God's Participation in Violence

Genesis 4:3-16

There’s been a lot of bad news this past week. The Pulse night club in Orlando was the scene of the largest loss of life in a domestic mass shooting to date. Our country’s response to the violence has been predictably divided. It’s painful to watch the pain and grief of people in mourning become almost instantly enslaved in the service of polarizing political platitudes. “See, this is why we need less guns!” “No, this is why we need more guns!” The church is called to respond in ways that unite, to participate in God’s work of reconciliation, to cry out, “See, this is why we need more God!” Our news anchors, pundits, politicians, despite their powerful opinions are hardly theologians, their responses are more often governed by platforms, and positions, and paranoia, and, dare I say, profit. The church’s response to bad news is nourished and regulated by Good News, the Gospel, the Word of God. As one called to lead the church in faithful response to its calling, I turned to God in response to the shootings in Orlando, I turned to prayer and to Scripture. And it was anything but comforting. More than anything, I identified with the sorrowful singer of Psalm 42, longing for the living waters of the Lord amidst a sea of doubt and the taunt of my adversaries, “Where is your God?”

Where is God in all of this? It’s a question that haunts us all. It’s a question whose answer often makes the difference between faith and unfaith, between hope and hopelessness, between belief and unbelief. Dwindling in Unbelief is a website whose tagline is “An unbeliever’s thoughts on the Bible, Quran, and Book of Mormon.” One of the author’s blog is written on the anniversary of the massacre at Virginia Tech, which prior to this past Sunday was the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history. “The massacre was one of the worst in U.S. history,” the author writes, “but it was small indeed by biblical standards.” The blog goes on to list Biblical massacres.

In Genesis 4, Cain kills Abel. Moses kills an Egyptian in the Second chapter of Exodus, then in the 12th chapter, God kills all the first born males of the Egyptians, and then in the 14th chapter, Moses and God tag-team to kill all of Pharaoh’s army in the waters of the Red Sea. In Judges 3:31, Shammer kills 600 Philistines with an ox goad, and Samson in Judges 15, kills 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass. In Judges 9:5, Abimelech kills all 70 of his brothers on a single stone. In 1 Samuel 22:18-19, Doeg the Edomite murdered 85 priests and all of the men, women, children and infants, even oxen, donkeys, and sheep in the city of Nob. Just one chapter later, in 1 Samuel 18:25-27, David kills 200 Philistines to purchase his first wife with their foreskins. In 2 Samuel 23:18, Abishai kills 300 men with a spear. In 1 Chronicles 11:11, David’s chief captain kills 300 men with a spear, or, if you take the account from 2 Samuel 23:8, he kills 800. Just a few weeks ago I preached from 1 Kings 18, in which Elijah kills all 450 of the prophets of Baal after they lose the prayer/cook-off competition. In 2 Kings 1:1-12, Elijah calls on God to send fire from the sky and burn 150 men to death. Just one chapter later, Elisha is at it again, in 2 Kings 2:22-23 he curses children in the name of the Lord for making fun of his bald head and sends two bears to kill 42 of them.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the death and destruction mentioned in the Bible. Where is God in this violence? God seems to be involved in invoking, inspiring, and inducing violence. For sure, the Bible doesn’t sugarcoat the harsh reality of the violent ways of world in which we live. But how does this help us make sense of the murder and violence in Orlando, or in San Bernadino, or Newtown, or Ft. Hood, or Blacksburg, or Columbine, or in Paris, or Turkey, or the Middle East? This is where the Bible can become extremely problematic, because we see, time and again, God being called upon to enact violence against Israel’s enemies. In Deuteronomy 7, God prepares the “chosen people” to move into the land he will give them, after “clearing away many nations before them…” Verse 2 reads, “when the Lord your God gives them [the nations] over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.” But then there’s Isaiah’s description of the peaceful kingdom in chapter 11, where the 9th verse reads, “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” Where is our God? Which verse do we use to help us understand God’s participation in violence? What is God’s participation in the violence of our own times? We can’t simply pick and choose, willy nilly, the texts that support the way we already believe. No matter what you believe, if you read the Bible in partnership with the power of prayer the Word of God will find a way to challenge your beliefs and shake you to your core. You can’t pick and choose Scripture, but you can pick…or choose to follow Jesus, who as the Word of God incarnate and that makes a huge difference in our “knowledge of the Lord.”

But we’ll get back to that.

I called up Ree to tell her about the music that Martin and I were choosing for worship. I told her I was planning to preach on God’s participation in violence. “Good luck with that,” she said. Indeed. I started to feel like I’d bitten off more than I could chew—which of course reminded me of the story of forbidden fruit, which appears just before the story of Cain and Abel. This story depicts the predicament of humanity learning to live in a world that it did not create, a world with prohibitions and temptations, but it is also a story about the reality of God and God’s resolve for life in a world on its way to death.

