Violence in the Bible

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

 

 

 

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

September 24, 2023

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

 

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Mission Statement:

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

Give thanks to the Lord!

Call upon the name of the Lord!

God’s love and mercy are given daily for each of us.

God’s forgiveness and tenderness are poured out for us.

Praise be to God who deals so kindly with us.

Lord, help us offer the same compassion to others. AMEN.

*Hymn              Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation       #559

Prayer of Confession:

Forgiving Lord, we are such jealous people. We want to make sure that we get what we deserve, that we are always treated fairly. Yet we complain when you treat others, who have not worked as hard or been as faithful, with such love. Just like the workers in the Gospel lesson, we want to know why you are as generous with the late-comers as you are with us, after all, we whine, we’ve been here longer. You are merciful and compassionate. You do not count the time, but the quality of the heart. Forgive us, generous Lord, when we have been so petty about your love. Heal and restore us. Help us reach out with love and hope to others in the name of Jesus Christ. AMEN.

Assurance:

Blessings are showered on all who seek God. Come and rejoice! God has given you such love and mercy. AMEN.

Scripture Reading Judges 11: 29-40

29 Then the Spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah. He crossed Gilead and Manasseh, passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there he advanced against the Ammonites. 30 And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, 31 whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

32 Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into his hands. 33 He devastated twenty towns from Aroer to the vicinity of Minnith, as far as Abel Keramim. Thus Israel subdued Ammon.

34 When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Oh no, my daughter! You have brought me down and I am devastated. I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break.”

36 “My father,” she replied, “you have given your word to the Lord. Do to me just as you promised, now that the Lord has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. 37 But grant me this one request,” she said. “Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry.”

38 “You may go,” he said. And he let her go for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. 39 After the two months, she returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin.

From this comes the Israelite tradition 40 that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.

Sermon                                 Violence in the Bible

Friends, you’ve made it to the very end of Stump the Preacher 2023, sermons requested by you guys and then researched by me. Our last topic is another request from a TikTok-er of the cloth, who was curious what I would say about violence in the Bible.

Oh boy, how clergy ask each other the toughest questions.

Where do I even start?

The very first story in the Bible, that of the Creation of the world, ends in violence, in Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden, and God’s declaration that Eve will answer to her husband and give birth in pain. In other words, violence in the Bible began with disobedience of God, and immediately resulted in the oppression and harm of women. The first bloodshed in the Bible was birth. Granted, I have a whole lot more to say about Adam and Eve than that, but that will have to wait for another sermon. When Adam and Eve go on and have children, one of their kids kills their other kid. The first combat in the Bible is between family.

From there the generations of those who try, fail, and try again to follow God spirals outward, as does the atrocity of the stories. We have exile and estrangement, idolatry, ritual sacrifice, and wars over Gods and borders. The sheer gore in these stories would quickly earn the Bible an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. But, despite how incredibly hard it is to read the details, I don’t shy away from them. Violence is a part of life. Sometimes glorified, sometimes mourned, sometimes a symptom of cruelty, and sometimes a part of a hero’s journey. Even the first stories we drew adorable crayon art of in Sunday School are quite violent when you break them down. In the story of Noah’s ark, he saves his family and 2 of every animal while the rest of Creation drowns. In the story of David defeating Goliath, a grotesque head trauma takes down the bad guy. 

Please don’t allow anything else I say to overpower this point: I’m a pacifist. And so was Jesus. He told us to beat our swords into plough shares, and would not allow violence even to defend his life. When Jesus was apprehended in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Peter used his sword to attack one of the men with their hands on Jesus, Jesus yelled at him, and told him to put his weapon away, because “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” In today’s world, where the United States averages two mass shootings a week, those words have never felt more relevant. In this verifiable hellscape of police shootings of unarmed men of color, knee to neck holds, immigrant families in cages separated from their children, natural disasters caused by climate change, bathroom bills and don’t say gay curricula, and women baring their Me Too stories, the greatest challenges of our time are the results of violence. 

