Service: Choral Evensong, Pentecost 19 May 24 (Christ Church St. Lucia)
Readings: Ezekiel 36: 22-28; Psalm 103: 13-22; 1 Corinthians 12: 1-13
Like all of us, I imagine, Libbie and I were horrified by the stabbing attack at Westfield Bondi a few weeks ago. Words can’t describe the maelstrom of our feelings – ranging across horror about what happened, anger at how this could have happened, compassion for victims and their families, and for the parents of the perpetrator who deeply loved their son but struggled with the enormity of what he’d done; thanksgiving and admiration for the courage of bystanders, police, ordinary people rising to do extraordinary things in the face of sudden and terrible violence. But the thing is, over the weeks since then I’ve been both astounded, concerned, even depressed by the seemingly constant daily stream of accounts of violence. We’re constantly assailed, it seems, by stories from the courts about appalling domestic violence, coercive control of women by men, always with the fear of violence behind it, constant breaches of court ordered apprehended violence orders often with tragic outcomes, the very high proportion of indigenous women who’ve been subject to violence of various kinds, unprovoked knife attacks, gangland murders in Sydney and Melbourne, even before we get to the awful violence of Gaza, the Ukraine, Sudan and in recent days New Caledonia. I feel in myself more concerned about all of this than I can recall feeling before. I can recall during my ministry prior to retirement remarking on more than one occasion in sermons about the violent undertones that were readily apparent in bumper stickers and T-shirts and how these could not be just brushed off as somehow harmless. Words matter. And that was before the exponential growth of social media platforms and their capacity to enable violent language and glorification of violence to go unchecked. Are social media platforms the news trees of the knowledge of good and evil?[1] I don’t want to catastrophise all of this but have found myself wondering that despite the extent to which violence seems always to have been part of the human condition, why has come to this and how, as Christians, we might think about this.
I began thinking that I might preach tonight from the context of domestic violence. In my first parish, my churchwarden was a wonderful, humble, prayerful saintly woman. She disclosed to Libbie and me one day that she was being beaten by her husband. We encouraged her to leave him, but she wouldn’t at first – she believed her marriage vows were sacred and the idea of, in her mind, breaking the vow was very difficult. She wasn’t the one who had broken them, of course. However, I decided to broaden my reflection, partly because of what I was seeing in news accounts, and because we, in the church need to hear women’s voices about domestic violence in the church. It seemed presumptuous of me to offer myself as a male having a view privileged above theirs. I do want to acknowledge though that this month is Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month in Queensland and there are several activities in the Diocese to raise the profile of this issue, including a Domestic and Family Violence Evensong at St. John’s Cathedral next Sunday evening at 6pm. The Queensland Churches Together publication “Questions Woman Ask About Domestic Violence and Christian Beliefs” is a good resource too.
I want to think about violence and Scripture, and then about what we might learn from this Feast of Pentecost. First, to violence and Scripture – we need to acknowledge that there is a great deal of violence in scripture. Scripture is searingly honest about the human condition and its propensity to violence. It’s a huge topic. For example, in 2022, a project to examine the topic of the Bible and Violence was announced. It’s called the Shiloh Project[2] and it was planned to produce 100 chapters. One writer comments that in fact, the religious heritage of the west is scarcely less violent than that of Islam. One could bring the Crusades to mind. Religious violence he says is deeply embedded in the scriptures that are the wellsprings of Judaism and Christianity.[3]
The Book of Exodus tells us that “the Lord is a man of war.” In the ancient world, gods were supposed to defend their people and help them in battle, and the God of Israel was no different in this respect. The most problematic part of the biblical account is surely the conquest of Canaan. According to Deuteronomy, the Israelites were to destroy the people of the land utterly. “Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.” “Break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles and burn their idols with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples of the earth.” The Book of Joshua describes how this commandment was carried out. Because Israel is the chosen people, it may, and is even commanded to, destroy any people that seem to obstruct its mission. We’ve seen that form of violence continue down the centuries