April 14, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

What Lies Beneath

Laurie Kraus
Coordinator, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance

Psalm 30
Revelation 5:11–14
Acts 9:1–20

To live in this world
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver
“In Blackwater Woods”

Just before Christmas this past year, I was sitting in the office of a woman pastor in the tiny town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, helping her to plan worship for the second Sunday of Advent. The reason I was there, rather than in my own pastoral study in Miami, Florida, was a hard one: on the first Sunday of Advent, during the opening hymn, “My Lord, What a Morning,” the ex-husband of the congregation’s organist burst into the sanctuary behind the choir and shot the organist multiple times, until, as he said to Pastor Evon, he “was sure I had finished the job.” What he had finished was the old “normal” that had been the ordinary-time life of that small congregation. What had begun was a new story, a story the news media—and paradoxically the Bible—might both describe as apocalyptic. It is a story marked by an unspeakable trauma, which could be shaped either by denial and defeat or by an intentional, prayerful embracing of pain as a pathway to peace and a future grounded in wisdom. As a part of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, I was there on your behalf to walk alongside that pastor through the valley of the shadow of death,a journey that could be one day shaped, as Jesus’ death was, by the power of resurrection, not despite, but in the midst of, chaos and hurt.

This morning, on this third Sunday of Easter, that is the witness of scripture. Our readings—whose voices rise from communities wildly different from each other and from us—are speaking a truth that makes strange assertions regarding the power of the Holy over our seasons of pain, fear, and chaos. Though we may in our secret hearts suspect that their truth may not have much influence in a world like ours, they sing on, stubbornly asserting that God finds us, even in our deepest losses and places of abandonment. It seems too good to be true, too “spiritual,” may we dare say, to hold much power in the challenges we face: the threat of nuclear action in North Korea, the continuing impact of financial uncertainty and market instability on the well-being of all of us, the apparent impotence of our political system or our religious institutions to sustain our better selves or transform our crumbling national identity.

What authority can stories like these have over the many dangers, toils and fears we face in this hard world, day by day? Can these fairy tales of faith give us the real strength and moral compass we require to thrive in this hard world, where our ordinary-time experience is what Lutheran New Testament scholar Erik Heen describes as “the everyday reality of empire: divide and conquer”?

The reading from Revelation is the only example in the New Testament of the kind of writing scholars describe as apocalyptic. And while the writings in the book of Revelation seem strange and bizarre to us, the experience of apocalypse, sadly, is not. We can describe apocalypse: from our observation of natural catastrophes here or elsewhere; in our horror-stricken witness of mass shootings like the one in Newtown, Connecticut, or cumulative violence in neighborhoods here in Chicago; out of the tragedy of war that has driven more than a million refugees from Syria, with no end in sight. Apocalypse, we know, is that catastrophic event that shatters our present and maims our future. And in the Bible, some believe, apocalypse is in our common future as well, when this sinful world will be judged by a fed-up God and destroyed in fire.

But apocalypse in the lexicon of faith does not address what lies ahead of us, but, rather, what lies beneath, the hidden meaning of these events around which our own stories have been shattered and misshaped. Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but, instead, the beginning of a radical new way of seeing the world and our place in it. Apo-kalypto does not signify catastrophe at all, but, rather, signals to un-cover, to reveal, the meaning in such events.

I was taught this in seminary, but I never “got it” until I had spent years as a disaster volunteer, trying to help people “recover” from the event that had changed their world for the worst. A pastor from the New York City area was participating in a retreat Presbyterian Disaster Assistance offered following 9/11, and as we and his colleagues spoke of what “recovery” might look like for their churches in the months to come, he got a strange look on his face and fell silent. Later, Mark sent me a letter describing how, after that gathering, he had searched the Bible for the word recovery but could not find it. The only word he could find that was similar was “uncover,” that is, apo-kalypto, apocalypse. He wrote about how everyone wanted our country and the survivors to “recover,” but that he saw no benefit in people of faith recovering or, as he saw it, covering up the effects of traumatic events in our lives. How strange it is, he wrote, that we want so badly to cover up the evidence of what has happened to us, even when the cost of living through something, the invisible marks it leaves on our souls, has changed us forever. If we believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God, that the Spirit is at work in us to transform all circumstances for good, if that is what we believe, Mark said, why would we ever want to recover? It is apocalypse, uncovering, that leads us into resurrection life.

The story of the conversion of Saul in Acts 9 offers us another such story of apocalyptic transformation. For those of us who may never ourselves experience such a dramatic experience of transformation, we might also pay attention in this story to Ananias, the disciple who, against all odds, walked alongside Paul when the worst happened and, in so doing, had his own life transformed.

