Tag Archives: justice

Becoming One

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a Sermon for Lent 2C
Text: Luke 13:31-35

Western Wall adjusted

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

A friend asked my Dad for a recommendation years ago. He was hoping to go to Jerusalem with a school exchange program. My Mom, in learning of this plan, wondered aloud “Why?” It sounded pretty awesome to me, so I couldn’t understand what her problem with it was. I asked her to explain.

“It is so dangerous there,” she said.

We had learned a little bit about Israel and its relationship with the Palestinians in school. I was aware that there was occasional violence, not unlike the violence in Ireland at the time. Yet, I really had no idea why she was so worried.

Of course, it makes a certain sense now. The perpetual presence of automatic weapons, the erratic and spontaneous expressions of conflict. The fence.

There in the center, is Jerusalem, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” A city of comfort and tragedy. A city of constant disappointment. A city stained with the blood of innocents for countless generations. The city of David, the Temple, and the crucifixion.

When Jesus bemoans the holy city, He does so knowing it doesn’t have to be this way. People don’t have to be this way.

Becoming Jerusalem

We remember that there was no Temple before Solomon and no Jerusalem before David. In David, Jerusalem was the new capital of a newly united kingdom and would serve as a great symbol of unity. A unity that would disappear with his son’s death. A unity that would never be reestablished.

The division would be great. Generation after generation obsessed with power and politics, condemned to separate lives.

As a character in the story, Jerusalem speaks to that eternal image of the unity that GOD wants and the division we perpetuate.

A division made plain by Jesus’s walk to Jerusalem, the victory of the earthly powers in killing Him, and in the surprising reversal in which Jesus proves this way of violence of victimizing is the way of ignorance. In trying to protect their faith, the Temple authorities continue the condemnation of Jerusalem.

A lesson we haven’t learned. A lesson about protecting our faith, responding out of fear, resorting to earthly violence, becoming Jerusalem.

Two Identities

Jerusalem need not be that city. And perhaps Jesus need not have died there. But it is that dual identity that helps lead us to GOD’s interest: a city of unity and division. A city that has at its core the power to unite and divided embedded. The power to turn us all to witness the Kingdom as one or keep the Kingdom far from us in our separate camps.

A power that is still there.

A different friend visited Jerusalem a few years ago. He was surprised, not by the division, but in the striking different lives lived on opposite sides of the fence. And it was the complete opposite of his expectations. How the Israeli territory was driven by fear, control, and occupation, treating all of its citizens and guests with suspicion. How the perpetual reminders of authority and violence oppressed the character of its people. However, when he crossed into Palestine, the people, living in greater poverty and subject to the sudden seizure of their property, were kind, generous, and happy. For all their reason to fear for survival, the Palestinians seem to live with more joy than their Israeli counterparts. In the same city. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills.”

And Jesus names a new way—the old way—being gathered together as a mother’s children.

Becoming one.

Empire is Not Inevitable

Our country’s original motto, before we changed it during the Red Scare, e pluribus unum, means “out of many, one.” And like Jerusalem, our DNA is infused with the power of unity and division.

Just as Jesus’s death warrant was written when he spoke against Rome and the Temple authorities, our many martyrs would be killed for the powerful. From King to Romero, speaking out on behalf of the weak against the powerful gets people killed by the powerful. Yet, these deaths need not be inevitable. The fingerprints of empire coat our lives with division and discord. And yet the fingerprints of GOD enliven us with love and unity.

Unity is just as inevitable. It is the way of Jesus and the Kingdom. It is the way of righteousness and hope. It is part of our nature and our identity.

In this season of Lent, marked by a call to embrace the Kingdom, reconcile the divided, and show mercy, may we reject the way of division—the way of the Jerusalem that is condemned to kill its prophets and GOD’s immigrants. And may we embrace the way of unity—the Kingdom way of generosity and Sabbath journey. May we become one.

