Fifth Sunday Of Easter
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VIII, Cycle A
Object:
Theme For The Day
Jesus Christ is the cornerstone.
First Lesson
Acts 7:55-60
The Stoning Of Stephen
Acts 6:8--8:1a is the extended story of the apostle, Stephen, one of the early church's most eloquent preachers. He is the embodiment of Luke 12:11-12: "When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour..." Luke tells the story of Stephen's arrest in 6:11-15, and it closely parallels the arrest of Jesus. Stephen, too, is the victim of false charges of blasphemy (6:11). He, too, is seized suddenly and hauled before the council (6:12). He, too, is charged with predicting that the temple will soon be destroyed (6:14). Like Jesus, Stephen is innocent. Even the members of the council can see that "his face was like the face of an angel" (6:15). Stephen's lengthy sermon (7:1-54) can be seen as a summation of the early Christian message. He ends it provocatively, calling his listeners betrayers, murderers, and lawbreakers (verses 52-53). Because of Stephen's incendiary remarks, it is no surprise that the religious authorities "become enraged" and "grind their teeth" at him (v. 55; see Psalm 35:16; 37:12; 112:10; and Lamentations 2:16 for other references to the wicked grinding or gnashing their teeth against the righteous). Filled with the Holy Spirit, Stephen suddenly sees a heavenly vision of "the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God," and reports this to the court (v. 55). This enrages the crowd even more, who drag him outside the city and begin stoning him to death. A certain young man named Saul holds the cloaks of the mob, while they perform this grisly deed (verses 57-58). Stephen's death is Christlike: He prays for Jesus to "receive his spirit," then pleads for forgiveness for his murderers (verses 59-60). The reading ought to be extended to include the chilling line: "And Saul approved of their killing him" (8:1a) -- for this sets the stage for the story of Saul/Paul, which will soon begin. Paul's subsequent ministry can be seen as an atonement for Stephen's death, and a continuation of his apostolic witness. Stephen's apostleship went off like a brilliant skyrocket, brief and beautiful -- although, if his faithful witness indeed inspired Paul's conversion, then he goes down in history as one of the most important early Christian leaders.
New Testament Lesson
1 Peter 2:2-10
Christ, The Cornerstone
Having selected 1 Peter 2:19-25 for last week's lesson, the lectionary editors now move backward, to include the first part of chapter 2. To provide proper context, the reading should begin with verse 1; there is no good reason for omitting it. Verses 1-3 are an exhortation to purity. They include the image of mother's milk as a symbol of God's word: believers are as nursing infants, wholly dependent on this spiritual nourishment. Verse 3 -- "if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good" -- refers to Psalm 34:8. In verses 4-8, the author introduces the image of Christ, "the living stone," referring to Psalm 118:22 and Isaiah 28:16. Christian believers, themselves, are also living stones, who are being "built into a spiritual house" (v. 5). Christ, "the stone that the builders rejected," has become the cornerstone, and we are built on him (verses 6-8). There is a strong, communal emphasis here: The destiny of the living stones is to be built together into a spiritual house, not to stand alone in austere, isolated virtue. Verse 9 -- "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people" -- has at times been misused. Adolf Hitler, in fact, quotes it in Mein Kampf, as justification for his racist ideas. In extending it beyond the Jewish people, however, the author is clearly attempting to be as broadly inclusive as possible. It is our relationship to Jesus Christ that makes us "a chosen race," not any genetic characteristic. Verse 10 -- "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people" -- is a reference to Hosea 1:9.
