A few weeks ago when I was planning worship and preaching for this
Sunday of Easter Three, I envisioned something light and springy.
I wanted to carry forward the upbeat mood of Easter. After all, this
passage from John’s Gospel contains one of the most fun and
potentially impious sayings of Jesus, that great invitation to his
disciples to “Come and have breakfast.” In fact, I was
thinking that next year, we should ask the Scouts to do their Pancake
Breakfast on this Sunday and we could make the theme of the whole
day: “Come and have breakfast!”
But
then, Monday morning, the horrible news began to trickle out of the
campus of Virginia Tech and it was as if we were plunged right back
into the depths of all the pain and suffering of Good Friday. The
whole nation was pulled back from the celebrations of Passover and
Easter back into that place of pain and sorrow from which we had just
emerged. And I knew that I would be unfaithful, to my calling and
to you, if I did not preach this morning, as the great theologian
Karl Barth once instructed, with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper
in the other.
For
on this morning, more than ever, we must remember that the Word of
God is given to help us learn what it means for Easter to be real,
what it means for us to be a part of Jesus’ life, death, and
resurrection, and how it is that a Crucified and Risen Savior is our
source of hope and strength.
I
was listening to the radio early Monday morning and heard the first
brief report: that there was someone with a gun on the Virginia Tech
campus and students had been instructed to stay indoors. We have been
horrified as the story unfolded over the following days. By Monday
night, the news was filled with conflicting reports and confusion
as the students and administrators and law enforcement personnel tried
to figure out what had happened and when and where. And students were
bravely gathering to comfort and console one another and to say through
their tears that healing their community would be the most important
thing.
By
Tuesday the details were emerging, names and faces were put on the
dead, students and faculty—they ranged in age from 18 to 76;
they came from nine states, along with Puerto Rico, Egypt, India,
Indonesia, and Romania. They were male and female, African-American,
Asian, Middle Eastern and Anglo, so gifted, so bright, lives so full
of promise and hope. And we began to get a sense of not only the personal
grief of families but of the loss to our nation of their scholarly
work and their potential. We began to hear first-hand accounts of
those terrible moments, stories of terror and of heroism, too, like
the one Eagle Scout who saved a life by knowing how to stop the bleeding
from a life-threatening wound.
And
we began to learn about the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, who took his own
life when it was all over. Wednesday brought to light his videos and
writings that so wrenchingly reveal the distorted thoughts of a mind
wracked by serious mental illness. And with the administrators and
the college counselors, we are all tormented by the “what-if”
questions—why didn’t we know, why couldn’t we see,
what could we have done?
There
have been prayer vigils and a huge candlelight memorial on campus.
The Methodist Wesley Foundation has been open round the clock. My
colleague, Rev. Leigh Ann Taylor, on the staff of the Blacksburg UMC,
has already held several worship services and spent hours counseling
and comforting students, parents and faculty. And with them we pray,
we grieve, we search for answers. We stand by them, our sorrowing
sisters and brothers, as they wonder how life will be put back together
again.
There
are just a few observations I want to offer this morning along with
a proclamation of faith that will come back round, strangely enough,
to that one little verse: “Come and have breakfast.” So,
first, let me say a few things.
In
a situation such as this, it is very tempting to want to immediately
assign blame, as if saying “whose fault it was” helps
us move past our pain.
At
a luncheon this week, a woman I’d just met said to me: “I’m
so disturbed by all this. I can’t believe we just keep letting
those foreigners into our country to come and kill our people.”
I confess to you that I was so taken aback that it wasn’t until
some time later that I came up with what I wish I had said to her.
Cho Seung-Hui did not kill people and himself because he was Korean.
He killed because he was very ill, very disturbed, and he had access
to guns that by federal law he should not have been able to purchase.
Our
denomination’s resolution on gun violence in our 2004 Book of
Resolutions points to the significant risk of handgun violence, especially
to children and youth. "Our communities and schools are so exposed
to large numbers of privately owned guns that no mere attempts at
providing slightly better security can match the awful threat of guns
finding their way through our well-intentioned safety systems…we
are called to support education and prevention workshops around the
issue of gun violence,”
We
know that the college and the governor will conduct extensive inquiries
into what was known about Cho, what was and could have been done,
and how the administration might have handled the crisis. Many allegations
have been made that not enough was done soon enough to prevent the
carnage. I have no doubt that many painful lessons will be learned,
and policies and procedures revised in light of what has happened,
because I trust that no one wants more wisdom about how to prevent
this type of incident than those administrators and college counselors.
But
we also must live with the painful knowledge that there are limits
to what we can know and do in a society that always holds in tension
the desire to protect with the freedom of the individual.
As Dr. Russ Federman, the Director of Counseling at the University
of Virginia, observed in an interview this week: “We experience
a day of safety and relative stability and if things go haywire, we
like to find a way to prevent it in the future, such that if we can
prevent it in the future, we can feel less anxious about life. But
the reality is that human behavior is not always predictable and that
there are limits to the ways we can control it and maintain the freedom
of the individual.”
