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March 16, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Search for a Moral Center
A Series on the Ten Commandments:
"The Value of Life"

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 19: 7–14
John 10:7–10
Genesis 4:8–9; Exodus 20:2,13

“I am the Lord Your God. . . You shall not kill.”
(Exodus 20: 2,13) (NRSV)

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Eternal God, silence from whom our words come, questioner from whom all our questions arise, mystery in whose depths we find healing, we pray that you would enfold us now in your presence, fill us with your peace, renew us with your power, and ground us anew in your eternal word which never changes, for the sake of Christ. Amen. (1)

Karl Barth, one of the giants of twentieth-century theology, offered a memorable piece of advice to the preachers of his day. “You should always preach with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other.” (2)

To read today’s newspaper in light of the Bible is to realize that the world is a long, long way from the vision of peaceful coexistence envisioned by the prophets and the promise embodied by Jesus Christ and summed up by his words, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Abundant life, the peaceable kingdom: they seem far away from the events of our time. Last year, for example, there were 15,980 homicides in the United States, mostly caused by firearms. (3) To read the newspaper is to read statistics like that. It is to encounter stories of stabbings and human stampedes and suicide bombings and all manner of mayhem, violence, and destruction.

To read today’s newspaper is to be reminded of the genocide and vast environmental destruction perpetrated by Saddam Hussein in recent years.

To read today’s newspaper is to learn that 250,000 American troops and 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles have been moved into battle positions in the Middle East.

To read the paper is to read about the Marine unit in Kuwait awaiting battle, dealing with anxiety, and listening to lectures about how to prepare. Get your letters home written today, the young Marines are told. Then, they are given plastic bags to add to their equipment to collect a dead comrade’s personal effects, should that comrade be killed in battle. (4) To read all of this grim news in light of the Bible’s hopeful promises is to be perplexed almost beyond description. Yet, who can doubt that we need a word beyond our own, a word that invites us to consider a different way of being human?

This morning we continue our sermon series on the Ten Commandments and come to what appears to be as clear a statement as you could ever ask for—a simple idea expressed in four one-syllable words. “You shall not kill.” But beneath those words lies a world of complexity. To hear the words straight is to assume they literally mean what they say: Never, under any circumstances, should you kill anything. Yet, the commandment arose out of a society in which people were expected to kill animals for ritual sacrifice at the temple, and animals were universally used as a source of food. This was a culture in which the notion of a holy war was not an anathema. The people of God had license to kill the Edomites and the Philistines and whomever else they considered to be enemies of the one true God. In other words, killing and war per se were not prohibited by Old Testament law. Moses himself could be described as a murderer; justifiable homicide perhaps, but you remember how he killed an Egyptian whom he found beating a Hebrew slave, and how he looked this way and that way and buried his body in the desert sand. (Exodus 2:12)

What kind of killing is addressed by the sixth commandment? The Hebrew word that is used in the commandment is employed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures to refer specifically to killing as murder. Originally then, the commandment was intended to protect the right of a person not to be killed as a consequence of revenge or resentment or anger or jealousy. The killing of Abel by his brother Cain, graphically described in Genesis, is exactly the kind of death-dealing aggression forbidden by the sixth commandment. The first homicide recorded in the Bible addresses the basic human question of what ought we to do about the other who threatens us or competes with us. Cain was a farmer, Abel a keeper of sheep. God had preferred Abel’s offering of sacrifice to Cain’s offering, and it had enraged his brother, and so he killed him. Beneath this incident lies one of the great moral questions: what do we do with our injured pride?

And beneath that question lies the basic theological question: toward what end did God create the human creature? (5) Earlier in Genesis, the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is told. God created man and woman in God’s own image. Here are two key clues as to the answers of these questions: First, we are created to reflect the image of the One who gives life. Second, we are created to live in a partnership marked by peace and harmony with one another.

Well, you know how the story goes. Adam and Eve misused the precious gift of freedom God had given them, the consequence being that they were banished from the garden, and there they lived, and there their children were born, somewhere east of Eden, and all the brokenness came to a head as one brother rose up and killed the other. At that moment, the death knell of any assumption about the innocence of the human creature sounded. From that time on, moral ambiguity has shadowed the human path.

This past Friday evening, I spoke at Friday Shabbat services at Chicago Sinai. The highlight of that service is the presentation of the Torah, the scrolls of parchment that contain the Pentateuch, the centerpiece of which is the holy law. Seeing the Torah presented with such reverence caused me to ponder: Before the first murder, who needed the law? But after it, God became more of a realist, and saw human beings as we are, capable of great good but also capable of great evil. Was creation a complete failure? No, but it didn’t work well. We needed help, so God moved to plan B, the giving of the law. (6) When the law proved to be inadequate, God sent God’s own son to give his life for the sins of the world. For the Jew, the highest mountain is Sinai; for the Christian, it is Calvary’s hill. But wherever you stop in the story of salvation, clearly God realized along the way that we human beings needed help in the worst possible way.

Because this is a serious sermon, I feel moved to offer a little relief by telling you the story of two fellows, true reprobates, who had spent Saturday night out painting the town and found themselves sleeping it off in the sanctuary of a Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning. They dozed through most of the service, but woke up at the point of the Prayer of Confession to hear the whole congregation saying, “O Lord, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things that we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.”

One of the fellows elbowed the other and said, “Hey Horace! I think we have finally found our crowd.”

We are broken people who are without hope save in God’s sovereign mercy and guiding hand.

