Exclamation, Not Explanation

“Exclamation, Not Explanation”

Luke 24:36-49

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

April 26, 2009

Easter 3

There is, if you drive down Falconer Street , a poignant memorial to Timothy Bindics, the four year old boy who tragically was struck and killed this week by a pick-up truck into whose path he suddenly and unwittingly darted. On the terrace on one side of the street is a large spread of flowers, some crosses, and several stuffed animals. Spray-painted in the road on the spot at which he was killed are the letters RIP – “rest in peace.” We often say that, do we not, when someone dies? “May she rest in peace.” Does that reflect a sense in us that peace during our lifetimes is elusive and unattainable, that it comes, if at all, after we die?

In my midweek email to those in the congregation who have signed up to receive it, I told of a book I purchased a week or so ago at a great little second-hand bookstore I discovered in…well, I don’t think I want to share that information yet (smile). The book was written by Joshua Loth Liebman who, it turns out, was a well-known rabbi from the middle part of the last century. In it, Liebman tells how as a young man he compiled a list of what he thought were the elements required to construct a well-lived and satisfying life. He named health, love, beauty, talent, power, riches, and fame. Proud of his list, the youthful Liebman presented his list to a wise elder whom he considered his spiritual mentor and model. Looking it over, the old sage said to his younger protégé, “An excellent list. Well digested in content and set down in not-unreasonable order. But it appears, my young friend, that you have omitted the most important element of all. You have forgotten the one ingredient, lacking which, (all else) becomes a hideous torment, and your list as a whole an intolerable burden.” “What could that be?” Liebman asked. With a pencil stub, the old man crossed out Liebman’s entire list and then scrawled on the sheet of paper three words: peace of mind.

Then in my email I cited a poem by the widely-celebrated poet, James Kavanaugh, whose poetry about being human has touched the lives of tens of thousands of people. One might think, with all the acclaim, that he would hold life by the tail, but listen to one of his poems he wrote about himself, entitled, “Here I Am”:

Here I Am

Here I am opening my mail and discovering that I am a source of hope

To a tender lady in Concord and a venerable man in Tennessee ,

While I wonder in the midst of a sudden, midlife sadness,

Who will give strength and solace to me?

All my friends seem too happy to understand, even the losers are some-

how finding their way.

I, who apparently have everything to live for, am hard pressed to find a

reason today.

If I were a woman it would be purely hormonal*, and an understanding

doctor would provide me with pills.

But men don’t go crazy over nothing. We just shrug and make light of

our ills.

After all, I’m the guy who played tackle football, and beat the hell out

of fast Eddy McGee.

I can’t sit here answering my letters, begging strangers to have pity on me.

(* remember, it is Kavanaugh saying that, not me…smile)

Those are not the words of a man who is at peace, but of a tortured soul.

Another illustration: I read in The Baltimore Sun this week about a prominent Long Island family who had gone to Baltimore last weekend to visit their daughter and sister who was a sophomore at Loyola University there. In an unfathomably horrific series of actions in their Sheraton Hotel room on Sunday afternoon, William Parente killed his wife, Betty, then their eleven year old daughter, Catherine , and finally, that night, their Loyola daughter, Stephanie, before killing himself. When hearing about it, their stunned Long Island neighbors could not believe it, each of them remarking about what a wonderful family the Parentes appeared to be, how kind and charitable and peaceful they seemed. Upon investigation, it turned out that William Parente, in these tough economic times, had engaged in some dubious business dealings with his clients and accusations had started to surface and, apparently, in a horribly tormented effort to shield his family and himself from the great shame and embarrassment to come, in a twisted quest to find peace of mind, he killed them all and then himself.

Fortunately, our lack of peace of mind does not in most of us lead us down the path that William Parente took. However, I suspect that many of us can identify in some way with James Kavanaugh along the way of our lives. I know I do. Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the mass of men (and women) lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Across the years of my ministry, the largest number of people who have wanted to talk to me about their lives are those who are seeking peace of mind and heart.