Adam and Eve are chilling in the Garden in the cool of the day when they are approached and tempted, “Did God really tell you not to eat from any tree in this garden?”

“No,” Eve replies, “Just not from that one, if we eat from that one, God says we’ll die.”

“God’s not being honest with you. You won’t die if you eat this fruit! You’ll be able to see clearly and become like God, knowing good and evil.” Note: it is God’s will that they not take the bait; in defense of their best interest, God warns them not to bite. The fruit is a symbol of a temptation to avoid the will of God. There is no point at which this fruit looks tastier than when the world seems to be out of control. The tempter asks us, “Where is your God? Are you sure God is here? Are you sure you can trust God to know what’s best for you?”

Adam and Eve were tempted to turn from God and trust their own instinct, to take the pursuit and defense of their best interest into their own hands. In doing so, they immediately become aware of their unworthiness in this task, symbolized by their nakedness. They presume they can abdicate control, only to immediately realize they’ve made a mistake. Genesis 3 is an allegory of the endless temptation to take the pursuit and defense our our best interest into our own hands, and our inability to see the mistakes we make in pursuit of those interests until after we’ve made them. This hindsight, which reveals our failures, also brings with it the fear-inducing realization that we have jeopardized our relationship with the One who is in control. The combination of knowing-we’ve-failed-to-protect-our-best-interest-in-the-past and the fear-of-failing-to-do-so-again-in-the-future manifests itself in the present in the form of anxiety. The tempter comes in many shapes and forms, but it always targets our anxiety, for anxiety is the place where we are most vulnerable, where our nakedness is revealed. And we are tempted to cover, rather than to confront and confess, our sinfulness; we are tempted to hide our nakedness, our mistakes, our brokenness. We are tempted to fight to protect ourselves from being attacked where we are most vulnerable.

The stories of Scripture shows how this temptation works its way into Cain’s anxiety of unworthiness. God favors Abel’s offering over Cain’s. The ambiguity of this favor is not explained in the story. But it does describe Cain’s response. His face falls. He chooses violence as a defense of his well-being against the perceived threat of unworthiness. Here again, it is God’s will that Cain not take the bait. “If you don’t do the right thing, sin will be waiting at the door ready to strike! It will entice you, but you must rule over it.” God knew that Cain’s anger was in response to the fear-of-failure attacking a place of vulnerability. But Cain chose to trust his own instinct, and took the pursuit and defense of his own best interest to the next level: to defend the worth of his life at the expense of his brother’s life. Failure to trust God will always inevitably lead to violence and death. God knew this. God warned that the knowledge of good and evil would consume us if we consumed it. God told us that we would die. But there is good news inserted here, too—this beast at the door, this sin, can be overcome! We, human beings, have the capacity to tame it! Sadly, this story does not reveal the power of human sinlessness in perfect union with the will of God, but it does let us know that the power is there. It’s not till we get to Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, that we see a human being who overcomes the power of sin and lives in perfect union with the will of God.

But we’ll come back to that.

Immediately after killing his brother, Cain is aware that he has made a tremendous mistake. He’s left feeling incredibly vulnerable. “My punishment is more than I can bear. Now that you have driven me away from the fertile land and I am hidden from your presence, I’m about to become a roving nomad on the earth, and anyone who finds me will kill me.” But God doesn’t want more death, and so God marked Cain so as to remind anyone who might be tempted to exploit his vulnerability that Cain’s death would only lead to more death.

“Anyone who kills Cain will be paid back seven times,” God says. Surely sounds like God is making a threat to exact revenge, which is incredibly problematic taking God’s will to protect of the best interest of all creation. Up to this point, God has adamantly advocated non-violence as the only defense against the attack of sin. It doesn’t make sense that God would now promise to participate in the perpetuation of violence. Which is why I want us to consider God’s words of warning to Adam and Eve, to Cain, and to the would-be-enemies of Cain as the same warning. “If you eat this fruit, you will die.” This is very different from God saying, “If you eat this fruit, I’ll be forced to kill you.” The warning is God’s attempt at preventing violence, because violence breeds violence. If we give in to the temptation of violence, we are not serving God’s will, we are not trusting that God knows what is best for us.

The stories of violence and murder that follow this episode seem to throw a wrench into our claim that the will of God is for non-violence, especially when Scripture tells us that God is responsible for floods of destruction, angels of death, victories in battle, and even for the sending of two bears in Elisha’s defense of his own vulnerably naked baldness. The temptation is to think that the will of God changes from desiring the best interest of all creation, to desiring the best interest of only a chosen few. Scripture again and again reveals God’s will for the well-being of all of creation, thus revealing God’s “chosen people” not as a mere “few”, but as an innumerable multitude, spanning all nations, creeds, races, languages. I’d like us to consider existence of a “chosen few” as the inevitable progression of sin’s manipulation of the anxiety of human unworthiness. If there’s a “chosen few,” then there must be an “unchosen few.” These are manifestations of the fear that our failures make us unworthy of God’s love and care and protection. In Jesus Christ, the indomitable power of God’s love and care for us is powerfully revealed.

