Our Peace
Proper 11B
19 July 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony
Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.,
at Trinity Episcopal Parish
Ashland, Oregon
God,
take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Twenty years
ago this last week, one of the great horrors of modern European history took
place. On July 11-13, 1995, in and near
the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia, soldiers and irregulars of
the Bosnian Serb army rounded up and then murdered en masse over 8,000 Bosnian
Muslim men and boys, dumping their bodies into bull-dozed grave pits. This act of genocide was part of a campaign of
“ethnic cleansing” trying to create a “pure” Serbian enclave.
Mourner at one of the Mass Reburials of the Victims
The horrors
of Srebrenica reveal the costs of identity politics: working to create
governmental and social power by appealing to people’s sense of belonging to
one group or another. Before the war,
Bosnia/Herzegovina was a historically multi-ethnic region with
about half its population Muslim Bosniaks, a slightly smaller number of Orthodox
Serbs and about half that number of Catholic Croats. Many
people lived in perfectly happy mixed neighborhoods, and many of them in mixed
families. When the region attempted to
declare its independence from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, Serbs there started
the war to create their own separate enclave in the region.
When the war
ended three years later after NATO intervention, the entire population had been
traumatized and brutalized. 100,000
people were dead. 50,000 women, the vast
majority of them Bosniak, had been raped.
2.2 million people had been driven from their homes, most of which were
destroyed.
Bosnia is not alone in showing how
dangerous identity politics are. Think
of Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and the partition of India and subsequent
Indian-Pakistani wars, the crusades, Nazi anti-Semitism, the thirty years’ war
of 17th century Europe, the civil wars in post-colonial Africa, the
American Civil War, and the burden of Apartheid in South Africa and racism in the
United States. It does not matter
whether the identity appealed to is religion, race, nationality, region, linguistic
group, or any other group marker:
politics based on group identity is a deal with the devil.
I took a course in mediation, peace
building, and reconciliation from one of the chief U.S. negotiators behind the
Dayton Accords, which created the framework that ended the Bosnian War. I remember well: Ambassador John Menzies told me the single
hardest difficulty he had to work to help people overcome was the fear and distrust
generated when religious and ethnic identity were brought into the political
mix. The desire for revenge for
atrocities only complicated these. “Group hatred is a genie that, once out of
the bottle, is hard to put back in.”
Identity politics is powerful and
demonic stuff. But that is because group
identity is deeply ingrained in us as one of the great sources of joy, comfort
and solace: our families, our people, our tribe. In identifying with our group, we find
ourselves and feel we have a place in this world. Because it runs so deep, it is prone to
powerful abuse.
Today’s reading from Ephesians is all
about group identity:
“Remember that at one
time you Gentiles by birth, … [were] aliens … and strangers to the covenants of
promise…. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought
near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace… he has broken down the
dividing wall, … he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and … to
those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to
the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are
citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God….”
Our peace; no longer strangers and
foreigners; he has broken down the dividing wall. This is how a follower of St. Paul, writing
in his name, characterizes the effect of Christ’s victory over death on the
cross on his world. The idea is that by
suffering and overcoming the worst that the wickedness of the world could throw
at him, Christ preached peace to those who were far off and those who were
near, and broke down one of the great divisions of his world: Jews and Gentiles.
Paul himself had expressed the idea a
little more expansively in these words: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”
(Gal 3:28).
The idea is profound—in Christ, all
divisions and distinctions are healed, all distinctions blurred, polarities
centered, dualities united.
Think of the following divisions we
make in our world:
Rich and poor.
Black and white.
Strong and weak.
Saints and sinners.
East and West. (In the world, but also in the nation.)
North and South. (ditto)
Male and female.
Catholic and Protestant.
Young and old.
Supervisor and subordinate.
Able-bodied and disabled.
Straight and Gay.
Republican and Democrat.
Native and foreigner.
Religious and secular.
Healthy and sick.
“Christ
is our peace; in him, we are one.”
Ephesians is not saying that these
groups cease to exist after the Cross and resurrection. But it is saying that they no longer matter,
that in light of the cross, they are secondary and unimportant.
