Who, Me?
Children's sermon
Illustration
Preaching
Sermon
Worship
In this week's Gospel lesson (John 21:1-19), Jesus commands the repentant Peter to "feed my sheep." While that seems like a fairly straightforward mandate, in this installment of The Immediate Word team member Jim Killen reminds us that fulfilling this obligation is more than just a matter of words and good intentions -- it means doing something positive to make a difference on the issues of hunger and economic justice. With Earth Day occurring this Sunday, it's also an opportune time to think about our responsibility for environmental stewardship as an additional dimension of Jesus' imperative to care for his flock -- and to consider what we can do to help stave off the looming global-warming catastrophe. Team member Barbara Jurgensen touches on the controversy swirling around radio personality Don Imus, suggesting that Saul's claim to be a new person in Jesus Christ must have been much more difficult to believe than Imus's apologies for his offensive remarks. In addition to our normal complement of illustrations, worship resources, and a children's message, we are also offering a special section on the breaking news story of the Virginia Tech campus shootings. Team member Carlos Wilton shares a thoughtful response plus several related illustrations and helpful weblinks, team member Jim Killen provides an additional meditation, and a litany responding to the violence written by John H. Thomas, the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, is also included. (To find this material, scroll down past the "Another View" section.)
Who, Me?
by James L. Killen Jr.
John 21:1-19
What would you think if you had just read an article that said: "At over 9 million deaths a year, hunger is preeminent among global disasters"? ("Bringing Discipleship to the Table" by Willam J. Sappenfield, in The Living Pulpit [January-March 2007], http://www.pulpit.org/articles/hunger.asp) And then immediately read the words of Jesus from this week's scripture lesson: "If you love me, feed my sheep"? Would you think that one of those statements would have anything to do with the other? It would appear that they would, wouldn't it?
This is Earth Day, a day on which we are reminded that God created the world like a garden that can produce all that is needed to meet all of the needs of the earth's inhabitants -- and then put us in charge to care for the garden and manage it (Genesis 2:8-9, 15-16). For some reason -- for lots of reasons -- the garden does not seem to be meeting the needs of all of God's people. Could Jesus be talking to us, the managers of the garden, when he says, "If you love me, feed my sheep"?
That sounds like a tall order, doesn't it? Most of us are inclined to respond: "Who, me?" Let's talk about it.
THE WORLD
We are surrounded these days with information about humanity's mismanagement of the earth. The movie An Inconvenient Truth has finally convinced most of us that global warming, resulting from our short-sighted abuse of the environment, could result in far-reaching disasters that could have devastating effects on the world's population.
The January-March 2007 issue of The Living Pulpit magazine assembles a great deal of information about hunger and poverty in our world (http://www.pulpit.org/backissues/hunger_toc.asp). It includes a review of a book with a surprising trio of authors that says, "Ending hunger now represents, not a reach of utopian dream, but a realistic vision within humanity's grasp." (Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith by George McGovern, Bob Dole, and Donald E. Messer [Augsburg Fortress, 2005])
Another dimension of the problem of hunger and poverty is the worldwide economic injustice that distributes the produce of the garden earth in ways that leave many having not enough and a few having too much.
All of this may seem unreal and distant to us because we don't see it daily. All of the people around most of us seem to be prosperous and well-fed. But in other parts of our world, and maybe in other parts of our own cities, you couldn't go out of your house without seeing it.
THE WORD
It is actually a significant question to ask: "Does Jesus telling Peter to 'Feed my sheep' have anything to do with world hunger?" Jesus came to teach a new way of understanding life and a new way of relating to all of reality. These things can make great basic changes in the lives of persons and nations. He intentionally avoided getting sidetracked into becoming a healer of sicknesses (Mark 1:35-39) or a feeder of the physically hungry (John 5:25-34). And yet -- and yet -- that new way of understanding life which he spoke of had to do with a God who loves us all. And that new way of relating to life that he taught had to do with trust and with a love that is a joyful commitment of life to life, a love that would eventually embrace all whom God loves. If we take all of that in and then look at our poor, hurting world through the eyes of love, will we not hear Jesus calling us to make some living response to the suffering people of the world? We might even feel called to be God's agents in the management of this earth so that we can make it produce more to meet the needs of humanity, just as Jesus miraculously enabled the disciples to catch a boatload of fish from what had seemed an empty sea.
But we really do want to know how we can do that, don't we? Most of us think it is far beyond us. Well, let's talk about that.
CRAFTING THE SERMON
I think I would start with the material above as the first part of the sermon. I would, however, look for two really good illustrations that would help people visualize the reality of poverty and hunger. It would be good if one of these could come from close to home and the other from the other side of the world.
Then, I believe I would use the fact that Jesus said, "If you love me, feed my sheep" in slightly different forms three times to move the people through three levels of possible participation in work to save the world and to respond to the needs of the hungry.
At the first level, I would affirm what they are probably already doing, bringing canned goods for the church food pantry and helping with the garage sale to support the inner-city mission.
Next, I would talk to them about things they can do to change their own lifestyles to help to save the environment, everything from recycling to conserving energy. (J. Matthew Sleeth does a good job of this in his book Serve God, Save the Planet [Zondervan, 2006].)
Finally, I would talk to the people about the things that they can do to influence public policy to save the environment and to work for economic justice. Yes, you have to be very careful what you say about these things -- but say what you can say and trust your people to get the picture.
ANOTHER VIEW
by Barbara Jurgensen
Acts 9:1-6 (7-20)
Don Imus, the radio shock jock who has been fired by MSNBC and CBS, says he's sorry about what he called the Rutgers women's basketball team after they recently lost the national championship game.
What he called them was not only extremely racist but also over-the-top sexist ("nappy-headed hos"). It was also disgusting and revolting. Many people have spoken of his comment as a monumental insult, as an immense slur, not just to the team itself but to all people of black ancestry and to all women of whatever color.
Imus has since said that his remarks were "really stupid." Many people feel that they went far beyond that -- more like "foul, abusive, and hateful."
Is Imus sorry for what he said? Has he repented? Has he changed his way of thinking about people that he seems to consider "less" than himself?
People living at the time of the book of Acts in the Bible must have been asking the same questions about Saul -- later to be known as Paul.
Saul had done far worse than utter a racist/sexist affront. On the authority of the rulers of the temple in Jerusalem, he'd traveled far and wide across the countryside, rounding up Jews who'd shifted from their traditional beliefs to following the Way of Jesus. He'd led them in chains back to Jerusalem where they would be imprisoned, tortured and even put to death.
So it was on one of these journeys, this time to the city of Damascus, a little to the northeast of the Holy Land, that Saul was suddenly confronted by a laser-like light from heaven that blinded him.
As he fell to the ground, he heard a voice asking him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?"
And Saul, unable to see, asked, "Who are you?"
And the voice said, "I'm Jesus, the one you're persecuting. But get up and go into the city, and you'll be told what to do."
Now, the men who were traveling with Saul were bewildered because they could hear the same voice, but they couldn't see anyone. But Saul knew that he himself had come face to face with Jesus.
So Saul, sightless, got up from the ground, and his companions had to lead him into the city.
And now comes the part about Ananias. The Lord came to Ananias in a vision and told him to go and help Paul regain his sight. Well, Ananias knew that Paul was the terrorist of their day, the one who was notorious for leading people away, bound hand and foot. So Ananias argued with the Lord for a while.
It can't have been easy for Ananias, as a Christian, to go to Paul, who'd made it his life's mission to rid the world of as many Christians as he could -- it can't have been easy for Ananias to even think of going to Saul to bring him the Lord's blessing and restore his sight.
Had Saul really changed? All in three days? Had Saul really repented? Was Saul really a new person in Jesus Christ?
Saul, after all, had done things much worse than call a women's basketball team a revolting name, shameful and hurtful as that was. Saul, chapter 9 of the book of Acts tells us, was breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord -- and then carrying out those threats.
It was not easy for Ananias to switch his own thinking 180 degrees and now consider this Saul to be a follower of Jesus -- and even meet with him.
