A Deafening Blow

Matthew 26:47-56

I want to start off by sharing words that are not mine...words which are removed from our current realities, but which speak of hope and possibility within the context of tension, unrest, discord...that is, speaking of a new reality within the context of the world as we know it. I share from a book which I would love to read together in a book group this year, call this a shameless plug. David Lamotte’s Worldchanging 101: Challenging the Myth of Powerlessness. Looking back, perhaps we can see last week’s “lecture” on eschatology as a set-up. May you find the same hope, challenge, and encouragement in these words as I have:

On May 26, 2007, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups gathered for a rally in Knoxville, Tennessee. The defendants in a local murder case were African American, and some White supremacists from out of town drove there to protest. The general tone of their rally was unsurprisingly hateful. One man in camouflage held up a hand-drawn poster with a picture of a noose and the words “insert neck here” scrawled beside it, expressing his preference for a lynching over a trial.

Most people in Knoxville were not pleased to have the Klan come to town, but how should they respond? The first two natural responses to aggression, built into our psyches at a very deep level, are quite familiar in this type of situation: fight and flight. One the one hand, we are tempted to go down to the rally and give them a piece of our minds. “We’ll see how tough they are when we have a bigger crowd and we shout louder.”

On the other, people will often say, “Ignore them. They just want attention,” which is more or less a form of retreat.

The problem with the first approach is that, in the words of Dr. King, it adds “deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” Meeting hatred with hatred only increases the amount of hatred in the world. That may sound idealistic, but I am convinced that it is at the heart of pragmatism. In this particular case, the Klan does thrive on anger and opposition. They love it, and adding our hatred to theirs is no more effective in opposing their message than trying to put out a grass fire by dousing it with gasoline.

The problem with the second approach, in its most usual form of ‘just staying home’, is that it allows damaging and hateful rhetoric to be broadcast unopposed. Such rallies will nearly always gather some kind of a crowd and media exposure, unless there is an organized effort to deny them one. When such hatred goes unopposed, the people who are being attacked by their rhetoric end up feeling abandoned by potential allies who could be standing with them.

They feel that way because they are being abandoned. “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

So neither option is satisfactory, but what other options are there? That’s a question that activists in Knoxville, led by members of an environmentalist action group called Mountain Justice, asked themselves. By not assuming that the question was rhetorical, they came up with a wonderful and effective answer.

That day the Ku Klux Klan was met by the Coup Clutz Clowns, who had prepared carefully and found what theologian Walter Wink called a ‘Third Way’: neither fight nor flight, but a creative way to transform violence and hatred--in this case with humor.

When the Klan began to chant, “White power!”, the clowns pretended they couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. They facetiously decided it must be a rally for “White flour” and pulled out bags of flour they had brought with them. A big flour fight and much hilarity ensued….

The Klan was baffled. They are accustomed to being feared and shouted at, but there was no response in their repertoire to a crowd across the street actually having a wonderful time. They left an hour and a half early, with only one arrest: a neo-Nazi who charged across the street towards the clowns.

As my friend Scott Shepherd, a former Klan leader who is no an anti-racism activist, wrote to me, “The Klan is successful with their public demonstrations only when they get the attention, they feed off the hatred, and stir up negative emotions with the crowd. When the counter-protesters step up and take the control and attention away from the Klan, they fail with their attempt to get their negative message out. I have always heard that humor is the best medicine, and I believe this after witnessing the clowns’ effect on the KKK demonstrations.”

It is important to note that none of these chants made fun of the Klan themselves. The clowns simply refused to take the Klan’s ridiculous ideas seriously. So there is a window, however small, for the Klansmen to laugh too. There is an invitation to transformation, not just a squashing of the opposition.

They had found a third way--creative, non-violent engagement. It was hardly an obvious response, but when they invested creative energy in the question of how to respond, they came up with an option that was better than the ones to which we usually turn….

Creativity is expressed through an act of creation. When we speak of creation, however, we tend to speak in scientific or religious terms (or an integration of the two). In both cases we are generally referring to something that happened a long time ago and then was over.

That’s not how it works.

[If you remember from last week, however, when we speak of eschatology...we speak of something that happened a long time ago, is still happening, and will come to fruition in the fullness of time.]

The world is still being created. There is a blade of grass outside the cabin where I am writing now in the southern foothills of Virginia that wasn’t there a few week’s ago. Now it is. There is a flame in the fireplace that didn’t exist two hours ago, before I built the fire.