When the man who had been Saul wrote to his churches of the transforming power of resurrection, he never covered up. Paul knew the power of his own transformation and never, ever tried to pretend that he was anything more than a man who had viciously persecuted the church and then, miraculously, came into its embrace.

Sometimes, it is not what happens to us, but what we do to ourselves that shatters our complacency or threatens the careful balance of the lives we have built for ourselves and those we love. Saul was a man possessed by theological correctness, in captivity to his fear that the emerging movement of the Way of Jesus might destroy “the everyday reality of empire” and put his community at risk. He became a tool of the divide-and-conquer strategy Rome used so well, and he diligently persecuted those whom he once had embraced as kin. Fear drove him and infected the lives of those he stalked, destroying from within what Rome could never destroy from without. As the apocryphal gospel of Thomas puts it, “Jesus said, if you bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

What lies hidden in your past? What needs to come forth from within you, right now? What secrets are we hiding, even from ourselves, whose revelation we fear might break our lives in two, but whose uncovering could transform us if we could only believe the witness of scripture?

The story in Acts tells us how, on the road to Damascus, when the cost of his life’s choices literally knocked him off his feet, Saul was blinded by the light. His eyes were covered up—a visible symbol of the blinding effort it took to hide himself from truth and the challenge of change, and evidence of the many ways we do violence to ourselves and others when we cannot face our fearfulness with hope and grace or tolerate our deep anxiety without making enemies, breathing threats, as our brother Paul once did, in our effort to survive.

How fortunate Paul was to be sent a man who, because of his deep faith in God and his willing embodiment of the Spirit of the risen Christ, could manage his own terror at confronting this infamous enemy, Saul of Tarsus, and remain centered in his grace-filled mission of loving proclamation. Where Saul controlled his fear by harming and hunting others, Ananias did not permit fear to control his life. He knew, as we know in the words of the letters of John, that “there is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear—for fear has to do with judgment, and those who fear have not been made perfect in love.” Abiding in love, Ananias was able to confront and master his fear and then to reach out in compassion to his bewildered, blinded enemy, When in our pain and blindness we are touched by another—touched with understanding, compassion, and love—we find within ourselves, maybe, as Paul did, the courage to change the things we can and to begin to walk the path toward wholeness and peace.

We all—each of us—have things we hide from ourselves or keep secret from others. What needs to be uncovered in your story so that you can become the child of God you were meant to be and experience a wholeness not rooted in denial or forgetting or avoidance? As a pastor I have seen the power in the lives of persons who are able to say, “I am an alcoholic . . . I am an addict. . . . I failed in my marriage. . . . I am a survivor of abuse.” In my work in Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, it is my privilege to participate in the uncovering of meaning in the experience of disaster and to bear witness to the transforming power of those unsought events in the lives of those who are willing to walk through them with their eyes and hearts open. This is what Erik Heen calls a “practical theodicy”—theodicy being the study of where God is in the midst of suffering and evil. Practical theodicy is a way of being, in the midst of such events, that helps us and helps us help others walk the way toward new life.

The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once prayed, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that you will make all things right if I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you in the next.”

That is what the message of Easter is, I believe: When Jesus confronted his own betrayal, torment, and death, when he was able to give voice to his deepest fear that even God had abandoned him—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—and still remain centered in his integrity, in his mission of healing love, death did not have the final word with him. He was resurrected, which is a mystery we can never understand wholly but a gift we can embrace with all our soul, fearful and fallible though we may be. Jesus’ suffering transformed him, and as we live in Christ’s way, we, too, can be transformed, like Ananias, like Paul.

I received a letter a couple of weeks ago from staff at the Ferncliff Presbyterian Camp, which since 1998, through your gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing, has partnered with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to host nearly a dozen special camps for children affected by gun violence. The letter can say far better than I what our scripture today invites us to believe and do:

My name is Sara. Although we have never met, you supporters of Ferncliff changed my life. On March 24, 1998, there was a shooting at my school similar to the one at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. At the time, I was eleven. I lost my dear friend of four years that day. I can tell you now that if it had not been for the wonderful support we received from Ferncliff in that aftermath, many young lives would have also been lost to the fallout. When you witness such cruelty in the world at such a young age, it is very easy to believe pain and violence are the only things that exist. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing our community that love truly is stronger than hate. The memories of those special camps are priceless to me. They help me to see that something positive can come from something so horrific. It also shows me that God has a plan, even if we cannot see it sometimes through the chaos. I will marry my best friend this July, whom I met at a Ferncliff-sponsored lock-in. Thank you for doing God’s work. I implore you to continue. Sara.

Let us pray:

It’s in every one of us to be wise:
find your heart, open up both your eyes.
We can all know everything without ever knowing why. . . .
It’s in every one of us
by and by, it’s in every one of us, by and by. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church