Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Easter People: Kathleen O'Malley
This Sunday, our Easter person came to deliver the sermon herself. Being a much more skilled speaker than I, she did not have a manuscript of her sermon. Thank you to Kathleen for a wonderful message about how our politics and spirituality are intimately connected.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Easter People: Paul Farmer
John 21:1-19
April 18, 2010: Third Sunday of Easter
The author of the gospel of John captures so much of what Jesus is about in this beautiful scene. The way Jesus engages the disciples is basically a recap of how Jesus dealt with people throughout his ministry.
The disciples are together – and they are suffering…and they are suffering on at least two different levels. First, there is the material or physical level. We have every day fishermen engaging in the every day struggle of trying to make a living. On this occasion, the fishermen are not catching anything – a problem that can lead directly to a lack of food and other necessary resources. This is not a trivial thing. The material level matters. Real people with real problems.
Second, they are suffering on a spiritual level. The disciples have been on a bit of a spiritual rollercoaster ever since Jesus died. His death was a huge blow, making them question everything that had gone before. Then, they didn’t know what to make of the empty tomb. It was maybe a glimmer of hope, but exactly what it meant was pretty much a giant mystery. Then, Jesus appears to them while they are locked in a room – twice. That, of course, had to be a spiritual upper. But it seems that spiritual high didn’t last too long. Soon after, they are back to where they started…back to the beginning. They are returning to their old lives of fishing. Their spirits, it seems, are diminished.
Peter, of course, had additional reason to be in spiritual turmoil. He had, in the end, betrayed his friend Jesus. He denied any connection to Jesus because he was afraid of what it would mean to be associated with him. He feared he would meet the same fate on the cross, so he lied about knowing him, about being a follower, about believing in what he stood for. It is not difficult to imagine what feelings that would engender. Shame, guilt, embarrassment.
And so here the disciples are, back at the sea of Galilee. After all that had happened, after the three-year whirlwind tour with Jesus, his crushing death, and the bewildering appearances, it’s almost like they just don’t know what to do next. It was probably a crisis of faith. But it was also an economic crisis. They needed to live, and for that they needed to work. So Peter, ever practical, ever concrete Peter, says, in a voice I imagine to be sullen and resigned, “I’m goin’ fishin’”. What else is there to do, he seems to be saying. That’s it, the dream has died, let’s get back to our real lives now.
So, here we are in the last chapter of the gospel of John, and after everything that had happened, we find the disciples defeated and in economic and spiritual disrepair …Peter having a double dose of the spiritual blues. And now, not even their tried and true lives were working – they weren’t catching any fish. It was, to put it mildly, a pretty low point.
Jesus comes to them in this time of need, and he ignores neither the material nor spiritual suffering. In classic Jesus style, he cares for the whole person. He attends to the material needs of the disciples, and he attends to their deep spiritual needs…with a double dose of healing for Peter. They weren’t catching fish, so he provides fish-o-plenty. “Do you have any food?” He asks. They don’t, so he feeds them. He meets them in their immediate, pressing, physical need – they need food. But he doesn’t just give them any meal, he sets a Eucharistic feast. Loaves and fishes he gives them. They would recognize these as the foods of miracles – the food that never stops feeding. It wasn’t just that he met their immediate need for food; this was a sign that he promised to keep feeding them forever.
Then, after they had eaten, Jesus faces Peter. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Even if Peter gets a little impatient with Jesus asking this question three times, we know how kind and compassionate it is. Here’s your chance, he says to Peter. Denying me is not the last thing you will do. You get to put that behind you and come back to the fold. Three times he denied, three times Jesus lets him declare his love for him.
So, Jesus feeds their bodies, Jesus feeds their souls, and then, because he’s Jesus, he invites them to do exactly the same thing for others. He’s not just comforting the disciples, he’s commissioning them. I have fed you, physically and spiritually; now, go feed my sheep. Jesus cares for the whole person – every aspect, and he sends us out to do the same.
From Jesus’ mouth to Paul Farmer’s ears. Paul Farmer feeds Jesus’ sheep. He cares for people, and like Jesus, he cares for them on every level, healing people in physical, material and spiritual ways.
Farmer graduated in anthropology from Harvard and went on to Harvard Medical School to become a doctor. He began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 when still a student, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau, determined to bring modern health care to the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere. Starting with a one-building clinic in the village of Cange, Farmer’s project has grown to a multiservice health complex that includes a primary school, an infirmary, a surgery wing, a training program for health outreach workers, a 104-bed hospital, a women’s clinic, and a pediatric care facility. It has become a model for health care for poor communities world wide.
I think it’s because of his dual perspectives of anthropologist and doctor that Farmer’s model in everything he does is to care for the whole person. He understands that illness is caused not just by biological forces, but by social, political, material and spiritual forces as well. He has cured many, many people of diseases…so much so that he has eradicated things like TB and malaria from entire regions in Haiti. But, he did not do this by attending to only the disease itself. To treat medically alone was not sufficient. To begin with, often people did not keep taking the medications once they left the clinic. This is a constant problem in treating curable diseases in the developing world. But Farmer was not deterred by this.