“You shall not kill,” the commandment says. We immediately bristle at the thought. It’s so much easier, isn’t it, to think of why there are thousands of exceptions to the commandment than there are reasons to take its imperative seriously. Yes, we shouldn’t kill, but what about the murderer? What about the despot? (7)

Is Christianity a pacifist religion to its core? No, it is not, though many Christians, through the depth of their commitment to the way of Christ, have been led to pacifism. John Calvin, the great theologian of the Reformed tradition, was not a pacifist, but he wrote this radically Christian thought: “If we do not wish to violate the image of God, we ought to hold the image of our neighbor sacred in the most basic sense.” (8)

Was Reinhold Niebuhr a pacifist? No. As he addressed the question of participation in World War II, he reminded the American people that they lived between the times in a broken world. Therefore, the two values of mercy and justice must be held in tension with one another. (9) The “just war” theory attempts to hold together three principles in tension: the value of human life, the state’s right to defend its citizens and defend justice, and the reality that sometimes force is necessary to protect innocent people and to defend lasting moral principles.

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer a pacifist? Bonhoeffer was executed by the Gestapo in 1945, having been arrested because of his decision as a Christian to practice his faith in terms of obedient action and join in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

What person of faith today could be an apologist for Saddam Hussein? He is a dangerous dictator who has wreaked havoc on his own people and upon his neighbors and needs to be removed from power. The daunting moral question is how that ought to happen, and when. There are 24 million citizens of Iraq who have suffered greatly in recent years. Twelve million of those citizens are children under the age of 12.

I was personally helped this week by a statement released by major religious leaders, including the leader of our own Presbyterian denomination, which urged our leaders to separate Saddam from the Iraqi people, to target him but protect the people. As Martin Luther King would have put it, “We have come to a moment that is five minutes before midnight,” a moment in which military conflagration is immediately before us. (10)

I want to suggest this morning that at a time like this, we ought to remember a thing or two that comes to us from the Bible and the great religious tradition of which we are a part. We are all children of God, Creator of all people, and therefore we can never ever be glad or gleeful about the prospect of killing other human beings. If we go to war, we go with a lump in our throats and with sorrow in our soul. (11)

We will want to remember that moral ambiguity permeates every war, but especially this one. We will want to try, in every way imaginable, to eliminate the threat of Saddam Hussein. I believe that before we resort to full scale war, we should pursue every other option. I am heartened this Sunday that the leader of our nation is meeting with leaders of Britain, Spain, and Portugal to see if there is an alternative.

If all these efforts fall short, and war comes, what shall we do? We will pray for our nation and its leaders and for all the nations of the world. We will support the brave men and women in the Armed Services with our prayers, even as we pray for the Iraqi people and for all who stand in harm’s way.

If we are God’s people and disciples of Christ, we will not fail to focus on the human face of war. Do you remember Kim Phuc, the young Vietnamese woman whose photograph gripped the world in 1972? Severely burned by napalm, she ran down the road, her arms extended, her body naked, her face marked by horror and anguish. She captured for the world the face of war, not just that war, but the horror and suffering that are a part of every war. (12) Don’t forget the girl in the picture, vulnerable against the forces of violence and death.

These are serious days in our world. They are serious days in the church, as we walk through the solemn season of Lent, remembering the vulnerability and suffering and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came that we might have abundant life. He found that the only way for abundant life ever to be possible on this broken earth was for him to go to the cross. Vulnerable, without any semblance of worldly power, he was tortured and killed. The Good Shepherd became “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” (John 1:29) This savior who loved life better than anyone gave himself for the sake of peace and reconciliation. He had been anticipated by the prophet with the beautiful expression, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” and so he was. (Isaiah 9:6)

I don’t know where else besides church you would hear the kinds of things that I have tried to say today. (13) They are difficult for me to say and difficult for you to hear.

I want you to think one more time with me about the commandment, “You shall not kill.” Imagine it, not as a prohibition, but as a promise that someday, through God’s grace, we will not kill. Swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. “Nation will not lift up sword against nation; neither will they study war anymore.” (Micah 4:3) That is God’s promise, and on that promise we stand. In it, we find our hope for the facing of these days.

On 9/11, we thought together about the words of Desmond Tutu. Take them with you now:

Goodness is stronger than evil,
love is stronger than hate,
light is stronger than darkness,
life is stronger than death,
victory is ours through him who loved us.

To him be the glory, in the church and in the world, throughout the ages. Amen.

Footnotes
1. Paraphrased from Ted Loder’s poem “God Among Us.”
2. As K.C. Ptomey reminded me in his sermon of 2/2/03 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee.
3. “Vital Statistics,” New York Times, 10/31/02.
4. New York Times, 3/14/03.
5. Edwin M. Poteat, Mandate to Humanity, Abingdon/Cokesbury Press, 1953.
6. See Harvey Cox, Common Prayers, Houghton Mifflin, 2001, p. 75
7. Albert C. Winn, A Christian Primer, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990, p. 229.
8. The Christian Institute.
9. Personal correspondence.
10. “An Alternative to War for Defeating Saddam Hussein,” prepared by members of the U.S. religious delegation that met with Prime Minister Tony Blair on February 18, 2003: Jim Wallis, Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners; John Bryson Chane, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C.; Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church USA; Melvin Talbert, Ecumenical Officer of the United Methodist Council of Bishops; and Dan Weiss, Immediate Past General Secretary of the American Baptist Churches in the USA.
11. A great John M. Buchanan idea.
12. Denise Chang, The Girl in the Picture, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 364.
13. A point made by Eugene C. Bay in his sermon, “Truthfulness: A Luxury or an Essential,” referencing Hauerwas and Willimon, The Truth about God, Abingdon Press, 1999.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church