Could a person change that much in just three days?
It's no wonder that the Lord had Saul -- now, in his new life, to be known as Paul -- head out of town somewhere for a few years. Paul himself tells us in the first chapter of his letter to the Galatians that after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus he went into Arabia for some years. It was not until 14 years later that he went to Jerusalem to meet with the leaders of the church, and they could finally see that he had indeed changed.
Jesus calls you and me today to repent -- that is, he calls us to realize that we've been living in ways that are not right, and to ask the Lord to help us follow him more closely.
Let's ask ourselves a few questions:
Do you and I sometimes put others down, maybe not as much as a well-known shock jock did, but put them down nonetheless?
Do we sometimes treat others as though their lives were of little or no value, maybe not going as far as Paul did, but devaluing them in some way?
Do we sometimes treat our earth as if we can go on misusing and abusing it in various ways -- ways that may seem small at the time, but with many of us doing them add up to too much?
Our Lord calls us to repent, which means to turn -- to turn from what we've been doing to what we, as his people, need to be doing.
What do you and I need to be doing today to clean up the world around us so it will be a healthy and pleasant home for our grandchildren?
What do you and I need to be doing today to share our Lord's love with our family and friends and neighbors -- with all those we come in contact with?
What do you and I need to be doing today to truly live as our Lord's faithful people?
A "BREAKING NEWS" TIW RESOURCE
The Shootings at Virginia Tech: Breathing Threats and Murder
by Carlos Wilton
Saul was "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord" (Acts 9:1). It's a vivid expression. Particularly striking is the metaphor of breathing. The image implies a two-way dynamic: breathe in, breathe out.
What is it that leads a person to perpetrate a shocking act of violence such as we have seen in Blacksburg, Virginia this week -- as a young man named Cho Seung-Hui massacred more than 30 students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute? How can a human being exhale such violent hatred towards his fellow human beings? We may never understand the psychology of this troubled man, who now lies dead along with his victims, but we can venture a general sort of answer. Such an aberration can only occur if a person has first inhaled much in the way of violence, to such an extent that he has become desensitized to its awful cost.
We live in a violent society. More than most other cultures, we Americans have more access to guns -- and more access to a ceaseless array of violent images on our television and movie screens than those who live in most other places. Day by day, we breathe in violence. Eventually, like carbon monoxide in a closed garage, it lulls us into a stupor before it kills.
There is an awful familiarity to this news story. What once -- in the days of the Columbine shootings -- seemed an unthinkable aberration has now become an accepted category of news story: just another school shooting. Only the body count sets this story apart, making it a grim record-breaker.
When such a story breaks the news media swings into action, following all-too-familiar protocols. Katie Couric hops the first plane to Virginia. Sensational slogans and graphics appear behind other TV commentators. A CNN newscaster appeals for Virginia Tech students to send in cell-phone video clips. We've seen it too many times before.
Universities, like other schools, are supposed to be peaceful places, neutral ground where civilized discourse is encouraged, where young people are free to grow and develop without fear. Along with other valued institutions, universities form the commons of our society. They are places where people gather across ethnic, religious, and economic lines, forsaking all the divisions that otherwise beset us. Beyond the sheer horror of the violence against individuals, a shooting at a university seems to be an assault on society itself.
Such violence is an assault not only on our children, and not only on our society, but also on God. Acts 9 says that Saul was breathing threats and murder against the Lord. Yes, he was directing his persecutions against individual Christians, but Luke clearly understands him to be attacking Jesus Christ as well. Every time Cho Seung-Hui methodically pulled the trigger of one of his guns, we Christians understand him to have been crying, "Crucify him!"
Such is the impact of violence on individuals, on the community, and on God. We have grown far too familiar with it, and have been far too tolerant of it, as a culture. Someone once told a parable about a man sitting beside a stream who witnessed a succession of badly beaten and abused people come floating down in the current. He would pull each one out in turn, ministering unto them, binding their wounds. How many bodies must come floating down the stream, the storyteller asks, before the man walks upstream to see what he can do about addressing the cause of the violence?
Additional illustrations and resources:
[Y]oung people grow up understanding that love means possessing and being possessed. It is a consumer model of love, an "if I can't have her, nobody will" psychology that all too often turns deadly. Nearly half the murders in North Dakota, for example, are "domestic" in origin. It seems that many men, and some women, cannot give up the illusion of possessing another person. The idea of that person -- and "idea" is related etymologically to the word "idol" -- becomes more important, more potent, than the actual living creature. It is much safer to love an idol than a real person who is capable of surprising you, loving you and demanding love in return, and maybe one day leaving you. People who have murdered their spouses often talk about how much they love them, and they mean it. In order to keep the idol intact, in order to keep on loving it, they had to do away with him or her.
-- Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (Riverhead, 1998), pp. 89-90
***
After the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally wrote in the Boston Globe about another aspect of this sort of incident, one that isn't often mentioned: the gender dynamic.
It is tempting to look at the murderous attack in Littleton as a manifestation of individual pathologies, an isolated incident involving deeply disturbed teenagers who watched one too many video games. That explanation ignores larger social and historical forces, and is dangerously short-sighted. Littleton is an extreme case, but if we examine critically the cultural environment in which boys are being socialized and trained to become men, such events might not appear so surprising.
Political debate and media coverage keep repeating the muddled thinking of the past. Headlines and stories focus on youth violence, "kids killing kids," or as in the title of a CBS 48 Hours special, "Young Guns." This is entirely the wrong framework to use in trying to understand what happened in Littleton -- or in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; or Springfield, Oregon.
This is not a case of kids killing kids. This is boys killing boys and boys killing girls. What these school shootings reveal is not a crisis in youth culture but a crisis in masculinity. The shootings -- all by white adolescent males -- are telling us something about how we are doing as a society, much like the canaries in coal mines, whose deaths were a warning to the miners that the caves were unsafe.
Consider what the reaction would have been if the perpetrators in Littleton had been girls. The first thing everyone would have wanted to talk about would have been: Why are girls -- not kids -- acting out violently? What is going on in the lives of girls that would lead them to commit such atrocities? All of the explanations would follow from the basic premise that being female was the dominant variable.
But when the perpetrators are boys, we talk in a gender-neutral way about kids or children, and few (with the exception of some feminist scholars) delve into the forces -- be they cultural, historical, or institutional -- that produce hundreds of thousands of physically abusive and violent boys every year. Instead, we call upon the same tired specialists who harp about the easy accessibility of guns, the lack of parental supervision, the culture of peer-group exclusion and teasing, or the prevalence of media violence.
All of these factors are of course relevant, but if they were the primary answers, then why are girls, who live in the same environment, not responding in the same way? The fact that violence -- whether of the spectacular kind represented in the school shootings or the more routine murder, assault, and rape -- is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon should indicate to us that gender is a vital factor, perhaps the vital factor.
Looking at violence as gender-neutral has the effect of blinding us as we desperately search for clues about how to respond.
The issue is not just violence in the media but the construction of violent masculinity as a cultural norm. From rock and rap music and videos, Hollywood action films, professional and college sports, the culture produces a stream of images of violent, abusive men and promotes characteristics such as dominance, power, and control as means of establishing or maintaining manhood....
What this case reinforces is our crying need for a national conversation about what it means to be a man, since cultural definitions of manhood and masculinity are ever-shifting and are particularly volatile in the contemporary era.
-- Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally, "The National Conversation in the Wake of Littleton Is Missing the Mark," Boston Globe, May 2, 1999 (the full story can be accessed on the web at http://www.jacksonkatz.com/missing.html)
***
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
***
Each of us has underneath our ordinary personality, which we show to the public, a cellar in which we hide the refuse and rubbish which we would rather not see ourselves or let others see. And below that is a deeper hold in which there are dragons and demons, a truly hellish place, full of violence and hatred and viciousness. Sometimes these lower levels break out, and it is to this lowest level of humans that public executions appeal.
