Breaking through Fear

And yet again I have been remiss in writing. Apologies! But here is a sermon I preached today at St. Paul and Norrisville United Methodist Churches on the birth of Moses.

This sermon is significant to me for a number of reasons: 1. The book of Exodus is my favorite book in the bible, 2. I relied on my work in college on race as a social construction which was awesome, and 3. This sermon is the one I am using for my Provisional Membership Examination in February where the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church will decide if I will be commissioned (in non-church speak it basically means that I need this sermon for a big interview that will determine whether or not I'll have a job when I graduate).

I thank both churches my family and my friends Amanda, Laura, Nancy, Kim, and Gavin and of course to my partner Aaron for their support and affirmation of my calling.

So, here's the sermon.

Scripture: Exodus 1:8-2:10 1

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

Jesus' baptism using imagery from this story

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live." But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?" The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.


The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him, "This must be one of the Hebrews' children," she said. Then his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Yes." So the girl went and called the child's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages." So the woman took the child and nursed it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, "because," she said, "I drew him out of the water."

Sermon: Breaking through Fear

Good morning everyone! I am excited to be here today. The book of Exodus was the first book of the bible I read in its entirety as a child, probably because I really liked the cartoon version of the story The Prince of Egypt when it came out in 1998. Many of us are familiar with the story of Moses, or at least a version of that story, because every Easter evening The Ten Commandments is shown on TV. It is an epic story, so to preach on the birth story of Moses is challenging, but it is also an honor.

So will you pray with me?

Patient Teacher,
one who has delivered us through times of trial to see your presence among us
grant that this morning we may feel that presence, that you may speak to us
through this scripture, the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts,
so that we might better live out your teachings. Amen.

The world that we begin with this morning is a dark one, beginning with the words, "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." At the end of Genesis, Joseph forgave his brothers and brought them to Egypt to escape famine and there they enjoyed Pharaoh's favor. For them, Egypt was a place of refuge. But many many years have passed, so many that the story of Joseph has been lost to the new Pharaoh. And so he begins to oppress the Israelites.

Dennis Olsen, a professor at Princeton seminary writes, "A tempting political strategy for new leaders, whether an Egyptian pharaoh or a Nazi Hitler, involves trying to solidify power by singling out a relatively weak minority or outsider group and calling them an enemy. Fear of others can be a powerful source of unity."2 Fear can bring people together, but ultimately it tears them apart. Fear is not a strategy that can be sustained, and it is a strategy contrary to the very life that God is calling us to live.

Living in the Norrisville area, most of us have not known this systemic fear. Many of us may have heard of it through stories of growing up black in the south before and during the Civil Rights Movement. Or stories of living under Nazis in Europe. These are stories where we can taste the darkness and the horror of what it may have been like to wake up as those Israelites, one day living normal lives and then beginning to see their dignity taken away. In these first and second chapters of Exodus, we see that first the Israelites are conscripted into forced labor, but they continued to multiply and so the Egyptians forced them into complete slavery. The fear here, then, does not just belong to exclusively to the Israelites. Maintaining a culture of fear in which to oppress one group means that the oppressors, the Egyptians here, must also be fearful. Fearful of revolt, of losing power, but mostly they are afraid because they have seen how easy it is to have your dignity taken away.

But some Egyptians and Israelites broke that cycle of fear, as we see in our scripture reading this morning. We're going to explore the Hebrew midwives and Pharaoh's daughter specifically. These women model for us our roles as the Church in the world today. We are to break through fear and move our communities to the abundant living that Jesus calls us to when he says in the Gospel of John, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."3 The story of Exodus is a story of moving into our calling to abundant living, though the way is difficult.

Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives, are the first we see to stand up to Pharaoh's reign of fear. It may seem strange that Pharaoh would summon these two women, these two lowly Hebrew midwives, and invite them to conspire such appalling and horrific genocide with him. Why not just jump straight to his order to all the Egyptian people in verse 22 to throw all the Hebrew boys into the Nile? The text does not tell us why he whispers his evil plans to these midwives, but we can imagine why. This story of the Egyptians forcing the Hebrews into slavery is not simply a story of finding a workforce, but it is the story of the construction, the creation, of a people who were once favored by another Pharaoh into a hated and feared people.

Many of you have heard me talk extensively about my experience in Bosnia. In Bosnia, Muslims and Christians lived side by side before the war, as Hebrews and Egyptians did before the rise of this new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph. But after the fall of Yugoslavia, leaders like Slobodan Milosevic looking for power used propaganda to turn Christians from seeing Muslims as neighbors, coworkers, and friends to seeing them as monsters who needed to be eliminated. This also happened in Nazi Germany, and in places like Rwanda, and even in the USA in areas for instance where the KKK was prevalent. This culture of fear that functions to create a distinct "us" and "them" between people who used to be friends is common throughout history.

The difficulty I imagine Pharaoh had with his propaganda was the Hebrews' fertility. In most cultures and times, fertility is seen as a blessing from God. So too it was in this case, as the midwives are rewarded in this story with families. So Pharaoh wants to hide that evidence of blessing from the Egyptians, for surely it is more difficult to oppress a people you know are favored by God. He calls the midwives to make murder look like God's blessing is being taken back, so that the Hebrews will be known for their inability to keep their sons alive past birth.4

At very real risk to themselves, these women stand up to Pharaoh, rejecting a part in his evil plan. The text says that these women feared God, and that was their motivation for defying Pharaoh. There is that word fear again, and it seems to conflict with my understanding of Pharaoh's reign as one of fear and God's as a reign of abundant living. And certainly in my understanding of God, fearing God is not something I talk about much. For me, following God comes out of a love for God, not fear. But in this sense, fearing God does not mean being afraid of what punishment God will reign down for disobeying: in the tradition of the Old Testament fearing God is much more complicated. According to J. Cheryl Exum from Boston College, the center of this scriptural concept "to fear God" is a sense of God's mystery that affects our behavior, so that we are "guided by basic ethical principles and in harmony with God's will."5 These midwives have a sense of God's mystery that guides them in their daily walk. They ignore Pharaoh and continue to participate in God's blessing of the Hebrew women.

They are called before Pharaoh again, and Pharaoh asks why the boys are continuing to live. Should the midwives have spat in Pharaoh's face and denounced his evil, he would have them killed and found new midwives. This is typical of those in power even today--- if you hear something you don't like, silence them and find someone willing to tell you what you want to hear. So the midwives play on Pharaoh's own creation of the Hebrews as somehow not human. They say that Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They describe the Hebrew women as more like animals because they can just pop out babies without midwives, though more dignified Egyptian women need help.6 This is a lie, but it feeds into Pharaoh's own construction of Hebrews as more like animals than humans. So Shiphrah and Puah catch Pharaoh up in his own lies and go back to work among the Hebrew women, and the people multiplied and became very strong.

I read a book this summer called A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell about the end of World War II and Italian resistance to fascism. She focuses specifically on the actions of a few families living in valleys in Northern Italy at the end of the war. These were families who suffered under Mussolini, many of whom had lost sons to the war, and now they were being oppressed under the German Nazis who has moved in following the collapse of the Italian government. These were ordinary Catholic Italian peasants who hid Jewish refugees in their homes, made them part of their families. It is a story we know little about, but it is a powerful one. Mary Doria Russell ends the book talking about Hitler: "One hollow, hateful little man," she writes. "One last awful thought: all the harm he ever did was done for him by others."7 I always get chills reading that. Because the author of this novel is right. Hitler probably didn't even fire a gun--- all the atrocities he committed were done for him by other people. Pharaoh himself did not kill Hebrew babies. No, his genocidal plans were carried out for him by others. But Shiphrah and Puah stood up and refused to do harm for Pharaoh, and the people multiplied and became very strong.

