Sermon Series, Readings from the Minor Prophets — Nahum 1:1–8, 15; Mark 7:14–15, 21–30
Sacramento, California is in the middle of a crisis. Like many places in the state, unemployment and homelessness are at a shockingly high rate, but that’s not the biggest problem. The city is surrounded by wildfires running out of control. But that, too, isn’t the most pressing issue. The real challenge this week is the huge influx of people. In about three days, the city has welcomed the number of new citizens they would usually receive in nine months. With a large Afghan population already, it’s one of the places that our government and agencies are sending the masses of people fleeing Afghanistan.
I’m not a big news-watcher, and I have no interest in political issues. I’m not going to try to analyze what’s going on in Afhanistan. I only know the real basics: Twenty years ago, shortly after the September 11th attacks, American military entered the country and, among other things, drove out the Taliban government. This group enforced a fundamentalist, repressive interpretation of their religion, and Americans were welcomed by some as liberators.
But Democratic and Republican administrations alike failed to establish anything that would last. Now we’re finally leaving, and the Taliban were able to regain control—faster than anyone expected. People are afraid of the expected oppression, and are trying to get out before things settle down, and they find themselves trapped there.
For half of my life, Afghanistan has been “the enemy,” connected in American minds—including mine—with repression, extremist faith, and terrorism, though if I had to explain why, I couldn’t. My feelings over all this, then, are mixed: I have compassion for the people who are trying to get out. But even with all my values and travels, they still feel like the enemy, and so I secretly hope they don’t end up here.
We never read the Prophet Nahum in church, in our three-year cycle of readings. That’s probably because he’s an angry prophet with an angry message. The people of Nineveh are terrible human beings, committing unspeakable atrocities in the ancient world that we’d call human rights abuses today. In their time, they were not just Israel’s greatest enemy; they were the enemy of the civilized world.
Nahum proclaims their destruction. God hates their abuse; they are God’s enemy too. And so God himself will bring them to an end.
In our reading today, an odd phrase interrupts Nahum’s description of God’s strength and power and vengeance. “His wrath is poured out like fire,” he says, “and by him, the rocks are broken in pieces.”
And then, suddenly: “The Lord is good, a stronghold in a day of trouble.” Such an angry, destructive God doesn’t sound very good to me. I suppose in this context, Nahum says God is good to the Israelites because he destroys their enemies. But what about to the people of Nineveh? We might ask if they thought God was good.
We might also ask if their lives were good. After all, they behaved with hatred and fear; they lived in hatred and fear. You can’t torture and kill human beings without dehumanizing yourself. Perhaps, in a way, the destruction of Nineveh’s power would have been a liberation of the people of Nineveh as well. Was this a way God freed them from their oppressive, hateful ways? Did God need to break down their evil, so that they could start lives of love?
Once in a while you see one of those bumper stickers that say things like “Tolerance” or “Diversity.” I don’t like them because I believe that if we want to build a healthy society, we need to do more than tolerate other people. We need to reach beyond ourselves, build connections and relationships, truly understand the Other. I think some people are afraid that will make us want to be like them—for example, reaching out to Muslims might make us want to become Muslim. But if that’s true, then our Christianity wasn’t very good in the first place. Understanding others won’t force us to stop being ourselves; it will enrich our understanding of who we are, and why.
So when I drove past the mosque near our church in central Massachusetts, I knew we had to connect with them somehow. It took me a few years to get up the courage and walk into the building. The front desk administrator promised to connect me with the social chair, and a month or two later, I walked in again, with sixteen Lutheran youth in tow. I had no idea what we were getting into.
We weren’t able to participate in worship, salat, mostly because we didn’t know how. But we were invited to sit in the prayer hall and watch, to experience what they do when they stand before God. Lots of bowing, proclamations of God’s praise, reading of their scriptures, cognizant with their understanding of the need to submit to God’s will.
After worship, we went to the social hall for a meal, mostly Middle Eastern food, part of the high Muslim value on hospitality. Then we sat in a circle on the floor, our youth and theirs, and talked. They explained the basics of Muslim faith. Then we went around in a circle, each person asking a question, or saying something they valued about their own faith. Most of our teenagers had questions—and so did most of the Muslims. They wanted to understand us as much as we did them.
At the end of the visit, we gave the Mosque a small gift, a few copies of the Qur’an, a symbolic action to oppose the burnings of the Qur’an in other places. It was hardly the most important thing done that day, but it symbolizes for me what was really accomplished. Yes, we were different, very different, than these Afghan and Egyptian and Indonesian Muslim immigrants. But we had started to understand each other. That allowed us to see the Image of God in them, and they in us. We learned something about Jesus just by spending time with these Others. And because of it, we were no longer enemies. We were friends.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus and his disciples encounter a Syrophonecian, a woman from the north, one of the old enemies of Israel. They treat her, at first, like an enemy. But she insists on engaging, on relating, and soon, everyone there learns that God’s salvation is for her and her daughter as well. After all, it is the things that come out of us—slander, and fear, and hateful speech—that defile us. And it is relationship and the building of love that cleanses us and makes us holy. A love that, for Christians, begins in our baptism, when God himself insists on engaging with us, and claims us as his own.
We like it when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor. We also like to forget that Jesus tells us to love our enemy as well. We live in a world where enemies are quickly made. As we think about the future of our church and community, we might do well to consider how we can respond to God’s call to end oppression, build relationships, and turn enemies into friends. That is in fact how God defeats our enemies—by making us love one another.