In the cross this level of our being has thrust itself up out of its deepest underground cellar so that we humans may see what is in all of us and take heed. The cross is crucial because it shows what possibilities for evil lie hidden in human beings. It is the concretion of human evil in one time and place. Whenever we look upon the cross, which was simply a more fiendish kind of gibbet, we see what humankind can do, has done, and still does to some human beings. It can make us face the worst in ourselves and in others, that part of us which can sanction a cross or go to watch a crucifixion. The cross is the symbol, alive and vivid, of the evil that is in us, of evil itself....
This destructiveness within us can seldom be transformed until we squarely face it in ourselves. This confrontation often leads us into the pit. The empty cross is planted there to remind us that suffering is real but not the end, that victory still is possible if we strive on.
-- Morton T. Kelsey, "The Cross and the Cellar," from The Cross: Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ (Paulist Press, 1980)
***
When we denounce and condemn violence, when we complain about the wave of violence which is breaking upon us today, we always mean other people's violence. The violence of which we read indignant accounts in the papers is that of the enemies of society, the gangsters, the criminals, the gunmen, the militants -- never our own. What I discover in the course of meditation and in reading my Bible is my own violence, which I had been calling legitimate indignation. Yes, indeed, what the Bible reveals is that it is not a case of the righteous on one side and the sinners on the other, peacemakers on one side and men of violence on the other, with a clear line of demarcation between them, but that violence is in the heart of all men.
-- Paul Tournier, The Violence Within (Harper, 1982), p. 31
***
Carolyn Winfrey Gillette's hymn "A Prayer for Our Children," originally written in response to the Columbine killings, may be useful:
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Gun violence fact sheet on the website of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:
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American Academy of Pediatrics Firearms Injury Prevention Training Project Resource Guide:
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Children's Defense Fund Annual Gun Violence Report, 2007:
Cry Horror!
by James L. Killen Jr.
Revelation 5:11--6:8
Cry Horror! Thirty-three people die in an unexplained, irrational explosion of violence in the midst of what should have been a scene of safety and security, a morning on a college campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. We can only cry out in horror. There may come a time later to talk about rational questions such as campus security and gun control and mental health -- but for now, cry out in horror. When we realize that there are places in the world where car bombs and tsunamis make such devastation ordinary, it only increases the horror -- it does not diminish it. It forces us to reckon with the fact that there is very little security anywhere. We search for explanations, but there are none. We turn to God and cry out, "Why?" and we receive answers something like the ones he gave to Job, answers that can eventually lead to understanding -- but never offer any explanation. What is needed is not some explanation but rather some work of abstract art like Picasso's Guernica that can embody what we experience and help us to cry out, "Horror!"
It is exactly that, a work of abstract art, that the Bible gives to us. It is really best to understand the book of Revelation in that way. It is a book written to give hope to people suffering in the midst of devastation in the first century -- and the 21st -- and whenever after that anyone reads it. Yes, it was written to give hope, but not a naive hope, not a hope that has to pretend that there is no violence or suffering or horror. The Bible is completely honest about the tragic realities among which we live. But for our encouragement, it offers us a vision of a greater reality that surrounds and supersedes this very real reality that presses upon us every day. It begins with a vision of all that is eternal with God in the midst. It is a reality in which there is great majesty and beauty and love.
That is not much comfort to us if that majesty is always separate from the world of suffering in which we live. But it is not. Remember, this book is the climax of a larger story -- a story in which the very one who reigns in unimaginable majesty in this vision actually loves us enough to come among us as one of us, to endure the suffering that we endure, to cry horror with us, and then to show us how to live life in keeping with eternity in the midst of the things that fill our time. In that story, that very one suffers death in the midst of this horror as a decisive act -- and a part of a decisive life -- that accomplishes our salvation. For that reason, that one can be represented as a sacrificial lamb that has been slain, just as he is in our text.
But if our salvation has been accomplished, why were 33 people killed on that quiet college campus, and why are things like that happening every day in Iraq and other places?
The victory has been accomplished, but it still has to be worked out in the realities of human life and history. If it were simply accomplished with the wave of a magic wand, it would not be real, and we would not have participated in the awesome drama that is the loving work of God. Revelation 5:11-14 portrays the whole heavenly host bowing down and exclaiming, "Worthy is the Lamb...!" This one whom they worship is the same one who breaks the seals and opens the scroll representing the unfolding drama of history. Among the first dreadful signs Revelation's author relates is the appearance of four apparitions the composer Wagner would have loved -- dreadful horsemen representing oppression and war and famine and death. The scenes that follow represent an unfolding history of conflict and horror. The Bible knows about the real world we live in.
But where is the hope in that? The hope is in the direction in which the saga goes and the end toward which it moves. A number of years ago, American popular music produced a piece of apocalyptical literature that is remarkably like the book of Revelation in many ways. It is Don McLean's popular 1971 song "American Pie," which commemorates "the day the music died" -- the 1959 plane crash that killed singers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (aka the Big Bopper). Like the book of Revelation, McLean's song strings together an enigmatic series of symbolic images that might seem obscure to some. But for many, the numerous allusions in "American Pie" paint a richly textured picture of life and popular music as it evolved in post-war America through the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The song starts with an image of a heartbroken teenage boy who sees his girlfriend dancing with another guy, then moves downward through visions that represent the spread of communism, the threat of nuclear war, the death of God theology, and ends with a vision of the world in flames as the devil laughs with delight and the jester is forced to wear a thorny crown. It starts low and moves down into ultimate despair.
The book of Revelation, on the other hand, sets history in the context of eternity, and then honestly traces a history in which God and all that is allied with God works in this world of suffering and violence to move history toward a fulfillment that is the accomplishment of God's good purpose for us all. And those who suffer and die in the process are promised a participation in the victory. Where is the hope for us who so often have to cry horror? It is in the assurance that nothing happens that is outside of the context of God's love, and that the future is indeed in the hands of God who loves us. And now and again -- now and again -- we catch a glimpse of the ultimate end of things, when good things happen and love wins its occasional victories.
Crafting the Sermon
The best thing you can do with this is to provide some stories of times when God has worked in history to move things from horror through turmoil to victory -- the more recent and local the better.
You might also shift to a personal level for part of the sermon and tell how God sometimes finds us near despair and moves us toward some victory of our humanity.
A Litany for the Third Sunday of Easter
in Response to the Violence at Virginia Tech
(using themes from John 21:1-19)
by John H. Thomas
General Minister and President, United Church of Christ
Click here for a printer-friendly bulletin insert.
Through the ages we hear the Risen Christ: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my lambs." Yet today we grieve for precious lambs, not fed, but slaughtered. For those sons and daughters, students and classmates, colleagues and friends whose lives we cherish, whose loss we mourn, we pray,
Lord, have mercy. [a time of silence is kept]
Through the ages we hear the Risen Christ: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Tend my sheep." Yet today your flock is scattered by fear at Virginia Tech and throughout the world where guns and bombs kill and maim. For those paralyzed by fear in Blacksburg and Baghdad, Kabul and Karachi, Gaza and the Golan Heights, we pray,
Christ, have mercy. [a time of silence is kept]
Through the ages we hear the Risen Christ: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know every thing, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my sheep." Yet today we are hungry -- hungry for peace, hungry for justice, hungry for security, hungry for hope. For children who look for bread but are given the crushing stone of violence, often with our complicity, we pray,
Lord, have mercy. [a time of silence is kept]
Take us, O God, to places we are reluctant to go, to the wounded places, the shattered places, the terrified places. There may we feed your lambs with compassion, tend your sheep with healing, feed your flock with hope. There, with Peter, may we move from denial to discipleship, and thus find strength in the midst of this week's sorrow and rage, to sing again the Easter song, "Alleluia, Christ is risen!"
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia! Amen.
ILLUSTRATIONS
An April 11 op-ed piece in the New York Times ("Letter from California: A Late-Night Seminar on Lewis Thomas" by Verlyn Klinkenborg,) cites a classic essay by biologist Lewis Thomas called "On Medicine and the Bomb." Thomas' essay, published in 1981, pursues a reductionist sort of argument. Beginning with a straightforward journalistic account of then-recent developments in medical treatments that were saving many lives, Thomas paints a hopeful picture of the future, as enhanced by technology.