Many people, including those who set world health policy, assume the reasons for non-compliance with medical directions is because of things like lack of education, religious or cultic superstitions, primitive time keeping mechanisms or mistaken understandings of how medicine works. This has led many to assume some people are simply beyond help and it’s not worth putting resources into an effort that’s destined to fail. Farmer, however, conducted his own research into this problem. What he found was that compliance with complicated protocols of taking drugs to cure TB and manage symptoms of HIV and AIDS did not depend on level of education, religion, or how far out in the country someone lived. Instead, the main factor influencing compliance and cure rates was the availability of food and social support. Setting world medical policy, according to Paul Farmer, should not consist of ordering up research that justifies medical inaction. Rather, it should be directed at identifying the obstacles to care and removing them.
These obstacles include lack of housing, lack of clean water, no money, no food. In short, poverty. The World Health Organization now acknowledges that poverty is the world’s biggest killer. And the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed. Farmer, and Partners in Health as a whole, recognize that treating disease and treating poverty must go hand in hand. Tracy Kidder, in a book he wrote on Farmer, describes how time and time again, Farmer and other doctors follow up with people who missed appointments or to see if they are taking their medications. They go to them – which often means hours-long hikes into the far reaches of rural Haiti to see just one person. And on these house calls, they deal with whatever they find when they got there. If they find them without money, they give them money. If they find them without a home, they build a home. In other words, they remove the obstacles to healing the whole person. And so Farmer’s patients comply perfectly with medical instructions, and they get better.
Farmer also attends to the spiritual needs of the patients who come to his clinic. He neither rejects as simplistic or farcical the local understandings of spirits and curses. Nor does he over romanticize or indulge things he sees as counter productive to someone’s health. He sees their religion for what it is – which is, of course, what religion is wherever you find it: a very complex mix of spiritual truths, myths and superstitions invented to cope with situations beyond our control. By treating a sophisticated system of beliefs sophisticatedly, Farmer allows people’s faith and beliefs to contribute to the healing of the person, something he sees as not just a nice add on, but essential to the whole picture of healing.
Farmer’s secret ingredient in all of this is that he listens to people. He accepts how people present their problem, even if it doesn’t fit his own way of understanding the world and science. He does not discount them, paternalistically asserting his own expertise. Instead, he helps people see that medication and religion can work side by side, helping each other.
Farmer is an Easter person, showing his love for Jesus and for God by feeding God’s people, physically, materially, and spiritually.
We, too, are called to love Jesus by feeding his sheep. But, let’s be clear about exactly what are we getting ourselves into when we try to feed those most in need? Paul Farmer’s story is inspirational. By any measure, he has done amazing things. No one would call him a failure, that’s for sure. But, step back and take another look at Haiti and we see, despite all that Partners in Health has done, a country that still looks beyond hope.
Even before the earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. 55% of people in Haiti are living below the poverty line. Haiti has an infant mortality rate of 60 babies out of every 1,000 live births, compared to 6 in the United State. Their economy has a negative growth rate year after year. And now, of course, those statistics are almost meaningless in the face of the recent earthquake. It’s hard to know what kind of difference something even as amazing as Partners in Health is making. People are becoming poor and sick at a much faster rate than Paul Farmer and the staff there can cure them. So here’s Paul Farmer, a great example of an Easter person, and yet even if we did what he did, just what kind of impact would it have?
Farmer finds the answer to this in his faith. By his own admission, Farmer’s religion most closely reflects Christian liberation theology. Liberation theology says we should care first and foremost for the poor –called a preferential option for the poor. His “conversion” to this religion came by talking and listening to many people in Haiti and other poverty stricken parts of the world. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: “Everybody else hates us,” they’d tell him, “but God loves the poor more.”
Farmer often talks about an imbalance of suffering. All suffering isn’t equal, he says. God has a preferential option for the poor, but Farmer is fond of saying that Tuberculosis also has a preferential option for the poor. Suffering is not equal. Liberation theology puts you squarely on the side of the losers in this world. Farmer believes we are called to feed the sheep – specifically the ones Jesus fed: the poor, marginalized and the outcast. But he admits this work is something that he calls, “the long defeat”.
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat,” he says. But that isn’t the end of the story for him. He goes on, “I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. But, [we Americans are] used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in Partners in Health is make common cause with the losers. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.” Then he explains, “I don’t care if we lose, I’m gonna try to do the right thing. And then all the victories are gravy. The other option is to be jaded because you’ve been fighting a defeat for so long.”
When Jesus says to Peter, “Feed my sheep,” he is both freeing him from his spiritual turmoil by restoring him to the community of disciples and he is inviting him into the long defeat. I’m sure the disciples’ spiritual rollercoaster continued over the years, but they didn’t go back to their old lives of fishing. In the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters we see the disciples and early followers of Jesus living out the ministry Jesus began. So why do people do this? Why do people join the long defeat? Remember, this life – this long defeat – is grounded not in obligation. It is not something we do because if we don’t God will punish us. It is grounded in love – in God’s love for humankind, seen so clearly in Jesus, and in our love for God. Faith is not a list of rules or a system of rewards and punishments, it’s love. And that love is manifest in our care for people – care for the whole person.
