Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 3, 2023

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 105:1–6, 23–26, 45b
Romans 12:9–21

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Pastor Joe spoke beautifully last Sunday about the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He specifically recalled some of the singers who were there, Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennet. But another singer there that day was Joan Baez, who led that crowd in the song that would become something of the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”

Baez didn’t write that song, of course; it had a long history and multiple iterations as an African American spiritual before she ever sang it. It’s in our Glory to God hymnal, actually, and the companion book to that hymnal describes the role that the Highlander Folk School played in popularizing the song among leaders of the struggle for civil rights.

The book explains that Highlander was “a social justice leadership school and cultural center in Grundy County, Tennessee” that provided “training and education for the labor movement in Appalachia and throughout the southern United States.”

The music director at the school learned “We Shall Overcome” from striking tobacco factory workers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1946. She taught it to Pete Seeger in 1947, and over the next decade it was “often part of evening singing sessions at Highlander.” In 1959 the next music director taught it at the first-ever meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group that would go on to organize the Freedom Rides and the lunch counter sit-in protests.

After the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the song became “one of the most recognizable movement songs in the world.”

Dr. King quoted it frequently in speeches and sermons, including in his final Sunday sermon, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.: “We shall overcome. We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

We shall overcome.

It’s the last sentence of our scripture reading this morning that brings “We Shall Overcome” to mind for me, the line that says “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

If you were to ask me to condense the teaching of Christianity down to a single sentence, “Overcome evil with good” might be it. If nothing else, it is a strong distillation of the Christian ethic advocated by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Rome.

By “ethic” I mean a kind of code for right living. We all have an ethic, whether we acknowledge it or not. I have a friend who has said for years, both at home and in church, “Big kids take care of little kids.” That’s his ethic.

Families have ethics. You may have seen some version of this sign hanging in someone’s kitchen or bathroom (it may be your kitchen or bathroom) laying down “house rules”: the one in my best friend’s house growing up said, “If it’s open, close it; if it rings, answer it; if it’s dirty, clean it; if it’s hungry, feed it; if it cries, give it a hug.”

There’s an ethic in there, perhaps several.

For the church, for Christians, overcoming is our ethic; overcoming evil is our ethic; overcoming evil with good is our ethic.

This is not an ethic to be endorsed lightly. For one thing, we need to remain grounded — anytime we’re talking about good and evil — in a healthy skepticism about ourselves and our ability to tell the difference. We need to bear in mind the apostle’s admonition to not claim to be wiser than we are.

Because painful experience has taught all of us how easy it is for people of faith to find ourselves on the wrong side of the good–evil divide.

The church is not — and never has been — immune from evil simply by virtue of it being the church. Indeed the catalogue of evils permitted or endorsed by organized Christianity is long and sobering and ought to give us pause before we begin to speak of “hating” and “overcoming” evil.

Still, the Christian ethic is to overcome evil with good. With humble discernment and with God’s help, it is possible. We must at least try. We can’t just stand here in a position of privileged relativism and throw up our hands, like “Good? Evil? It’s anyone’s guess!”

If we believe that, we wouldn’t pray each week in the Lord’s Prayer to be delivered from evil.

No, the reality is that the distinction between good and evil is not anyone’s guess, and It’s a copout to claim good and evil are relative terms, because they’re not relative to the victims of evil.

Evil is not a relative term to people fleeing their homes for fear of violence. Those people don’t look at the buoys in the Rio Grande River, the ones with circular saw blades between them, and say, “Maybe that’s evil, maybe not — it depends on your cultural situation.”

Evil is not a relative term to communities targeted for harassment and discrimination. Evil was not a relative term for the masses who gathered on the national mall 60 years and one week ago.

To say that good and evil can’t be told apart is not to keep our thumb off the scales of morality and justice with a posture of enlightened objectivity. It’s actually to place our thumb directly on the scales, on the side of evil.

Evil and good can be told apart, and they must be told apart, especially for people of faith. Because overcoming evil with good is our ethic.

And once we have discerned evil from good, once we have committed ourselves to an ethic of “holding fast” to that which is good and “hating” that which is evil, the first thing we know we must not do is what not to do. And that is to pay back evil for evil.

We know this. At least, we should know this; we hear it often enough. This is part of the standard charge given by preachers from this lectern each Sunday (I guarantee you’re going to hear it again this morning):

Repeat after me: Return no one evil for evil.

Return no one evil for evil. Vengeance ain’t Christian.