Then, having led his readers down this hopeful path, Thomas throws in the ringer. All these hard-won victories over disease will be lost, he says, if we don't solve the problem of nuclear proliferation, which has the potential to destroy untold millions of human lives.
The reason Klinkenborg is resurrecting this decades-old essay is because -- with a slight tweak -- it's still applicable today. Yes, the Iranian nuclear threat is of present concern, but our anxiety level over the arms race is nowhere near what it was in the bad old days of the Cold War. What is increasingly fearsome to the human race, says Klinkenborg, is global warming. This is a truly macro-problem that makes other problems like cancer and heart disease -- that strike individuals, rather than the entire planet -- seem like micro-problems.
A sermon on the environmental threat of global warming could follow the same ingenious outline of the Thomas essay. Begin with other threats to human life, like cancer, AIDS, and heart disease. Recount how many millions are being spent on research to solve these problems, and what successes are being achieved. Then ask if we're all doing as much as we can to address the looming macro-problem of global warming.
It's something to think about the next time we change a light bulb.
***
A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.
Were you thinking that those were the words,
those delicious sounds out of your friends' mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious than they....
The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal'd either,
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly,
Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter and utter,
I speak not, yet if you hear me not of what avail am I to you?...
The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.
The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself, possesses still underneath,
Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the wail of slaves,
Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young people, accents of bargainers,
Underneath these possessing words that never fall.
-- Walt Whitman, excerpted from "A Song of the Rolling Earth"
***
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
-- Black Elk, from Black Elk Speaks
***
The world can produce enough to meet everyone's need. It just can't produce enough to meet everyone's greed.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
***
From the special section on "Leadership and the Environment" in the April 16, 2007 issue of Newsweek magazine:
Unless you're living in a tree eating nuts, you are a global-warming polluter.
-- Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, speaking about how we are all involved in the pollution of our planet, cited in "16 Ideas for the Planet"
"If every household in America switched out one compact fluorescent bulb, it would reduce energy consumption as much as taking a million cars off the road," says Des Moines mayor Frank Cownie.... "Production of the bottles [that we use to bottle drinking water] consumes over 1.5 million barrels of oil a year," says [mayor] Rocky Anderson in Salt Lake City.
-- "America's Greenest Mayors"
Most food travels 1,200 miles or more from the pasture to your plate. Buying locally saves fuel and helps farmers in your community.
-- "How to Live a Greener Life"
***
Creation began with a single being; to teach you to destroy a single life is to destroy an entire world; and to sustain one human being is to sustain an entire world.... Therefore let every human being say: For my sake the world was created.
-- from the Talmud
***
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
***
Most of us are sometimes jealous, malicious, unkind, irritable, proud, intolerant, impure. We pull off the slick business deal and feel a little bit ashamed. We disparage another's good name. In a hundred ways we do what we know to be wrong and fail to do what the inner spirit prompts us as right. Terribly often we are indifferent to another's need. [In repentance and confession] we recognize and put away from us our secret resentments, our arrogant self-importance, our refusals to forgive, our jealousy and envy, our hate and malice, and that terrible desire to hit back, which, if retained, block the entry of God's peace into our hearts.... All deception blocks the path to God's peace.
-- Leslie D. Weatherhead, A Private House of Prayer
***
I have not reached the shore where there is no hatred,
the clouds of unjust struggles have not yet passed.
The scars of wounds endured have not yet closed,
warm trust in man lies totally dead.
From the springs of forgetting I have not drunk wisdom,
weary memories still poison me.
From the glades of forgiveness I am still distant,
from the sanctuary of refuge I am a great way separated.
Lord, bring me the clear dawn of other days,
may all painful shadows depart from me.
Let me look with tender emotion on the scars of my wounds,
and with meek goodness upon the faces of my enemies.
Bring me the dawn whilst the way is so long,
but do not hinder my striving until I reach the shore.
-- Traian Dors, "Romania," from Prayers Encircling the World (Westminster John Knox, 1999)
***
But the way in which this taking away of sin is put into practice varies from individual to individual, and from case to case. It isn't just a matter of a divine decree being issued, wiping the slate clean.... There is nothing officially "on the record" against us, but there may still be plenty in our memories and imaginations: old failings, old sores, old wounds. Like a computer with a faulty and virus-ridden software on the hard disk, we need to have it dealt with before we can operate to maximum efficiency once more.
So Jesus goes to where the pain is, as he often does.... And he asks the question that goes to the heart of it all: "Do you love me?"... What matters is that the question is asked and answered; and even more, that the answer earns, each time, not a pat on the back, not a "There, that's all right then," but a command. A fresh challenge. A new commission. Time to learn how to be a shepherd. Time to feed lambs and sheep, to look after them.
-- Tom Wright, "John 21:1-19," from John for Everyone (Westminster John Knox, 2004)
WORSHIP RESOURCES
by Thom M. Shuman
Call to Worship
Leader: Sing, all people of God!
Sing the good news:
People: We cry ourselves to sleep
and God comes in with the dawn,
to awaken us with Joy's embrace.
Leader: Sing, in every land, in every tongue!
Sing the good news:
People: When our lives bottom out,
God takes us by the hand
to lead us into the light.
Leader: Sing, in heaven and on earth!
Sing the good news:
People: Broken, hopeless, lost --
we cry out to God,
who hears our hearts.
Leader: Sing, all people of God!
People: We will sing the good news of Easter!
Prayer of the Day
You take away the drab gray dress of our despair
and clothe us with hope and joy.
You fill our empty souls
with the resurrection feast of peace and life.
You are worthy, Healing God, and so we worship you.
You come to us not as a ravenous lion,
but the Lamb who leads us into God's heart.
When we long to keep you in our pockets like a good luck charm,
you challenge us to live a love which goes beyond mere friendship.
You are worthy, Heaven's Light, and so we follow you.
You make us speechless with your mercy,
yet choose us to tell God's story of new life to all the world.
When our secret wounds would sap our energy,
you pour your peace into us, so we may be agents of healing.
You are worthy, Love's Spirit, and we will praise you.
God in Community, Holy in One,
you alone are worthy of all that we have, and all that we are,
and so we lift our prayers to you,
saying as Jesus has taught us,
Our Father . . .
Call to Reconciliation
We can carry our grudges around with us for years,
just waiting for the right time for our hurt to erupt.
But God gets angry for but a moment,
while surrounding us with grace and mercy all the days of our lives.
Join me as we pray to God, saying . . .
(Unison) Prayer of Confession
We sing loud songs to you, Morning Joy,
Trusting they will drown out our mean-spirited murmurs about those around us.
We hope you will turn a blind eye to our behaviors,
while we imprison our families and friends with impossible expectations.
We pull a muscle stretching to pat ourselves on the back,
but our attitudes and actions towards the poor and outcast of the world
reveal we are not worthy to be called your children.
You never give up on us, Healing God.
You are quick to forgive us,
and quicker to offer us ways to share your name with everyone we meet.
As you continue to be loving and affirming towards us,
let us go to share the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
our Lord and Savior.
(silent prayers may be offered)
Assurance of Pardon
Leader: Do not cry.
The Lamb of God has come to lead us into the kingdom,
where we may praise our God, and serve our sisters and brothers.
People: Songs of blessing, glad shouts of joy;
hearts for others, hands for service.
All these we offer, and more,
to the One who forgives us and makes us whole.
Thanks be to God, we are forgiven. Amen.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Love God By Loving Others
John 21:1-19
Objects: cans of food, money, and an article of clothing
In this lesson Jesus tells us one of the best ways to show we love him. He says that if we love him we will help take care of his sheep -- his people. What are some ways we can do this? (Talk with the children for a while about this so that lots of ideas can come out.)
I have brought some things that might help people. I might give this food to someone who is hungry. I might give these clothes to someone who doesn't have very many clothes or to someone who is cold. I might give this money to help someone who is poor. These are just some ideas, but there are lots of other ways to help people.
