“The Better Angels of Our Nature”

a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett

Preached at Pleasantville United Church of Christ, September 11, 2011

Exodus 14:19-31 & Matthew 18:21-35

^“Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me,
how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times,
but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’”

(Matthew 18:21-22)^*

            There are moments in history that galvanize generations; moments so powerful that -- if you were to ask – people could very likely tell you exactly where they were at the time.  For my Dad’s generation, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor.  He was sitting by the radio, listening to the news.  For others, it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Bobby Kennedy.  September 11^th was one of those moments.  If you were to ask everyone in this room where they were when the Towers fell, my guess is – they could tell you.

            I was here.  I spent the morning up in the Youth Room on the third floor of the Education Building.  Over the course of the day, the entire church staff found their way up to that room. The television remained on and those who gathered watched in silence, or moaned and rocked in wordless prayer.  In time we realized we needed to do more than watch: we needed to make plans to gather the community for worship.  And that very night, we did.

            This past week, we’ve been awash in memory.  This past week, I’ve seen more news footage, read more articles, listened to more stories and interviews and digital archives than I have since that terrible day ten years ago.  This past week, I’ve prayed for the safety of the city and people of New York and Washington D.C., as we’ve heard about the “credible threat” which is facing us on this day that already trembles with terrifying power.  On such an occasion, when the horrors of the past and the terror of the present are laid bare, it is very hard indeed to imagine a way forward that includes the remotest possibility of forgiveness. 

            Our summer preaching series was focused upon the letters of the apostle Paul to the early churches.  We now return to what is called the Revised Common Lectionary which is a cycle of scriptures readings that, over the course of three years, give us a good representation of the depth and breadth of the biblical witness. And so this morning we turn to two of the texts which are suggested for this Sunday and in so doing we join with congregations all over the world who similarly follow the Revised Common Lectionary. There is power, I believe, in the discipline of reading the same texts.  We are being changed by them; they are forming us.  There is something powerful in knowing that Christians all over the world are studying these same texts on this Sunday in September.  And so we turn our attention to these two very different texts offered to us for study this week: a text from the Book of Exodus where the bad guys get defeated, and a provocative passage of teaching on forgiveness from the Gospel of Matthew.

            Even if you’ve never read the Book of Exodus, the chances are good that you know this story. 

At least once a year The Ten Commandments returns to television and Charlton Heston waves his staff over the sea.  Miraculously, the waters are swept aside, leaving a dry roadway for the former slaves to walk across in safety.  Pharaoh’s chariots pursue them but Moses raises his staff again and the waters crash back covering the chariots and the chariot drivers: “and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.”[1]

Barbara Lundblad teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and she asks the question of this text, “Why couldn’t the Exodus story have ended earlier?”  Why couldn’t it have ended a few verses back when the Egyptians realized that the Lord was fighting for the Israelites?  If you read the text carefully you can see that the Egyptian army was already retreating.  They had already turned around and were headed in the opposite direction.  The Egyptian soldiers had already acknowledged the power of God and the Israelites were safe on the far side of the sea. “Did the Egyptians have to be drowned?”  She asks.  “Did we have to see their bodies dead on the seashore?”[2]

            Maybe you know what comes next: Moses and the Israelites sing a joyous victory song.  Moses’ sister, Miriam, sings a song which is thought to be one of the oldest fragments of text in the Hebrew Bible.  From Exodus 15:21:

“I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously,
the horse and rider thrown into the sea.”

            “But does God want such songs?  Long after the sea was crossed and the singing died out, the rabbis struggled with this story.”[3]  And in struggling to understand, they developed the art of Midrash.  Midrash is a word that refers to stories that grew up out of the rabbis’ attempts to deal with contradictions and confusion that exist within the biblical record.  Collections of these stories were gathered in books called the Talmud – which is a word meaning, teaching, instruction, learning. 

            One story from the Babylonian Talmud gives us a sense of how the tradition of Midrash engaged the learner with the biblical text.  It tells of how, when the sea covered the Egyptians, there were angels watching up in heaven.  And the text says that: "In that instant the ministering angels wished to utter song before the Holy One, but He rebuked them, saying, 'The works of My hands are drowning in the sea, and you would utter song in My presence!'"[4]  I have come to understand that, over the years this Midrash has been retold with God rebuking not only the angels, but the Israelites themselves.

            Our sacred texts are as complicated as we are.  It may be our first instinct to dance on the shores of the Red Sea like Miriam, tambourine in hand, rejoicing in the death of our enemies. Revenge is a human desire and we are easily caught in its web.  But our own deeper spirits know that the story from the Talmud has great wisdom to share – even if it is not the book of our tradition.  And delighting in the death of our enemies offers little comfort in the end.

            On the far, far shore of this text from Exodus lies another – our gospel text for this very same day; a text which challenges us in ways that many of us would just as soon not be challenged. 

Then Peter came and said to [Jesus],
“Lord, if another member of the church sins against me,
how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him,
 “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

            I’ve been reading a lot of history lately.  In a few weeks I will gather with a group of 18 colleagues who participate in a seminar that the Rev. Dan Moser and I lead together each year. Among the books we are reading is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book called, Team of Rivals, which explores the political genius of Abraham Lincoln.  If you are a student of Abraham Lincoln, then you know that I took the title of this sermon from his First Inaugural Address.

            When Abraham Lincoln came to the podium for his First Inaugural Address the stakes were very high indeed.  He was a known opponent of slavery and upon his election, slave-holding states were poised for secession.  In his first speech as President, Lincoln appealed to what he called, ‘the better angels of our nature’ when he argued, in hope, that the Union would not be rent asunder.  Concluding his speech, he writes:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

One month later, the Civil War began and with it, America’s costliest battle. 

            In the four years of the Civil War, more American’s would die than in all the other battles of all the other wars fought since. Every village, town, and hamlet across this country lost someone in that war.  Not uncommonly, families were torn apart by competing loyalties -- with one side fighting for the North and the other side fighting for the South.  It could have been the end of this country; it could have been a conflict from which we never recovered.  Unrelenting vengeance could have become the last and lasting legacy of what had once been the United States of America.

            But four years later, in his Second Inaugural speech, Lincoln led the nation in how to move forward; he gave us a glimpse of how to forgive when he spoke these words a month before the war came to an end:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Four years later, and after all that he had seen, Lincoln was still appealing to “the better angels of our nature.”

            Abraham Lincoln was no saint.   I do not bring his words to us this day to imply that they are on a par with the teachings of Scriptures.  C.S. Lewis wrote that, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive…”[5]  There was no time in our history as a nation when we had more to forgive than after the Civil War.  There was no time when it was harder to try to put ourselves back together. And Lincoln gave us an incredible model of how to respond to a time when so many had suffered so much.

Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

            Our texts this morning present two very different perspectives on how to deal with those who wrong us: we can dance on their grave and sing songs in the wake of their destruction.  Or we can be stretched by the teachings of Jesus that challenge us to daily forgive – not seven times, but seventy-seven times… which is to say, more than we can even imagine.

            The better angels of our nature; we know they’re in there – vying for control of our hearts.  May our Lord, Jesus, give us strength to stand among them.  Amen.