violence – By Another Road

The Way of Peace: A Sermon for Troubled Times

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 14, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 6:14-29, the beheading of John the Baptist.

I sometimes wonder what John the Baptist thought about, just before the end of his life.

They say that sometimes the past comes back to us in our final moments, in visions and in fragments–that we can see people long dead, and that we can hear the music of songs long finished. And so I wonder what faces and melodies danced in the darkness of John’s prison cell.

Maybe it was the face of his mother, Elizabeth, who in her old age thought she’d never be a mother, looking upon him once more with a gaze of tenderness and wonder. Maybe he heard the song of his father, Zechariah, the song sung the day of John’s birth, the one even we might remember: and you, my child, will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.

And so he did, all the way up to this moment in our Gospel text.And while I imagine he might have wept for that all that seemed lost, all that felt like it had been wasted, my hope is that all of God’s promises came back to John in the end, carried on a wind that smelled of wilderness and wild honey. A glimpse of heaven, even as he commended himself to the unseeing darkness.

I hope so. I hope he knew that his efforts were not in vain, that he had done his part, that his voice had indeed cried out and been carried on the wind where it needed to go. That the paths had been made straight.

I hope so because his actual death, and the circumstances that led up to it, are, like all political violence, so unbearably shortsighted and pointless and small. John, the prophet of the Most High, the one who bathed Jesus in the waters of baptism, the one who, his whole life, burned with the fire of the Holy Spirit, is here, today, snuffed out over a bit of palace intrigue, by the machinations of another petty empire.

No dignified sacrifice, no farewell discourse—just a debauched party and an idle grudge and a series of terrible decisions and a swift, pitiful ending. Even the writer of Mark’s Gospel seems at a loss for words, unwilling or unable to describe anyone’s reaction to the senselessness of what has taken place.

Because, as is always the case, what can you really say when rage and violence emerge, yet again, into our midst? Thoughts and prayers for your family, John. This is not who we are, John. We promise we’ll be nicer to each other in the future, John, so that your death meant something.

And we keep on saying it, hoping next time it will be true.

Yesterday, another act of political violence struck at the heart of our civic life in what should be a peaceful political process in this country. The shooting at former President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, which resulted in the death of one bystander and which will likely have historic repercussions we cannot yet understand, is a stark and frightening reminder that we are all still subject to the same destructive tendencies that plagued our forebears.

We pray for all victims of political violence, including those harmed yesterday. And we are reminded, yet again, how cultures and rhetorics of violence are self-perpetuating—that all the words and wounds we choose to inflict upon one another play out in predictable, terrible ways. I hate to say it, but this is who we are. At least, it’s who we choose to be, too much of the time.

These forces of division, enmity, and the desire to eradicate those we deem as other are active and at work in our politics, in the broader world and, as hard as it is to admit, to some extent within each of us. We resist them, and build around them, and sometimes even seem to rise above them, but they are there.

And from time to time, in seasons like the one we are living through now in this country, we are called to account for the persistence of violence. We are called to reckon with the warring impulses of the human heart, called to ask if another way is possible, if indeed our feet might actually be guided somehow into the way of peace. John certainly believed it could be so, but his life demonstrated that calling people prophetically into the way of peace is rarely a safe endeavor.

And so I wonder, as John sat in the darkness, waiting for the end, I wonder whether he finally understood that we need something more than just thoughts and prayers and the invitation to do better next time. That for whatever reason, at least on our own strength, we cannot be much better than we already are.

I wonder, in those flashes of memory and music, in the fragmentary sum of his long and mysterious journey, if John could sense that Jesus, the One for whom he had waited and prepared the way, was not simply a new political leader strong enough or charismatic enough to enforce peace, but was, in fact, the Holy One who came to show us a truth both very new and eternal: that strength and force and violence will never achieve a redemptive end or guide us to a place of rest. That only love and peace and an embarrassing level of gentleness will do that.

Because that is what Jesus is. He is the one who embarrasses the Herods of the world by his gentleness; the one who stops the dance of death in its tracks; the one who reveals not just violence’s depravity, but its futility, its weakness. He does this because although he was also killed senselessly, for pointless political ends, he comes to us as the Risen One, the Wounded One who stands in the midst of our fear and our cynicism and our despair and says, peace.

He says, peace.

He does not say revenge or rage or retribution, but peace. And this is something altogether different from what we have been given to expect of this life or this world, or even of ourselves. Something different, even, than John expected–John who had once spoken of the Lord’s winnowing fork and fire.

