Hilton Head Island, SC – August 11, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Acts 7:51-8:3; Revelation 18:1-10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he called out with mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul and hateful bird.” – Revelation 18:2 (RSV)
We see it in the newspapers every day and we watch it every evening on television newscasts. The “it” to which I refer is religious extremism. It is alive and well and thriving in many places throughout the world.
19 American embassies were closed because of fears of attacks by religious extremists. A few days ago, every American in Yemen, including everyone at the American embassy, was urged by the State Department to leave the country immediately. In Egypt, moderate or secularist Muslims and Salafist Muslims or members of the Muslim Brotherhood daily confront one another, sometimes violently. The army and the political moderates drove the democratically elected Egyptian Islamist President from office. In Iran a new reportedly moderate President has been elected to follow the hardline Islamist President Ahmadinejad, although at the end Ahmadinejad was not sufficiently hardline for the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei. But then, probably no one, no matter how extreme, would suit him.
In Israel religious settlers take over land in the Palestinian territories, defying the Israeli government to stop them. In some places they prevent cars from driving through their area on the Sabbath. They refuse to serve in the army, and they insist that the government provide funds for their men to study in the yeshivas for their entire lives. Nice work, if you can get it. And on the other hand, Islamist members of Hamas in Gaza regularly fire missiles into southern Israel.
In the US, fundamentalist Christians still stand in protest at the few abortion clinics still operating in our country, despite the fact that years ago the Supreme Court ruled that women have a constitutional right to have an abortion. Christian extremist legislators in many states have attempted to make abortion so difficult to obtain as to make it practically impossible.
Almost three thousand years ago (it was about 850 BCE to be inexactly exact), Ahab the Israelite was king of Israel. However his wife, Queen Jezebel, was a Canaanite. The Canaanites were polytheists who mainly worshiped the god they called Baal, a word which simply means “Lord.” The prophet Elijah was the number one religious figure in Israel at the time. Ahab and Jezebel engineered a contest between Elijah and 450 of the prophets of Baal. Without going into the details because we don’t have time, suffice it to say that I Kings 18 reports Elijah won the contest. Then, so that no one could mistake his victory, Elijah ordered all 450 Canaanite prophets to be killed beside the River Kishon. Was that an example of religious extremism? Yes? I guess! But because this incident is reported in holy writ, we may not think it represents extremism, even though most assuredly it does.
Stephen was one of the first leaders of the New Testament church. He was brought before the Jewish high priest and his council to stand trial for preaching Jesus as the Messiah. He gave a stirring defense of what he perceived to be the unique concepts of Christianity, backing it all up with an historical summary of the Hebrew Bible. However, his defense didn’t work, and Stephen was stoned to death, as you heard in the reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. And, so the narrative tells us, those who killed Stephen had a man named Saul, later the apostle Paul, hold their cloaks while they threw their lethal rocks at the first Christian martyr. Further, we are informed, “Saul was consenting to his death” (Acts 8:1). There were Jewish extremists in Elijah’s day, and there were Jewish extremists in New Testament days.
But there also were Christian extremists during New Testament times as well. We see an extended example of that in the entirety of the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, or, as it is sometimes known by an alternative title, The Apocalypse.
Tradition says that Revelation was written by John, the disciple of Jesus, who also, says tradition, wrote the Gospel of John and the three letters of John. Scholars insist the disciple wrote nothing in the New Testament, and that whoever wrote the Gospel and the three letters was the same man, but he was not the man who wrote the Revelation. I strongly urge you to lose no sleep over any of that, but I’m just telling you what I was told in seminary and what I have read many times since. The more you study the Bible, or study about the Bible, it can get more confusing.
Anyway, the writer of the Revelation, whoever he was, was a religious extremist of the first order. He wrote at length about what he called “Babylon,” but those Christians in the first and second centuries were meant to know that he really was secretly writing about Rome and its hated empire. Rome was the horrible harlot, the woeful whore, the salacious slattern. And, said John of Patmos, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit…, for all the nations have drunk the wine of her impure passion, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her” (Rev. 18:2-3).
Listen very carefully, Christian people, for this is very important. There is something in religion, any religion, every religion, that brings out extremism in some people --- not in all people, but in some people. But then, there are some people who also are extremists in many other kinds of behavior, or in political attitudes, or in personal tastes, or whatever. As long as there are people, some of them will be extremists, and that includes religious people as well.
Why is that? I certainly am at a loss to explain it. Why are some people outstanding musicians or athletes or mathematicians or orators or whatever, and most are not? I don’t know. But that’s the way it is.
That being so, throughout human history there has always been an omnipresence of religious extremists. They aren’t everywhere, and there really aren’t all that many of them as a percentage of the total population, but they’re there, somewhere. Right now they are in unusually high numbers in the Middle East and Burma and Thailand and Indonesia and parts of Africa. And they include Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, and others.
Anti-religious atheistic extremists, people such as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or the late Christopher Hitchens, blame religion for producing extremists. There is some truth to that, but it is not essentially true, any more than it is essentially true that atheism produces anti-religious extremists like Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Why any individual turns out to be an extremist about anything will probably never be fully understood. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists can shrink heads until the cows come home, but I suspect it will never be completely comprehended why there are Osama bin Ladens or Ayman al-Zawaharis rather than Martin Luther Kings or Dalai Lamas.
