On Violence and Human Weakness

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.