The Rev. Keri T. Aubert       1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

All Saints Episcopal Church, South Burlington, Vermont Psalm 20

June 14, 2009 2 Corinthians 5:6-17

Proper 6, Year B, RCL     Mark 4:26-34

Two years ago this week, I went with my family to our first and only visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The Holocaust Museum is a place like no other place I’ve ever been. I don’t think it can be adequately described; it must be experienced. We actually kind of dreaded going, because we suspected it would be hard, and we were right. When I think about that visit, the first thing that comes to me is the feeling in my body of how it felt to be there. I wouldn’t describe that feeling as sadness, though we certainly saw many sad things. I can only describe it as a king of weightiness, as if we were moving through and breathing something heavier than air. Walking through the doors is like stepping into another realm. From the moment we entered, we spoke to one another in reverent whispers. We left feeling emotionally drained but also, to our surprise, hopeful.

For Jews and non-Jews alike, the Holocaust Museum is a kind of pilgrimage site. I would describe it as a holy place. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why Wednesday’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum was so very disturbing. The perpetrator seems to have carefully selected the location for maximum effect. There were other places he could have gone to more effectively target Jews; the sole victim, security guard Stephen T. Johns, was not even Jewish. But in choosing the Holocaust Museum, the perpetrator chose a location with great symbolic significance, so his action implied additional threat. And in choosing a location frequented by non-Jews, his action became a threat not just to Jews but also to those who would support them.

A week earlier, the perpetrator in the death of Dr. George Tiller also seems to have carefully selected the location. He didn’t shoot Tiller at or near the abortion clinic that was the center of so much controversy. Maybe that’s because security was always tight at the clinic. Still, one can suppose that security around Tiller would have been lax at any of a number of locations. In the end, though, the perpetrator chose to act at the Lutheran church where Tiller was serving as an usher. It was a congregation that seems to have simply accepted Tiller as one of their own. According to one news story, “For years at Reformation Lutheran, where the doctor was slain in the foyer as Sunday services were starting, anti-abortion protesters held Sunday vigils. Men stretched their sport coats to cover their children’s eyes as they passed gruesome posters of dismembered fetuses on their way into Sunday school. And yet, according to one parishioner, the congregation never discussed Tiller’s membership, one way or the other.”[i] I don’t know if it was intended, but it’s easy to see in that location, too, both symbolic significance and implied threat, this time targeted to progressive people of faith.

Two shootings, very different, yet sharing some common elements. In the perpetrators’ use of symbol and threat, the purpose was not simply to injure individuals, but to cause fear. And in their underlying motivation, I think, lies an incredibly powerful intolerance, an intolerance that they would terrorize others into joining.

There is an interesting article in this week’s Time magazine about patterns in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam around tolerating other religions. The author searches scriptures—both the Bible and the Koran—and finds that all three faiths have shifted back and forth between belligerence and tolerance toward other faiths. Other faiths were tolerated when leaders operated under the perception that the situation was either win-win or lose-lose. That is, if leaders perceived that all would either win or lose together, they cooperated with leaders of other faiths. This could be expected to increase the likelihood that all would win. On the other hand, other faiths were not tolerated when leaders operated under the perception that some must lose in order for others to win. In this case, for leaders who feared being the loser, cooperation yielded to competition.

I suspect that this author’s findings are valid beyond the scriptural era and beyond communities of faith. It makes sense to me that, more generally, tolerance of others is fostered by a sense that everyone can win, and intolerance of others is fostered by a sense that someone has to lose. I think we hear this in the trash talk and shock media that is so prevalent right now. Thinking about this in terms of Christian community today, I think the most important thing to say is that, in the kingdom of God, everyone wins.

Not all Christians agree with this. I suspect that the idea that winners can exist only in combination with losers is related to the intolerance we see even in Christian communities. Further, I suspect that this in turn is connected to their members’ relentless focus on individual salvation. In this way of thinking, the community is important only to the extent that it affects the salvation of the individual.

