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Shocking, Awful, ViolentApril 22, 2007 Third Sunday of Easter I have been benumbed by the news out of Blacksburg, Virginia this week. Benumbed by the bombardment of the reporting. As you all know, that small city had a 9/11-type experience: shocking, awful, violent. 33 persons dead. A suicide attack. That so many were so young, so situated between adolescence and adulthood, amplifies our emotional response. With you, my heart goes out to the victims’ families. Gracious God, hold them close. By Thursday, we learned that the gunman should not have been able to purchase his weapons based on a magistrate’s determination several years ago that he was a danger to himself. That judgment never made it into the system for background checks. Under other circumstances, I suppose, we would call that a small human error. It does make me shudder to think how porous the system of checks and balances really is in our gun-addicted land. A land chock-full of over 200 million firearms in private hands. But the gunman was mentally defective. He lacked rational motive, so the crime was more senselessly random. I wonder if our response to this nightmare would be different if, say, the 33 victims had been riding a bus that had gone over an embankment? That would still account as an awful event. In real numbers, the same grievous loss. The difference between these scenarios is the modifier, violent. To the real case, in addition to tragic, the modifier violent must be added. And that word is accompanied by a larger array of considerations. Dr. James Gilligan of Harvard and NYU, a psychiatrist who has spent many years studying violence, says, “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every sort of violent criminal is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is commit a violent act.” In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity, he adds, “it is tremendously tempting to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.” [1] The story from Blacksburg was a case of irrational, premeditated violence, and the perpetrator intended to be seen on television, the internet, and wi-fi devices of every sort. He intended his violence to play like other violence plays in our culture. And he would be noticed for it. He would be a real man, a true player, someone who should have been taken more seriously than he was. Violence was his method, because violence would get him noticed. On that point, his delusions did not obscure. Despite the story’s overexposure, I found I was not really connected to it until I heard individual biographies of the victims late in the week. Small photos accompanied by brief descriptions brought the sense of the tragic up close and personal. It was reminiscent of the feeling I have when the PBS News Hour runs the pictures of the latest soldiers to have given their lives in Iraq accompanied by silence. I’ve told you before how I have made that recurring report into a little ritual. When the pictures appear, I stop whatever else I might be doing and I say their names aloud. Like their counterparts from Virginia Tech, the majority are so very young – 19, 20, 21-years old. In my way, I lift them into God’s presence. Over three thousand now. And these are just the American soldiers among the tens of thousands of victims. Oddly, they don’t seem to garner the same universal national attention as the Hokies of Virginia Tech did this week. But those young men and women are also victims of violence. The difference there is that the violence is supposedly quite rational, and all parties enter the field of battle with full knowledge of the risks. But day after day, news reports tell of yet one more suicide bombing and I find the definitions of sane and insane, rational and irrational, blurring some as time goes on. What’s very clear, however, whether rational or irrational, is the ubiquity of violence as the means to garner attention and power in our world and to assert one’s supposed potent presence. What is war after all, if not a grand conflation of intended violence for power, dominion, or at the least, some focused attention? Violent death is perhaps the most difficult death to accept. Not that any premature end is easy, certainly. Still, violence requires human participation. It adds human agency, intention and morality to the life/death equation, and therefore sponsors multiple layers of agitated mental, emotional and spiritual considerations. Violence spawns despair. In fact, often that’s one of its intended outcomes. So, for instance, when Jesus was put to death, one of the intended outcomes was to silence his followers by prompting despair. And that’s just what the disciples experienced. All the stories indicate this. In fact, his arrest alone managed to accomplish this. In the weeks leading up to Easter, we made a lot of the disciples’ fear, especially Peter’s outright, three-time denial. He was afraid of the violence that might come at him. He had good reason to be afraid. Despair was a very natural result. Jesus’ death was brutally violent. If Mel Gibson’s famous passion movie several years ago served no other end, it certainly emphasized that fact. Indeed, many of that movie’s critics accused Gibson of cynically playing to our culture’s fascination with violence in a genre that makes billions of dollars glorifying violence. Still, for that, every culture in every age has been guilty of feckless and reckless, rational and irrational, bloody, bloody hands. No more so than in first century Jerusalem. Brutality and violence are part of the human drama, part of the drama Jesus signed up for. Human violence did him in. And you will recall that, before it came at him full force, in the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” 2 That cup was full to the brim of violence; he knew what was coming. So into this desperate human situation Jesus emptied himself, allowing himself the complete experience, all the way to a brutal, violent end, at the hands of foe and friend alike. All somehow related to the violence. But then, part of the remarkable news of resurrection isn’t solely about death per se – it also concerns this matter of violence – broken, sinful human intention. Humans killing one another. Resurrection not only overcame death, it overcame violent death. A small modifier, perhaps. But one that has significant ramifications for the human situation and for those who would come to believe that Jesus was somehow raised. Resurrection transformed the despair wrought by brutal aggression and turned it into its opposite. From the whole cloth woven with fear and despair, resurrection fashioned a garment of hope and faith. This accounts for how the murder-breathing Saul was transformed into the great missionary Paul who wound up writing perhaps the most beloved passage in western literature on the nature and meaning of love. Earlier in Acts than the passage we heard Derek read this morning, it’s reported that Paul very much approved the stoning death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. [3] A brutal and barbaric way to die. And this morning’s text began this way, “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples…” [4] Saul was a violent man who believed in violent means to an end. It's no wonder he needed to be thrown from his horse and struck blind in order to garner his attention. It’s a great story, isn’t it? But it’s best if we really see the full ramifications of resurrection transmuting a violent man into a passionate lover. This is important because of our own dreadful experience, our own fascination and even addiction to violence, our own tendency toward despair. We could go so far as to say resurrection was God’s end with violence as well. Crucifixion was God’s unilateral disarmament and resurrection his commitment to our future. With the passion of Christ God is forever identified with the victims of violence. Eventually the transformed Paul would write, “so faith, hope, love abide, these three and the greatest of these is love.” [5] That would become the resurrection equation for life. A sharp rebuke to the death-dealing violence that ran amuck within every human culture. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends,” [6] Jesus told his disciples. In the wonderful story we heard from John, Jesus serves breakfast to his friends. A humble and disarming act of hospitality for those who had abandoned and denied him. He asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Three times as a way to wash Peter’s guilt from his three-time denial. Love is the restorative means that gives Peter’s life back to him. And from that love, Peter is told to feed and tend to the needs of others. And so he will. As testimony to the power of that loving hospitality we’re gathered here two millennia later. Astonishing, isn’t it, when you stop to think of it? Think of all the intervening years of violent human behavior and still we gather as memorial to the enduring power of loving hospitality born of resurrection. The great theologian of the last century, Karl Barth, put it this way: “The Easter message tells us that our enemies, sin, the curse and death, are beaten... They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but fundamentally we must cease to fear them any more.” [7] He said those words standing in the wreckage of Bonn, Germany, in 1946, following the devastation of World War II. People of the resurrection are not undone by violence. Nikki Giovanni, Distinguished Professor and award-winning poet of Virginia Tech said this at the end of her memorial address this past week: Which leads me to the last thing I wish to say. You have it to take home with you as a small souvenir…. The words of William Sloane Coffin on the cover of your bulletin. This is how resurrected people prevail: “Easter represents a demand as well as a promise, a demand not that we sympathize with the crucified Christ, but that we pledge our loyalty to the risen one. That means an end to all loyalties, to all people and all institutions that crucify…” [9] __________
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