University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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Romans 12:9-21

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

            All this week, knowing Mark Braverman was to preach at the 11 a.m. service, I have been thinking about the fragile and deceptive peace in the Middle East, how peace has been such an elusive commodity there. We know of the administration’s attempts to get the peace process moving again recently through indirect talks, but it remains a hard row to hoe…and there is no shortage of provocations for violence. As Janine Zacharia wrote from Jerusalem in the Washington Post last week,

In the decade since Israelis and Palestinians came close to a peace deal in 2000, the complexion of Jerusalem, perhaps the most sensitive of all the sticking points, has been altered. Israeli construction is blurring lines between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods, making any bid to share or divide the city even more difficult than in the past.

A battle for sovereignty and international legitimacy is playing out on every hilltop and valley here. And with tens of thousands of new apartments planned for Jews in [traditionally Palestinian] East Jerusalem – well beyond the 1,600 announced in March during Vice President Biden's visit – the potential for construction derailing the new peace negotiations is high.[1]

            Add to the settlements controversy the recent tensions between Israel and Syria, and one can feel the Middle East temperature rising higher once again. The region is a tinder box waiting only for something to ignite it, and any single event – an incident at a checkpoint, a Scud missile firing, or a Palestinian protest turned violent…most anything – could trigger a catastrophe.

            It’s interesting, given the teachings of the Torah and the Hebrew prophets about peace, not to mention teachings of other religions, that the world finds itself in such a predicament.  The Hebrew understanding of peace is rooted in the concept of shalom, which is far more than the absence of conflict, and indeed points to individual and collective wholeness and well-being and justice…a concept honored more in theory than in practice in the Middle East… a region that has been bitterly conflicted through most of our lifetimes, with attacks and repression and seemingly endless cycles of violence and recrimination.

            Several years ago I read and shared with some of you an article in The New York Times by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology. Professor Gilbert began by remembering the occasional fights he used to have with his brother when they were children. It is a story many families could tell.

When our [fights] had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would … chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But he hit me harder.”

It turns out, Gilbert says, that his brother and he were not alone in believing that these two claims could get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious laws provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral – unless they are responses in kind, in which cases they are okay.[2]

Says Gilbert, that’s why participants in every one of the world’s intractable conflicts offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation. But there’s a problem with such reasoning, as he notes by citing two psychological studies.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

He describes a study at the University of Texas, in which pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second was asked to respond, the first was then asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown tapes of several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they [quickly] remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, [what they remembered was] how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.

What seems like a terribly self-serving pattern of recall is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because our interior life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.

Professor Gilbert names some obvious examples of such tendencies in the world: Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq; Irish Catholics and Protestants; and, since 1948, all of the parties in the Middle East, all of them arguing that they are only playing defense.

In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.[3]

Clearly, what is needed in such occasions, are neutral third parties to help bring those in conflict to the negotiating table. At the very least, such parties need to be willing to use strong persuasion that any punching and counter-punching at least be proportional in scale. But the truth is, we have as much trouble gauging the intensity of a given blow as we do determining who struck first. To make this point, Gilbert cited another study at University College London, where pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

[The conclusion is unsettling.] Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it, and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.[4]

If it is true of individuals, it surely is even truer of groups, where hatred, intolerance, and deceit add exponentially to what Professor Gilbert calls “this miserable stew.”

There is no question that evil exists, or that it must be fought with moral and spiritual, and at times even physical force.[5]  But “responses in kind” are never really “responses in kind.”  The problem with the principles of even-numberedness and even-handedness is that people count differently. And eventually, the counting gets out of hand, lending credence to Gandhi’s argument that “An eye for an eye [only] makes the whole world blind.” One party initiates a deliberately provocative act. A nation responds, supposedly with proportional scale, but soon whole towns are reduced to rubble and innocent non-combatants, hundreds of them, die. Retaliatory strikes are launched in response, and take their toll and then, with increased ferocity, a re-retaliation. Such is the pattern of the people in the very birth land of our faith.

