Returning Water
Exodus 14:19-31; Matthew 18:21-35
September 11, 2011
It was August 24, a Wednesday. There was no TV coverage or radio, but it took only a week for the Catholic bishop of Hippo to hear about it. The worst thing in the world had happened. The world would never be the same again.
Augustine was away in Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, when he heard the news. The year was 410. An army of barbarian Goths led by the infamous Alaric, had entered Rome, and for three days burned and sacked the city.
Rome was not what it used to be, but it was still the centre of civilization. All roads still led to the Eternal City, but now it was emphatically mortal. Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, exclaimed, “If Rome can perish, who can be safe?”
A British monk, Pelagius - a later opponent of Augustine - wrote to a friend recounting the terror of those three days.
“It happened only recently and you heard it yourself. Rome, the mistress of the world, shivered, crushed with fear, at the sound of blaring trumpets and the howling of the Goths. Where, then, was the nobility? Where were the certain and distinct ranks of dignity? Everyone was mingled together and shaken with fear; every household had its grief and an all-pervading terror gripped us. Slave and noble were one. The same spectre of death stalked before us all.” (Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 289). Haven’t we heard this, ten years before?
Augustine, arguably the most influential thinker in Christianity outside of the Apostle Paul, was deeply shaken. The universe had now been altered; but he was a Christian. Soon there were those who blamed the sack of Rome on the fact that the Christian faith had undermined and undone the classical pagan gods of Rome. Augustine responded by writing his longest and perhaps most famous book, The City of God.
It was a Tuesday, not a Wednesday, that our world was crashed into by barbarians, though now we use “terrorists” as the word carrying the fear of uncivilization.
We have our modern-day pagans also. Jerry Falwell, trying his hardest to be as self-righteously fundamentalist as the most radical Islamic mullah, declared that the U.S. “probably got what it deserved.” Falwell directly blamed the American Civil Liberties Union, the federal court system, the public school system, the abortionists, the gays and lesbians.
If this were a normal Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost the Gospel reading still would be the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant and the Old Testament would still be the Parting of the Red Sea. God works in mysterious ways and none more mysterious than what happens in the Bible when we need to hear it. The Red Sea needs to be parted again today.
I haven’t heard many people say it directly, but the question has oozed out of every pore throughout this decade: what is the meaning of all this? Have we, in fact, lost the meaning for our world, lost into some darkest corner of chaos? It was not abnormal weather patterns or shifting tectonic plates, but abnormal human hatred. Human hatred unnerves us like no other force.
Yet, are you and I not human? Can you or I honestly say that we have never hated? I cannot, and I can name names. Hatred is an incarnation of evil and we all participate in it. Hatred strips from us meaningfulness, goodness, and purpose to life. We are losing it.
What kind of a story is the Parting of the Red Sea? For many it is a miraculous redemption, an instance when according to human beings and the natural world there was No Way, just death, but God made it a Way of Life. Keep your ears open, there are just as many who hear a different punch line in this epic saga - the destruction of the enemies of the people of God. The parting of the waters was abnormal, but things had to return to normal – and that meant the death of Israel’s enemies. Can everyone say hurray?
No one is ever meant to read or listen to this story and not have to figure out, “Who am I in this tale?” Am I a freed slave? What is my Red Sea? Where is the Promised Land? And just who on September 11th was Pharaoh?”
Lots of people have tried to squeeze the square peg of Osama bin Laden into the round hole of the Pharaoh, but it never quite works. Partly because a very significant part of the world is convinced that we in the West are the collective Pharaoh, and partly because our governments and popular thinking has assigned all Muslims to the ranks of the pursuing Egyptian soldiers who should be drowned. We need a new parable and we need to learn how to read all over again.
Parable time to the rescue. It starts with a king – Pharaoh, by the way, simply means ‘The King’ – who wants to settle up with some servants behind in their debts. One man was brought to him – he was brought by others, dragged; he didn’t come willingly – who owed 10,000 talents and couldn’t pay it back. Sentenced to debtors’ prison, he begs the king for patience, declaring solemnly, “I will repay you everything!”
Whoa. This is not a story from everyday life, as some would want us to understand the parables. Ten thousand talents would have been roughly the gross national product of the world at that time. No one person could have owed that much to anyone, no one could have earned that much, not even Bill Gates, and how in the world could he possibly repay all the money in the world? Maybe you and I do owe everything in the world to a certain King of the Universe, but we can never repay enough or the right kind of enough to set things straight. The king here had pity and compassion and not only released this super-debtor from the possibility of prison, but forgave him everything. Everything, he was starting his life again from the beginning. And how did he begin his new life? Practically the first guy he runs into owes him a hundred bucks and mercilessly he throws this unfortunate into that same debtor’s prison.
The forgiven servant’s co-workers are nauseated at this behavior and report him to the king, who promptly throws him into prison “until he should pay all his debt.” That should be a good one to watch. How do you repay your entire life, except by forgiving someone who has done you wrong? What have we been doing as a society, as governments, as heightened security agencies, as individuals deathly afraid of “The Other,” those people who are so different? Who are we repaying? We have been changing the world so that it includes more fear of The Other, more insecurity, more doubt about the motives of the most innocent. It is well known that Al-Qaeda was not just interested in causing brutal death; they want to kill our souls: their targets told us more about what is important and symbolic to us. For the time being, Al-Qaeda is winning its most fundamental war. But it is not over.
“The world will never be the same” is a tired refrain heard often this past decade. The world should never be the same. Dazed and confused, people around the world are still struggling to make sense of what has happened, to find out what it all means. I have not heard anyone find any meaning in that awful Tuesday. That is because that Tuesday has no meaning in and of itself. It is an example, a demonstration of the existence of evil and human hatred, but ultimate meaning, No. Is it the Real World as pragmatists of so-called common sense are so wont to pontificate? No, the Real World is not there, only a lack of imagination, an inability to see faith, hope and love in the midst of a hurting world deludes us into believing that hatred is the only reality that counts.
As Christians, we unashamedly, unapologetically declare a different reality as the meaning to life. The meaning is the resurrection of Christ through which God finds us even in the midst of the cruelest, darkest deaths. We mourn, not as citizens of a particular nation or ethnic or religious group, but as human beings we mourn with the families of those so cruelly lost in the terror. We dare not say that hatred has made these deaths and lives meaningless, for God has yet to act finally. Resurrection is never finished.
You may think that the fall of Rome wasn’t that big a deal, but for the ancient world, it was probably more disconcerting than Tuesday. The fact we no longer give it much consideration is because God found a way to resurrect not Rome, but the greatness of the human spirit which had once been Rome’s. The Black Death killed millions of people and whole cities became ghost towns, yet God raised us up again to bring new life to civilization. After the Holocaust, we could not live in the same way. We had to examine our hatred, not those of the crushed Nazis.
No time now for our vengeful versions of a Christian fatwa. If we do, they have won, for then we have become barbarians too. Only when we admit that we are lost and wandering will we be found.
We have been shattered, we have been shaken, we mourn our common loss, but we have not lost the meaning of life. Martin Luther wrote in his great hymn: “Let goods and kindred go; This mortal life also; The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever.”
We shall overcome, for God finds us even now in the midst of the rubble of our insecure souls.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan