  Exclusively male symbols for God function destructively.  God is neither name nor female.  Our words for God, be they male, female, or gender neutral, are symbols that point to God not facts about God.  Female images for God are every bit as appropriate as male ones, and they are much more needed today.  “In God’s image God created them.  Male and female God created them.”  Women too bear the image and likeness of God, and God may come to us in images of women and from the lives of women.  It’s time.  It’s way past time.  So let us pray to God our Mother.  Let us praise the name of She Who Is, the great I AM in feminine guise.  It’s time.  It’s way past time.  Amen.

On Peace

The Christian education folks at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, the church I serve as pastor, decided earlier this year that they wanted to do a vacation bible school for our children.  As they worked on that project they changed from doing a traditional vacation bible school to doing what they are calling a "peace camp."  They will teach the children about peace and will help them build a peace pole, a pole with the words "may peace prevail on earth" on it in four different languages.  They will install the pole on the grounds of the church as a permanent expression of our commitment to peace.

I can think of little more important in the world today than teaching children, and all people for that matter, about peace and specifically about the Bible's vision of peace, which is very different from the world's vision of peace.  So today, the day before our peace camp starts, I build the worship service around the theme of peace the way the Bible sees it.  Here's the sermon from that service.  May it inspire all who read it to think anew about the ways of peace.

On Peace

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 8, 2012 

Scripture:  Micah 4:3-4; Matthew 5:38-46; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It doesn’t make any sense, does it.  Jesus says “Love your enemies.”  He says “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not resist an evildoer violently.  He’s kidding, right?  We’ve got no business loving our enemies.  They hate us, and the only sensible thing to do it to hate them back.  How else are we going to defend ourselves from them?  Don’t use violence to resist an evildoer?  Nothing else works!  Oh, of course all that love your enemies stuff, all that beat your swords into plowshares stuff is very nice and all; but we live in the real world, not in some fairy tale where everyone is nice and peaceful.   The world just isn’t like that.

Now let me ask you something, or rather let me ask you quietly to ask yourself something.  How many of you just now as I said those things were shaking your heads and saying yes, that’s right?  How many of you agree with that rejection of nonviolence as unrealistic and even foolish?  It’s perfectly understandable if you do.  What I just gave you is the voice of the world on the issue of violence and war, of nonviolence and peace; and we all live in the world.  We’ve all been conditioned by the world.  We’re all immersed in the world’s way of seeing things from the moment of our birth until the moment of our death.  In the world’s way of seeing things that rejection of love of enemies and nonviolence as the way to peace just makes sense.  It’s the only realistic way to see things.

But here’s the thing.  The Bible is the foundational book of our faith, and the Bible really does have a different view of the matter.  The Bible really does call us to a different view of the matter.  We call Jesus savior and Lord, and Jesus really was a prophet of nonviolence.  As we heard in our reading from 2 Corinthians Paul really did consider what the world considers weakness to be true strength.  We can just dismiss all that out of hand if we want, but we can’t just dismiss it out of hand if, as we claim, we take the Bible seriously.  We can’t just dismiss it out of hand if, as we claim, we believe that Jesus is our savior and Lord.  So I invite you now to come with me on a brief journey into the Bible’s way of seeing issues of violence and peace, into Jesus’ way of seeing issues of violence and peace, and to consider them afresh.

Jesus is the Bible’s prophet of nonviolence par excellence, but the Bible’s teachings on peace go back much farther than Jesus.  In the Psalms, for example, peace is one of God’s greatest gifts to the people.  Thus Psalm 4 says “I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”  In the Psalms peace is a goal to which all should aspire.  Thus Psalm 34 says “seek peace and pursue it.”  For the prophets too peace is God’s gift to the people.  Thus Isaiah has God say “my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed.”  Isaiah 54:10  And then there is the great prophecy of peace from Micah that we recited as our call to worship this morning:  “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation shall not life up arms against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  It is one of the most enduring images of peace in all of scripture.