The Gospel
John 14:1-14
Jesus: The Way, The Truth, And The Life
After washing the disciples' feet and dismissing Judas to go and "do quickly what you are going to do" (13:27), Jesus reveals that he will soon depart from the disciples: "Where I am going, you cannot come" (13:33). Peter vows to follow Jesus anywhere, but Jesus predicts that he will soon deny him (13:36-38). Jesus' words from today's passage are an answer to his followers' understandable worries. "Do not let your hearts be troubled," he says to them; have faith (14:1). Jesus may be going away from them, but he is going to "My Father's house," that has "many dwelling places" -- or "rooms," in the more familiar King James Version (v. 2). Although Jesus has just told them they cannot follow -- at least not yet (13:36) -- Thomas wonders aloud how they can discover the way. Jesus' response is the famous "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (14:6). "Then, show us the Father," says Philip, still not getting it (v. 8). Jesus replies, in effect, "You have already seen the Father -- in me!" (verses 9-11). Jesus promises to remain connected to them, even after he leaves them in the flesh: "If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it" (verses 13-14). The line, "No one comes to the Father except through me" (v. 6b) has been much-discussed in recent years, especially in the context of interfaith dialogue. With so many wars and acts of terrorism being justified -- at least, ostensibly -- on religious grounds, many Christians are beginning to question whether the old, unthinking exclusivism may be unfaithful to Jesus' example. Our ability to enter into fruitful, interfaith dialogue may depend wholly upon our ability to see the "way" as being broader than we had previously supposed. Jesus' earlier, cryptic saying about "other sheep that do not belong to this fold" may provide the basis for such a re-thinking (10:16). We may need to entertain the possibility that people "of good faith," other than our own, may be coming to God "through Jesus" -- even though they may not be aware they are doing so.
Preaching Possibilities
Fifty years ago, the phrase, "school shooting" would have seemed incomprehensible to anyone who heard it. Sadly, in these days following Columbine, Virginia Tech, and a number of other tragic incidents, the expression is all too familiar.
Lots of people are fond of saying that religion is a purely private matter. It's personal, they'll insist. It's nobody's business but your own -- although the events at schools that have been the targets of assaults by their own students give a very different impression.
The fact is, it's crucially important that young people have faith. It's important to them, of course, on a personal level; but -- and this is the point that's all too easy to forget -- it's also important to society at large.
The author of 1 Peter invites his readers to "come to [Christ], a living stone... and let yourselves be built into a spiritual house." He goes on to quote Psalm 118: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone...."
What if the gunmen of Columbine and Virginia Tech had built their lives on that solid foundation? Jesus once told a parable about that: "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell -- and great was its fall!" (Matthew 7:24-27).
Great was the fall of these young men, who showed up at their school with guns in their hands and their pockets bulging with ammunition. If someone had only managed to convince them that Jesus died for their sins, and rose so they might have new life!
There have been some provocative studies on the importance of churchgoing: not only to the individual, but to society. In 1992, the Search Institute of Minneapolis conducted a national survey. It established that "youth involved in a church, synagogue, or other community of faith are half as likely as uninvolved youth to display many 'at-risk' behaviors" -- with "at risk" defined as things like drinking and drugs, casual sex, and suicide attempts.
A few years later, in another article, the Search Institute posed a question: Why is it that, with such convincing evidence that churchgoing is good for kids, good for their families, and good for society, schools don't partner with churches more often to help meet the needs of youth? Listen to these actual words from that report:
"Everyone, it seems, is talking about what our nation needs to do for its youth. At the national level, youth and children are "in" again, with people in all branches of government and both political parties claiming the issues as their own. Community coalitions form almost daily to address some issue or need or concern about young people. But in all of the discussion about solutions to our crisis, one institution is left out of the discussion: the religious community. And there is an important irony here, for, we believe, congregations have more potential than schools or community youth-serving agencies to address the crisis."
Those words come not from a church-related organization, but -- surprisingly -- from a secular, educational think-tank. They bring home this image from First Peter: of Jesus as cornerstone.
We all know that in a building the cornerstone is that crucial part of the foundation on which the whole structure rests. Jesus has that kind of role in society. Because of Jesus, the forces of chaos are held at bay -- and everyone benefits, both those who believe in him and those who do not.
Remember the film, It's a Wonderful Life, about George Bailey, the small-town banker played by Jimmy Stewart? Bailey's on the verge of suicide, when a clumsy angel named Clarence allows him the privilege of seeing what his town would have been like if he had never have been born. In that shadowy dreamscape, the little town of Bedford Falls is a darker and gloomier place. In the vision, it's not even called Bedford Falls; it's Pottersville, named for a grasping miser. Without George Bailey to keep him in line, he's taken over the town.
