Because It Was Impossible

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.