And so I hope, somehow, before the end, he saw the truth in the darkness and smiled and said, yes, this, yes, peace, yes, we have warred and wept and wandered in the wilderness, and we may continue to do so for many more generations, but yes, another way is possible and it is here, now, insistently alive even in the face of all this senseless death, and its name is love, and its name is God and its name is Jesus.

I hope we see this, too, every day, but especially on days like today, when those forces of violence and fear seem so strong, so palpable, and when forcefulness seems to be the only way forward. I hope we will see that there is something deeper and stronger than anger that animates our common life and our work and our faith, even after all that has been done and left undone.

Long before our own endings, long before we must gaze into the darkness, I hope we will glimpse that vision, fragmented though it might be…the one that is revealed in the faces of the ones we have loved and in the songs of peace we have sung and in the ways we have tried to practice tenderness and gentleness with each other in this place.

And then I hope we will go out and proclaim that vision in the world, costly as its might be to do so. Not to win a political or cultural battle, not to earn a spot in heaven, but simply because it is true. It is the only true thing there is to hold onto—that love and justice and peace and forgiveness are the only things which will endure in the end, long after our seemingly endless capacity for violence has consumed itself.

Because this is the Gospel: that on that day, when everything is finished, when every game is played and ever last war is waged, God will still be there standing on the wreckage of our best intentions and worst impulses and God will still be saying, Peace, peace I give to you. My love I give to you. My life I give to you. Let the dawn from on high break upon you, my children. Let us begin again.

We don’t have to wait til the end to begin, though. We can start right now. Because no matter what happens in the next several months in this country, or the next several years of our lives, or in the next several generations on this planet, I can tell you this: the things worth doing, the things that will survive and flourish long after we are gone, are the same things that John glimpsed in the dark: the face of love and the song of peace, and the courage to trust in something other than the hurt we’ve known.

God be with our country as we try to remember this.

God be with us as we try to live it.

What If?: A Sermon for Palm Sunday

I preached this sermon on Palm Sunday, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The text cited is the Passion narrative in the Gospel according to Mark.

One thing that strikes me, every year, as Holy Week envelops us in the stark power of its narrative, is how inevitable it all feels, this story about Jesus’ betrayal and death. How fixed the trajectory, after lifetimes, after centuries, after millennia of retracing it. It is easy to forget that the story we tell today began so differently.

Just a few months ago, we beheld a baby born in Bethlehem under the chill of starlight, and we heard angel choirs singing of peace, and then we watched that child grow and mature through the soft gloom of the season, and in the slow lengthening of our days through Epiphany, we beheld his light and his life and his love gathering their own brightness, and we have looked for signs of the unfurling promise of his Kingdom, like springtime emerging from the muddy, fertile ground of Lent.

And yet, once more, here we stand on Palm Sunday, only to witness this particular story of God’s goodness cut short again, this particular promise deferred again, the tender green growing palms trampled, again, under the force of misguided adulation; the gently stirring earth soaked, again, not with gentle spring rain, but with blood.

And yet, despite the grave horrors, the enduring shock of what we see and experience in this Passion story, still, I think, we tend to see it as inevitable. As if this brutal end to Jesus’ earthly ministry was somehow the necessary price of his message, as if it were normal for for mothers to mourn their children, as if it were normal for springtime to give way to winter instead of summer. As if this sacrifice was as natural as the turning of the seasons. As if there was no other way the story could have ended.

What if there was?

It’s odd, we rarely seem to ask that question about Holy Week. And it’s especially odd because, for most of us, in our own lives, we spend a lot of time and energy asking “what if?”

What if I had made a different choice? What if I had chosen a different path? What if I had learned from my mistakes sooner? What if we, as a nation or as a community or as a church had chosen another course of action?

Asking these sorts of questions is, most of the time, as natural as breathing.

We are accustomed to “what ifs” because we are faced with a dizzying number of choices every day, and so of course we wonder how else things might have turned out if we had gone a different way.

And yet, when it comes to Holy Week, when it comes to Jesus stumbling on the rocky road to Golgotha, we surrender him to his fate. We surrender our “what ifs” to the violence we know and expect, and we behold the drama as if it were fixed and preordained, the way that it had to be for Jesus to be who he was and accomplish what he did.

