This is the text of a sermon I gave on April 21, 2013, prompted by the Boston Marathon bombing of the previous Monday.
On Violence and Human Weakness
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 21, 2013
Scripture: Revelation 7:9-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
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.
Well, it’s happened again. Of
course, it happens all the time in this country. As of a few days ago more than 3,300 people
had been killed by guns in the United States since the school shooting in
Newtown, Connecticut, last December; but we’re real good at ignoring that
violence. It’s hidden. It’s private.
We don’t notice it. 90% of the
American people support background checks for gun purchases and the Senate
won’t even pass that innocuous and helpful if hardly decisive measure. We notice things like the Boston Marathon
bombing, and we should. I suppose we
knew something like that would happen again.
We didn’t know where, or when, or how, but we knew it would happen. Once again human beings have inflicted death,
dismemberment, and pain on other randomly targeted human beings. The toll:
four dead (five if you count one of the perpetrators, as I think we must)
and over one hundred seventy wounded, many of them severely. It’s happened again, and it won’t be the last
time.
When these things like the Boston Marathon bombing happen we wonder why
someone would do such a horrific thing, and we look for some statement by the
perpetrators about why they did it. That’s
why we’re so glad one of them was taken in alive. Maybe he’ll talk (although there is some
doubt that he’ll ever be able to). When
we ask why something like this happened we want to know the thinking of those
who did it. What was their motive? What compelled them to do it? What statement were they trying to make? What were they trying to accomplish? What were they trying to prove? Those are all interesting and important
questions of course, but here’s the thing.
Those are interesting and important questions, but they are also
superficial questions. The answers to
those questions are interesting and important answers, but they are superficial
answers. The real question we need to
ask probes much deeper. The real answers
we need go much deeper. Of course we ask questions and seek answers
about specific acts of human violence, but the deeper question that we need to
ask but rarely do is why we humans resort to violence at all. Is there a root cause, a fundamental
explanation, of human violence? Is there
something about the human existential condition that prompts us to
violence? It sure seems that there must
be, given how ubiquitous human violence against other humans is. I’m not looking here for an
justification. There is no
justification. I’m looking for an
explanation, which isn’t the same thing.
So this morning I ask: Why? At the most fundamental level, why? Why do we humans so often, so universally,
resort to violence against our fellow humans?
Why do we so rely on violence?
Why do we think that violence will solve our problems when violence itself
is our most fundamental problem, when we now have instruments of violence that
will one day destroy us all if we can’t find a way to stop being violent? Minds far greater than mine have grappled
with that question for ages, but this morning I will be brave enough, or
foolish enough—it’s often a fine line between the two—to suggest an
answer. I am convinced that human
violence, all human violence, is an
expression of human weakness. Not human
strength, human weakness. We so see the
use of force and violence as an expression of strength. It isn’t.
It is grounded in human weakness and is always an expression of human
weakness. And yes, I know. That statement needs a lot of explanation, so
here goes.
We begin with looking at the foundational characteristics of what it is
to be human. We humans are odd
creatures, unique as far as we know among all animal species. We are acutely aware of our own existence,
and we know that we live suspended between a bunch of polar opposites, opposite
forces in our existence that pull us in opposite directions. Here are some of them: We are physical, and we are spiritual. We must survive as creatures, and we strive
to be gods. We are grounded in the
earth, and we grasp for that which is far beyond us. We know we are finite, and we long for the
infinite. We know we are mortal, and we
yearn for immortality. We know we are
weak, and we ache for omnipotence. We
are strange creatures indeed, living always in tension, a tension most of us
don’t think about consciously but that subconsciously we all know is real, we
all know we can’t escape.
Human violence arises out of the existential tension in which all
humans live. Again, that’s not a
justification of violence, only a part of the explanation of it. Specifically human violence arises out of our
inability to gain that which we know we lack.
We long for transcendent, spiritual values—peace, dignity, freedom,
safety, respect. We long for these
things, and we know we don’t have them.
Yes, some of us have more of them than others, but none of us has them
in their fullness. We long for
them. We strive for them. We hurt because we don’t fully have them. We don’t fully have them because we are
creatures not gods, and we handle our creaturely status very badly. We don’t fully have the things for which we
long because we are finite not infinite.
