There’s been some great stuff in the news over the last couple of weeks... We’ve seen our POW’s coming home and being greeted with almost hysterical adulation... many of our troops are on the way home as well. The bloodbath that many feared didn’t happen, and much though we mourn those who fell, the fact that there were so few is truly a testimony to the courage and professionalism of our military. And the turnout of cheering Americans who greeted the aircraft carrier Lincoln was great fun to watch. Isn’t it good to have heroes? It’s really heartening to see people turning out for genuine heroes instead of the usual assortment of shallow celebrities, famous for being famous. On the down side, of course, is the Lacy Peterson murder case, and even below that is the new Monica Lewinsky show Mr. Personality. Did any of you watch it? Talk about being famous for being famous. Or I should say, infamous.
Our society is full of celebrities of all kinds, and even the church has its celebrities, many of whom are really worthy of our admiration - people like Billy Graham or Chuck Swindoll. And our soldiers, too, are worthy of our admiration. But the Biblical idea of heroes is very different from our culture’s. The great end-time army of God that John shows us in this chapter turns out to be an army of martyrs, rather than powerful warriors. Instead of slaying the wicked for God, they die for proclaiming God’s message. And their admiration, their cheers, are for the ultimate hero, their leader Jesus.
Now, martyrs have a very mixed image in this day and age. The same word is used for both the extreme Islamic view which glorifies those who die in the process of killing for their God, and there is the classic Christian understanding of martyrs as those who are willing to be killed for their God. What is important to remember is that the Greek word "martyr" means, simply, “witness.” Death alone doesn’t make someone worthy of praise. What is important is who or what they are witnessing to. Their deaths are important be1cause of why they died.
And so this text reminds us who our true hero is. Every hero in the Bible has some flaws, whether major flaws like Samson and David or minor ones like Abraham and Samuel. They were heroes in the same way that our own soldiers, imperfect human beings all, are also heroes. They were willing to risk their lives in a cause they believed in, even though they had imperfect knowledge of either the issues or the outcome. And some never expected they’d be called on to fight;
they joined for the opportunity for advancement - kind of like Abraham, right? who wanted an inheritance ... does anyone think that God’s promised of land and descendants didn’t matter to him?
But they trusted their leaders and their cause, and so they went forward. Some died. Some came home. We honor them all. But we have to be just as careful of over-praising our military as we should have been to avoid demonizing them, as people did a generation ago, when our troops came home from Vietnam.
But there is one hero who has no faults, whose motives are not mixed, and whom we can - indeed should - follow and imitate and praise without limits or conditions or cautions. And that is, of course, Jesus, the only true hero in the ultimate sense. The palm branches the martyr army holds to praise their conquering general reminds us that what Jesus did for us by his death is of far greater consequence than anything an army can accomplish by fighting, as necessary as
that sometimes seems to be.
That these believers overcame by suffering and the victory of the Lamb rather than by armed resistance redefines for us the nature of triumph for the present age. Christ reveals his power more clearly through the broken than the powerful, through the Mother Teresas rather than the Crusades, more through the cross than through the sword. One Jewish writer observes her respect for one sort of Christianity: “When Christianity speaks of God’s strength being revealed in weakness, I understand it best through the deeds of evangelicals who do not overlook those who are weak and apparently powerless.” [Bru Greenberg, “Mission, Witness and Proselytism”] .
As spectacular as our military victory was, it is our commitment to peace that will have a lasting, long-term effect on changing the anger and division of the region into mutual respect and cooperation As impressive as our strength may be, it will mean nothing unless our service to the people of Iraq in rebuilding their country and helping toward self-government reflects the selfless, self-giving attitude of Jesus Christ. There is an Arabic proverb that goes, “You kiss the hand you cannot bite.” In that culture, gentleness is often seen as weakness. Having displayed our strength, our gentleness may now have an impact.
If Jesus Christ had not risen from the dead, we would not even have understood the principle, much less have been able to live by it: that God’s power is indeed perfected in weakness. But since he has, we know that following his example is the only way to new life. Vengeance - tit for tat - getting even - just gets us the same old, same old. “Doing good to those who hurt you” turns things upside down. And God specializes in just that, turning things upside down.
Examples of such grace evident in weakness often move even hard hearts. While researching for this sermon I ran across a story Tony Campolo tells about some homeless teenagers from the Philadelphia streets who beat to death a Korean honor student doing graduate work in medicine at the U of PA. His parents came to the US for the trial, and sat silently through his murderers’ entire trial. At the end, they asked for an opportunity to speak. The guilty verdict came in, and they rose and knelt before the judge.
“Before a stunned audience these parents begged ... him to release their son’s murderers to them so that they could give the boys the home and care they had never had. They were Christians, they explained to the judge, and they wanted to show something of the grace they had received from God to those who had done them such grievous evil.”
The judge, whose reputation for coldness was well known, had tears in his eyes when they finished. By their forgiveness, the parents testified to a kingdom utterly different from the kingdoms of this world, a kingdom for which all long who dare to believe its existence. But many do not dare to believe. Our system of democratic self-government is far from being the kingdom of God, do not mistake me. But our habit of rebuilding our enemies instead of destroying them
comes directly out of our Reformed Christian heritage, and a living out in our imperfect human way the basic Biblical principles Jesus Christ demonstrated with such final, earth-shaking perfection. It is no wonder that the Iraqis do not believe us when we say we are coming to liberate them. Who would ever do such a thing without wanting something in return? Only Jesus Christ - and those who, however imperfectly, try to imitate him.