Jesus says that the most important thing we can ever do is to love God. After that, the next most important thing is to love others in the same way we would wish to be loved. If we were hungry, we would want someone to help us find food. If we were cold, we would appreciate clothes to keep us warm. If we were lonely, we would want someone to be our friend. If we were having a hard time with a problem, we might like someone to help us with it.
There are lots of ways to help others. We are showing God's love when we help others, but we are also showing that we love God. This makes God so happy, and it makes others happy too.
Prayer: Dear God, help us remember that there are people around us who need us. Help us find ways to reach out and care for your people. Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, April 22, 2007, issue.
Copyright 2007 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
Who, Me?
by James L. Killen Jr.
John 21:1-19
What would you think if you had just read an article that said: "At over 9 million deaths a year, hunger is preeminent among global disasters"? ("Bringing Discipleship to the Table" by Willam J. Sappenfield, in The Living Pulpit [January-March 2007], http://www.pulpit.org/articles/hunger.asp) And then immediately read the words of Jesus from this week's scripture lesson: "If you love me, feed my sheep"? Would you think that one of those statements would have anything to do with the other? It would appear that they would, wouldn't it?
This is Earth Day, a day on which we are reminded that God created the world like a garden that can produce all that is needed to meet all of the needs of the earth's inhabitants -- and then put us in charge to care for the garden and manage it (Genesis 2:8-9, 15-16). For some reason -- for lots of reasons -- the garden does not seem to be meeting the needs of all of God's people. Could Jesus be talking to us, the managers of the garden, when he says, "If you love me, feed my sheep"?
That sounds like a tall order, doesn't it? Most of us are inclined to respond: "Who, me?" Let's talk about it.
THE WORLD
We are surrounded these days with information about humanity's mismanagement of the earth. The movie An Inconvenient Truth has finally convinced most of us that global warming, resulting from our short-sighted abuse of the environment, could result in far-reaching disasters that could have devastating effects on the world's population.
The January-March 2007 issue of The Living Pulpit magazine assembles a great deal of information about hunger and poverty in our world (http://www.pulpit.org/backissues/hunger_toc.asp). It includes a review of a book with a surprising trio of authors that says, "Ending hunger now represents, not a reach of utopian dream, but a realistic vision within humanity's grasp." (Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith by George McGovern, Bob Dole, and Donald E. Messer [Augsburg Fortress, 2005])
Another dimension of the problem of hunger and poverty is the worldwide economic injustice that distributes the produce of the garden earth in ways that leave many having not enough and a few having too much.
All of this may seem unreal and distant to us because we don't see it daily. All of the people around most of us seem to be prosperous and well-fed. But in other parts of our world, and maybe in other parts of our own cities, you couldn't go out of your house without seeing it.
THE WORD
It is actually a significant question to ask: "Does Jesus telling Peter to 'Feed my sheep' have anything to do with world hunger?" Jesus came to teach a new way of understanding life and a new way of relating to all of reality. These things can make great basic changes in the lives of persons and nations. He intentionally avoided getting sidetracked into becoming a healer of sicknesses (Mark 1:35-39) or a feeder of the physically hungry (John 5:25-34). And yet -- and yet -- that new way of understanding life which he spoke of had to do with a God who loves us all. And that new way of relating to life that he taught had to do with trust and with a love that is a joyful commitment of life to life, a love that would eventually embrace all whom God loves. If we take all of that in and then look at our poor, hurting world through the eyes of love, will we not hear Jesus calling us to make some living response to the suffering people of the world? We might even feel called to be God's agents in the management of this earth so that we can make it produce more to meet the needs of humanity, just as Jesus miraculously enabled the disciples to catch a boatload of fish from what had seemed an empty sea.
But we really do want to know how we can do that, don't we? Most of us think it is far beyond us. Well, let's talk about that.
CRAFTING THE SERMON
I think I would start with the material above as the first part of the sermon. I would, however, look for two really good illustrations that would help people visualize the reality of poverty and hunger. It would be good if one of these could come from close to home and the other from the other side of the world.
Then, I believe I would use the fact that Jesus said, "If you love me, feed my sheep" in slightly different forms three times to move the people through three levels of possible participation in work to save the world and to respond to the needs of the hungry.
At the first level, I would affirm what they are probably already doing, bringing canned goods for the church food pantry and helping with the garage sale to support the inner-city mission.
Next, I would talk to them about things they can do to change their own lifestyles to help to save the environment, everything from recycling to conserving energy. (J. Matthew Sleeth does a good job of this in his book Serve God, Save the Planet [Zondervan, 2006].)
Finally, I would talk to the people about the things that they can do to influence public policy to save the environment and to work for economic justice. Yes, you have to be very careful what you say about these things -- but say what you can say and trust your people to get the picture.
ANOTHER VIEW
by Barbara Jurgensen
Acts 9:1-6 (7-20)
Don Imus, the radio shock jock who has been fired by MSNBC and CBS, says he's sorry about what he called the Rutgers women's basketball team after they recently lost the national championship game.
What he called them was not only extremely racist but also over-the-top sexist ("nappy-headed hos"). It was also disgusting and revolting. Many people have spoken of his comment as a monumental insult, as an immense slur, not just to the team itself but to all people of black ancestry and to all women of whatever color.
Imus has since said that his remarks were "really stupid." Many people feel that they went far beyond that -- more like "foul, abusive, and hateful."
Is Imus sorry for what he said? Has he repented? Has he changed his way of thinking about people that he seems to consider "less" than himself?
People living at the time of the book of Acts in the Bible must have been asking the same questions about Saul -- later to be known as Paul.
Saul had done far worse than utter a racist/sexist affront. On the authority of the rulers of the temple in Jerusalem, he'd traveled far and wide across the countryside, rounding up Jews who'd shifted from their traditional beliefs to following the Way of Jesus. He'd led them in chains back to Jerusalem where they would be imprisoned, tortured and even put to death.
So it was on one of these journeys, this time to the city of Damascus, a little to the northeast of the Holy Land, that Saul was suddenly confronted by a laser-like light from heaven that blinded him.
As he fell to the ground, he heard a voice asking him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?"
And Saul, unable to see, asked, "Who are you?"
And the voice said, "I'm Jesus, the one you're persecuting. But get up and go into the city, and you'll be told what to do."
Now, the men who were traveling with Saul were bewildered because they could hear the same voice, but they couldn't see anyone. But Saul knew that he himself had come face to face with Jesus.
So Saul, sightless, got up from the ground, and his companions had to lead him into the city.
And now comes the part about Ananias. The Lord came to Ananias in a vision and told him to go and help Paul regain his sight. Well, Ananias knew that Paul was the terrorist of their day, the one who was notorious for leading people away, bound hand and foot. So Ananias argued with the Lord for a while.
It can't have been easy for Ananias, as a Christian, to go to Paul, who'd made it his life's mission to rid the world of as many Christians as he could -- it can't have been easy for Ananias to even think of going to Saul to bring him the Lord's blessing and restore his sight.
Had Saul really changed? All in three days? Had Saul really repented? Was Saul really a new person in Jesus Christ?
Saul, after all, had done things much worse than call a women's basketball team a revolting name, shameful and hurtful as that was. Saul, chapter 9 of the book of Acts tells us, was breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord -- and then carrying out those threats.
It was not easy for Ananias to switch his own thinking 180 degrees and now consider this Saul to be a follower of Jesus -- and even meet with him.
Could a person change that much in just three days?
It's no wonder that the Lord had Saul -- now, in his new life, to be known as Paul -- head out of town somewhere for a few years. Paul himself tells us in the first chapter of his letter to the Galatians that after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus he went into Arabia for some years. It was not until 14 years later that he went to Jerusalem to meet with the leaders of the church, and they could finally see that he had indeed changed.
Jesus calls you and me today to repent -- that is, he calls us to realize that we've been living in ways that are not right, and to ask the Lord to help us follow him more closely.
Let's ask ourselves a few questions:
Do you and I sometimes put others down, maybe not as much as a well-known shock jock did, but put them down nonetheless?