Let's try a little thought-experiment. What would the world be like if Jesus Christ had never been born? The German poet of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine, thought he knew. Heine was born a Jew but developed a high appreciation for Christianity. In these powerful words, he pictures the cross of Jesus Christ as a magic talisman that keeps the dark forces of chaos at bay:
"Should ever that taming talisman break -- the Cross -- then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors, with all their insane, Berserker rage, of whom our Nordic poets speak and sing. That talisman is now already crumbling and the day is not far off when it shall break apart entirely. On that day, the old stone gods will rise from their long-forgotten wreckage and rub from their eyes the dust of a thousand years' sleep.
At long last leaping to life, Thor with his giant hammer will crush the Gothic cathedrals. And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer.... For thought goes before deed as lightning before thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French Revolution was but an innocent idyll."
If any poet's words can be called prophetic, these words of Heinrich Heine's fit the bill. Before Adolf Hitler had even been born, Heine shared a nightmare vision of what the Nazi terror would be like -- right down to Hitler's fascination with the old Norse and Germanic mythology.
We gaze with horror at the headlines as they report the latest school shooting or other horrific acts of violence. Yet, what kind of world would we live in had Jesus Christ had never been born? Why, there would have been hundreds of Hitlers and Stains and Idi Amins and Pol Pots! We would see them not as aberrations on the body politic, but as the norm.
If Jesus had never been born, would there ever have been such a thing as a modern high school, with its free education for all, and with committed teachers willing even to die for their students -- as we saw happen at both Columbine and Virginia Tech? No, that carpenter from Nazareth laid down his life long ago, and in so doing he made himself the foundation for our entire culture. As a result, even those who profess not to believe in him benefit from, and in their own way even strive after, the kinder, gentler ways he brought into the world. None of us, I'd venture to guess, would want to live in a world without Jesus!
We Christians can become so lazy in our faith, so lackadaisical, so quick to assume that faith will always be there -- the old home-remedy in the medicine-cabinet, whenever we need it. Many of us meander our way through life, thinking of God only rarely in the course of a typical day, if at all. When something good happens, we take credit; and, when the news is bad, we assign God the blame.
Sometimes it is the tragedies of life -- the rushing floodwaters that carry off the topsoil, revealing the foundation -- that reveal to us the nearly forgotten presence of the cornerstone. May all of us learn anew the value of this treasure that has been entrusted to us: Jesus Christ, who has been made "the sure foundation"!
Prayer For The Day
Lord God,
we pray for our young people.
We pray for those in their schools who teach them.
We pray for the society that surrounds those schools,
that surrounds us all.
May we be a people founded on your love,
on your justice.
Give us Christ, the sure foundation. Amen.
To Illustrate
"Do you believe in God?" the gunman asked. The scene was Columbine High School. Littleton, Colorado. Tuesday, April 20, 1999. Adolf Hitler's birthday.
Seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall was sitting in the school library, a copy of Shakespeare open on the table in front of her. She looked up into the eyes of her schoolmate. He held a gun in his hand. It was leveled at her.
"There is a God," Cassie answered quietly, "and you need to follow along God's path."
The shooter looked down at her with contempt. "There is no God," he said coldly, and shot her in the head.
Cassie Bernall died that day, along with thirteen schoolmates and one teacher. Two of those schoolmates, of course, were the mentally disturbed gunmen themselves: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Scores more students and faculty were injured.
Although some details of her story have since been disputed, the news media described Cassie Bernall, a few days later, as a Christian martyr: Someone who died for her faith. The word "martyr" literally means "witness." It's commonly used to describe those first-century believers, thrown to wild beasts in the Roman coliseum, or those whom the Emperor Nero coated with pitch and set afire. A seventeen-year-old American schoolgirl, at the turn of the second millennium, doesn't expect to be martyred for her faith in the school library.
But that -- if the account of what happened in the school library is correct -- is what happened to Cassie. The gunman asked her if God exists. She said yes. He disagreed, and he killed her.
Faith hadn't always been such a sure thing for Cassie. Her parents told an ABC News reporter that her junior-high years had been troubled. Cassie hung with a bad crowd. She flirted with Satanism. She abused drugs and alcohol.