in different guises – we’ve come to call it ethnic cleansing. It lies, I think, behind what we see in Gaza today. The English Puritan revolution was justified repeatedly by biblical analogies drawn from the Old Testament. Oliver Cromwell drew a parallel between his revolution and the Exodus and proceeded to treat the Catholics of Ireland as the Canaanites. A generation later, the Puritans of New England applied the biblical texts about the conquest to their own situation, casting the native American Indians in the role of the Canaanites and Amalekites. This rhetoric persisted in American Puritanism through the 18th century, and indeed biblical analogies have continued to play a part in American political rhetoric down to the present. We see very worrying signs of this in the links between extreme right-wing Christianity, armed militias of varying kinds,[4] and what is called religious nationalism - when a nation-state unites the nation, state and ethnicity with religion. Misuse scripture, poor theology and misuse of social media can fuel all of this. It makes it too easy to “other” people, both nations, communities, people of different race, individuals, ex-partners. This seems to lead all to easily to violence, or at least create a climate for it. We should recall the perhaps most basic theological principal of our faith stemming from the Hebrew Scriptures, that all people are made in the image and likeness of God. In the New Testament, the violence is less apparent, but still there in some of the parables – the wicked slave for example who is handed over to be tortured.[5] But one incident comes to my mind. In St. John’s account of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Simon Peter cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant Malchus. Jesus remonstrates with Peter “Put your sword back into its sheath”[6], to my mind condemning revenge and retribution. We recall too how many stories of compassion, forgiveness, and grace that Jesus told and it’s to these we should constantly turn.
Secondly, what can we learn from Pentecost? For that, we turn to our readings this evening. Ezekiel is a prophet of the exile. Amid the extraordinarily violent events of siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and its eventual capture Ezekiel and much of the population was taken into captivity and exiled in Babylon. In the prophecy read this evening, Ezekiel tells the people that despite all that has happened to them, and despite all that they have done, there is a future. He says “A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you..”[7] St. Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, a church riven by dissension and conflict and argument raises with them the matter of spiritual gifts. He doesn’t want them to be uninformed. He wants to emphasize the common good – something we, in our society seem to have lost sight of. And then he counsels them that in the body of Christ, there is to be no “othering” of people. All, in the body, are filled with the one spirit.[8] He would later write to the Galatians about the fruit of the Spirit which, he wrote, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.[9] “Spirit” appears in both readings this evening. God acting in and through the Spirit is about to do a new thing and open a future in which people can have hope.
Peter, speaking to the crowds after receiving the gift of the Spirit at the first Pentecost invokes the prophet Joel and speaks of dreams and visions. Maybe this Pentecost is an invitation to dream – to dream and envision a future in which people can have hope – a gentler, more respectful, peaceful, kind future rather than what we have now, where we seem to have lost sight of the common good and all to easily have created conditions in which violence flourishes. The journalist, Julia Baird, writing only a day or so ago in The Sydney Morning Herald in a different, but related context concluded her article by writing “There are so many good, decent people in churches, caring for others, trying to make a decent fist out of life, trying not to fall apart, trying to find meaning.”[10] It could describe us, or any church. When there is so much violence these days that seems meaningless, maybe we can take to our hearts the Pentecost vision of the fruit of the spirit, recall that we say and think and do matters and pray and dream that the hearts of stone of the violent everywhere will be transformed to hearts of flesh filled with the fruit of the Spirit.
[1] Genesis 2:17
[2] https://www.shilohproject.blog/about/
[3] This is extensively covered in https://reflections.yale.edu/article/violence-and-theology/bible-and-legitimation-violence by John J. Collins Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School.
[4] Apparently amongst the largest sales of baseball caps and T-shirts in the USA are those emblazoned “God, Guns and Trump.”
[5] Matthew 18:34
[6] John 18: 10-11
[7] Ezekiel 36:25-26
[8] 1 Corinthians 12:13
[9] Galatians 5:22
[10] Sydney Morning Herald 17 May 24
© Reverend WD Crossman