Living the Questions: A Complex Web of Connection
April 22, 2007
Acts 9:1-6 / John 21:1-19
Historic St. George?s United Methodist Church
Fred Day
_____
I cringed at the jarring opening of today?s scripture reading: ?Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder?? (Acts 9:1) The phrase eerily reflects the news of this past week, and our struggle to make sense of all that took place:
-Monday, Blacksburg Virginia, 33 dead
-The next day, bombs in Baghdad killed 180 some.
-A Philadelphia teenager playing with a handgun in his basement accidentally killed himself, and the murder rate of our city continues to grow.
-We?ve pretty much turned a deaf ear to Sudan and the genocide there, overwhelmed, desensitized, or living in denial.
We have heard quite enough about ?breathing threats and murder,? thank you.
Whether hearing the words of pre-converted Paul or reading the crawl across CNN on the TV screen, we are ?senseless-violence??ed out. We are ?breathing threats and murder??ed out. In the words of the old Negro spiritual: ?How long, O Lord, how long?? (I know the answer in that song is ?Not long!? But God, it feels like it?s taking so long!) I came to church this morning, you think, and the first words out of the Bible are ?breathing threats and murder?? I could get this from Bill O?Reilly.
In Blacksburg, not only were the comfort zones of the college campus, or family?s getting ready for graduations, or students pulling all-nighters to make the grade shattered. Each of us, once again, received the painful reminder that we are vulnerable in an unexpected instant to a world ?breathing threats and murder.?
What is the Bible doing talking this way? It is telling us that life and faith and church are not the Sunday strolls or the tamed three point explanations of life we?d like them to be, as much a word and witness to God?s presence surrounding all of life ? good and bad, suffering and celebration. This word and witness frame our lives with questions (more than answers!) such as Saul heard from a blinding vision of Jesus: ?Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me?? and then in the gospel, the risen Jesus to Peter, ?Do you love me??
In the midst of their being broken ? Saul as tormentor of the people of ?the Way,? or Peter and the other disciples as heart-broken disappointers to their teacher?s vision of God?s kingdom ? the God of goodness and mercy chasing after them comes at them with questions. As God comes to us, all the days of our lives.
How Saul and Peter and others respond to these questions converts them from enemy to ambassador, from doubters to recognizers.
We would do well to listen to both the divine and practical questions begged by the events of this week, and from all the violence surrounding us. Like Paul, some scales fell off my blinded eyes; like the disciples, I heard a call to feeding and tending for Jesus? sake in what I witnessed following the Blacksburg rampage.
Witness One: There is holy power; there is Spirit power in people coming together. What impressed me most in the response was the way the college community came together; how the people in that community immediately, instinctively spoke about ?Hokie Spirit? and ?Hokie Pride;? how clear it was the Virginia Tech community wanted and needed to be together on the quad, in candlelight vigil, not rushing to mass exodus.
The voices from the outside looked immediately for explanation and blaming, while the Virginia Tech community looked immediately to each other. Their response to the unimaginable shock and horror loosed in their community: ?this is a good place, this is a good school, we are good people, this is a caring, supportive community,? they said to each other and to others.
A speaker at one of the prayer vigils, a woman of Hindu faith, told a parable about broken bones. When bones are broken, the pieces are brought together, she said. They are set in place with one another; they are positioned together. In so doing the broken pieces are set in place so that the body can do what it lives to do ? to begin healing and knitting the broken to wholeness and strength.
Then she said, ?How do broken hearts heal??
?In the same way,? she said. ?We bring the broken pieces together and let the body do what it wants to do instinctively ? to loose its healing power, to make the broken whole. It doesn?t happen immediately. There will be limping along and need for support. But bringing the broken together is what effects healing.?
Witness the powers of community; the power of the Spirit in community. The community of Virginia Tech shows a powerful image of what God intends for the community of faith. One of the oldest words for ?church? is the Greek word ?ecclesia,? meaning ?assembly.? We have a way of making religion a private affair ? about God & me, me & God. Everyone else ought to butt out. We have a way of being the church/ecclesia that can leave people standing alone in crowd.
What we have witnessed this week is a reminder that there are no ?lone-rangers? when it comes to making and keeping faith. We need each other. We are connected to each other. Something is broken in life when we are not doing well together. One of the stark contrasts of this week is the description of Cho Seung-hui as a loner, one that couldn?t, for whatever reason, find a way into community.
One interpretation of Jesus? parable about the lost sheep, the one about the ninety and nine in safety and the one stray, says the joy in heaven isn?t only for the lost one being found, but equally for the community, which was incomplete without the lost one.
There is some Holy Spirit serendipity in today being Earth Day. We hear the Native American prayers that called us to worship speaking about a web of life and the circle that connects us.
What I witnessed ? for all the horror, tragedy and brokenness in Blacksburg is nothing less than the power of the Spirit coming to life in community; an image of the community of faith that might teach us something about what God intends for our coming together.
