Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Deep and Twisted Roots
Scriptures: Isaiah 25:1-9& Philippians 4:1-9
The violence happening in Israel and Palestine for the past two weeks has been dreadful. The news has shown us details of the atrocities committed and the ongoing struggles of two communities as violence is inflicted on ordinary people trying to live their ordinary lives.
For all the politics involved, there is an undeniable religious dimension to all this and of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. None of us have clean hands. This conflict has deep and twisted roots and I hope that by getting a sense of these we can get a sense of how to move forward and support work that creates both peace and justice for all the people involved.
You have my apologies in advance that the history I am about to share doesn’t have room for all the subtlety and detail it deserves.
An important part of the understanding of the Jewish faith is that they are an extended family: they are called by God because they are the descendants of people who were called by God.
They have lived under oppression for most of their history. At first they were wandering nomads, slaves in Egypt after that, briefly tribes living in a conquered land with religious rulers called judges, then for a few generations, a kingdom mostly divided into two kingdoms. Eventually they would be conquered and oppressed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans with a brief stint of independence under the Maccabees and the illusion of independence under king Herod.
The Romans were replaced by the Byzantines, then the early Muslim rulers, then generations of European crusader kingdoms and then the later Muslim rulers, including the Ottoman Turks who were replaced after WWI by the British.
Our lesson from Isaiah, written during the Babylonian years, expresses a vision where the powerful oppressor is defeated and the great city, Babylon, is laid to waste and all the peoples of the world will celebrate in God’s holy place because God has helped everyone: all the poor, all the oppressed of all nations. Even death will be eliminated.
It’s an expression of hope that crosses borders. “There’s been enough of the killing and the armies, enough of the brutality of a ruling power.” It is a vision that captures the common experience of minorities around the world.
This kind of vision struggles within the Hebrew scriptures with a competing vision of purity: faithful people who keep themselves apart from strangers to follow God’s law as closely as possible because the law is seen as the expression of how God wants to bring holiness to the world. It was this vision of purity that led to the genocide that came with the Exodus occupation of the promised land; killing anyone who might steer the hearts of the Hebrews towards any other locally established gods.
Jesus, who was born under King Herod and lived under Roman occupation, grew up within the Jewish tradition as visions of purity were being examined and re-interpreted. Matthew shows us a Jesus who wanted to minister exclusively to the Jewish people and who expanded his vision when faced with a bold Syrian woman who was desperate to heal her daughter.
Christianity, under the leadership of people like Paul, grew amazingly by reaching out beyond the borders of Judaism, which led to increasing friction with the more traditional Jewish community who opted for purity and threw out the Christians from the Synagogues. This really rankled with early Christians who felt that the Jewish leaders were questioning the legitimacy of Christianity (which, of course, they were).
Those Christians declared that Jesus’ version of Judaism was the only correct interpretation and some even argued that Christians had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people. We find early evidence of this in our own scriptures and there are still people today who use these passages as justification for their own modern antisemitism.
Eventually Christianity made the fatal mistake of converting the Emperor of Rome, Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion. It looked like a great short-cut to spreading the faith but it was really a betrayal of the roots of the faith where Jesus embraced the people who weren’t in power and saw in their weakness a kind of truth that the powerful have a hard time understanding.
So, Christianity took power and was still resentful about being thrown out of Synagogues. We developed antisemitism into an accepted part of our faith: blaming the Jews for killing Jesus and calling the Romans innocent despite the obvious fact that only the Romans ever crucified anyone.
This kind of religious and racial hatred has been distilled over the centuries with Jewish communities facing atrocities across Europe at the hands of different denominations of Christians who worked hand in glove with one empire after another. In the 20th century, all of this was taken as justification for the hideous work of the Nazis.
We know how the holocaust inspired the creation of the modern state of Israel, to provide a place in the Biblical promised land where Jewish people could live free from the genocide and oppression they had encountered around the world.
While Christianity was cooperating with empires, Islam arose out of a re-interpretation of the laws of Judaism and the evangelism of Christianity. Christianity responded with its own vision of purity, denounced the Muslims as heretics and launched centuries of warfare through the crusades.
The common challenge that I see here afflicting each of our faiths is that whenever we give in to the temptation to use force to promote our agenda, we fail. Whenever we become the oppressor, no matter which faith we represent, and we lose sight of the vision Isaiah presents (a passage of scripture that is common to all our faiths), we fail.
Paul points the way in our second lesson where he encourages the whole Philippian church to come together and encourage two faithful women, leaders in the church, to overcome their differences and work together again.
As Christians, we have not been unbiased in this modern conflict and some Christians have been actively unhelpful in declaring the modern state of Israel to be the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy and a sign of the second coming of Christ. I completely disagree with this interpretation but a full discussion won’t fit into this sermon.
So, we can’t call for peace as if we were a neutral party but we can promote the position that as peoples of faith which arise out of common roots and shared values we can work on a way of engaging with each other that puts aside the need to dominate and control. We can bring into place that vision from Isaiah of a shared world where oppression is put away. And, we can recognize in each other the traumas we have suffered and find the forgiveness we need for the harm we have caused to find the healing that we cannot find alone – the healing that will only be complete if we work together to discover the common position we share as children of God.
The centuries of conflict in the Middle East will not be solved overnight: the roots are too deep. If the conflict is to be solved at all, it will be because we find a way to work together across lines of faith, ethnicity, and other traditional barriers; it will be because we find a way to acknowledge and remove the latest version of oppression and prevent any new oppressors from coming to power.
May we pray and work for this outcome in this land that is so important to all three of our faiths. Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 