Hurry down to Bethlehem

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

4^th December 2022

Luke 2.1-20

Mural in the Franciscan Church of the Shepherd's Fields, Bethlehem

 
On our recent church trip to Palestine,
            we were collected from the airport by a minibus,
            which was to be our main mode of transport for the next ten days.

We decided that it needed a name,
            and because it was carrying us to Bethlehem,
            in quite a bouncy manner,
we christened our minibus ‘Little Donkey’,
            and the name stuck
as our tenacious beast of burden and its driver
            time and again managed to make progress
            on roads that would have had most vehicles giving up in disgust.
 
I’m sure we all enjoyed singing the carol, ‘Little Donkey’ just now,
            and I’m sorry if you find it stuck in your head for the next week!
 
But of course, the donkey of the nativity story
            is a later addition to the narrative,
            not mentioned in the Bible at all.
 
I don’t personally think this matters too much,
            after all, as my Dad often says,
            ‘don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story’.
 
But it does raise the question for us
            of the relationship between Luke’s gospel
            and the historical context in which he sets his story of the birth of Jesus.
 
In fact, Luke goes to some pains
            to set the birth of the Messiah
            within the wider context of Roman and Jewish history.
 
Right through his gospel,
            Luke gives us lots of little historical clues,
so much so that he has sometimes been described
            as a bit of an amateur historian.
 
However, the problem we have
            with his version of the birth of Jesus
            is that he doesn’t get his history entirely right!
 
As far as we know, there was a census in Judea (it just wasn’t empire-wide)
            and it took place, as Luke suggests, under Quirinius,
            but the problem with it is that it happened in the year 6 A.D.!
 
However, this is only part of our historical conundrum:
            The other issue is that Herod the Great,
                        who, according to Matthew’s gospel
                        was alive at the time of Jesus’ birth,
            actually died in 4 B.C., some nine years before the census…
 
And the thing we need to hold on to here,
            is that interesting though such historical background might be,
                        Luke’s purpose in telling his story the way he does
            is to contrast the Roman Emperor Augustus,
                        a man who held worldwide political power,
            with a seemingly insignificant birth in Bethlehem.
 
Luke’s story is told the way it is, historical inaccuracies and all,
            to reflect the fact that Jesus was a Galilean from Nazareth, of all places,
                        which is a bit like saying he’s a Scouser from Newcastle,
and also to show that the birth of this ‘working class northerner’
            fulfilled the prophecy of Micah 5.2
            that the ruler of all Israel was to come forth from Bethlehem.
 
But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days. (Micah 5:2)
 
So Luke tells his story
            to show that it was the Emperor Augustus who unwittingly enabled Jesus
                        to be born in the right place, by calling the census,
            thereby demonstrating that the final power belongs to God,
                        and not to any human forces at work in the world.
 
The circumstances of the birth of Jesus
            point to the life of one who will have nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9.58);
                        born as he is in a borrowed stable,
            but they also indicate that the child will be a Saviour;
                        in fact he will be the Messiah, the Lord,
                        far outshining even the emperor.
 
For the time being, however,
            the birth is announced only to humble shepherds.
 
They hear the heavenly host singing an angelic song,
            which echoes the cry of the seraphim in Isaiah 6.3.
Heaven and earth are now indeed full of God’s glory.
 
Nativity plays and popular culture often cast angels as female,
            when, as we all know,
                        in the Bible angels are universally encountered
                        as male messengers from God.
 
However, there is a further possible gender confusion in Luke’s nativity story,
            and this time it's one which goes the other way.
 
In traditional Bedouin societies,
            it was the women who often looked after the flocks,
and it is certainly at least possible that these shepherds,
            who rushed to the scene of a new born baby, were women.
 
Of course, at the end of Jesus' life,
            those who remain with him to the very end are the women,
            and the first witness to the resurrected Jesus also is a woman.
 
Add all this to the fact that his mother is a teenager and unmarried,
            and take it in a context where women were more commonly
                        regarded as property than persons,
            and a peculiarly liberating picture of Jesus emerges...
 
This is a messiah for all people,
            not just for powerful men.
 
