Texts:
Genesis 21:1-21,
Micah 4:3-7, Hebrews 13: 1-3, 5-6
Thank you. And hello, friends.
Back in January, when Marcia Harrington gave her teaching on God’s covenant with Abraham, she mentioned that our mission group is reading a book together, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Sacks served as the chief Rabbi for the United Kingdom for over 20 years and his very timely book was published here less than a year ago.
I have been very grateful for this book this Lenten season because, for the past year, I have had a sense that the world seems to be falling apart. I have been aware of a lot of ideologically motivated violence all over the world, and I have found this sad and challenging to my perceptions of the world.
This year we all became more aware of increasingly violent conflicts that are forcing people from their homes all over the world. The United Nations estimates that there are 60 million people worldwide who have been displaced by violent conflicts and natural disasters. Tens of thousands of people continue to flood into Europe seeking safety from violence, much of it religious violence, in Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, and Nigeria, the list goes on.
I have been horrified at what seems to be an explosion of violence in the world, in particular a rise of extreme violence perpetrated in the name of religion. When I looked into it more, it turned out I wasn’t just imagining this problem. There has been an exponential increase in terror attacks since 2004.
Between 2004 and 2014, there were over 80,000 terrorist attacks around the world, primarily occurring in Muslim countries. Christians, Muslims and Jews all around the world have become victims of terrorism that are in some cases are so extreme and thorough as to reach the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing. The super-violent ISIS and Boko Haram, both of which are radical Islamists, have been especially dangerous as they gain power.
Unlike the Nazis who carefully hid their crimes from the world, today’s terrorists are advertising their atrocities to the world, using professionally produced videos that they spread using social media. Even though Islamic theologians have deemed these kinds of terrorist actions forbidden, sinful, and contrary to the Koran, Radical Islamists’ lack of conscience in committing these horrible acts is breathtaking. In his book, Sacks writes that one survivor of an attack on a Nigerian village by Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. ‘They told us they were doing God’s work even those all the men they shot in front of me were Muslims. They seemed happy.”
This is beyond shocking to me. Brutal mass killings and kidnappings are alien to our concept of humanity.
So, in this really troubled frame of mind, I came looking to this book for help to understand what is going on. Why such a seemingly sudden surge of religious violence now? And is there something inherent to religion that leads to violence? We as Christians have this shared Abrahamic faith tradition with Islam. Is there something in our shared faith tradition that can contradict the power of this radicalized violence? These are some things I’ll explore today, leaning very heavily on the Sacks’s book.
To the student of history, religious violence is a repeat of a very old story. Western history is full of wars, colonization, and oppression in the name of religion, particularly Christianity. But here in comfortable Western civilization in the 21st century, I guess, I had hoped that the modern world had evolved past this. Haven’t modern Western values triumphed – the concept that every individual has rights and freedoms, that life is precious, that tolerance of difference and religious freedom are hallmarks of civilization?
But Rabbi Sacks says that today’s rise in religious extremism was predictable.
Sacks points out that the reason for this upsurge in religious fundamentalism is because humans seek meaning in their lives. Sacks argues that modern Western values have given us a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning. Religion has seen resurgence because humans find it hard to live without meaning.
As Sacks puts it,
Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us on how to use it. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose but on principal refuses to guide as to how to choose.”
Religion, on the other hand, can offer this guidance to answer some of life’s fundamental questions: Who am I? Why am I here? And how shall I live?
Western modernism gives us individualism, but, Sacks argues, the world’s great faiths provide identity. With religious faith come community, loyalty, direction, and a code of conduct and set of rules for the moral and spiritual life. That’s a powerful set of forces.
Unfortunately, over the last fifty years, particularly in the Middle East, a lot of money has been poured into a network of schools of religious education that have taught that loving God means hating the enemies of God. Teaching and preaching of hate has become a tool to provide a strong identity for people who wish to stand apart from secular, Western values.
