Visions of Peace in the Time of Violence

A Reflection for II Easter              All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC April 12, 2015                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 4:32-35 Psalm 133 1 John 1:1-2:2 John 20:19-31

 

Visions of Peace in the Time of Violence

This is actually the second part of the Easter Sermon from last week. I spoke of the Empty Tomb which I saw as a Holy Vision that transcends our limited senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and time as well as our limited rational concepts of reality, granting us vision into a deeper and spiritual reality. We remember Teilhard de Chardin's insight that “we are not just human beings having a 'Spiritual Experience’; we are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.” Both realities exist at the same time, sides of the same coin, having to be viewed by different sides of the same brain - the rational, language-based left brain and the imaginative, symbolic-based right side. Let me give you an example: if I asked an engineer to describe this room, s/he would give us the dimensions, the angles of structure, the composition of materials and other facts. But if I asked an artist who actively worships here to describe her/his experience in this worship space, s/he would add a deeper spiritual dimension. Now, which encounter is the right one? It depends on the relationship and the questions we ask. If we only use one side of our brain, we miss the whole picture.

In the Gospel lesson for today, the author of John recounts two Holy Visions when the Resurrected Christ appears to the disciples. They are filled with fear, the author tells us, of the crowd that killed Jesus with a legal lynching. In this Holy Vision Jesus appears to his disciples and they see him in their midst. His presence is a response to their fear, and he breathes on them, giving them peace with his spirit. If we are wedded to rational experiences limited to our senses, we would say that nothing happened but a mass delusion. But if we talked with the disciples, they would say that Christ came into their frightened lives to give them power to forgive their enemies who killed Jesus and to forgive themselves, they who deserted him in his hour of need. This risen Christ, this Cosmic Christ who was at the beginning of all creation, not only comforted them but gave them the power to change their lives from a leaderless group of scared, disheartened, depressed folk with no hope to courageous, hopeful representatives of a new movement speaking a deeper truth about their Jesus experience. The proof of the resurrection was not in physical proof but in the lives that were changed and through whom the world is changed.

Wonderful Caravaggio painting 1601-1602  -original is in Potsdam I have only seen it in copies

One of the disciples, Thomas, was not there and, saddled with a literal, left-brainer mind, he felt sorry for his friends who were laboring under a delusion. Remember Thomas was pointed out earlier in John's Gospel, and each of the three times he appears he is called “Didymus”- the twin. Matthew, Mark and Luke do not give him the nickname, and none of them remember what he had to say; only John. The twin of who? The author of John does not say. But suppose we don't look for facts and instead ask what is the symbolic image of a twin. A twin is a person who looks the same as another person since he was separated in the womb from the twin; he has a different way of looking at the world. A twin can be seen as a different side of the same coin. So, right away you know you are not in Kansas anymore. 

The three times Thomas is mentioned before are:

1.    After the death of Lazarus where he sees that the return to Bethany could only bring more death, whereas Jesus returns to Bethany to bring life.

2.    When Jesus speaks of dwelling with God and Thomas asks for directions to a physical place.

3.    When the disciples share their experience and he points out that he needs to place his fingers in the pierced hands of Jesus and to place his hand into the wounded side.

Therefore, it seems Thomas is the twin, the symbol of those who only use rational facts to understand reality, which would also be the twin of most of those people who do not have the spiritual experience of meeting the Cosmic Christ, the resurrected Jesus.

But there is more; it is in this next encounter that he makes a journey to touch the wounds, the rips in the Cosmic Christ. As I imagine entering into this vision, I would see Thomas as that part of myself that needs to touch the wounds caused by the love of violence and the abuse of power in this world. Part of believing in the presence of Christ is to change me so that I can no longer ignore the evidence in the political, social, physical, and economic violence in this broken world. Thomas' response, my twin's response, is not to ask for revenge when he touches the wounds of Jesus, but to go deeper into the non-violent response to the violence by asking the Risen Lord, the Cosmic power, to change him into the forgiving person that the rest of the disciples became. The power to forgive is a Spiritual gift - it is not something of which we are humanly capable.

Forgiveness is a process. It begins when there is a behavior which causes harm, and it was intentionally done with the knowledge that hurt would happen. If there is no harm and only my pride was hurt, that does not need forgiveness - only getting over myself. If there was no intention, only an accident, that does not need forgiveness, only an awareness that we live in a universe in which accidents happen. If it was a crime, I need to make the authorities aware of the crime so that others will not be hurt. If it was not a crime, but there was a hurt and it was intentional and it was done with the knowledge that hurt would happen, then forgiveness is

your/my option since, without it, the hurt will draw me to seek/cause me to destroy my peace by seeking revenge or wallowing in bitterness.

The steps of forgiveness are (1) to acknowledge the reality by bringing it to the attention of the offending person and admitting my own feelings about what happened. The other person is not going to change if they don't pay attention to the reality of her/his actions. (2) To suggest ways in which the relationship might be healed and (3) Forgive them by recognizing that the only power I have is the power to change how I respond - I have no power over making the other person change. If there is reconciliation, fine, but if there is not, bless them on their way and find a new relationship.

Since God gives us all peace, then we are to be peace-bearers to the rest of creation, and all of us are called to be like Thomas and open the eyes of our spirit and touch the torn fabric that violence does to our creation. This has been a ministry of the church from the beginning: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

Where is the violence? I remember part of my ministry in a previous city almost 30 years ago was to go to the places where an act of violence had been done and, with a group of others, mainly a Roman Catholic Peace group led by a friend, gather with members of the community and pray for the victim and for the person who did the crime. We would listen and try to bring some sort of healing by acknowledging the worth of every human being. For several years this group would gather the next day at the site of every murder after the police had cleared the area, or at the next intersection if the site was still cordoned off.

We would gather at the downtown steps the seven times that I lived in that city of Lynchburg when an execution was to be held that night in Virginia and hold a vigil of prayers for the victim, the family and the killer. We would gather when our government would start a violent response to an act of violence, six times in the ten years I was there. We were not under any illusion that we would change policy, but we were there to touch the rips in the fabric of God's creation caused by our love affair with violence.

On the Outer Banks, the North Dare Ministerial Association, in response to the violence of Racism in our country, sponsored an essay writing contest in the public schools with cash prizes for the High School, Middle School and Elementary School winners.

In this diocese there is a series of Anti-Racism Workshops held on a regular basis which we require all leaders of the church to take.  The next one is this coming Saturday in Williamston.

In this diocese there is the Farm Workers Ministry which is a response to the economic violence perpetrated on many Farm Workers in this state. There is a request that we use the 50 days of Easter and respond each day with an offering in little green boxes to help alleviate the conditions in which they live. Fifty days of Easter season and fifty dollars and  our Bishop has said that he will match every church that has fifty participants. 50 may seem like an arbitrary number, but $50.00 is the amount of wages earned by a farmworker in this state when he or she harvests two tons of sweet potatoes. Two tons, four thousand pounds, hours of back breaking labor, $50.00.

The options of what we can do to follow Thomas in touching the wounds of Christ in this world are endless. I think this story is more than one disciple’s problems of belief and backing up a physical resurrection and historical event two thousand years ago. The way I look at the Bible is that those visions that were given to the people of Israel and to the Disciples of Christ are the visons we need to encounter in our daily lives today. As those disciples were told to forgive and to touch the wounds of violence, so are we to forgive and to respond to heal the rips of violence in the fabric of the world. If you can acknowledge these visions as visions you can claim, then what does God call us to see in this world and to touch with God’s healing?