I love what Farmer says about his own faith. He has faith in the religious sense, he says, but then adds, “I also have faith in penicillin, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true too. So if I had to choose between liberation theology and science, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don’t have to make that choice, do I?”
Faith is action, faith is love, faith is using every means we have to heal, feed, house and help one another. Faith is a preferential option for the poor. Faith is loving God so much that we feed God’s sheep with the bread of the earth and the bread of life. Amen.
April 18, 2010: Third Sunday of Easter
The author of the gospel of John captures so much of what Jesus is about in this beautiful scene. The way Jesus engages the disciples is basically a recap of how Jesus dealt with people throughout his ministry.
The disciples are together – and they are suffering…and they are suffering on at least two different levels. First, there is the material or physical level. We have every day fishermen engaging in the every day struggle of trying to make a living. On this occasion, the fishermen are not catching anything – a problem that can lead directly to a lack of food and other necessary resources. This is not a trivial thing. The material level matters. Real people with real problems.
Second, they are suffering on a spiritual level. The disciples have been on a bit of a spiritual rollercoaster ever since Jesus died. His death was a huge blow, making them question everything that had gone before. Then, they didn’t know what to make of the empty tomb. It was maybe a glimmer of hope, but exactly what it meant was pretty much a giant mystery. Then, Jesus appears to them while they are locked in a room – twice. That, of course, had to be a spiritual upper. But it seems that spiritual high didn’t last too long. Soon after, they are back to where they started…back to the beginning. They are returning to their old lives of fishing. Their spirits, it seems, are diminished.
Peter, of course, had additional reason to be in spiritual turmoil. He had, in the end, betrayed his friend Jesus. He denied any connection to Jesus because he was afraid of what it would mean to be associated with him. He feared he would meet the same fate on the cross, so he lied about knowing him, about being a follower, about believing in what he stood for. It is not difficult to imagine what feelings that would engender. Shame, guilt, embarrassment.
And so here the disciples are, back at the sea of Galilee. After all that had happened, after the three-year whirlwind tour with Jesus, his crushing death, and the bewildering appearances, it’s almost like they just don’t know what to do next. It was probably a crisis of faith. But it was also an economic crisis. They needed to live, and for that they needed to work. So Peter, ever practical, ever concrete Peter, says, in a voice I imagine to be sullen and resigned, “I’m goin’ fishin’”. What else is there to do, he seems to be saying. That’s it, the dream has died, let’s get back to our real lives now.
So, here we are in the last chapter of the gospel of John, and after everything that had happened, we find the disciples defeated and in economic and spiritual disrepair …Peter having a double dose of the spiritual blues. And now, not even their tried and true lives were working – they weren’t catching any fish. It was, to put it mildly, a pretty low point.
Jesus comes to them in this time of need, and he ignores neither the material nor spiritual suffering. In classic Jesus style, he cares for the whole person. He attends to the material needs of the disciples, and he attends to their deep spiritual needs…with a double dose of healing for Peter. They weren’t catching fish, so he provides fish-o-plenty. “Do you have any food?” He asks. They don’t, so he feeds them. He meets them in their immediate, pressing, physical need – they need food. But he doesn’t just give them any meal, he sets a Eucharistic feast. Loaves and fishes he gives them. They would recognize these as the foods of miracles – the food that never stops feeding. It wasn’t just that he met their immediate need for food; this was a sign that he promised to keep feeding them forever.
Then, after they had eaten, Jesus faces Peter. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Even if Peter gets a little impatient with Jesus asking this question three times, we know how kind and compassionate it is. Here’s your chance, he says to Peter. Denying me is not the last thing you will do. You get to put that behind you and come back to the fold. Three times he denied, three times Jesus lets him declare his love for him.
So, Jesus feeds their bodies, Jesus feeds their souls, and then, because he’s Jesus, he invites them to do exactly the same thing for others. He’s not just comforting the disciples, he’s commissioning them. I have fed you, physically and spiritually; now, go feed my sheep. Jesus cares for the whole person – every aspect, and he sends us out to do the same.
From Jesus’ mouth to Paul Farmer’s ears. Paul Farmer feeds Jesus’ sheep. He cares for people, and like Jesus, he cares for them on every level, healing people in physical, material and spiritual ways.
Farmer graduated in anthropology from Harvard and went on to Harvard Medical School to become a doctor. He began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 when still a student, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau, determined to bring modern health care to the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere. Starting with a one-building clinic in the village of Cange, Farmer’s project has grown to a multiservice health complex that includes a primary school, an infirmary, a surgery wing, a training program for health outreach workers, a 104-bed hospital, a women’s clinic, and a pediatric care facility. It has become a model for health care for poor communities world wide.
I think it’s because of his dual perspectives of anthropologist and doctor that Farmer’s model in everything he does is to care for the whole person. He understands that illness is caused not just by biological forces, but by social, political, material and spiritual forces as well. He has cured many, many people of diseases…so much so that he has eradicated things like TB and malaria from entire regions in Haiti. But, he did not do this by attending to only the disease itself. To treat medically alone was not sufficient. To begin with, often people did not keep taking the medications once they left the clinic. This is a constant problem in treating curable diseases in the developing world. But Farmer was not deterred by this.