Theirs is an example for us as the Church. The Church has a long and unfortunate history of being Pharaoh, but we also have a history of moments that we acted as those midwives, as those Catholic Italians did when they hid Jewish families during World War II. But when we choose to live abundantly, those relying on fear to maintain power become desperate.

Pharaoh in his desperation gives a new order to his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live."

In the film The Prince of Egypt, a young Moses learns of this order by looking at the drawings on the wall of the temple that depicted history. The drawing describing this order of Pharaoh is haunting: rows of soldiers hold babies by the leg preparing to throw them in the Nile, and more children are drawn falling through the water into the waiting mouths of crocodiles. And it is into this horror that Moses' mother gives birth.

She hides her son as long as she can, but ultimately she turns to the Nile, where so many have died already, and tries to subvert Pharaoh's orders. She does not throw her child into the Nile but places him in a basket onto the Nile.

And then we meet the daughter of Pharaoh, another example for the Church. She is a child of Pharaoh, so surely she knows her father's order to throw all the Hebrew babies into the Nile. Surely she knows this baby is a Hebrew. And yet, she opens the basket, sees the baby, hears its cry, and something stirs within her. Her own father Pharaoh has put so much effort into making a distinction between Hebrew and Egyptian that he believes himself that Hebrews are more animal than human. He raised his daughter to fear the Hebrews. But she sees through the fear and her heart is moved for the baby. She takes him as her son, thoroughly destroying the barrier that her own father was trying to construct between Hebrew and Egyptian.

As the Church, this breaking of barriers is also our work, despite history as the constructors of those barriers. Ephesians 2:14 reads, "For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."8 We are supposed to open the basket, know the baby is a not one of us, know that society is telling us that we should shut the basket and leave it there among the reeds, and instead allow ourselves to be moved by compassion to make that baby our own.

The story of Pharaoh's daughter reminds me of the ministry of a church in Tucson, Arizona, a ministry called No More Deaths in which volunteers provide food, water, and medical care to save the lives of people crossing the treacherous border between the USA and Mexico.9 Earlier this summer, volunteers from this church found Gonzalo lying barely conscious on the side of a remote road. He was severely dehydrated from drinking contaminated water from a cattle tank, and he was going to die. But volunteers from this Tucson church found him and laid him in the back of their pick-up. He asked if he was dreaming, and then after being assured he wasn't, he asked, "Are you angels?"

Are you angels? Perhaps that would be what baby Moses would have asked if he had been old enough when he saw Pharaoh's daughter's face.

Now, No More Deaths volunteers have been arrested before while transporting immigrants like Gonzalo to receive medical aid, and some have been stopped by police and interrogated just for leaving water for weary travelers to find. After being treated, Gonzalo was deported--- but he was alive because of the love of these No More Deaths volunteers. They were like the Pharaoh's daughter--- these volunteers opened the basket floating down the river to find Gonzalo, a person they have been told they cannot help at the risk of arrest. But they have compassion. They saw that Gonzalo was a child of God and so they reached out to him.

And so we have seen who we are supposed to be in this story. But who are we now?10 No one here is really like Pharaoh, but almost all of us, myself included, can be like all those Egyptians who may not have come up with Pharaoh's horrible ideas but who still do his dirty work for him from time to time. Sometimes this is just because we afraid for ourselves or our families, sometimes it seems simpler to follow orders, but most of all it is that sometimes the fear we live in tells us that there is no other way to live.

But God pokes a hole in our fear. God strengthens us when we act as those midwives, choosing to honor God rather than fearing Pharaoh, or when we act as Pharaoh's daughter, moved by compassion to use our own place and power for justice and love instead of for fear.

May we all break our own cycles of fear to live more abundantly. Amen.

Who is this?