Her parents forbade her to see her bad-news friends. They randomly searched her backpack and her bedroom for drugs. The family turned, anew, to church. And then, one day, Cassie came back from a youth retreat. She announced, "Mom, I've changed. I've totally changed. I know you're not going to believe it, but I'll prove it to you."
"When she came back," said her father, Brad Bernall, "her eyes were open and bright. And she was bouncy and just excited about what had happened to her and was just so excited to tell us. And it's like she was in a dark room and somebody turned the light on, and she saw the beauty that was surrounding her."
"Worry about your kids, when you don't know where they're at," Brad Bernall advises. "You don't know where they're at. But we know where Cassie is."
***
God's story is true. We know that God's story is true because God gave us his Word -- that Word who came to us, as one of us, and died for us, and descended into hell for us, and rose again from the dead for us, and ascended into heaven for us. The Word became the living truth for us, the only truth that can make us free....
When was the last time anybody asked you, "Do I have your word?" Or when was the last time anybody said to you, "I give you my word," and you knew that you could trust that word, absolutely? How many times in the last few decades have we watched and listened to a political figure on television and heard him say, "I give you my word..." and shortly thereafter that word has proven false. In the past year alone, how many people have perjured themselves publicly? Sworn on a Bible, given their word, and that word has been a lie. Words of honor are broken casually today, as though they don't matter.
Small wonder that when God tells us, "I give you my Word," few people take him seriously. "I give you my Word," said God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."
-- Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (Shaw Books, 2002)
***
Christian psychologist Paul Tournier has this to say about the violent impulses within all of us:
"When we denounce and condemn violence, when we complain about the wave of violence that is breaking upon us today, we always mean other people's violence. The violence of which we read indignant accounts in the papers is that of the enemies of society, the gangsters, the criminals, the gunmen, the militants -- never our own. What I discover in the course of meditation and in reading my Bible is my own violence, which I had been calling legitimate indignation. Yes, indeed, what the Bible reveals is that it is not a case of the righteous on one side and the sinners on the other, peacemakers on one side and men of violence on the other, with a clear line of demarcation between them, but that violence is in the heart of all men."
-- Paul Tournier, The Violence Within (Harper & Row, 1982), p. 31
"Christ broke into the vicious circle of violence by taking upon himself the violence of men, and then refusing -- though he knew how to be violent! -- to pay back violence for violence. He is literally a savior, as we still call him without really understanding the significance of the word: a sacred savior from human violence, breaking its fatal determinism" (Tournier, p. 76).
***
The executioner's nature is found in embryo in almost every contemporary man.
-- Dostoyevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford, 2001)
***
I do not like to stop and, in the silence, look within, but when I do I hear a pounding on the floor of my soul. When I open the trap door into the deep darkness I see the monsters emerge for me to deal with. There emerges the sheer mindless destructive brutality of the Frankenstein monster, and next the deft and skilled Aztec priest sacrificing his victim. Then I see the image of the slave trader with his whips and chains and then Torquemada fresh from having burned his witch and then the accuser crying at me with a condemning voice. How painful it is to bear all this, but it is there to bear in all of us. Freud called it the death wish, Jung the demonic darkness. If I do not deal with it, it deals with me. The cross reminds me of all this.
-- Morton T. Kelsey, "The Cross and the Cellar," The Cross: Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ (New York: Paulist, 1980)
***
More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa.
Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN. You have heard of the Washington area sniper shootings and the massacre at Virginia Tech. I am sure you have not heard about the "Lex Street massacre," in which ten people ages 15 to 56 were lined up and shot, execution-style, in the winter of 2000. Seven were killed, three critically injured.
You haven't heard about this tragedy because it happened to inner-city poor people in a crack house in Philadelphia. Imagine, for a moment, if this had occurred in a suburban shopping mall or if a Marine unit in Iraq had been involved. There would be shock, outrage, 24-hour news coverage, Senate hearings and a new color of ribbon to wear. That double standard, that triage of compassion and empathy, is why the war on the streets continues unabated.
-- John P. Pryor, "The War in West Philadelphia," The Washington Post, August 5, 2007; B07. Dr. Pryor directs the trauma program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He served at a combat hospital in Abu Ghraib from February to June 2006.
