Reject the Logic of Violence

Reclaim peace.

Sermon Text: Mark 1:1-8

In our Scripture this morning, Mark is picking up the thread we heard in last week’s text from Isaiah. Invoking the prophet’s description about what God’s coming will look like—a future where mountains are flattened, the low places lifted up—the herald of this radical future is finally embodied. The big moment thousands of years of communal religious history has built toward is here. The harbinger of peace, ending years of cyclical violence—of conquering and being conquered—a millennia’s cumulative yearning has finally arrived, Mark is telling us. Isaiah’s grand messenger, the one who prepares the way for God. Here he comes! Clothed in camel hair. Eating bugs. Daring us to look behind him—perhaps there’s a more regal messenger waiting in the wings. Maybe John is the warm-up guy.

But no, it’s just John. What’s interesting, however, is that while a lot of preachers—clearly myself included—will play the strangeness of John’s attire for a chuckle, his appearance wouldn’t actually be strange to the folks who saw him. Camel hair was not some unknown fabric, it’s been a staple of Bedouin communities as long as people have domesticated camels. Similarly, the locusts are not a wild departure from a nomadic diet. When you live in the desert, sometimes you eat bugs. John doesn’t look unfamiliar, he just looks like a shepherd. A poor person. And that, for Mark, is what makes this messenger so remarkable: Not that he’s somehow unique but the fact that he is common. The revolutionary part is that God’s coming is proclaimed by a voice from the margins, when people have grown so accustomed to hearing God’s words from the empire’s mouth.

And that message in Mark is particularly potent because of what is happening in Israel’s collective religious life during the period of Jesus’ ministry. Before we go any further, a reminder that any frame seeking to set Jesus against the Pharisees, or suggesting Christ came to replace Judaism, is fundamentally antisemitic. You cannot understand who Jesus was, how God shows up at this point in history, without understanding that this is an intrareligious conversation. However, similarly, don’t let the fact that this was a disagreement inside Jewish community downplay the very real truth that—in this period—the conflict within Judaism was reaching a fever pitch—one that, forty years later, would culminate in a violent rebellion against the Roman Empire and the destruction of the second temple.

So, what’s going on? And what does it have to do with our new friend John? Obviously, it goes beyond the scope of any sermon to fully explain all the nuances. However, the fundamental tension bubbling over is that Rome, who occupied Israel and forced them to pay taxes to the empire, used the religious power concentrated in the temple and its officials to control the Jewish people. The territory of Judea is ruled by client kings, like Herod who shows up in our Christmas story. These rulers were Jewish, but were often raised in Rome, and their responsibility was to maintain Roman control of the province and keep taxes flowing. And one of the central forms of that collaboration was wedding Jewish religious practice to imperial power. So, for example, Herod puts a giant Roman Eagle on the entrance to the Temple. He replaces some of the priests with people loyal to him. “You can worship your God,” the Pax Romana said, “as long as you’re also swearing fealty to Rome.”

And there were a great many people who saw through this unholy marriage. Who resented the way their faith was being used to prop up a system that oppressed them. Who understood that you cannot worship God and Caesar. And into the middle of that simmering conflict strides John. Daring to speak on God’s behalf, far from the temple. And coming with a message that, in fact, those who use God’s name to defend Roman violence are speaking for Rome, not God. He brings the dangerous message that God is not moving in faith that has been corrupted by empire, but is alive in the wilderness.

John’s words and context are an eternal reminder to be suspicious of the ways that power distorts religion, the way that it can use God’s explicit and repeated desire for peace as means to justify violence. And it’s a prescient warning, because the history of Christianity and peacemaking has been a struggle between Christians who follow that voice from the wilderness and those who invoke God to justify war.

The Crusades are one of history’s more famous religious conflicts, in no small part because of how overt its advocates were in invoking God to defend its horrors. A heads up that throughout this sermon, I’ll be quoting some primary sources, because the language is grotesque. But I think it’s important to read, because part of learning to hear God is familiarizing ourselves with the lies that empire authors in God’s name.

In his call to invade the Holy Land, to kill Muslims, Pope Urban II promised, “All who die in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. Destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends,” he commands. God wants Christians to have this land, he tells the people, and therefore God will give eternal paradise to anyone who kills the folks already living in it.

We know this story. We hear its echoes in the Doctrine of Discovery, the ways that Christians justified genocide—again and again—as a necessary evil to build God’s Kingdom. But we’re less familiar with the voices of Christians who dared to speak against the Holy Roman Empire. Folks like Jan Hus. Jan Hus was a Czech priest who was enraged by how the Church sold indulgences to pay for its wars, and even more enraged by the way that the Pope tried to sanctify this bloodshed—the Church’s message, in his words, “that we can give you the Holy Ghost or send you to hell.”

“Bonfires never yet removed a single sin from the hearts of men,” he wrote, “it is better for me to die than not to oppose such wickedness, which would make me a participant in their guilt and hell.” For his heresy, the Catholic Church burned him at the stake.

Again and again this dynamic plays out, dancing across history: Empire promising that killing is the only way to bring peace, moral justifications for bloodshed echoing through the corridors of power, while the heirs of John the Baptist dare to oppose that sinful consensus, often at great personal cost.

