Sermon April 22, 2007

Easter III C 2007

So many good readings today! We have the collect talking about the community formed around the breaking of bread, Acts showing a murderer becoming a believer, the psalm reflecting Earth Day's theme of our stewardship of creation, and the gospel our stewardship of each other seen through the holy meal.

But this week throughout this week another theme has dominated.

In the same way that the weeks and months following September 11, 2001 were filled with images and conversation about death and destruction so this last week has seen all the news media focusing on the tragic events at Virginia Tech.

So many young lives with so much promise snuffed out in almost the blink of an eye.

Like all of you, I'm sure, I have listened and watched to the coverage of this unfolding tragedy. It's been filled with poignancy and pain, shock and sadness.

But there have also been moments of profound meaning and insight from the survivors themselves and the community gathered around them.

On Wednesday I listened to an interview on NPR with one of the survivors, a young man named Clay Violand, who was in a French class on the second floor of Norris Hall that saw 11 of the 22 students enrolled in that class and their instructor murdered.

As he talked to interviewer Melissa Block he described lying on the floor under the desk as the shooting was going on around him and looking at a girl he didn't know lying next to him on the floor. He said:

"[She]....was....really brave. She didn't cry the whole time. I know she got shot in the back, and I was looking at her in the eyes most of the time when we were under those desks, just, kind of, staying human."

".....staying human."

There is a human solidarity in the face of pain and suffering and, ultimately, in the face of death, that tells us who we are. In fact it's one of the few things that really keeps us human.

It is the face of authentic human community.

We find out who we are in community. We find out what it means to be a human being - in all the best meanings of that identity - primarily with others.

We who gather here today have something to say about this tragedy, because we are a community that knows something about suffering and pain and death - it lies at the heart of our faith. Every year we make the journey to the place of a skull - a place which has many names, including, now, Norris Hall, Virginia Tech., Blacksburg, Virginia.

When we get to this "place of a skull" in our lives we come to know almost immediately what we are not intended to be. We know without really knowing how that this is the place of the ultimate betrayal of human identity, grace, and belonging - a place of loneliness, loss and pain - a place of agony and death, spiritual and literal - that can sometimes make us do terrible things to ourselves and each other.

For that rift in human identity to be healed requires the forgiveness and grace of the community because it is often not possible for individuals to bring themselves to that difficult place. Yet without forgiveness the healing cannot begin.We have to forgive for them and on their behalf so that their journey back to wholeness - their journey of reconciliation with life and each other - can begin.

That takes a special sort of community.

It is not the community of the perfect and the guiltless that can do this - there is no such thing as that sort of ideal community this side of the river.

We know that. We know in our hearts that such a perfect community is not authentic or real. The marker of any authentic community is not some false persona that claims perfection, nor that there will be an absence of struggle and strife - even sometimes very violent strife. Such a community is simply not attainable.

Every community that is genuinely seeking to be authentic is made up of imperfect human beings struggling to be whole, facing internal and corporate struggle and strife with integrity and grace, committed to each other's healing.

But some communities have more experience than others, especially those who are Followers of The Way, as today's reading from Acts describes the early Christian believers. It is the Broken Community of Jesus that has the most experience in this journey into the wholeness of God's good creation as its stewards, as the psalm reminds us.

What we have to say - and it is not trite or shallow - is that there is an unbreakable bond between suffering and resurrection, between destructive emptiness and individual and communal transformation.

Most importantly, what we have to say is that the journey between these two sides of the chasm is what life is really about, and that we can only make it together.

As we make that journey we seek, in the fullest sense of that phrase, to "stay human", to enter into that fuller humanity of authentic community into which God continues to call us. This is a God-given, Spirit evolving identity that is, quite literally, who we are intended to be.

This journey is about embracing the fissures in our lives and seeking ways to mend them as a community, for only so can we begin to enter fully into the new life of grace promised for us since the creation of the world.

And as we seek to engage our own struggling and strife with grace, compassion and love we can also offer the fruit of that struggle, that gift of abundant-life-through-brokenness, to the world, and especially to those who now suffer so tragically.

We can - and should - pray and act as reconcilers, as bearers - as much as it is possible for us to do so - as bearers of some of their pain on their behalf. This is surely some of what taking up the cross daily really means.

Just a few, short weeks ago we journeyed the Triduum - from Upper Room to Empty Tomb - and learned again that it is not, it is never, only about the cross, or only about the resurrection but about both, inexorably and unbreakably linked. We see before us in this terrible tragedy in Virginia the first part of that journey.

Let us be the bearers of the message that there is more to the journey, and that it does not even end at the empty tomb; that it is sustained by our companions on the way, who, like those two disciples on the road to Emmaeus, have helped us to discover that our hearts - that all hearts - can again burn with the fierce joy of coming home - in all the meanings of that phrase - to the place of celebration where bread is broken and wine shared and new life is again born into the ever breaking and reconciling community of the Savior.