We are living in what seems like a time of excessive religious extremism. It only seems like that because we are able to live only in this time and not in other epochs of human history. A thousand years ago, which is to say, during the Crusades, there was probably a far greater percentage of Christian and Muslim extremists than there are now. In the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era, I would guess there also was a much higher percentage of religious fanatics than there are now. We are just more aware of our own extremists, because we are far more exposed to extremist actions than ever before in the history of the world. Mass communication does many things, including snatching a balanced sense of proportion from too many people. We think everything is too, too, TOO, simply because we may be too exposed to it.
Please understand this: I am not trying to suggest there is a higher or lower percentage of religious extremists now than ever before, because I don’t know, nor do you. I am convinced of this, however: It is not God who creates religious or any other kind of extremists; instead it is likely psychological or existential or circumstantial factors which create such folks. Nevertheless, however extremists get to be the way they are, they have always existed, and they will continue to exist, if not next door or in the next town or state or nation, then somewhere. That is the way it is, and the way it’s always been, and the Bible, I’m sure completely unintentionally, strongly illustrates that.
Here’s another thing to think about: If God doesn’t create extremists, He doesn’t always lead them to moderation, either. Sometimes, maybe, but always?: no. God isn’t an interfering God, as much as we wish He were.
What is going on in Egypt is a struggle between Muslim extremists and Muslim moderates or secularists. What is going on in Syria is a struggle in part between extremist quasi-Shiite Muslim secularists, represented by Bashar Assad, and extremist Sunni rebels and Al Qaeda types. What is going on in Iran is a struggle for supremacy among religious extremists who want Islam to rule Iran and Muslim moderates who don’t want religion to control government at all. And what is going on to some degree in the United States Congress is a small but powerful group of Christian extremists who want their notion of Christianity to dominate American government and a large group of people who are not religious extremists, some of whom are not even religious, but who have allowed the extremists to get the upper hand. Democracy: Go figure.
A young religious leader is purported to have said the following: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. …If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell” (Mt. 10:34,35,37;5:29-30).
Did Jesus actually say those things, or did Matthew insert those words into his mouth because that’s what Matthew thought Jesus should have said? Do we truly know what Jesus said? Can we know it? Was Jesus, as the new book title provocatively suggests, a zealot? If so, did he mean for us also to be zealots?
Kevin Phillips happily worked in the Nixon Administration. He changed his mind about some of the things his political party was doing in later decades of American life. His book American Theocracy, written in 2005, chronicles what Phillips believes has been the unwholesome union of religious extremists who have joined forces with Middle Eastern leaders who for decades controlled the flow of oil to the world. The author foresees a 21st century “Disenlightenment” as a result of this trend. He cites religious extremism as the major cause in the decline of Rome, Spain, Holland, and Britain, and he thinks it is leading to an American national decline. If his observation is accurate at all, I would say religious extremism is not a cause but a symptom of decline. When things appear to be going badly, religious extremists become more vocal, and they believe themselves to be God’s sole agents to prevent further deterioration. I suspect that has always been the case. Those who feel the most threatened also feel the most compelled to act decisively and even violently.
Edward Rutherford wrote a long historical novel about the New Forest in southern England. It is called The Forest. If you know anything of Rutherford’s historical novels, you know all of them to be extraordinarily lengthy. In The Forest one of his characters makes a cogent observation. He says, “Faith is not always easy, even for the faithful.” How true that is! Sometimes it is hard to remain both faithful and religious when it feels as though so many other religious people have gone off the deep end.
Journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote about religious extremism in one of his recent columns. He said, “The new fundamentalists seek the most extreme forms of tribal identity and theological certitude…. In Egypt one side emphatically believes (the) massacre of Muslim Brotherhood supporters was instigated by the military; the other asserts, with equal certitude, that the Islamists provoked the violence. These factions do not merely have their own worldviews; they have their own facts.”
It is alarming when extremists are absolutely convinced of things which simply are not true. But that is a sobering reality with which we all must live, for there are countless numbers of religious extremists who firmly believe “facts” which clearly are not factual.
But then calm voices of reason come along and speak out, and by their irenic words the world itself seems to calm down. Several weeks ago Malala Yousafzai addressed the United Nations General Assembly. You may recall that Malala was the 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by Pakistani members of the Taliban. All she wanted to do was to go to school, and they fiercely oppose girls being allowed to receive an education. She received treatment in England, and she has recovered very well. In perfect English, she declared to the Assembly, “On October 9, 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my head. They shot my friends too. They thought the bullet would silence us, but they failed. Out of the silence came thousands of voices.” She was given several standing ovations during her inspiring speech.
Religion spawns extremists. But so does politics, economics, business, education, and the military. As long as anybody is involved in anything, some of those involved people will inevitably come out of the process as extremists.
Therefore it behooves the rest of us to do our best to maintain our own sense of equilibrium in troubled times. It is imperative that we not throw out the religious baby with the extremist bathwater, if that is the kind of bathwater in which the baby is currently being bathed.
As in so, so, SO many other things, hang in there, dear hearts. This too shall pass.