Generally, though, we look at a big problem, can’t see a solution, and throw up our hands. If no one has figured it out yet, we reason that we are unlikely to do so. But the truth is that people are discovering and developing new ways to approach problems every day. It might make more sense to look at a problem, gather people together, and make space for ideas to unfold. In order to be creative, we have to be intentional and invite that creativity….

It matters which stories we tell. If our actions are guided by our stories, then it is worthwhile to create and curate better visions within them. Creativity is essential to the work of positive change, and vision is the first step in that process.

Jesus’ ministry as the Christ begins with his baptism at which, the Spirit, like a dove descends, to symbolize God’s anointing of him. Also in the spoken word of God, “This is my son, my beloved”, beloved is a reference to Jesus’ status as the Christ, the anointed one of God. And right when his public service as a minister to the Kingdom of God begins he encounters temptation. Three of temptations, to be specific. The second of these temptations is that of dominion, his own kingship.

This is “a dominion that can bring peace to the nations,” explains Stanley Hauerwas in his book, The Peaceable Kingdom, “since one powerful king can force all to his will. But Jesus rejects such dominion. God’s kingdom, it seems, will not have peace through coercion. Peace will only come through the worship of the one God who chooses to rule the world through the power of love, which the world can only perceive as weakness.” Now listen to what Hauerwas says next, “Jesus thus decisively rejects Israel’s temptation to an idolatry that necessarily results in violence between peoples and nations. For our violence is correlative to the falseness of the objects we worship, and the more false they are, the greater our stake in maintaining loyalty to them and protecting them through coercion. Only the one true God can take the risk of ruling by relying entirely on the power of humility and love.”

Jesus’ ministry ends with one last temptation, too, points out Douglas Hare. Jesus has known what is coming all along, and he’s shared this with his disciples on multiple occasions. Ultimately what’s coming is the kingdom of God, but penultimately his own persecution, crucifixion, and death. Quite the cup of suffering. In the garden of Gethsemane he prays that this “cup” might pass, “but” he tells God, “not my will but yours be done.” He’s struggling with the reality of what must pass for the power of God’s love to be made known. And when the armed guards show up to arrest him, one of his disciples gives him an out: he draws his sword to defend Jesus from God’s plan. Had Jesus allowed his disciples to defend him that night, he might have been able to escape, to go into hiding along with them, to avoid sure and certain death. But he would have simply reinforced the power of violence by doing so, and simultaneously reinforced fight and flight as the only two viable responses to conflict. It simply was not creative enough.

This is why Jesus commands the sword be put away...he is not witnessing to the coercive power of violence, but the radical, and seemingly ineffective, power of God’s love. A power that will continue to seem ineffective, silly, ridiculous unless he is able to open the eyes of the blind, so to speak, through his own death and resurrection, and show the world what God’s plan actually entails. Not more of the same, but something new. The sword is a tool of destruction, but Jesus is witnessing to a God who is doing something creative.

So Jesus puts the kibosh on violence and then what happens? The disciples run away. They flee. They switch plans from fight to flight. As if completely unaware that a third-way is available. I find it ironic that the guard gets an ear cut off, yet it is the disciples who demonstrate to not have been listening to Jesus. They too are in need of Christ’s witness to the resurrection, or as Walter Wink puts it, they need the “assurance that there is a power at work in the world to transform defeat into divine victory.”

Following Jesus’ way of non-violence is not, as some critics might claim, turning ourselves into a doormat to be trampled upon by our enemies. But it takes a tremendous amount of faith and trust to envision an outcome other than what we have come to expect from human history: that at some point in an escalating conflict violence will be necessary. I don’t want to appear naive, so I must confess that I do struggle tremendously with non-violence. Violence, while not perfect, has a proven track record of effective peacekeeping, of removing threats. The comfort and quality of my life in the United States of America is thanks to the courage and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces.

Armed. Like weapons...like swords… Do Jesus’ words in the garden still echo in our world today? Do will still have ears to hear them? Is the command to put away our weapons still a discipleship requirement? I cannot presume to answer these questions for you...but I can acknowledge that there are seemingly only two ways of answering them, and I can wonder if there just might be a third way.

God, I hope so. And in that hope lies the way of the kingdom of God.

Bibliography (sorry for being a bit lazy on this one, please don't sue me.):

Lamotte, David. World Changing 101: Challenging the Myth of Powerlessness.

Hare, Douglas. “Matthew” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 303.

Wink, Walter. The Powers That Be. 135.