Do we sometimes treat others as though their lives were of little or no value, maybe not going as far as Paul did, but devaluing them in some way?
Do we sometimes treat our earth as if we can go on misusing and abusing it in various ways -- ways that may seem small at the time, but with many of us doing them add up to too much?
Our Lord calls us to repent, which means to turn -- to turn from what we've been doing to what we, as his people, need to be doing.
What do you and I need to be doing today to clean up the world around us so it will be a healthy and pleasant home for our grandchildren?
What do you and I need to be doing today to share our Lord's love with our family and friends and neighbors -- with all those we come in contact with?
What do you and I need to be doing today to truly live as our Lord's faithful people?
A "BREAKING NEWS" TIW RESOURCE
The Shootings at Virginia Tech: Breathing Threats and Murder
by Carlos Wilton
Saul was "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord" (Acts 9:1). It's a vivid expression. Particularly striking is the metaphor of breathing. The image implies a two-way dynamic: breathe in, breathe out.
What is it that leads a person to perpetrate a shocking act of violence such as we have seen in Blacksburg, Virginia this week -- as a young man named Cho Seung-Hui massacred more than 30 students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute? How can a human being exhale such violent hatred towards his fellow human beings? We may never understand the psychology of this troubled man, who now lies dead along with his victims, but we can venture a general sort of answer. Such an aberration can only occur if a person has first inhaled much in the way of violence, to such an extent that he has become desensitized to its awful cost.
We live in a violent society. More than most other cultures, we Americans have more access to guns -- and more access to a ceaseless array of violent images on our television and movie screens than those who live in most other places. Day by day, we breathe in violence. Eventually, like carbon monoxide in a closed garage, it lulls us into a stupor before it kills.
There is an awful familiarity to this news story. What once -- in the days of the Columbine shootings -- seemed an unthinkable aberration has now become an accepted category of news story: just another school shooting. Only the body count sets this story apart, making it a grim record-breaker.
When such a story breaks the news media swings into action, following all-too-familiar protocols. Katie Couric hops the first plane to Virginia. Sensational slogans and graphics appear behind other TV commentators. A CNN newscaster appeals for Virginia Tech students to send in cell-phone video clips. We've seen it too many times before.
Universities, like other schools, are supposed to be peaceful places, neutral ground where civilized discourse is encouraged, where young people are free to grow and develop without fear. Along with other valued institutions, universities form the commons of our society. They are places where people gather across ethnic, religious, and economic lines, forsaking all the divisions that otherwise beset us. Beyond the sheer horror of the violence against individuals, a shooting at a university seems to be an assault on society itself.
Such violence is an assault not only on our children, and not only on our society, but also on God. Acts 9 says that Saul was breathing threats and murder against the Lord. Yes, he was directing his persecutions against individual Christians, but Luke clearly understands him to be attacking Jesus Christ as well. Every time Cho Seung-Hui methodically pulled the trigger of one of his guns, we Christians understand him to have been crying, "Crucify him!"
Such is the impact of violence on individuals, on the community, and on God. We have grown far too familiar with it, and have been far too tolerant of it, as a culture. Someone once told a parable about a man sitting beside a stream who witnessed a succession of badly beaten and abused people come floating down in the current. He would pull each one out in turn, ministering unto them, binding their wounds. How many bodies must come floating down the stream, the storyteller asks, before the man walks upstream to see what he can do about addressing the cause of the violence?
Additional illustrations and resources:
[Y]oung people grow up understanding that love means possessing and being possessed. It is a consumer model of love, an "if I can't have her, nobody will" psychology that all too often turns deadly. Nearly half the murders in North Dakota, for example, are "domestic" in origin. It seems that many men, and some women, cannot give up the illusion of possessing another person. The idea of that person -- and "idea" is related etymologically to the word "idol" -- becomes more important, more potent, than the actual living creature. It is much safer to love an idol than a real person who is capable of surprising you, loving you and demanding love in return, and maybe one day leaving you. People who have murdered their spouses often talk about how much they love them, and they mean it. In order to keep the idol intact, in order to keep on loving it, they had to do away with him or her.
-- Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (Riverhead, 1998), pp. 89-90
***
After the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally wrote in the Boston Globe about another aspect of this sort of incident, one that isn't often mentioned: the gender dynamic.
It is tempting to look at the murderous attack in Littleton as a manifestation of individual pathologies, an isolated incident involving deeply disturbed teenagers who watched one too many video games. That explanation ignores larger social and historical forces, and is dangerously short-sighted. Littleton is an extreme case, but if we examine critically the cultural environment in which boys are being socialized and trained to become men, such events might not appear so surprising.
Political debate and media coverage keep repeating the muddled thinking of the past. Headlines and stories focus on youth violence, "kids killing kids," or as in the title of a CBS 48 Hours special, "Young Guns." This is entirely the wrong framework to use in trying to understand what happened in Littleton -- or in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; or Springfield, Oregon.
This is not a case of kids killing kids. This is boys killing boys and boys killing girls. What these school shootings reveal is not a crisis in youth culture but a crisis in masculinity. The shootings -- all by white adolescent males -- are telling us something about how we are doing as a society, much like the canaries in coal mines, whose deaths were a warning to the miners that the caves were unsafe.
Consider what the reaction would have been if the perpetrators in Littleton had been girls. The first thing everyone would have wanted to talk about would have been: Why are girls -- not kids -- acting out violently? What is going on in the lives of girls that would lead them to commit such atrocities? All of the explanations would follow from the basic premise that being female was the dominant variable.
But when the perpetrators are boys, we talk in a gender-neutral way about kids or children, and few (with the exception of some feminist scholars) delve into the forces -- be they cultural, historical, or institutional -- that produce hundreds of thousands of physically abusive and violent boys every year. Instead, we call upon the same tired specialists who harp about the easy accessibility of guns, the lack of parental supervision, the culture of peer-group exclusion and teasing, or the prevalence of media violence.
All of these factors are of course relevant, but if they were the primary answers, then why are girls, who live in the same environment, not responding in the same way? The fact that violence -- whether of the spectacular kind represented in the school shootings or the more routine murder, assault, and rape -- is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon should indicate to us that gender is a vital factor, perhaps the vital factor.
Looking at violence as gender-neutral has the effect of blinding us as we desperately search for clues about how to respond.
The issue is not just violence in the media but the construction of violent masculinity as a cultural norm. From rock and rap music and videos, Hollywood action films, professional and college sports, the culture produces a stream of images of violent, abusive men and promotes characteristics such as dominance, power, and control as means of establishing or maintaining manhood....
What this case reinforces is our crying need for a national conversation about what it means to be a man, since cultural definitions of manhood and masculinity are ever-shifting and are particularly volatile in the contemporary era.
-- Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally, "The National Conversation in the Wake of Littleton Is Missing the Mark," Boston Globe, May 2, 1999 (the full story can be accessed on the web at http://www.jacksonkatz.com/missing.html)
***
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
***
Each of us has underneath our ordinary personality, which we show to the public, a cellar in which we hide the refuse and rubbish which we would rather not see ourselves or let others see. And below that is a deeper hold in which there are dragons and demons, a truly hellish place, full of violence and hatred and viciousness. Sometimes these lower levels break out, and it is to this lowest level of humans that public executions appeal.
In the cross this level of our being has thrust itself up out of its deepest underground cellar so that we humans may see what is in all of us and take heed. The cross is crucial because it shows what possibilities for evil lie hidden in human beings. It is the concretion of human evil in one time and place. Whenever we look upon the cross, which was simply a more fiendish kind of gibbet, we see what humankind can do, has done, and still does to some human beings. It can make us face the worst in ourselves and in others, that part of us which can sanction a cross or go to watch a crucifixion. The cross is the symbol, alive and vivid, of the evil that is in us, of evil itself....
This destructiveness within us can seldom be transformed until we squarely face it in ourselves. This confrontation often leads us into the pit. The empty cross is planted there to remind us that suffering is real but not the end, that victory still is possible if we strive on.