Many people, including those who set world health policy, assume the reasons for non-compliance with medical directions is because of things like lack of education, religious or cultic superstitions, primitive time keeping mechanisms or mistaken understandings of how medicine works. This has led many to assume some people are simply beyond help and it’s not worth putting resources into an effort that’s destined to fail. Farmer, however, conducted his own research into this problem. What he found was that compliance with complicated protocols of taking drugs to cure TB and manage symptoms of HIV and AIDS did not depend on level of education, religion, or how far out in the country someone lived. Instead, the main factor influencing compliance and cure rates was the availability of food and social support. Setting world medical policy, according to Paul Farmer, should not consist of ordering up research that justifies medical inaction. Rather, it should be directed at identifying the obstacles to care and removing them.
These obstacles include lack of housing, lack of clean water, no money, no food. In short, poverty. The World Health Organization now acknowledges that poverty is the world’s biggest killer. And the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed. Farmer, and Partners in Health as a whole, recognize that treating disease and treating poverty must go hand in hand. Tracy Kidder, in a book he wrote on Farmer, describes how time and time again, Farmer and other doctors follow up with people who missed appointments or to see if they are taking their medications. They go to them – which often means hours-long hikes into the far reaches of rural Haiti to see just one person. And on these house calls, they deal with whatever they find when they got there. If they find them without money, they give them money. If they find them without a home, they build a home. In other words, they remove the obstacles to healing the whole person. And so Farmer’s patients comply perfectly with medical instructions, and they get better.
Farmer also attends to the spiritual needs of the patients who come to his clinic. He neither rejects as simplistic or farcical the local understandings of spirits and curses. Nor does he over romanticize or indulge things he sees as counter productive to someone’s health. He sees their religion for what it is – which is, of course, what religion is wherever you find it: a very complex mix of spiritual truths, myths and superstitions invented to cope with situations beyond our control. By treating a sophisticated system of beliefs sophisticatedly, Farmer allows people’s faith and beliefs to contribute to the healing of the person, something he sees as not just a nice add on, but essential to the whole picture of healing.
Farmer’s secret ingredient in all of this is that he listens to people. He accepts how people present their problem, even if it doesn’t fit his own way of understanding the world and science. He does not discount them, paternalistically asserting his own expertise. Instead, he helps people see that medication and religion can work side by side, helping each other.
Farmer is an Easter person, showing his love for Jesus and for God by feeding God’s people, physically, materially, and spiritually.
We, too, are called to love Jesus by feeding his sheep. But, let’s be clear about exactly what are we getting ourselves into when we try to feed those most in need? Paul Farmer’s story is inspirational. By any measure, he has done amazing things. No one would call him a failure, that’s for sure. But, step back and take another look at Haiti and we see, despite all that Partners in Health has done, a country that still looks beyond hope.
Even before the earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. 55% of people in Haiti are living below the poverty line. Haiti has an infant mortality rate of 60 babies out of every 1,000 live births, compared to 6 in the United State. Their economy has a negative growth rate year after year. And now, of course, those statistics are almost meaningless in the face of the recent earthquake. It’s hard to know what kind of difference something even as amazing as Partners in Health is making. People are becoming poor and sick at a much faster rate than Paul Farmer and the staff there can cure them. So here’s Paul Farmer, a great example of an Easter person, and yet even if we did what he did, just what kind of impact would it have?
Farmer finds the answer to this in his faith. By his own admission, Farmer’s religion most closely reflects Christian liberation theology. Liberation theology says we should care first and foremost for the poor –called a preferential option for the poor. His “conversion” to this religion came by talking and listening to many people in Haiti and other poverty stricken parts of the world. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: “Everybody else hates us,” they’d tell him, “but God loves the poor more.”
Farmer often talks about an imbalance of suffering. All suffering isn’t equal, he says. God has a preferential option for the poor, but Farmer is fond of saying that Tuberculosis also has a preferential option for the poor. Suffering is not equal. Liberation theology puts you squarely on the side of the losers in this world. Farmer believes we are called to feed the sheep – specifically the ones Jesus fed: the poor, marginalized and the outcast. But he admits this work is something that he calls, “the long defeat”.
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat,” he says. But that isn’t the end of the story for him. He goes on, “I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. But, [we Americans are] used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in Partners in Health is make common cause with the losers. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.” Then he explains, “I don’t care if we lose, I’m gonna try to do the right thing. And then all the victories are gravy. The other option is to be jaded because you’ve been fighting a defeat for so long.”
When Jesus says to Peter, “Feed my sheep,” he is both freeing him from his spiritual turmoil by restoring him to the community of disciples and he is inviting him into the long defeat. I’m sure the disciples’ spiritual rollercoaster continued over the years, but they didn’t go back to their old lives of fishing. In the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters we see the disciples and early followers of Jesus living out the ministry Jesus began. So why do people do this? Why do people join the long defeat? Remember, this life – this long defeat – is grounded not in obligation. It is not something we do because if we don’t God will punish us. It is grounded in love – in God’s love for humankind, seen so clearly in Jesus, and in our love for God. Faith is not a list of rules or a system of rewards and punishments, it’s love. And that love is manifest in our care for people – care for the whole person.