There is a deep logic to the
argument. Philosopher René Girard defines community
as “unanimity minus one,” that is, a group united in accusing and expelling at
least one of its own. Community defines
itself in part by pointing to those who are not part of the community. It regulates itself by scapegoating. Community is not just joined hands and linked
arms of embrace. It in its structure is
also the pointing finger of accusation, of exclusion.
Anthropologists have noted that most of the world’s
primitive cultures have myths that express this dynamic. Generally a dissident, abnormal, or impure
member of the community is singled out, driven out, and often killed in the
myth. Thereby the community is made
whole. Impurity and wrong are thus
purged.
Girard notes that Christians have their own version of this
myth, based on the death of our Lord:
the crowd points their fingers at Jesus and calls for his death, he is
brutalized, taken outside the city walls, and killed.
But the difference is this:
in the Christian telling, Jesus is innocent. It is he who is right, and the community that
is wrong. This story condemns the dark side of community, the accusation, the
driving outside the city wall, the scapegoating itself, not the accused deviant
put to death outside of the city walls. Easter
morning tells us that everything has been turned on its head here.
Thus Ephesians says that Christ on the cross preaches peace
to those who are far off and those who are near. The resurrection condemns accusation
itself. The cross, that cruel tool the
Roman Empire used to enforce community, that instrument of public terror as an
act of policy, is itself undone by the resurrection of our Lord.
And it is not just the accusation of group hatred that is
undone by the cross. Our own accusation
of ourself, our own sense of guilt is undone by Jesus’s unjust death at the
accusers’ hands and his being raised from it.
As Paul says elsewhere, Jesus
“erased the record against us from any legal demands. He set
this aside, nailing it to the cross”
(Col. 2:24)
Thus Christ, once driven outside the wall, becomes our
peace, and breaks down all dividing walls.
He brings those far off, those driven outside the walls themselves,
back, and brings them near.
That’s what all the shepherd imagery in today’s other
readings is about: where the kings of
Israel, called the shepherds of the people, here the bad shepherds, failed
them, in large part by striving too hard to maintain their advantage over other
nations, by playing identity politics, Jesus sustains them and brings them all
together—regardless of their background—into a single fold. He tends them not because they are his sheep
and others are not, but, because like in today’s Gospel, he sees that they need
a shepherd. And so he feeds them and
serves them, regardless of their origins.
It is not just the alienation between groups that Jesus breaks
down. He also destroys the alienation within
each of us because of the accusation built into our individual lives. Anthropologists and critical theorists who
work in the area of liminality, the puzzling places where we are at the margins
or caught between group identities, value systems, or ritual status, note that
being on the margins causes great stress and doubt, often experienced as
self-alienation.
What alienates us from ourselves? What makes us accuse ourselves?
It usually is difference, the
difference between:
What we desire versus what we actually have.
What we ought to do versus what we actually
do.
What our community expects of us versus
who we are in reality.
How we’d like to be versus how we actually
are.
Even in this, “Christ is our peace; in
him we are one.” The cross and
resurrection tell us that we ought not accuse ourselves. They tell us that we are one, that we are
beloved.
Gillian Welch’s Appalachian-style hymn
“Orphan Girl” expresses alienation and Jesus’ role in driving it away well, and
speaks to my heart:
I am an orphan on
God's highway
But I'll share my troubles if you go my way
I have no mother, no father
No sister, no brother
I am an orphan girl. …
But when He calls me I will be able
To meet my family at God's table
I'll meet my mother, my father
My sister, my brother
No more an orphan girl
Blessed Savior make me willing
Walk beside me until I'm with them
Be my mother, my father
My sister, my brother
I am an orphan girl
I am an orphan girl
Loved ones, alienation is real, whether between
groups or within our hearts. We are all
orphan girls. We are all strangers and
foreigners. We try to make ourselves
feel better about it by clinging to our group, our family, our tribe, defined
in part by making strangers and foreigners of others. We accuse scapegoats or blame enemies; we also
accuse ourselves as forlorn, desolate losers.
But Jesus took this all with him outside the wall, and it died with him. In the light of Easter morning, we can see
that it is all a sham.
In Christ, we are one.
In Christ, we are no longer orphans.
We are no longer strangers and foreigners. He has broken down the dividing walls, and has
nailed the accuser’s power itself to the cross. He is our peace.
Thanks be to God.