What Sacks says is imperative for Muslims, Christians and Jews today is to emphatically put forth the counter-narrative, that loving God means welcoming the stranger, that is means loving the Other. And we have the strength of our shared faith heritage to back up that assertion, that loving God excludes no one.
**
The scripture passages we heard are not the lectionary passages for this weekend. The Hebrew scripture passage for this weekend is from Genesis chapter 15, about God making a covenant with Abraham, promising that his descendants will number as the stars.
The scripture I chose is from Genesis Chapter 21, when God finally gives Sarah and Abraham the son that God promised. Isaac is finally born. And then, Sarah acts out of her jealousy of Hagar. Hagar was Abraham and Sarah’s slave girl. Several chapters before, when Abraham and Sarah still thought they were never going to be able to have a child of their own, Hagar bore a son for Abraham. In this story Sarah sees the other woman, Hagar, and her child Ishmael, as threats, and she banishes them to the desert alone where they nearly die. That’s awful – we are supposed to see that as awful. But God loves Hagar and Ishmael, and provides them water in the desert, saving their lives.
Now I remind you that this is part of the story of Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it is a story of rivalry and dangerous family conflict.
Even the plan for this foundational family is a messy one, with conflict. But God does not play favorites. He loves them all.
Not only that, but we find ourselves sympathizing with Hagar and Ishmael who are, to Abraham and Sarah, the outsiders. We are forced to confront the humanness of every character in this story. Our heart goes out to the slave woman and her son who will not inherit along with Isaac. We empathize with the Other.
**
I think we’re probably all familiar with Genesis Chapter 1, verse 27, “So God created humankind in his image. In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” This is a simple, familiar line but it is an important reminder of one of our core shared values – that all humans are made in the likeness of God. From this concept, we can assert that to love God, you must first honor the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of God.
Another part of the legacy of our Abrahamic faith is a hope for peace. The reading I chose was from Micah, but other prophets, including Isaiah and Jeremiah, share a vision for a peaceable future. In Isaiah, a verse reads, “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” What an incredibly audacious vision!
Human history is a long story of wars over scarce resources, conflicts, and violence against the Other. But in Micah’s vision, nation shall not lift sword against nation, and God will collect those who have been driven away, and God will lift up the powerless.
And so it is important to point out that while these verses are familiar to us in this room, they are pretty revolutionary. The imperative to acknowledge the humanity – that of God – in the Other, and to dare to hope for a peaceable and just world, these concepts do make the Abrahamic faiths special.
Hebrew scriptures are also full of stories in which the stranger turns out to be a helper. God is constantly reminding the us to welcome the stranger, because, he says, you were once a stranger in a strange land. The history of the Israelites, wandering the desert, and in slavery in Egypt, serves as a reminder to relate to and show compassion for the Other.
Deuteronomy 10: 19 You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
God calls us to imagine ourselves as the strangers. This is the only way to defeat the most powerful drive to evil: the sense of being threatened by the Other, the stranger.
Our reading today from Christian scripture comes from Paul’s letter to the Hebrews and it is a reminder of this very tradition. Paul says, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that, some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
Abraham’s God is the power that rescues the powerless. God hears the cry of the powerless. If we are God’s followers, so do we.
**
While we in this room might have already known this, it is worth explicitly stating that terrorism in the name of religion is blasphemy. While religion obviously can and does get used to justify violence and hatred, that is a travesty of our faith. To proclaim war or to commit terrorism in the name of God is idolatry. To claim to perpetrate violence against innocent people in the name of God is to try to force God’s image into a likeness of our own making, instead of acknowledging that we are all to be in God’s image.
What is necessary at this time is for people of faith – Christians, Jews and Muslims – to come forward with this authentic understanding of our shared faith tradition.
That we are all blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed.
God is calling us, Rabbi Sacks says, “Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and to live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honoring God’s name by honoring God’s image, [the image that is reflected in all] humankind.”
Thank you.
Reference: Sacks, Jonathan, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, New York, NY, Schocken Books, 2015.