Accepting our Violence
Sermon by Rev Bev Cameron preached at Pitt Street Uniting Church
on Sunday 26th June 2005 (celebrating the 28th anniversary of the Uniting Church in Australia)
Genesis 22: 1-14 - God commands Abraham to Sacrifice Isaac
Four youths gang rape a young mother in front of her children. An aggrieved man takes kindergarten children as hostages and shoots one because he cries. A four year old is murdered by an Iraqi insurgent because he happens to be in the way. A suicide bomber blows himself and twenty others away on an Israel bus. It’s on our TV screens every night. Sometimes we even choose to watch violent TV shows as a way to relax and unwind after a frustrating day. And yet we don’t usually think of ourselves as violent. But, quite clearly, we have that potential.
I’ve drawn inspiration on the matter of violence from the work of Catholic theologian Sebastian Moore1. With guidance from him, we’ll take a new look at the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac. Perhaps we’ll find some wisdom in that bizarre tale.
MESSAGE
Maybe we shall find that only as we come to terms with our innate propensity to violence can we become truly free to love.
Moore says both violence and love come from the same vibrant centre of human energy. Both passions are essential parts of our human nature. But we aren’t doing too well. Violence still wins over love more times than we want to know about
PREPARING THE GROUND
First, let’s prepare the groundwork for our thinking. Let’s be clear from the start that the story of God calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is very largely myth. Critical biblical scholarship makes it clear that the story is not true in the historically validated way we think of as being true today. What is more, those who wrote the story had a point to make - to show the Hebrews as God’s chosen people. They could play fast and loose with any traditions they did have in order to do that. And all we have to go on today, if we wish to check it out historically, is the Genesis story itself plus other folk tales of the time.
And while we’re giving our thinking room to move, let’s remember that the understanding the Ancient Hebrews had of God as a supernatural being existing outside the creation and intervening in human affairs in a rather quixotic way, is not the God many of us know, post Jesus, post Enlightenment, post theory of Evolution and even some would say, post awareness of the groaning of our natural world. We would be more likely to describe God in the terms used by Bishop John Spong as “the ground of our Being, that power which enables us to live courageously, love generously and be all that we can be.” The way we conceive of God will certainly make a difference to the way we think of ourselves and act in the world.
CONTEXT FOR DISCUSSION
The gist of Moore’s argument is that our violence has a fascination which easily seduces us into forgetting the cruelty that is part of it. THIS VIOLENCE IS STIRRED UP BY THE EXCITEMENT OF SEEING ONE’S OWN DESIRE HAPPENING IN ANOTHER PERSON. Just think of disappointed football crowds that riot or street demonstrations that go very wrong. Almost without thought, bystanders join in, caught up in the contagion of passion.
But we don’t want to admit to violence in ourselves. We’re scared of it. And the result of not accepting it is that it gets displaced into other more presentable emotions such as the sense of grievance and injustice. Just recall some of the violent things people say to TV cameras outside law courts when they are unhappy with the verdict.
The only CURE FOR VIOLENCE is LOVE. That’s the positive side of fascination with the other. Where we can accept that it’s OK to have violent feelings aroused in us but not to express them and tap into our loving feelings instead, violence is overcome. I’ll never forget going to the movies with Bruce and seeing THELMA AND LOUISE, a story of two women pushed beyond endurance by macho males, mowing men down with bullets, locking a police officer in the boot of their car and driving gloriously to their extinction over a precipice. It left me on a marvellous and rather self assertive high from the experience of vicarious female violence as a response to male oppression. But I’m happy to say Bruce is still very much alive, still with me, and much loved! If we can have these experiences without feeling we must go and beat someone up, then we are tapping into the same vibrant energy that enables us to love.
So the challenge becomes how to redirect fascination away from violence towards love in order to change lives.
In the case of group violence, IF WE IDENTIFY THE VICTIM, if we know who he or she is, then we defuse the whole force of the group violence. After all, we only go in for group violence because of the thrill of sharing in it, NOT because we aim to inflict pain on a certain, identifiable individual. Their identity is not important. The members of a rape pack don’t want to know their victim’s identity.
ANCIENT RELIGION
By now you may be wondering what happened to the story of Abraham and Isaac. We’re almost there. But first, to set the scene, a word about ancient sacrifice which is a form of group violence.
One thing that horrifies yet fascinates us about much primitive religion is human sacrifice. The Hebrews were also fascinated by this practice of their pagan neighbours.
Human sacrifice served a crucial psychological purpose.
The victim, THE SCAPEGOAT was a way of dealing with highly explosive situations. In the midst of a conflict, an accusing finger is pointed at one member or outsider. Everyone finds themselves agreeing to it. And when the deed is done, there’s a hush. THAT was ANCIENT RELIGION - a sudden release of violence in a shared act of violence, a sacrifice. The god is thought to be satisfied.
Now - and this is an important question - ask yourselves how a religiousness that has to do with mutual respect and moral responsibility towards each other was ever going to establish itself in the ancient world of religion. The two are radically opposed.
