Due to technical difficulties, the camera was not working today. However, the message is too important not to offer for consideration. Below is the complete transcript of the sermon.
Working for Mercy
& Peace
Deuteronomy
34:1-12
October
26, 2014
This is, without doubt, the hardest
sermon I’ve written. Philadelphia Baptist Association has asked pastors to
preach this Sunday on domestic violence awareness. While it is not entirely clear
what all leads to domestic violence, an often silent and hidden epidemic in our
culture and our churches, it is known that conditions leading to family stress
ignite it. Right now, economic growth is below normal. Unemployment rates remain
too high. Those individuals suffering beneath the poverty line have increased
to roughly 50 million, around one in every six persons in our population. As we
have seen working with the Interfaith Food Cupboard, the rate of food
insecurity is far too high. Opportunities for advancement have dwindled. This
is an incredibly stressful environment to live in and fertile ground for
domestic violence. According to the pamphlet available from PBA, 2,135,000 women
and men are abused annually by partners. Numbers
like this can leave us feeling helpless and wanting to withdraw. However, using
God’s methods of mercy and peace, as seen in today’s Scripture reading, we
Christians can make a difference.
Moses was an extraordinary prophet and
leader. Moses had an amazingly close relationship with God. We are told Moses
had God’s Spirit, received a divine calling and divine revelation from God.
Moses spoke with God’s words. Here was the prophet who led the Israelites out
of slavery in Egypt. Moses formed this “stiff-necked people” into a nation.
Listening to his father-in-law’s advice, he gave them a judicial system. All of
the prophets who came later were compared with Moses. In the New Testament, parallels
were made between Jesus and Moses, so powerful was Moses’ legacy. In
Deuteronomy 34:10, it is written, “there has not arisen a prophet since in
Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” No one short of Jesus
would be used by God so intensely as an instrument of revelation. God spoke to
Moses clearly and Moses saw God’s form without dying.
And yet, Moses, for all his virtues, was
a human being filled with human flaws, human fears, and a human temper. In his
youth, Moses struck down an abusive Egyptian beating a Hebrew and fled to
Midian to evade Pharaoh’s wrath. Later, in the wilderness of Zin, after the
death of Miriam, Moses’ sister, at Kadesh, Moses was caught up in a quarrel
among his people. They were waterless and sure they were going to die. They
were accusing Moses of poor leadership, bringing them to this hostile place.
God told Moses and Aaron to command the rock to yield water before the
assembled crowd. This would be a sign of God’s power and holiness. Instead,
Moses, apparently with temper flaring, proclaimed, “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this
rock?” Striking the rock with his staff twice, the water came. God saw this
action as Moses’ lack of trust in God and God’s methods, stating, “Because you
did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites,
therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given
them.” Moses was neither free of fear nor sin, though God made great use of
him.
For many centuries, that judgment, in the
face of all Moses did right, has worried scholars. Many explanations have been
offered but none seem to satisfy. Right now this is a painful story of
judgment, harsh judgment. And Moses was about to die. Will this story be
redeemed? There is a modern story about which we can ask the same painful
question.
Moses was in a situation of high stress
both times when his temper got the best of him. The people of Israel became
those famous “stiff-necked people” arguing and abusive when they were stressed
as well. Great social stress today leads to domestic abuse, as we have seen.
That is the dangerously fertile soil into which the evil seeds of cruelty fall
and thrive. Seeking out an explanation for the cruelty involved in domestic
violence, I turned to the Dictionary of
Pastoral Care and Counseling. The experts there explained that our life’s
expectations are “mapped out” early in childhood. Those expectations grow as
the years roll by and impact behavior. Generally speaking, if a child received
love and care, those are the expectations mapped out for later life and that
child is likely to be loving and caring. However,
when a child is told constantly and unfairly that he or she is bad and is
treated with cruelty and violence, the map of life’s expectations is altered
and behavior changes. That child will likely exhibit cruel behavior later in
life. Victims become victimizers as they try to decrease painful, pent-up
feelings from their own trauma. This awful and wrong cycle perpetuates. Again,
this is general. There are exceptions.
Sadly, social attitudes going all the way
back to the Code of Hammurabi, the oldest legal documents, have been lax on
domestic violence. In the Code, the rights of a husband to discipline a wife
and children as he saw fit were affirmed. In time, restrictions were placed on
how men might exercise this right. By the 19th century, social
reform movements made child and wife abuse less excusable. However, today,
while there are laws in every state prohibiting assaults on family members, all
too often there is reluctance to enforce them. Batterers are rarely charged and
victims are encouraged not to press charges. Worse, victims are often blamed as
being complicit in the abuse.
Any community that tolerates interpersonal
violence perpetuates it and passes it on like toxic seeds to the next
generation. For instance, a 28-year-old contractor filed for divorce from his
estranged wife, a wife he declared he no longer loved. One day, cancelling his
wife’s home insurance, he obtained the necessary permits and demolished her
three bedroom home. Fortunately, she and their three children were away. Quite
a few men in the community called this violence “bulldozer justice” and supported
the contractor. His community let it be known that violent, vengeful attitudes
and behaviors were legitimate ways to end family disputes.
