The Republican National Convention was the past week and I guess some of the steam was taken out of the meeting because of our national concern with Hurricane Gustav and our concern for peoples along the gulf coast, especially those in Louisiana.  However, the Republicans quickly captured the media spotlight after Gustav turned out to be a lesser impact storm and after John McCain shocked the world by naming an unknown as his running mate.  This running mate happens to be the Governor of Alaska, which is a place where big news is a moose in downtown disrupting the traffic.   I caught a little of Sarah Palin’s speech and she had some memorable lines.  We all have heard the one about the Hockey mom and the pit bull.  I don’t get it; I have never thought pitbull’s looked good in lipstick.  I also heard that she can field dress a moose, which might mean she has more skills than our current Vice President who seems to be hunting challenged, and also more than W who at times seems to be just plain challenged period.

I really don’t know what I think about her, but you have to admit it will be an interesting race these last two months.  Palin has been all the buzz on late night TV.  Some of my favorites lines from Leno and company are:

• Speaking of Sarah Palin, she said she’s a life-long member of the National Rifle Association. Which may explain why she’s in favor of shotgun weddings.” –Conan O’Brien
• “Governor Sarah Palin gave her speech tonight at the GOP Convention, and it gave people who didn’t know anything about her the chance to finally meet her, you know, like John McCain.” –Jay Leno
• By the way, here’s good news, ladies and gentlemen: the Palin family crisis that we were talking about on Sunday and Monday, that has been solved now, and, today, the baby is being adopted by Angelina Jolie.” –David Letterman
• “And you’ve got to love this: Sarah Palin is an avid hunter. An avid hunter. A vice president who likes guns? Well, what could go wrong there?” –David Letterman

Well, I will give it to McCain, he sure surprised us, and maybe the old maverick still has some of that rebel in him.  I am really not that politically minded, but I think more so than usual politics are on our minds because of the economy and the war – however you vote, this election is critical – both parties realize this, both McCain and Obama are claiming to be agents of real change.  I do think whatever we end up with will have to be an improvement.  I don’t like expensive gasoline and a struggling economy, but the war has me the most upset.  It is difficult to justify it on any front.  We perhaps are the liberators of Iraq, but in the process may also have become the oppressors of the peoples of Iraq and elsewhere.

          I ran across an excellent article by Jimmy Carter on the possibility of war in Iraq before we got involved in the whole sorry mess:

Profound changes have been taking place in American foreign policy, reversing consistent bipartisan commitments that for more than two centuries have earned our nation greatness. These commitments have been predicated on basic religious principles, respect for international law, and alliances that resulted in wise decisions and mutual restraint. Our apparent determination to launch a war against Iraq, without international support, is a violation of these premises.  As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology. (Jimmy Carter, “A Just War or Just War?”  The New York Times, March 9, 2003)

So is there such a thing as a just war?  Catholic ethicists have advance something called “Just War Theory” which seeks to define theologically what conditions must be present for war to be justified.  More recently, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2309, lists four strict conditions for “legitimate defense by military force”:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

It seems difficult for me to evaluate the war in Iraq by these criteria, because I am not sure our batting average would be too good in meeting these four concerns.  I don’t know if we have met any of them, Carter seems to think that we did not in his excellent article. Unfortunately, we fight because that is what we do.  Patton said it best when he said the truth is that we American love a good fight.  And as long as we can easy defeat people who disagree with us, it will always be a front line option instead of a last hope desperate measure. It is easy for us to loft bomb from ships hundreds of miles away until resistance is futile.  It is sadly easier and quicker than diplomacy and other tough solutions.

We went to Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, and to liberate the Iraqi people from a tyrant.  So are we a country of liberators?  I believe that we are, but we must also be careful not to turn into the oppressor, a role that we are seen to play by many in the world.

In today’s lectionary passage from the Exodus, we find a story of liberation, in fact the classic story of liberation that has inspired the downtrodden, the enslaved and oppressed peoples everywhere.  But I would also suggest that there is more than just liberation going on here, that at least on the surface there is a new kind of oppression as well.  Maybe it is as Dan Clendenin states, God has become both the liberator the oppressor.

