Ethnic Triumphalism, Isolated
Individualism or God of Peace?
Transcribed from the Sermon preached November 6, 2005
The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor
Scripture Readings: Joshua 24:1-3, 14 -25
Bob Dylan had this to say in one of the songs he wrote after his conversion:
You may be an ambassador to England or France;
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance;
You may be the heavy-weight champion of the world;
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls;
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Yes indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Well it may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Who are we going to serve? Choose this day,
says Joshua, and choose we must. I have to admit that I have
struggled with Joshua this time around. Last week I gave a
personal, gut level reaction to the genocide and ethnocentrism so
blatantly displayed in this book. Joshua is troubling, because
its vision of divinely sanctioned exclusion and genocide calls into
question our understanding of a loving God, of the sacredness of
scripture, the claim to identity through land, culture and
religion. In this overpopulated, small world we find ourselves,
we are faced with the dilemma of conflicting claims. We would
like to be able to claim identity through our connection to God, the
Creator, to land, and to our culture without necessarily insisting that
others claims and faiths are all evil and in need of repulsion,
subjugation or annihilation.
I suspect that I over read for this sermon, that I
am too long and wordy, but I couldn’t help myself. I was
looking for help. I am going to take you on my journey through books
and the internet. First I looked at the historical and political
context within which the book was compiled. Then I looked at
recent Jewish and Christian applications, including modern Zionism and
America’s “Manifest Destiny;” I looked at
conversations on genocide, religious claims to land, and religious
claims of being God’s “Chosen People” or “The
Saved.” Finally, I googled “Affirming pluralism while
maintaining Christian Identity.”
We know that History did not take place as it is
depicted in Joshua, and that the Bible and the book of Joshua itself
have conflicting reports of what God ordered and what actually took
place. We think that the bulk of Joshua was compiled in the late
seventh century BCE from several sources by scribes of King Josiah a
half millennium after the settlement of Israel. Josiah was
hoping to reconsolidate Palestine under one central government.
The archeological record shows no rapid conquest in
the populating of Israel and Palestine. And we believe Palestine
was not taken over by a large group of immigrant nomads, but was made
up of largely indigenous farmers. David was the outsider whose
regime benefited from the” Exodus to Promised Land”
myth. Over 300 years later, Josiah refocused on this mythical
history to once again unify and centralize power. Even with
different claims within scripture and an understanding of the
archaeological record of the conquest as less than total annihilation,
we are still left with these passages in which God seems to call for
racial separation and genocide.
I found all of the reasons given to justify God’s calls for
destruction and brutality less than satisfying. For instance, it
helps a little to remember that warfare was and always has been brutal,
even when necessary, and the book of Joshua is only one record of such
brutality in ancient culture. Some preachers point out that the
Canaanites had it coming because of their sin. Surprisingly, Elie
Wiesel in his book Five Biblical Portraits justifies it, saying
“Joshua’s troops were small in number: showing mercy would
have been mistaken for weakness. They had to be ruthless.
Kill or be killed: that was the international law, the law of
destiny. For Canaan to be conquered its inhabitants had to
disappear. That is how God willed it. Had the natives fled
or collaborated, they would have remained alive.” But he
goes on, “Did Joshua have to impose such choices on them in the
first place? Didn’t the land belong to them? No,
affirms the Talmud, the land of Canaan had belonged to Israel since
creation; the Canaanites were only temporary caretakers. Thus
Joshua’s wars were not wars of aggression or conquest but of
reconquest…They were going home, they were not
invaders…That is why Joshua repeatedly reminded them of
God’s covenant and His promise: their fight was part of a divine
design.” The Canaanites were “God’s
victims. It was God who gave their land away.” says Wiesel.
The “somehow this was different argument” was a regular
theme in my reading of both Jewish and Christian sources. And it
is a small jump from the claim of prior land claims to prior divine
favor claims. This is precisely what the author of the Gospel of
John does by linking Jesus with the Spirit in the beginning of
Creation. “In the beginning was the word, the word was with
God, and the word was God.” God’s old covenant with
Israel was merely to set up the New Covenant in Christ. It was
God’s intention from the beginning.
From our Christian preemption of Jewish identity as the chosen or, in
Calvinist terms, the elect, it was a short jump back to view Christian
conquest of land and people as divinely sanctioned by God, like the
conquest of Canaan.
We know that immigrants to the New World used this biblical theme to
legitimate the war against the indigenous peoples. The conquest of the
Americas was justified in order to punish blasphemy, but also because
the continent was God’s special gift (The Pope, like Joshua, as
Christ’s representative on earth had the authority to give the
lands.) God chose the European Christians, the argument went, to
carry out this divine judgment against the infidels, and to conquer
their lands.