The bias we all want to lean toward is one that views all true religion as inherently nonviolent. We have that, in part, as Christians. We interpret everything we see, read, and experience of our spirituality through the lens of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. For Jesus, peace was and is the greatest good, and the highest goal. Peace is the end, and moral, of our Christian story. But as much as we might want it to be, peace is not our whole story. Our whole story is huge, and encompasses love and all the suffering that comes from it, as well as justice and the fighting that brings it to fruition. We have a story of very high stakes, and our Bible may end after 66 books, but our story is far from over. When we talk about peace and violence in the Bible, and in our faith life, I am reminded of Dr. King’s words from “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, where an unquestionably nonviolent man put the quest for peace in context, and was unafraid to shake up some timid and complacent White people:

“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Our insistence on suppressing anger, tension, and unrest can itself be an act of violence. This all begs the question, what is violence? I would argue in response that violence is not only overt acts of injury, bloodshed, and lifetaking, but also covert acts of discrimination, silencing, and paternalism.

It was very difficult to pick one and only one scripture passage to accompany this sermon, since our Bible is practically dripping in blood. But the story I settled on is one that I feel best encapsulates the human harm of violence, what God really thinks about it, and how people responded in biblical times, and how we should feel now.

Today’s story is told from the perspective of a man named Jephthah, who will come across heroically because, to quote an African proverb, “until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” Jephthah is an Israelite who just came back from war. He was victorious, and prayed to God for strength in battle, and in return he promised to sacrifice the first person who greeted him when he came home. 

Jephthah assumed this person would be a servant, which is horrible enough that he saw their lives as expendable and thought nothing of it. But to his shock and dismay, his daughter comes out singing, dancing, and playing instruments to greet her dad. Supposedly, Jephthah loves her to pieces, even though he never bothers to say her name once this entire story. He claims deep grief, but nonetheless tells his daughter that she’s going to die now. She goes along with it–what choice does she have?--and only asks for a few days in the mountains to mourn dying a virgin.

Jephthah sacrifices his daughter and moves right on with his life. Adding insult to the reader’s moral injury, it seems Jephthah is less broken up about killing his daughter than he is about killing his only child. If he had more, he’d still have an heir. So according to Jephthah, he’s the victim of this story. He jumps through hoops to make this killing absolutely everyone else’s fault–God’s, because he was praying when he promised to kill the first person who greeted him at home; his daughter’s, because she just HAD to come out first to say hi; society’s, for making him way too comfortable with human sacrifice; the war’s; the enemy’s; the altar’s; the fire’s; the knife’s. He’ll do anything but point a finger at who’s actually to blame: himself. He’s the one who did the thing. It was entirely his decision, no one made him.

No one remembers his daughter, no one says her name. But while the men move on and do what they do, the young women have a private remembrance once a year. Even then, we’re told that Jephthah’s daughter is lifted up for her sexual purity, not her personhood. Nevertheless, in every society, we have war mongers that burn cities while the peaceful hold candlelight vigils for the lost. And despite what the warriors tell themselves, God isn’t out blessing their weapons and helping them kill. God is at the candlelight vigil.

And that is the real moral of the story for us. The imperfect life we live, in an imbalanced world, is one where violence permeates the air like smoke in an unventilated room. And it serves a self-centered, short-term purpose. We can’t claim ignorance, look the other way, or deny fault, because God knows better, and so do we. We can face it head on, clean up our mess, and, with God’s help, build a world of peace.

Amen.

*Hymn                       All Who Love and Serve Your City                   #433

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication           

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Holy God, we come before you in prayer,

lifting to you the joys and concerns,

the hopes and dreams of our lives. 

May we also be open to your voice in our lives

that we may see with new eyes, and hear with new ears,

the direction you will have us to go.

Bless, we pray, this gathering of your people

that we may grow and flourish in your love and grace

for the purpose to which you have called us.

Hear our prayers for those whose lives have touched us—

those who are in pain, those who are ill, those who grieve. 

May we touch their lives not only through our prayers,

but through our lives and actions as well.

Guide us, bless us, uplift us, and hold us,

for we are your children called to our purpose in your world. 

Hear our prayers, those spoken and those hidden in our hearts,

we pray in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen. 

~ posted on Life in Liturgy, from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). https://lifeinliturgy.wordpress.com/

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

*Hymn                      Every Time I Feel the Spirit                              #404

Benediction

Postlude

---

Staff

Natalie Bowerman Pastor

Betsy Lehmann Music Director

Joe White Custodian

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant