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April 30, 2017 - 3rd Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14a, 36-41
14aPeter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,
36“Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God
has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
37Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter
and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” 38Peter
said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus
Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the
Holy Spirit. 39For the
promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away,
everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40And he testified
with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this
corrupt generation.” 41So those who welcomed his message were
baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.
“Teach your children how to forgive, make your homes places of love and
forgiveness; make your streets and neighborhoods centers of peace and
reconciliation. It would be a crime
against youth, and their future, to let even one child grow up with nothing but
the experience of violence and hatred.”
These words were spoken by
Pope John Paul II at mass in Drogheda, Ireland on September 29, 1979. They are
a challenge for all adults to not pass on the hatred of the troubled past to
the next generation. But even more than that, they are a promise to those
children, that they will know a kinder, less violent world than those who came
before them.
As I read and re-read our
text from Acts this week, one line from Peter’s sermon kept coming back to me: “For the
promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone
whom the Lord our God calls to him.” These words are especially wonderful, because in
the Greek it doesn’t just say ‘sons;’ Peter is careful to use the word for both
genders of children: girls and boys alike are equally entitled to this promise.
But
what is this promise? In a word: forgiveness. Peter begins his sermon by "cutting people to the heart." His delivery is blunt, speaking of Jesus’ murder
by saying, “this Jesus whom you
crucified.”
He’s
not allowing them to gloss over their complicity in the death of Jesus. But –
and this is really important – he’s not denying his own complicity, either.
History has taken these words of Peter as an excuse for incredible hatred and
harm. Blaming Jews for Jesus’ death has been used a theological rational for
everything from distrust to prejudice to the Holocaust.
What
a twisting this is of Peter’s words! After all, he was a Jew, speaking to his own people, not an outsider
condemning another racial and religious group (a very important distinction).
And he didn’t just name
complicity – like Pope John Paul II would later do, he also named a promise,
not just for them, but for their children, girls and boys alike. The promise of
forgiveness, freely given and received from God.
Now, there are some preachers
who would at this point make this a sermon about praying a short prayer and
accepting Jesus into your heart. But here’s the thing: Peter wasn’t just preaching to the hearts of people.
His Lord had been killed by a collusion of state and religious power. So, he
was also preaching to the heart of systems of injustice. To neighborhoods ravaged by violence. To households in which
children grew up hating and fearing the other just because they were other.
Yes, he may have wanted people to personally accept the promises Jesus had for
them, but this is much farther reaching than any individual: 3,000 people were
baptized. That’s even more people than live in Cameron!
Just as violence and hatred
are a communal act, so forgiveness and repentance are, too. Let us never think
the gospel is just about my “personal relationship with God.” It is also always
about my relationship with my neighbor, especially the neighbor I have a
tendency to label, judge or hate.
When power is wedded to that
hatred, we all know what happens. History has shown it, though it’s been downplayed
and hidden. But the truth always prevails.
Such is the case in the film
The Promise. It tells the story of the Armenian Genocide in the early 20th
century, a period of 3 years in which 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by
the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, Turkey. Turkish authorities have
denied this genocide, calling the death of so many Armenians mere collateral
damage in a civil war.
The Promise is a love story
by nature, but its deeper purpose is to viscerally depict a terrible historic
reality: that Armenians were exterminated by their own government. It might
come as no surprise that this movie was written and directed by Terry George, a
Belfast boy whose been a part of numerous films about the Troubles, as well as
Hotel Rwanda, shedding light on that conflict. His mission is to tell the
ugliest parts of human history, and he did it again here. It seems odd to name
such a movie The Promise.
What promise could there be
in the face of genocide and violence? The same promise Peter spoke of:
repentance and forgiveness. A wound that is constantly covered up or ignored
will never heal: it must be exposed to the light, given air, and treated
directly.
While most documents the
Ottoman had relating to the Armenian Genocide were destroyed or hidden away, a
telegram has been discovered by Turkish historian Taner Akcam from July 4,
1915. On official Ottoman letterhead, it asks whether deported Armenians have
been ‘liquidated’ yet.
In an interview[1],
Akcam was asked a blunt question: “You are Turkish. You are not Armenian. Why have you
devoted your life, your career, to studying the Armenian genocide?” He
replied, “I'm an historian. It is my job to educate [a] new generation on
violence in the past so that this should not happen again in the future.”
I have a good friend and colleague, Rev. Julie Hoplamazian who
is Armenian. For her, denial of the Armenian Genocide is denial of her own
story: she lost much of her family. Medz Mayrig, her great-grandmother survived
through the kindness of a Turkish family who took her as a slave girl, and
later she was able to escape to the States. Most were not so lucky. Despite
warning after warning from journalists and missionaries, the world failed to
respond.
My friend writes, “Sadly, the lesson was not learned;
this mistake of history was repeated just a quarter century later. In a speech
authorizing the invasion of Poland and the ruthlessness with which his soldiers
were to act, Adolf Hitler said[2], 'I have issued the command...our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the
physical destruction of the enemy...Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' Justifying his evil
genocide with the assurance that history would not speak of it, Adolf Hitler
succeeded in killing 6 million Jews during World War II."
We
have to speak of it, to remember in order to forgive and be set free from our
patterns of violence, because genocide still happens[3]. In
Syria. In Sudan. In the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Ethiopia. In Burma.
If
this season of Easter is anything, it is a promise that just because
crucifixion is the way of the world, we don’t have to ignore it, or be
complicit in it. Peter named Jesus’ violent death that he could then name the
promises of repentance and forgiveness. Jesus didn’t rise again because he was
bored in that tomb. He rose because he refused – and refuses still – to let
violence and hatred reign. He rose because he wants better for the children of
this world than genocide. (After all, he was nearly a victim of it through
Herod.)
If
we claim to be an Easter people, as we should, then our faith can’t just be
about our private souls. It has to be about communal salvation as well – doing
all we can to ensure that every child is saved. Because
it’s not enough to say the promise is just for us…what a cheapening of God’s
grace that would be!
This
promise is for every child of God, to know a life without threat,
a
home of peace and forgiveness,
and a church that never forgets them.
Alleluia! Amen.
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