Christian families are not exempt from
this crisis. Some years ago, Methodist church women were surveyed and 68%
revealed they had experience with abuse. Domestic abuse is a crisis facing
peoples of every social and economic class, every ethnic group, both genders,
all ages, and every faith. Like our story from Deuteronomy, at this point it
feels like terrible, harsh judgment and leaves us in a quandary as to what we
should do.
It
is easy to imagine ourselves standing on some high mountain, looking longingly
off into a promised land, but unable to reach it.
While this is a story of God’s judgment, it is even more a story of God’s
mercy and peace. In the Bible, among the nation of Israel, the infirmities of
advanced age were often used to portray God’s judgment against the people.
Weakness is the result of sin and rebellion. And yet, Moses, a man of 120 years
was clear-sighted and vigorous. Moses’ past actions may have denied him direct
access to the Promised Land, but God’s judgment is further muted by his
treatment of Moses at the end. God is very gentle with his faithful, dedicated,
if sometimes prickly servant. God grants Moses a rare delight. Ascending Mount
Nebo, some 2,600 feet above sea level—there’s vigor in a 120 year old for you—God
provides Moses with a view of the entire Promised Land as no mere mortal could.
Moses sees in detail the future homes of the various tribes of Israel. God
reminds Moses, “this is the land that I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to
Jacob …” when the tour is finished.
The
promise was about to be fulfilled. God shows mercy to Moses and Moses receives
that mercy with acceptance, receiving also God’s peace.
Throughout Moses’ long life he responded
with a range of emotions to God’s calls. At times Moses was filled with
self-doubt and fear, then with bravery in the face of great danger, and even offering
up a gentle reproach to God to calm things when the people were at their worst.
Just once did he stumble as God’s prophet, at Meribah, as his impatience and
temper rose with his people. One scholar wrote that since Moses was a model for
his people for all time to come, the price Moses paid for that lapse was high. Yet,
when God’s justice collides with God’s mercy, as it did here, mercy prevails.
In the end, the text even suggests God may have buried Moses God’s-self,
providing a final moment of startling closeness in the relationship between God
and his prophet. God helped Moses with his final mile on this earth. The text
suggests, in Moses’ quiet observation of the Promised Land and his ending
without complaint that Moses had serenity in the face of God’s mercy and peace.
It is a hopeful end. How
might we use those great qualities of mercy and peace today to change lives and
offer hope to those struggling with domestic abuse today?
Last week Paul asked the Thessalonians to
do the “work of faith and labor of love” by imitating Paul’s efforts among the
church. This week, in this story of Moses, we can see ourselves imitating the
ways of God, the ways of mercy and peace. We can also take the message away
that, even in the face of the turmoil created by domestic violence and the
circumstances that aggravate it, we should continue to have faith. God’s great
age of the peaceable kingdom will come and we can strive for the mercy and
peace it represents in the here and now, seeing it from afar like Moses from
Mount Nebo. Like Moses, we may not live in the Promised Land in which such
violence is finished forever, but we can work toward it. We can have faith,
like Moses, that God will guide us in our work.
From this Scripture lesson we can also
take the lesson that while our efforts might not be complete, like Moses we can
pass them on to another generation and have our work continued, just as Joshua
continued Moses’ work with the people of Israel. Using God’s example of mercy over judgment and
peace over wrath, we can contend with domestic violence. This never appropriate
behavior is criminal assault. It includes physical and emotional abuse and
neglect. The intent is to control others in the relationship. Victims include
children and adults, males and females, the single and the married. Domestic
violence takes on many forms, including name calling, putdowns, isolation from
family and friends, withholding money, preventing partners from getting or
keeping jobs, actual or threatened harm, assault, stalking, and intimidation.
There is much we can do to help work against this crisis. Churches like ours
can provide emergency help for victims. We can help victims get the legal,
medical, and social help they need through persistent advocacy on their behalf.
When no emergency centers are available, some churches have developed host home
networks for temporary safe housing.
We can also help
victims and families recover from long-term effects of abuse with guidance to
counseling services and by sponsoring support groups. We can offer violent
families the chance to build positive bridges with others, breaking their
isolation for a healthier way of life.
As a church, we can also offer up
nonviolent images of family life so needed today. We can provide family-life
education programs that offer instruction on non-abusive ways of parenting and
conflict resolution. Pastors are offering up premarital and post-marital
counseling to address domestic violence prevention.
Further, we can work to reduce social stresses
that are flash points for violence. We can work, reaching out with mercy and using
peaceful methods against sexism, racism, poverty, and hunger, poisonous soil
from which domestic violence grows. We can also speak out against domestic
violence, making others aware of this crisis, and never supporting violent
actions like “bulldozer justice.”
American Baptist missionaries Ray and
Adalia Schellinger, and their partners in Tijuana, Mexico, are working against
domestic violence there with Deborah’s House, a shelter for women and children
escaping severe domestic violence fostered by a harsh economy paying less than
$1 an hour that demands 50-60 hour weeks, and offers no child care—when work
can be found. At Deborah’s House, women learn the sewing business. Working
together, these women form a business that allows them to make salaries three
times higher than factory rates, allowing them to spend more time with their
children, and frees them from violence. Ray and Adalia also provide counseling
for abusive men, guiding them toward different, non-violent ways.
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