Exodus 12 describes the institution of the Jewish feast of Passover that commemorates Israel’s liberation from 430 years of bondage to slavery in Egypt. Liberation from oppression is a good thing, and always worthy of celebration. But the writer of Exodus construes Israel’s emancipation to include Egyptian subjugation. Today we would say that the horribly-oppressed became the new oppressor, except in this instance the writer insists that Hebrew revenge was the very act of Yahweh Himself. Yahweh will “bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt.” In something akin to divine infanticide, Yahweh will slay the first-born of every Egyptian, from the highest in Pharaoh’s house to the lowliest prisoner languishing in a dank dungeon, even including the firstborn of Egyptian livestock. To punctuate his point, the writer adds: “there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead” (Exodus 12:30). In a departing act of humiliation, the Hebrews looted and plundered their Egyptian oppressors. (When Faith is Hijacked, Dan Clendenin)

            This is of course one of the foremost and most important stories in the Hebrew canon and we seldom stop to pause to consider that it is also one of the darkest passages in all the Bible as well.  I believe that it is a deeply disturbing undertones, where Yahweh liberates the children of Israel from terrible bondage (a fundamentally good thing) and in turn subjugates the Egyptians by sending a series of plagues including an unbelievable infanticide.  Now sure God warned Pharaoh with a series of plagues of escalating intensity, so you might say Pharaoh had multiple chances to do the right thing.  You might argue that God’s people would have never been freed short of something this radical, and from where we sit we cannot fathom the cruelty that the taskmaster directed toward equally innocent Israelites. But on the other hand, one also might argue that God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart as the text say so that he was after a point incapable of any other action other than the one he chose all for the purpose of being an object lesson that you don’t mess around with Yahweh.  You might also argue that two wrongs don’t ever make a right.

So where does that leave us?  What might be the greatest story in the Old Testament also includes a very dark subplot of a God who accomplishes his purposes at the expense of the most helpless and innocent in society – he appears to kill babies, and that is a tough deal in a corpus of holy writings that is as full of tough deals as the Old Testament.  I understand that I was not there and that there is more to the story, but as it reads it offends my civilized sensibilities.  And you won’t hear this point in any other Baptist Church this morning, but the truth is we get so caught up in the greatness and power of the Almighty to do battle for the measly Israelites, that we conveniently overlook the means behind the way. And I am sorry if that sounds harsh, I don’t like it either.  I wish it would not have happened (well, more on that later).  The Nile turning to blood was cool, and the frogs and bugs, well OK.  That hail turning to fire was a neat trick.  Even the famine might be justified.  But surely not killing the babies.  Why does that have to be part of this story?  Why the heck didn’t God just kill Pharaoh and his henchman?  It seems to me that what happened here is not nearly as cool as what Charlton Heston portrays happening in the “10 Commandments.”  This is more than a “God is great” story.    I think the real miracle would have been to deliver the children of Israel without using intrinsically evil means to do so.  Anybody can force peoples into coercion who carries a bigger stick. 

So I guess this passage raises an important question this morning, namely is this evil necessary for God to accomplish his purposes, to accomplish a great good?  Are any tactics justifiable in order to achieve noble ends?   There may be no more relevant question in a day where all wars seem to be holy wars, and religion is more fragmented than ever on our planet.  This question of the means justified by the ends is hard to fathom. It is hard to explain what happens in our text by any rules other than the one that says that God can do whatever he darn well pleases because he is God.  

But I am convinced of something else today. This is just a story (albeit an important one), meant to convey a spiritual truth.  I don’t know it is a historical event orchestrated by Yahweh or not as there is little archaeological or historical evidence that such a wide scale Exodus ever occurred, but who the heck knows.  I do know that Biblical critics have a field day with this one my friends.  Take a look at the International Critical Commentary on Exodus and read up, it will make your brain hurt and slap the theological Pollyanna right out of you.  But for whatever reason it is the story that we are told.  And even in light of what I have already said, I do believe that we profit by it being told. 

            I don’t know if God really killed babies or not, and I don’t know if that is ever really OK.   But here is what I do know: We use God to justify all kinds of evils.  I am convinced that as the story was retold so that the children of Israel believed that their enemies were God’s enemies, and I also believe in retrospect that even if that were the case, God was working with what he had to work with and had an entirely different plan in mind.

