Sermon 1/18/20: God's Secret Weapons of Non-Violence (Pr. Ben Adams)

Pr. Ben Adams

Lectionary 2a

January 18, 2020

God’s Secret Weapons of Non-Violence

You are God’s secret weapon. I know how that sounds, extreme, intense, even aggressive or violent, but if we take our reading from Isaiah seriously today, I think we can find some truth in the assertion that you are God’s secret weapon.

The first verses of Isaiah 49 begin this way, “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified."

To whom this promise is made is somewhat ambiguous, but it does indicate the Lord’s servant, Israel, who is broken and exiled, will be glorified. Whether directed at an individual human agent who is called to a life of service, or at the fragmented exiled community who is given a new-found goal in life to care for others near and far, this call to service is not to be taken for granted.

And the imagery here is striking, like a child yet unborn, a sharp sword hidden in the shadow of God’s hand, or a polished, specially chosen arrow not yet pulled from a quiver and launched, our purpose and life trajectory is kept hidden from the world like a weapon not yet deployed. Although, one day, this servant’s fate and will reveal the fullness of life God would give all nations.

“I’m the arrow, you’re my bow, shoot me forth and I will go.” That lyric is part of the chorus of one of my favorite songs by Matisyahu, an American Jewish reggae rapper.  All of those descriptors of Matisyahu might sound like I made them up like they were thrown together in a random generator, or maybe they sound like the results you’d get from an online quiz as to what kind of musical artist you would be based on some of the letters in your name. Regardless, I do like Matisyahu’s music, and specifically that lyric, “I’m the arrow, you’re my bow, shoot me forth and I will go.” it has been a line that I have returned to over and over again when I struggle to find hope or purpose in my vocation. Knowing that I am a secret weapon in God’s quiver who has been launched, I can trust the trajectory of my flight and know that I will find a home in the target God has aimed me for.

But we do have to wrestle with the fact that secret weapons can cause destruction. So, if we understand ourselves to be secret weapons hidden in the shadow of God’s hand or her quiver, or launched towards a target, can we be non-violent secret weapons? Or if our target is going to be destroyed or killed when the tip of our arrow or sword meets it, can we envision the target to be something like racism, queerphobia, sexism, nationalism, ableism, or all of the above? Can those be the targets that we have been deployed to destroy as secret weapons of God? Thinking of it that way can help start to redeem the image of ourselves as God’s secret weapons.

Let’s take a moment though to imagine a non-violent weapon. A non-violent weapon almost seems like a contradiction, and a Google search might try and convince you that a non-violent weapon doesn’t even exist, only non-lethal ones. But I think as followers of Christ, we can strive to live into both parts of this identity, destroying sin in the world through non-violent tactics.

And we can’t talk about non-violence this weekend without talking about the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. We celebrate King each January on the third Monday which is tomorrow, because it’s the Monday that either falls on, or closest to King’s birthday which was January 15th.  King is celebrated for being one of God’s greatest secret weapons for his work leading the Civil Rights movement. But King had a secret weapon of his own which was non-violence. He learned it from Ghandi, and he brought it to the US struggle for racial justice.  In King’s first book, Strive Towards Freedom, he even says “The Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom”

Christian love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people. As God’s secret weapon, King shows us how powerful non-violence can actually be when it becomes our secret weapon in bloodthirsty world.

But the violence of this world eventually did take the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Despite his total commitment to non-violence, he was assassinated by a violent man with a single shot fired from his Remington rifle. King was yet another victim sacrificed on the altar of American violence.

As followers of Christ, the Lamb of God, we must be like non-violent secret weapons of God destroying the altars and the idols we are sacrificing our own to. Because Jesus was the final sacrifice. Jesus’s death on the cross was meant to end all other sacrifices.

In our Gospel today John the Baptist points to Jesus coming and says, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Gil Bailie, a scholar of religion and violence, elaborates on how it is a reversal of our common sacrificial understanding when we say "Lamb of God." This is the “New Testament way of talking about the scapegoat, with a couple of different nuances. Scapegoat means a smelly he-goat -- belligerent, and so on -- in other words, the sort of creature you want to kick out. "Lamb of God" brings out the innocence. And being "of God" can help bring out the reverse sacrificial direction. Who is it that demands the sacrifice? Is it God? Is it God who has his fist in the air, shouting, "Crucify him!"? Who demands that Jesus die? The crowd. The mob. Us. God only asks that he remain faithful through it all.”

Furthermore, “Jesus, the Lamb of God, comes from the Father and returns to the Father; he is the lamb that God is offering to the sacrificial monster. Who is the sacrificial monster? Humanity. It is humanity's sacrificial predilections that are being exposed and deconstructed in the passion story, so that we can no longer blame it on God. We can no longer say God wanted that sacrifice. This is the Lamb of God: not the lamb of the human community given to God, but the Lamb of God given to the sacrificial human community.”

So, what is it going to take, until we realize that our thirst for blood sacrifice offered to our gods of war and greed are the same idols and altars that Jesus’ death was meant to expose and destroy in humanity. Yet we continue to drop bombs and pull triggers.

When it came to his understanding of sacrifice, King actually advocated that instead of sacrificing others, the church must recapture a sacrificial spirit. In Letter from a Birmingham Jail he says, “the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

Man I feel that statement as real today as it was when King wrote it in 1963.  Jesus, the Lamb of God, takes away the sin of the world by exposing it. With sin exposed, we can be the instruments of God, the secret weapons of non-violence who then destroy this sin in the world. The time was right when King was about this non-violent work, and the time is right today because after all King said, “with the potential destructiveness of modern weapons, the choice today is no longer between violence and non-violence. It is either non-violence or non-existence”

So in an attempt to not end this sermon on such a dire and alarmist note, I offer to you one last bit of hope from Dr. King. He had six principles of nonviolence, and it’s the sixth principle that I would like to leave with you today. And the sixth principle is that the nonviolent resister must have a “deep faith in the future,” stemming from the conviction that “the universe is on the side of justice” As people of faith and children of God we can trust in a future that is just and life-giving because Jesus Christ the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world and in dying to our sacrificial human community shot us like an arrow from his bow, and the moral arc of our trajectory mirrors the moral arc of the universe which always bends towards justice. Amen.