Witness Two: The voice of the poet. I heard the voice of God speak through the voice of the Virginia Tech poet Nickki Giovanni at one of the college community gatherings:
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 Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to know when to cry and sad enough to know when to laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by some rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in the crib, in the crib his father made with his own hands, being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hoky nation embraces our own with open hearts and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave, we are innocent and afraid. We are better than we think, not quite who we want to be. We are alive with imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and our tears, through all this sadness. We are the Hokies. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.
Amidst the cacophony of voices about the events of the week, this one rang out as most holy, hopeful and true. It was not the voice of one speaking flat prose, news copy, endless interview questions, critique, or formulas or manuals for change. It was words born of deep presence and reflection, listening to broken hearts and broken people ?breathing threats and murders,? but listening also for something more: listening for the soul.
If we could have heard the conversation from Jesus? resurrection breakfast on the beach with the disciples, I imagine it would have sounded like Giovanni?s words.
There are and will be times for words from reporters, historians, analyzers, news anchors, evaluators, psychologists, lawyers and law makers. But the words of the poet give us our deeper bearing, create vision, and chart the course to hope and change we might dare not imagine without them.
God?s prophets were poets. They, with Jesus used to say after they spoke such words: ?If you have ears, listen.? God open our ears.
Witness Three: A vigilant eye for the lost and lonely. A prayer posted on the web said:
Lord, I cannot help but wonder
what disrupted this man?s life
so much that he would explode into a campus
to interrupt so many lives.
I cannot help but wonder
if we missed him when he cried out in pain;
if we missed the opportunity to touch his life
before he took theirs.
Almighty God, open our eyes
to the way we touch those around us
and ways to stop the plague of violence that lurks among us.
Our hearts are with the thirty-two victims of this senseless violence, and their families in unimaginable grief and loss; our hearts go out to parents and families in Baghdad, parents of service men and women in Baghdad or soon to be there; and to the likes of so many who acutely feel the breath of ?threats and murder.? But never to the exclusion the Cho Seung-hui and his family. Neither for Dylan Klebold nor Eric Harris of Columbine. Nor Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City. And how somehow we have missed them. How, as in that parable of the lost sheep, is isn?t only for the benefit of the lost and lonely that we must find a way to find them, but to the benefit of life itself, and joy in heaven ? because without them we are not whole.
From our Methodist beginnings, preachers have talked about reaching the ?least, the lost and the lonely? with the good news of God?s love. In fact, there was many an instance when the preacher, so caught up in the Spirit, would actually begin to weep over the thought of someone not experiencing the love of God in his or her life. Times like these, we know and feel why they were moved to tears.
God, open our eyes to people in pain. God, help us to touch them with a gospel of life-changing love. It will not be easy. We Methodists have been called mealy-mouthed, mushy and irrational ? all this talk of God?s overwhelming love. We will fail sometimes. We will not be able to save everyone. But God, never let us quit reaching out to loose Divine love to the least, the lost and the lonely.
And more than that ? God, help overcome this national epidemic of violence ? the antithesis of Divine love. God, awaken us from our denial at this national addiction.
The stories we heard from the readings today ? jarring as the words ?breathing threats and murder? sound ? end in dramatic turning. Lives are restored and sent forth: Paul, from being a Christian killer to its greatest ambassador; Peter, from being one of the greatest Christian failures to become the church?s foundation.
We need a conversion story, too. Personally, and as a people: not just the sawdust trail or 700 Club kind either.
I want to tell you about my friend Celeste Zappala. Almost three years ago to the day, she called me with the horrible news that her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, had been killed by an IUD in Baghdad. I was her pastor at the time.
Working through the shock, hurt, loss, grief literally brought her to her knees in weeping and sighing too deep for words.
To lose a child in any way, but especially in this way, was the worst day of her life. (Celeste is a social worker by trade ? so she been around some hurtful painful things with others. But this was her son.) She vowed that Sherwood?s death would not be a life that was lost, but promised him and her family that Sherwood?s life would become a means for other lives to be found; that Sherwood?s life would lose no more to this senseless war.
Celeste founded an organization called Gold Star Families for Peace, a gathering for the families of service men and women for coming together to both support their children in the service AND speak out against the war at the same time. And speak out they have, on every platform and podium, to every president and politician and pundit they can. Gold Star Families is a leading voice to end the war in Iraq. Celeste is responsible for bringing the ?Eyes Wide Open? exhibit of empty boots and dog tags of service men and women killed ? and Iraqi women and children killed ? to the lawn of the National Park Visitor Center for the last two years.
Celeste?s story is a conversion story no less than Paul?s or Peter?s or yours and mine because in each of them, the forces of death are thrown in reverse to move forward with the force, the spirit, the Holy Spirit of life.
We need a conversion story too: from the epidemic of violence and death to the things that make for life and healing.
Lord, like you did with Paul, blind us by your light until the scales of breathing threats and murder fall of our eyes and we are filled with your peace and presence and love to change the world. Amen.