His birth may have been set against a backdrop
            of Emperors, Kings and governors,
but he will be a messiah for those whom society devalues,
            a messiah for shepherds and refugees,
                        for single parents and frightened fathers,
            every bit as much as he is a messiah for the wise,
                        the educated, and the prosperous.
 
The challenge for those of us who follow him
            is to never lose sight of the one in whom, as St Paul said,
                        there is neither male and female, neither slave nor free,
                                    neither foreigner nor native. (Gal 3.28)
 
The message of the Christ child
            is that in his kingdom all are included, all are welcome.
 
And so the shepherds are vociferous in their excitement and amazement,
            they sing and babble and shout the good news
            of a messiah for all people.
 
But Mary needs to contemplate quietly,
            keeping her thoughts to herself.
 
‘Mary treasured all these words.’ Says Luke.
 
After Jesus’ birth there is no song of magnificat
            to mirror the song she sang when first told
            that she was going to have a child as a gift from God.
 
It seems that Mary found no words
            for such an overwhelming experience:
A young woman, pregnant out of marriage,
            far from home, giving birth in poverty,
                        facing a long journey, with our without a sturdy donkey,
            and shortly to become a refugee
                        on the run from a murderous tyrant.
 
Is it any wonder that her words ran out,
            and her song fell silent.
 
Christmas is a complicated time for us all,
            just as the birth of Christ was complicated for Mary.
 
For some of us, Christmas is a time of joy,
            as our Lord comes to us in the midst of our happiness and festivities.
 
But for others, our experience can be closer to that of Mary,
            as we struggle to find the words to combine reality with hope.
 
Sometimes, the coming of Christ is not to a world made easy,
            but to the difficulties, arguments, griefs and conflicts
                        that make up the reality of our lives.
 
But whether we are sad or happy this Christmas,
            whether we mourn or rejoice
nonetheless it is to us that the Christ child comes,
            as hope arises in the midst of despair,
            and good news breaks into our reality,
as God takes human form and comes to the world once again.
 
And as God draws near to us,
            we too draw near to God,
making our own journey to Bethlehem,
            to worship with the shepherds
            the one who is the good news of God,
            for all people, in all places.
 
Amen.

The faith of defiance

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 27^th November 2022. Advent 1.

 

Habakkuk 1.1-4; 2.2-4, 20; 3.1-6, 17-19

For our engagement with Habakkuk this morning,
            I want to acknowledge my debt to Juliana Claassens’ writing on this book.
She is Professor in Old Testament at Stellenbosch University in South Africa,
            with a focus on human dignity and female resistance.[1]
 
Preachers don’t often show their working, so to speak,
            although my online sermon scripts often have footnotes
            to show what I’ve been reading.
But I think it’s helpful sometimes for those listening
            to know that the person preaching is also a student,
            learning from the wisdom of others.
 
And I don’t know about you,
            but I’ve not spent much time
            with the writings of the prophet Habakkuk over the years?
 
So it was something of a surprise to me
            to discover that at one point in the mid-20^th Century
            it was deemed to be a ‘dangerous book’.
 
Apparently, in 1940, in the early years of the second world war,
            a church newspaper in Basel in Switzerland published a column under the title:
                        “Word on the (Current) Situation”
            that included an excerpt from the book Habakkuk.
 
The military censors then banned the newspaper
            because they viewed this text as a critique of the Nazi regime of the time.
 
And I want us to hold on to this story,
            because I’ll come back to it later.
 
Habakkuk is a dangerous text,
            it is a book that inspires defiance.
 
It’s origins are found in an exceedingly traumatic time in Israel’s history,
            in about the year 605 BCE
 
Not long before, the mighty Assyrian army had destroyed one city after the other,
            brutally killing vast swathes of the population of Northern Israel.
And now the threat to the Southern Kingdom of Judah,
            where Habakkuk lived under the reign of King Jehoiakim,
            was coming from the Babylonian empire.
 
Habakkuk 1.6, which is outside of our selected verses for this morning,
            helps us contextualise the book,
because it references the battle of Carchemish,
            where the Egyptian Pharaoh’s army was defeated by the Babylonians,
and marked the point at which King Jehoiakim of Judah
            started paying tribute to Babylon
            in the hope of avoiding a confrontation or invasion.
 
