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Power Corrupts, but the Holy Spirit Heals and Saves by Bert Newton
Preached at Pasadena Mennonite Church
July 2, 2006King David, Israel's greatest king, a man after God's own heart, a man whom the Lord God loved, the king who began the Messianic line of kings that would one day lead to Jesus of Nazareth, this is the king of our text today. This is the David who committed adultery with Bathsheba, and then had her husband Uriah, a faithful servant of his, killed to cover it up, and then added her to his harem.
The NT opens up in the first chapter, in the first verse, telling us that Jesus is a Son of David. Then five verses later, in the middle of Jesus' genealogy, it reminds us of this story, the story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah. The normal pattern in a genealogy is "so and so begat so and so." Whenever something else is added, the author is trying to tell us something important. In Jesus genealogy, when it comes to "David begat Solomon," it adds, "by the wife of Uriah." Matthew takes pains to remind us who the mother of Solomon was, that she was someone else's wife, someone whom David murdered. Matthew reminds us that David was an adulterer, a liar and a murderer. So the NT opens up in the first verse telling us that Jesus is a son of David, and then five verses later reminds us that David was an adultery, a liar and a murderer. What are we to make of this!?
About a month ago, I picked up a copy of the Orange County Weekly. In there I read the account of a guy named Alex who tried to sign up for the Marines. Now Alex had no job, no car, and a jail sentence hanging over his head. But he had been hearing in the media how the military is desperate for recruits because they've been having difficulty meeting their quotas and seem to be willing to take just about anyone. Well, Alex figured that he was "anyone," and the prospect, ironically, of being one of the "few and the proud," not to mention the employed and the fed, sounded pretty attractive to him.
So Alex walks into a Marine recruiting office (Alex is telling this story himself; he is the author of the article), and is interviewed by a big, muscular Marine recruiter. The recruiter begins by asking Alex why he wants to sign up for the Marines, and Alex waxes patriotic about wanting to serve his country, yada, yada, yada. And then recruiter gets into skills; what skills does Alex have? Alex tells him that he's a writer; in fact, he likes to say that he is a writer, not a fighter . . . then he realizes that line is not quite appropriate for this interview. But for some reason he adds that he also bakes a mean batch of chocolate chip cookies . . . and lasagna. There is an awkward silence, and the recruiter presses on with interview, covering a list of topics he needs to review with each recruit. He comes to drug abuse history, and Alex tells him that he has a prescription for medical marijuana. At that point the recruiter tells him that he needs to cut that out, 30 days before his physical, because it takes 30 days for marijuana to work its way out of your system. But Alex protests that it's medical, what if he vomits in basic training? The recruiter is flummoxed by this response and begins talking about how everyone has a past . . . and then he just awkwardly presses on with the interview.
They get to physical fitness and Alex tells him that he is legally blind in one eye and that the other one is fading because it has to compensate so much. The recruiter misses only one beat and then states that the Marine doctor will have to determine whether Alex is physically fit to serve. Finally, they get down to logistics: Where should Alex report for basic training, first he has to get his physical . . . and Alex throws in that he is on probation and the scheduling will have to take that into account, cause he has to periodically report to the probation officer. The recruiter pauses, then asks Alex when his probation will end. Alex then comes clean and lets him know that he is actually out on bail. At that point the recruiter states that everyone has a past, but sometimes things have to be taken care of before we can call it a past. And the interview finally comes to an end.[1]
Now, this story is funny because it lays bare the hypocrisy and desperation of the war machine as it attempts to recruit more human cannon fodder for its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Marines want "a few good men," men of strength, and honor and high moral character . . . and in walks Alex. And yet we sense that the Alex's of the world, in a comedic way, in their weakness, occupy the moral high ground in relation to this war machine, if for no other reason than that they can't participate in it. They can't participate in the war and violence and domination. Their moral failings are at least more honest, and, in comparison, benign. The Marines (and here I'm speaking of the Marines as an institution, not as individual soldiers, which I think is very different, and I will get to that in a moment), in its propaganda, perhaps exemplifies the hypocrisy of our society's systems of violence and domination: The propaganda covers the Marines over with a facade of moral purity, strength and goodness, while its mandate is to lead the charge of empire and domination. So we shouldn't be surprised at the recent spate of atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers, many of them Marines, now being reported in the media. "The accounts are brutal: An Iraqi man dragged from his home, executed and made to look as if he were an insurgent. Three prisoners killed by their Army captors."