The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
April 22, 2007

3 Easter - C
Acts 9:1-19a
Revelation 5:6-14
John 21:1-17

Except perhaps for Mary, no saints of the Church are honored more than Peter and Paul, whose experiences of the risen Christ were the subject of today’s readings. Peter and Paul are such great saints that the Church’s calendar contains not just one, but two feast days for both of them. Together with Mary, Peter and Paul now stand larger than life. But it was not always so.

Jesus had invited Peter to follow him, to be one of his disciples. And for three years or so, Peter did follow Jesus. He lived close to Jesus, listened to his teaching, witnessed his miracles, and experienced his power. In addition, Peter witnessed Jesus’ glory at his transfiguration, the glory that was the glory of God himself. One day when Jesus asked Peter who Peter thought Jesus was, Peter boldly confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the son of the living God, and when Jesus pointed out the cost of following him, Peter was the first to say that he, for one, would follow Jesus wherever he went.

But then came that fateful night when the authorities, the ones with the worldly power, arrested Jesus and took him to the high priest’s house. Peter followed Jesus there, too, but this time at a distance. And three times someone pointed Peter out to the authorities. ”Why, this man Peter, the one over there in the shadows, is one of Jesus’ followers! Even his accent gives him away.” But each time he was challenged that night, Peter declared, ”I have never seen this man Jesus before in my life.” After his third denial the cock crew, and Peter then remembered how Jesus had said that Peter would not follow him all the way, but would deny him. And Jesus turned and looked at Peter, and Peter looked at Jesus, and their eyes met. And Peter, seeing the great hurt in Jesus’ eyes, turned away and went shamefully into hiding.

That was the last time Peter saw Jesus before the soldiers took Jesus away and mercilessly executed him, crucified Peter’s friend, whom Peter and everyone else knew to be innocent, leaving no one but the thief on the cross next to him to speak up for him.

This is the Peter we honor every year on the Feast of the Confession of St. Peter and on the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

And Paul? Well, Paul, you remember, before he was Paul, he was Saul of Tarsus, and Saul was a stooge for the authorities. Saul, as we heard in the reading from The Acts of the Apostles today, was the leader of the terrorist hit squad that was sent out to capture and, if necessary, kill the followers of Jesus.

Saul had begun his training for this assignment by holding the coats of those who had shoved Stephen into a pit and then hurled boulders on top of him until he was crushed to death, and all this for the sole reason that Stephen was a follower of Jesus who had preached the Resurrection.

Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that Saul was right there at the stoning, congratulating the killers. And Stephen’s death set off a terrific persecution of the church in Jerusalem. The followers of Jesus were all scattered throughout Judea and Samaria, except for a few brave men who stayed to bury Stephen, giving him a solemn funeral. And Saul just went wild, adds Luke, ”devastating the church, entering house after house, dragging men and women alike off to jail.”

This Saul of Tarsus is the Saint Paul we now honor each year on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul and the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

How did we get from there to here? How did we get from the weak and frightened Peter who shamefully denied that he ever knew the one he loved, and from the vicious, self-righteous Saul who terrorized the followers of Jesus, how did we get from these two pitiful failures to follow Jesus to the strong and faithful Peter and Paul who later boldly proclaimed Jesus to the world, to the two saints who built Christ’s Church and gave their own lives on Jesus’ behalf, the Peter and Paul whom we honor?

We got to the Peter and Paul whom we honor because of something Jesus did. We got there because of two questions Jesus asked.

When, that morning by the seashore, the risen Christ appeared to Peter and the others who had denied and deserted him, he first said, “Friends, you’ve had a hard night of work.” “Friends” he called them! “Friends,” let me fix you breakfast.” And after breakfast Jesus asked Peter, ”Peter, do you love me?” He asked it three times. My! How Peter must have grieved for the three times he had denied ever knowing Jesus when Jesus asked him the third time, ”Do you love me?”

“You know everything, Lord,” said Peter. “You know I am weak. But you know I love you, too.” And each time Jesus responded with gracious words of forgiveness and absolution: “You can still do it, Peter. It’s not too late. I love you, too. Feed my sheep. Be with me now.”

Is that what you’d have said? Is that what I’d have said?

And when Saul was on his way to Damascus breathing threats of murder and terror, the risen Christ appeared to him and asked, ”Saul, why are persecuting me? What have I ever done to lead you to treat the ones I love this way?”

Perhaps it was Jesus’ tone of voice, perhaps it was the way the question itself was posed, not in anger but in the sadness of love, that led Saul to respond, ”Lord, I want to feed your sheep, too!”

Last Monday another wayward soul perpetrated unspeakable horror not only upon the students and faculty of Virginia Tech, but upon all of us. It cannot be excused or justified. It is not, however, an isolated incident. It has a history. The same or worse happens every other day now in Baghdad, and our experience of such events here at home seems to be increasing in frequency. Just off the top of my head while I was typing this paragraph, I thought of these atrocities from our own lifetimes: the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Oklahoma City, Columbine, the Amish school house, the taxi driver in Colorado Springs last Wednesday night, and the Friday hostage event in Houston, and I’m sure you’ve already added some that have slipped my mind.

Add to the acts of murder and mayhem committed by disturbed individuals the list of wars and civil wars of political origin. Consider just the period of our own history as a nation – the Mexican War, the American Civil War (which was the bloodiest war in the world in the nineteenth century), our long conflicts with Native American tribes, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, all the wars in the Balkans and Africa, the Holocaust, September 11, and now the war in Iraq – and we have to admit that we modern human beings have a record every bit as sordid as that of our ancestors when it comes to trying to settle our differences, either foreign or domestic, with violence.

