Monday, August 10, 2015

Sermon for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 9, 2015

B Proper 14 BFC 2015

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33

August 9, 2015

Recently performing their hit summer single on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the group out of Denver, Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats, sang of the double-edged sword of addiction. There is the pure ecstasy of giving into the liquid elixir and then there is the inevitable death, if one cannot break it, to which addiction leads. Rateliff sang,

I'm gonna need someone to help me; I'm gonna need somebody’s hand; I'm gonna need someone to hold me down; I'm gonna need someone to care; I'm gonna writhe and shake my body; I'll start pulling out my hair; I'm going to cover myself with the ashes of you; and nobody's gonna give a damn; My heart was aching; hands are shaking; bugs a’ crawling all over me.[1]

Though the lyrics intone the disconnection of addiction, its inevitable fatalism and doomsday, the tune carries with it the seductive high of addiction—the backbeat of the chorus luring us into its energy and abandon.

I believe that is where we are as a country, loving the energy and abandonment of our identification with our addiction to power and violence, and angry that anyone would suggest that maybe it shouldn’t go so far. We bristle against checks and balances against our freedom to harm or destroy, rape or kill. And that’s what we call it. We disguise our energy and abandonment in the word “freedom.”

One of my favorite prophets stepped down from his post this past week. It was typical Jon Stewart to show his humility and almost embarrassment for the work he has done as the satirical commentator and truth-teller on Comedy Central’s, “The Daily Show,” ending it all, with two songs by Bruce Springsteen, a champion of blue-collar rights and another prophet of our times. The tributes rolled in, probably the most touching, for me, on Facebook from now Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren remembered her first time on “The Daily Show,” when she was a member of the TARP Congressional Oversight Committee, a little known professor trying to articulate the need for financial reform. Warren said she was so nervous that threw up backstage. After what was supposed to be the whole of the interview, Jon Stewart could tell Warren had not said what she wanted to say, so he took her by the arm, told her to stay in her seat, extended the interview. In doing so, Warren told us all what would need to happen to get the country back. She said, “Unless we can provide some form of accountability and regulation of the highest of all power, we know we are doomed.” After that appearance on “The Daily Show,” people would recognize her on the street as the woman on Jon Stewart and tell her to keep fighting. She ended her Facebook tribute by saying, “That’s what Jon has done for 16 years: with passion and humor, he skewered the people who needed skewering, called out the big guys who rig the system, and prodded us all to fight back.”[2] As Stewart reminded us in his last show, however, if the fight to provide accountability, regulation, and some check on power, remains with him, and only him, we are, to quote Warren, doomed.

There is the initial thrill and ecstasy, the bloodlust, of power and violence unregulated, that must be checked with the wisdom and maturity of restraint and the understanding that our freedom must have a necessary end at the doorstep of our neighbor’s want for goodness, life, and livelihood, a neighbor who may look very unlike me. If we are willing to have our addiction checked, we may find, down the line that a harmony settles in which allows all of us to live without bust after bust, tragedy after tragedy.

Throughout this summer, we have been following the story of King David and his reign over a unified Israel, considered the golden age of Jewish history and mythology. If we look at the Scriptural stories surrounding that age, however, one would wonder why King David’s reign was so beloved and so golden. When we last left King David, he had raped Bathsheba, discovered that she was pregnant with their child, ordered the murder of Uriah the Hittite, and welcomed Bathsheba into the palace with all of his other wives and concubines--thinking he had completed the perfect crimes. David’s power and violence go unchecked, unrestrained but for the prophet Nathan who comes with the Word of God to David.

These stories convey that such behavior does not go unwatched. Even more powerfully, though, they convey that once the rush of unmitigated power and violence gets into our system, into our bloodstream, though we might think we can control and shape their narrative, they return with a vengeance to shape us. We need a bigger and bigger rush, a bigger and bigger hit. We might feel the ecstasy of what, initially, our power and violence can do in the world, but we begin to see that a lack of the wisdom and maturity of restraint, the inability to see how our freedom harms the neighbor not like us, inevitably lead to that power and violence being visited on the people we love and ourselves. We start out doing acts of unmitigated power and violence. We then become that in the world. The air becomes thick with it. The chickens come home to roost.

If you thought this part of the Bathsheba and Uriah story was wild and wooly, you haven’t seen anything yet. David had set in motion something that would come at a high price. He believed he could control the evil, limit the damage, so that the scope of his sin would only affect those for whom David intended evil. But evil does not work that way. And chaos ensues.

The baby born to David and Bathsheba dies. Amnon, David’s son, rapes his stepsister and then disgraces her by wanting to have nothing to do with her. Because Amnon is David’s first-born and he loves him, maybe even because David recognizes his own behavior, he refuses to punish Amnon. In revenge, Absalom, another of David’s sons and Tamar’s brother, murders Amnon. Though Absalom flees in exile for a time, David’s heart yearns for his son, weeps for his son, entreats his son to come home not only because he loves Absalom but maybe because David also recognizes himself in his other son. Absalom does return home only to plot an insurrection against his father.

At the height of the insurrection, Absalom is counseled to show what it means to have power by taking and raping the “secondary wives” of David on the roof of the palace so that all of Israel could see that the unmitigated power and violence of Absalom rivals the unmitigated power and violence of David. What David has “taken away” as king is now “taken away” by Absalom.[3]

Even with such grand displays of willfulness, throughout the insurrection, David has counseled his military commanders not to harm Absalom, his son. But, as we hear in our Scripture passage for today, Absalom’s head becomes stuck in a great oak. Joab, the commander of David’s military, the one who followed through on the orders to have Uriah the Hittite killed, now operates counter to the orders of David, takes three spears, and runs them through Absalom’s heart. In the spears run through Absalom’s heart, David’s heart is broken.