-- Morton T. Kelsey, "The Cross and the Cellar," from The Cross: Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ (Paulist Press, 1980)
***
When we denounce and condemn violence, when we complain about the wave of violence which is breaking upon us today, we always mean other people's violence. The violence of which we read indignant accounts in the papers is that of the enemies of society, the gangsters, the criminals, the gunmen, the militants -- never our own. What I discover in the course of meditation and in reading my Bible is my own violence, which I had been calling legitimate indignation. Yes, indeed, what the Bible reveals is that it is not a case of the righteous on one side and the sinners on the other, peacemakers on one side and men of violence on the other, with a clear line of demarcation between them, but that violence is in the heart of all men.
-- Paul Tournier, The Violence Within (Harper, 1982), p. 31
***
Carolyn Winfrey Gillette's hymn "A Prayer for Our Children," originally written in response to the Columbine killings, may be useful:
***
Gun violence fact sheet on the website of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:
***
American Academy of Pediatrics Firearms Injury Prevention Training Project Resource Guide:
***
Children's Defense Fund Annual Gun Violence Report, 2007:
Cry Horror!
by James L. Killen Jr.
Revelation 5:11--6:8
Cry Horror! Thirty-three people die in an unexplained, irrational explosion of violence in the midst of what should have been a scene of safety and security, a morning on a college campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. We can only cry out in horror. There may come a time later to talk about rational questions such as campus security and gun control and mental health -- but for now, cry out in horror. When we realize that there are places in the world where car bombs and tsunamis make such devastation ordinary, it only increases the horror -- it does not diminish it. It forces us to reckon with the fact that there is very little security anywhere. We search for explanations, but there are none. We turn to God and cry out, "Why?" and we receive answers something like the ones he gave to Job, answers that can eventually lead to understanding -- but never offer any explanation. What is needed is not some explanation but rather some work of abstract art like Picasso's Guernica that can embody what we experience and help us to cry out, "Horror!"
It is exactly that, a work of abstract art, that the Bible gives to us. It is really best to understand the book of Revelation in that way. It is a book written to give hope to people suffering in the midst of devastation in the first century -- and the 21st -- and whenever after that anyone reads it. Yes, it was written to give hope, but not a naive hope, not a hope that has to pretend that there is no violence or suffering or horror. The Bible is completely honest about the tragic realities among which we live. But for our encouragement, it offers us a vision of a greater reality that surrounds and supersedes this very real reality that presses upon us every day. It begins with a vision of all that is eternal with God in the midst. It is a reality in which there is great majesty and beauty and love.
That is not much comfort to us if that majesty is always separate from the world of suffering in which we live. But it is not. Remember, this book is the climax of a larger story -- a story in which the very one who reigns in unimaginable majesty in this vision actually loves us enough to come among us as one of us, to endure the suffering that we endure, to cry horror with us, and then to show us how to live life in keeping with eternity in the midst of the things that fill our time. In that story, that very one suffers death in the midst of this horror as a decisive act -- and a part of a decisive life -- that accomplishes our salvation. For that reason, that one can be represented as a sacrificial lamb that has been slain, just as he is in our text.
But if our salvation has been accomplished, why were 33 people killed on that quiet college campus, and why are things like that happening every day in Iraq and other places?
The victory has been accomplished, but it still has to be worked out in the realities of human life and history. If it were simply accomplished with the wave of a magic wand, it would not be real, and we would not have participated in the awesome drama that is the loving work of God. Revelation 5:11-14 portrays the whole heavenly host bowing down and exclaiming, "Worthy is the Lamb...!" This one whom they worship is the same one who breaks the seals and opens the scroll representing the unfolding drama of history. Among the first dreadful signs Revelation's author relates is the appearance of four apparitions the composer Wagner would have loved -- dreadful horsemen representing oppression and war and famine and death. The scenes that follow represent an unfolding history of conflict and horror. The Bible knows about the real world we live in.
But where is the hope in that? The hope is in the direction in which the saga goes and the end toward which it moves. A number of years ago, American popular music produced a piece of apocalyptical literature that is remarkably like the book of Revelation in many ways. It is Don McLean's popular 1971 song "American Pie," which commemorates "the day the music died" -- the 1959 plane crash that killed singers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (aka the Big Bopper). Like the book of Revelation, McLean's song strings together an enigmatic series of symbolic images that might seem obscure to some. But for many, the numerous allusions in "American Pie" paint a richly textured picture of life and popular music as it evolved in post-war America through the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The song starts with an image of a heartbroken teenage boy who sees his girlfriend dancing with another guy, then moves downward through visions that represent the spread of communism, the threat of nuclear war, the death of God theology, and ends with a vision of the world in flames as the devil laughs with delight and the jester is forced to wear a thorny crown. It starts low and moves down into ultimate despair.
The book of Revelation, on the other hand, sets history in the context of eternity, and then honestly traces a history in which God and all that is allied with God works in this world of suffering and violence to move history toward a fulfillment that is the accomplishment of God's good purpose for us all. And those who suffer and die in the process are promised a participation in the victory. Where is the hope for us who so often have to cry horror? It is in the assurance that nothing happens that is outside of the context of God's love, and that the future is indeed in the hands of God who loves us. And now and again -- now and again -- we catch a glimpse of the ultimate end of things, when good things happen and love wins its occasional victories.
Crafting the Sermon
The best thing you can do with this is to provide some stories of times when God has worked in history to move things from horror through turmoil to victory -- the more recent and local the better.
You might also shift to a personal level for part of the sermon and tell how God sometimes finds us near despair and moves us toward some victory of our humanity.
A Litany for the Third Sunday of Easter
in Response to the Violence at Virginia Tech
(using themes from John 21:1-19)
by John H. Thomas
General Minister and President, United Church of Christ
Click here for a printer-friendly bulletin insert.
Through the ages we hear the Risen Christ: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my lambs." Yet today we grieve for precious lambs, not fed, but slaughtered. For those sons and daughters, students and classmates, colleagues and friends whose lives we cherish, whose loss we mourn, we pray,
Lord, have mercy. [a time of silence is kept]
Through the ages we hear the Risen Christ: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Tend my sheep." Yet today your flock is scattered by fear at Virginia Tech and throughout the world where guns and bombs kill and maim. For those paralyzed by fear in Blacksburg and Baghdad, Kabul and Karachi, Gaza and the Golan Heights, we pray,
Christ, have mercy. [a time of silence is kept]
Through the ages we hear the Risen Christ: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know every thing, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my sheep." Yet today we are hungry -- hungry for peace, hungry for justice, hungry for security, hungry for hope. For children who look for bread but are given the crushing stone of violence, often with our complicity, we pray,
Lord, have mercy. [a time of silence is kept]
Take us, O God, to places we are reluctant to go, to the wounded places, the shattered places, the terrified places. There may we feed your lambs with compassion, tend your sheep with healing, feed your flock with hope. There, with Peter, may we move from denial to discipleship, and thus find strength in the midst of this week's sorrow and rage, to sing again the Easter song, "Alleluia, Christ is risen!"
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia! Amen.
ILLUSTRATIONS
An April 11 op-ed piece in the New York Times ("Letter from California: A Late-Night Seminar on Lewis Thomas" by Verlyn Klinkenborg,) cites a classic essay by biologist Lewis Thomas called "On Medicine and the Bomb." Thomas' essay, published in 1981, pursues a reductionist sort of argument. Beginning with a straightforward journalistic account of then-recent developments in medical treatments that were saving many lives, Thomas paints a hopeful picture of the future, as enhanced by technology.
Then, having led his readers down this hopeful path, Thomas throws in the ringer. All these hard-won victories over disease will be lost, he says, if we don't solve the problem of nuclear proliferation, which has the potential to destroy untold millions of human lives.
The reason Klinkenborg is resurrecting this decades-old essay is because -- with a slight tweak -- it's still applicable today. Yes, the Iranian nuclear threat is of present concern, but our anxiety level over the arms race is nowhere near what it was in the bad old days of the Cold War. What is increasingly fearsome to the human race, says Klinkenborg, is global warming. This is a truly macro-problem that makes other problems like cancer and heart disease -- that strike individuals, rather than the entire planet -- seem like micro-problems.