This week I heard an old song by the singer/songwriter Jack Johnson that gave voice to a common lament : “Where’d all the good people go?/ I’ve been changing channels/ and I don’t see them on the TV shows./ Where’d all the good people go?/ We’ve got heaps and heaps of what we sow.”[6] His song led me to wonder if the church might have any answer to the question, any answer to the hostilities we see raging all around the world in our time. To break the cycle of one skewed perspective feeding another so that retaliations and violence only escalate – might you and I step in? I know it sound ludicrous, but if “good people” don’t raise their voices, who will? If we can get past our reluctance to offend those who may disagree with us, past our fear of speaking a truth that may well be misinterpreted, might that not be, in part, why we exist?

“Where’d all the good people go?” Jack Johnson asks the question. And I bet Jack Johnson would find the Apostle Paul a breath of fresh air. Do you remember Paul’s words to the church at Rome?

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them… Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘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.

Paul wrote those words to a church in the midst of persecution, of course, not to a government or nation in a time of hostilities. But they are words that form and shape us as a people. They are words that remind us of who and whose we are, remind us of our best nature. They are words that challenge us to think differently than the rest of the world, to trust in God’s might more than in our own. They are words that help us to see that acting on the desire for revenge and retaliation, though perhaps satisfying for a season, will never bring the peace and the security – the shalom – that people seek.

            As our own denomination’s Middle East Task Force concluded in its recent report:

A just and lasting peace and security for Israel is possible when the occupation has ended and the Palestinian acts of violent resistance are no longer employed. A just and lasting peace and security for the Palestinians is possible when the occupation has ended and Israel does not need to resort to military force to maintain its illegal land possession. If there were no occupation, there would be no Palestinian resistance. If there was no Palestinian resistance, Israelis could live in peace and security. The Israeli occupation leads to the denial of many human rights and the violation of international laws.

The violent forms of Palestinian resistance to the occupation also leads to violations of international law. The only just solution is to insist that both Palestinians and Israelis abide by international law and justly respect the human rights of all. Double standards must give way to equal justice for all, which will result in peace for all.[7]

The report suggests a way, I believe, that is consonant with the teachings of Paul.  Paul is no hopeless romantic who sees the world through rose-colored glasses and does not comprehend the difficulty of what he asks.  Indeed, Paul approaches this matter with great realism, because he understands that sometimes it is not up to us whether our neighbors will be our friends or not.  We are responsible for our own behavior, but we cannot guarantee that others will treat us as we treat them.  Paul is realistic because he acknowledges that how we behave will shape not only our reputations, but our hearts.  He is realistic because he acknowledges that faithful obedience will often meet with opposition and perhaps even terrible persecution.^[8]

            What constitutes faithful obedience for the church? What constitutes faithful obedience for you… or me?  You surely don’t need me to tell you what to say or do about this conflict, and I’m not going to try. My task, I believe, is to lay out my best understanding of Christian teaching and Christian tradition, and then encourage you to wrestle with it until you have figured out what you are going to do.

So, here’s what I believe. We are the church of Jesus Christ. Our church, our lives are shaped by the way Jesus taught and the way He lived. I believe Christ is at work whenever people are ashamed of the inhumanity of conflict and oppression and seek creative and earnest ways of settling disputes. I believe Christ sends us to minister to people on all sides of wars and disputes: the victims, the participants, and those who refuse to participate.  I believe God calls us to urge all peoples to devote to making peace the resources, intelligence and energy they spend on making war.[9] I believe that the sage counsel of the apostle Paul to the Roman Church is a model for what we might say. We can say it to one another first…and then to our own nation’s leaders, urging them to share it with the world.

Have we reached a time when it is important to act, to challenge the authority of people and nations who are not using their power toward moral purposes?  I’m no expert on international relations or public policy. I do not pretend to have all the answers. But I do understand something of God’s Word, and in light of what I see and hear, I do wonder: Is it not a time for us to urge those in power to become arbiters of peace rather than supporters and purveyors of (or silent allies in) unconscionable mayhem?  We have seen the results of the latter, and it continues to make things worse.  Is it not time to question the wisdom of policies that aim to weaken the power of terrorists, yet only seem to add fuel to the fire?  With eyes wide open, remembering who and whose we are, could not now be a time to lift our voices to say “Enough”? Could not now be just such a time?