Without the suffering of Christ, without the brutality of the Cross (we have often been taught) there would be no salvation, no redemption, no liberation from the brokenness and sin that formed and fashioned the Cross in the first place. And so we have accepted, on some level, that all of this was necessary.

It’s a strange sort of logic that a God of Love would require torture to prove that love. At best, it leaves us to simply shake our heads and shrug at God’s inscrutable will. But at worst, it gives rise to the idea of redemptive violence—a God who inflicts harm upon himself and creation to achieve the ends of peace. Which sounds suspiciously like the tyrants we know, not like the God for whom we long.

And so I wonder if, perhaps, as we move through Holy Week together, we are meant not to accept the inevitability of the Passion as passive observers of Jesus’ pain, but to trouble the narrative, just as our spirits are troubled by it. I wonder if we are meant to ask “what if?”

What if Jesus did not have to die in the way that he did? What if his own predictions of the Passion reflected his deep, grief-stricken understanding of our brokenness rather than some necessary violence inflicted by his Father?

What if none of this had to happen?

What if the crowd chose to listen to his actual teachings? What if they understood, as he entered the city, the subversive symbolism of his ride on the colt for what it was—a challenge to the pageantry of imperial power—rather than projecting their own political agendas onto his actions?

What if his disciples had not forsaken him? What if the temple authorities had kept an open mind, had been humble in the face of things they did not understand? What if Pilate had chosen to be something more than a functionary of the deadly inertia of empire?

What if there had, in fact, been another way for the story to end, another way for Jesus’ undying love to be made manifest and to bless the earth?

We cannot know the answer to these questions, anymore than we ever know the answer to the “what ifs” of our own lives. The story is the story. And we must tell it.

But that is not the point. The point is that we still need to ask the question. We need to ask “what if” during Holy Week, just as we must ask “what if” every time we are faced with violence and pain and prejudice, so that we do not accept these things as somehow normative, somehow determinative, because without “what if,” we will have made an uneasy peace with the crucifying impulses of the world. We will have surrendered our imaginations to the sense of their inevitability.

But what if we didn’t?

What if the God who has repeatedly said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” actually meant it, and meant us to expect this from ourselves and our world? What if the brutality of this Passion story is no more part of God’s plan than any of the rest of the suffering we inflict upon one another?

Because when you start asking “what if,” you realize that everything in the Passion narrative is the result of choices, choices made made by people not so different from you and me, choices made, too often, in service to the prevailing order, choices made by people who were as agitated and lost and polarized as we are, people caught up in faltering hopes and flourishing suspicions, people distracted and weighed down by a history of loss, people who also forgot to ask, “what if this was not the way it has to be?”

I tried it this week, asking “what if” as I was reading and wrestling with the story. And there are signs of possibility, thank God, if we look closely. Especially if we look closely at the women.

There’s the unnamed woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out her rare, costly, sweet ointment with the same mixture of wild abandon and care by which God pours his love upon creation. They say it is wasteful, this love and care, and yet she seems to be asking, “what if it’s not?”

And there’s the servant girl who, like a prophet, calls Peter to account for abandoning his true identity, all of his no, no, no, I do not know him. And she seems to be asking, “what if you said yes? What if you did finally, fully, know him and claim him as your own?”

And the women who gather near the Cross to hold vigil with Jesus as he dies, refusing to abandon him to his shame and loneliness. The crowds call it a lost cause, a failed revolution, a big disappointment, but the women seem to be asking, “what if none of that was the point?”

All of these women are the ones who refuse to accept the unfolding trajectory of the story—the ones who see another way, the true Way. They are the ones brave enough to name presence and fidelity, not violence and power, as the strongest force at work in this narrative. They are the ones who are asking, what if this story is not about the myth of redemptive violence that forms its center, but about the quiet, determined insistence of love that flourishes on the margins?

What if the point of Holy Week is not to valorize the story of Jesus’ suffering, but to build a world in which it is the last such story that ever need be told?

What if we realized that the Cross is not the necessary means to an end, that God would have saved us in a thousand different ways if we would have let him, and that he still will?

What if we realized that the only inevitable narrative is not the Passion, but this: that Jesus—and all of us— are loved passionately from the day of our birth, all of us adored by angels under the chill of starlight, loved through the soft gloom of the turning seasons, loved through the lengthening of our days, and loved when we rejoice and loved when we despair and loved even when we die—however we die—and loved, ultimately, back to life.

What if that was the one, true, enduring, necessary story we needed to hear? What if all the rest was up to us?

What if?