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.
