Sermon Year C, Easter 3
"Adonai, my lord, my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. Sing praises to God, O you faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name. For God's anger is but for a moment; God's favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning." (Psalm 30:2, 4-5)
On Wednesday, a small group of us gathered here to remember the students and faculty killed at Virginia Tech and to pray for their families, friends and colleagues. It was a dark moment in the middle of our joyous season of Easter.
The spiritual journey is marked by moments of elated joy and deep, dark, dread and bone-shaking grief. Our journey to Easter began with a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where the peasants, the poor, the lepers and the outcasts proclaimed Jesus as king. And yet by the end of the week, Jesus was betrayed by a friend, spit on, whipped, tried as a political dissident and nailed to the hard wood of the cross and mocked until he died. And then, three days later he was raised and greeted the disciples with a word of peace.
This week we hear the stories of transformation of two leaders in the early church. Their stories are marked by betrayal and redemption and each was so changed by their encounter with Jesus that they received new names and missions. Their former identities just couldn’t contain the new reality that God called out of them.
Simon was a bumbling fisherman. A bit thickheaded, it often took him longer than the other disciples to grasp the teachings, but he also was the first to jump in the water. He charged forward, but he often second-guessed himself. In many respects, Simon was self-centered, but Jesus gave him the name Peter and called him to a wider reality. However, when Jesus was captured, Peter denied his relationship with Jesus three times, but Jesus gave him another opportunity to proclaim his allegiance. "Simon son of John, do you love me? ... Feed my sheep." Peter's forgiveness and reconciliation is just the beginning of his calling to lead the community. Peter's is a story of betrayal, redemption, and vocation.
Likewise, Saul's story is of persecution, transformation, and mission. A Pharisee, Saul was a merciless persecutor of the early Christians. He would hunt them down and throw them in jail. However, God interrupts his life so radically that he is never the same again. His eyes are opened to a new reality, a deeper mission and calling. Again, the change is so radical that his name is changed to Paul. He became one of the greatest evangelists and servants. Ultimately enduring imprisonment for his faith. We cannot encounter the living God and remain the same.
Both of their stories are marked by points of profound joy and elation as well as points of fear, pain, isolation and betrayal. Indeed, all of our spiritual journeys are marked by moments of elated joy and deep, dark, dread and bone-shaking grief.
This week we hit one of those moments of darkness. I think it's easy to cry out to God and ask Why!? Why, what plan is this part of? We instinctively want answers, we want accountability, we want justice.
The preacher and emergent church leader Brian McLaren wrote this week that:
We hope that the pressure can be released and the rage relieved by finding an outlet in explaining ... or in naming, blaming, and shaming someone for being at fault. There is certainly a time for seeking explanations, including investigating fault.
But I find we make a mistake in believing that explaining and blaming will help us escape our pain. Pain in times like this, I believe, is not simply something to be escaped, resolved, fixed.
Instead, it is something to be suffered, something that must, in a sense, crash over us like a wave or knock us down like a fever, shake us so that we truly feel our feelings and name them; so that we can speak of them and share them and feel an exchange with others of sympathy, empathy, common grief, and common sorrow. (Click here to read his full commentary)
McLaren points to the commonality of suffering and the universality of the cross. Jesus violent death is a profound sign that God will go anywhere with us, even to senseless and horrific death.
Our own grief connects us to the grief of others. Our tragedy points to other tragedies.
At the memorial service, Virginia Tech professor and poet Nikki Giovanni said this:
We are Virginia Tech.
We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are strong enough to know when to cry and sad enough to know we must laugh again.
We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. (Click here to hear her full remarks)
When I read the headlines on Monday, I also saw that almost 200 people had been killed in suicide bombings in Iraq. In the time it took to Cho to kill 32 other children of God, 2400 children died of hunger, malnutrition and preventable diseases.
No one deserves a tragedy.
When confronted with the horror of a tragedy like the Virginia Tech shooting or the overwhelming magnitude of global poverty or the centuries of conflict that mark the Middle East, it can be easy to want to retreat to the safety of our homes and our church. We seek the secure, the definite, and the known. We look for security and stability.
In the context of Christianity, we have tendency to make this about a personal relationship with God. And God does indeed desire a profound and transformative relationship with each and every one of us, but it would be a mistake to assume that professing love for God is the end of the story. Instead, love for God must be translated into an active love for our neighbors. If we love God, then we must love those who suffer, those are on the margins, those forgotten or ignored, those afflicted with disease or war.
What will we do? Will we respond to a crisis by awakening to other crises? Will we turn inward and insist that the church focus only on itself?
As a church, we've adopted the Millennium Development Goals as our mission priority. These goals center on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. We have an incredible opportunity to end poverty in our lifetime, but it will require us to be changed by God. This July, July 2007, marks the halfway point from when the Millennium Development Goals were established and 2015 which is the first key benchmark year.
I fear that we may not make it, because we will get distracted by other things. It's easy to applaud noble causes, but not actually get involved ourselves or not risk losing our lives.
Time and again we have the opportunity to reach out to our neighbors that suffer from mental illness. Time and again we have the opportunity to offer food to the hungry or homes to the homeless. We have been invited by God into the transformation and redemption of not just ourselves, but in fact the entire world. What will you do when you leave church this morning?
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said:
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity...Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too Late." ... Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the [children of God], and our brothers [and sisters] wait eagerly for our response. (A Time to Break Silence, April 1967)
33 Children of God did not have to die at Virginia Tech. 200 people did not have to die in a suicide bombing. 2400 children did not have to die of hunger and disease.
"Simon son of John, do you love me more than these? ... Feed my lambs"
"Simon son of John, do you love me? ... Tend my sheep"
"Simon son of John, do you love me? ... Feed my sheep"