I love what Farmer says about his own faith. He has faith in the religious sense, he says, but then adds, “I also have faith in penicillin, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true too. So if I had to choose between liberation theology and science, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don’t have to make that choice, do I?”
Faith is action, faith is love, faith is using every means we have to heal, feed, house and help one another. Faith is a preferential option for the poor. Faith is loving God so much that we feed God’s sheep with the bread of the earth and the bread of life. Amen.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Easter People: Immaculee Ilibagiza
Acts 5:27-32 ; John 20:19-31
April 11, 2010: Second Sunday of Easter
[Much of the information on Immaculee Ilibagiza's life and experiences in this sermon comes from her book "Left To Tell."]
Being in a room with the doors locked for fear that someone might come and kill you is something far too many people have experienced. It is all too common today. It’s been all too common throughout history.
When the disciples were locked in that room, it wasn’t just that they were regrouping or gathered to mourn their friend, Jesus. They felt like they were being hunted. They locked the doors because there was a very real possibility that people were trying to kill them, just as they had Jesus.
Most of us can not imagine what that is like. It’s difficult for to put ourselves in the disciples’ shoes. What was going through their heads? How likely did they think it was that they would survive? What did they imagine about their enemies? What were they thinking about their family and friends? It’s hard for us to imagine, but this is where we find the disciples on the day they first heard about the empty tomb. They didn’t yet know what the empty tomb meant. They are in a room with the door locked to the outside world, hoping against hope that they won’t meet the same fate as Jesus did.
These are extreme situations, and they change you. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but they change you. Being locked in a room for fear of someone coming to kill you breeds fear, anger and often hatred. How could it not? The people trying to kill you care nothing for you. Most of the time they see you as barely human, if that. You can’t hope for their compassion, you can’t rely on their mercy. Fear, anger and hatred seem like the only sane response. And those things change you – those feelings do something to us. When fear, anger and hatred are allowed to enter our hearts and take up residence, the locked room becomes a metaphor. We lock our hearts shut as well, making sure our enemies can never get in.
When we lock our hearts to our enemies, our heart is affected in many ways. Our fear of violence becomes the seed of violence within us. Our hatred of our enemies becomes the fuel that keeps the fires of revenge and retaliation burning in our heart. Actions that come from such a place – from such a heart – only perpetuate a world of fear, anger and hatred. People everywhere locked in rooms for fear of being killed desire more than anything for the fighting to stop, for the fear and anger on both sides to stop so that they might live in peace. But when you are locked in a room for fear of others, fear, anger and hatred seem like the only sane response. Trouble is, it is a response that guarantees peace will never come.
Yet somehow, some people in such situations do resist this response. And I think what makes the difference as to how you respond when your heart is locked away, barred shut by fear, anger and hatred, depends on who enters the locked room first.
In that room, the disciples could have made the choice to hate those who were hunting them. The religious and political authorities were after them and their way of life. They opposed everything they stood for. You can almost imagine the conversation between the disciples, each one reinforcing the anger of the others, justifying impulses of revenge and hatred. Left to their own devices, it’s not clear what they would have decided – it’s not clear what would have happened to their hearts – if their hearts would become as locked to the outside world as their room was.
But Jesus entered first. Before any soldiers, before the enemy, Jesus entered first. And I think that stopped the downward spiral leading to hearts lock in fear, anger and hatred. Jesus brings the key to unlock their hearts and free them from this most understandable human response. And the key is peace and forgiveness. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says as soon as he enters the locked room. We tend to read right over this – as if it were a simple greeting like, “hi.” We skim right over it, just as we often skim right over the words in our own worship service. “The peace of Christ is with you, and also with you,” we say every week. Unfortunately, because of the routine nature, the commonness of this part of our worship service, I fear those words affect us no differently than if we said “good morning” to one another.
But Jesus is bringing these terrified, locked away fugitives peace – true peace. And it’s no small thing. Peace in this midst of violence is nothing short of miraculous. Peace when your life is in danger does not come easily, if ever at all. But this is what Jesus brings.
It’s not something magical that he gives them. It’s not just that because Jesus comes in the room and says, “Peace” they all of a sudden feel calm and unafraid of their enemies. It certainly doesn’t mean their enemies are no longer coming after them. The peace Jesus brings comes through choosing a way of life. The way, Jesus tells them, is the way of forgiveness. That’s where the peace comes from. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
You can choose to harbor the anger and fear, but then only anger and fear are possible between you and your enemies. Or, you can choose to forgive, and then another way is opened up. That is the choice we often face. That is the choice Immaculee Ilibagiza faced in the most extreme of circumstances.
