“ Forgiving and Loving Our Enemy:

Breaking the Cycle of Violence"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
November 11th 2007

Matthew 5: 1-10

Every year around this time, I wonder what it would be like to be called by my country to go to war. A few weeks ago, I went to see a Timothy Findley play, The Wars. It helped me to imagine this circumstance. The movie traces the story of a young 19 year-old, Canadian, Robert Ross, from the moment he joins the army at the start of WW1 to his tragic end. Because of his social standing he was catapulted into a position of leadership, probably beyond his capacity. But he proves himself on the battlefield, leading his men through the mud fields that many horses drowned in, through attacks of poison gas, the insanity of trench warfare, and the many unconscionable acts of war. The tipping point comes for him, when his battalion is faced with overwhelming odds and he makes a request to his commanding officer to free the horses. They were terrified and faced certain death if they remain tied up. The request was refused and he snaps. It was this act of inhumanity that breaks him. He kills the commanding officer and leads the horses to safety, abandoning his post. The horses, it seems, embodied the last vestige of innocence – they had done nothing to deserve this. I could imagine myself doing the same thing.

I also try to imagine the founder of this congregation, The Rev. Col. Fallis in these circumstances. He was stationed in the Ypres salient, a bulge in the front lines of the Allied Forces, which meant that they were surrounded on three sides by the enemy and suffered unrelenting attacks. He returned home, having witnessed untold atrocities, and promptly setting about keeping the promise he made to those he buried – to build a sanctuary dedicated to peace. This was the one sane act he could imagine in the midst of the insanity of war.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The Bible regards the problem of violence as the central problem facing humanity. On page 6 of the Bible, God looks out over humanity and feels like He’s made a mistake. God looks upon the violence in the heart of humanity and decides to start over – to send a flood to cleanse the earth of the human ones, saving only a remnant to start creation anew. It’s possible to look at the whole of Jesus’ teaching, along with his death, as an attempt to help humanity transcend our tendency to turn to violence to solve the problem of violence.

Peter asked Jesus how many times we needed to forgive another –as many as seven? Jesus responded “seven times seventy times”, a direct reference to the curse of Lamech, Noah’s father, in Genesis. Violence escalates exponentially in the story of humanity as it is portrayed in Genesis. The first murder is by Cain - of his brother Abel. Knowing that Abel’s sympathizers will try to avenge this death, God promises that whoever kills Cain will suffer a “sevenfold vengeance” (Genesis 4:15). Five generations later, Lamech kills a young man after the young man struck him. He then tells his wives, “If Cain is avenged seven-fold, truly Lamech seventy fold” (v.24). Jesus is intentionally reversing the age-old strategy of threatening or enacting retaliation as a means of controlling further violence. By forgiving seven times seventy times, the curse of Lamech is reversed.

This curse is still with us today. The gang slaying of two young men in our own neighborhood at Granville and 70^th streets this past week is a modern day manifestation of this ancient strategy. But as Rene Girard, an anthropologist and professor of literature, points out, this kind of violence is merely contagious. These gang-related slayings are a microcosm of the violence that is the curse of the human species. We have arrived at the 21^st century with retaliatory violence continuing to be our default position. Nations, states, ethnic groups, gangs, and individuals continue to unconsciously believe that retaliatory violence is an effective way of dealing with violence.

Jesus’ teachings and his manner of death show us an alternative that requires spiritual discipline. Forgiveness, to which I’ve referred, is the foundation of all the spiritual disciplines that can break the cycle of violence. To forgive another when you’ve been hurt assumes in the first place that you have some larger purpose to live for than remaining in the drama of revenge. I remember reading a book by war journalist Christopher Hedges, War Is a Project That Gives Life Our Meaning. He refers to the high he got covering war zones around the world – times when he lived on the razor edge between life and death. Ironically, he never felt so alive than when he was facing death. I have witnessed a good number of people who seem to revel in conflict. Keeping it alive gives their life meaning. Ending it would render life slightly boring and throw one into a crisis of meaning.

I’m serious about this. Many people love to keep family conflicts going because without them, life would have no drama. Let me ask this: When a nation bases a good portion of their economy around a military-industrial complex, and is intent on being a dominant power in the world, what incentive is their to find an alternative to war? The spiritual practice of forgiveness does not fit in with the agenda because there is nothing to replace the ideology of dominance as a meaning project. The genius of leaders like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. was that they offered a transcendent vision for a nation – something other than dominance – a vision of greatness that was focused around justice and compassion. If this is truly our agenda, then forgiveness is a necessary tool. When dominance is the name of the game – that is, if we want to show the other that we are superior, more righteous, smarter or if we are passionate about  “putting them in their place” (lower than us) – then forgiveness is a non-starter.

Put bluntly the question we must ask ourselves is whether we have any better to do, individually and collectively, than engage in the drama of conflict and revenge. Once we do, forgiveness releases us to engage in that project. The moment we forgive, we enter another realm. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. And we exit the culture of dominance, personally and collectively. We discover the culture of humility. And when we enter the Kingdom of God, this culture of humility, we find the grace to do what we thought impossible. This is because God honours transcendent projects – those projects that have to do with reconciliation, and taking another’s perspective. A woman has just made a documentary about a man who served in the Viet Nam war. His entire battalion was wiped out in one offensive. He went back to the Viet Nam where this occurred to build a peace village, focused on the care of those who suffered from the effects of Agent Orange, a chemical that his side used against the enemy. He didn’t go back seeking revenge. He returned with a transcendent project. He sought out and found the General responsible for wiping out all his men. Then he forgave him and went about building the village.

On Loving Our Enemies

Jesus also taught that we should love our enemies. This can only make sense from beyond a level of consciousness that divides the world into us and them. From a tribal, ethnocentric worldview, the other exists as a threat. What’s happening in some towns in Quebec right now is a manifestation of this ethnocentric level of consciousness. The fear is that if we let those “others” into our province, then our own identity will be threatened. Therefore they must be willing to relinquish their otherness by becoming like us, before we’ll accept them. Evangelical Christians will accept gays the moment they stop being different from them, and “convert” to heterosexuality. I’ll start loving you again, the moment you change into what I want you to be. The blows being struck here are not physical, but they hurt every bit as much: it is a form of systemic violence perpetrated by those who are stuck at an ethnocentric worldview.

Seventy percent of the world’s religions are stuck at this ethnocentric level of development. What this means, practically speaking, is that we are fated to reenact violence over and over again until we come up with an intentional strategy to help get religions unstuck. One of the primary strategies for those at a higher level of consciousness, who have the capacity to see what’s going on, is to love their enemies into the next stage of consciousness. This was Martin Luther King’s strategy:

“To our most bitter opponents we say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

What an incredible act of leadership! I mean this in a particular way. In the act of loving his enemy, Dr. King acts as an attractor to pull him up to a higher level of consciousness. At one and the same time, he is elevating, not only his own followers – which is crucial in the evolution of religious consciousness – but also the enemy. The enemy is treated as a brother or sister who is simply acting foolishly, out of sync with this own nature. And if the enemy wants an image of what that higher nature is all he must do is listen to the words of the very one he is in the act of destroying. Hanging from the cross, Jesus says to his God, with his enemies overhearing, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” He signals that they are not acting out of their true natures, because they are ignorant of their true nature. They are in the midst of crucifying their true selves. Jesus’ love for them forces them to recognize that this act of murder is also an act of self-hatred – a refusal to embrace their highest self. This is how we should understand the meaning of the crucifixion. It’s an image of the heart of God in human form, acting as a love attractor – even in the midst of his execution – to the enemy. Jesus’ last earthly gestures lift us all up to his level of spiritual awareness.

The centurion who is in charge of the execution gets it – “truly, this was the Son of God”, he concludes. Allowing these words to come out of his mouth forever changed his consciousness. The future of humanity lies in the evolution of consciousness. We often hear the old adage trotted out by generals: “If we do not finish the job we’ve come to do (in Afghanistan or wherever), those who have fallen will have died in vain.” It’s the most powerful and terrifying argument for justifying the continuation of war. By this logic, all battles ever fought should be carried forward – because every battle ever fought has issued in a winner and a loser. The losers have moral obligation to see to it that their comrades deaths were not in vain. This moral obligation is carried forward, at the ethnocentric level of consciousness, forever. Slobodan Milosevich awakened this 600 year-old moral obligation in the Serbian consciousness to get them to commit atrocities against their own neighbours. Again, the question must be asked. Do we have anything better to do with our lives? Like build a global village of peace.

What if we changed that adage and replaced it with something like: If we do not finish the job of helping humanity to evolve in consciousness to a place where war is inconceivable, then all those who have died in battle will have died in vain. Surely, this was the peace dividend offered by our veterans in war. Surely they died to give us a window of opportunity to teach our children the ways of peace. Surely, they assumed that at least as much of our annual federal budget would go into studying peace rather than refortifying for weapons for war.

If this is to be our transcendent life project, the same Spirit that animated Jesus of Nazareth, will be with us to empower us. The spiritual practices of forgiveness and loving our enemy are more nuanced and complex than we might imagine. They should not be equated with being a doormat for every tyrant. It is surely more complex than a choice between passive acquiescence and outright war. There is a Third Way that Jesus taught. It involves non-violent resistance to projects of domination on the personal and collective levels. War and terrorism of all kinds are preceded by literally thousands and thousands of missed opportunities to practice this Third Way. These opportunities have been missed because we have not taught our children in this path. If we continue to squander the opportunity given to us by those whom we honour this morning, they will truly have died in vain. We give thanks today and honour the sacrifices of those who died,  by taking up the path of the Christ. May it be so. Amen.