Sermon Archive

Exodus from Vengeance

(Rutgers, August 29, 1999; 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A)
Exodus 3:1–10 (OT, pp. 55–56);  Romans 12:9–21 (NT, p. 169)
Some of this material has been drawn from  The Living Pulpit, vol. 3, no. 2 
(April-June 1994), pp. 16–17, 37–39, 48–49.

In Chapters 12 + 13 of his letter to the Christian community in Rome,
the apostle Paul wrestles
with the moral dimensions of everyday life,
and my sermons for this Sunday and next
will take their cue from these chapters.

Next Sunday I'll focus on something in the moral life of our community
that I believe we need to affirm,
and this week I'll focus on something I believe we need to give up.

The Book of Exodus, the source of this morning's First Lesson,
describes God's calling of Israel out of bondage in Egypt
and into freedom.
And Christians have always seen this calling of Israel
as a metaphor for God's calling on all of humanity
to leave behind, with God's help,
whatever it is that enslaves us.

This morning, I want to focus on God's call to us
to leave behind, to abandon, the desire for revenge,
a desire that captures and enslaves so many of us
and that lies at the root of so many horrors
both here in our own society and throughout the world.

God's call to us to abandon vengeance is one we can hear
through the apostle Paul in this morning's Second Lesson,
when he writes (Romans 12:19–21):
"Beloved, never avenge yourselves.
No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them;
if they are thirsty, give them something to drink
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good"—
which is to say, do not remain trapped in relationships of enmity
but work with God to transform those relationships.

And God's call to free ourselves from vengeance
can also be heard by us through the Buddhist tradition.
Two weeks ago, when the Dalai Lama visited New York, he urged 
his audiences to break free from every bond of desire,
including the shackle of our desire for revenge.

The temptation to desire revenge is one that the Dalai Lama says he
himself experiences often in his role as leader of the Tibetan people.
For the Dalai Lama is forced by the rulers of China to live in exile, 
the refugees living in exile with him suffer greatly, and those of
his people still living at home in Tibet are severely persecuted.
They're denied religious freedom as the rulers of China seek
to eradicate every distinctive trace of the Tibetan culture.
Each morning the Dalai Lama practices a discipline of
meditation for four to five hours, between 3 and 8 am,
and among the meditative tasks he undertakes
daily is that of keeping his mind and heart
free of hatred for the rulers of China
and free from all desire for revenge.

So, prompted this morning both by Paul and the Dalai Lama,
I want to reflect with you in this sermon
on humankind's universal need for an exodus from vengeance.

James Thurber, an American writer and cartoonist particularly
popular in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, once observed satirically:
"It's easier to forgive an enemy once you've gotten even with him."

Yes, "getting even," "having one's revenge," before forgiving—
these desires, these feelings are quite human
and well known to us,
and they are, I fear, powerfully alive and active
both here in our own country and around the world.

Witness here the desire to "lock 'em up and let'em rot"
that's turned prison construction into a "boom" industry;
and the rush to "sue the bastards"
that's slowed our court dockets to a snail's pace;
and the rebirth, amidst widespread acclamation,
of capital punishment—
all these fueled in large part by a desire for revenge.

And abroad, vengeance lies at the heart of many wars
and their aftermaths.

Outraged at the assassination of the Hutu president of Rwanda,
Hutus took vengeance and murdered nearly half a million Tutsis,
unleashing a cycle of violence and vengeance
that has all but consumed six nations in central Africa
and dislocated from their homes 3/4 of a million people.

In Kosovo, in the aftermath of a despicable ethnic cleansing by Serbs,
the Albanians' desire for revenge is now coursing so strongly
that one or more acts of reciprocal violence have been committed
against Serbs every single day since June 12th,
despite the presence of the NATO + Russian "peacekeepers."

As reported by Carlotta Gall in Thursday's New York Times (p. A10):
"In Pristina, peacekeepers are now guarding individual Serbs,
living in the top floors of apartment blocks
or camping out 24 hours a day in front of a Serbian house.
They have been dubbed the 'granny patrols' because
many of the remaining Serbs [that they need to protect]
are poor and elderly."

And as reported by Duncan Hanson in the last issue of
The Christian Century magazine (August 11–18, 1999, p. 767),
one Serbian Orthodox monastery has to be guarded by
"a protective squad of Italian soldiers, complete with a tank
and an armored personnel carrier" in spite of the fact that
the monks of that monastery "have long been outspoken
opponents of Milosevic's policy toward the Kosovars"
+ actually opened their monastery to offer housing
"to [Albanians] who had been driven from their
homes by Serb military and police forces."

The reasons why the Kosovar Albanians desire revenge
are fully understandable—
hundreds of thousands routed from their homes and
forced into exile, and
thousands massacred by Serb troops and civilians.
And among those who've been able to return,
many have found their homes stripped, or gutted,
or burned to the ground, or booby-trapped.
Others have found their wells contaminated
by motor oil, or by the carcasses of dead animals,
or by the corpses of murdered human beings.

But justice for the innocent, Albanians and Serbs alike,
and just judgment for the guilty,
and new hope for political stability in the area
can be realized only if vengeance is given up.
Peace can be given new birth only through
acts of forgiveness and commitments to co-existence.