He also said that of course, there is a responsibility to act “when
we have clear evidence of imminent danger to self or others.”
This holds, of course, for all teachers and counselors and administrators
and pastors. And we all know very well the gray area into which most
people and situations fall short of such clear evidence. “The
lesson”, Dr. Federman said, “is to pay close attention
and to get as involved as we can be.”
Another
psychologist observed this week that that was the very lesson we were
all to have learned after Columbine just eight years ago. This counselor,
who studies practices of hazing and related behaviors on campuses,
noted that the major lesson out of that past tragedy was that students
be urged not to ostracize those who are different, or odd, or who
act strangely, but rather to keep them in community, to hold them
close. But she concluded that in fact, in these intervening years,
things have gotten worse rather than better. And she names one prominent
cause as being Reality TV, so popular now, which ridicules community,
which scapegoats and shuns the weak, and throws out those who cannot
make the cut.
Dear
friends, crisis moments like these are always opportunities to take
stock of who we are as a people and as a nation. Almost everywhere
I’ve been this week, from meetings to my own kitchen table to
the check-out line at the grocery store, people have been talking
and wondering and grieving and striving to see what there is we can
learn about how to make our schools safer, how to make our kids healthier
and how to make our society less violent. We don’t need to agree,
but we are called to seize the moment as an important time to engage
one another around the things that matter most.
Which
brings me back round to the matter of Jesus’ invitation to breakfast
together. That verse always jumps out from the lyrically poetic and
philosophical and spiritual theology of John’s Gospel with its
direct ordinariness. A welcoming fire on the beach. Hungry friends
gathered round after a long night of work. An astonishingly simple
invitation from their Risen Savior.
The
power of our faith lies in the fact that this is Christ Jesus, crucified
and resurrected. Our crucified savior, the very one who has borne
in his own body the suffering and pain of this life. The very one
who was killed by forces of violence and evil. The very one whose
blood was shed, whose side was pierced, whose hands and feet were
nailed to that instrument of death. Our faith is no stranger to all
this, though sometimes we forgot. Sometimes I think the Catholics
have it right to keep a crucifix in front of them in worship. We Protestants
are sometimes too quick to want to clean things up, pretty things
up and move on to a pristine and beautiful cross as if no one had
ever sullied it with a bleeding, dying body.
But
only this savior, crucified and resurrected, is strong enough to comfort
us in times such as these we have experienced this week, the violence
we have seen, the suffering we have shared. Only a savior such as
this, crucified and resurrected, has the authority to offer hope on
the other side. And only a savior such as this, crucified and resurrected,
could know that what was needed at that moment on the beach in those
first days after his death and resurrection was not finger-pointing
and blame, not scape-goating and ostracism, not even high fallutin’
theology—but just the most simple and basic hospitality of all:
“Come and have breakfast.” Come and know me as your friend,
your companion on the Way, your crucified and risen Lord.
People
who have known grief—and who hasn’t?—know that sometimes
the only thing that gets you out of that pit of sorrow and despair
is found in the very ordinariness of life. Getting up in the morning.
Brushing your teeth. Making coffee. Having breakfast. Getting through
the day. And then the night. And then the next. It is the very ordinariness
of things that keeps us going and slowly creates a space for healing
to begin. It’s where we find God again, on the other side, while
yet still in the midst, of the sorrow. As Kathleen Norris has written:
“The Christian religion asks us to place our trust not in ideas…but
in a God who was vulnerable enough to become a human and die, and
who desires to be present to us in our everyday circumstances. And
because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane
that we must find our way to God.”
And
on that beach that morning, Jesus was also trying to teach us a lesson
we learn and forget and learn again and again. That we must hold one
another close, that we must insist on love especially when it’s
hard. In another interview this week, a young college student who
had been in the sixth grade at the time of the 1998 school shooting
in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in which her best friend was killed at her
school, reflected that what got her through were very good parents
who supported her and being surrounded by “good people”,
as she said, the ministers and counselors that the school brought
in. She said that “what we need in bad ugly times is people
close to us.”
When
Jesus drew his disciples to him to have breakfast, he knew how very
much they needed the support of one another. Come closer to me, Jesus
said and closer to one another. Hold one another close and I am there
with you. For we are resurrected in every moment of love. Come, and
have breakfast.
May
God now grant healing and insight and wisdom and simple comfort, breaking
bread with us every day in the great, never-ending circle of love.
Amen.
Notes:
Dr.
Russ Federman interviewed on NPR “All Things Considered”,
April 18, 2007.
Kathleen
Norris. The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s
Work.” New Jersey: The Paulist Press, 1998.
Interview on NPR “Morning Edition”, April 20, 2007.
©Patricia
Farris, 2007. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
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