ABRAHAM AND ISAAC
The most dramatic example of this tension is the story of Abraham “hearing” God tell him to sacrifice his only son Isaac.
Abraham’s primitive religious soul hears this command as any good pagan would. Human sacrifice is the very stuff of religion, so if you’re serious about religion, sacrifice your son as people at the time regularly did. But something odd, something non-routine is going on here. Man and boy set out alone toward the hill of sacrifice, and on the way the boy asks his father: “Dad, where’s the victim?” Immediately our sympathies are with the victim, and this breaks rule one of sacrifice. That is, when the victim has an identity, the drive to violence is sapped of power.
Then, at the moment of climax, Abraham holding the knife ready to plunge it in, the Angel says, “Abraham, Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy or do him any hurt!” Isaac is no longer the anonymous hooded victim: he is “the boy”. And the long-established habit of human sacrifice that gave its shape to religion, is broken. The spell under which human beings become sacrificial victims to secure good crops is sapped, and “sacrifice” becomes “murder” that Abraham, acutely tuned to the promptings of God, senses is not what God wants.
We learn another important thing from this story, when the Angel points out to Abraham a ram caught in a thicket, and tells him to sacrifice that instead of his son. This suggests that animal sacrifice was a substitute for human sacrifice, an interim arrangement on the way from a religion of human sacrifice to something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
TWO FORCES
What would be so completely different from the use of ritualised violence?
Obviously, our power to love. It has become so obvious to us that God wants us to love one another that we have absolutely no idea of the incredible struggle it has taken historically for this kind of religiousness to establish itself in a psyche that is scared, confused, fascinated, violent and loving by turns and afraid of death. AND IT IS STILL OUR PSYCHE, YOURS AND MINE. That is why we totally fail to love.
Our religion of love is a fiasco, collapsing immediately under economic and social pressure. Just think of the role of the church in Germany in WW II. We can see the futility of much religion in face of ritualised violence. In the Iraq conflict, both sides claim God is with them.
The religious commitment that is needed to actually overcome our violence is revolutionary. It has always depended on a power that is in us and yet beyond us. Grace. Jesus remains our paradigm.
The way forward is to recall THAT THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE AND THE ROOTS OF LOVE ARE ONE AND THE SAME THING: THE ENORMOUS EXCITEMENT AT SEEING OUR PASSION AT WORK IN EACH OTHER. Any love worthy of the name and able to change the world is a redirection of that excitement. That kind of redirection of our raw human energy is what Jesus demonstrates. For me, one of the joys of belonging to this church is the excitement of seeing so many of you doing such loving work in the world. Jesus alive in you!
Unfortunately, our private struggle to redirect the excitement that springs from seeing violence in others is not helped by the kind of God many people still believe in. This is the God portrayed in parts of the Old Testament, a distant but controlling God of vengeance who insists on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is not the God of love we know in Jesus Christ. It is not the kind of compassionate God who has concern for the vulnerable and marginalised and calls us to love our enemies. This vengeful God wants human sacrifice. Is this perhaps the god of those who would insist on the right to own guns?
Never let us forget that our potential for violence is what we are most dishonest about. It has only been through a long and painful historical process of education specifically focussed on Jesus that we have come to see the real God who is love. Through that process, we can continue to learn to redirect our initial undifferentiated fascination towards love rather than violence.
CONCLUSION
We still have a long way to go. We need all the help we can get from the God we name as the ground of our being, that power which calls us to live courageously, love generously and be everything we can be.
A WORD FOR THE UCA
As we celebrate our 28th UCA birthday in times which are difficult for the church as a whole, this message throws us an enormous challenge: to show the surrounding and sceptical community that, at our centre, we do have something different and valuable to offer the world. And that is that we relate to each other – and the world beyond our doors - with love, not violence. Within our denomination, there are passionate differences of belief, there is conflict about the way we should be the Uniting church and there is potential division. Some of these differences result in at least verbal violence, and more rarely, physical violence. For example, those who would reject gay and lesbian persons from positions of church leadership and in some cases from the church itself can make extremely violent comments, quoting from very provocative OT anti-homosexual texts to reinforce their arguments.
Our forthcoming State Synods this year and National Assembly next year will provide public exposure of just how we members of the UCA relate to one another. Let us, with the love of God to help us, pray that in all debates, no matter how divided are members’ views and how passionately they hold them, our representatives have the insight, wisdom and faith to make sure love prevails over violence. That will be our saving grace.
[1] "The Roots of Violence" by Sebastian MOORE, OSB, in New Thinking Summer 2003
Dom Sebastian Moore is a member of the Benedictine community of Downside Abbey, near Bath in England. He has taught theology at Marquette University and Boston College. Among his published works are: Jesus: The Liberator of Desire; The Fire and the Rose are One; and Let this mind be in You. He is a regular contributor to the annual proceedings of Lonergan Workshop. And he has published articles in such publications of the Downside Review, Commonweal, and The Tablet. Aside from his well-known scholarship on the work of Bernard Lonergan, he has also done much work investigating the relationship between religion and psychology.