And we know that not long after Habakkuk was written,
            the Babylonians under king Nebuchadnezzar
                        would three times attack Jerusalem,
            taking the leaders and skilled citizens into exile,
                        and in 587 BCE, just twenty years after Habakkuk
                        the Babylonians would destroy both the city and the temple.
 
Indeed, as Habakkuk puts it, violence is all around,
            and the question that is uppermost in his mind, is why?
 
Why does he witness violence and injustice,
            and what is God going to do about it?
 
This text might be over 2,500 years old,
            but it still rings very real in our contemporary world,
where we too see violence, oppression, and injustice;
            and on a scale that Habakkuk would have found incomprehensible.
 
It is this wrestling
            with the gap between the world as we believe it should be
            and the reality of the world as it is experienced by us,
that lies at the heart of Habakkuk’s message.
 
Why are things not the way they should be?
            And what, in God’s name, is happening about this fact?
 
Well, the lectionary text for today
            gives us three short sections from this fascinating book,
but if you have the time,
            I’d recommend reading the whole thing through later,
            it’s not very long.
 
In chapter 1 verses 1-4 we see how the prophet looked around
            and was overwhelmed by all the violence he saw.
 
In verse 3, he asks why God is tolerating all these evil deeds,
            and why he has to see all the injustice, the oppression,
                        the strife, and the terror around him.
 
And then in verse 4, the prophet laments
            that the wicked are overpowering the righteous,
            and that justice is being perverted.
 
Actually, the force here is more visceral than this,
            and it comes with a trigger warning.
 
What Habakkuk is saying,
            is that justice is being raped and violated before his eyes.
 
And in a world where sexual violence
            is still used as a weapon of war,
and where domestic violence and sexual assault are rife,
            I think we need to hear again the shocking truth
            that injustice and sexual violence often go together.
 
The Babylonians used rape as part of their domination strategy,
            as se find reflected in the book of Lamentations 5.11,
and Robin Parry comments on this passage,
 
‘In the ancient world rape was often used as a deliberate strategy of humiliation
            to signal to opponents that they could not protect their own women.
Even after the siege and fall of Jerusalem the situation remain[ed] one
            of ongoing violence in which the women of Judah are raped…
There is nowhere safe.
            Judah’s enemies want to make clear who is in control’ [2]
 
Within in this context of violence, we hear Habakkuk’s lament:
            “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?”
 
In the midst of this nightmare,
            the only thing the prophet can do
is to help his people voice their pain,
            to cry over the anguish they are experiencing.
 
Echoing the Psalms of lament as well as the book of Lamentations,
            we hear how the prophet cries out to God:
“Lord, how long?
            Lord, help me … ”
 
Habakkuk’s lament joins contemporary laments from all around the world
            in which people have found the words
            to name the situations of violence and injustice in their lives,
so resisting whatever is threatening their well-being and happiness. [3]
 
And here’s the cruicial thing:
            to lament is not to give up, lie down, and die,
                        it is rather to resist,
            and it does so by naming the evil,
                        by not allowing the injustice to escape unacknowledged.
 
It is significant to note that the violence and terror
            would continue for a long time,
as evident in the ongoing description of violence
            that marks the rest of the book Habakkuk.
 
Habakkuk’s lament offers no quick fix,
            but typical to the prophetic voice in the Hebrew Bible,
            violence and injustice are not allowed to have the last word.
 
And then, as we keep reading through,
            God’s answer comes.
 
But God’s answer
            was not what Habakkuk would have wanted to hear.
 
God says, “Wait. Be patient.
            Deliverance is coming, but you will have to wait.”
 
This divine response challenges all the easy answers
            or quick fixes that humans crave.
 
In Israel’s history, the prophet’s message
            would be followed by many more years of violence and injustice.
 
Things would get much worse before they were to become better.
 
However, even amidst the most dire of circumstances,
            we see how the prophet clings to God’s faithfulness and love.
 
We see this for instance in how the prophet continues to pray.
 
