September 10, 2023

Exodus 12:1-14; Matthew 18:15-20

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

This passage from Exodus may sound familiar. It is the description of the Passover, both an event in the history of the Hebrew people, who had been enslaved by the Egyptians, and a festival of their descendants to remember the day they were delivered from slavery. It reminds them about what has happened and reminds them about what should never happen again.

I once made the observation that the Book of Exodus is in one sense the most important book from the Hebrew scriptures. Now, someone might say that the Book of Genesis might be a better choice. It contains the creation story. It contains the story of Noah. It tells us about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers.

All true. But I would argue that those stories are not as important as that of Moses and the journey to the Promised Land. It is the foundational story of the people of Israel. The Book of Genesis tells us a story about how the world began. The Book of Exodus tells us how a people began.

This fall, I am starting a new sermon series about the nature of beauty and how beauty has influenced religion across the centuries. Art and music, poetry and prose are all aspects of that influence. And I would argue that the Book of Exodus is one representation of beauty within the Jewish tradition. Not that it is always a pleasant story. Not that the people in it are always heroic or kind or even good. But it is a chapter in the life of a people. And in this sense, we can call it an epic.

Traditionally an epic is a poem. And technically an epic only needs to be a long poem. It is about word count more than about the content of the poem. But most of the poems that come to mind when we hear the word “epic” are more than long-winded. They are meaningful. Like the Book of Exodus, they are definitional. They are part and parcel of what it means to be of a certain people, a certain culture.

Think about the Iliad. This is the sweeping story of the war between the Greeks and Trojans. It is filled with battle scenes and interludes with the gods themselves. It is high art and high intrigue. This poem became a cornerstone of what it meant to be Greek. How does it begin?

Rage-Goddess. Sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous. Doomed.

That cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls.

Great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion.

Feasts for the dogs and birds.

And the will of Zeus was moving, toward its end.

Begin. Muse, when the two first broke and clashed. Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

The first word of the poem is “rage” and that word describes the entirety of the story. This war was fought because of rage. Rage of men and rage of the gods.

The starting point for the war was rage over a woman. Helen, wife of the Greek leader Menelaus, is taken away by the Trojan leader, Paris. It is unclear whether this was Helen’s choice, but that mattered little in the minds of those fighting. And at every moment, the gods took sides, helping their favorites.

It is a war over a woman, but it was far more than that. Just like World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, that was not a war about one man’s death but about long built up animosities across Europe and the desire to claim power. Even though it was a poem from ancient times, the Iliad is in many ways as familiar as recent history.

And, for the Greek people, it was definitional. It described a history of bravery and treachery, loyalty and violence, heroism and greed. Why might such a complicated story become so important? How do you follow a story when there are no clear candidates for good guys and bad guys?

Indeed, there were few morally upstanding figures in the poem. The great warrior Achilles sat sulking in his tent because he had to give up one of his slaves to the Greek leader, Agamemnon. Agamemnon was a selfish and petty man. As one of the few main characters to survive the long war, he returns to Greece only to be killed by his wife, who had taken up with another man.

And then there were the god themselves. Paris, the man who started the war, had been made the judge of a contest in which he was to award a golden apple to the most beautiful goddess of all. The goddesses all sought to convince Paris to give them the apple. That apple had been dropped by Eris the Goddess of Discord.

The goddess Hera offered him all of Europe and Asia. Athena offered him wisdom and prowess in battle. And Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Paris chose Aphrodite.

Again, why would this terrible tale become so important in the minds of the people of Ancient Greece? This story does not seem morally clear or ethically useful. The men are terrible and the gods are often worse. What is it about this epic that became so influential to the culture of Ancient Greece? It explained a complex and often cruel world in a way people recognized. It rang true even if it was not entirely pleasant.

One of the enduring characteristics of modern American culture is a desire to have clearly defined characters in our stories. We want our heroes to be heroic and our villains to be villainous. There should be happy endings and all bad behavior should be punished. That is how an American story should unfold.

But that is not the norm for most cultures. Stories can have unhappy endings. And these epic tales in particular, they often involve not only unhappy endings, but truly tragic passages throughout.

In the great Scandinavian sagas, the story ends when the world is destroyed in a fiery war that wipes out almost all of the gods and all but a single man and woman. A Viking Adam and Eve.