Jesus Christ is the cornerstone.
First Lesson
Acts 7:55-60
The Stoning Of Stephen
Acts 6:8--8:1a is the extended story of the apostle, Stephen, one of the early church's most eloquent preachers. He is the embodiment of Luke 12:11-12: "When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour..." Luke tells the story of Stephen's arrest in 6:11-15, and it closely parallels the arrest of Jesus. Stephen, too, is the victim of false charges of blasphemy (6:11). He, too, is seized suddenly and hauled before the council (6:12). He, too, is charged with predicting that the temple will soon be destroyed (6:14). Like Jesus, Stephen is innocent. Even the members of the council can see that "his face was like the face of an angel" (6:15). Stephen's lengthy sermon (7:1-54) can be seen as a summation of the early Christian message. He ends it provocatively, calling his listeners betrayers, murderers, and lawbreakers (verses 52-53). Because of Stephen's incendiary remarks, it is no surprise that the religious authorities "become enraged" and "grind their teeth" at him (v. 55; see Psalm 35:16; 37:12; 112:10; and Lamentations 2:16 for other references to the wicked grinding or gnashing their teeth against the righteous). Filled with the Holy Spirit, Stephen suddenly sees a heavenly vision of "the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God," and reports this to the court (v. 55). This enrages the crowd even more, who drag him outside the city and begin stoning him to death. A certain young man named Saul holds the cloaks of the mob, while they perform this grisly deed (verses 57-58). Stephen's death is Christlike: He prays for Jesus to "receive his spirit," then pleads for forgiveness for his murderers (verses 59-60). The reading ought to be extended to include the chilling line: "And Saul approved of their killing him" (8:1a) -- for this sets the stage for the story of Saul/Paul, which will soon begin. Paul's subsequent ministry can be seen as an atonement for Stephen's death, and a continuation of his apostolic witness. Stephen's apostleship went off like a brilliant skyrocket, brief and beautiful -- although, if his faithful witness indeed inspired Paul's conversion, then he goes down in history as one of the most important early Christian leaders.
New Testament Lesson
1 Peter 2:2-10
Christ, The Cornerstone
Having selected 1 Peter 2:19-25 for last week's lesson, the lectionary editors now move backward, to include the first part of chapter 2. To provide proper context, the reading should begin with verse 1; there is no good reason for omitting it. Verses 1-3 are an exhortation to purity. They include the image of mother's milk as a symbol of God's word: believers are as nursing infants, wholly dependent on this spiritual nourishment. Verse 3 -- "if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good" -- refers to Psalm 34:8. In verses 4-8, the author introduces the image of Christ, "the living stone," referring to Psalm 118:22 and Isaiah 28:16. Christian believers, themselves, are also living stones, who are being "built into a spiritual house" (v. 5). Christ, "the stone that the builders rejected," has become the cornerstone, and we are built on him (verses 6-8). There is a strong, communal emphasis here: The destiny of the living stones is to be built together into a spiritual house, not to stand alone in austere, isolated virtue. Verse 9 -- "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people" -- has at times been misused. Adolf Hitler, in fact, quotes it in Mein Kampf, as justification for his racist ideas. In extending it beyond the Jewish people, however, the author is clearly attempting to be as broadly inclusive as possible. It is our relationship to Jesus Christ that makes us "a chosen race," not any genetic characteristic. Verse 10 -- "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people" -- is a reference to Hosea 1:9.