In Habakkuk 3:1, we read the prayer of the prophet
            that is to be sung on the melody of a lament:
 
O Lord, I have heard of your renown,
and I stand in awe, O Lord, of your work.
In our own time revive it;
in our own time make it known;
in wrath may you remember mercy. (3.2)
 
Habakkuk reminds believers millennia later
            how important it is to keep on believing
            in a God that promises deliverance.
 
This unflinching belief in God’s ability to make an end to violence#
            is precisely the reason why the book Habakkuk was banned in Nazi Germany
                        — the idea that God will end unjust power
                        was considered too dangerous to be tolerated.
 
The book Habakkuk also played a role in South Africa’s history
            serving as an important source of resistance
            against the apartheid regime of the time.
 
So Allan Boesak in the tumultuous 1980s
            preached a sermon in London on Habakkuk 2,
imploring God:
            “Lord, how long must we wait before you help?”
 
In his book The Tenderness of Conscience, Boesak says:
 
            Black Consciousness, Black Power and Black Theology
                        merged and emerged as the key which unlocked the door
            to the future for the oppressed people of South Africa
                        at a time when most of us thought that all was lost.
 
            It rekindled the almost decayed hope in the hearts of the downtrodden,
                        reasserted the faith of the people in the liberation God of the Exodus,
                                    the prophets, and of Jesus of Nazareth.
            It reclaimed the gospel for the poor and the oppressed;
                        rediscovered and rewrote the vision
                        and ran with it as the prophet Habakkuk enjoins us to do,
            unleashing the tremendous energies of a people
                        who, long before Thabo Mbeki discovered it,
            knew that they were born of a people
                        who would not tolerate oppression.
 
            It came at a most opportune time, a Kairos moment, to put it biblically,
                        and it paved the way for the decisive phase of the struggle
                                    during the eighties
                        as it found expression in the United Democratic Front.
            It became a spiritual force without which resistance to apartheid
                        would have remained singularly ineffectual. [4]
 
Boesak also quotes John Calvin,
            who says the following on Habakkuk 2:6:
 
            Tyrants and their cruelty cannot endure
                        without great weariness and sorrow …
            Hence almost the world sounds forth these words,
                        How long, How long?
 
            When anyone disturbs the whole world by his ambition and avarice,
                        or everywhere commits plunders, or oppresses miserable nations,
            when he distresses the innocent,
                        all cry out, How long?
 
            And this cry, proceeding as it does
                        from the feeling of nature and the dictate of justice,
                        is at length heard by the Lord …
            This confusion of order and justice is not to be endured. [5]
 
The truth that Habakkuk knows
            is that God hears the cries of those who are suffering
                        under the yoke of unjust regimes
            and will one day bring an end to violence.
 
This is good news for those who are being oppressed.
            But it not so good news for those who are abusing their power.
 
However, as the examples from Apartheid South Africa or the Nazi regime show us,
            situations of violence can last many years and even decades.
 
Also in our personal lives,
            we may find ourselves in a situation of pain and suffering without end.
 
Even the beautiful confession of faith with which Habakkuk ends
            acknowledges that the situation of violence and suffering is far from over.
 
The fig tree does not blossom.
            There are no fruit on the vines.
                        There are no livestock in the stalls.
 
And yet the wonderful thing about Habakkuk’s confession
            is that the believer can still say,
            ‘I believe in a God that gives me strength to endure’.
 
Amidst the violence, amidst all the depravity,
            The vision articulated by Habakkuk
            is a vision of another world, of another way.
 
And as Allan Boesak again puts it,
            the encouragement to overcome lies in
 
            knowing with God and Habakkuk, that the vision lives.
                        Even though evil seems to prosper
                                    and the law is paralysed so that justice never prevails,
                        the vision lives.
            Even though the righteous are trapped, “hemmed in”,
                        have nowhere to turn to and justice is “perverted”,
                        the vision lives. [6]
 
And this is why we have the book of Habakkuk today,
            as our reading for the first Sunday in Advent.
 
Advent is a time of waiting,
            not just waiting for Christmas,
but of waiting spiritually,
            a time of recognising before God
                        that the world is not the way that it should be,
            and of longing with hope
                        for a new and better world of justice and peace.
 
The life of faith is, at its heart, a life of waiting,
            of having faith that God’s coming Kingdom has not just vanished,
and that despite the evidence sometimes to the contrary,
            evil and death do not get to write the last word on our lives.
 
And so we wait for God to act,
            for God to break into our world, our lives,
            with news of peace and justice.
 
As we approach Christmas,
            we draw near to the celebration
                        of God’s intervention in the person of Jesus,
            but we are conscious that still the world is not as it should be.
 
From Palestine to Ukraine,
            from South Sudan to Ethiopia,
from Yemen to Myanmar,
            to world is deeply divided and torn by conflict.
 
And we live in the time-between-times,
            between the first advent and the long-awaited second.
 
And in this time-between-times,
            we are called to live by faith,
longing for justice with a desire that drives us to our knees in prayer,
            and then from our knees to a life of prayer in action,
as we live into being the promise of the in-breaking kingdom of God,
            living as if it were true, until it is true.
 
One of the moments that will stay with me
            from our recent visit to Palestine,
was our joining the worship service
            of the Christmas Lutheran church in Bethlehem.
 
I was invited to assist the minister in the administration of the Eucharist,
            and as he gave the bread, I held the cup for people to dip their bread into.
 
There we were in David’s town,
            in the church named after the coming of the prince of peace,
and I was ministering to people who live daily with violence and oppression,
            but who nonetheless turn up for church on Sundays
                        with the smile of hope on their faces
            to receive the symbol and sign of the broken body of their saviour,
                        who was born in their town as a sign of hope.
 
One of those who came for communion was Daher Nassar,
            from the farm known as the Tent of Nations,
            which has been in his family for hundreds of years.
 
We had visited the farm a couple of days earlier,
            and this smiling man had shown us how he works his land,
but had also told us how the bulldozers come in the night
            to destroy his olive trees,
and of how young men had come one afternoon earlier this year
            and beaten him and his brother with iron bars. [7]
 
He had told us how his family farm had been declared state land,
            and of his decades-long legal fight to not be evicted.
 
But still the stone at the entrance to their property
            bears its carefully written inscription,
declaring the heart of their Christian faith:
 
‘We refuse to be enemies’.
 
As the Lord said to Habakkuk:
            ‘Write the vision; make it plain on tablets,
            so that [even] a runner may read it’
 
It was an immense privilege to be part of his receiving communion,
            and to see his face smile with recognition when he saw me.
 
Friends, the world is not as it should be,
            and evil and violence and oppression
                        still stalk the land where Christ was born,
                        and the world he came to save.
 
Sometimes all you can do is lament.
 
But we who have lamented with Habakkuk,
            and who have seen with him a glimpse, a vision, of a better future,
will not give up:
            we will live in faith!
 
And faith like this is an act of defiance,
            faith like this challenges the powerful, and lays low the mighty,
            faith like this refuses to ignore the plight of the suffering,
and faith like this, lived in hope,
            opens the doorway to the new world of Christ’s coming kingdom.

---

[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/faith-as-a-way-of-life-2/commentary-on-habakkuk-11-4-22-4-33b-6-17-19
http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2413-94672015000200009
http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/ote/v34n3/09.pdf
[2] Parry, Lamentations, Two Horizons Commentary, p.151.
[3] Nancy C. Lee, ‘Online Material for Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation’ http://ms.fortresspress.com/downloads/9780800663018WebLinksLyricsofLamentnew.pdf?redirected=true
[4] Allan Boesak, The Tenderness of Conscience, p.10.
[5] John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, Habakkuk 2: 6, volume 4, 93-94:
[6] Allan Boesak, The Tenderness of Conscience, p.234.
[7] https://www.presbyterianmission.org/story/tent-of-nations-brothers-speak-out-about-jan-28-attack/

The Wisdom of Love

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

30 October 2022

The Cathedral of St Martin, Lucca: 

Floor mosaic, The Judgment of Solomon, by Antonio Federighi

1 Kings 3.4-28

The question of what kind of person should lead a nation
            is not a new one, it seems,
and as the UK embarks on its third Prime Minister in two months,
            I wonder what you would put forward as the top priority
            for a newly appointed national leader?
 