[2] Just yesterday a new report came out of U.S. soldiers who gang raped an Iraqi young woman they saw on the street and then killed her and three of her family members, including a young child, to cover it up.[3] The most famous of these incidents is the one that occurred in Haditha. There Marines went door to door for three hours, executing families, Men, women and, even small, children, as revenge for one of their own who had just been killed by a roadside bomb outside of that town. What are we to make of these atrocities? Are these soldiers just evil people? Associated Press reporter, Antonio Castaneda, spent time with the soldiers who committed the atrocity in Haditha (before they committed that atrocity). They are the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, Kilo Company. Castaneda was imbedded with them for a while, and he got the impression that they were a select group of Marines. Their officers were nurtured in the finest institutions of the military. They gave very thoughtful answers to his questions. He also witnessed them exercising restraint on several occasions. He was with them one time when they swept into Haditha. Haditha was one of these towns that they would have to reoccupy from time to time because there aren't enough soldiers to continuously occupy all the towns that they need to occupy. So they would periodically occupy Hadith, then leave, then come back when there were reports of renewed insurgent activity there. When Castaneda was with them on one of their reoccupations of Haditha, he reports that it took them two days, and they fired very few shots. At one point, he witnessed a lieutenant of Kilo Company call down his lookouts from a house rooftop because the homeowner, a middle-aged woman, began weeping, and he couldnât stomach her crying. Castaneda in his report gives other examples of times at which the men of Kilo company chose restraint, even when they might have been tempted to take revenge. These were not naturally evil soldiers. They were men, who under very tough conditions were trying to do a very difficult job. But they did it in the service of an imperial beast, and the spirit of that beast got inside of them. People join the military for all sorts of reasons. Statistically, the main reasons people join the military are economic: to get job training, to get money for college or merely to have a job. But right after the economic reasons are the reasons of patriotism and love of country. I wouldnât be surprised to find out, if there were a way to measure this, that the average person going into the military, especially the Marines, is of a higher moral character, has a greater sense of honor and self-sacrifice, than the average American. But they are joining a war machine whose interests are not always moral or honorable, and, in fact, are often brutal and heinous, and it is easy, especially during times of stress, for the spirit of that machine to get inside of them, so that they act out that spirits agenda in ways they never imagined they were capable of. When I was in fourth grade, I lived in the Middle East, in Jordan; my parents were missionaries. I went to a school called the American Community School, set up through the U.S. embassy there. Most of my classmates were children of military advisors. We boys in that class were enamored with anything having to do with the military. We loved to draw tanks and airplanes. We were always pretending to be soldiers, battling it out with each other on the playground, especially when we had our cub scout uniforms on â we were all in cub scouts together. My best friend that year was a boy named Simon Linder. His father was a Colonel in the Air Force. Another thing about our class is that most of us were from various parts of the U.S. (I say most of us, because, three of my classmates weren't American), but only those of us from the South had any regional pride about where we were from. The other kids seemed to have little or no consciousness about where they were from, but those of us from the South made a big deal about it. So it began to be cool to be from the south, everyone wanted to be from the south. Our teacher was a man named Mr. Hayman. Mr. Hayman was a white man who had been very involved in the civil rights movement in the states, and he had a passion for the history of the civil rights movement and for black history in general. He tried to teach us a little about these things. At one point he taught us about the Ku Klux Klan and all the terrible things they had done. Even though I'm from the south, I had never heard of the Klan before that. And even though Mr. Hayman taught us about the terrible atrocities of the Klan, we didn't hear what he wanted us to hear. We heard that the Klan was a southern paramilitary institution. And since we boys in the class were enamored with military violence and the south, we thought the Klan was cool. So