Virginia Tech is only the most recent event in the long litany of human violence that has been our chosen path. The Crucifixion is but the pivotal act of violence in the history of mankind from ancient Babylon to contemporary Palestine. It cannot be excused. But how are we to respond? Where is our hope?

So this leads us to the Gospel’s question for today: Who, in 2007, if not us, the followers of Jesus in our day, who, is going to ask the questions of grace and extend the love of Christ to the Cho Seung-Huis among us, and to all the lost of the world?

Jesus saved Peter and Paul with the words he spoke and with the absolution his words carried. What would Peter and Saul have become if not for Jesus’ questions? If Jesus had responded to Peter’s betrayal and to Saul’s terror in kind, where would it have led? What if the risen Lord had said, ”Go to hell, Peter! I never want to see your face again!” And what if he had said, ”Saul, you madman! You know only how to terrorize people. You understand nothing but force, so this is holy war now, a jihad!” What then? What if Jesus had responded with dismissal and violence to Peter and Saul instead of with his words of love at the Sea of Galilee and on the Damascus Road?

Those responsible for unjustified violence must be held responsible. But how? That’s the question. How are we to hold them responsible? Are we to do it by our behaving like them? Are we to do it by our wanting to tear them apart if only we could get our hands on them, by our reacting with the fear they seek and hope to inspire, by our denying them, and therefore ourselves, the very liberties and protections of law that our nation has worked so hard to build, by our saying, in effect, that anyone who kills thirty-two people is not worthy of the Christ whose loving forgiveness turned Peter and Paul around made them new men?

Or, are we to respond to Columbine and Oklahoma City and September 11, and now Virginia Tech, by our seeking faithfully to be who we are and who we want to be? By our responding according to what is most worthy of us as Americans, as well as what most worthy of us as the redeemed of Christ? By our seeking to respond as the risen Christ responded to Peter and Saul?

The future for Peter and Saul depended upon the way Jesus greeted them after their treacheries, and by the tone of voice and heart with which Jesus asked his questions. Our own future also depends upon the way we greet each other now, and by the tone of voice and heart with which we respond to those around us.

Is the history of our own violence all that different from the horrors committed by Saul of Tarsus, who sought the genocide of a people who believed differently from him? Is the history of our own disloyalty to Christ all that different from the treachery of Peter, who sliced Jesus open at Gethsemane with a word every bit as sharp as the soldier’s sword at the Cross? “Go back to China,” Cho’s classmates used to tell him, not even knowing him well enough to know that he was Korean.

Did anyone, at home or at school or at church, ever say, “You’re very much a somebody, Cho Seung-Hui?” I don’t know. I hope so. Perhaps some tried, but weren’t heard. That, too, sometimes happens. But do we understand how somebody who wants to be a somebody, but who is treated as a nobody, might act antisocially, even violently, toward those who treat him as a nobody? Understanding, of course, does not excuse murder. But it can be a first step toward a solution, toward prevention and healing.

We mark some anniversaries this month. Thirty-two years ago this month Saigon fell, and we, the people of the United States, lost our first war, at the cost of 58,000 of the lives of our own sons and daughters and at the additional cost of thousands of the lives of the sons and daughters of Asia. Some among us believe that we deserved to lose that war, not only because we did not fight with the power necessary to win it, but also because we have never resolved the question of the moral limits of force and had no moral right to be there. Others among us think differently.

But the question is: How are we going to resolve it today? With charges of anger and fear and retribution, with terror of our own? Or with words of responsibility, words of love and compassion and hope? Words like: “Peter, I love you and need you. Saul, I need you and love you.”

Sixty-two years ago this month, Adolf Hitler committed suicide while thousands were being liberated from death camps where millions had died at the hands of people who professed to be followers of Jesus, death camps so atrocious and heinous that they make Virginia Tech look like a traffic accident. Let’s not forget that.

How tempting it is to seek a scapegoat! How tempting it is to try to lay the responsibility for evil at the feet of one evil man! But it cannot be done. No man, by himself, can unleash terror on half the world and murder millions of people. Let us not forget that World War II and the holocaust also lie at the feet of thousands of otherwise good and civilized men and women who, like Peter, fearfully failed to ask the authorities the important questions about the moral limits of their power, and who, like Saul, enthusiastically carried out their orders.

“If only it were all so simple!” cries Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” Solzhenitsyn reminds us. “And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (The Gulag Archipelago)

The questions for us today that literally jump out from the pages of Scripture we heard today are: Who, if not we, the followers of Jesus today, will extend the love and grace of the risen Christ from the shore of the Sea of Galilee and the Damascus Road to the lost of the world? Remembering Peter and Saul and the Lord who forgave them in love, and remembering the disloyalty to Christ that cuts through our own hearts, who, if not we, will ask the important questions of the moral limits of force in our day that Peter and Paul and generations before us failed to ask in theirs?

In the wonderful book Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, Bessie Delany, whose father was born in slavery, is asked about growing up as a black in segregated America and about the secret of her longevity. She replies: ”This Jim Crow business was pure foolishness. It’s not law anymore, but it’s still in some people’s hearts. I just laugh it off, child. I never let prejudice stop me from what I wanted to do in this life. You have to decide: Am I going to change the world, or am I going to change me? Or maybe change the world a little bit, just by changing me? ...It took me a hundred years to figure out I can’t change the world. I can only change Bessie. And, honey, that ain’t easy either.”

“Peter, do you love me?” asks Jesus. That’s the powerful question of history for the followers of Jesus. But it’s not just an historical question. It’s the Gospel question for us this morning:

“Do you love me? Then feed my sheep.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.