Easter 3 (B)                             Still Wondering              Luke 24:36b-48

Peace be with you. That's what he said. Of course, that's what he usually said. It's hard to know what he meant by that. There is so much about the human story and the human condition that is so unpeaceful, so unpeacelike, that to believe that peace is even really possible let alone something that is with us may be more than we can really even imagine in our wildest dreams right now. Even then, in the moment recorded here in the Gospel of Luke the primary emotions were not those usually associated with peace. Terror, fear, doubt, anxiety, disbelief, these are not emotions that are symptomatic of peace by any definition but they sure sound familiar to me, too darn familiar. Peace has proven to be illusive at best, then and ever since. There is some hope here in this word which is always a good thing. They were still wondering, it says. Still wondering. Still wondering if it could really be true that the so-called "prince of peace" though he was brutally and cruelly killed was alive again and that peace itself was not completely lost even though, even then, there was very little about anything at all that even slightly resembles or felt like peace.

There are reasons for this of course. There is a reason that our world does not yet know anything like real peace. There are voices from the silence of the past that speak loud and clear. Black Elk of the Lakotas is one of those voices:

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. . . the nations hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

This that Black Elk remembers happened a long time ago and none of us were even born yet so one might wonder what this could possibly have to do with us.

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us." (Black Elk, Oglala Sioux)

We called them savages but they knew more about the connections than we. They knew that peace is not fragmented but must be complete and whole, an integration of all, connected and in harmony with all. Furthermore, time passing does not eliminate the past.  

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round..... The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours . . . Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. (Black Elk, Oglala)

We carry the past within us wherever we go. It cannot be ignored or forgotten but it can be transformed. This, and it is no coincidence, is only possible through forgiveness. Forgiveness does not end what needed forgiving but transforms it. Forgiveness does not knock down walls or obliterate what has happened, it walks through walls not unlike the resurrected Christ and changes what needs forgiving into something new. It comes full circle. What happened is not forgotten but is remembered and learned to enable us to change what we do now. So it is that peace can come on earth. It is a very, very slow process requiring patience and sacrifice and faith and much, much love. Unfortunately our world has chosen another path, a path of impatience, selfishness, of fear and war, a path that feeds on itself, a circle too, but a vicious one.

As the Dutch social scientist Henk Houweling puts it, "one of the causes of war is war itself.' Wars produce warlike societies, which, in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves. War begets war and shapes human society as it does."

This does not even account for the cycle of revenge and inheritance of grievances that come from the violent conflict of God's children with God's children. In our fear we want to be safe and our longing for security only inspires us to do what makes us less safe.

The archbishop of Canterbury in his Palm Sunday letter of this year wrote: . . . the deepest enemy to peace is always the spirit of grasping and clinging to what makes us feel safe while the truth is that we shall only be safe when others are not frightened of us, when others do not feel silenced, despised or suffocated.

Perhaps, in our fear, we forget that our perceived enemy fears us as much as we fear them. We citizens of the United States of America justify our actions in the world as what is necessary to protect ourselves from what we fear but I wonder if we are prepared to be the ones who are feared and not just by those who may deserve to be afraid of us. As the one superpower left and a superpower where some of its leaders have begun to speak of nuclear weapons as "usable" as a first-strike option, it is natural  that we are and will be feared. We should ourselves be fearful of even considering using such a weapon. What is happening to us? Are we safer because we have nuclear weapons that we might actually use? Is the world really safer now that we have gone to war? What is the evidence that there is anything like peace in the Middle East or anywhere else today?   

Fear plays a leading role in the way we order our lives in this world today and fear is the enemy of love and also of peace. We, therefore, have a serious problem if it is truly peace that we want. Buechner said, as you must know by now, peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of love. Peace in other words is not a utopian vision of a world where everyone is in agreement with everyone else or is it a world in which everyone is forced to agree with the most powerful but is a real world where we agree to disagree and learn to respect and care for all others, a mutual concern that is not a new idea but one that Paul himself in the first generation of the church was using to gather a people of faith who would be reconcilers in a broken world. Reconcilers do not use force. They listen to others, they seek ways to share the abundance, to find what best serves the good of all, not just some.