            Today, many have preached that America’s enemies are God’s enemies and it is on my mind since the seventh anniversary of 9/11 is this Thursday.  There has been a truckload of bad religion exposed since that fateful day, and not all of it has been by the Muslims, as they are not the only ones to glorify and valorize war. They are not the only ones to suggest that wars are holy and that God is on their side fighting the infidels. Many Christians have added fuel to this fire as well. About a year after the 9/11attacks, on November 16, 2002, Franklin Graham, Billy’s son, appeared on the NBC Nightly News and derided Islam as “an evil and wicked religion.” Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, denigrated the prophet Muhammad as “a demon-possessed pedophile” in his annual address to the convention on June 10, 2001. Call me naive, but I think that may not qualify as loving your enemies as Jesus preached. In a speech before his colleagues on March 4, 2004, Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma characterized the Middle East conflicts as “a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.”  On his television program The 700 Club, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who is an ardent critic of President Bush especially his foreign policies.  We could go on and on and on.  We often believe that our enemies are God’s enemies and God wishes us to kill them, or if we do it then we are doing God’s will.

            It is an old story.  I suppose that it all began after three hundred years of sporadic, state-sponsored persecutions of Christians, most of whom were the peripheral and the poor, the Roman emperor Constantine credited his military victory over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge to the Christian God. Tradition says that on the evening of October 27, the night before the battle, Constantine had a vision of a cross emblazoned on the setting sun, and the Greek letters XP, the first two Greek letters of “Christ,” superimposed on it. Constantine either saw or heard the phrase, often rendered in Latin, “In Hoc Signo Vinces“—”With this sign, you shall conquer.” Constantine, who was a pagan at the time, put the symbol on his solders’ shields, thus transforming a sacred symbol of innocent, redemptive, suffering love into a talisman of violent, hate-filled, military conquest.  And people have done the same ever since, killing in God’s name

            So how do we get to this point of advocating violence in God’s name?  Clendenin says that somewhere deep within the human psyche there seems to reside a dark and primitive impulse toward hatred, exclusion, and deadly violence. Perhaps to justify ourselves, or to calm our deep insecurity, we insist that God not only sanctions our hatreds and our causes, whether personal or national, but that He himself hates our enemies and at some points in history even exterminates them. But when God hates all the same people that you hate, you can be confident that you have created Him in your own petty and paltry image.   

            So while it is not a pretty picture, there is an important point this morning. I believe whatever else this story means it does at least mean this: that God seeks to liberate the captives and is serious about it and does so in a way that points out the gravity of the Pharaoh’s evil.  The over-the-top killing of babies makes the point emphatically that God wants the oppressed to be liberated and the captives set free.  And I would suggest to you this morning that there are captives to all kinds of things all over our world in need of such a gift, but that is another sermon. 

            If indeed the children of Israel thought their enemies were God’s enemies, and if indeed God did battle for them, one other thing I know:  God’s intention was never violence even if it were some kind of justified or necessary evil, and God’s master plan is best revealed in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.   God’s intention was to not save the world through a conqueror, but through a suffering servant, one who fully expressed God’s heart of love.  After hundreds or thousands of years of not being messengers of the Grace of God, Christ intervenes in our world to do just that.  Jesus Christ is the embodiment of the Godhead revealed to us, and he showed us a different way.  One that does not seek revenge, but one who repays evil with good.  One who wins through compassion, not through conquests.  One who taught us to turn the other cheek, to walk the second mile, and to love our enemies because anyone can love a friend, right?  One who said that being his follower meant something different, that we would be known by one thing and one thing only, our love.  It is hard to imagine Jesus sanctioning any kind of violence. After all, he could have called down as the saying goes, 10,000 angels, but chose the way of the cross, a sacrificial option in response to the greatest injustice of all time.  

            So what is the answer to the violence question? In a nutshell it is Jesus Christ.  And as his followers we have to develop a new culture of peace. One based not on power, not on might but on the word of God, on the law of love. You remember the one – to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself. In fact, you have heard it said love your friends and hate your enemies. Jesus says unto us, love your enemies too. It is hard to love someone you are fighting, abusing, mistreating, or simply bombing the hell out of. The gospel message is that only the law of love will win the day. Only the law of love will change our culture of violence. Only the law of love will make the Kingdoms of this world become the Kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. And in the end it is more up to us than not.  And if we don’t realize that, then September 11, 2001 was truly a tragedy of epic proportions.  May it not be so.  Amen.