God is love Reflection

A Reflection for V Easter                                           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.   

May 3, 2015                                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 8:26-40               Psalm 22:24-30                       1 John 4:7-21              John 15:1-8

In today’s epistle lesson, the writer of the first letter of John wrote that God is love. At the Bible Study this week as we looked at the lessons for today, I asked each person to tell me about love. We got all sorts of responses, and mainly the respondents kept giving me examples and talking about how they wished that they could love like God loves. In the end they decided that the definition of love was a bit like Justice Potter Stewart’s statement in the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court opinion where he wrote that he could not define hard core pornography but “I know it when I see it.” 

Who is God and what is love? Aristotle posited that God was the “unmoved mover” which was developed by Thomas Aquinas as the standard definition of God in Christian faith. James Boice, a very popular 20^th Century conservative Evangelical preacher, proclaimed the exalted image of God as:  (1) creator of the universe standing over time and reigning over creation, (2) omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, (3) accountable to no one, acting with complete freedom from all external influences.

Yet, in tension with this view of God is the view put forward by the writer of John’s epistles, “God is love”. C. S Lewis wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

 

To define love is as fruitless a task as trying to define the indefinable of God; human words are just not capable of making a dent. The author of the Epistle uses the Greek word “Ginosko” which means “know”, but not in the way we “know” facts, but in the way we come to an understanding through experience and even in the way the word is used to mean intimate relationships. This kind of knowing is not book-knowledge but wisdom by living life fully aware in relationship. Last week I quoted from Teilhard de Chardin who defined matter as “spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”; in the same way, for me, God and love are not static nouns but verbs speeding by which slow down and caress us - and we almost always know it in hindsight when we are able to catch the fading action and say something like “Oh yes, now I know that is God, that is love.”  

Prose does not work, but maybe we can use poetry, like from the 2^nd verse of the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne:

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

St. Clare, who loved St. Francis of Assisi, said:

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others.

If the writer of 1^st John is correct, and God is love, and then how we “know”, understand, love is how we can attempt to understand God. This week we have had a couple exercises in the national news on how we attempt to understand love. There was a riot in Baltimore caused yet again by the official use of violence that was perceived by many residents as being part of the legacy of racism in this country. In that riot a mother saw her only son preparing to participate in the violent response to the violence. She charged into him and dragged him out of the line of danger. She used violence to keep her son from being violent and from what she thought was dangerous activity that might subject him up to a violent response. I don’t agree that violence is a way to teach non-violence, but she loved her son so much that she decided to risk his approval of her and, at least in this way, lived into the prayer of St. Francis to “not so much seek to be loved as to love.” Love is sometimes saying no. I would have preferred if she had hugged him, but I understand her fear. It is usually fear that drives us to violence, and as the writer of 1^st John suggests, that “perfect love drives out fear”. If only we believed that, for one of the ways we try to justify violence is to focus in on the “wrath of God” as a metaphor to excuse our own actions. Jesus commanded the sword to be put away when he was being arrested.

Another example of our attempt to understand love is the argument before the U.S. Supreme Court this week on the issue of same-gender marriage. My own view is that it is a question of how we really define marriage. For instance, in Dare County and in North Carolina when I fill out a marriage license, I send it to the Register of Deeds, and that makes sense if you understand that for most of the history of marriage until probably the middle of the 19^th and early 20^th  century, marriage was a transfer of property from the father of the bride to the husband of the bride. English Common Law ruled that “the man and woman become one” and that one is the husband.  When the justices asked about “traditional” marriage, they should be looking at ALL the traditi         on.  In the Prayer Book with which I was raised, the Marriage ceremony had the mandatory question, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” In the 1979 revision it is an option to ask, “Who presents this woman to be married to this man?”  In our heritage, if marriage is a contract, a legal contract by the state, certified by the state, then it does seem to be discrimination by a state to deny access to a contract. Contracts are not based on love but awareness that there is an exchange of goods and services between the party of the first part and the party of the second part. In that way it fits the usual definition of love in popular culture, which is that love is a cathexis, an emotional and mental investment, in a person, thing, or idea for the perceived benefit of the person doing the investment. One of the other Supremes, Diana Ross, sang about that kind of love all the time: “Baby love, my Baby love, I need you, oh how I need you.” It will be interesting to see how the other nine “Supremes” rule if marriage is about getting needs met. The state usually holds that contracts are null and void if there is an inequitable exchange of goods and services, or return on the investment, or the property was misrepresented, and the state calls that a divorce.