The Gospel
John 14:1-14
Jesus: The Way, The Truth, And The Life
After washing the disciples' feet and dismissing Judas to go and "do quickly what you are going to do" (13:27), Jesus reveals that he will soon depart from the disciples: "Where I am going, you cannot come" (13:33). Peter vows to follow Jesus anywhere, but Jesus predicts that he will soon deny him (13:36-38). Jesus' words from today's passage are an answer to his followers' understandable worries. "Do not let your hearts be troubled," he says to them; have faith (14:1). Jesus may be going away from them, but he is going to "My Father's house," that has "many dwelling places" -- or "rooms," in the more familiar King James Version (v. 2). Although Jesus has just told them they cannot follow -- at least not yet (13:36) -- Thomas wonders aloud how they can discover the way. Jesus' response is the famous "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (14:6). "Then, show us the Father," says Philip, still not getting it (v. 8). Jesus replies, in effect, "You have already seen the Father -- in me!" (verses 9-11). Jesus promises to remain connected to them, even after he leaves them in the flesh: "If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it" (verses 13-14). The line, "No one comes to the Father except through me" (v. 6b) has been much-discussed in recent years, especially in the context of interfaith dialogue. With so many wars and acts of terrorism being justified -- at least, ostensibly -- on religious grounds, many Christians are beginning to question whether the old, unthinking exclusivism may be unfaithful to Jesus' example. Our ability to enter into fruitful, interfaith dialogue may depend wholly upon our ability to see the "way" as being broader than we had previously supposed. Jesus' earlier, cryptic saying about "other sheep that do not belong to this fold" may provide the basis for such a re-thinking (10:16). We may need to entertain the possibility that people "of good faith," other than our own, may be coming to God "through Jesus" -- even though they may not be aware they are doing so.
Preaching Possibilities
Fifty years ago, the phrase, "school shooting" would have seemed incomprehensible to anyone who heard it. Sadly, in these days following Columbine, Virginia Tech, and a number of other tragic incidents, the expression is all too familiar.
Lots of people are fond of saying that religion is a purely private matter. It's personal, they'll insist. It's nobody's business but your own -- although the events at schools that have been the targets of assaults by their own students give a very different impression.
The fact is, it's crucially important that young people have faith. It's important to them, of course, on a personal level; but -- and this is the point that's all too easy to forget -- it's also important to society at large.
The author of 1 Peter invites his readers to "come to [Christ], a living stone... and let yourselves be built into a spiritual house." He goes on to quote Psalm 118: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone...."
What if the gunmen of Columbine and Virginia Tech had built their lives on that solid foundation? Jesus once told a parable about that: "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell -- and great was its fall!" (Matthew 7:24-27).
Great was the fall of these young men, who showed up at their school with guns in their hands and their pockets bulging with ammunition. If someone had only managed to convince them that Jesus died for their sins, and rose so they might have new life!
There have been some provocative studies on the importance of churchgoing: not only to the individual, but to society. In 1992, the Search Institute of Minneapolis conducted a national survey. It established that "youth involved in a church, synagogue, or other community of faith are half as likely as uninvolved youth to display many 'at-risk' behaviors" -- with "at risk" defined as things like drinking and drugs, casual sex, and suicide attempts.
A few years later, in another article, the Search Institute posed a question: Why is it that, with such convincing evidence that churchgoing is good for kids, good for their families, and good for society, schools don't partner with churches more often to help meet the needs of youth? Listen to these actual words from that report:
"Everyone, it seems, is talking about what our nation needs to do for its youth. At the national level, youth and children are "in" again, with people in all branches of government and both political parties claiming the issues as their own. Community coalitions form almost daily to address some issue or need or concern about young people. But in all of the discussion about solutions to our crisis, one institution is left out of the discussion: the religious community. And there is an important irony here, for, we believe, congregations have more potential than schools or community youth-serving agencies to address the crisis."
Those words come not from a church-related organization, but -- surprisingly -- from a secular, educational think-tank. They bring home this image from First Peter: of Jesus as cornerstone.
We all know that in a building the cornerstone is that crucial part of the foundation on which the whole structure rests. Jesus has that kind of role in society. Because of Jesus, the forces of chaos are held at bay -- and everyone benefits, both those who believe in him and those who do not.
Remember the film, It's a Wonderful Life, about George Bailey, the small-town banker played by Jimmy Stewart? Bailey's on the verge of suicide, when a clumsy angel named Clarence allows him the privilege of seeing what his town would have been like if he had never have been born. In that shadowy dreamscape, the little town of Bedford Falls is a darker and gloomier place. In the vision, it's not even called Bedford Falls; it's Pottersville, named for a grasping miser. Without George Bailey to keep him in line, he's taken over the town.