Immaculee Ilibagiza is a Rwandan Tutsi who lived through the genocide there in 1994. She was 24 years old at the time and was home from college to spend Easter with her family when the death of Rwanda’s Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of more than one million ethnic Tutsis. This was, of course, a part of a larger cycle of violence that had not been interrupted. The Tutsis had, in the past, oppressed and at times terrorized the Hutus. Now, the hatred born in that oppression was tapped into, turning ordinary people into ruthless killers. Ilibagiza was locked in a room for three months because she, and ethnic Tustis all over Rwanda, were being hunted down by people who wanted to kill them.
Ilibagiza survived by being locked in a Hutu pastor’s tiny bathroom with seven other starving women for 91 days. She lost her mother, father, two brothers, much extended family, and almost all of her village in the genocide. Locked in that bathroom, she had a lot of time to be afraid, to get angry and to foster her hatred for the people who killed her family, her neighbors, her friends and were trying to kill her.
But Immaculee, although locked tightly in that bathroom, made way for Jesus to enter. She prayed. They couldn’t speak to one another, couldn’t make any noise at all, could barely sleep. So she prayed. She turned her mind, as much as she could, to God. At first, it simply did not work. “My prayers felt hollow,” she writes. “A war had started in my soul, and I could no longer pray to a God of love with a heart full of hatred. I tried again, praying for [God] to forgive the killers, but deep down I couldn’t believe that they deserved it at all.” She knew the only way she would be able to resist the tide that had swept over her country and taken the hearts and souls of so many was if Jesus was the first to enter that locked bathroom. So again she prayed: “Please open my heart and show me how to forgive. I’m not strong enough to squash my hatred – they’ve wronged us all so much…my hatred is so heavy that it could crush me. Touch my heart, Lord, and show me how to forgive.”
Just as Jesus broke into the locked room where the disciples hid, somehow, God broke through her locked heart and showed her that it was possible, despite the impossibility of it all, to forgive – to choose peace over fear. She describes a particularly horrific event that happened outside the window of the bathroom in which she and the other women hid. It was a terrible scene that ended with an infant left to die alone in the streets. All night, she and the women listened as it’s cries grew weak and eventually stopped altogether. And again she prayed, “How can I forgive people who would do such a thing to an infant?” And this time she heard God answer: “You are all My children.”
“The killers were like children,” she writes. “Yes, they were barbaric creatures who would have to be punished for their actions, but they were still children. They were cruel, vicious, and dangerous, as kids sometimes can be, but nevertheless, they were children. Their minds had been infected with the evil that had spread across the country, but their souls weren’t evil. Despite their atrocities, they were children of God, and I could forgive a child, although it would not be easy…especially when that child was trying to kill me.
“In God’s eyes,” she goes on, “the killers were part of God’s family, deserving of love and forgiveness. At that moment, I prayed for the killers, for their sins to be forgiven. I took a crucial step toward forgiving the killers that day. My anger was draining from me – I’d opened my heart to God, and God had touched it with infinite love.” Immaculee was locked away in a room for fear of the Hutus, and Jesus entered, said “Peace be with you,” and told her “forgive and they will be forgiven, retain and it will be retained,” and somehow she was able to forgive the very ones hunting her down.
That is what the risen Jesus asked of the disciples that day. And, he had a lot to say in the days following about what it means to live as an Easter person. We don’t know exactly how well they responded in the moment, but we have Luke, the author of the book of Acts, who tells us that the disciples did indeed try to live another way. They too tried to open space in their hearts, even though they were not safe and had plenty of enemies. They carried on the message and practice of forgiveness, even when it again threatened their lives. “We must obey God rather than any human authority,” they said to their persecutors in the trial scene described in the book of Acts. “God raised Jesus,” they continued, “that he might give repentance to Israel and the forgiveness of sins.”
They caught on. Immaculee caught on. This forgiveness of sins is what Jesus brought in order to make peace possible. In the face of ones enemies, one can actually have peace – true peace.
This is what Jesus asks of us too. We have locked hearts for all sorts of reasons. We have locked parts of ourselves away because we fear being hurt, we fear those who dislike us or have power over us, we have been hurt and fear the ones who did it. But Jesus breaks through, enters our locked hearts and says, “Peace be with you.” Forgive the sins of others and the sins will no longer have power over you. Retain them, and you will always live in fear, anger and hatred, and the cycle of sin – yours and others – will never end.
Peace is neither a casual greeting nor a pie in the sky dream. Peace is possible in our hearts, in our relationships and in our world. Think about where our passing of the peace is in our worship service. It always follows the prayer of confession and the declaration of forgiveness. No matter what we have done, we know – we say it each week – no matter what, we are forgiven in Christ. In Christ, we are forgiven, freed and made whole. This truth, true for me, you and even our worst enemies, is what makes peace a reality. In Christ, everyone is forgiven, and so, the peace of Christ is with you all. It’s no casual greeting. It’s the Easter hope we have when Jesus is the first to enter the locked room of our hearts.
It was Easter when the killing started in Immaculee’s village. And like that Easter day when the disciples were locked in their room, the risen Jesus broke through all padlocks of fear, anger and hatred and showed them how to be Easter people. Forgive and bring peace – bring an end to a cycle that only kills and hurts. Forgive like God has forgiven you, and that is how you keep the risen Christ alive in our world.
Since the end of the worst of the killing, Immaculee went on to get a job with the United Nations. She now lives in New York and spends a great deal of her time talking about her own experience. She feels like she was left to tell the story not only of the genocide and all the people who were killed, but also the story of how she came to forgive her enemies in the most impossible of circumstances. And she could, because in Christ we are forgiven, freed and made whole. The peace of Christ is with us all. Amen.
April 11, 2010: Second Sunday of Easter
[Much of the information on Immaculee Ilibagiza's life and experiences in this sermon comes from her book "Left To Tell."]
Being in a room with the doors locked for fear that someone might come and kill you is something far too many people have experienced. It is all too common today. It’s been all too common throughout history.
When the disciples were locked in that room, it wasn’t just that they were regrouping or gathered to mourn their friend, Jesus. They felt like they were being hunted. They locked the doors because there was a very real possibility that people were trying to kill them, just as they had Jesus.
Most of us can not imagine what that is like. It’s difficult for to put ourselves in the disciples’ shoes. What was going through their heads? How likely did they think it was that they would survive? What did they imagine about their enemies? What were they thinking about their family and friends? It’s hard for us to imagine, but this is where we find the disciples on the day they first heard about the empty tomb. They didn’t yet know what the empty tomb meant. They are in a room with the door locked to the outside world, hoping against hope that they won’t meet the same fate as Jesus did.
These are extreme situations, and they change you. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but they change you. Being locked in a room for fear of someone coming to kill you breeds fear, anger and often hatred. How could it not? The people trying to kill you care nothing for you. Most of the time they see you as barely human, if that. You can’t hope for their compassion, you can’t rely on their mercy. Fear, anger and hatred seem like the only sane response. And those things change you – those feelings do something to us. When fear, anger and hatred are allowed to enter our hearts and take up residence, the locked room becomes a metaphor. We lock our hearts shut as well, making sure our enemies can never get in.
When we lock our hearts to our enemies, our heart is affected in many ways. Our fear of violence becomes the seed of violence within us. Our hatred of our enemies becomes the fuel that keeps the fires of revenge and retaliation burning in our heart. Actions that come from such a place – from such a heart – only perpetuate a world of fear, anger and hatred. People everywhere locked in rooms for fear of being killed desire more than anything for the fighting to stop, for the fear and anger on both sides to stop so that they might live in peace. But when you are locked in a room for fear of others, fear, anger and hatred seem like the only sane response. Trouble is, it is a response that guarantees peace will never come.
Yet somehow, some people in such situations do resist this response. And I think what makes the difference as to how you respond when your heart is locked away, barred shut by fear, anger and hatred, depends on who enters the locked room first.
In that room, the disciples could have made the choice to hate those who were hunting them. The religious and political authorities were after them and their way of life. They opposed everything they stood for. You can almost imagine the conversation between the disciples, each one reinforcing the anger of the others, justifying impulses of revenge and hatred. Left to their own devices, it’s not clear what they would have decided – it’s not clear what would have happened to their hearts – if their hearts would become as locked to the outside world as their room was.
But Jesus entered first. Before any soldiers, before the enemy, Jesus entered first. And I think that stopped the downward spiral leading to hearts lock in fear, anger and hatred. Jesus brings the key to unlock their hearts and free them from this most understandable human response. And the key is peace and forgiveness. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says as soon as he enters the locked room. We tend to read right over this – as if it were a simple greeting like, “hi.” We skim right over it, just as we often skim right over the words in our own worship service. “The peace of Christ is with you, and also with you,” we say every week. Unfortunately, because of the routine nature, the commonness of this part of our worship service, I fear those words affect us no differently than if we said “good morning” to one another.
But Jesus is bringing these terrified, locked away fugitives peace – true peace. And it’s no small thing. Peace in this midst of violence is nothing short of miraculous. Peace when your life is in danger does not come easily, if ever at all. But this is what Jesus brings.
It’s not something magical that he gives them. It’s not just that because Jesus comes in the room and says, “Peace” they all of a sudden feel calm and unafraid of their enemies. It certainly doesn’t mean their enemies are no longer coming after them. The peace Jesus brings comes through choosing a way of life. The way, Jesus tells them, is the way of forgiveness. That’s where the peace comes from. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
You can choose to harbor the anger and fear, but then only anger and fear are possible between you and your enemies. Or, you can choose to forgive, and then another way is opened up. That is the choice we often face. That is the choice Immaculee Ilibagiza faced in the most extreme of circumstances.
Immaculee Ilibagiza is a Rwandan Tutsi who lived through the genocide there in 1994. She was 24 years old at the time and was home from college to spend Easter with her family when the death of Rwanda’s Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of more than one million ethnic Tutsis. This was, of course, a part of a larger cycle of violence that had not been interrupted. The Tutsis had, in the past, oppressed and at times terrorized the Hutus. Now, the hatred born in that oppression was tapped into, turning ordinary people into ruthless killers. Ilibagiza was locked in a room for three months because she, and ethnic Tustis all over Rwanda, were being hunted down by people who wanted to kill them.
