Journey's Weekly Homilies

March 16, 2003
Second Sunday in Lent
Tom Kinzie

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

All of us have been hurt at one time or another.  We have some wound that perhaps bears scar tissue.   The scar tissue is there to protect the wound.  It is part of the human condition that this is so.  This is as true of the mind and heart as it is of the body. And not just that we bear wounds and bear scars from those wounds but that we have, all of us, wounded others.  Sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose.  Often when we wound another we are deeply grieved and pained by what we have done.  At other times when we wound another we are not so sorry.  We feel justified by the size of the pain we have endured.  Sometimes we are convinced that we are serving justice by causing pain to another.  It doesn’t matter whether this sense of justice is or isn’t true, for our purposes.  But I do believe that when we cause pain to another we are also wounding ourselves. 

Jesus apparently thought so.  He named the interior motivation for hurting or wounding another as important as the wounding itself.  This is a hard saying and it can come off as some kind of emotional and moral perfectionism.  But that wasn’t Jesus’ point.  His point was simply that this is what happens: when we wound another we also wound ourselves.  Our every attempt to justify and rationalize what we have or have not done wounds us even more deeply.

What is it that causes to act so, to live, as it were, not in our own best interest (even if we think we are doing just that)?  Some writer, and I cannot remember who, said that we are all wounded because we have experienced an insufficiency of love.  At some time and place, in some relationship or another, we have not been loved as we deserved to have been loved.  Perhaps, even at this exact moment, your mind will fly to just such a time in your life.  If so, it is likely that that occurrence is still painful.  At other times this insufficiency of loved occurred when we were very young.  We cannot remember the exact event, but we know that there have been and will continue to be consequences to this insufficiency of love.  For example, We may live with needless defensiveness (this is my own all-time favorite), or timidity, or a lack of self-confidence…  The list grows.  There is no blaming here.  This is just a simple acknowledgement that a failure to been loved sufficiently has consequences.

It is not only in our personal lives that this wounding plays itself out.  How much of our cultures demand for more goods, for power, for the need to control other nations, and the vast expenditures on weaponry is really a result of this fundamental alienation, this insufficiency of love?  And clearly, how we decide to live our life, whether we live and respond out of that woundedness or whether we choose another guiding principle for both our personal and corporate lives matters greatly.

How then shall we live?  By the time I knew who Roy Rhoades was he was already an older man.  He was a carpenter and cabinetmaker and I cannot think that in that sparsely populated valley he could ever have become well off from his work.  I didn’t know much about him and I suppose I never had more than a short conversation with him in all the years we were in the same church.  I did know that he was one of the unofficial elders in the church I grew up in.  I guess he must have had a playful side to him.  He seemed always to have this kind of shy smile and I remember coming across things, funny things, that Roy wrote in pencil on wall boards or on the bottom of furniture in the church about and to his old friend Percy Shamberger.

I was older when I discovered the startling fact the Roy Rhoades had been a conscientious objector during World War I, (Startling in my youth, for youth often believes that everything it thinks or experiences must be entirely new.)  From our vantage-point it is clear that World War I was a cruel and useless war in which hundreds of thousands of men died without really settling anything except the discovery of new and better ways to kill each other and the bending a few borders.  A large part of a whole generation of men had been decimated in Europe, physically and emotionally—a wounding of terrible proportions.  World War I also has the dubious distinction of being the war that began to make civilian casualties and destruction of cities an important part of military strategy. 

The futility of that war wasn’t so clear then, of course.  It was the war to end all wars and yet another war to make the world safe for democracy.  Like other wars before and since it unleashed a fervent patriotism as well as a kind of virulent anti-German mentality.  Stores were boycotted and trashed if the owners were German.  Some people found the mood in America so dangerous that they changed their last names to less German sounding ones.  People were spat upon, forced to walk off of sidewalks, shouted at and cursed at, even physically assaulted..  Roy Rhoades, belonging to a then largely German protestant and pacifist sect, must have felt and experienced much of this.

But I never heard him speak of it.  I was part of a group of young people who visited Roy and his wife in their modest home.  We asked him about those experiences.  He smiled shyly and just said that yes, he had been an objector during World War I and yes he had experienced some types of abuse and discrimination.  He would not speak further of it.  It was, he seemed to be saying, no big deal.

Roy Rhoades became a kind of hero for me, a hero of the faith.  I felt in him something worth emulating—his quiet kind of faith, his simple and yet clear conviction, even unwavering in its insistence, that he was to do what seemed right as a follower of Jesus.

In this whole middle section of Mark from which our readings are taken, Jesus says eight times that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer and die.  The passion is, of course, absolutley central to our tradition.  But the gospel of Mark also makes clear that this is hard saying for the disciples.  Again and again they do not understand or do not want to understand it.  Peter rejects this saying, rebukes Jesus for it, implying that a real messiah would not suffer such an indignity.  Jesus rebukes Peter back saying, “"Get behind me, Satan!  You do not have in mind the things of God, but human things."  Jesus means literally, get behind me, follow me.  I am the teacher and you are the student.  Be behind me.  As the Cistercians use to say, we are life-long students in the school of Christ.  Our studies are not just to learn about Jesus, but to become Jesus for this time and place.

And this means, doesn’t it, that we are to be love in this world.  We are called to die to the patterns of domination, empire, and privilege of this culture.  Oh how hard this is in a world that values expertise, control, manipulation far more than the alternative realities of shared wisdom, shared resources, and shared community, where all are welcome to find fulfillment in their lives.  Truly, to live by the latter is to die to what this culture honors most.  And yet, how else can we participate in a sufficiency of love that does not perpetuate a woundedness that brings us nothing new?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that when Jesus calls us he bids us come and die.  I don’t think this is Hollywood stuff.  It may not even be heroic in the usual sense of the word.   I think of the carpenter Roy Rhoades, who with a simple, but deep conviction, felt there was a way to stay loyal to love, to Jesus, amidst the noisy clamor of a world thirsty for blood.  He heard a call and he followed it.  In our own way we too must find a way to follow.  And can we not agree that at least we will not add any more wounds to a world already in too much pain, that we will be love-makers, and that we will aim for our love to be sufficient for all.  We will in every way strive to be followers of Jesus, all the way to Jerusalem if we must, and there to live in the Kingdom of non-violence, peace, and love.