The monthly sermon post! This is a sermon for Palm Sunday, that I first used on my preaching class with Dr. Gary Simpson at Drew. Today, I preached it at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I have been preaching once a month as part of my supervised ministry. It is a very small congregation, and the people are so wonderful and friendly. I thank them for their support of me as a student pastor and will be sad to go, since this was the last Sunday I will preach there. But that means supervised ministry is almost over and I will have some time to write something for my blog other than a sermon!

Scripture: Matthew 21:1–11 (from the Inclusive Bible translation)1

As they approached Jerusalem, entering Bethphage at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent off two disciples, with the instructions, "Go into the village straight ahead of you, and immediately you will find a tethered donkey with her colt standing beside her. Untie them and lead them back to me. If anyone questions you, say, 'The Rabbi needs them.' They they will let them go at once."

This came about to fulfill what was said through the prophet:
"Tell the daughter of Zion,
Your sovereign comes to you without display,
riding on a donkey, on a colt---
the foal of a beast of burden."

So the disciples went off and did what Jesus had ordered. They brought the donkey and her colt, and after they laid their cloaks on the animals, Jesus mounted and rode toward the city.

Great crowds of people spread their cloaks on the road, while some began to cut branches from the trees lay them along the path. The crowds--- those who went in front of Jesus and those who followed--- were all shouting,
"Hosanna to the Heir to the House of David!
Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Most High!
Hosanna in the highest!"

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to its depths, demanding, "Who is this?"

And the crowd kept answering, "This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee!"

Sermon: “Who is this?”



I saw Godspell at Bernards Township High School a few weeks ago. It is one of my favorite musicals--- I prefer hippie musicals. And, though the song "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord" is a John the Baptist song, calling people to repent, I always hear this song and think of Palm Sunday. If you have seen the musical live, you may associate the rushing forward in the song--- which at the high school due to that large cast sounded like a herd of elephants--- with the forward motions of the crowd, proclaiming as loudly and joyously as you have to do to sing "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord."

And so this is the image I have in my mind of Palm Sunday, a rushing forward, a joyous preparation of Jesus coming to Jerusalem to assume his role as King, really. The occasion is one of such brightness and color that we almost skip over that verse, the one that is foreshadowing the events coming later in the week. You see,

As Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred to its depths,
demanding, "Who is this?"
Who is this guy riding a donkey with her colt alongside her into our city? Who is this person that has so invigorated the masses? Who is this and what does he want? What does he want with us?

Will you pray with me?

Gracious God, Patient Teacher, we ask your presence among us as we gather here. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts bring us closer to understanding who is this Jesus and how can we become better followers of him. Amen.

Thoughout my study of this passage this week, the question I kept coming back to was that "Who is this?" question. The text, though, makes it pretty clear who this is. In the beginning of the passage, we see Jesus as a great teacher, as one who gives instructions that are followed, as one who says "you will find a tethered donkey" there and it is so. And the author of this gospel tells us that this happened to fulfill what was said through the prophet. So who is this Jesus? The Promised One. The One the people have so longed for. The sign of this king was not a warhorse, not chariots drawn as Caesar would have it, no the sign of this promised one given to the people by God through the prophet was that a simple man would ride in without display on a dinky old donkey, still tied to her young colt. The people are clear that this man on the donkey is prophesying a change, and that is why they shout Hosannas.

I think the scene was one so like what we saw in Egypt. The people so overflowed with joy at the thought of their freedom. They stood in Tahrir--- which means liberation--- Square, together surging forward with a vision of the end of oppression and the beginning of a new way to be Egypt together. The whole city stirred to its depths is the world, people glued to the TV wondering what will happen next, asking who are these people?