Though it is quite popular. A casual review of movie trailers over the past several years prominently feature the theme of revenge of the good guys (frequently Liam Neeson or Denzel Washington) dishing out some much-deserved payback to the bad guys.

And that’s understandable on a very human level. Payback feels good. If you or someone you love has been wronged, has been harmed, leveling the score feels like justice, or at least it feels like something, like fighting back, like restoring dignity.

Commentators note that the context of this letter is the Roman cultural context of honor and shame codes. There were clear rules about what was required of a person if their honor had been insulted, and they all included harming the honor of the offender in like kind.

Have we come all that far from that?

The theology of revenge has never worked to the benefit of the faithful. For Christians in Rome during the first century, responding to provocation or persecution in kind would have harmed the credibility of their witness to Jesus, who did not resist his own arrest, and would have invited a far harsher response.

But this letter is not the first prohibition in the Bible against taking revenge; it’s all over the Bible, from beginning to end. “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord in the song of Moses in Deuteronomy, quoted here in Romans. But also Leviticus 19: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s right: the command that Jesus identified as one of the most important commandments in scripture is connected to a prohibition against taking revenge. Jesus went on to say, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Jesus went on further to say, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Jesus continued an old, old biblical teaching against score settling.

Paying back evil for evil is not how we overcome evil with good.

Still, evil is real, and its impact on people is real. When a person’s humanity is degraded, when a peoples’ freedom is denied, when you are demeaned or talked down to or ignored — how can you be expected to resist the enticement of revenge?

I think we have to consider the possibility ahead of time and decide what we’re going to do.

On the last day of our Senior High mission trip in Memphis last summer, our group visited the National Civil Rights Museum. There is an exhibit there of a Woolworth’s lunch counter that explains the sit-in protests against segregation in public places, like restaurants, in cities like Greensboro, North Carolina, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

What really catches your attention is the video playing on the wall behind the counter. It’s a video of a training class that prepared protestors for what they would experience when they took seats at segregated lunch counters.

And the class wasn’t a lecture. Fellow protestors taunted one another, threw water and coffee on one another, blew cigarette smoke in one another’s faces, shouted racial epithets — all kinds of things to try to prepare themselves to suffer evil and not return evil for evil.

“Do not return anyone evil for evil,” says the scripture, “but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” There was no question, when television footage and newspaper photographs of the sit-in protests were broadcast across the country, but that the protestors’ behavior was noble while their opponents’ was evil, because they thought about it in advance, and they trained for nobility, rather than score-settling.

Incitements to retaliation only seek to drag you down to an evildoers level. You’ve heard the advice about not wrestling with a pig, I’m sure, because you both get muddy and the pig likes it. Instead, the positive nonresistance the sit-in protestors practiced and then taught the world changed the rules. They changed the terms of the struggle to their own terms — good and evil — and they refused to accept the terms of racism and white supremacy.

In a video about the demonstrations and the training for it, a young John Lewis says, “There was something deep down within me, moving me, that I could no longer be satisfied with an evil system, that I had to be maladjusted to it. And in spite of all of this I had to keep loving the people that denied me service.”

The Christian ethic of overcoming evil with good does not accept a terminology of relativity or of vengeance. Rather, it dictates the terms based on its apprehension of what is good and beautiful and true and honorable, trusting the power of the good to overcome. And so it shall.

Worship is the arena that shapes us in the terminology of the good and the honorable and the noble and the beautiful. Worship is our classroom to be trained in the ethic of overcoming evil with good. This whole section of the letter to the Romans is really concerned with worship, how it shapes our thinking about ourselves and everyone else, including our enemies. In the verses Pastor Joe read last Sunday we were urged “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

In particular, our participation in the Sacrament of Communion in worship trains us in the good and the perfect. The Lord’s Table is our curriculum for overcoming evil with good, for even on the eve of his arrest Jesus took time and created space for mutual affection with his disciples.

In John’s account of the supper, Jesus associated with that which was “lowly” by washing his disciples’ feet, thereby outdoing them in showing them honor. And even in the presence of an enemy, Judas, who had already betrayed him, Jesus pronounced a blessing and not a curse.

The resurrected Christ comes to his disciples, the same ones who had fled and abandoned him, the same one who denied him, not with retribution but with peace. And so we — so far as it depends on us — extend that peace to one another in worship and to all when we leave here.

Coming to this table in worship patterns our life after Jesus’ own life — his spirit, his joy, his suffering, his prayer, his welcome of all: his love. Here we are fed by that love, the love of a Lord who died for us “while we were yet sinners,” in order to feed one another with that love and to feed a world famished for love.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church