But we’ll get back to that.

Sin tempts us to doubt God’s power of love. Sin lures us deeper into fear, to blame the other, to violently take the protection of our best interest into our own hands. It is sin that lures is away from confession and into confrontation—sin loves it when we ignore the role that sin plays behind the scenes, sin loves it when we open the door and let it in. We have all seen and felt sin’s power to manipulate our behavior by targeting our anxiety. Terrorism exploits this power. Terrorism succeeds when it paints a picture of a world in which we can no longer trust God’s love and care to have any power. Terrorism succeeds when we feel hopeless to respond faithfully to the taunt of our enemy, “Where is your God?” Terrorism succeeds when it convinces us to take the pursuit and defense of our own, or our family’s, or our nation’s best interests into our own hands. Terrorism succeeds when we see people as the problem, rather than sin. But violence is the power of sin and we will never be able to overcome sin by killing, no matter who it is we kill. The tempter comes in many shapes and sizes, but it always targets our anxiety. When the tempter attacks our anxiety, brothers become others, others become enemies, and enemies become justifications for violence. Violence breaks God’s heart.

Okay. Let’s get back to Jesus—in whom knowledge of the Lord is revealed, in whom human life is lived in perfect union with the will of God, in whom the indomitable power of God’s love and grace is revealed, through whom the power of sin is overcome. Jesus Christ is the one sufficient revelation of God, whose life, death, and resurrection illumine our interpretation of the overarching story of God’s love and faithfulness revealed in the work of reconciliation throughout scripture. In Jesus Christ, God’s story is revealed as a story of non-violence. In Jesus Christ, God’s love and faithfulness were made incarnate and inserted into the story of sin. The powers of sin inevitably perceived the presence of the prince of peace as a threat to its own power. In response to this threat, the powers of sin lured the world to respond in the only way it knows how: violently. When Peter sought violence to defend Jesus from his arrest, Jesus sternly rebuked him. Jesus refused to give in the temptation of the powers of sin. His refusal to fight the perceived oppressive powers of the Roman Empire with violence is perhaps what turned his Palm Sunday paraders into the crucifixion crowd. Even there upon the cross Jesus resisted the temptation to sin unto death. In doing so, he died to the way of death. Through Christ’s conviction to non-violence, the way of life was again revealed. Through Christ’s conviction to non-violence, God was able to raise Jesus from the dead, from the powers of sin which no longer had any power over him.

This we profess in the confessions of our church: “The life, death, resurrection, and promised coming of Jesus Christ has set the pattern for the church’s mission. His life as man involves the church in the common life of all [humanity]. His service to [humankind] commits the church to work for every form of human well-being. His suffering makes the church sensitive to all the sufferings of [hu]mankind so that it sees the face of Christ in the faces of people in every kind of need. His crucifixion discloses to the church God’s judgment on [humankind’s] inhumanity to [humankind] and the awful consequences of its own complicity in injustice. In the power of the risen Christ and the hope of his coming, the church sees the promise of God’s renewal of man’s life in society and of God’s victory over all wrong.”

The Gospel reveals God to participate in the violence of our world through death. Where is our God? Our God is there on the cross. Our God is there with each of the victims in the Orlando shooting, indeed, God dies with all victims of violence. The Gospel reveals, in Cain, a God who is willing to die with those who are willing to kill, even those willing to kill God. The Gospel reveals, in Christ, that God does indeed know what is best for us, and ceaselessly seeks to protect us from the power of sin. The Gospel ultimately reveals God’s grace, which is, indeed, a perplexing mystery beyond our understanding, but grace is also the only adequate shield against sin’s attack, the only fortress from fear, the only defender against death, the only protection against the temptation to take life, whether our own or another’s, into our own hands. When the tempter attacks our anxiety, brothers become others, others become enemies, and enemies become justifications for violence. But by grace, we are justified through faith, not through violence. By grace we are called to love our enemies. By grace we are empowered to live and love and have our being grounded in the reconciling purposes of God.

Our vulnerability to violence is our greatest temptation to violence. And we are most vulnerable, when we mourn, when we grieve, when we’re angry. But we must mourn and grieve and be angry about the shootings in Orlando. We must mourn and grieve and be angry about the persistence of violence and sin throughout our world. Here’s the thing: the vulnerability through which sin justifies revenge, is the same vulnerability through which the Spirit justifies us by grace, through faith, as worthy participants in the work of reconciliation. Friends may the Holy Spirit hold you in the love of God, that the life, and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ might be in you. And may the Holy Spirit hold the church in its calling to participate in proclaiming God’s victory over violence. Amen.