Let's try a little thought-experiment. What would the world be like if Jesus Christ had never been born? The German poet of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine, thought he knew. Heine was born a Jew but developed a high appreciation for Christianity. In these powerful words, he pictures the cross of Jesus Christ as a magic talisman that keeps the dark forces of chaos at bay:
"Should ever that taming talisman break -- the Cross -- then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors, with all their insane, Berserker rage, of whom our Nordic poets speak and sing. That talisman is now already crumbling and the day is not far off when it shall break apart entirely. On that day, the old stone gods will rise from their long-forgotten wreckage and rub from their eyes the dust of a thousand years' sleep.
At long last leaping to life, Thor with his giant hammer will crush the Gothic cathedrals. And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer.... For thought goes before deed as lightning before thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French Revolution was but an innocent idyll."
If any poet's words can be called prophetic, these words of Heinrich Heine's fit the bill. Before Adolf Hitler had even been born, Heine shared a nightmare vision of what the Nazi terror would be like -- right down to Hitler's fascination with the old Norse and Germanic mythology.
We gaze with horror at the headlines as they report the latest school shooting or other horrific acts of violence. Yet, what kind of world would we live in had Jesus Christ had never been born? Why, there would have been hundreds of Hitlers and Stains and Idi Amins and Pol Pots! We would see them not as aberrations on the body politic, but as the norm.
If Jesus had never been born, would there ever have been such a thing as a modern high school, with its free education for all, and with committed teachers willing even to die for their students -- as we saw happen at both Columbine and Virginia Tech? No, that carpenter from Nazareth laid down his life long ago, and in so doing he made himself the foundation for our entire culture. As a result, even those who profess not to believe in him benefit from, and in their own way even strive after, the kinder, gentler ways he brought into the world. None of us, I'd venture to guess, would want to live in a world without Jesus!
We Christians can become so lazy in our faith, so lackadaisical, so quick to assume that faith will always be there -- the old home-remedy in the medicine-cabinet, whenever we need it. Many of us meander our way through life, thinking of God only rarely in the course of a typical day, if at all. When something good happens, we take credit; and, when the news is bad, we assign God the blame.
Sometimes it is the tragedies of life -- the rushing floodwaters that carry off the topsoil, revealing the foundation -- that reveal to us the nearly forgotten presence of the cornerstone. May all of us learn anew the value of this treasure that has been entrusted to us: Jesus Christ, who has been made "the sure foundation"!
Prayer For The Day
Lord God,
we pray for our young people.
We pray for those in their schools who teach them.
We pray for the society that surrounds those schools,
that surrounds us all.
May we be a people founded on your love,
on your justice.
Give us Christ, the sure foundation. Amen.
To Illustrate
"Do you believe in God?" the gunman asked. The scene was Columbine High School. Littleton, Colorado. Tuesday, April 20, 1999. Adolf Hitler's birthday.
Seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall was sitting in the school library, a copy of Shakespeare open on the table in front of her. She looked up into the eyes of her schoolmate. He held a gun in his hand. It was leveled at her.
"There is a God," Cassie answered quietly, "and you need to follow along God's path."
The shooter looked down at her with contempt. "There is no God," he said coldly, and shot her in the head.
Cassie Bernall died that day, along with thirteen schoolmates and one teacher. Two of those schoolmates, of course, were the mentally disturbed gunmen themselves: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Scores more students and faculty were injured.
Although some details of her story have since been disputed, the news media described Cassie Bernall, a few days later, as a Christian martyr: Someone who died for her faith. The word "martyr" literally means "witness." It's commonly used to describe those first-century believers, thrown to wild beasts in the Roman coliseum, or those whom the Emperor Nero coated with pitch and set afire. A seventeen-year-old American schoolgirl, at the turn of the second millennium, doesn't expect to be martyred for her faith in the school library.
But that -- if the account of what happened in the school library is correct -- is what happened to Cassie. The gunman asked her if God exists. She said yes. He disagreed, and he killed her.
Faith hadn't always been such a sure thing for Cassie. Her parents told an ABC News reporter that her junior-high years had been troubled. Cassie hung with a bad crowd. She flirted with Satanism. She abused drugs and alcohol.