Acts of forgiveness for so massive a set of wrongs cannot, of course,
be founded on any premise of forgetting.
It would be wrong to ask Albanians "to forgive and forget."
There can be no forgetting of crimes so monstrous as
these forced expulsions and cold-blooded massacres.
Indeed, they’re needs to be an active remembrance of
them, and their needs to be
 registering of clear moral judgments about
the crimes that have been committed.

It is essential in Kosovo that both peoples come to agree
that what many of the Serbs did to the Albanians was a grave sin—
a sin needing to be confessed and repented of,
a sin needing also to be forgiven, by God and by the Albanians—
and it is also essential that Serbs and Albanians come to agree
on the restitutions, compensations, and penalties
that need now to be leveled against the offenders.

For you see, forgiveness does not require the abandonment of
just punishment for the evildoer.
But forgiveness does require the abandonment of
the desire for wreaking vengeance.

Forgiveness does not need to exclude
moral judgments and just punishments,
but forgiveness needs to include forbearance-from-revenge.
For without forbearance-from-revenge
the old crimes will simply repeat themselves, in reverse;
and without forbearance-from-revenge
the fractures caused by enmity can have no repair.

At the end of World War II, Soviet soldiers liberated Theresienstadt—
a German concentration camp that had proved for many Jews to be
simply a stopping place on their way to the gas ovens of Auschwitz.
The Soviet soldiers tried to goad the Jewish inmates
into taking immediate revenge on their Nazi guards.

But in that camp there was a great German Jewish rabbi named
Dr. Leo Baeck, and he counseled his fellow inmates
to forgive the guards and to leave them alone, for, as he said,
"It's not our task to repay one injustice with another."

That kind of forgiving and non-vengeful spirit—one
displayed by Rabbi Baeck, + the Dalai Lama, + the apostle Paul—
is the kind I pray will take hold, with the help of God,
among the Albanians in Kosovo.

I pray that the citizenry will renounce the vengeful attitude
advocated + displayed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
And in that regard I find it a source of great hope that
the spiritual leader of the Muslim Albanians, Dr. Rexhep Boja,
is showing himself to be a person
possessed of a forgiving and non-vengeful spirit and
intent on helping to spread such a spirit among his people.

And here at home, in our own church and city and country,
it is also the kind of forgiving and non-vengeful spirit displayed by
Mufti Boja, + Rabbi Baeck, + the Dalai Lama, + the apostle Paul
that I pray will take hold, with the help of God,
in our minds and hearts!
I pray that we, too, may experience in all our relationships
an exodus from vengeance.

In her book The Human Condition, published in 1958,
the great Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt speaks of
forgiveness and vengeance as exact opposites of each other.

In a relationship between persons, she says,
any wrongful injury sets in motion a chain of tragic consequences. 
And when the party who is wronged reacts to that injury
by pursuing vengeance, then both parties remain trapped
in bondage to that chain of tragedies.

On the other hand, Arendt says, when the party who is wronged
reacts to injury with forgiveness,
then that act comes as something new and unexpected
that exists outside any predictable chain of tragic consequences.
For that reason, forgiveness has the power to free us
from the consequences of wrongful injury, to free
both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.
Forgiveness has the power to enable
both the wronged and the wrongdoer to go forward
into a new, unpredictable, but hopeful future
rather than to be held captive by the past
in a predictable cycle of vengeance.

Arendt then goes on to say (and remember she was Jewish):
"The freedom contained in Jesus' teachings of forgiveness
is the freedom from vengeance",
the freedom to move forward into a positive, hope-filled future.

Few portraits in all of literature offer us a more terrifying image
of the way vengeance paralyzes our lives,
renders us unavailable to each other,
and cuts us off from the joy of open, tender living than
Charles Dickens' depiction of the character Miss Havisham
in his novel Great Expectations.
Miss Havisham stands as a literary metaphor for the
obsessive nature of the human desire for vengeance.

As a proud young heiress, Miss Havisham falls passionately in love
with a handsome cad who stands her up on their wedding day.
She receives his cruel letter of rejection at 20 minutes to 9,
as she is in the very process of dressing for the ceremony.

From that moment on, her life remains frozen, paralyzed,
cut off from joy, locked in a desire for vengeance on men.
All forward movement is arrested;
she no longer grows or develops or even feels anything
beyond her wound and her resultant drive for revenge, a
drive that twists and distorts her personality, as we see her
wither and decay without ever having blossomed.

She keeps the watch and the clock in her dressing room
stopped at the hour she received the cruel letter—20 minutes to 9.
The wedding shoe she hadn't finished putting on
she keeps unworn on her dressing table, while the wedding
stocking she wears continually on her unshod foot
gets trodden ragged.
Her long banquet table remains set for a formal feast,
the center piece of which is a rotting wedding cake
out of which run speckled-legged spiders and black beetles.
And in this setting, which she never leaves to go outside,
she rears as her protg,
for the purpose of wreaking vengeance on men,
a beautiful adopted orphan child named Estella,
to whom she whispers the command,
"Break [men's] hearts, my pride and hope,
break their hearts and have no mercy."

The heart most broken by the beautiful but cold Estella
turns out to be that of the hero of the novel, the youth named Pip.
Instead of marrying him, Estella is about to repeat
Miss Havisham's fatal error by marrying a stupid, brutish cad.
When Pip responds to this by pouring out to Estella, in a
moment of broken-hearted agony, all his love, pain, and despair,

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