American Contradictions: Violence & Peace
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
August 3, 2008
Romans 12:9-21
Those of you around my age - you know, 35 or so - may recall the television series, Daniel Boone. The series premiered in 1964. Author Rodney Clapp, remembers that first episode. He writes, ""When Daniel Boone premiered on television, I was seven years old. I recall the episode very dimly, but what is quite clear is that I was disappointed by its ending. I loved Daniel's coonskin cap and the rousing theme song, punctuated by two gunshots and promising that Boone 'was the rippinest, roarinest, fightinest man the frontier ever knew.' In the first episode of the television show, Boone had established a fort in the Kentucky wilderness. Indians threatened. I expected there to be a climatic battle, the fort secured for the settlers by Boone's violent prowess. Instead our hero went outside the fort's gate - unarmed - and calmly negotiated a truce. Daniel Boone made friends with the Indians and the first episode was over."
Says Clapp, "What? No gunfire? No tomahawks? No knife fights? I grew up only seventy miles from legendary Dodge City and had worn toy six-guns around my diapers, and I'll wager I wasn't the only American boy disappointed that night. Violence, heroic violence, is a staple in American entertainment and in typical conceptions of American history. Daniel Boone settling with the Indians without a fight seemed unheroic, maybe even vaguely un-American."
Now I don't intend for this to be a sermon on Daniel Boone - although I could do worse - but did you know that the real-life Daniel Boone was the son of Pennsylvania Quakers? Nonviolent pacifists. One biographer has said that Boone "hated killing." He admired his Indian neighbors, learned much from them, and unlike many of his peers, never became an Indian hater. One of his contemporaries declared, "Boone had very little of the war spirit. He never liked to take life and always avoided it when he could." Interesting how this man who wanted to be a person of peace, who always preferred negotiation and compromise to violence, has become transformed in our cultural memory into the "rippinest, roarinest, fightinest" man on the frontier.
I think Daniel Boone serves as a fascinating case study in how American violence has often been exaggerated and idealized. The violent resolution of issues and disputes continues to hold so much power over us. It attracts us as heroic, necessary, even as a way to regeneration and new life. Who will ever forget this comment during the Vietnam war: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." And, of course, often our violence is accompanied by an almost dangerous innocence, the conviction that our use of violence will be different, that it will always be justified and appropriate and necessary. And so, after unleashing the "shock and awe" of our unprecedented military might, of course we assumed we would then be welcomed as utterly benevolent liberators. The myth of redemptive violence, the violence that cleanses and leads to new beginnings. We have this cultural bias toward believing that when worst comes to worst, violence can, in fact, be outstandingly effective. But might there be another way?
I have told you before about the extraordinary people of the Hugenot community in France during the dark days of World War II. From 1940-1943, they dedicated themselves to the dangerous activity of hiding Jewish children from the Nazi killing machine. It was said that during those years in that community there was not a root or wine cellar that did not hide a Jewish child. Finally, in 1943 the Nazis found out what they were doing and all the community leaders were arrested. When asked why they did this, risked their lives for these children they did not know, non-Christian children, the pastor replied simply, "We did this because we wanted to be with Jesus."
And isn't that true for us - this desire to walk ever more faithfully the path of Christ? And herein lies another great American contradiction. For even as we find violence compelling in many ways, and often can point to moments in our history when violence was used for a noble cause, still, as followers of the Prince of Peace, we are never entirely at home with violence, we have an uneasiness and ambivalence toward it, and we look away from the carnage and ugliness of actual battlefields, not even allowing pictures of the flag-draped coffins as they come home.
If ever there was someone who understood - and lived - the American contradiction of violence and peace, it was Johnny Cash. Early in his career, he developed a persona as an "outlaw" figure, and he often did his best to live up to it. Trashed hotel rooms, wrecked cars, drug abuse, even using a microphone to shatter the footlights at the Grand Ole Opry. It was as if there was a dark yearning to wreck and destroy that ran through much of his activity. And Cash knew this. And so he often wrote and sang about violence and the results of violence. Perhaps his most famous song he sang in a live performance in San Quentin, "Folsom Prison Blues." (song played) "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. And each time I hear that whistle, I hang my head and cry".
Cash sings about violence, but it is never idealized or glorified in his music. Even his patriotic songs about the ragged old flag and being "a patriotic nephew of my Uncle Sam," carry a hint of regret about the terrible cost of violence. In one of his lesser known songs, "The Big Battle," a soldier sings that the sorrow and memory of war will "cover the part that has blackened the sun." For Cash, the participants, the perpetrators of violence, suffer lifetimes of remorse, torment, imprisonment, or died foolishly trying to prove their manhood, "Son, don't take your guns to town." "Each time I hear that whistle..." You get the feeling that Cash, like many of us, is looking for another way, another path, for himself and for his world.
"Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. If your enemies are hungry, feed them, if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
Cash, for all his personal demons, was also a man of deep Christian faith. And in his music, as it develops over the years, I think you begin to see his struggle to kind of walk a different path, to overcome evil with good. Listen as he sings "Man in Black." (song played)
Sometimes I wonder if we, and that includes this preacher, ever really get it, if we ever really understand what a radical intrusion into our world and the accepted ways of our world was this Jesus of Nazareth. It seems he was able to see that deep within each of us, in the shadow side of our human nature where fear, violence, pride and aggression live, there is also the potential for transformation through love and compassion and forgiveness. He believed in the power of this transformation - he called it the Kingdom of God - and was able to call it forth, not only in himself, but also deep within the people around him.
Never forget, Jesus came into a world dominated by the power of Rome, a world where everybody knew that peace came through victory, again the way of redemptive violence, and he dared to speak of another way. A way in which servanthood replaces dominion, forgiveness absorbs hostility and in which the course of history is not determined by lethal violence, but indeed by nonviolent suffering and compassion. Convinced of God's love and power, he was never afraid to confront evil with the weapons of love and truth alone.
Like Johnny Cash, I don't want to be pessimistic. It is so difficult to keep our heads and our hearts clear of the narcotic of violence. It has such an allure, promises so much, and can be all-consuming. It is a powerful voice, often promising nothing less than redemption and new life. But I hope you understand, as Johnny Cash seems to have understood, as Paul understood, that it is not the only voice. There is another voice who insisted that we recognize and respect the sacred in every person, including ourselves, including the one we would call enemy, one who suggested that the "we-they" game leads only to conflict and misunderstanding, one who suggested that love, not violence, casts out fear, one who dared to plant seeds of love and forgiveness with the unshakable hope that they would grow a harvest of love, compassion and the capacity to forgive. Another voice, in a dangerous and fearful world, one who brought the vision of another world - indeed a whole new world. A person would have to be crazy to follow someone like that.