In the Indian epic the Mahabharata, the reluctant hero Arjuna is told by the god Krishna that it is his duty to fight in a war. A war that will end with most of his family and clan members dying, one side killing the other. It is in fact his religious obligation to do so.

And in the Iliad, most of the Greeks do not make it back home and almost none of the Trojans escape death or slavery.

Why are these ancient tales such downers? Why would we listen to any of that depressing stuff?

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

The Bible is in a sense a set of epic tales, tales we are called upon the remember. The Book of Exodus is a form of odyssey, a long and eventful journey or experience. Moses is a hero of sorts who speaks with God and helps the people escape slavery.

And yet those very people complain mightily about everything during that journey to the Promised Land. They break faith with God again and again. Even Aaron, Moses’ own brother, allows the people to melt down their jewelry to create the Golden Calf that causes God to punish the Hebrew people.

Most of the Bible is about people who break their covenant with God. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. The entire world gets flooded, minus Noah and his family. Abraham nearly sacrifices his son Isaac. These are not good guys in the American storytelling sense. None of them are. So why do we listen to these tales about troublemakers and evildoers every Sunday morning?

Before we turn to that question, let us consider another one. Many cultures have epic stories. The Ancient Greeks had the Iliad and the Odyssey. The English have the Arthurian legends. The Chinese have their many ancient classics. The peoples of Africa have many tales of heroes and gods, monsters and tricksters. The question then for us is: what is an American epic? Do we have one?

If we use the definition of a long poem, then we have plenty. “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman, for example. Some scholars have argued for that, but is that poem really a foundational story for America? Others have mentioned Mody Dick by Herman Melville, with its grand, mad struggle against nature in the form of the white whale. I think that is getting warmer.

But let’s think back to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Let’s think back to the Book of Exodus. These are ancient stories, but they are considered by their respective people as having happened. There was a war between Greece and Troy. There was a literal exodus, a long journey by Moses and his people. If we use that framework as our guide, I think there are stories that we can look to as foundational and descriptive. One is the American Revolutionary War. And the other is the American Civil War.

The Revolutionary War seems pretty on the nose. It is about how we began as a nation. It has episodes of bravery and loyalty and heroism. But think back to my description of the Iliad. It was not only about bravery and loyalty and heroism. It was also about treachery and violence and greed.

There was a lot more to that conflict than a noble fight for liberty. It was about taxes. Americans did not want to be paying taxes for England – some things never change. It was a war about religion. Americans were upset because the English king was giving religious freedom to Catholics in Canada. Not Catholics in England and Ireland, mind you, just in Canada because they wanted to keep the peace in this relatively new Catholic territory.

For some people it was a war about ideals, to be certain, but for many it was about being left alone. Which honestly is not a terrible goal in life.

The Civil War is also a good candidate for an American epic. It was a deadly struggle over the identity of a nation and its very existence. It is often described as brother against brother, family against family, but truthfully the North and the South were different in many ways. The South was primarily an agricultural area. It relied upon slavery to function. And the defense of slavery was the primary basis for the Southern states attempting to leave the Union. The North was more industrialized. Slavery was outlawed in most of the area. Maintaining the Union was the primary goal of the North.

Notice that I did not say abolishing slavery. I would argue that maintaining slavery was the main motivation for the South but maintaining the Union was the main motivation for the North. The elimination of slavery was an outcome of the war and, one might argue, it was a way of punishing and weakening the Southern states. Abolition was a byproduct of the conflict rather than its purpose.

How can I say that? After the war, the process of Reconstruction fizzled. The conditions of slavery were then over time transformed from legal ownership to crippling social restrictions. These were the Jim Crow laws that made it difficult for Blacks to live freely.

That was the South. What about the North? It was better. Better by degree. But one of the dirty secrets of that time was that even the most avid Union supporters and abolitionists did not believe that Blacks and whites were socially equal.

For example, William Llyod Garrison, a true political radical from Masschusetts, fought for many years against the institution of slavery with great fervor. And yet he held depressingly negative views about the abilities of Blacks because they had suffered under the harsh conditions of slavery. For those reasons, Garrison thought emancipated Blacks were not as able to function in society as whites. And Garrison was one of the most outspoken abolitionists.