So, then, our gospel reading today is an important one for most of us for, in it, Jesus comes into the group of huddled, anxious disciples and says to them, “Peace be with you.” Into their sadness and anxiety, the risen Christ could have said any number of things. He could have said to them, “I still love you.” He could have said, “It’s not that bad” or “Everything is going to be okay.” He could have given them a pep talk and said, “Come on, guys, you cannot just sit around in here and mope. Get back up on the horse.” But, instead, he exclaimed succinctly, “Peace be with you.” He does not explain his appearance there with them. He does not explain the resurrection. He does not explain his continuing presence in the disciples’ lives, at least to their satisfaction, for the text says, “…in their joy they were disbelieving, and still wondering…” While Desi always seemed to be saying to Jamestown ’s Lucy, “You’ve got some ‘splaining’ to do,” Jesus preferred exclaiming. He simply exclaimed to the disciples, “Peace be with you.” St. Paul was later to echo Jesus in his epistle to the Philippian Church , “The peace of God that passes all understanding, that transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds…”

Peace of mind and heart comes to us as a gift of God bestowed on us by God’s Spirit who teaches us and equips us and empowers us for gospel living that leads to peace. The “peace” that God gives is not a “thing-in-itself” but is the harvest of a well-tended gospel garden. That is why in our reading today Luke says that Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to understand the scriptures that tell about the gospel, that tell of the mysteries of God, that tell us what it means to be human. The Bible always is short on explanation but long on exclamation. Faith is the key to experiencing the gifts and promises of God.

Over time, I have come to identify – sometimes by their presence in my life and sometimes, I hate to admit, by their absence – three primary components that, as we grow more proficient in them, lead us to experience the peace of God, three components that are confirmed by the witness of our scripture:

The first is truth-telling. Jesus himself said, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free…” Someone said to me recently something that startled me. She said, “It is not love that sets us free. It is truth that sets us free.” It set me aback a bit because I always have been such a proponent of love as the elixir of a good and peace-filled life. And in many ways it is. But love set in the context of dishonesty, for instance, does not bring peace. Love that hides or conceals the truth does not bring peace but only tumult and turmoil. How easy it is to be slippery with the truth and thus to manipulate circumstances and other people in order to get something we want. But whatever we get as a result is its only reward for in obfuscating the truth, we also forfeit peace of mind.

The second component of gospel living that leads to experiencing the peace of God in our lives is forgiveness. When Jesus was asked how many times we have to forgive, he replied, “Seventy times seven.” By that he meant endlessly. Why? Because he knew that when we do not forgive, our hearts get hardened and our lives get poisoned and peace escapes us. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “the one who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us and, when we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” Of course, forgiving ourselves is as important as forgiving others because we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. If we hate ourselves, we’ll hate others, too. If we are tolerant toward ourselves, we can be tolerant toward others. If we can forgive ourselves, we can forgive others. Perhaps when Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself it was not so much an imperative as an indicative. How we love ourselves is indicative of how we shall love our neighbors. Without forgiveness, either of ourselves or others, we shall know no peace.

The third element is connectivity. I happened onto a podcast on the internet this week of a Santa Fe radio program in which our own John Monroe-Cassel, who has served as a chaplain for several hospice groups, was talking about the importance of connectedness. He told of scientific research in which two single human cells each were placed on separate slides for microscopic study. When the two slides, and thus the cells, were far away from each other, the cells fibrillated and convulsed and finally died. However, as the two cells were moved nearer to each other and they became more closely proximate and connected, their convulsing ceased and the shaking lessened and a healthy equilibrium set in, and the cells grew stronger and thrived.

What is true at the microscopic level of our lives is true also in the macroscopic picture of our lives. Jesus talked about the importance of connectivity when he said, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” Much earlier than this, of course, the Hebrew community had said, “The Lord our God is one” and thus everything is one…the oneness of everything as we sometimes have named it in this church. Without the acknowledgment and the practice of the essential oneness and interconnectivity of all life, we shall experience life and our lives as broken and factionalized instead of whole and unified. Peace of mind does not come to us in escape from “it” all but in solidarity, community, and communion with “it” all.

The genius of the gospel is that it does not depend on explanation, but exclamation. You do not have to understand how it all works in order to experience it. You simply have to trust what is exclaimed and seek to live accordingly by the help and power of God’s Spirit. So it is with the peace of God. It is why some people in the most despicable of circumstances can experience the peace of mind that passes all understanding while some who seem to have everything live in misery.

Jesus, who was entrusted with the exclamation of the gospel he also embodied, even in hard and difficult situations lived in peace because he told the truth no matter the cost, he forgave even his gravest enemies, and he loved all because he knew he was part and parcel of it all within the great oneness of God.

In the great mystery of resurrection, the risen Christ still is exclaiming. Can you hear? Christ comes into this room, into these days, into our lives, exclaiming, “Peace be with you!” So, trust God and tell the truth; forgive, forgive, forgive; and live at one with God and all life.

Amen.

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