Consider the war in Vietnam. With the safe remove of history and clear consensus about the disastrous results of our barbarism, it’s easy to forget how many Christians vociferously endorsed that violence. To justify the war, Southern Baptist President H. Franklin Paschall wrote flatly, “If it takes ‘total victory,’ that is total destruction of North Vietnam to bring about negotiations for a just and honorable peace, then I am for it.” Writing in 1967, Billy Graham cautioned, “Do not believe that the Bible teaches pacifism…to preserve some things, love must destroy others.”

And, in the same year, a preacher took the pulpit at Riverside Church, and said, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,” Dr. King preached, “I cannot be silent.” Speaking on the suffering of the Vietnamese people, he mourned, “They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.”

Again, the fame of that address can lead you to believe that it was received to rapturous applause. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was roundly condemned for betraying the war effort, for giving comfort to the enemy. His pacifism and theology of nonviolence was called naïve. Even folks who stood beside him in the fight against segregation told him that condemning the U.S. military was a bridge too far. One year to the day after making that speech, he was murdered on a balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

And I know this struggle between God’s prophets and the religion of empire because I lived it in the aftermath of 9/11. In those days of harrowing grief, after I watched the horror of classmate’s parents dying, I learned about the accompanying horror of watching people demand a War on Terror, invoking God’s name in its defense. “This nation is in is a spiritual battle, a battle for our soul,” General William Boykin said, serving the Defense Department, “the enemy is a guy called Satan, Satan wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy our Christian army.” Never one to be outdone, Jerry Falwell wrote a viral essay simply titled, “God is pro-war,” invoking how, “God calls the Israelites to go to war against the Midianites and Philistines,” as the model for our response. “One of the primary purposes of the church,” he concludes, “is to stop the spread of evil.” We did not stop the spread of evil. We did stop the hearts of more than 400,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In contrast, Representative Barabara Lee was the only vote in Congress against the war. On the floor of the House she spoke resolutely, even when her voice trembled with grief. “This unspeakable act on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience and my God for direction,” she confessed, “Our deepest fears haunt us, but I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of terrorism. As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

These two traditions stretch through history, and stretch out before us now: We can be chaplains to empire, or we can follow the God who promises to bring peace through vulnerability, not violence. We can attune our spirits to those who seek to make the temple speak for Rome, or we can answer John the Baptist knowing full well that to follow John means entering the wilderness.

Pacifism is not popular. There will always be people who offer very detailed explanations for why, this time, violence is necessary. Why, this time, the bombs are what will bring us toward peace. Empire has helpful terms like “collateral damage” to explain how intentionally dropping bombs on hospitals, schools or refugee camps doesn’t mean that we intend for civilians to die. To explain why dead children are a tragedy, but not a reason to stop.

Opposing war doesn’t just require defiance of any particular conflict, it calls us to reject the entire logic of violence upon which both our government and understanding of history are built. And pacifism is not passivity. It asks us to answer killing with courageous diplomacy. It asks us to see justice as a desire for reconciliation, not retribution. It asks us to stop glorifying conflicts like World War II as a victory and understand them as a collective failure to keep the world from coming to that point. It is profoundly countercultural. It will make people angry. But it is the only way that we escape the cyclical violence that otherwise will destroy us.

And the hope and comfort we receive in Advent is the reminder that, even when defying the war consensus feels like a lonely and vulnerable place—we are joined in that witness by the generations of faithful Christians who said, “No. I will not let God be turned into a sword.” When your voice wavers, feel strengthened by Jan Hus and every so-called heretic who chose to die before joining the Crusades. Hear the echo of Dr. King confess, “I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.” See the vision of Barbara Lee standing alone on the Congress floor but on the right side of history. Follow the footsteps of Jesuit brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan and the Plowshares 8, who broke into a nuclear weapons facility to beat a hammer against warhead nosecones and pour blood over missile plans. Who went to jail for God. Live in the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who would not tolerate apartheid but also insisted that the means of that revolution were what would dictate South Africa’s future.

Because that, ultimately, is where Advent calls us: the birth of a different world. And the truth is that empire’s logic of violence doesn’t only uphold warfare. It’s what gives corporations the “right” to pollute sacred indigenous rivers. It’s why we’re told safety comes from policing. It’s the beating heart of mass imprisonment and a carceral state. The same logic that says children unfortunately must die in order to bring peace is the same logic that says putting children in detention facilities prevents crime is the same logic that says no one is responsible for poisoning children in Flint, Michigan. We cannot escape the forces of degradation and desolation unless we disavow them entirely.

But when we do, John promises we will meet the one who baptizes the world in God’s spirit. When we reclaim peace and follow that radical pacifism, we will birth a world where all people can flourish. In severing the union between God and Rome, we create the circumstances for goodness and life to pour forth in abundance, like a tree freed from a choking vine. “We still have a choice today,” Dr. King said on that pulpit, “nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

That decision is still before us, but the clock is ticking. God waits for what we choose.

This sermon was preached at Middle Church on Sunday, December 10, 2023.