Journey's Weekly Homilies
May 18, 2003
5th Sunday of Easter
Homily by Tom Kinzie
Acts 9:26-31
1 John 3:18-24
John 15:1-8
There
is a God whom the Gods have not imagined.
Our tradition says this.
There is beyond our thoughts, our feelings, our imaginings,
and words the God we cannot fathom, a hidden God, a God beyond our
seeing. Indeed, this
God is hidden in plain sight, transparent in all that is, in all
creation, but this one can only be seen by the eye of the heart,
the eye of faith. This
is the God of the prophets, the God who calls us into new
relationships, new possibilities, new realities.
“Behold, I make all things new."
This God, a poet says, is the secret within the secret.
This God is the deepest mystery and the deepest reality of
things. But this not
so in a way we can grasp and hold on to or manipulate and manage.
This God surprises and pulls us in deeper and deeper until we
are grasped by love itself.
Even
though words are not enough, we also say something else about this
God of our tradition. We
believe that God, as Jim reminded us recently, has a human face.
In the weeping, laughing, angry, contented, agitated and
agitating Jesus God comes to us as fully human.
The mystery is in our midst.
So, we experience God in the silence where words cannot go.
But we also experience God in the human embrace where words
are often not enough but we say them anyway.
When, for instance we say, “I love you.”
The word that was in the beginning is also, in some strange
way, the word we say to each other.
It is the word we say when we are authentic and real and
truly connected.
Here
we begin to see that in the biblical telling, this mysterious
other is the God who so desires relationship, the God who yearns
and pines for relationship. Come
back to me, return to me, be with me, this God of the prophets
calls. It is not that God has gone somewhere so much as it is that
our gaze is elsewhere. Like
a jilted lover, God grieves for us when we are no longer close.
Scripture makes this clear and Jesus is the intensification of
this image of a God who wants us and desires us.
Jesus is the symbol of a God who even dies for our love and
our lack of love in a dirty little back door state sponsored
execution.
The
Trappist writer Michael Casey writes that God’s desire for us is
very like what happens in families when a young child wants for
the first time to be involved in gift giving for a birthday or
holiday. The child is
too young to have money for a present so the parent gives the
child the money to buy the present that the child then gives to
the parent. And this
event is very satisfying for both parent and child.
I remember my first such gift clearly: an absurdly large
ceramic rooster that my mother proudly, I thought then, placed in
the center of our dining room table for months.
God will give us everything we need to be in relationship
with God. All we have
to do is ask and be open to receiving the gift that makes possible
our giving the gift of our love to God in return.
Parenting
can be an absurd enterprise. When I think of some of the small
potatoes over which I have made principled stands or things about
which I have drawn a rhetorical line in the sand with my children
. . .well, I can only look back with amazement if not outright
embarrassment. It is
too humiliating to confess to particulars (although I will admit
that putting the lid on the juice pitcher did at a time reach the
importance of Moses receiving the Decologue).
It is enough to say that these heated exchanges will
certainly not make “Parenting” magazine as paradigmatic of
good fathering. What I want to draw attention to is how often and
easily my children seem to forgive this wretched excess.
It is as if there is some automatic and deep movement
within my children—yours, too, I bet—that longs to bridge
those moments of conflict and adult temper tantrums.
They want to move back to restored relationship.
Sometimes, I can still be brooding over the justice and
rightness of some parental stance and my children will do or say
something that quickly restores relationship.
It’s as if they were saying, “I know parents do the
craziest things, but life goes on.
Let’s go on.” Or
maybe another way of saying it is that often for children
relationships are not so easily called into question, but for
adults the slightest word can feel as if the very structure of
reality has disappeared. The
dreaded words appear in our heads: you don’t like me.
The
poet Stephen Mitchell said that the entire ministry of Jesus could
be summarized in two phrases: do not judge and forgive everything.
In John these thoughts are spoken of
in a symbolic way. In
John the image is of the vine and the branches.
Abide in me. I
am the vine and you are the branches.
Apart from me you cannot live.
This is, of course, not literally true.
Many people seem to live just fine apart from the sacred,
the vine. But there
are consequences. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the violence
and madness of the past century could be attributed to men who did
not believe in God. By
this he meant also those men who worshipped gods of their own
making. We know too well that there are gods of a terrible ethnic and
geo-political reality from whom only sorrow emanates. In World War II German soldiers had the phrase “Gott Mit
Uns,” God is With Us on their belt buckles.
No country is so different.
If we are not actual atheists, it is still very difficult
in our culture to not live like functional atheists: people who
believe that they are responsible for everything and therefore
feel they can and must do anything to be successful.
God
calls us to a relationship of abiding.
The shoots and branches cannot live apart from the vine.
It is the abidingness that is key.
It is the resting in the presence of the sacred that is
everything. It is the
piece that wants relationship.
We abide in one another as much as we abide in God.
We judge nothing. We
forgive everything. We
seek always to be in this place of love.
It is abidingness that lets us love God and to experience
God’s love for us. It
is abidingness that helps us to love another regardless of what
they do or do not say, how they act or do not act.
This happens for people who know themselves to be deeply
connected to God.
I
want to end with a story that absolutely astonished me when I
first read it. Could
it be true, I wondered? Most of you, I am sure, are aware that
when apartheid was overthrown in South Africa, a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission was created to give some sense of
closure to the terrible acts of brutality that had been committed
enforcing apartheid. At
one such meeting an elderly South African woman was brought before
a group of white police officers led by a Mr. Van de Broek.
They admitted killing the woman’s 18-year-old son,
shooting him, setting his body on fire, and partying around the
fire, around the charred body.
Eight years later the same group of men came and took her
husband into captivity. Some
time later that same night, the white officers came and took the
woman to an isolated setting by a river where her husband was tied
to a pile of firewood. The
woman was forced to watch as they covered the man in gasoline and
then ignited a fire. The last words the husband spoke to the woman were,
”Forgive them.”
Now,
many years later, the woman was asked to speak at a commission
meeting before punishment would be announced.
I want three things, the woman said.
I want Mr. van de Broek to take me to where they burned my
husband’s body. I would like to gather up his dust and give him a decent
burial. Secondly, Mr.
van de Broek took my family away and I still have a lot of love to
give. I would like
him to come to the ghetto and spend a day with me so I can be a
mother to him. Third, I would like Mr. van de Broek to know that he is
forgiven by God, and I forgive him, too.
And, I would like someone to come and lead me by the hand
to where Mr. van de Broek is so that I can embrace him and he can
know my forgiveness is real.
As the elderly woman made her way across the room it is
reported that Mr. van de Broek was overcome by emotion and
fainted. Then the
silence was broken and someone began singing “Amazing Grace”
and soon others were singing and then the whole courtroom was
joined in song.
Can it be true? Can we not help but wonder what miracles might occur If we would deeply abide in God and God in us?