Her parents forbade her to see her bad-news friends. They randomly searched her backpack and her bedroom for drugs. The family turned, anew, to church. And then, one day, Cassie came back from a youth retreat. She announced, "Mom, I've changed. I've totally changed. I know you're not going to believe it, but I'll prove it to you."
"When she came back," said her father, Brad Bernall, "her eyes were open and bright. And she was bouncy and just excited about what had happened to her and was just so excited to tell us. And it's like she was in a dark room and somebody turned the light on, and she saw the beauty that was surrounding her."
"Worry about your kids, when you don't know where they're at," Brad Bernall advises. "You don't know where they're at. But we know where Cassie is."
***
God's story is true. We know that God's story is true because God gave us his Word -- that Word who came to us, as one of us, and died for us, and descended into hell for us, and rose again from the dead for us, and ascended into heaven for us. The Word became the living truth for us, the only truth that can make us free....
When was the last time anybody asked you, "Do I have your word?" Or when was the last time anybody said to you, "I give you my word," and you knew that you could trust that word, absolutely? How many times in the last few decades have we watched and listened to a political figure on television and heard him say, "I give you my word..." and shortly thereafter that word has proven false. In the past year alone, how many people have perjured themselves publicly? Sworn on a Bible, given their word, and that word has been a lie. Words of honor are broken casually today, as though they don't matter.
Small wonder that when God tells us, "I give you my Word," few people take him seriously. "I give you my Word," said God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."
-- Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (Shaw Books, 2002)
***
Christian psychologist Paul Tournier has this to say about the violent impulses within all of us:
"When we denounce and condemn violence, when we complain about the wave of violence that is breaking upon us today, we always mean other people's violence. The violence of which we read indignant accounts in the papers is that of the enemies of society, the gangsters, the criminals, the gunmen, the militants -- never our own. What I discover in the course of meditation and in reading my Bible is my own violence, which I had been calling legitimate indignation. Yes, indeed, what the Bible reveals is that it is not a case of the righteous on one side and the sinners on the other, peacemakers on one side and men of violence on the other, with a clear line of demarcation between them, but that violence is in the heart of all men."
-- Paul Tournier, The Violence Within (Harper & Row, 1982), p. 31
"Christ broke into the vicious circle of violence by taking upon himself the violence of men, and then refusing -- though he knew how to be violent! -- to pay back violence for violence. He is literally a savior, as we still call him without really understanding the significance of the word: a sacred savior from human violence, breaking its fatal determinism" (Tournier, p. 76).
***
The executioner's nature is found in embryo in almost every contemporary man.
-- Dostoyevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford, 2001)
***
I do not like to stop and, in the silence, look within, but when I do I hear a pounding on the floor of my soul. When I open the trap door into the deep darkness I see the monsters emerge for me to deal with. There emerges the sheer mindless destructive brutality of the Frankenstein monster, and next the deft and skilled Aztec priest sacrificing his victim. Then I see the image of the slave trader with his whips and chains and then Torquemada fresh from having burned his witch and then the accuser crying at me with a condemning voice. How painful it is to bear all this, but it is there to bear in all of us. Freud called it the death wish, Jung the demonic darkness. If I do not deal with it, it deals with me. The cross reminds me of all this.
-- Morton T. Kelsey, "The Cross and the Cellar," The Cross: Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ (New York: Paulist, 1980)
***
More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa.
Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN. You have heard of the Washington area sniper shootings and the massacre at Virginia Tech. I am sure you have not heard about the "Lex Street massacre," in which ten people ages 15 to 56 were lined up and shot, execution-style, in the winter of 2000. Seven were killed, three critically injured.
You haven't heard about this tragedy because it happened to inner-city poor people in a crack house in Philadelphia. Imagine, for a moment, if this had occurred in a suburban shopping mall or if a Marine unit in Iraq had been involved. There would be shock, outrage, 24-hour news coverage, Senate hearings and a new color of ribbon to wear. That double standard, that triage of compassion and empathy, is why the war on the streets continues unabated.
-- John P. Pryor, "The War in West Philadelphia," The Washington Post, August 5, 2007; B07. Dr. Pryor directs the trauma program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He served at a combat hospital in Abu Ghraib from February to June 2006.