But too often the asking of the question who is this? is the signal of fear. It is clear from the passage that Jesus has come to Jerusalem to change some things--- we can say that before he even overturns the tables in the Temple, which in the Gospel of Matthew, he does the same day as his entry into the city. A Palestinian man, who must be obviously poor, obviously dusty from extensive travel, sits on top of a donkey, rides through the streets, and is given the welcome of a great king. This is frightening for those in power; this is the time when their fear translates into a need to quash the uprising. Yet others are out in the streets shouting Hosannas.

The whole city is stirred to its depths as it is presented with a choice, to continue with the old way of living, the way of warhorses, or to try to do something new. To follow this strange man on a donkey.

The Who is this? question is really one about what truths we will admit to ourselves, about whether or not we are willing to let the God who is stirring us to our depths do something new in our lives or whether we are going to quash it within us, close our eyes, turn our backs on the processional.

We all have these who is this? moments in our lives, these moments when we see God and know who God is but we have to ask if we are willing to admit that to ourselves.

One of the most important Who is this? moments for me in my life happened when I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina on a mission trip for the first time. My sister and I were picky eaters, but we certainly were nowhere near starving, but our host, a tiny firey woman named Saja decided we were wasting away and so whisked us away from the rest of the group, bringing with us one of our translators named Ðana since Saja herself knew little English, to the home of her friend for a special dinner. Now, I was sixteen, out of the country for the first time, sitting at a table outside a home still riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel from the war, listening to three strange women chatting in Bosnian. Bosnian is not a language like French or Spanish where a lot of the words are similar to English either. But despite the confusion of the situation, my sister Kate and I just sat quietly, absorbing it all. Ðana became quiet soon too, and then she reached over to Kate and I and told us she loved us. She had known us for two days, and here she was telling us she loved us.

Who is this?It had to be God. I had known the woman for two days. I had lived an extremely sheltered life and spent my childhood planting pumpkins in my backyard that didn't grow until the year we moved, playing with kittens, and writing science fiction. Ðana spent her childhood hiding from the Serb and Croat armies. Her father was killed during the war and every day she leaves her house she passes the marker along the road where he had been murdered. She had never spoken English outside of class before she met us, and the only Bosnian word I knew at that point was the number 8 because it sounds like the word awesome. She was a Muslim whose people were targeted by Christian genocidaires and I was a USAmerican Christian in a post- 9/11 world. And yet the God within her reached out to me beyond all of those barriers and loved me.

And this is one of the moments in my life where I did recognize God, and that I still today rely on as the assurance that God loves me. Me of all people. This is what I imagine those folks along the road that day celebrating. Of course, my who is this? moment is not completely parallel to that of Palm Sunday. There, God had given them this radically different picture of kingship, but in that picture they felt God saying, as I felt in Bosnia, I love you. And I have a better way of living planned for you.

But with this recognition comes a call to a change. Are we going to be those people shouting Hosannas, or are we going to insist that we do not know the answer to the question Who is this?

Of course, even when we are in that crowd, shouting Hosannas on a Sunday,

where do we end up that Friday?

For sometimes we shout Hosannas on Sunday only to go into hiding Friday or even become the bloodthirsty crowd. We must remember that not all revolutions end peacefully. Right now many of us are praying for Libya, mowed down by a dictator. This is not another Egypt revolution, which though it did come under siege briefly by Mubarek's thugs, was overwhelmingly peaceful and joyous. But Libya resembles less this joyous parade to Jerusalem than it does the way Jesus left Jerusalem on Good Friday. We read in Matthew,

On their way out [of Jerusalem], they met a Cyrenian named Simon who they pressed into service to carry the cross. Upon arriving at a site called Golgotha--- which means Skull Place--- they gave Jesus a drink of wine mixed with a narcotic herb, which Jesus tasted but refused to drink.

Once they had nailed Jesus to the cross, they divided his clothes among them by rolling dice; then they sat down and kept watch over him. Above his head, they put the charge against him in writing: "This is Jesus, King of the Jews."2

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is a scene of rich color and vibrance, not the darkness pressing down on us of the scene of Jesus leaving Jerusalem.

