Easter 3: What We Will Be

Most of you know, because of my major gloat during the NCAA, tournament two years ago (Wahoowa!), that I spent four happy years as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia.  One of the few things I disliked about my time there was how segregated the college was.  After first year, most of us lived, studied, and hung out with people whose skin color was similar to our own. Our social life, in particular, revolved around the fraternities and sororities that were, with rare exception, separated by lines of color. And, it seemed to me then, students of color were so often in the news, complaining about injustices that I thought were exaggerated.  I didn’t get why it had to be that way.

Some of us–mostly well-meaning white students–decided to create a group called STARS–Students Together Against Racial Separatism–to come together to discuss the invisible line dividing the Grounds by color and to try to eradicate it.  I remember going to the first meeting full of excitement and hope, especially when I saw the diverse group who had gathered for the meeting.  The leaders outlined their vision.  And then a black student in the crowd stood up.  This was 35 years ago, but here’s the gist of what I remember her saying, mostly to the white students gathered there.

“Look. You don’t get it.  This isn’t about you.  We like to be together.  For some of us, this is the first time in our lives we’ve been able to support one another, to talk about things that have happened to us. There’s nothing wrong with that.  We know you want everyone to get together and be one big happy family, but it’s not that easy for us.”

I was blown away by this.  From my comfortable worldview, everyone getting together, seeing each other on equal terms,  and just getting along was exactly what needed to happen!  But when that honest and patient young black woman and the others that followed her got up and told us their truth, it helped me begin (just begin!) to understand that my experience and my vision of the world was neither universal nor the ideal. 

It took many more blunders like that to make me understand that just believing that skin color didn’t matter and just making personal decisions that demonstrated I wasn’t racist didn’t make me or my experience the same as my black classmates and friends. Black students who crossed those same lines often found themselves in unsafe, unfriendly, and sometimes dangerous territory.   I wasn’t wrong that we are all equally God’s beloved children, but bringing that kingdom to earth was going to take something more from me. And the first step for me was to take my blinders off and see.  

This is, I think, something like what Peter is trying to do in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  When I hear “You Israelites,”  followed by a lecture on all the terrible stuff they did, killing the AUTHOR OF LIFE, my first impulse is to cringe and dismiss the whole passage as an anti-Jewish rant.  Except that Peter is Jewish, and he’s speaking to his own people, trying to make them see how their comforting belief in a Messiah who was going to rescue them from the Romans, restore the throne of David, and bring a happy ending to all their troubles was not just off; it actually hurt–killed–an innocent man, a holy man, who had done nothing but tell them the truth about themselves and about what really needed to happen for the kingdom of God to appear.  

In his book My Grandmother’s Hands, retold on On Being, trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem describes a day when he was a child, sitting on the couch with his grandmother watching the Milwaukee Bucks, who his grandmother loved.  She was sitting as always on the couch with her legs draped across the children’s legs and her arthritic hands on her thighs, and the kids would rub them, as they all sat together and watched the game. 

One day Resmaa looked at his grandmother’s hands while he was rubbing them and blurted out, the way kids do, “Grandma, why your hands so fat?” And without missing a beat — not even taking her eyes off the game she said, “Oh, boy, that’s from picking cotton.”

He just sat there for a minute and then said, “From picking cotton?” 

Something in his tone, he explains, must have caught her attention because she looked at him and said, “’Boy, you ever seen a cotton plant?…. Them damn cotton plants got a burr in ‘em…. I started walking up and down them rows when I was four years old….As you walking up and down the rows, you put your hands in, them cotton plants rip your hands up. And so when they rip your hands up, your hands bleed.’” 

Then she turned back and started watching the game again. But something in her voice caught Resmaa, and even as a little boy, he knew he had to pay attention to it.  Looking back on that day now as an adult, here’s what he has to say:  “Einstein said energy cannot be created nor destroyed. But it can be thwarted. It can be manipulated. It can be moved around. When we’re talking about trauma, when we’re talking about historical trauma, intergenerational trauma, persistent institutional trauma — and personal traumas — those things, when they are left constricted, you begin to be shaped around the constriction….So when my grandmother is saying that, I need to pay attention.” That day, his grandmother’s story, carried in the hands he rubbed, came alive to him and changed the way he saw her, himself, and the world.

It may be that Peter’s Israelites have trouble seeing Jesus for who he is because the trauma that they have experienced–the trauma passed down through their yearly Passover remembrance of their delivery from slavery and reimposed on them by the Roman occupation–makes it extraordinarily difficult for them to accept that the Messiah they had hoped for is this man who allied himself with the weak, the sinners, and the aliens, this man who gave up without a fight to a brutal death on the cross.  The story of the Messiah who suffers–although it’s as deeply embedded in Scripture as the victories of King David–is not the story they had been telling themselves all their lives.  It’s not the story they wanted.

This may be the same trouble faced by the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in today’s Gospel.  When Jesus first appears, “their eyes were prevented from seeing him”;  instead of Jesus doing the preventing there, it makes much more sense that the trauma that keeps them clinging to their hope in one who would redeem the human kingdom of Israel is what keeps them from recognizing Jesus.  Jesus keeps pressing the disciples to see and touch the wounds on his hands and feet because he wants them to stop grasping for a God who will reward His people with earthly power and riches and instead accept the one who redeems the suffering of this world by entering into it.  Like Resmaa, touching those scarred hands may be what is needed to make the disciples feel the reality of Jesus’s woundedness, the woundedness of their community, the woundedness within themselves, the woundedness of the world.  

And so it is with me and maybe with you, still reluctant to let go of the comfortable narratives we create to solve the same problems we faced decades ago.  Our own woundedness and fear can still, as Peter puts it, cause us to act in ignorance and keep us from seeing other’s struggles and other’s truths. But here’s what I know: when we do start, like the disciples, to let that fear go, there is the love and the glory, the presence of Christ, right there, breaking bread and eating with us, forgiving, opening our minds, blessing us with the peace that comes from seeing what is true–which is not always what we have wished to be true.    When God’s children finally come close and touch one another’s pierced and swollen hands, feeling the pain of all God’s beloved, then, to riff off John’s Letter, finally, what we will be, will begin to be revealed.