However, one of the arguments used is that marriage is a “sacred institution.” I am always thankful for the Bill of Rights which keeps the government out of the role of defining what is sacred; I am more than a little leery of the government telling me what God looks like. I see marriage as sacred, so that when we are able to see what love looks like between two people, we get a glimpse of what God looks like. Jesus and Paul saw even in the inequality of marriage in their time that God’s love could be made manifest as the couple followed Christ and respected, honored, forgave, and sacrificed themselves to each other.  I see God as graceful, who gives a covenant of love rather than a contract of obligations, and therefore see the couple in a marriage as being “ministers” of the sacrament – their ministry is to love each other and show us what God looks like in daily life. I cannot do magic and make a marriage sacred - I can only pray that the couple will empty themselves out of their own agendas so that they will be able to forgive, find hope, and love. If sacred marriage is the willingness to be humble ministers who understand the need for a power greater than themselves to help them keep their vows of mutual commitment to love, I have a hard time seeing what gender has to do with it. When Pat and I got married, no one in the government of Virginia quizzed us about whether our decision not to have children would make our marriage less sacred.

 All agree the Supreme Court will be making an historical statement, but time will tell if this case will be another Brown vs. the Board of Education” or another “Dred Scott” decision. However, the most important decision is the one we make each day in making a decision to love as God loves today.

Names that smell like sheep

A Reflection for IV Easter                                             All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC April 26, 2015                                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 4:5-12          Psalm 23       1 John 3:16-24        John 10:11-18

Let us pray: Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. In the name of Jesus we pray.   Amen.

That prayer ends with “in the name of Jesus”; so what am I trying to say when I say “in the name of Jesus”? Is it a magic formula or what?

When I do confirmation classes, I usually ask people about their names; what do the names mean to them? Sometimes they answer that their name means they are different from someone else. Sometimes they wish they had a different name because it has become a burden - a version of the old that old Johnny Cash song with lyrics by Shel Silverstein, “A Boy Named Sue”.

So - what does your name mean to you? Think about that for a minute.  Anyone want to share?

 I have no idea why my father named me Thomas, but over the years I have come to know that Thomas means “twin”, and I find that at times I am the twin of the Thomas in John’s Gospel.  I pledge to be there like Thomas promised Jesus, but when the excrement hits the fan, I start to wonder if I need more proof. 

I know why I was given my middle name, Everitt; my father admired his father, Everitt Wyche Wilson, and he wanted his son  to grow up to be a man of honor and vision. Whenever I do something honorable or have vision, it is not me but the Spirit, the personality of Everitt Wyche Wilson and William Everitt Wilson that lives in me that gives me the strength to do it. Whenever I fall short, I do not live into the name that was given to me at my birth, the real self I was created to be. Still working on that.

The name of Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Yehoshuah or Joshua, which means God (YHWH) delivers, or saves, or will deliver or save. The original Joshua was the follower of Moses who took the people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. The name was very popular since Israel was always surrounded by enemies and the people longed for someone who could deliver them from those who threatened them and bring wholeness and Shalom, peace, to their lives.  So when Peter says that the man born lame was healed, delivered, saved, from being a cripple and brought to wholeness by the name of Jesus, he is making a pun on the Jesus name.

Like my middle name Everitt, names carry personality as well. The early followers of Jesus had a mystical union with the Risen Lord. Jesus was not up in heaven but inside their very selves. In the Book of John when Jesus breathes his Spirit onto the disciples, they take that Spirit into their very lives and Jesus the Christ lives within them. They acknowledge in this story that it was not Peter and John who healed the man born lame but it was the living personality of Jesus in them that was able to deliver, save, redeem, make whole, and heal this man. When they live into the name of Jesus, they live into who they are at the core of their being and are able to bring about healing, deliverance, making whole.

There is a fondness for the phrase “In the name of Jesus” in some parts of the healing ministry in the wider church, and it seems to be used as a magic formula.  But whenever the ministers of the Healing Team in this church come forward to offer prayers of healing, they do not come out of their own power, but out of the humility of emptying themselves out of their own agendas so that they live into that mystical union with Jesus living in them and in the space between us. Their prayers ask for wholeness, peace, saving in the name of Jesus.

The writer of the Epistle lesson for today in 1^st John talks about being able to lay down one’s life for another and helping a brother or sister in need, thus living into the name of Jesus. The writer uses the phrase “believing in the name of Jesus” because, for the author and for me, belief is not a mental exercise but a commitment to live the Spirit of the Risen Christ in our lives on a daily basis.

