Episodes
Sunday Apr 21, 2013
Teaching the teacher
Sunday Apr 21, 2013
Sunday Apr 21, 2013
Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-25
Anyone else feel a little anxious this week in spite of yourself when you were standing in a crowd at a Metro stop or waiting to get into the ballpark? Anyone else in spite of yourself look suspiciously at people wearing back packs? Anyone else feel self-conscious because you were wearing a backpack?
We had Foundry members at the Boston Marathon last Monday. A mother and daughter from Foundry were there to cheer on their sister and aunt who was running in the marathon. She ran faster than she expected to, so they had left the finish line and were in a taxi on the way back to the hotel when they heard the sirens and knew something had happened.
The mother said that she could not help think about the role of randomness and chance in life.
The thing about Boston is that we have not yet recovered from Newtown.
What do these meaningless acts of violence mean? I don’t know what to call them. Sick? Psychotic? Evil? How do we even name them?
It is odd when we are relieved that an explosion in a fertilizer factory in Texas that killed 14 and injured 200 was caused not by terrorism but only by human negligence. The factory had not been inspected for two years.
How do we think about Boston and Newtown and the Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting, and the VA Tech shootings and the Amish schoolgirls’ shootings and 9-11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and endless violence in Israel and the list goes on and on? What does all this violence tell us about human nature … who we are as human beings? What does it tell us, if anything, about God? What does it tell us about the way we need to live our lives in a violent and dangerous world?
All this raises lots of questions and real questions, if we are honest: real everyday kinds of questions, about how we treat others, especially strangers and people who look differently or act differently or believe differently. What kind of world do we live in?
I want to go back to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
All this Easter season we are studying an Easter account found only in the Gospel of Luke. It is about two of Jesus’ disciples who are walking from Jerusalem to a little town named Emmaus seven miles away.
They are disheartened and confused because of Jesus’ crucifixion.
A stranger joins them on their walk to Emmaus. It is Jesus but they do not recognize him.
Jesus asks them what they are talking about.
They tell him their story … the story of following Jesus for three years believing that he was a messiah sent from God to bring a new kingdom of justice and inclusion to Israel but how instead he had been crucified and their hopes had been dashed.
Not knowing it was Jesus they tell Jesus how much he has disappointed them.
Isn’t that almost what we are feeling this week after the Boston Marathon and only four months after the Newtown shootings?
Disappointed because we had hoped that the Newtown would at least lead to some kind of gun control. The bill defeated in the Senate wasn’t that big a step … it would have only expanded background checks and banned assault weapons and high capacity magazines … but even it could not pass Congress in spite of most Americans wanting it.
We are still such a violent world, still such a violent people.
Jesus is still crucified daily.
What are we to make of all this violence?
Here is the New Testament story: God sent Jesus into the world to teach us and show us how to live with one another even though God well knew that Jesus might be crucified … probably would be crucified.
The way I put this sometimes is to say that God did not childproof the Garden of Eden. God created us with human freedom … the freedom to love each other or destroy each other. The freedom to live loving and productive lives … the freedom to destroy ourselves. The freedom to help or hurt each other.
God created us with radical freedom and then sent Jesus to show us how to live knowing that Jesus might well be rejected and scorned and crucified because God was confident that we had the capacity to learn from the cross … that we have the capacity to learn from our own violence how to live together with justice and inclusion and peace.
This is at its core the essential meaning of resurrection and Easter. We can do the worst imaginable to God and yet God will not give up on us because God has confidence in us that we can learn to live together in love.
God is not naïve. God knows that it may take millenniums. God knows that it may take not just one revelation, not just one religion, but six or seven or more, that it may take not just religion but science and medicine and ways of understanding ourselves that we have not discovered yet.
But God is confident that humanity can and will learn from our pain how to live together decently and lovingly and justly and peacefully.
When the disciples on the road to Emmaus had told Jesus, not having recognized who he was, how much he had disappointed them, Jesus said to them: “O how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe…”
I’ve been studying the Greek text this week and this is the way I think what Jesus said to the disciples might be translated: “O how clueless you are and how quick to be defeated …”
God believes we can learn how to live together the way Jesus showed us how to live. The resurrection is God saying to us – you have done an awful thing but you can become better because of this. You had hoped Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel, but I hope you can be the ones to redeem the world.
I want to quote Pat Robertson this morning. Actually I want to quote him and try to find something positive in what he said. Stay with me here.
This week Pat Robertson blamed the Boston bombing and the Texas fertilizer factory explosion on our nation’s growing acceptance of gays and liberals. The exact quote is “God has seen this in the moral fabric of this country and has responded with three straight days of violence as a warning against our acceptance of these gays/liberals.”
OK, let’s be perfectly clear that I am not agreeing with what Pat Robertson said. Matter of fact I watch what Pat Robertson says regularly in order to remind myself that it is possible for preachers to go on preaching too long, well after their brains have stopped working right.
Robertson, of course, assumes wrongly that God was responsible for these bombings. And he assumes wrongly that God hates gays and liberals.
But I want to give Pat Robertson credit for this. He is asking the question of whether we can learn anything about the way we are living from all of this violence. His answer is wring but he may be asking the right question. He is asking whether these acts of violence mean that there is something wrong in our culture and our way of thinking and our way of relating to each other. He is asking whether these acts of violence mean there are ways we need to change.
It is not enough to say that there are sick or disturbed individuals who do horrific things in our world. We need to ask what in us as individuals and as a culture feeds this violence.
God believes there is nothing so awful that happens in the world that we cannot learn from it. There is nothing so God-awful that –if we look it in the face and feel the pain of it—that we can grow as a result of it.
It may not happen in one lifetime. But each of us has an assignment … an assignment on behalf of eternity. Our assignment is to move the world forward at least one tiny step, one inch, one centimeter, in at least one way in our lifetime.
There are infinite possibilities about how we can do this. It may be through politics, it may be through the way we raise our children, it may be through the way we relate to a difficult relative or co-worker or neighbor, it may be by a great act of heroism, it may be by a simple act of sacrifice.
Maybe the Boston bombing has not affected you much. Maybe you have not found yourself being anxious in crowds or nervous around backpacks.
But if you have been affected there are one of two ways to respond … We can let this makes us a more fearful, suspicious people. We can be more careful around strangers. We can put better burglar alarms in our homes. We can stop running in marathons and five Ks.
Or we can ask how we can move the world a centimeter closer to peace … we can decide to support our youth trip to Turkey to learn about Muslem-Christian understanding, we can come hear Marian Wright Edlemann talk next Sunday about working for gun control, we can reach out to an angry teenager and invite them to talk, invite them to church.
Did we think peace and justice would come easily or quickly or magically? Then we are foolish … clueless. Do we think it will never come? Then we are slow of heart and quick to lose courage. Then we have less confidence in ourselves than the resurrected Christ has.
Our assignment is to move the world closer to the Kingdom of God … one lifetime … one centimeter … in one way.
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