A sermon on the environmental threat of global warming could follow the same ingenious outline of the Thomas essay. Begin with other threats to human life, like cancer, AIDS, and heart disease. Recount how many millions are being spent on research to solve these problems, and what successes are being achieved. Then ask if we're all doing as much as we can to address the looming macro-problem of global warming.
It's something to think about the next time we change a light bulb.
***
A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.
Were you thinking that those were the words,
those delicious sounds out of your friends' mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious than they....
The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal'd either,
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly,
Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter and utter,
I speak not, yet if you hear me not of what avail am I to you?...
The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.
The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself, possesses still underneath,
Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the wail of slaves,
Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young people, accents of bargainers,
Underneath these possessing words that never fall.
-- Walt Whitman, excerpted from "A Song of the Rolling Earth"
***
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
-- Black Elk, from Black Elk Speaks
***
The world can produce enough to meet everyone's need. It just can't produce enough to meet everyone's greed.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
***
From the special section on "Leadership and the Environment" in the April 16, 2007 issue of Newsweek magazine:
Unless you're living in a tree eating nuts, you are a global-warming polluter.
-- Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, speaking about how we are all involved in the pollution of our planet, cited in "16 Ideas for the Planet"
"If every household in America switched out one compact fluorescent bulb, it would reduce energy consumption as much as taking a million cars off the road," says Des Moines mayor Frank Cownie.... "Production of the bottles [that we use to bottle drinking water] consumes over 1.5 million barrels of oil a year," says [mayor] Rocky Anderson in Salt Lake City.
-- "America's Greenest Mayors"
Most food travels 1,200 miles or more from the pasture to your plate. Buying locally saves fuel and helps farmers in your community.
-- "How to Live a Greener Life"
***
Creation began with a single being; to teach you to destroy a single life is to destroy an entire world; and to sustain one human being is to sustain an entire world.... Therefore let every human being say: For my sake the world was created.
-- from the Talmud
***
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
***
Most of us are sometimes jealous, malicious, unkind, irritable, proud, intolerant, impure. We pull off the slick business deal and feel a little bit ashamed. We disparage another's good name. In a hundred ways we do what we know to be wrong and fail to do what the inner spirit prompts us as right. Terribly often we are indifferent to another's need. [In repentance and confession] we recognize and put away from us our secret resentments, our arrogant self-importance, our refusals to forgive, our jealousy and envy, our hate and malice, and that terrible desire to hit back, which, if retained, block the entry of God's peace into our hearts.... All deception blocks the path to God's peace.
-- Leslie D. Weatherhead, A Private House of Prayer
***
I have not reached the shore where there is no hatred,
the clouds of unjust struggles have not yet passed.
The scars of wounds endured have not yet closed,
warm trust in man lies totally dead.
From the springs of forgetting I have not drunk wisdom,
weary memories still poison me.
From the glades of forgiveness I am still distant,
from the sanctuary of refuge I am a great way separated.
Lord, bring me the clear dawn of other days,
may all painful shadows depart from me.
Let me look with tender emotion on the scars of my wounds,
and with meek goodness upon the faces of my enemies.
Bring me the dawn whilst the way is so long,
but do not hinder my striving until I reach the shore.
-- Traian Dors, "Romania," from Prayers Encircling the World (Westminster John Knox, 1999)
***
But the way in which this taking away of sin is put into practice varies from individual to individual, and from case to case. It isn't just a matter of a divine decree being issued, wiping the slate clean.... There is nothing officially "on the record" against us, but there may still be plenty in our memories and imaginations: old failings, old sores, old wounds. Like a computer with a faulty and virus-ridden software on the hard disk, we need to have it dealt with before we can operate to maximum efficiency once more.
So Jesus goes to where the pain is, as he often does.... And he asks the question that goes to the heart of it all: "Do you love me?"... What matters is that the question is asked and answered; and even more, that the answer earns, each time, not a pat on the back, not a "There, that's all right then," but a command. A fresh challenge. A new commission. Time to learn how to be a shepherd. Time to feed lambs and sheep, to look after them.
-- Tom Wright, "John 21:1-19," from John for Everyone (Westminster John Knox, 2004)
WORSHIP RESOURCES
by Thom M. Shuman
Call to Worship
Leader: Sing, all people of God!
Sing the good news:
People: We cry ourselves to sleep
and God comes in with the dawn,
to awaken us with Joy's embrace.
Leader: Sing, in every land, in every tongue!
Sing the good news:
People: When our lives bottom out,
God takes us by the hand
to lead us into the light.
Leader: Sing, in heaven and on earth!
Sing the good news:
People: Broken, hopeless, lost --
we cry out to God,
who hears our hearts.
Leader: Sing, all people of God!
People: We will sing the good news of Easter!
Prayer of the Day
You take away the drab gray dress of our despair
and clothe us with hope and joy.
You fill our empty souls
with the resurrection feast of peace and life.
You are worthy, Healing God, and so we worship you.
You come to us not as a ravenous lion,
but the Lamb who leads us into God's heart.
When we long to keep you in our pockets like a good luck charm,
you challenge us to live a love which goes beyond mere friendship.
You are worthy, Heaven's Light, and so we follow you.
You make us speechless with your mercy,
yet choose us to tell God's story of new life to all the world.
When our secret wounds would sap our energy,
you pour your peace into us, so we may be agents of healing.
You are worthy, Love's Spirit, and we will praise you.
God in Community, Holy in One,
you alone are worthy of all that we have, and all that we are,
and so we lift our prayers to you,
saying as Jesus has taught us,
Our Father . . .
Call to Reconciliation
We can carry our grudges around with us for years,
just waiting for the right time for our hurt to erupt.
But God gets angry for but a moment,
while surrounding us with grace and mercy all the days of our lives.
Join me as we pray to God, saying . . .
(Unison) Prayer of Confession
We sing loud songs to you, Morning Joy,
Trusting they will drown out our mean-spirited murmurs about those around us.
We hope you will turn a blind eye to our behaviors,
while we imprison our families and friends with impossible expectations.
We pull a muscle stretching to pat ourselves on the back,
but our attitudes and actions towards the poor and outcast of the world
reveal we are not worthy to be called your children.
You never give up on us, Healing God.
You are quick to forgive us,
and quicker to offer us ways to share your name with everyone we meet.
As you continue to be loving and affirming towards us,
let us go to share the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
our Lord and Savior.
(silent prayers may be offered)
Assurance of Pardon
Leader: Do not cry.
The Lamb of God has come to lead us into the kingdom,
where we may praise our God, and serve our sisters and brothers.
People: Songs of blessing, glad shouts of joy;
hearts for others, hands for service.
All these we offer, and more,
to the One who forgives us and makes us whole.
Thanks be to God, we are forgiven. Amen.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Love God By Loving Others
John 21:1-19
Objects: cans of food, money, and an article of clothing
In this lesson Jesus tells us one of the best ways to show we love him. He says that if we love him we will help take care of his sheep -- his people. What are some ways we can do this? (Talk with the children for a while about this so that lots of ideas can come out.)
I have brought some things that might help people. I might give this food to someone who is hungry. I might give these clothes to someone who doesn't have very many clothes or to someone who is cold. I might give this money to help someone who is poor. These are just some ideas, but there are lots of other ways to help people.
Jesus says that the most important thing we can ever do is to love God. After that, the next most important thing is to love others in the same way we would wish to be loved. If we were hungry, we would want someone to help us find food. If we were cold, we would appreciate clothes to keep us warm. If we were lonely, we would want someone to be our friend. If we were having a hard time with a problem, we might like someone to help us with it.
There are lots of ways to help others. We are showing God's love when we help others, but we are also showing that we love God. This makes God so happy, and it makes others happy too.
Prayer: Dear God, help us remember that there are people around us who need us. Help us find ways to reach out and care for your people. Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, April 22, 2007, issue.
Copyright 2007 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
