Third Sunday in Easter

Third Sunday in Easter, 2003 -- Susan J. Barnes -- Luke 24:36b-48

Last Wednesday, my friend Posy and I went back to Ground Zero. I hadn't been there since November 2001. Then, in the wake of September 11, downtown New York was dark and lifeless: streets blocked off, buildings closed, businesses shuttered. Gloom, horror and tragedy--the kind of darkness that we just heard about in 1 John.

Posy and I met last week in New York to attend a conference at Trinity Church, Wall Street. As many of you know, Trinity Church Wall Street is very close to the site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers. The hotel we stayed in is even closer--a mere block away--but what with one thing and another, it wasn't until the end of the conference, our last day, that we made the pilgrimage to the site, and to St. Paul's Chapel.

St. Paul's is the Episcopal church where George Washington worshipped right after his inauguration as President. It's a beautiful 18th century stone building with Palladian windows and a spire that makes it look like one of Wren's churches in the City of London. Behind it is a yard filled with trees and an ancient cemetery--a rare sight in Manhattan. The Twin Towers were just beyond those trees, and people say that the trees saved the building. The trees absorbed the shock waves when the towers fell. That's what kept the old church from even having a single pane of glass broken.

St. Paul's has been a museum for a long time. On September 11, 2001, it became a church again in the best sense. It was transformed by the Holy Spirit into a center of ministry for the relief workers. For the next 8 months, 24/7, St. Paul's was open for them. It was staffed by volunteers from churches around the country, who ministered to the workers' every need: providing prayer, food, rest, clothing, massage, medicine--and most of all, sanctuary, a safe place, a place to find consolation for the thousands of men and women who had the grim duty of recovering the remains of those who died.

Posy and I had both served at St. Paul's as volunteer chaplains at different times, so we each had powerful memories of a remarkable time in our lives and in the life of this country.

Standing there on Wednesday, I recalled suddenly, in my very body and soul, the grace of God that had filled that place. The Grace was love--God's love incarnate in and among the people there. It was the tender caring for people whom you had never seen, but whom you met as brothers and sisters. It was the openness we had to the sweet vulnerability of sharing, the ability to cry together, but also to laugh in the midst of tragic loss.

Standing there I remembered. Then I understood: God's grace had filled that place in that extraordinary way because the events of 9/11 had broken us open. God had blessed and sanctified us--especially in our brokenness.

It's a paradox, of course, like so many core Christian truths that Jesus taught: like the last being first, losing your life to gain it, the leader being the servant of all. They are paradoxes whose deep truth we learn because our lives in God bear them out again and again. The paradox I met at Ground Zero was this. Our brokenness empowered us. It empowered us to be Christ to one another, to meet as fellow children of God. That's because our brokenness, our weakness, our vulnerability had melted the barriers of race, region, class, occupation--all manifestations of the false self--that would normally have separated us.

God loves us. God blesses our brokenness. God hallows and transforms brokenness. That's the gift of Easter.

In today's gospel, Jesus comes to the disciples. Raised from the dead, he appears--not as a superhero, but as before, in his humanity. He eats some fish, sits among them. And he shows them his wounds. Jesus has died. Christ is risen. Victorious over death, he not only carries the scars of his mortality and suffering, he bares them.

Once again, Jesus gives us the example of humility, as he did on the eve of the Crucifixion when he washed the feet of his disciples.

But humility is a tough lesson: it's so hard to learn to be vulnerable. I don't know about you, but I tend to hide my scars--even more so my wounds. It happened again yesterday, at a small conference here in town. We had been talking about poverty and how it leaves people powerless. All of us had agreed that we were rich--in education, entitlement, voice, and political power, if not materially. So the speaker asked us, on a break, to recall a moment when we felt powerless, and to share it.

I wanted to flee, because I was feeling powerless right then. It's a small thing, really, but I'd just learned that my childhood home, the house my parents lived in for 47 years, will likely be torn down by the new owner. I'm powerless to do anything about it. A small thing, but a wound--one that's freshly opened. So, yesterday, I did flee for a minute. Then I found myself sharing with a woman I didn't know. Lo, and behold, she was grieving the same loss--her mother's house in Dallas. In sharing our small, ordinary, necessary loss, our brokenness, we were blessed; we found our common humanity.

Brokenness levels the playing field. Vulnerability opens us to receive compassion as well as to feel it for others. Jesus bared his wounds to the disciples. He showed them that they need not fear their humanity, need not fear their wounds. He showed them that suffering is not the end, not the last thing. Suffering happens; evil exists. Yes. And God does not wish either upon us. But, God is there, always in love. And if we open ourselves to God's love, suffering can bring us into a deeper relationship with God and one another. Jesus suffered--not so that we might never suffer, but to show us that suffering is a path to transformation.

On September 11, 2001, this country was violently, wickedly attacked. And we were suddenly broken as never in our history since the Civil War.

It was a terrible event--one that in our pride and self-sufficiency we would like to forget. But because God is God, and God loves us, countless blessings came out of that tragedy. Countless lives were transformed as people gave themselves over to be instruments of God's healing grace.

Today, lower Manhattan is abustle again. St. Paul's is a museum again. There are few signs of the devastation of 9/11. The transportation network beneath the World Trade Center is being repaired; the hole being filled. Plans are being made for what will rise in that place.

But we need to remember what happened there--the evil, yes, but even more than that the goodness it unleashed. I pray that--as we have at other scenes of tragedy, like Oklahoma City--we carve out a space at Ground Zero, a place that shows the scar. A scar that bears witness to the wound we suffered--as Jesus' scars did--and to the transformation brought there by God' grace.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed.