1 Samuel 1: 4-20, 1 Samuel 2: 1-10, Hebrews 10: 11-25, Mark 13: 1-8
Rev. Neale Bennet
It is a great pleasure to be preaching here today in my home church. I have fairly recently taken up a new expression of ministry as president of the Atlantic School of Theology. I want you to know that in the 25 years since I first started coming to St Paul’s you have been a tremendous support to me in each step of my journey of growth in faith and with each new expression of ministry and each new challenge. This latest is no exception. I am grateful for your prayers and know that I can continue to count on them.
I have been thinking and praying and preparing to preach this morning for the past few weeks. A few days ago I thought I was pretty much set. I was going to tell you a bit about AST. I even had a small theological joke to start things off.
And then, at about 9:30 pm Friday night I turned on the television and of course realized that I would have to start again.
This weekend we have, one more time, been presented with horrific images of violence. Dozens and dozens of people have been killed in Paris. People like Valentin Ribet, Nick Alexander, Nohemi Gonzales, Fabrice Dubois, and Lola Salines.
Hundreds more have been injured, many of them grievously. Hundreds of families have been traumatized. A country has been paralyzed with fear. Police and military are on the streets. Vows of revenge have been issued by political leaders. Expressions of sympathy and support have been offered by others.
It is all so tragically and so disturbingly familiar. And yet, two things strike me. The first is that there is something that feels uncomfortably closer to home this time. Like New York on 9/11 or Boston during the Marathon bombing, Paris is a city we all know whether we have been there or not. It has coffee shops, restaurants, concert halls and a stadium – all the recognizable trappings of a big city. And all targets of unspeakable violence.
And the second is that, paradoxically, the familiarity of the images on CNN – the flashing lights of the emergency response vehicles, the scenes of victims being loaded into ambulances – the very fact that we have seen these images so many times before puts a certain distance between us and the reality of the event.
As empathetic as we might be, we – here in Halifax, on this Sunday morning – are living lives essentially untouched by the violence inflicted upon Paris this weekend, and in so many other towns and villages and cities around the world.
Jesus warns against this feeling of distance and detachment in today’s Gospel. Looking back at the Temple in Jerusalem Jesus says to his disciples – see this, all this, someday it will be destroyed. Reduced to rubble.
The Temple was a massive structure. The courtyard was half a kilometer on each side. Some of the building stones were 30 or 40 feet long. If we were to stand on Citadel Hill looking out over the city, the whole downtown core – from Duke Street on the left to Sackville Street on the right, all the way down to the water – all of it would fit into the Temple courtyard. The TD Bank tower, City Hall, the Art Gallery, the ferry terminal, the waterfront boardwalk. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Province House, the new convention centre complex, the old Metro Centre. The Grand Parade. St Paul’s itself. All of it would fit into the Temple.
And so in a way Jesus is saying to us: see that, see all of those impressive buildings and streets and parks and plazas. All those familiar edifices and monuments to our comfortable existence in this quiet corner of the world – all of this is subject to destruction. Ultimately none of it – not one brick or stick of wood, not a steel beam or concrete block will be left standing.
It is an apocalyptic vision. A harsh message, hard for us to contemplate, a stretch for us to imagine. Halifax on November 15, 2015 is, relatively speaking, such a peaceful, such a settled and stable community.
And yet the people of Paris would this morning find it all too easy to imagine.
It wouldn’t be hard for John Egan Almon to believe, either. He died in the trenches of World War I. You can find a plaque about him over there on that column. He saw first-hand how cities and towns and whole countries can be laid waste.
It wouldn’t be hard for Nate Leipciger to believe. He is a Holocaust survivor and Polish immigrant to Canada, who spoke at the Halifax Library a few days ago during Holocaust Education Week.
It wouldn’t be hard for Chantal Vincelli to believe either. Born in Montreal she was a Marketing Assistant at DataSynapse Inc. Chantal died on September 11, 2001 on the 106th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York.
And it wouldn’t be hard for Fattemah Abu al-Rouse to believe. Four months pregnant with her second child, accompanied by her husband and with one year old son Hammouda in tow, Fattemah walked across a continent after her home in a Damascus suburb was destroyed by a bomb.
As hard as it may be to hear, these things may well happen to us. Indeed, they already have.
It is all in how you define “us.” God, of course, defines “us” as all God’s children.
Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu. Haligonian, Parisian, Syrian, Bulgarian, Turk. Gay, straight, trans. Of African, Asian, European, Native North American descent, or any combination thereof. English speaking, French speaking. Swahili speaking.
None of these distinctions matter to God. God doesn’t even see them. God sees just the human community of God’s children.
Beware of those who lead you astray, says Jesus. Beware of those who tell you otherwise. Who seek to divide, to elevate one individual, one people, one country, one cause above another. Beware those who judge who is righteous and who is not, who is good and who is bad.
Who is us and who is them.
Beware the self-defending and self-deluding thought that somehow Fabrice, Lola, Nick, John, Nate, Chantal, Fattemah, are not us, not part of our community. Beware the false comfort that comes from thinking that way.
What happened to them has happened to us – because there is only “us,” there is no “them.” It is purely an accident of birth that I wasn’t born Fabrice, Lola, Nick, John, Nate, Chantal, or Fattemah. It is nothing more than an accident of birth that I was born an Anglo-Saxon Canadian, rather than an Arab Syrian. We make a false distinction when we think of us and them. When we consign living, breathing individuals with bodies and feelings and lives and spirits to the category of “other.”
Even, it must be said, when we consign them to the category of “terrorist.” As loathsome as are their acts, God does not objectify or dehumanize even the perpetrators of the horrific crimes committed in Paris. And so too must we set our minds and hearts against that beguiling temptation.
Because, as hard as it is to accept, the very act of categorization is at the root of the problem of violence in our world. We are addicted to categorizing the other. And we have been convinced at every turn to understand each other as first and foremost participants in transactional, conditional relationship.
You attack us, and in return we will attack you. You hurt me, and in return I will hurt you. If you support me I will support you. Pray for me and I will pray for you. If you love me I will love you.
This, sadly, is the way of our world. And so it seems it must ever be. It is so engrained, so much a part of the air we breathe, that we can hardly imagine another way. We have been shaped and formed by a dominant, global ideology to believe that we live in a transactional world.
Our world is a place where human beings are first and foremost “purchasing” beings – where the dominant metaphor for our existence is that of consumer. I work and you pay me. I pay you and you serve me. I will give you this thing if you give me that money.
We have been so indoctrinated that it seems like natural law, a fundamental law of human relational physics. Is it any wonder that violence is the logical, if extreme, extension of this objectifying, transactional mentality?
If you hurt me, I will hurt you. If I believe you have hurt me, I will hurt you. In return for my pain, you get a bullet or a bomb.
This is not God’s way. This morning we will participate in holy communion. Communion – the Eucharist – is the opposite of a transaction. Not even the opposite – it is a radical rejection of the whole logic of transaction. The whole framework of economic thinking is revealed as false, as an illusion, in the Eucharist.
We come to the Lord’s Table already forgiven. We come to the table to receive the free gift of God’s love. No strings are attached. Nothing is required of us. The gifts of God for the people of God are freely and lovingly given.
The absolutely, unequivocally, unconditionally free gift of God’s love. That radical, even revolutionary idea is what pulls the rug right out from under our transactional, objectifying world.
We come to the Lord’s Table not as consumers, not as participants in a trade, or parties to a contract. Not even as individuals but as one community, the community of God’s children. In communion with each other and with God.
Communion is a world-changing act of peaceful rebellion. It is an act of societal transformation. It undermines the whole illusory and destructive notion that the basic rule of human relationship is give and take.
Because God – your God, my God, our God, the God of all, the God of love and grace and goodness – is all give.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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Rev. Neale Bennet
President
Atlantic School of Theology