"Overcoming Evil with Good" | The Rev. Peter Sipple | April 3, 2022
A frightening reality has hit our world, taking the form of wars being fought not by armies in the open field or on the sea, but by “insurgents” bringing destruction and death into cities and other areas inhabited by peace-seeking people. The war in Ukraine produces daily reports of horrendous acts unleashed on innocent people whose lives, assuming they survive, have been totally upended.
We are left wondering why human beings are so violent? Why does violence persist in the world? How can people be so ready to die in order to bring about the death of others? The short answer to these questions is sin, but let’s ask again how our Church’s teaching and scripture can help us work to overcome this sinful condition. How can our faith as Christians help us to outgrow this escalation of violence perpetrated on innocent people? I bring these questions to church not to suggest that we should live with fear and insecurity, or dwell on our vulnerability, but in fact quite the opposite: to remind us that, threatened by torture and the most excruciating form of death, our Lord Jesus showed his followers how life can prevail.
Our Christian faith has at its very center the conviction that life overcomes death, and that life is made even more abundant by that belief. So we hear St. Paul writing to the Philippians: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus...I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings.” Paul knew intimately about suffering. He found himself in harm’s way again and again, only to rebound so that he could tell the story of his faith and call others to share in it. No retrenchment there, no self-protection in the face of danger, but a conviction that in our spiritual deserts God will ultimately, as Isaiah assures the Hebrew people, provide the water that sustains life.
All three of the synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, include the surprising parable that we heard today. It may have served the early Church as an easy-to-remember synopsis of the Christian Gospel. In this parable, more appropriately termed an allegory, the vineyard stands for Israel, its owner is God, and the tenants are Israel’s temporal rulers. The reader can substitute any nation, state or region for Israel and the allegory works as well. The vineyard-owner sends a servant to ask for a reasonable share of the crops from those in charge of working the fields. A portion of what’s produced was owed to the one who made it possible to use the fields; that’s a principle of Christian stewardship. But the servant is dealt with badly and sent packing; two more are received even less hospitably. Fortunately, this treatment isn’t typical of the way parishioners deal with members of the stewardship committee when they ask for God’s portion of our livelihood. Then the land-owner said, “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.” But they don’t; they kill him on the assumption that if the heir were dead, they themselves would inherit the farm. In fact, a law would have made that possible in Jesus’ day—an odd form of squatters’ rights. How will the vineyard-owner react to such a violation of their relationship—such a terrorist act? He will give the vineyard to others. Matthew’s resolution of the allegory makes the vineyard owner’s response even more closely identifiable with Jesus’ teaching: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.”
This story tells us a lot about basic Christian teaching. The vineyard owner knew that the tenants had verbally abused and physically harmed his earlier messengers, so sending his son into the fray appears naive and heedless of the danger lurking in the vineyard. And yet, to paraphrase John’s Gospel, God so loved the world that God’s beloved son moved into the very midst of that mess we call human existence. The very essence of goodness came into the world to teach, heal, and demonstrate how life, more abundant life, can confront and ultimately overcome death. We learn again that dulling the sharp edge of hatred and revenge requires carrying the message of peace and love into the midst of conflict. And what fuels our message-carrying is hope—hope that conflict can be resolved.
Good friends of Margaret’s and mine meet each Saturday morning on the Guilford Green to observe a peace vigil with a few other folks, and they’ve done this for years. I asked them why they do this—what do they see themselves accomplishing? They responded: it gives us something to hope for, and those who see our banner, they may recognize they can hope for it too. It pulls us out of the present and we can come out the other side. It gives us something to long for, and creates an opening. Their responses reminded me of this comment in the book Hope Matters by Elin Kelsey. “Protests are inherently hopeful acts. Researchers who study social movements tell us that hope plays a crucial role in mobilizing individuals to take part in collective action, just as participating in collective action fuels feelings of hope.” And the author Barbara Kingsolver has written that hope is “not a state of mind but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands, to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages.”
God did not fight evil with evil; God overcame evil with good. This simple truth lies at the heart of Christianity. Jesus taught it in word and example; Gandhi and Martin Luther King articulated and demonstrated it in the midst of political and social strife. Moving into the midst of danger and harm armed with hope and convinced of the possibilities for peace, prepared to negotiate and reconcile, and, yes, to sacrifice in order to achieve a peaceful solution—this is the way of Jesus. For the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone of the building. The son taken out of the vineyard and killed has returned to serve as the first prince of God’s new kingdom, the first principle of God’s new covenant.
What can you and I do to confront those who choose death over life? We can urge those in our government to use every bit of ingenuity at their disposal to help bring about peaceful solutions in conflicted parts of the world, including the streets of our American cities. We can be agents of peace in our own families, workplaces and neighborhoods, taking loving solutions into conflicts, helping others “get to yes.” The final overcoming of evil will occur at the last day; until that time, we are, along with Our Lord Jesus, in the midst of human tendencies to choose evil over good, death over life. But, God be praised, we have it within ourselves to remain hopeful, to be instruments of God’s peace, and our calling as Christians commits us to nothing less. AMEN.