Colossians: Violence, Progress and Peace - Part Five: Questioning Violence

10.24 [Sermon] Colossians: Violence, Progress and Peace - Part Five - "What is violence?" At first glance, it may seem like a strange question and yet the word "violence" is very important for our culture and in recent years has acquired a much broader usage. Many things other than direct bodily harm are often labeled a form of violence.

 

So when we contemplate the idea of violence, whether we prefer a wider or more narrow understanding of the word, we must come to grips with what it means to do violence to something. And, we begin to understand that when order, time, love and care have been invested into anything whether a person, an artwork, a garden, a system, etc... Only then can any one of these things fall victim to violence. If nothing is ordered to anything, then it is impossible to do violence to anything.