We see this redeemer, savior, helper, bringer into wholeness and peace in the Psalm for today where God, in the metaphor of the Shepherd, is the one walking with the sheep, saving, protecting, making whole in the community gathered around the union with God. That metaphor of the Shepherd is reinterpreted when the Gospel writer of John remembers Jesus saying he is the living metaphor of the Shepherd, he is the one who held the smelly sheep in his arms becoming like what Dr.  Lynn Anderson wrote in 1996, “A shepherd who smells like the sheep”.

Pope Francis in his Maundy Thursday Homily in 2013 a month after he was installed urged his clergy to be out among the people who need them;

“The priest who seldom goes out of himself … misses out on the best of our people, on what can stir the depths of his priestly heart. … This is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, lose heart and become in a sense collectors of antiquities or novelties — instead of being shepherds living with ‘the smell of the sheep.’ This is what I am asking you — be shepherds with the smell of sheep.” 

John’s community does not write John’s Gospel to do a biography but, as the ending of the Thomas story suggests: 

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

I think that Thomas lived into his name, the twin, that moment when he allowed himself to go into the wounds of Jesus and into the compassion of Jesus to become the twin of Jesus, as he entered into mystical union with his true being.  All those who follow Jesus are called to go and become shepherds who will smell like the sheep. Jesus did not spend much time talking about going to church, or about life after death but about life in union with him in daily life.. I think he assumed that he was helping us live for today and that since God always redeems, saves, makes whole, then God’s love, which does not end, will continue to do that in this life and in the next.

Each week when we come here and take the bread and wine, we remember, we  re -member, enter into again, that mystical union as we are taking the body of Christ, the name of Jesus, into our lives. 

A Reflection for The Third Sunday of Easter- April 19, 2015

A Reflection for Easter III                                         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC   

 April 19, 2015                                                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 3:12-19               Psalm 4                        1 John 3:1-7                Luke 24:36b-48
Coming Back Home

Bill and Sharon Capps 1969

First of all I want to say that I’m sorry for missing last week’s service; I would have preferred to stay with you, but I went to Roanoke, Virginia to the church home of a longtime friend of Pat’s and mine. Pat knew her for forty years and I for almost 31 years. Sharon’s funeral service had been held on Saturday afternoon. Sharon had visited us and come to church here in the Outer Banks a couple times, but the last time Pat and I were in that church was six years ago, also during Easter week, when her husband, Bill, was buried after he died on Maundy Thursday. Bill’s funeral had been on Easter Monday at 10:00 in the morning, and Sharon died last week at 10:10 AM Easter Monday, and after being apart in life but never in spirit for six years, they were finally reunited. Bill had been the church’s organist and Sharon, who had been a music teacher, was the director of the choir, and OH the outpouring of song as they followed Sharon’s written instructions - she had revised the order of service four times in the past six years. The tables were put up after the overflow crowd was cleared out of the Parish Hall to go out to the columbarium to place Sharon’s ashes next to Bill’s. The tables were groaning with the offerings of love from parishioners for all of us who knew and loved Bill and Sharon. Pat and I wanted to hug their grown children and to comfort another longtime friend of ours, Susan, the Rector of that church. Holy Week is exhausting and burying a friend is hard, and the combination is very hard. To top that off, Susan’s husband, Michael, had heart bypass surgery during Holy Week. 

 I am also sorry that I missed the service here this last week because I hear Pastor Al Douglass, the Lutheran replacement, was a very good preacher and a fine presider of the services. I hate it when that happens - I prefer replacements that leave the congregation longing for my return. I tend to have a competitive streak within me, and I was confronted with that side of myself last Sunday. Since I had already written a sermon for All Saints’, I suggested to Susan at dinner on Saturday night with her and Michael that I could fill in for her on Sunday morning.  Actually the dinner had been provided by those same loving parishioners who had more than enough love for Susan and Michael. She thanked me and said that a retired Episcopal Priest who helps out there had already volunteered. Well, I also knew this priest from the time I was first ordained. Thirty years ago when I was very arrogant - I still am, but even more so then - I had occasion to hear him preach, and while he was much beloved in the Diocese, in his church, and by fellow clergy, I sniffed in derision at the altar of my ego at how much better I was than he.  I have come to realize that the Risen Lord is in the space between my ego and another person, and I don’t need to keep proving my worth to the One who loves us both.

