A Sermon About the Torture Issue: Imagine the Sojourner

St. Paul’s Church, Richmond, Virginia 2009

 

A Sermon About the Torture Issue:
"Imagine the Sojourner"

 

This sermon is adapted from a chapter that Fleming Rutledge contributed to a collection of articles against torture, soon to be published.

 

Fourth in a series of Lenten sermons by Fleming Rutledge

 

Justice is the topic for Lent at St. Paul’s. The first two sermons this week were focused on the knowledge of God. Without the knowledge of God, justice can become an abstraction. So the plan for the first two sermons was to lay a foundation for this final sermon in this week’s series.

 

Today, we will touch upon a topic that preachers all across this country have been avoiding ever since it became relevant on September 11, 2001. I preached on this topic once before, during the Bush administration, and several people stomped out.[1] Somehow I think that you, under this new administration, may be more receptive.

 

In 2002, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction was a book by Samantha Power called A Problem from Hell. Its subject is the genocides of the 20^th century, beginning with the Turkish massacre of the Armenians and continuing through to Rwanda in the 1990s. If Samantha Power has one theme above all, it is failure of imagination. She identifies one person for each genocide who tried tirelessly and at great personal cost to warn the world, only to be met with varying degrees of disbelief and incomprehension.[2] She identifies this lack of response as a lack of imagination. In the sermon yesterday we heard a story about the members of an all-white jury who could not imagine the innocent black defendant as if he were a member of their own family. In a similar way on a larger scale, government officials, diplomats, United Nations personnel, the intelligence community, congressmen, senators and presidents—they could not or would not imagine genocide, so they passed on it. In recent years, the journalist Nicholas Kristof has been the voice in the wilderness for Darfur; he has never ceased trying to help his readers to imagine what is still going on in Darfur.[3]

 

The point here is that sympathy and pity are not enough. Sympathy and pity come to the other person or group as if from a distance, from a safe height. Imagination, empathy, and understanding, however, arrive on the same level as the person in need. Empathy requires effort, the effort to imagine what it is like to be that other person or group, even when they appear to be utterly unlike oneself and not worthy of our consideration.[4]

 

Our text today is from the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, one of the five books of the Torah:

 

The Lord your God…loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. (Deut. 10:19)

 

More than forty times in the Torah, the Lord speaks of the sojourner(s). This is not a word we use very much in everyday conversation, but it is very important in biblical thought.[5] The sojourner is one who comes into a culture from a different race, class, or creed and lives essentially as a refugee. God expects his people Israel to have special regard for the sojourner. The people of the covenant are asked, in effect, to imagine themselves into the place of the sojourner, to see things from the sojourner’s perspective. The motivation for the care of the sojourner arises out of the memory of the community about what God has done for them. In Deuteronomy, the people of God are to remember that they too, once upon a time, were sojourners. They were slaves in Egypt before the Lord delivered them at the Red Sea and forged them into a nation. So their mandate to care for the sojourner arises out of their own experience of having been in a foreign land at the mercy of someone else. That’s what they must not forget. Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. God loves the sojourner. That’s the primary fact. Therefore and for that reason, God’s elect people show love for the sojourner—not because of legal notions of universal rights or general moral principles, but out of the power of the shared story of salvation through which God has revealed God’s self, God’s nature.

 

We began this sermon series with Abraham, the original sojourner. The story of Abraham is the story of a man who left his ancestral land at the command of God and never again had a permanent home anywhere. He became a permanent illegal alien, if you will. The New Testament picks up the theme: “Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land…” (Hebrews 11:9). The letter to the Hebrews then opens up the category of sojourner to include all Christians. We aren’t wandering in the land of Canaan, we aren’t serving under the lash in Egypt, but Scripture declares that we are a new kind of foreigner now; we are “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:14-16) because our true home is in the Kingdom of God.[6] So the motif of the sojourner in Scripture is carried forward as a figure of speech to denote our status as aliens. Some of the important novelists, especially our Southern ones, have referred to this. Walker Percy, for instance, created a whole gallery of characters who cannot accommodate things as they are in this world. They are not “adjusted.” One of them says, “I cannot tolerate this age.”[7] This is the sojourner theme, the theme of the person who is not at home. There’s a sense in which this applies to all Christians who are serious about their faith. There’s something wrong with the setup in this world and we are not meant to be content with it.