In contrast, noted New Testament scholar and Church of England Bishop N. T. Wright offers this:

Knowing God for oneself, as opposed to merely knowing or thinking about him, is at the heart of Christian living. Discovering that God is gracious, rather than a distant bureaucrat or a dangerous tyrant, is the good news that constantly surprises and refreshes us. But we are not the center of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him. It may look, from our point of view, as though “me and my salvation” are the be-all and end-all of Christianity. … But a full reading of Scripture itself tells a different story.

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world. And the closing scenes of Scripture, in the book of Revelation, are not about human beings going off to heaven to be in a close and intimate relationship with God, but about heaven coming to earth. The intimate relationship with God which is indeed promised and celebrated in that great scene of the New Jerusalem issues at once in an outflowing, a further healing creativity, the river of the water of life flowing out from the city and the tree of life springing up, with leaves that are for the healing of the nations.[ii]

In today’s reading from Mark, Jesus describes the kingdom of God using two parables that involve planting seeds. These seeds, though quite tiny, are sown, grow, and reach fruition, all through the miracle of God’s grace. As Paul puts it, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” We may be walking by faith, but still we’re walking. In the creation of the kingdom, we have a role. I suspect that our role has less to do with our plans for individual salvation and more to do with God’s plans to save the world. N. T. Wright sums it up this way: “We are in orbit around God and his purposes, not the other way around.”[iii]

I’m not sure we take that responsibility as seriously as we might. In the 1930s, an entire society colluded in Nazi Germany to help create the conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. This month, two individuals committed the murders of Stephen Johns and George Tiller, but our society provided the environment that allowed them to fester and grow and act. We must always consider our participation in creating such an environment and our responsibility to make it different. We release ourselves of this responsibility only at great risk to us all.

After being closed for a day, the Holocaust Museum reopened on Friday. According to news stories, people had left bouquets in memory of Stephen Johns. “On top of one bouquet was a photo of … Johns … with the inscription, ‘Truly a righteous Gentile.’ The term “righteous gentile” has been used to describe non-Jewish people who took risks to save Jews from the Holocaust.”[iv] The Holocaust Museum is full of their stories. Today I’m wearing a lapel pin I purchased there. It has a red triangle on it; in Nazi concentration camps red triangles were used to indentify political prisoners and Christian clergy. I wear the pin as a reminder and as a prayer: a reminder that Christian clergy before me took actions that cost them their lives; a prayer that if I am ever faced with the decision to take such actions, I will have the courage to do the right thing. Of course, the truth is, we are faced with such decisions, though on a much smaller scale, all the time. Our path is always before us.

Long before my family’s visit to the Holocaust Museum, I’d heard about its exhibit of shoes. It’s impossible to anticipate just how powerful those shoes are when seen in person—you simply have to be there. You have to be there to see not just a few shoes, but a roomful of shoes, shoes by the thousands, shoes stripped from people being herded toward death at concentration camps. Gripped by the power of all those shoes but overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, I began to wonder about the owner of one particular shoe. The shoe I noticed was a woman’s shoe, black, leather, lace-up, with a low heel. As I looked at it, I wondered about the person whose foot had shaped the leather just so, and whose habits had left precisely that pattern of wear. Of course there was no resolution to my wondering, and yet the simple act of wondering itself, lifted me and the shoe’s wearer into a sort of communion.

I suppose that’s why the Holocaust Museum is a place of hope. It’s about giving the faceless faces and the nameless names, and about joining their stories to ours. I suspect that it is always through one relationship at a time that we find the keys that allow us to open the kingdom of God’s fullness in our hearts, and thereby to help bring that kingdom to all. It’s about human beings, people who love and hate, people who laugh and cry, people who in many ways are just like us. As we set aside our fears about being the losers, we can join with others to help realize a world in which we are all winners.