The Lenten Journey to Non-Violence

For the Fourth Sunday of Lent, I had the opportunity and blessing to be with the good people of St. Mary's - Harlem and preached this sermon. The readings for the day are below. 

1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41

The Lenten Journey to Non-Violence

This morning, while there are many approaches I could take with the Gospel reading, I would like to focus our attention on what I call the Lenten Journey to Non-Violence, which I think this particular Gospel passage speaks to quite strongly.

In fact, I actually believe that all the middle Sunday's of Lent, the second through fifth Sundays, speak to this issue of non-violence. From Nicodemus on the second Sunday, to the Samaritan woman at the well last week, to the blind man this week, to the raising of Lazarus next week, what we have is a tangible way to commemorate liturgically the walk to non-violence that Jesus engaged in on his way to the entry into Jerusalem, the Cross and the Resurrection. That walk consisted of inviting all he encountered into the community of those who would make up the kingdom of God.

Community is, of course, key to non-violence. It is what we monastics like to think we know something about. And what Jesus does, throughout John's Gospel is to demonstrate various ways that the community is to be built. All are welcome: from the Establishment figure of Nicodemus; to the ethnic and religious outsider of the Samaritan woman, to the blind man presumed to be a sinner and also, importantly, a poor person; to the dead Lazarus rotting in his tomb. The community is for all: the living and the dead, the powerful and the weak, the sick, the poor, the outsider. All are welcome. All are welcome.

Now, this is what Martin Luther King would refer to as the “beloved community” which is established by four principals that the non-violent work toward. Dr. King would say that first, non-violence is “not for cowards: it does resist.” In other words, the beloved community is not passive, it will take a stand. Second, that “non-violent resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.” Third, that non-violence is “directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those evil forces.” And fourth, non-violent resistance “avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.” Dr. King goes on to say that “at the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.”¹ That principle is the core of the beloved community.

And all along the way, Jesus works to create that beloved community. In John's Gospel, Jesus takes the time to have long conversations with people, who by the rules of his culture, he should not have. And in each case, he invites them into the beloved community. Some accept immediately, some refuse, some take their time to consider. But anyone is welcome to join.

So let's take the blind man of today's Gospel. How do the four principles of the beloved community apply to this story? First, Jesus is not passive in the presence of the blind man. It would have been much easier to simply walk on by. But instead, he acts. He answers the disciples question, he assures them, and by extension, assures the blind man, that he is not responsible for his condition, and then he actually heals the blindness.

Next, Jesus neither seeks to humiliate nor defeat the disciples who asked what could be construed as a cruel or silly question nor the Pharisees who are, after all, out to trap him. Jesus simply states his truth with love and honesty to the Pharisees and leaves it at that.

Third, Jesus directs his action against the forces of evil, and not the man. In this case the evil is represented by the blindness and the resulting economic injustice. He does not blame the man for his condition, he simply heals him. And that point is crucially important to understand this story in the context of non-violence. For as bad as blindness would be, in and of itself, for anyone at any time in history, at this particular time in history, blindness means that the man must beg for his food and for anything else he needs. He is destitute and, in a time of no social services, has to live off the charity of others, which was often not readily given. The act of Jesus giving the blind man his sight is not only an act of healing, but an act of economic empowerment. It turns the class system of the culture – with Pharisees near the top and blind men near the bottom - on its head. It empowers the man not only to see the sun and the moon, the olive trees and the Temple, but to earn his own living. And, as Dr. King wrote, “when the underprivileged demand [or gain] freedom, the privileged at first react with bitterness and resistance. Even when the demands are couched in non-violent terms, the initial response is substantially the same.”² The Pharisees use the fact that this healing took place on the Sabbath as a way to attack Jesus because he is doing a great deal to unsettle and even uproot the established order. This always, in every circumstance, makes those in power nervous. They feel that their way of life might be threatened and react accordingly.

Finally, Jesus works to not only avoid any violence toward the spirit of the blind man, but to heal that which has been caused by the Pharisees. As soon as Jesus sees that the Pharisees have driven the man out, Jesus finds him and assures him that God loves him. He affirms his spiritual life and allows him to worship. This gift of dignity is priceless to the human soul and furthers the healing of the whole man.