This same Christian justification is used to oppress Jews as the
blasphemous enemies of God, and to drive the crusades to reconquer the
lands of Jesus from the Muslims. It is here in my internet search
that I was led back to fears, many Jewish, of genocide and exclusionary
claims to means of salvation. We are reminded of the National
Socialist Party’s cry for the purity of the Motherland in its
justification of the Holocaust of Jews. Something sounds familiar
too, in the defiance of Mohammed Bouyeri, the Muslim extremist who
brutally murdered Theo Van Gogh for making a movie critical of
Islam’s treatment of women. At the trial he said to the
mother of the victim, “I have to admit, I don’t have any
sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think
you’re a nonbeliever…If I were released and would have the
chance to do it again, I would do exactly the same thing…I am
motivated by my faith to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah
and his prophet.” And it is only for a matter of time that
we leave out the many examples of religiously justified
marginalization, hierarchy, and conquest among nations and the
religions of the East. And in our attempt to listen to the voice
the Canaanites, infidels, women, homosexuals and other victims of our
Holy wars, we ought not flip the mistake and idealize the world view of
the other as completely free of moral error. It is true that not
all belief systems are equally destructive, but none are without flaw
or sin.
The secular humanist and atheist websites weigh in at this point.
We hear Nietzsche who thought violence itself was a religion.
This scary half truth and the frustration of competing religious claims
to divine sanction and destiny may lead us to the often heard
conclusion, “Do away with religion, all it does is promote
violence, prejudice and hatred.”
Still we are left with the postmodern dilemma. How do we honor
pluralism when part of the plurality is against pluralism? How do
the powerful administrators of this new pluralistic order respond when
a people choose through democratic election to give up democracy in
favor of a theocracy? Or when fundamentalist Buddhist, Hindu,
Christian, Jewish and Islamic women claim their support for patriarchal
social order? For in the vacuum of meaning and connection,
millions the world over are converting to fundamentalism. Do we
play the secular equivalent of holy war and overthrow the ignorant
religious infidels? Or maybe we renounce power and the
responsibility that comes with it? Maybe this is what God would
have us do.
Yet are we not obligated to help liberate the minority voice which has
been silenced, whether in the Sudan, Bosnia, Germany, Israel, Palestine
or North America, or in our own homes and hearts? What if we are
the minority? How we hate to admit it, but at times perhaps, war
is necessary. Maybe, a part of us has to agree with Calvin, our
Presbyterian forefather: from our own limited, sin clouded perspective
we are scarcely in a position to judge the judgements of God.
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men (and
women) are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights…” Even as we have to
admit that there is scarcely a religion that has not been compromised
by association with violence and a sense of superiority, so they also
have embedded in them important ethical values – repentance,
forgiveness, compassion and justice – which they have inspired
through the ages.
John D’Arcy May, writing for the World Counsel of Churches in
“The dialogue of religions: source of knowledge? Means of
Peace? points out “This is not to say that such values cannot
exist independently of religious traditions, but simply that the
religions have been the matrix in which they have been able to
flourish. The religions as such have seldom been the sole
underlying cause of conflict; not even in the internecine conflicts of
the first Islamic centuries, the Crusades, or the post-Reformation wars
of religion was this the case. Rather, it is what the Buddhists
succinctly call the ‘three poisons’ of greed, hatred and
delusion, manifested in economic inequality and injustice, communal
rivalry and ethnic resentment, the lust for power and the flaunting of
wealth, that have motivated violence. Ethnic superiority and
religious intolerance are pressed into service as ideologies to
legitimate the brutal enforcement of these attitudes or violent
resistance to them, but they are seldom ‘causes’ in their
own right.”
When we return to our faith tradition, our own experience of the
transcendent God, we find within Christianity and the Hebrew scripture
powerful weapons for self critique and transcendence. We find
them from the very beginning. Wiesel points out that while war
may at times be necessary to repel evil, it is itself always
evil. “Cain and Abel? Two brothers waging war:
whoever kills, kills his brother.” We are all brothers and
sisters, all God’s children. No war is holy. War is
not what God wants.
Certainly there are many idols in our secular,
capitalist culture which temp and threaten to distract us from the
transcendent, the liberating, community building and the just.
Our battle is within our own tradition as well as without, within our
own scripture and law. Our battle is within our own hearts.
And so, we cannot escape the necessity to choose.
“Take the log out of your own eye before you take the speck out of your neighbor.”
Choose this day whom you will serve. Whether it be the god of
materialism or nationalism, the god of greed or the god of self
righteousness, the patriarchal man god, or the god of Conquest,
Crusade, Jihad and Holocaust, the god who is only on our side.
But as for me and my household, we will choose to remember and worship
the God who said, “Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed
and founds a town with violence! We choose to serve the God
who “calls for justice, not bloodshed,” and says those who
live by the sword die by the sword...”
Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my family we
will worship the God who said, “Do unto others as you would have
them do to you.” “If you have done it to the least of
these, you have done it to me.” Choose this day whom you
will serve, as for me and my household, we no longer question whether
to worship God on this mountain or that, but in Spirit and in
Truth. We will worship the same God as Gandhi, Bartolome de las
Casas, St. Francis, Thich Nhat Hanh and Abraham Lincoln, Pocahontas,
Jane Adams and Rosa Parks.
We choose to worship the God who hears the voices of people long
silenced, the God who liberates slaves and in whose promised land we
find swords being pounded into plow share, spears into pruning hooks,
where “Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never
again will they train for war. Each of them will sit under his vine and
under his fig tree, with no one to make them afraid.”
Choose this day whom you will serve; as for me and my family, we will
worship the God who calls for “justice to flow like a river, and
righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
Choose this day whom you will serve; as for me and my household, we
will serve the God of peace, the Mother of all life, the Father of
Creation and every human being. Choose this day whom you will
serve. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.