Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”
Last week was the 1st anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech - my alma mater. Soon after the incident, memorials were placed. People prayed and comforted each other. Hokie stones, the unique limestone quarried locally from which all the buildings are made, were etched with the names of the victims. 33 stones were originally etched. But in the darkness of night the stone for Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter, was pulled up and cast away. And the nation watched with heartfelt compassion.
Early October was the 1st anniversary of the shootings at the Amish community’s school in Pennsylvania. Soon after that, before any memorial could be set, the families of the victims prayed and comforted each other, and then invited the wife and children of Charles Roberts, the shooter, to pray with them, to forgive, and to be reconciled. And the nation watched with stunned disbelief.
It saddened me deeply that Virginia Tech, the place I love so much, that place where I lived and moved and had my being for three years; that place where the virtues of Christianity are so prominently honored, was not, in spite of their vast resources, able to do what the people of a simple, small Amish town were able to do. Blacksburg, Southwestern Virginia, the Bible Belt, where Christian values are held like a shield, ended up shielding out the grace of the forgiveness of God. I was deeply saddened indeed, and perhaps a little bit angry too.
I’m not certain if anyone ever reached out the hand of forgiveness to the Cho family, in the way that was modeled with the Roberts family. School shootings, and other vile, senseless acts of violence will continue. Of that I am certain. We will continue to shock ourselves by the degree of violence we can come up with to inflict on our sisters and brothers. The shootings at Northern Illinois University bear witness to that. And of course, there have been, and will be others. How can forgiveness enter such places of intense grief?
In the midst of his Passion: a humiliating, and violent, torturous death, Jesus was able to ask God to forgive his persecutors. What strength, we might say. What divine compassion he showed. Only Jesus, Son of God, fully divine and human, could have the presence of mind to speak those words. Some might say that’s why he’s God and we aren’t. I would challenge that notion with today’s lessons.
In our first reading we find Stephen, a man, not human and divine, but just a man, who by his inspiring vision of faith was able to utter similar words as Jesus for his executioners. Stephen, like Jesus, was the immediate victim, not the surviving family. If anyone had the right to cry out for justice it was he. Can it be so easily accounted as “presence of mind” that he asked God to forgive those people? I don’t think so. I believe it is presence of spirit in heart.
The Spirit that Jesus left with us, as we read just a few weeks ago, is the spirit of forgiveness with which we can bind or loose others. Jesus said, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Retained by whom? Aaah, there’s the temptation! - the temptation: to hold others forever accountable for their actions, versus forgiving. Seeking an irretrievable justice that is not ours to demand, hazards us to the erosion of our own souls, and the distancing of the Kingdom of God from our sight. The thought troubles the heart. What would happen if we spent more time forgiving and less time scheming for clench-fisted justice? Might we too see the vision of the Kingdom of God as Stephen did?
Society would say that the Amish community has set a dangerous precedent. The argument goes: if we are so quick to forgive those who do these terrible things, we will continue to be victimized people. Look around you. Being outraged and unforgiving hasn’t exactly stemmed the flow of violent crime in this country, has it? That memorial stone laid for Cho, then removed by unknown hands in the dark of night, may just be the stone that makes us all stumble. We stumble because, as Peter tells us, “We disobey the word.” But we are God’s own people, chosen to proclaim “the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into marvelous light.”
There is hope. We are not so doomed to forgivelessness. We are the people of the risen Lord, who freed us from sin. We can rise us and claim that vision of the kingdom of God. We can loose the millstone of resentment from around our necks that binds us to unforgiving. We can model what we learn from Stephen, and Jesus, and the Amish community, what it means to forgive and to be forgiven. As the prayer of St. Francis so poetically states:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
for it is in giving that we receive,
and it is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
That’s a good place to start. In 1965 the Roman Catholic Church decided to stop blaming the Jews for the murder of Jesus. That’s a good place to start. Some people have told me that when they’re cut off in traffic they pray for the drivers of the other cars rather than shake their fists at them. That’s a good place to start. Nikki Giovani, author and scholar at Virginia Tech, said it well in her address to the university. “We are better than we think, and not quite what we want to be.” That is a good place to start. We don’t have to retain the sins of others, at the cost of eroding our souls, of troubling our hearts, or distancing our vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. By the grace of God we can become all that God calls us to be: a people of forgiveness and reconciliation. Where is the good place for us start?
What inspires our vision of faith? How do we forgive? Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” And so we pray that God will give us the grace, and the strength, to forgive. In Jesus’ name we pray… Amen.