Simon and I tried to convince Mr. Hayman to dedicate our bulletin board, right outside our classroom, to the Ku Klux Klan. I still remember Mr. Hayman's completely puzzled look as we made this request. You see, Simon was African American. Despite everything Mr. Hayman had taught us, we were so full of the spirit of military violence that we couldn't hear what was really important, what we really needed to learn. Now back to King David. A man after God's own heart, a man whom the Lord God loved. This King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, then had Uriah killed to cover it up, and added Bathsheba to his harem. It seems that the spirit of monarchy, the spirit of absolute power, a spirit that Lord Acton warned us long ago, corrupts absolutely, that spirit had gotten inside of him. You see, Israel wasn't supposed to have a monarchy. Israel was at first a more egalitarian society. But out of fear the people clamored for a king. They said to Samuel, give us a king who will go out and fight our battles for us. God told Samuel to go ahead and grant them their wish. He told Samuel, "it is not you they are rejecting, it is me." The people no longer wanted to trust in God for their protection and deliverance, they wanted a king, like all the other nations. But God told Samuel to first warn the people how a king would oppress them. So Samuel told them, "yes your king will go out and fight your battles for you, but not by himself. He will conscript your children into his army, and his battles will not all be about protecting you, but rather to enlarge his own domain and further enrich himself."[4] In recent years, we in modern America have known something about the impulse to cede power to a powerful person, or a small group of persons, out of fear. So Israel got her king, but the history of the kings of Israel is one largely of corruption, and this story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah is especially revealing of that history. It gives lie to the whole idea that it's okay to have concentrations of power as long as we somehow know that those in power are "good" people, whether it's a "good man" or "a few good men." A system that is set up that way breeds a spirit of corruption, domination and violence; and that spirit will inevitably get inside even the "good" people. The NT opens up in the first verse telling us that Jesus was a son of David. Then five verses later it reminds us that David was an adulterer, a liar and a murderer. Then in Mark 12 Jesus actually challenges the idea that he is a Son of David. He is not challenging his biological lineage, that he is a biological descendant of David. He challenges whether he is and ideological son, a theological son, of David.
Jesus is very different from David. He holds no official office, he has no army, he does not deal in that kind of power. Rather, Jesus hangs out with the Alex's of the world, the outcasts and rejects, the unclean masses. And that is where Jesus plants his kingdom. That is where Jesus builds his church, his ecclesia. It is among these Alex's of the world, the losers, the poor peasant trash class, that Jesus builds power and distributes authority. He makes them all priests for each other, effectively undercutting the power of the priestly class. He turns everything upside down and inside out: the last are first and the first are last. It seems so right when we hear Jesus preach this upside down Gospel: "Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth." It seems so right to us. But then we go out into the world . . . and power is so seductive. It's so easy to be enamored with power and with powerful people, and to seek power and status for ourselves in a system that we know distributes these things unevenly. That is why Jesus said that we need to be born again. We need to be born again so that we can believe in a very different vision for ourselves and each other than the one the world gives us, than the one beamed at us by our entertainment and news media. We need to be born again so that we can more consistently share power and authority and status; so that we can celebrate each other more than we celebrate our own personal achievements; so that we can celebrate especially the least among us. We must be born again so that we can expel the spirit of the domination system from within us, and instead be born of the Spirit of God, so that we can practice the Reign of God, a reign of love and mercy, in which every individual is a priest and monarch, in which every person reveals to us the very image of God Almighty, who has set us a little low than himself, a little lower than herself, and crown us with glory and honor, Hallelujah! [1] Brandt-Zawadski, "Alex, 2 Few, 2 Proud; How Not to Become a Marine," The Orange County Weekly, p. 10, May 26, 2006. [2] Tanner, Robert, "Charges Mark Turning Pont? Accusations of Troop Brutality Stun Military Analysts," AP report in the Pasadena Star News. [3] Lenz, Ryan, "Soldiers Probed in Iraq Slayings; Gang Rape of Woman, Cover-up also Alleged," AP report in the Pasadena Star News, Saturday, July 1, 2006. [4] I Samuel 8
Labels: 2 Few 2 Proud, Alex Brant-Zawadzki, Bert Newton, Elbert Newton, Marines, Pasadena Mennonite Church, Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