On Sunday morning at 8:00, I arrived a few minutes late and settled into one of the back pews. They were doing Rite One. I groaned to myself because I am so used to the cadences of Rite Two and even to our variations, but I was prepared to smile tolerantly at the coming sermon. My smugness evaporated as the service was comforting and the Preacher was right on target. The truth is that we can only fully feast at God's table when we send our own egos out to lunch.

As in the Gospel lesson for today from Luke, the Risen Lord was there with us as we gathered together and ate and drank, along with Bill and Sharon. So it had been all week long. The Risen Lord was here when we at this church did Bob Strickland’s service as we acknowledged each other’s wounds of loss and as we knew Bob’s presence on the other side of the Altar. We gathered to pray together and sing lustily, and then the Hospitality crew coordinated a wonderful time of fellowship in the Parish Hall where we hugged, mourned, and celebrated

In the Acts of the Apostles lesson for today, Peter says to the people who were either silent or complicit when Jesus was crucified, "And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance”. He is telling them that what they were doing to this man Jesus was because they were ignorant of the reality that this stranger from Galilee was really God. All acts of silence or complicity in the face of injustice, cruelty, and violence are not just against fellow humans but, because of our self-centered ignorance, they are also against God. 

When I was three, four, and five years old, our maid in Salvador would try to drum it in my head that all my acts of selfishness and meanness had a much larger dimension. She would say, “Oh, Tomasito - Nino, you are such a good child, but when you do something like this, you are driving a nail into the hands of Jesus.”

As I grew up, I dismissed her admonition as superstitious gibberish. Yet, as I have walked deeper in my faith, I realize she was telling me the truth - that when I pursue my own selfish agendas, ignoring the harm to others, or remain silent and complicit in the face of injustice, cruelty, and violence, with my ego as the center of my world, then there is not a dime’s worth of difference between me and the people that Peter is addressing. One of the most sobering moments of the Palm Sunday and Good Friday liturgies is the identification with the crowd calling for the death of Jesus that the congregation is invited into when they read the lines of the crowd. Also in the Good Friday liturgy, when we pound the nails into the cross, we hear the sound of our hammers and nails, feel the of vibration of the hammer each time it strikes the nail, and those sounds and sensations blend with the echoes of the hammer and nails of two thousand years ago. 

In the movie version of the John Steinbeck novel Grapes of Wrath, the hunted hero, the Jesus archetype, Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda gives a final speech:

"I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too."

On the other side, our church thought we did the service and reception out for love for Bob and Ellen, and the Roanoke church thought they did the service and reception out of love for Bill and Sharon, and both are partly true. But on a deeper level we did it for the glory of God from which all of love flows. Jesus said, “If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.” The Risen Lord is always is the space between us and all acts of love are acts of love for God.  Every service we attend, every reception we help put together, every meal in which we partake, there is a guest who is also the real host.

This is the Easter Season which follows Lent. In the forty days of Lent, we focused in on our individual and corporate sin, but now in the fifty days of Easter, let us work on how we can best share that God-given love with this broken world.

April Tomes for Newsletter

Tom's Tomes for April
In the last couple months we have had a lot of deaths and I mourn them as I see how the deaths have ripped families apart and me as well. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, chided those who mourned with this rhyme: “He that fears death, or mourns it, in the just,/Shews of the Resurrection little trust.” 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 20th Century Jesuit Paleontologist and Mystic opined: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Going through the human experience means that we will go through all that it means to be human; pain and joy, sadness and ecstasy, love and alienation, fear and courage, defeat and victory, faith and doubt, life and death – all that flesh is heir to. When the Christ poured out Godself and became Jesus; he suffered and enjoyed all that it meant to be human. 

However, as Spiritual beings we cannot stop being; we only change. The teachings of Jesus help me to live to the fullest IN this human life to make the world a better placein which our children's children can live and move and have their being. We face that God's love is infinite and since Divine love does not die, so also we will live in that infinite love. I do not know what that life will look like in that new stage of spiritual existence and the Bible only used symbols to hint at the indescribable but it seems to me meaningless speculation to nail down literal descriptions of streets of Gold when poetry is my best guide. 

I turn to George Herbert's The Dawning:

Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;/ Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;/ Unfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns; /Thy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth: /Awake, awake, / And with a thankful heart His comforts take. /But thou dost still lament, and pine, and cry, /And feel His death, but not His victory. / Arise, sad heart ; if thou dost not withstand, /Christ's resurrection thine may be ; /Do not by hanging down break from the hand /Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee: /Arise, Arise; /And with His burial linen drie thine eyes./Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief /Draws tears or blood, not want a handkerchief. 


Shalom:
tom+

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?