 

So the people who are literally refugees, literally “strangers and exiles” are representatives of the rest of us. They are living out what we try to ignore. Migrant workers, illegal immigrants, homeless people are reminders to us of something we don’t want to think about—our own essential vagrancy and homelessness apart from God. In Deuteronomy, God calls for acts of imagination on our part to overcome this denial, this amnesia, this failure to identify our own situation with that of the refugee:

 

The Lord your God…loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

 

For you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. The Lord says to his people: Remember that you were powerless in the hands of an enemy population. Remember that you would still be enslaved were it not for my mighty acts of deliverance; you would be forgotten skeletons in the wilderness without the food, water, guidance, and protection I, the Lord, provided. Imagine these things, remember these things, says the Lord, and you will understand why I have commanded you to care for the sojourner. In this way God asks us to imagine the condition of the sojourner the way God sees him.

 

Here’s an example of someone lacking imagination. When the photographs of the terrible abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were published, I was listening to the radio and I heard one of our United States Senators say on the radio that he didn’t see what the fuss was about. He didn’t see much difference between what the Americans did to their prisoners and the things he had go through when he was being toughened up in the Marine Corps.[8] This is an astonishing failure of imagination. The Marine recruit is in training for a powerful role, in company with other men who will become his comrades, men who will fight together and even die for each other. The prisoner, however, no matter what evil he may or may not have done, is entirely at the mercy of his enemies, surrounded by those who wish him no good, cut off from every possible source of support or relief. For the Senator not to see that, not to grasp that distinction, is an example of the moral failure that led our country into disgrace around the world..

 

The difference between a criminal or terrorist when he is free to function and one who has become a captive is a difference of power and powerlessness. Once a person or a group becomes powerless, then they have become sojourners, living in territory controlled by someone else. By definition, a sojourner is at the mercy of some other group. For this reason God cares in a particular way about all sorts of prisoners. It is no accident that Jesus spoke so incisively about prisoners. God, it seems, has special concern for prisoners and they are commended to us for particular care. I read an article by a man who served as a prison guard at Sing Sing for a year in order to write a book, a book which later won the National Book Critics Award. This man wrote, “It is a heady thing to have prisoners at your mercy…The true test of [a prison] officer, the [prison] system, and indeed the nation [is]: how will you treat those who are helpless before you?”[9]

 

            Another Abraham—President Lincoln—said that nearly all men can withstand adversity; but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.[10] As the most powerful nation—for the present—we Americans have been especially tested. We became like those whom the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk describes, men who exhibit “an easy confidence known only to those for whom it has become second nature to decide other people’s fates.”[11] That “easy confidence” stunts imagination. Easy confidence does not do the work of empathy. This is always the danger for the powerful.

 

            Do not think me naïve. I have read extensively about the French in Algeria, the British in Ireland, the Israeli special forces. I have read many articles and essays by and about those who interrogate “the worst of the worst.” But during the years since 9/11, there have been significant numbers of Americans who have done the work of imagining what it is like to be without human contact, without sleep, without sight of the sky.[12] I have a file about these people: they are FBI agents, military lawyers, retired generals and admirals.[13] These are people who are deeply concerned about what happens to the souls of people who torture other people, deeply concerned about the soul of a nation that, in the words of Dick Cheney, “goes over to the dark side.” The French in Algeria are an especially interesting case. Torture “worked” in Algeria in the sense of gathering information about future strikes and destroying the terrorist infrastructure of the FLN. But France was eventually defeated in Algeria. The battle for hearts and minds was utterly lost and the whole world is now paying that price. Therefore torture is today widely condemned in France. General Jacques Massu, who was the commander in Algeria, was interviewed by Le Monde many years later. He said, “When I look back on Algeria, it saddens me…One could have done things differently.” [14]

 

Remember the sojourner. Remember the prisoners and captives. A captive who is powerless is our ethical responsibility no matter what he has done, because we also were powerless. We were powerless in the grip of Sin and Death until the One who was at a great height came below. The Son of God stepped out of his position and made himself of no consequence. He gave up his power and placed himself at the mercy of torturers—torturers acting in the name of the greatest empire and the best religion in the world. In the manner of his life and of his death, Jesus Christ took upon himself the representative status of the sojourner with nowhere to lay his head, no one to come to his defense in a foreign land, no one to protect him from his enemies—that is to say, from ourselves. For this is the radical nature of the Christian gospel: when we look at a prisoner, no matter how evil we think him to be, we say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

 

Christian, imagine therefore the sojourners, and hold them in your heart as fellow sufferers like yourself, even as Christ knowingly suffered torture and death. And out of the love of Christ we will teach the next generations: remember the story; remember who we are before the Lord. In the words of Deuteronomy:

 

Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall serve the Lord your God  and cleave to him…He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you these great and terrible things which your eyes have seen. Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons; and now the Lord your God has made you as the stars of heaven for multitude. You shall therefore love the Lord your God, and keep his charge, his statutes, his ordinances, and his commandments for ever.                                   (Deuteronomy 10:19-22)

 

AMEN.