Both scenes are full of topsy-turvery reversals: in the first, a man is given the welcome of a king, though he comes without display, riding a donkey; in the second, a man is named a king mockingly as he is killed as a political criminal. But this Jesus is just as much our king here in this Good Friday scene as he is on Palm Sunday. This Good Friday scene is a fulfillment of that Palm Sunday picture. It shows that the answer to the Who is this? question is the one that got him killed.

We are in our last week of Lent, a time of renewal, a time of bringing life from ashes. We are spending this season of Lent, particularly this Holy Week, preparing ourselves for the Way of the Lord. And when we are preparing ourselves for the Way of the Lord, we have to prepare ourselves for those Fridays too, prepare ourselves to be willing to answer the question Who is this? even when we are stirred to our very depths.

“The Most Subversive Protest of All”

This is the sermon on Luke 5:38-48.1 I first preached it in my preaching class with Dr. Gary Simpson at Drew. I preached at Bernardsville United Methodist Church in New Jersey, where I preach once a month as part of my supervised ministry. It is a very small congregation, and the people are so wonderful and friendly. I thank them for their support of me as a student pastor!

Matthew 5:38-48:2


You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I don't know how many of you have been following the revolution in Egypt but one image in particular from this popular uprising really struck me. You may have seen it, but if not, here it is, a woman kissing a police officer during the protests.3

This week as I preparing the sermon, this image was just stuck in my head. Like when you have a song stuck in your head and you can't get it to go away. So I'm asking you today to hold this image in your mind as we explore this passage together.

Will you pray with me?




Patient Teacher, one who calls us to be hearers and doers of your Word, open us up to the movement of your Spirit as we gather here. May we be so bold to find the Word that lives within us today. Amen.

You know those scriptures you hear all the time, but are never explained? This is one of those passages for me. It is from what the Gospel of Matthew calls the Sermon on the Mount, which, if you have been following the lectionary for the past few weeks, you have been reading. This passage in particular includes two of the (what are called) antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount: these are places where Jesus tells us something we have heard said (you have heard it that it was said), and then tells us to do the opposite. And these things we've heard, they make sense. I want to focus on that first part of the scripture this morning, on how we've heard the saying "take and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

Recently I was reminded that this rule was really used to be merciful rather than vindictive.4 If someone knocks out your tooth, allowing you to knock out their tooth brings a kind of equality and prevents people from killing those who have wronged them just by knocking out a tooth, you know? In principle, international rules of war operate on this same idea, calling it proportionality. For instance, according to the law of proportionality, if some lone person launches a hand grenade into your country, you can't declare nuclear war on their country. It is the same idea in our criminal justice system that the punishment should fit the crime, meaning that if you murder someone you get more time to serve than if you steal something from a store. Makes sense, right? It is about fairness.

Only, and I think this is what Jesus is pointing out, this eye for an eye system of handing out justice to one another doesn't work. You've heard Ghandi's saying, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." More often than not, an eye for an eye means that you have little Palestinian boys throwing stones at an Israeli soldier, and the Israeli soldier retaliating by shooting at them. You have a woman put in jail for a long time after killing an abusive partner, but big bankers swindling millions of USAmericans get bailed out by the government. When we read Jesus' call to turn the other cheek, we think that he is asking us to do something that is too hard--- without looking at our failed attempts to follow that system we see as reasonable, an eye for an eye.

This is not to say that turning the other cheek is easy in comparison. But I think when we read passages like this, we often write Jesus off as some hopeless idealist, asking us always to do the impossible, but Jesus here is not about making us feel inadequate. Eugene Peterson in his contemporary language paraphrase of the bible called The Message presents this scripture as saying:




Here's an old saying that deserves a second look: "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth." Is that going to get us anywhere? Here's what I propose: "Don't hit back at all." If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. If someone drags you into court and sues you for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.5
Live generously, that's what Jesus is asking us to do here. It isn't about doing the impossible. It is about living into the abundance that God became incarnate in Jesus to show us how to do.

