Team building exercise on our Cross-Community Trip to South Africa with Northern Irish teens in July of 2005. |
April 27, 2014
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
14aBut Peter, standing
with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,
22“You that are
Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to
you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him
among you, as you yourselves know — 23this man, handed over to you
according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and
killed by the hands of those outside the law. 24But God raised him
up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held
in its power. 25For David says concerning him,
‘I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand so
that I will not be shaken;
26 therefore my heart
was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh
will live in hope.
27 For you
will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One
experience corruption.
28 You have made known
to me the ways of life;
you will make me full of gladness
with your presence.’
29“Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that
he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30Since
he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would
put one of his descendants on his throne. 31Foreseeing this, David
spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying,
‘He was not abandoned to Hades,
nor did his flesh experience corruption.’
32This
Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.
Sermon: “Because It Was
Impossible”
It was a dusty, winter’s day in July.
A group of Protestant and Catholic teenagers from Belfast were gathered
in a large room at a camp in the middle of the bush outside of
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. We had
worked with these teenagers for ten painstaking months, working first in
“neutral spaces” outside of entirely Protestant or Catholic territories of
Belfast, building relationships.
Eventually, there was enough trust to walk these former enemies around
their own neighborhoods, pointing out this place where they played as children,
and that place where a family member was tragically killed for being Catholic
instead of Protestant or vice-versa (I should say Catholic meant Irish and
Protestant meant British, these were cultural and not religious labels). We thought we’d come really far with these
kids.
Until that warm winter’s day in South Africa. The task was simple: take this lump of clay,
make something that will help tell your story, and then tell the rest of the
group your story.
The first teenager took that lump of clay and roughly balled it in his
fist. He spoke, “This is to represent a
rock, like what was thrown at us when we were peacefully protesting at Bloody
Sunday in Derry and you Prods – no offense – attacked us for no reason.”
That clay might as well have been a real rock. The teenagers erupted into the us-and-them we
had worked so hard to overcome:
“You Prods attacked us first!”
“You Teags (Catholics) threw bricks at British soldiers – they had to
defend themselves!”
As the tension in the room escalated rapidly, exposing just how fragile
that Northern Irish peace really is, we leaders stopped it. We told all the kids to go outside – separate
from each other – while we discussed what to do next. As leaders we said that it was quite possible
that this would destroy all the progress that had been made. What if these kids came to blows, in the
middle of the South African wilderness?
What would we do then?
Ultimately, we agreed: God is in
this thing. God has been here these past
ten months and we have to trust that God is somehow in this process, no matter
how scary it seems. So we invited those
kids back in. And we let them vent. Angry, bitter, vengeful words were passed
back and forth about events none of them had even been alive for, but had heard
about all of their lives.
Finally, a new kind of anger arose.
These kids stopped being angry at each other, and realized they had been
force-fed half-sided histories their whole lives. They found they had a common anger at having
been fed hate and fear for so long, at never knowing what really happened.
It could have gone very differently that day. But it didn’t. God showed up. And we let God move in ways that were
terrifying and risky.
I tell you this story from my time in Belfast and South Africa several
years ago because it’s one of those moments in my life when I’ve seen God do
something completely impossible, take kids whose families had been at odds for
generations and bring reconciliation.
We hear about another impossibility in our reading from Acts: that Jesus
was unjustly killed, but that God raised him up, having
freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its
power. Death could not hold Jesus, no
matter how hard it tried.
Death could not hold those kids in
Belfast in their half-true histories of violence, no matter how hard it
tried. The reality is, though, that
sometimes it feels like death might just win.
It’s why we stopped those kids that day, because we thought that, hard
as we had tried, maybe it was just impossible for them to know reconciliation
at a deeper level. Maybe superficial
peace was the best we could hope for, where they never actually got to the
level of their deepest pain and fear.
Deeper healing was impossible.
When Jesus’ disciples, those who
abandoned him actively and those who silently did so, watched the Son of God be
killed by the State through a people whipped into a frenzy by fear, I imagine
they thought death had won. That perhaps
the peace they’d received on earth walking beside and learning from Jesus was
the best they could hope for. Anything
more would be impossible.
But the thing is, God loves a
challenge! God takes what we call
impossible and instead of cowering in fear or defeat, says, “Okay, trust me,
and watch this.”
And if we’re able to let go of our
need to control everything, of our preconceived ideas about how God is and is
not supposed to work, sometimes something remarkable happens. We call that “remarkable something” resurrection:
when God takes what we have called ‘impossible’ and says that the only
impossibility in that situation is for God to do nothing.
This is why we are Easter people –
not because we prefer it to the horror of the cross and not because it has a
nice ring to it. We are Easter people
because this season of Easter is when God reminds us that it is impossible for
the forces of death to keep us from God’s new life, just as it was impossible
for that grave to contain Jesus.
There’s a lot of letting go required
to allow God to do the impossible.
This letting
go looks like, in our busiest and most stressed-out times, instead of doing
more, stopping, praying and giving God space to re-order our lives.
It looks like
sitting with the painfully raw conversations with someone we have hurt or who
has hurt us, and refusing to leave them and settle for superficial peace, but
talking and even more, listening, until we reach resurrection on the other
side.
It looks like
refusing to let the expectations of others define who we are, or who we have to
be, but listening to God as our conscience and guide above all else.
It looks like
answering God’s call to become a lasting part of an imperfect family – as
Sarah and Bronson are doing today – saying that we need each other to
follow God, and this world needs us to reach out together.
It looks like
getting out of our cars and into the woods, out of our calendars and into a
conversation with a child, and listening to the Risen Lord who walks with us
always.
God is doing
the impossible – whether we witness it or not.
But let’s not miss it – let’s be brave enough to let go and open our
eyes and hearts to the One who brings new life in risky and powerful ways. Alleluia!
Amen.