The evil visited upon Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite has now come full circle. David began the violence with the rape of Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah the Hittite. That violence escalates into the rape of Tamar, the loss of a child soon after it is born, the fratricide of Amnon by the hands of Absalom, the raping of David’s wives by Absalom, the killing of Absalom by David’s faithful military commander—all of this unmitigated power and violence ends in death. The Camelot of King David’s reign is ringed with victims of violence, corpses, becomes a killing field, and the sword is never returned to the Lady of the Lake. The chickens came home to roost.

The chickens have come home to roost. It was a phrase referenced by Malcolm X after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X believing that the power and violence that went unchecked against our African-American sisters and brothers for years upon years had now come full circle.

Perhaps you remember this quote. It was piped into our living rooms again and again as the Republican Party tried to unseat the popularity of then Senator and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama:

’America’s chickens are coming home to roost . . . .’ Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism . . . . An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don't have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.[4]

That was from a sermon given by the Senior Minister at Trinity UCC in Chicago, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., five days after 9/11, asking for deep reflection and personal self-examination for how we participate in violence, hoping for and seeking out the transformation of our society. Rev. Dr. Wright was quoting Ambassador Edward Peck, a one-time U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force, who appeared on Fox and warned us of the price for our addiction to unrestrained power and violence.

What Admiral Peck said had been written by the now deceased, former CIA consultant, Chalmers Johnson in his Empire series and predicted in his book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Long before 9/11, Johnson predicted that the continued power and violence we exerted in the Middle East would eventually lead to some form of terrorist attack. Not only was this power and violence exerted through war but also through lethal and brutal sanctions largely enforced by the Clinton Administration against Iraq. Human rights activist Kitty Kelly and Voices in the Wilderness chronicled these sanctions as having killed 500,000 children under the age of 5 years old. In 2005, as we waged war against Iraq, 300,000 children suffered from acute malnourishment. “Children,” Kelly said, “do not recover from acute malnourishment.”[5]

Now that we have some distance, maybe we can hear that these very sanctions were one of the reasons given for the 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden.[6] 500,000 children under 5. Can we imagine that kind of suffering and death? And then we doubled down by attacking Iraq for reasons undetermined.

Can there be any doubt that the unrestrained power and violence we have visited on other peoples and nations internationally has become part of our DNA domestically? We are addicted—to what we call freedom, but what amounts to our unrestrained bloodlust for power and violence. Our bloodlust to exert our unmitigated power and violence has become a spiritual practice. Seemingly, our Camelot will continue to unravel until our whole nation is ringed with bloody corpses, a killing field, in which we justify the taking of our neighbors’ lives who do not look like us.

Such was the destiny of Israel as prophet after prophet came forward with the Word of God to try and help free the people from their addiction. Isaiah spoke of the great sin of the nation, God unable to hear the prayers of the people as they held out their hands because their hands full of blood.[7] The prophet Jeremiah, seeing the circle turn, has a fire well up in his bones that has him proclaiming only violence and destruction every time he opens his mouth.[8] And, finally, Ezekiel, contemplating what all this has wrought, looks out and sees only dry bones, a killing field.[9]

So what shall be our fate? Will we only learn that violence begets violence and hatred begets hatred as our children are crushed under the boot of empire after empire as the Jewish people were? Shall we say that there were a people who rose up to say that we, collectively, as a people of faith will stop playing small with these moral trivialities and give our hearts over to the power of unarmed truth and unconditional love? At more than any other time in human history, we are the people who can watch the movies, read the books, participate in the marches, see the struggles of confrontational non-violence and the soul force it brings. But we cannot let those who shout hollow words of “Freedom!” go unchecked so that the lives of her children, the lives of his children, the lives of their children, the lives of our children are destroyed.

As in each age, God is begging the people of unarmed truth and unconditional love to muster their courage, to not play fools, and to measure those who believe their unrestrained power and violence gives them the right to destroy our economy, destroy our neighbor, destroy our earth. We must end our addiction and connect, bone by bone, while we may yet still have a chance. Regulation of that unchecked power and violence is necessary. We must be the mature and wise people who recognize the need for self-restraint so that immature cries for freedom do not destroy the freedom of our neighbors to experience life, and goodness, and peace.

Let us not go the way of ancient Israel. King David believed the evil and violence he visited on others would not return to ruin his own home. What he found was that it is the nature of evil to spin uncontrollably and rot and destroy the inner workings of those who use it. God bids us away from death and doom. May unarmed truth and unconditional love have the final word in reality. May the prophet’s words finally move us.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of humankind. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered people have torn down other-centered people can build up. I still believe that one day humankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every person shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid." I still believe that we shall overcome![10]

Amen.

[1]The chorus, mirroring the addict giving in to the addiction, begins with the words, “Son of a bitch!”; “S.O.B,” Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, http://www.nathanielrateliff.com/music/

[2] Elizabeth Warren, https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153171525303687&fref=nf.

[3] 2 Samuel 16:20-22

[4] Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” September 16, 2001, quoting Ambassador Edward Peck, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force, who was speaking on FOX News, quoting Malcolm X who referenced the assassination of President Kennedy as part of the legacy for the ongoing violent legacy of racism