Every deed that is done, is done forever. It remains in us. We carry it with us. One deed leads to another, sometimes unconsciously. We act sometimes without any awareness of what we are doing or why we are doing it. Peace does not come unconsciously. We will have to be conscious of our actions and whether or not they continue the brokenness or are a part of the healing. I think this was at least in part what Jesus hoped to communicate to those who were there that day when he said Peace be with you. I think he was telling them to take peace with them, to use peace to make peace, to build relationships, to put together the broken pieces with the work of forgiveness and self-giving love. Taking it a step further, in his last times present with them in resurrected form he wanted them to understand that they would be him in the world. There is a line from the liturgy of the Iona community in Scotland that I am borrowing this morning for the Holy Communion. It says, Re-member me, put me back together, become the body of Christ.

Fred Craddock says that the Gospel's accountings of the resurrection appearances is oddly restrained, that there is a certain realism in the description of these events. He writes:

This may not seem accurate at first, given the appearance of dazzling angels and of Jesus suddenly present and just as suddenly gone. But focus upon the believers to whom Jesus appeared: how realistically they are portrayed! They took resurrection stories as idle tales; they were startled, frightened, and confused; they "disbelieved for joy." Minds and hearts raced. What does this mean? Do we continue where we left off? Do we begin anew? Will Jesus now go to God and leave us here alone? What will happen to us? Will anybody believe this? Will we be resurrected as Jesus was?

Like us they weren't quite sure what to make of these things or anything for that matter. The world is big and complex. It is not always obvious what is true and what is false. There is much to fear. God asks us to believe in impossible things, to do something different than has always done. God asks us to act in ways that are faithful to what God wants for this world, a world that is reconciled, that knows peace,  that loves one another. We, obviously have a long way to go.

James Baldwin, a man who suffered the indignities and pain of yet another reason that there is not yet peace on earth, racism, yet became one of America's best writers wrote this:

I tremble when I wonder if there is left in Christian civilizations (and only these civilizations can answer this question-I cannot) the moral energy, the spiritual daring, to atone, to repent, to be born again; if it is possible, if there is enough leaven in the loaf, to cause us to discard our actual and historical habits, to cause us to take our places with that criminal Jew, for He was a criminal, who was put to death by Rome between two thieves, because he claimed to be the Son of God. That claim was a revelation and a revolution because it means that we are all the sons of God. That is a challenge, that's the hope.  (from "White Racism or World community" in The Price of the Ticket)

He, too, was still wondering, still wondering if this Gospel of reconciliation and hope and resurrection might not in fact be true. As a pastor I am acutely aware that nothing about humankind is simple. Good and evil are all mixed up together and yet we cannot just throw up our hands and seek the seeming comforts of unconsciousness. How is that different from death? No, we must rise from death. We must be conscious, awake, aware, listening, learning, becoming a people of peace, a people of God.

And so do not forget. Every Dawn as it comes is a holy event and everyday is holy, for the light comes from "WAKAN-TANKA" And Also you Must remember that the Two-leggeds and All other peoples who Stand upon this Earth are Sacred and Should be Treated as Such. ("White Buffalo Woman" Sioux Sacred Woman, quoted by Black Elk , (Oglala Sioux)1947).

Every day is holy and everyone who stands upon the earth is sacred. (Not exactly the image of the Native American I was taught as a child.) Did we really have to destroy these people and take it all for ourselves? There is before us all the challenge of repentance and forgiveness, to seek to be forgiven and to be forgiving, the challenge to see the truth about who we are and what is possible for who we might become. Therefore we gather at the table as those who ask forgiveness for the sin that is always with us and we ask also for the grace that forgives those who have sinned against us so that together we can take what has hurt us and broken us and make something new, something that moves us closer to the peace we long for. Barbara Brown Taylor writing in the Christian Century:

In this Easter season, fresh from the annual reenactment of Jesus' death and resurrection, I have never been more aware how he resisted the division of the world into good people and evil people. If anything, he challenged the assumption of those around him that they could tell the difference, while he dealt with the evil that all people do by suffering it, so that no one who looked upon his ruined body could fail to see where deadly violence leads. I am not a  pacifist, but if his followers sometimes find it necessary to take up arms, then they can at least do so with sorrow and not with triumph, praying that he will go on forgiving those who know not what they do.

Peace be with you, he said. Is it really possible for us, for our world? If rising from death is possible, isn't anything possible? At least we are still wondering.  

wimmer2003