January 31, 2010

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 4     
Luke 4:21-30


Video available on YouTube, Facebook

I confess that at times I can be a little competitive. You don’t want to know me in the middle of a hotly contested Scrabble game. It with some embarrassment that I remember, as a kid, resorting to cheating to beat my little sister in Monopoly. While I should be, I am less embarrassed that I never let my children just win at Candyland. They had to beat me. But there are times I know when I am out-gunned and just refuse to play. 

That was my temptation this week when I realized that last week Glynn preached on this week’s Gospel. At first annoyed, I thought of this as an opportunity to have a preach-off with the master, but then I remembered I’d lose. His was an outstanding sermon that I wanted to nail to the front door of St Matthew’s emulating Martin Luther’s “Here I stand” moment. So, I considered being uncharacteristically brief this week and end the sermon here with, “What Glynn said.”

But being out-gunned doesn’t mean not wanting to seek a little vengeance. I contemplated retaliating by preaching on his Gospel for next Sunday and seeing how much he likes it, I harrumphed. 

The problem with vengeance is it is so sweet in contemplation but so sour in execution. I was reminded of this when I read in the paper this week about a church sign that suggested, “Love your enemies, you made them.” Even a little friendly revenge between colleagues could add one more to the list of those who see me as the enemy. After the billboard I probably don’t need anymore. So I decided if I can’t beat him, I might join him. Maybe this Gospel reading can inspire more than one 14-minute sermon, no matter how on point his was?

As those of you who were here or have watched or read the sermon online will remember, Glynn asked how important is unity? His position was “not so much” if Jesus’ sermon to his hometown is any indication. Jesus could have played to the crowd’s delight that a local boy was making the rest of the region sit up and take notice. Instead he preached a sermon that transformed the congregation from a cheering crowd into a lynch mob ready to throw him off one of the cliffs that overlook Nazareth. Glynn argued that Jesus’ message is that unity is only possible as an outcome for a community that seeks social justice for those on the margins. He chastised especially the church for making unity a goal that trumps justice for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender community. I couldn’t agree more and I would co-sign those sentiments. But I would also argue that the church does not need to seek unity we are already united – by original sin.

Some of you may be wondering if you heard me right. We don’t dangle people over hell’s fire as sinful beings at St Matthew’s and we certainly don’t look at babies as contaminated because they were created by S-E-X. But, yes, you heard me right. 

There is a scientific theory that has gained considerable acceptance by anthropologists and other social scientists that humans are born with “Original Sin.” Rene Girard first articulated it. It is called the Mimetic Theory. Mimetic simply refers to the act of imitating. A painter imitates a landscape on canvas with oils. A novelist imitates life on paper with words. But Girard’s theory is that not everything we imitate is benign. We also imitate each other’s desire and the objects of our desire are not desirable because of need, scarcity or intrinsic goodness but because someone else desires them. The advertising world understands this well, using celebrities to model desire for whatever they are trying to sell.

This modeling of desire is found throughout great literature and even in bad movies where two guys compete for the affection of the same woman. The woman is not desirable simply because she is beautiful or charming or brilliant or playing hard to get. She is desirable because someone else wants her.

We see this in the story of the first sin in Genesis. The serpent reinterprets God’s generosity as shown in the bountiful Garden to makes Eve believe that God’s withholding of one tree from the gift of all trees shows that God desires it above all others. So of all the trees there is only one God values according to the serpent, namely the one he won’t give or share. By this means the serpent seduces Eve to imitate God’s desire. It becomes for her the only tree she wants. The original sin the story illuminates is that desire compels Eve’s desire to thwart God’s desire. She turns God, her loving and generous creator, into her rival. When our relationship with the source of our being turns from gratitude to rivalry, we displace God and become our own creator. [i] This results in Eve and her mate’s expulsion from the Garden to a life of hardship.

So Mimetic Desire is competitive and the theory argues that competitiveness often devolves into violence. The desire to possess the object gradually becomes secondary to the desire to best the rival. In Hollywood there is a saying that it is not sufficient for the actor to succeed, their best friend has to fail.

What this theory argues is that this desire that leads to violence is universal. It is the original sin that lives usually in a pre-conscious state in each of us. In that sense we are unified. If this violence were allowed to go unchecked by society we would live in violent chaos. What has evolved is the creation of a culturally sanctioned system of scapegoating. We unify ourselves by expelling from the community the targeted person we blame for all our problems or ironically we kill him to appease the guilt in our own violent souls that we might be innocent. Primitive civilizations resorted to human sacrifice, which evolved to the sacrifice of animals, which evolved to the ritual sacrifice or the “god-who-dies-for-us” once and for all. By this process, violence has been made sacred and defended as a necessary component society. It suppresses individual violence and brings some order.

Jesus was an affront to this understanding of violence and became its target. He had the temerity to tell the hometown folk that the way to manage violence is not by destroying our enemies but by loving them. We might as well. God didn’t make them enemies. We did. God loves them. The corollary to this truth is that God loves us too when we are the enemy. The good people of Nazareth, and eventually the respectable religious and political authorities reject him and his Gospel not just because it is a challenge to the human heart but to the social order itself. It challenged us to recognize that the violent nature we see in our enemies resides in our own hearts. It challenges the prohibitions and purity laws used to contain that impulse and the myth of our own innocence. The study of human nature suggests we are not overwhelmed with gratitude at learning we are no different than our enemies. We treasure our violent nature. It is a violence that blinds us to the divine that also resides in us. Our blindness to that reality allows us to demonize and hate with impunity. It allows us to go to war; to punish and not rehabilitate the criminal; to seclude and restrain the mentally ill; to beat our spouses and children in the name of discipline and order; to perpetuate economic policies that strip people of their dignity and hope; to justify depriving those who do not mirror us from the human rights we enjoy. Lastly, it allows us to scapegoat and sacrifice anyone who carries on Jesus’ Gospel that society and the church have rejected.

It is this last point Glynn and I and anyone who wishes to live out the Gospel must remain aware. To preach Jesus message from within the institution is risky business. For the church rewards and depends upon scapegoating. It has a long history of supporting sacred violence. Battling the infidel during the Crusades and persecuting the heretics during the Inquisition and burning witches until a couple of centuries ago are just a few examples. But it is still true today. It would be naïve to think that we can preach to a marginalised group and name how the institution excludes them without risking expulsion ourselves from the church.

It is also risky because we are human, and united with everyone else in the original sin of mimetic desire that leads to violence. We must call on ourselves, not just the rich and powerful, to become aware of our propensity for violence – a propensity that labels and defines the enemy. If we are confining our criticism only to those outside of our community and not to ourselves inside, we must hear our words for what they are – calls for violence. When we challenge institutional violence and it is an institution of which we are a part, we may become the target of violence. It is not likely we will hear much cheering for our preaching the Gospel but rather calls for our blood will ring out. We also must know that when we do we won’t always be able to escape the lynch mob unnoticed. Sometimes they will find us in Jerusalem.

If we take this journey, we must do so knowing that preaching peace is a blood sport. It is a daily competition in our souls to listen to the “Two Bloods.” The blood of Abel that cries out from the ground for vengeance, and blood of Jesus that whispers to us all, “Peace be unto you.”

[i] http://www.hamerton-kelly.com/talks/Anthropology_of_the_Cross.html