The Love Apocalypse (Eating Scripture)

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Eating Mark 13:1-8

This week, we tackle a gospel we don’t know what to make of, a type of literature we don’t understand, and a meaning for 21st Century American Christians that is consistent with Jesus’s teaching in under 4 minutes. What a workout!

This means there isn’t as much time to deal with what this story is not. There is a strand through Christian history that has wanted to see the time before Jesus as the “Old Covenant” and that Jesus brings a “New Covenant”. This language is very familiar to us. But where we get into trouble is by extrapolating from this thinking that Jesus (and more specifically, Christianity as known over the last thousand years or so) replaces Judaism. This is not consistent with Jesus’s teaching. This is most prevalent in conservative evangelical Protestants who take Jesus’s talk of the Temple’s destruction as evidence of their specific religious identity superseding others. This seems far away from what Jesus is teaching, and constructed without regard to the very things Jesus was teaching in the Temple and to whom he was teaching.

Today, we focus on the context. Specifically: what Jesus teaches and where. Because it reveals what is always a part of the apocalyptic despite its challenging appearance: truth about the present world and a promise of a more just tomorrow.


Eating Scripture is a short video series in which we explore the juicy and the crunchy in this week’s gospel in four minutes or fewer.

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Link

Whites Need to Write About Trayvon Martin

A solid article about the need for a “race case” to be handled by all people as a justice case, rather than delegated to the African American in the room. The killing of a young man and the lack of urgency in the police response is unconscionable and beyond the pale for what should be seen as acceptable by people of faith.

Violence is not a given

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Antonin Scalia in 2010.

Image via Wikipedia

I used to play over 30 hours of video games per week, so as a former gamer, the recent Supreme Court decision overturning a California ban on violent video games on free-speech grounds makes me happy.  I’m predisposed to supporting a maligned and misunderstood industry.  However, it is how  the industry won that is deeply disturbing.

The defense compared the restricting of children’s exposure to violence in video games to the legal restriction of exposure to sexual images.  In his thought-provoking essay on Justice Antonin Scalia’s written argument for the majority, Robert Scheer reveals Justice’s Scalia’s opinion is based on two ideas: 1) violence is ingrained and acceptable to the people of this country and 2) there is a similarly ingrained objection to sexual images.  He seems to bend precedent to imply that in free speech cases, only sexual content may be restricted.  There are many reasons one should find fault with Justice Scalia’s primary argument, but for Christians there should be one most glaring problem: Jesus consistently condemns the Pharisees’ obsession with personal ethics over acts of violence.  Jesus not only condemns violence, but extends it to systemic violence and that is of greater importance than worrying about other people’s purity.

In the example of the widow and her son, Jesus shows his compassion for the one who is failed by a system written (ostensibly) to help her.  In the 1st Century Judaic culture, widows were given favored status and laws were written to give them extra protection—particularly in their time of vulnerability (affirmative action?).  And yet, these women could still fall through the cracks into abject poverty.  Jesus rejects the belief that these laws were ‘the best they could do’ and rejects a system that does violence to her because of who she is (and isn’t).

Time and time again, Jesus rejects the placement of personal morality over the protection of the weak and disenfranchised.  From the parable of the Good Samaritan to the healings on the Sabbath, Jesus sees oppressive morality as a graver sin than almost any other.

In light of this, I can’t see the decision to maintain the restriction of a child’s access to sexual materials while overturning such a restriction to violent materials.  It seems to track as the opposite of Jesus’s direction to his followers.  I’m not saying Jesus likes porn or would want children to be exposed to it, but He seems to argue that we are wrong to obsess about sex and not violence.  He also seems to argue that violence is a graver concern than sexual ethics.  Full stop.

It all comes down to this, however.  As a Christian and a father, I reject that the ingrained violence in our culture is given privilege in the courts.  Free speech is not about freedom to promote violence, but instead, peace.  We are called to help GOD transform this world into something new and different—a world of peace and justice.  This decision is one more obstacle for that transformation.