Why are we shooting each other? April 23

 

Year A, Easter 3                                            Luke 24:13-35                                                             

         In the past week, there have been 4 incidents of people being shot for being in the wrong place and being a stranger.  The first was a 16 year old boy who knocked on the wrong door.  He was shot twice. The 2nd was a 6 year old and her father who went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into someone’s yard.  The third was a young woman who drove into the wrong driveway. She died. The fourth incident involved two high school girls who accidentally got into the wrong car and were immediately shot.  One week.  One young woman killed and 5 injured for making a mistake that everyone of us has probably made.  How many of us have knocked on the door of the wrong house, drove into the wrong driveway, walked into someone’s yard to retrieve a ball or tried to open the door of a car that looked like yours? I have done all of those things.

These were all different areas of the country. The victims were all young, but that was really all they had in common.  The perpetrators all seemed to have little in common as well.  It seems to me that the only common denominator is fear, particularly fear of strangers. None of the victims were known to those who did the shooting. 

What I want to know is how we got to this point, where 4 different people thought the best thing to do was not simply ask a question and take 10 seconds to find out why the person was in the wrong place, but instead, shoot the people.  How did we get to this place? 

            One of the interesting things about the resurrection accounts is that the disciples of Jesus never recognized him, not at first.  He was always a stranger to them.  It is not clear as to why his closest friends and disciples didn’t recognize him.  Some hypothesize that it was a kind of post traumatic stress.  And that makes sense when you think about it.  Listen to what Simon and Cleopas told Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  Jesus had been their chance at redemption and freedom and now he has been killed by the very people who he was supposed to free them from, the Romans.  They had hoped.  They had put all their hope in this man, and now he was dead. 

They were coping with two kinds of trauma—the violent death of someone who they loved and a lost hope.   Anytime someone we love dies, we experience a tremendous loss.  Sometimes that comes with losing hope—hope for a future with someone who is no longer living with us.  Yet Jesus had promised more than just a future with him, he had promised salvation and freedom. He had promised redemption and healing to all people.  When he was killed, people were terrified that all those promises were lost.  It was a trauma of epic proportions.  Embedded in trauma is fear, fear of what will happen next, knowledge that while we may have survived this trauma, we may not survive the next.  Fear is what made it so difficult to recognize Jesus—to believe that it could be Jesus.

On Easter, I talked about Mary Magdalene’s relative lack of fear. I hypothesized that she was able to handle her fear because of the afflictions she had coped with in her life. She didn’t recognize Jesus immediately, but it didn’t take her very long. It took longer for the men in our Gospel reading. I think these two men who met Jesus on the road had a little more fear than Mary did.  This is the first time we even hear their names, so they probably didn’t have as close a relationship with Jesus as Mary and the apostles.  And they were heading away from Jerusalem.  They were basically fleeing the scene.  They were scared. 

So it took them longer, longer to recognize Jesus, longer to remember that hope that they once had.  But they eventually did.  They did because they spent time with him, listened to him, got to know this man who they thought was a stranger.  The more time they spent with him, the less fear they had.  The reason they were able to overcome that fear was because hope was still there. They might have lost their hope for a time, but they never forgot it.  It was that foundation of hope that saved them.

To some varying degree, almost every person in our world is dealing with some  kind of trauma, which means that everyone is afraid.  Not only that, we have become isolated.  It was happening before the pandemic and then COVID made it that much worse.  We also have this wonderful 24 hours news cycle that seems to feed off of fear, which really isn’t helping matters. 

So what’s different now? Why are people so quick to shoot the stranger in front of them?  Part of it is because we have become isolated and it’s easy to avoid people who are different than us.  Many people are able to avoid interacting with anyone not like them. It’s also because fewer and fewer people have the foundation of hope that our faith gives us.  It’s one thing to deal with fear and loss when you have a foundation of hope and love.  It’s another thing to deal with that when you have no hope to begin with.  That is much more dangerous.

Everything that has happened over the last week (and the last several years) makes me angry. It makes me want to lash out and blame someone or something.  That is what a lot of people are doing. But that just feeds the fear and hopelessness.  Jon Meacham wrote: “Fear points at others, assigning blame; hope points ahead, working for a common good. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.”

As people of faith, we cannot allow ourselves to fear the stranger and to blame the other.  We can’t isolate ourselves in our safe places of hope and comfort.  We have to share this hope that God has given us.  Because people are starving for hope in our world and that dearth of hope is killing people.  It is literally killing people.  What can we do?  We can stop blaming the other political party.  We can stop blaming “the other.” We can stop letting fear be our guide when we have a much better guide in Jesus Christ. 

Notice that Jesus walked with the disciples and they walked WITH him, even though they thought he was a stranger.  In the same way, we can start walking along others, even the people who may scare us a little.  I am not telling you to start knocking on strangers doors, but there are safe ways that you can get to know people who are different than you.  If you aren’t quite ready for that, try to talk to the people who you know—who you know but might not agree with, and talk about those things. We are so busy avoiding talking about things that upset us, but it means we are no longer able to understand where others might be coming from.  That means that even people we know are becoming strangers. 

One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 139.  Lord you have searched me and known me.  It’s all about the God who knows us so well because he formed our inward parts.  It’s a gift to be known and loved by God.  Being known by an all loving being is what gives Christians the strength to deal with trauma and pain. And guess what, it’s not just us who God knows.  God knows all his children.  So think about that the next time you see someone who makes you a little nervous, a little wary.  Remember they too are created in God’s image. For God, there are no strangers.