The famous political ‘honeymoon period’,
            is often an opportunity for a newly appointed leader
                        to enact decisions that will soon be closed to them;
            and they must use it wisely,
                        with the penalties for getting it wrong severe
                        as Liz Truss and her team quickly discovered.
 
So what would you do, if you were handed the golden ticket?
            What would you do with your political honeymoon period?
 
This was the question that God put to Solomon one night,
            as he lay dreaming of his future reign,
            in the early days of his ascension to the Kingship of Israel.
 
He could have chosen wealth, health, and a long life,
            he could have chosen defeat for his enemies,
but instead he chose wisdom.
 
Except, well, … he didn’t actually ask for ‘wisdom’
            he asked for ‘an understanding mind
                        able to discern between good and evil’
            and he asked for this because he felt inadequate
                        to the task of governing the people.
 
But did you notice the resonance with another biblical narrative here?
            We’ve heard this phrase ‘discerning between good and evil’ before…
If you cast your mind back to the beginning of Genesis,
            you will remember that the tree in the garden of Eden,
                        that Adam and Eve are instructed to avoid,
            is the tree whose fruit gives ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2.17).
 
Solomon wants as a gift what Adam and Eve were denied,
            but which they took anyway.
 
And I think we’re invited to think here of Solomon as a kind-of new Adam:
            like Adam he falls into a deep sleep (Gen. 2.21-23)
            and is then met by a woman when he awakes.
Except in Solomon’s case, it’s not Eve handing him forbidden fruit (Gen. 3.6),
            it’s the lady Wisdom, the personification of God’s word in human form,
            who we meet in other places in the Hebrew Bible.
 
She appears most notably in the book of Proverbs,
            a wisdom text attributed to Solomon,
where she summons people to heed the wise words she speaks,
            because in them is found the secret to a long and happy life.
 
And sure enough, Solomon’s request for the wisdom of discernment
            unlocks for him not only the ability to govern Israel well,
            but also all the blessings of health and wealth a king could desire.
 
Well, so far, so archetypical!
 
This story of Solomon’s inauguration to the kingship
            has its parallels in other ancient Near Eastern stories
                        of kings whose have deities appearing to them in a dream
                        and commissioning them to their task. [1]
 
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating,
            as the old proverb goes,
and so we come to the second part of our reading for today,
            this disturbing story of one dead baby,
            and another baby nearly being cut in half.
 
It’s in this story that Solomon’s inner wisdom
            is put to the test in the real world of people’s lives,
and the question of whether he is fit to govern as a national leader
            is demonstrated in the complex realities of difficult decisions.
 
In researching this sermon,
            I discovered a passage from the second book of Kings
            which seems to function as a parallel
                        to our story about the Judgment of Solomon.
 
And when I read it, I had one of those moments
            where I found myself thinking:
‘I’m sure that wasn’t in there last time I looked!’
 
Listen to this story,
            which is set a hundred or so years after the time of Solomon,
with the king of the now-divided Israel a man called Jehoram,
            a descendent of the wise Solomon.
 
2 Kings 6:26-30
Now as the king of Israel was walking on the city wall,
            a woman cried out to him, "Help, my lord king!"
 ²⁷ He said, "No! Let the LORD help you. How can I help you?
            From the threshing floor or from the wine press?"
 ²⁸ But then the king asked her, "What is your complaint?"
 
She answered, "This woman said to me,
            'Give up your son; we will eat him today,
            and we will eat my son tomorrow.'
 ²⁹ So we cooked my son and ate him.
 
The next day I said to her, 'Give up your son and we will eat him.'
            But she has hidden her son."
 ³⁰ When the king heard the words of the woman he tore his clothes.
 
Jehoram has no answer to this terrible situation,
            in contrast to Solomon, whose brutally ruthless wisdom
enabled him to expose the hearts of the two women
            who came to him with their argument
            over whose son had died, and whose son had lived.
 
And I find myself here
            wondering what wisdom really is?
 
Is wisdom threatening to cut a child in half?
            I mean, we might argue that Solomon was so wise
                        that he knew he would not have to go through with the threat;
            but that feels a bit like special pleading,
                        because if it was a bluff, it wouldn’t have worked.
 