And so, what are the implications of this Lenten journey to non-violence for us here today? Well, first, I hope that we can begin to think of non-violence as a way of life, not simply as an approach to a particular issue. When you really study Dr. King's work, that is what he was aiming at, especially toward the end of his life. Non-violence had become for him not just a strategy to gain civil rights for African Americans, but a way of transforming his own life, the lives of his fellow Americans, the Church and ultimately, the world. Later this week, we will commemorate the forty-sixth anniversary of the martyrdom of Dr. King, among the very greatest practitioners of non-violence that our world has ever been blessed with. He is, for me, a great hero. May I suggest that we spend some Lenten time this week, in prayer and meditation on what this journey of Jesus and Dr. King might mean for us. Prayer and meditation are key enabling aspects of how we live more deeply into a non-violent life. We cannot hope to live that life, without prayer and meditation.

Second, perhaps we could begin a discussion on what the beloved community means to us, to this parish, to my monastic community. You have a great reputation as a community of believers that care for the poor and the sick, but as we know, there is always more work to do. And I cannot help but to wonder what it might mean for us today to not just care for the physically or emotionally sick or injured, but to heal them in such a way that the very economic structure of their lives, or of the economic structure of the neighborhood, or of the city, or country might get upended.

Our brother Martin taught us that “a religion that professes a concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion.”³ But to pay attention to these issues, and to work on them, while trumpeting to all that they are welcome is to form the beloved community. It is to live more deeply into non-violence.

My other hero of non-violence, Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, whose thirty-fourth anniversary of martyrdom we commemorated last week, said, on many occasions, and which communicates better in Spanish: “hay que cambiar de raiz todo el sistema”: In other words, we must uproot the whole system in order to bring justice to the poor and peace to our land.

And for us today, here in the United States, I believe we have to do some uprooting ourselves because the cries of the blind, the poor and the powerless rise up from our city streets, our suburbs, our rural areas. Those cries sound to me like whimpers that are slowly but steadily growing into wails.

For example, we have a system of so called justice that has imprisoned young men of color for non-violent crimes in outrageously disproportionate numbers. And then, upon release, these men are dumped on our streets with no jobs, no money, no hope. This is the same as what the Pharisees did – the powerful keeping the poor in their place in order to keep the class system we live with in its place.

We have laws that allow virtually anyone, no matter how inappropriate, to own guns in this country. While our homes, neighborhoods, schools, churches, malls and movie theaters are being shot up like the OK Corral. This is a pharisaic approach to the letter of the law we know as the Second Amendment. Its purpose only to keep gun manufacturers and their allies flush with cash.

We have a foreign policy that uses our young men and women as battlefield fodder to die in wars that never needed to be fought. These “preemptive” wars only enrich the arms makers and their political allies while gravely harming our best and brightest. This is an approach to foreign policy found in some parts of the Old Testament that says we can kill anyone and justify it in the name of God; equating God and flag a most dangerous form of idol worship.

This is a system that needs to be uprooted. Because, yes, if you listen closely, you can hear the cries of the despairing prisoner unjustly incarcerated, the forgotten homeless desperate for sleep under a bridge or in a park, the neglected veteran suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the children of Newtown. Listen to their cries. Do not drown them out by putting on spiritual headphones. There is no better beloved community than the Church to start digging away at those roots, planting a new garden, while learning to sing a new song.

This morning we heard Christ say that “as long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Toward the very end of John's Gospel, when Jesus appears to the disciples after the Resurrection, his first words are “Peace be with you...” His next words are: “as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” My sisters and brothers, Christ is still in the world, in each one of you and in me. The light remains, it is up to us to let it grow and glow into a beautiful, beatific, beloved community. This is the call of non-violence. This is the call of the Gospel. AMEN.

1King, Martin Luther. “Non Violence and Racial Justice” Christian Century 2/6/57. From the Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. p. 7-8

2King, Martin Luther. “Pilgrimage to NonViolence” in Strength to Love by Martin Luther King. p. 160.

3Ibid. p. 159.