Epiphany 5C 2010
St. Dunstan's
February 7, 2010
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
"The Lord is Peace"
The threat of war is hanging over the Middle East, endangering the security and the very lives of the people of Israel. A marauding band of soldiers, using a type of warfare never seen before, is ready to invade the Promised Land. The people of Israel are stocking up supplies, preparing to hide or defend themselves against the invaders.
Sounds like something you heard on CNN today, doesn’t it? But this modern-sounding story of war is, in fact, an ancient tale found not in today’s newspaper, but in this morning’s scripture reading.
The people of Israel are preparing for an invasion by the Midianites, a nomadic tribe of the Arabian desert, who would raid Israel when the harvest was ready, living off the land until the food was gone.
“They would encamp against the Israelites and destroy the produce of the land, as far as the neighborhood of Gaza,” the Bible says. “They would leave no sustenance in Israel, and no sheep or ox or donkey.”
The Midianites are particularly hard to defend against because they use a new form of military tactics – camel warfare. “The Midianites come up like locusts, both they and their camels cannot be counted,” scripture says.
Word has reached the Israelites that the Midianites – and their camels – have crossed the Jordan River and are heading their way. The people are scurrying to bring in whatever crops they can and stash the food in nearby caves.
The young boy Gideon is threshing wheat when an angel of the Lord appears to him. “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior,” the angel says.
Gideon all but laughs in the angel’s face. He is not a mighty warrior preparing to fight. He is the youngest son of the weakest tribe in Israel, preparing to flee.
And what is this business about the Lord being with him? In Gideon’s eyes, the Lord has delivered his people right into the hands of the enemy. In fact, earlier in the story scripture says that God was angry at Israel and gave them into the hands of Midian for seven years.
But the angel persists. “I hereby commission you to deliver Israel from the hand of Midian,” he tells Gideon. “The Lord will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them.”
And if we read further in the story, we find that Gideon and his followers do just as the angel predicts, killing more than 120,000 of their enemy.
Before Gideon goes into battle he does something surprising. He builds an altar to God and calls it “the Lord is peace.”
The Lord is peace. What an odd thing for a warrior commissioned by God to slay thousands of people to name an altar. A God who anoints warriors for battle hardly seems peaceful.
My guess if that if most of us were asked to describe the God of the Old Testament very few would answer “the Lord is peace.” Peace is a characteristic we would more likely attribute to the God of the New Testament.
The Old Testament God is the creator of the universe, but not the God whom Jesus came to reveal, says Marcion, a theologian of the early Christian church.
Marcion describes the God of the Old Testament, the God of Israel and Gideon, as “judicial, harsh, mighty in war, who takes delight in war, who is ignorant, cruel, inconsistent and wicked.”
The God of the New Testament, the good God, is, according to Marcion, “incapable of anger, mild, placid, and simply good and excellent.” Marcion sees a complete dichotomy between the God of Israel and the God of Jesus.
Before you start nodding your head, thinking that this guy Marcion makes a lot of sense, hear this – Marcion was expelled from the church as a heretic in the year 144.
Marcion may have been kicked out of the church centuries ago, but his ideas linger on. All too often today we see the God of the Old and New Testaments described as two different beings – one of anger and war, the other of love and mercy.
But the truth is that the God of Israel is also the God of Jesus, the same God we have come here to worship today. How do we reconcile the seemingly contradictory divine attributes?
First, we must look at how these attributes are lived out. When we use the world anger it often has connotations of spite and vengeance. But God’s anger is more correctly seen as righteous indignation, aroused by injustice and sinfulness. God’s anger is an impatience with evil.
God’s anger is never unpredictable or irrational. It is always motivated by a concern for right and wrong. If God were not concerned about humans, concerned about issues of justice, concerned about evil and sin, and the protection of the weak and innocent, then God would not get angry when injustice and evil occur.
God gets angry because God cares about humans.
God’s anger and mercy are not opposites, they are complementary aspects of God’s love.
God never takes delight in anger, never rejoices over violence, never is happy to see destruction. Divine anger, maybe even divinely-directed war, may at times be necessary in defense of the innocent, but it is never held up as good. God takes no joy in war or its victories.
