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"An End to Violence"
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
April 27, 2008
Sixth Easter
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
An end to violence.
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Day 1, 26 dead. Day 2, 43 dead. Day 3, 35 dead. Day 4, 19 dead.
Day after day. A numbing regularity. This is not a report from
Iraq, Gaza or Sudan. No, these are numbers from the United States,
the number of people who are dying, murdered, mostly with assault
weapons. On average, 34 people are killed, murdered every day,
from sea to shining sea, from the redwood forests to the Gulf
Stream waters. Of these 34, 15 on average are between 10 and
24 years old, 82% killed with firearms. Each year, more than
750,000 young people ages 10 to 24 are treated in emergency
rooms for injuries due to violence. 17% reported carrying a
weapon (e.g., gun, knife, or club). (source: http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/yvfacts.htm
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshippers exchange
blows at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is the Orthodox
Palm Sunday. Then using palm fronds, they turn on the police
and pummel them when they try to break up the brawl. The cause
of the fight is rivalry over rights at the Church, built on
the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried
and resurrected. It starts when an Armenian priest expels a
Greek priest from the space, pushing him to the ground and kicking
him. Then worshippers hit police with palm fronds they are holding
for the Palm Sunday service about to begin.
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Eric Thompson, the online weapons dealer who sold one of the
guns that was used at the Virginia Tech shooting meets with
sixty students at Virginia Tech, and encourages them to carry
concealed weapons. When asked by reporters about his high security,
nationally televised visit, he says, “Politicians need
to allow people to protect themselves…I just have a feeling
there’s a special responsibility I’ve been given…to
try to change people’s opinions.”
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
The church, the United States, the world. Violence is everywhere.
It has seeped into the very fabric of our lives. Deafened by
the shouts of violence, how can we hear the words of Jesus who
speaks softly to his disciples? In today’s reading from
the 1st Peter, we are admonished to always be ready to make
a defense of our faith to anyone who demands it from us and
to provide an accounting of the hope that goes with it –
and to do this with gentleness and reverence.
If someone were to ask you about your faith, about Christianity,
what would you tell them? How would you make an accounting for
the hope that is in you? How do you speak to a violent world?
There is a great rift in Christianity, beyond Protestants and
Catholics, conservatives and liberals. Perhaps it has always
been there, but over the last several hundred years a new fissure
has emerged, and now today, it is greater than ever. On the
one hand, there are those who claim, teach and emphasize exclusively
on a personal relationship with Jesus. It comes down to this
- if you accept Jesus as your lord and savior, you will be saved.
What does it mean to accept Jesus? You’ll hear words like
surrender and obedience. Others say that you need to open your
heart. It is something very emotional - a heart-felt experience.
Once this happens, and you’ll have no doubt when it does,
you will be saved or born again. These are the people who hear
today’s Gospel and cling to the words, “if you love
me” and hold onto a feeling of love and affection toward
Jesus, saying “Yes Lord, I do.”
There is another group of people who see universality in Jesus,
a man who spoke of, for and through God to those in prison,
the poor, the lonely, the outcast. Jesus is not so much about
belief as about justice and inclusion. Yes, in John’s
Gospel Jesus does say, “Believe in me.” But he also
says not to believe in him but the one who sent him. These are
the people who hear today’s reading from Acts and cling
to these words from Paul, “From one ancestor God made
all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the
times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where
they would live,…indeed he is not far from each one of
us.” This is a God who is close to everyone. We, all people,
are saved by God despite ourselves.
Episcopalians, in general, at least most of the time, have
rejected the notion of an either or approach to Jesus. On the
one hand, the first professions of the baptismal covenant are
about belief. We proclaim, “I believe in God, I believe
in Jesus Christ, I believe in the Holy Spirit.” On the
other hand, the baptismal covenant is about God’s universal
love for all people. Being made in the image of God, we promise
to strive for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of
every human being.
If you love me, you will keep my commandment. What is the commandment?
Jesus says, “love one another as I have loved you.”
The way to love Jesus is to love one another. To simply love
Jesus in a cloud of good feeling may be a nice thing but it
isn’t what Jesus commanded, taught or gave his life for.
For Christians, you love Jesus by loving others. It is a fusion
of today’s extremes of Christianity, of universality and
Jesus-specificity. It is on-going work – not a one-time
event. Loving one another is much more than a warm, emotional
experience. It is hard work. It is rooted in seeing others hurt
us and fail around us while holding an abiding and deep respect
for them. It is a transformation of contempt to empathy and
judgment to respect. Loving one another is looking within our
own lives and seeing our brokenness. It is seeing and rejecting
the violence in our own society. Why is our nation apathetic
about 34 murders every day, 12,000 per year – the equivalent
of 4 911s and Twin Tower collapses? Are we asleep, numb, resigned
or apathetic? In mostly white, affluent suburbs like Glen Ellyn,
the problem of violence seems to belong to other people, other
places. We can feel sorry for them, helpless and shake our heads
at those people who use drugs and fire guns into crowds of inner-city
teenagers. But we must not only see the violence but acknowledge
that we are a part of it. The murders and violence that happen
in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Philadelphia are our problem,
everyone’s problem. Guns that are designed specifically
to kill people can be bought online. Is the way to safety by
everyone owning a gun? Everyone with a gun, imagine that. If
you love me, you will keep my commandment.
The violence in our society is so pervasive that we are numb
to it. It is in our language, television, music, politics and
daily lives. I believe our faith, Christianity, is at its very
core anti-violence, against violence, non-violent. It can be
difficult rejecting violence as a single person, in isolation
from others, but as disciples of Jesus, we are empowered by
his teaching, by his commandment and by the gift of the Holy
Spirit, who leads us into all truth – who abides with
us and in us. If the essence of being a Christian is about an
emotional experience of loving Jesus, then the faith has been
corrupted and turned inward. A shallow universality leaves no
one accountable. But if you love one another, then you are following
Jesus, who is both master and servant, who turns you to your
neighbor, the other person, who is seen as a being of ultimate
worth.
To love another is a difficult commandment. We can find our
strength and hope in today’s reading from 1st Peter. “And
baptism now saves you” – where we are marked as
“Christ’s own forever.” We live and move and
have our being in the mystery of baptism, where the brokenness
and violence of the world is not insurmountable, where we are
empowered to love others, to love one another. And when not
if we fail, we can find assurance in the testimony of St. Paul,
who in Romans chapter 8 writes, “it is Christ Jesus who
intercedes for us…for neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will
be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus
or Lord.” If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
But whatever happens, I will love you to the end.
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