Ilibagiza survived by being locked in a Hutu pastor’s tiny bathroom with seven other starving women for 91 days. She lost her mother, father, two brothers, much extended family, and almost all of her village in the genocide. Locked in that bathroom, she had a lot of time to be afraid, to get angry and to foster her hatred for the people who killed her family, her neighbors, her friends and were trying to kill her.
But Immaculee, although locked tightly in that bathroom, made way for Jesus to enter. She prayed. They couldn’t speak to one another, couldn’t make any noise at all, could barely sleep. So she prayed. She turned her mind, as much as she could, to God. At first, it simply did not work. “My prayers felt hollow,” she writes. “A war had started in my soul, and I could no longer pray to a God of love with a heart full of hatred. I tried again, praying for [God] to forgive the killers, but deep down I couldn’t believe that they deserved it at all.” She knew the only way she would be able to resist the tide that had swept over her country and taken the hearts and souls of so many was if Jesus was the first to enter that locked bathroom. So again she prayed: “Please open my heart and show me how to forgive. I’m not strong enough to squash my hatred – they’ve wronged us all so much…my hatred is so heavy that it could crush me. Touch my heart, Lord, and show me how to forgive.”
Just as Jesus broke into the locked room where the disciples hid, somehow, God broke through her locked heart and showed her that it was possible, despite the impossibility of it all, to forgive – to choose peace over fear. She describes a particularly horrific event that happened outside the window of the bathroom in which she and the other women hid. It was a terrible scene that ended with an infant left to die alone in the streets. All night, she and the women listened as it’s cries grew weak and eventually stopped altogether. And again she prayed, “How can I forgive people who would do such a thing to an infant?” And this time she heard God answer: “You are all My children.”
“The killers were like children,” she writes. “Yes, they were barbaric creatures who would have to be punished for their actions, but they were still children. They were cruel, vicious, and dangerous, as kids sometimes can be, but nevertheless, they were children. Their minds had been infected with the evil that had spread across the country, but their souls weren’t evil. Despite their atrocities, they were children of God, and I could forgive a child, although it would not be easy…especially when that child was trying to kill me.
“In God’s eyes,” she goes on, “the killers were part of God’s family, deserving of love and forgiveness. At that moment, I prayed for the killers, for their sins to be forgiven. I took a crucial step toward forgiving the killers that day. My anger was draining from me – I’d opened my heart to God, and God had touched it with infinite love.” Immaculee was locked away in a room for fear of the Hutus, and Jesus entered, said “Peace be with you,” and told her “forgive and they will be forgiven, retain and it will be retained,” and somehow she was able to forgive the very ones hunting her down.
That is what the risen Jesus asked of the disciples that day. And, he had a lot to say in the days following about what it means to live as an Easter person. We don’t know exactly how well they responded in the moment, but we have Luke, the author of the book of Acts, who tells us that the disciples did indeed try to live another way. They too tried to open space in their hearts, even though they were not safe and had plenty of enemies. They carried on the message and practice of forgiveness, even when it again threatened their lives. “We must obey God rather than any human authority,” they said to their persecutors in the trial scene described in the book of Acts. “God raised Jesus,” they continued, “that he might give repentance to Israel and the forgiveness of sins.”
They caught on. Immaculee caught on. This forgiveness of sins is what Jesus brought in order to make peace possible. In the face of ones enemies, one can actually have peace – true peace.
This is what Jesus asks of us too. We have locked hearts for all sorts of reasons. We have locked parts of ourselves away because we fear being hurt, we fear those who dislike us or have power over us, we have been hurt and fear the ones who did it. But Jesus breaks through, enters our locked hearts and says, “Peace be with you.” Forgive the sins of others and the sins will no longer have power over you. Retain them, and you will always live in fear, anger and hatred, and the cycle of sin – yours and others – will never end.
Peace is neither a casual greeting nor a pie in the sky dream. Peace is possible in our hearts, in our relationships and in our world. Think about where our passing of the peace is in our worship service. It always follows the prayer of confession and the declaration of forgiveness. No matter what we have done, we know – we say it each week – no matter what, we are forgiven in Christ. In Christ, we are forgiven, freed and made whole. This truth, true for me, you and even our worst enemies, is what makes peace a reality. In Christ, everyone is forgiven, and so, the peace of Christ is with you all. It’s no casual greeting. It’s the Easter hope we have when Jesus is the first to enter the locked room of our hearts.
It was Easter when the killing started in Immaculee’s village. And like that Easter day when the disciples were locked in their room, the risen Jesus broke through all padlocks of fear, anger and hatred and showed them how to be Easter people. Forgive and bring peace – bring an end to a cycle that only kills and hurts. Forgive like God has forgiven you, and that is how you keep the risen Christ alive in our world.
Since the end of the worst of the killing, Immaculee went on to get a job with the United Nations. She now lives in New York and spends a great deal of her time talking about her own experience. She feels like she was left to tell the story not only of the genocide and all the people who were killed, but also the story of how she came to forgive her enemies in the most impossible of circumstances. And she could, because in Christ we are forgiven, freed and made whole. The peace of Christ is with us all. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)