A bit like the contemporary arguments around the nuclear deterrent,
            you have to be willing to destroy everything,
            for the possibility of not doing so to become viable.
 
Is this wisdom?
            Threatening destruction to secure life?
 
I’m not sure really,
            and find myself with some searching questions
                        that I’d love to be able to put to Solomon
            about how he saw wisdom functioning in the political sphere.
 
Various great minds have tried to define wisdom.
 
From Oscar Wild’s adage that,
            ‘A fool knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’
to the great doctors of the church Augustine and Aquinas,
            who sought to differentiate between
                        a mere rational understanding of facts,
            and the deeper wisdom of seeing behind the facts
                        to the underlying cause of why things are the way they are.
 
You can think of this difference, between knowledge and wisdom,
            as being like the difference between having
                        on the one hand, a mere knowledge of faith,
            and on the other hand,
                        having the wisdom of love. [2]
 
And my question of Solomon’s famous judgment,
            is where, in his threat to cut a child in half,
            do we find the wisdom of love?
 
Sure, his public political gamble worked,
            and like a good detective, he unlocked the truth of who the real mother was;
            but is this the wisdom of love?
 
I think that the love in this story
            is found in the heart of the mother of the child:
as she discovered that she was prepared to give up her claim on her baby
            in order to preserve its life.
 
I want to suggest that whilst Solomon’s wisdom
            brought him knowledge of the facts of the situation,
            which was, of course, what he had asked for in his dream,
the real wisdom, the deep wisdom of love in this story,
            is found in the heart of the true mother.
 
And to understand the real significance of this wisdom,
            and how it can speak to us and our lives, and our world,
we have to delve a bit deeper
            into the relationship between these two women.
 
Neither of them are named in the text,
            which is not unusual for biblical stories about women,
            particularly women who are of low social status.
 
And these two women were about as far down the social ladder
            as it was possible for them to get.
 
The Bible describes them as prostitutes,
            women for whom unmarried pregnancy was highly likely.
 
A tragic series of events
            has created the context for the rivalry between these two,
with one mother desiring the child of another
            to replace her own deceased offspring.
 
This is not a new story,
            but neither is it purely an ancient one either,
and you don’t have to look very far online
            to find stories of bereaved mothers abducting children. [3]
 
The mental stress of such a tragedy
            can create a context in which someone might do something
            that they would never normally consider.
 
So here we have two women,
            both of them victims in multiple ways;
from the abuses of their profession,
            to their experiences of grief and outrage.
 
And they find themselves before the king,
            who is about to test his newly acquired superpower of wisdom.
 
And he commands a bloody sacrifice,
            the killing of the living child.
 
And here I want us to stop for a moment,
            and take a step back from the specifics of the story,
and to realise that this is happening all the time,
            all around us, again and again and again.
 
This is the way the world works:
            people are traumatised and victimised by violence,
            people desire restitution and revenge,
                        they desire that which is not theirs, and they take it by force,
            and we all tell ourselves that the solution to this spiralling conflict
                        is just one further definitive act of righteous violence.
 
This is how wars start,
            not only actual wars between actual countries,
            but also personal individualised wars between people in community.
 
We can see it happening in Ukraine,
            it has been happening for decades in Palestine,
            and in so many other countries around the world.
 
An experience of trauma and violence
            gives birth to a desire for retaliation,
            and the renewed violence and trauma
                        simply cycles the situation round to the next level.
 
Think about it, if you hit me in the face,
            my strongest desire will be to hit you back.
In other words, to imitate you. [4]
 
But, in order to teach you a lesson,
            I will hit you in the face that little bit harder,
which will make you hate me even more
            and make you want to teach me a lesson too.
 
Likewise, if someone cuts you off in traffic,
            the tendency is to want to do the same thing back,
            but maybe a little bit worse.
 
In this way violence escalates.
 
When we feel hurt or insulted,
            the tendency is to imitate the offensive behaviour in the other person,
            but to add just that little bit more.
 
This cycle of violence can only stopped by someone refusing to imitate,
            by someone turning the other cheek and not hitting back,
by someone renouncing and sacrificing their desire to retaliate
            in the name of peace.
 