Of course, the world promises people peace too, but the Bible’s vision of peace is very different from the world’s vision of peace.  Or perhaps better, the Bible’s vision of how to attain peace is very different from the world’s vision of how to attain peace.  The world seeks peace through violence.  The world thinks that war, which is the opposite of peace, can bring peace.  Thus we call a war between imperial powers that decimates a continent and kills a generation of young men a “war to end all wars.”  We fight a “war on terror,” thinking that raining death and destruction upon people who already hate us will make them stop hating us.  That is the world’s vision of peace, peace through violence, and when you boil it down to its essence like that it really doesn’t make much sense, does it.

The Bible has a different vision, and a much better one.  The Bible envisions peace attained not through the opposite of peace but through the ways that truly make for peace, namely through economic justice and nonviolence.  We see the justice part of the Bible’s vision very clearly in our call to worship from Micah.  The prophet envisions a world free from war, and he sees how such a world can be created.  He prophesies peace, then says “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.”  Using an agricultural image like his image of the implements of war turned into the implements of peaceful and productive agricultural pursuits, Micah prophesies a world that is at peace, without the need for the implements of war, because it a world of distributive economic justice.  That is, it is a world in which all have enough.  All are secure in their material needs.  It is a world without poverty.  It is a world in which the rich do not exploit the poor.  That kind of justice, economic, distributive justice, may be a consequence of policies that may be pursued in peacetime, but the Bible knows that such justice is also and more importantly a cause of peace, a prerequisite of peace, a sine qua non of peace.

And the Bible knows that a true lasting peace cannot be created through violence.  A true lasting peace must be achieved through nonviolence.  That is Jesus’ message especially but not only in the brief passage we heard from the Sermon on the Mount.  There Jesus says “love your enemies.”  As a bumper sticker put out by the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches (which the UCC is not but I wish it were) says “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  Jesus says “do not resist an evildoer,” and the word translated as “resist” means to resist violently, to resist through military force, as the late, great Walter Wink has taught us.  When he says turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, go the second mile Jesus gives us examples of how we are to resist evil.  Not with violence but through creative, assertive nonviolent resistance.  (If you’re not familiar with that interpretation of Jesus’ sayings on nonviolence please let me know.  I’ll be happy to explain it to you in greater detail after the service.)  The Bible’s vision of peace is a vision of nonviolence.  It is a vision of a world of economic justice and peace achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil.

And many people respond:  Well, isn’t that nice.  It’s nice they say, but it’s wildly unrealistic.  It can’t be done.  It doesn’t work, not in this world anyway.  Maybe in some ideal world up in heaven, but not here.  That’s what advocates of the Bible’s vision of peace always hear, but let me ask you something:  Has the world’s way of violence ever brought lasting peace?  The only possible answer to that question is no, it hasn’t.  Violence has defeated enemies, but it has never put an end to violence.  That “war to end all wars” ended in 1918 and led directly to an even bigger war that killed even more millions of people a few short years later.  Since then our country has bounced from one war to another—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan, and those are only the major ones.  There have been lots of minor ones too.  We always say our wars are necessary to bring peace, and they never bring true peace.  They never result in an end to war.  It’s only a matter of time, and usually not very much time at that, before we’re back at war again.  People say nonviolence doesn’t work.  I say how do you know?  Have we ever really tried it?  And I say why is it so hard for the world to understand that it is precisely violence that doesn’t work?  I don’t see how history teaches any other lesson.

The Bible has a better vision than the world’s vision.  Jesus had a better vision than the world’s vision.  It is a vision of real peace, lasting peace, just peace.  It is a vision of peace through justice for all God’s people and of nonviolence as both its end and as its means.  It is a vision of peace that says you attain peace by being peaceful not by being violent.  It is a vision that knows with the sages of many times and many faith traditions that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.

Starting tomorrow many of our children will spend four days studying peace.  They will create a peace pole, a symbol of our faith’s abiding commitment to peace.  To peace the way the Bible sees it.  To peace the way Jesus saw it.  Peace the way God lives it and calls us to live it.  May they learn well.  May we learn well.  Amen.