Living with an eye for an eye mentality ends up being so shallow. It ends up being about payback, a payback that seems no matter how many times you pay it still doesn't bring any sort of healing. We can't keep up with our own misplaced sense of fairness, thinking maybe it will bring us happiness or something. But it turns out that rather than caring for people and relationships, we are keeping a tally, only caring about that tit-for-tat stuff. It is not about living generously. We know from experience if we think about it that this attempt to follow an eye for an eye turns into this vicious cycle.

Now some of you might read this passage and say, well I don't think that being walked all over is living generously either. Because isn't that how we read it sometimes? After all, in The Message, Eugene Peterson paraphrases Do not resist an evildoer, which in and of itself seems to be all wrong as, Don't hit back at all. We can easily read this as meaning that we ought to just smile and take it. This is that notorious passage that has been used time and again to tell people to go back to abusive spouses. They use these verses to say that passivity and nonaction are good things. This reading in effect says then to take yourself out of an abusive situation, to liberate yourself, is against the will of God.

But how is this living generously? Giving in to abuse does not fit with the end vision of the kin-dom, the end vision of how humanity will live together as whole, healed persons, Jesus is painting for us in these verses. Though it is easy to look at these verses and see that a literal understanding of them is calling us all to be pushovers, in fitting these pieces in with our readings of other scripture and our experience of God as a liberating God we know that on a much deeper level, these verses are pointing to something much different.

Clarence Jordan, New Testament scholar, farmer and Habitat for Humanity founder, translates Do not resist an evildoer in the Cotton Patch Gospels, as




But I'm telling you, never respond with evil.6
The living generously comes out of this refusal to respond to evil with evil. By turning the other cheek, we are not passively avoiding conflict, but we are standing up for a vision of living that is much different from the world as we see it today. We are responding, but our responses don't fit into those rules society has come to see as true and sensible.

Here's a big picture example what turning away from tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye living looks like. I've spent a lot of time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, starting with mission trips and then continuing to go back because of the relationships I developed there, so I've read a lot about the history and it just so clearly shows that tit-for-tat system at its worst. See, during World War II, Serbs and Muslims were put in concentration camps by Croats. And then during the Bosnian genocide in the early 1990s, in the north of Bosnia, Croats and Muslims were put in concentration camps by Serbs. And in fact, the Serbs used the cultural memory of a battle lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1389 to rally people to commit genocide against Muslims. Today, the country is still economically destitute and every few months I see a report from the BBC asking not if but when the Balkans will erupt again. Or just during the European Cup a couple years ago some young man was killed in the ethnically dividing uproar over the Croatia-Turkey game.

Yet there is hope in the actions of those who move to break this cycle of retaliation. I have worked with a support group for Muslim women survivors of concentration camps. I go and sit with women who lived through the genocide and listen to their stories and the horrors they lived through, yet they don't look at their Croat or Serb neighbors with violence. In fact, they see in the other women the same pain and fatigue that reside in their own eyes. Their response to the wars they have lived through is not to teach their children that they have been wronged and so must wrong those who hurt them. No, they want to educate, to tell their stories, to make that much-talked-about but little-done-about mantra, Never Again true for their community. They are turning the other cheek, not by rolling over and staying silent, but by choosing to use their experiences to educate their community about the horrors of war and encourage them to instead come together to return evil with good.

Turning the other cheek, giving our coat in addition to the shirt off our backs, then are not some passive action, a nonaction that we so often think they are. Rather it is a conscious decision to look in the face of evil and say, I will not. I will not stoop to that level. I will not continue living in this world of cold supposed fairness that doesn't work. Jesus has shown us another way, a way of abundance.

This is the revolutionary kind of living Jesus is calling us to, a generous way of living breaking free of the old way. Let it be so for you and for me. Amen.