Not every Christian has the privilege of martyrdom in the classic sense, as those who have literally died for the church. But we all have the privilege of witnessing. Because we are a martyr church, a witness church, fueled by a commandment to evangelize the world not only by our words but also by our behavior. When the church forgot its founder’s example, its distinctive commitment to peace and
reconciliation during such disgraceful episodes as the Crusades, it sowed seeds of hatred and mistrust that today stand as a major barrier between our testimony about Jesus Christ and the ability of our Islamic neighbors to hear, just as centuries of anti-Semitism has led to a profound Jewish skepticism about the credibility of the gospel message.
As you know, I believe that Scripture teaches us that peace and justice must sometimes be defended with force. But not even in the Old Testament are we taught to bring people to God by force. The point of the OT battles was to carve out an empty place where Abraham’s descendants could create a new society without the pressure of surrounding cultures, not to forcibly bring the Canaanites
into YHWH’s dominion. Changed hearts and minds were supposed to come about as their neighbors observed how they lived, saying, “what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today? [Dt 4:7-8]
But it didn’t happen, did it. Just being a good example wasn’t enough. Just as in the present being a good example isn’t enough, treating enemies kindly isn’t enough. Yes, it is the mission of the church to be reconcilers, to be bringers and even makers of peace between seemingly irreconcilable factions. But it’s hard enough when we all claim allegiance to the same God. As the old Tom Lehrer song has it, “The Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Hindus hate the Moslems, and everybody hates the Jews.”
Well, back in the first century, it was the Jews who hated the Christians, not the other way around, but the principle still applies. It was only IN CHRIST that Gentiles and Jews could be brought together, and it is only IN CHRIST that all the tongues and tribes and nations of the world can be made one. Visualizing world peace sounds great, but there is only one way it can happen.
Revelation’s multi-cultural throng did not happen because all sincere believers have their own path to God. It is not animists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Zoroastrians whom we see gathered together in heaven, it is Chinese, Kurds, Germans, Navajos, Russians, Scots, Zulus and Egyptians - all peoples and languages.
These multitudes have only one thing in common: and that is their common reliance on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he 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. [Eph 2:13 -14]
We here at First Pres Clayton are about as homogenous a white-bread congregation as can be... some day I hope I’ll look out over a sea of mixed dark and light faces, but it hasn’t happened yet. But we’re still different. How many of you are of Irish descent? Did you know that when this church was founded 150 years ago Irish immigrants were even lower on the social scale than black slaves? How many of you are of Polish descent? Have you ever heard a Polack joke? Actually, the best ones I ever heard were told by my roommate’s Polish boyfriend back in college, but that’s another story.
We’re all immigrants here. And most came not because they were powerful, or wealthy, or secure. They came because they had a vision of something better. Some came because they dreamed of economic opportunity, some came for religious freedom, some undoubtedly came with mixed motives, half spiritual and half material, like Abraham, following God but keeping an eye out for the main
chance. Some were persecuted before they got here, some afterwards... but somehow, we became one people. “E Pluribus unum.” Out of many, one. Now, we’re not the only multi-cultural population in the world. Look at Yugoslavia, for goodness’ sake. Serbs, Croatians, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians ... Or Afghanistan, with Pathans and Turkomen and Uzbeks and Tazhiks and numerous other tribes. Or Turkey, which has such a wretched history with its Armenian and Kurdish minorities. They’ve been multi-cultural for longer than we’ve been a country. What made the difference?
Two things. The first was a desire to make something new, to leave the past behind, to form new allegiances and new opportunities. And the second was a commitment to Christian principles. It was the Great Awakening under George Whitefield’s preaching in the mid-1700's that laid the foundation for a new way of relating to one another in the civic arena. It was the Great Awakening that brought
the idea of the equality of all - well at that time, it was just men - to the forefront of the political debate and the necessity of separating civil and religious authority. And we know from our own history that even Christian principles - no matter how well articulated or how firmly held - are not enough to eliminate the misunderstanding and mistrust that comes from differences in culture or habits or tradition.
It is not Christian principles, but Jesus Christ himself who makes the difference. That crowd gathered around the throne that John tells us about is filled with African saints drumming and dancing, Lutherans singing Bach and Handel, medieval monks chanting plainsong, Latin American Pentecostals with shouts of triumph, messianic Jews dancing the hora, Southern Baptists singing revival hymns and a generation of North American street evangelists doing gospel rap! Far from obliterating culture, God takes what is useful in each culture and transforms it into an instrument of praise for his glory. As Charles Wesley cried, “Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise!” And that offers hope for the future as well as an ideal for the present. God has sown into thousands of cultures through history aspects of his image in humanity, just as human immune systems are stronger the more genetically distinct their parents, so the body of Christ is strongest when it incorporates the perspectives of all its members. The Iraqis, the Kurds, the Iranians, even the North Koreans - all have something to contribute to the kingdom - but only if they pledge allegiance to the King.
The news these days is good. We cheer our heroes, we work for peace, we forgive our enemies, we believe in the future. But the only good news that we can count on is the good news of the gospel. If the peace we have so dearly won is to last, we have to do more than give our Islamic friends new schools and new forms of government. We must also give them a vision of a God who loves them enough to die for them rather than asking them to kill for him. Peace without the
cross will not last beyond tomorrow. But the peace we have in Jesus is available to all, lasts forever, and is ours - not for the taking, but for the giving away.