And so Gideon, divinely commissioned as a warrior, preparing to go to battle against his enemies, stops to build an altar to the God of peace. It is peace – not war – that is the ultimate good; peace – not war – to which altars are built.
Gideon’s actions are important for us to remember as we debate the moral questions of war. How do we decide what is right? How can we declare again, like Gideon, “the Lord is peace,” even as we begin the eighth year of war in Iraq and escalate an almost decade-old war in Afghanistan?
There are those in the Christian tradition who say we cannot worship a God of peace and engage in war. Quakers and other pacifists believe that to follow the God of peace is to practice absolute forgiveness and never to engage in violence for any reason.
They warn that all human motives are impure and no government can be totally trusted, especially in issues of war and peace.
But most of us are not pacifists. How then, do we decide when it is appropriate to go to war and when it is not? Since the fifth century, Christians have used Augustine’s principles of a “just war” to decide when and how they may participate in tragic violence.
These principles will not answer all of our questions, but they may once again offer some guidance to our consciences as we think about the great brutalities of war, and help us to move more quickly back to God’s altar of peace.
* * *
First, a just war must be defensive. A war of aggression is never just. When violence has been permitted in the Christian tradition it has only been to defend the innocent. War can never be part of the ambitions of any government.
Second, a just war must be declared by a legitimate authority. War is a public act, not a private one. War is an act of a legitimate government, not a private individual or dictator with a mercenary army.
A just war must have a specific, attainable purpose, not a vague, unattainable goal like a “war against evil.”
Even when engaged in war, governments must also work to end the conflict and make peace, must be willing to engage our adversaries in constructive dialogue.
Third, the possible good achieved by war must outweigh the bad of not going to war. If not going to war means enslavement and persecution, then the violence of war may be justified.
However, if the war goes on too long and produces even more chaos and violence, then other means of liberation must be found.
Fourth, war must be a last resort. War can be justified only when every peaceful means of negotiation has failed.
And last, a just war can use no immoral means. No abuse of prisoners of war, no killing of civilians, no total defeat and humiliation of the enemy, and certainly no torture of any kind by the government or its surrogates. A situation like the indefinite holding of detainees in Guantanamo Bay could never be justified in just war theory.
But even when all these criteria have been met, when the decision to go to war has been “justified,” it is important to remember that even a just war is not a good war.
War is never good. It always implies a failure, always indicates human sinfulness and evil.
The author of the principles of just war knew this. Wise people may wage just wars, he said, but will do so with grief, and sorrow, and pain – not with boasting and swagger.
“Let everyone who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery,” Augustine writes.
“And if anyone either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.”
Wars are always tragic. They are always circumstances of evil.
It may be important, even necessary, at times to slay giants and tyrants, to have the courage to wage war against those who promote injustice and evil.
But we must not built altars to a god of war, must not rejoice in war’s excitement, must not gloat over our victories.
Even in times of war, we must remember, like Gideon, that the Lord, our Lord, is peace.Amen.
Judges 6:11-24a
The angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites. The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior.” Gideon answered him, “But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.” Then the Lord turned to him and said, “Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby commission you.” He responded, “But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” The Lord said to him, “But I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them.” Then he said to him, “If now I have found favor with you, then show me a sign that it is you who speak with me. Do not depart from here until I come to you, and bring out my present, and set it before you.” And he said, “I will stay until you return.” So Gideon went into his house and prepared a kid, and unleavened cakes from an ephah of flour; the meat he put in a basket, and the broth he put in a pot, and brought them to him under the oak and presented them. The angel of God said to him, “Take the meat and the unleavened cakes, and put them on this rock, and pour out the broth.” And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord reached out the tip of the staff that was in his hand, and touched the meat and the unleavened cakes; and fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened cakes; and the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight. Then Gideon perceived that it was the angel of the Lord; and Gideon said, “Help me, Lord God! For I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face.” But the Lord said to him, “Peace be to you; do not fear, you shall not die.” Then Gideon built an altar there to the Lord, and called it, The Lord is peace.
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.
Luke 5:1-11
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.