I think the American Civil War is indeed the truest form of an epic story of the United States. Not because it is filled clear cut good guys and bad guys, though I will personally say that slavery was an unmitigated form of evil in every form and aspect. The Civil War reflects the complicated story of our nation, a story that was not resolved in 1865. A story continues to this very day.

And like many American stories, it has been heavily manipulated in its popular forms. That is how William Llyod Garrison becomes a hero of abolition without mentioning any of his shortcomings. I heard a radio interview this week taking a great leader in the 19^th century African American community, Booker T. Washington, to task. Why? He allowed desegregation to take root in the South, even as he raised funds from white donors to build what became strictly segregated schools.

And I will come right out and say it: the American desire for a happy ending is unrealistic. We want our heroes to be only that: heroic. We want to think of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as a great leader and statesman, but place aside that they owned slaves until the day they died.

Problems about race in America endure to the present day. I am guessing this comes as no surprise to anyone here. And one contributing factor, in my inexpert opinion of course, is that Americans are unwilling or unable to embrace the Civil War as our epic story.

Not as a story about how the North won. Not as a story about how the South will rise again. But as a truly an epic story like the Iliad, like the Book of Exodus. Stories filled with bravery and treachery, loyalty and violence, heroism and greed. Stories without a happy ending.

We have become a society that cannot stand shades of grey. We want happy endings where the guy gets the girl and the lost dog makes it home. We want comedy, not tragedy. No nuance need apply.

Our Founding Fathers were absolutely perfect, or they were irredeemable racists. The government will save us, or the government will be our downfall. We must trust doctors or scientists completely, or the intellectuals and the elites are out to destroy us.

This is not about choosing winning sports teams. It is about building and maintaining a society of over 300 million people who do not agree about everything. And in the not-too-distant past, that meant being able to compromise on important questions facing our society. But we no longer seem capable of placing aside our personal opinions and preferences for the greater good of society.

There is something infuriatingly puritanical about modern American politics. Purity without compromise. And I am not pointing to one side versus the other. You do not need to wipe away the past, even though some historic figures were less than perfect. And you do not need to defend every word or deed of someone because you think of them as a hero. The past needs to be remembered, not edited to our liking.

In Ancient Greece, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, heroes did terrible things even as they were being lifted up as heroes. “Hero” never meant perfect.

In the Bible, the crucial figures are all morally complicated. You should not build a life around the behavioral examples of Abraham or Isaac, Jacob or Joseph. The Bible is no less important because it is filled with cautionary tales about morally suspect people.

Which, as always, leads me to Jesus. The story of Jesus is not an epic tale in the sense I have been exploring today. It may be more like an odyssey, an eventful journey. But more importantly, Jesus represents a moral voice for how we are to live. He tells us stories to help guide us along the way. And he offered simple lessons so they would be easy to remember.

In our reading from Matthew, Jesus explains how we are to resolve arguments among ourselves. But that method of reaching out to a wayward brother or sister is not about browbeating them into agreeing with us. It is about reminding them of the relationships we have built and acting out those relationships in a spirit of love and concern. That relationship is in fact the method for expressing that love and concern.

 

It is not about ignoring the past or putting aside disagreements. It is not about one set of opinions being championed over another. It is about sorting out what we can within that relationship, but that can only happen when there is a relationship.

How do we build that fragile relationship back up? Maybe Coffee. Lunch, perhaps. Lots of talking. Lots of listening. A hefty shot of humility.

We create this society of ours everyday of our lives. We do so by the actions we take and do not take, the words we speak and do not speak. In theory, therefore, every social problem we face could disappear with the snap of our fingers. Feed the hungry. Yes. Build housing for the homeless. Okay. Stop the war. Let’s do that.

Those are unlikely outcomes, of course, but notice that they are not impossible. There is enough food to feed the world. There is enough housing in America right now for everyone – about 42 million units in 2021. We just need to buddy up.

And a war is often two sides waiting for the best moment to stop. And yet like our epic stories, that does not happen because we are complicated creatures. We do ourselves no great service when we ignore those complexities, but that is not where we should leave it.

We are not characters in a story, bound by any one ending. The Civil War taught us we could end slavery. We need to remember that hard lesson and remember that we are the authors of our fates. Remembering those epic stories is not about repeating them. It is about learning from the past to make for a better future. The value of the story is not to live it out, but this time to live it better. Amen.