We don’t have them because we are weak not omnipotent. Having the things for which we long in their
fullness simply is not given to us as created beings.
So often we misunderstand why we don’t fully have the things for which
we long. We don’t attribute our lack to
our existential condition. We think we
don’t have the things for which we long in their fullness because others have
taken them from us. Or at least we think
that others threaten to take them from us, which has much the same effect. We feel our lack powerfully, and time after
time we conclude that we must resort to violence against those we think have
taken things from us, or threaten to, to get what we want and don’t have or to
preserve our tenuous hold on the little bit of those things that we do
have. So often to us humans it looks
like violence can get us what we long for and don’t have.
I could use just about any instance of human violence as an example;
but I have only a short time here, and this sermon is already long, so I’ll
give just one example that makes the point. I’ll use the example of extremist
Islamist terrorism. Islamist, not
Islamic. They aren’t the same
thing. I don’t use this example because
I think the Tsarnaev brothers were Islamist terrorists. We don’t know enough yet to say. I don’t use this example because I think that
such terrorism is true to Islam. It
isn’t. It definitely, assuredly,
undoubtedly isn’t, but it is something very much on our minds these past eleven
plus years. We all know what it is. Just think of 9/11 if you need a reminder. What lies behind Islamist terrorism? Not Islam.
That much is plainly true. What
lies behind Islamist terrorism, and indeed behind all terrorism, is human
weakness. Islamic nations are dominated
today by the world’s dominant powers, and they have been for a long time. Islamic people, especially Arabs perhaps but
others too, feel disrespected by the western nations that are the world’s dominant
powers, the United States most of all.
They see wealth they do not have.
They see prestige, influence, and power they had many centuries ago but
do not have today. They see instruments
of American military power used against their people and installed on what to
them is sacred ground. It was, you know,
the installation of an American air base in Saudi Arabia that set off Osama bin
Laden. They see all these things and
many other degrading and disempowering things besides, and they know that they
are impotent to do anything about them.
They feel overmatched. Indeed,
they are overmatched in terms of military, economic, and political power. They know that they are weak, and in their
weakness they resort to violence, to terrorism, to killing and maiming innocent
people against whom they have no personal complaint. Their ability to inflict violence on others
makes them look strong. I suppose it
makes them feel strong, but their violence is grounded not in strength but in
weakness. They resort to violence
because they are too weak to do anything else.
In the case of Islamist terrorists it is quite clear that their
violence arises from and is an expression of their fundamental weakness. In other instances of violence, like the
liberal use of military violence around the world by the United States, the
analysis of the causes of the violence will be different and perhaps more
complex; but I am convinced that all human violence is grounded in and is an
expression of underlying human weakness.
In our weakness we lash out with violence, either individually or as a
nation; and we delude ourselves that we are not weak but strong.
Our faith tradition, Christianity, with its knowledge of the teachings
of Jesus Christ, gives us a different vision.
When we lash out in violence we are never true to our God. We are then never true to Jesus Christ. The God we know in Jesus Christ is radically
nonviolent. Violence sometimes passes as
the wisdom of the world, as when we say we must go to war in order to be safe. Yet our faith tells us that God’s wisdom is
not the wisdom of the world. We heard it
this morning in our reading from 1 Corinthians.
There Paul says “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and
God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” We could say God’s weakness is stronger than
human violence. God calls us to
nonviolence. God calls us to what to the
world looks like weakness. It
isn’t. It is the strength of God. Nonviolence is the strength of God and the wisdom
of God. It is the wisdom and the
strength to which God calls us, foolish as it seems to the world. Our passage from Revelation is also true when
it says that God will wipe away the tears of those who have been through the
great ordeal. God will wipe away our
tears when we have been through the ordeal of violence, both in this world and
in the next. Yet our call is to make it
unnecessary for God to wipe away those tears caused by violence because there
is no more human violence.
I know. It sounds impossible,
but whether or not it is possible isn’t our concern. Our concern is that it is what God calls us
to. There will be more violence. It seems there will always be more
violence. Until we see that violence is
an expression of weakness not of strength there will always be more
violence. Our call is to live in God’s nonviolent
strength not in violent human weakness.
May God help us live into that call.
Amen.