And so we come to the true mother of the child in our story,
            who by giving up her child to the other woman,
            enacted at her own cost a nonviolent end to their rivalry.
 
The bereaved mother had already accepted Solomon’s solution of bloody sacrifice,
            with her own experience of grief blinding her to the possibility
            that there could ever be a peaceable end to this story.
 
And how often is it the case
            that in a situation of conflict,
one side is willing to destroy what exists
            in order to get what they want,
            or at least to ensure that their opponent doesn’t
 
And so, motivated by the wisdom of love,
            the mother relinquished her claim to the object of the rivalry.
 
She sacrificed any hope of winning the argument for the sake of her child,
            whereas the bereaved mother was willing to sacrifice the child
                        for the sake of resolving the rivalry.
 
Sometimes, and I’m sure some of you at least can relate to this,
            winning a competition can start to feel like a matter of life and death.
 
From the outside, it is ridiculous.
            And it is ridiculous.
 
But my imitating your desire to win,
            strengthens your desire to win.
We each become the desired model for the other
            in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.
 
This is why we have football hooliganism,
            it’s why we have gang violence on our streets,
            it’s why we have escalating conflict in Ukraine.
 
Too often we close ourselves off from the wisdom of love,
            from the wisdom of giving up what we are trying to possess
            so that in place of spiralling conflict we might find an abundance of life.
 
And so to return to the two women before king Solomon,
            on the basis of the love shown by the child’s mother,
            he publicly declares her to be the mother.
 
Rene Girard, who has written a lot on the spirals of violence that consume humans,
            notes that ‘it does not matter who is the biological mother.
                        The one who was willing to sacrifice herself for the child’s life
                                    is in fact the mother.’
            He goes on:
                        ‘The first woman [was] willing to sacrifice a child to the needs of rivalry,
                                    [and] sacrifice is [always] the foundation of rivalry
                                    [as well as ] the solution to it.
                        [It was] the second woman [the child’s mother],
                                    [who was] willing to sacrifice everything. [5]
 
And here, I think, we find ourselves making a leap,
            into the example and teaching of Jesus.
 
Fundamental to the Christian story
            is the concept that Christ is a sacrifice
            who gave himself ‘for the life of the world.’
 
And just as Christ died so that humanity might abandon
            the habit of violent sacrifice,
so the child’s mother sacrifices her own motherhood
            so that the child may live.
She renounces that which is dearest to her, her own child,
            in order that life may prevail over death,
            peace over violence.
 
The mother in this story is the personification
            of the wisdom of love,
and she offers us a model for understanding God’s love for humans,
            as it is made known through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
 
Too many people read into the crucifixion
            a transactional understanding of sin,
whereby the only solution to human violent desires
            is a God who metes out a corresponding punishment on the divine son.
 
This is the worldview of Solomon,
            it is the ruthless logic of the dictator,
and it traps those already hurt and hurting
            into further cycles of violent retribution.
 
But there is another way:
            there is the wisdom of love;
by which the cross becomes the moment
            when God relinquishes all claim on that which they love,
in order that human injustice can exhaust itself on the innocent,
            and through that sacrifice discover a new and unexpected path to life.
 
So if you find yourself wondering what this morning’s disturbing story from 1 Kings
            has to say to our world, and to our lives,

I suggest it is this:
            there is always another way,

there is always a path to be chosen
            that avoids perpetuating the cycles of victimhood and violence;
there is a deeper wisdom at work in the world,
            and it is the wisdom of love;

and we are each of us invited to discover its call and its reality
            in the decisions we take in our lives,
as we take the decisive step away from violence,
            as the knowledge of our faith
            becomes the deeper wisdom of love.

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[1] Such as the Sphinx Steele of Thutmose IV of Egypt.
[2] Charry, 1993. 94.
[3] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/mothers-worst-nightmare-baby-stolen-1712026
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15593513/heartbroken-mum-nurse-hospital/
[4] This next section is from https://voegelinview.com/two-kinds-of-sacrifice-rene-girards-analysis-of-scapegoating/
 
[5] https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/girard-on-christs-death/