Blessed Are Those who Wash Their Robes | A Sermon in the Wake of Tragedy
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Seventh Sunday of Easter (C), May 29, 2022.
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
It is a comfort to be with you this morning after a terribly difficult week. Our nation is once again living in the wake of tragedy.
On Tuesday, a lost, broken soul senselessly and violently ended the lives of 19 defenseless, innocent children and two vibrant and committed teachers before being killed by officers himself. Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, now joins an ever-lengthening list of schools assaulted by gun violence.
Let everyone who hears say, “Come.” Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:17).
Places where we send our children to learn and to grow, to play and to befriend, places that should be safe and life-giving, these places should never fall victim to violence of any kind and particularly of this kind –preventable, senseless, soul-wrenching.
And yet here we are. Again.
Just days after a shooting at a church in California. Just days after ten people were shot and killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, this an event fueled by racist ideology and underwritten by white supremacy. And we’ve just passed the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The pain of it all is immense. The loss of life unfathomable.
In the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” (Jer. 15:18).
I’ll be honest and admit that I am still in the process of sorting out my own emotional and even theological response to all of this, and so perhaps I am not the best preacher for you this morning. And yet, I’m willing to bet that most, if not all, of you are in the same place.
We are not meant to live this way, and so it is natural that making meaning out of times like these seems futile. And not even making meaning, but just understanding how to move forward, what to do next, these do not come naturally to us here and now because things are not as they should be.
This is always the case, of course, that things are not as they should be. And yet, these days, the pendulum feels too far swung in the wrong direction.
Why does this keep happening? How have we not done better? Where is God? These are my questions. Perhaps they are yours as well. Maybe it goes without saying, but these questions are useful, these questions are of God and for God, because these questions burst forth from souls primed for goodness, justice, mercy and truth, because they are souls created by God, in God’s image, and our souls know and react to the chasm between the truth as we know it as Christ-followers and the realities of this world that we now occupy.
God invites our questions, our sorrow, our anger even. Lament is God-approved.
Fleming Rutledge reminded us after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary that,
“Christian ministry means living with the anguish and inexplicability of this mortal life, not reaching too quickly for easy answers” [1].
This morning, our reading from Revelation has a word for us. In it, we encounter the last words of Scripture.
See, I am coming soon . . . I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev. 22:12-13).
Every generation living in the wake of Christ’s Ascension (which the church observed Thursday) has experienced the phenomenon of religious leaders attempting to predict the exact date of Christ’s return. At first, this was quite understandable. The early church believed Christ’s return to be imminent (at least in our understanding of time). But we have moved quite beyond that, haven’t we?
At some point, one wonders about this orientation towards end times. If we are eschatologically oriented, waiting for the grand escape hatch if you will, what does this say about the lives we lead now? How are we meant to tend to the work of the faithful in the grave times in which we live if we are fixated on escaping this world?
Almost in answer to our very human tendency to look for other-worldly deliverance, the Book of Revelation says more:
See I am coming soon. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
[Yes, this is true, and] Blessed are those who wash their robes (Rev. 22:14).
Blessed are those who wash their robes.
There’s more than one way to interpret this, and yet I can’t help but be convicted that this line, one we might be tempted to throw away in our confusion or overlook in our eagerness, this line is critical. It reorients us to the work at hand. It suggests to us that we are not meant to be passive recipients of what is to come but active participants in the next chapter of God’s grand story.
While we may feel overwhelmed in the face of the tragedy in front of us, we are called, at the very least, to steer towards the pain, not away from it. We are called to feel it, as deeply as we must, to accompany others where we can and when we can in their pain, and then we are called to act. Enough is enough.
In the words of one commentator, we are “to be about the work of cleansing a world made unclean. . . . [and, of course] no one comes to the end of life unmarked, free of stains and smudges,” so we also need to tend to our own laundry lest we forget. [2]
Recognizing that we too bear marks, stains, and smudges, does wonders for the way we witness to our faith in a broken world. It allows us to serve others with compassion and empathy rather than judgment and scorn.
We are, right now, at the part of this tragedy where we look for where to place our blame for the events of this week. The news is full of finger pointing and, of course, with that comes defensiveness and deflection.
Please do not misunderstand me. We must seek answers as to why this happened. We must seek to address the policies, procedures, precautions, and politics that failed our children. We must act.
And yet, let’s make sure that in casting blame we ourselves are willing to search our own hearts, our own minds, our own actions and to begin there, with God’s help. And as we move outward, let’s make sure that in casting blame we are not seeking easy answers. That we are steering towards the pain with integrity and perseverance.
Blessed are those who wash their robes.
This, I very much believe, is what we should be about as people of faith. Striving to be about the work of making ourselves and the world clean from a place of love.
C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to a friend in 1952 that may as well have been written in 2022. It reads in part:
“The times we live in are, as you say, grave. [And yet,] our Redemption is now nearer than ever before. So let us say with St. John, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus! Meanwhile our only security is that [when that day arrives] He may find us working each one . . . fulfilling that supreme command that we love one another” [3].
Love. Because that’s the thing that animates us. That’s the thing that saves us. That is our beginning and our end. Alpha and Omega. Love.
Fleming Rutledge would remind us that, despite what is happening in the world, “the message, ultimately, is about God.
In the final analysis, there is no human answer whatsoever to the problem of evil. We can only continue to insist upon the reality, power, [and love] of God in spite of all evidence to the contrary” [4].
Let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift (Rev. 22:17).
This is our testimony to a hurting world; because this is a universal invitation –come one, come all. The times we live in may be grave, and yet the Lord is faithful in His devotion to us. He is making all things new. Salvation is at hand.
Let everyone who is thirsty come.
I thirst. This is one of the final sayings of our Lord as he hung upon the cross, echoing the longings of all our hearts. We thirst. For better days. For an end to war, violence, poverty, racism, and oppression. For clarity of purpose. For true unity with God and our neighbor. For safety and for the comfort of love divine. We thirst. And our thirst will be quenched. Salvation is at hand. And we have a part to play in that. We must act.
I’d like to end with a poem, a prayer really, from poet Amanda Gorman, written after the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas.
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.
Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.
Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change [5].
Amen.
*Image is a classic icon portraying Rachel weeping for her children (Jer. 31:15).
[1] Fleming Rutledge, “Bottom of the Night: Rutledge on Ordination, Advent, and Grief,” a sermon preached at Saint John’s Episcopal Church, New Milford, Conn., 15 Dec. 2012, published at Eerdword: The Eerdman’s Blog, on 19 Dec. 2019, https://eerdword.com/the-bottom-of-the-night-rutledge-on-ordination-advent-and-grief.
[2] Paul “Skip” Johnson, “Pastoral Perspective: Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21: Seventh Sunday of Easter,” in Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 2, Lent through Eastertide, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors (Westminster, John Knox, 2009), 534-536.
[3] C.S. Lewis, “from a letter to Don Giovanni Calabria, July 14, 1952” in NRSV: The C.S. Lewis Bible (Grand Rapids: HarperCollins, 2010), 1251.
[4] Rutledge, “Bottom of the Night.”
[5] Amanda Gorman, “Hymn for the Hurting,” Opinion: Guest Essay, The NYTimes, 27 May 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/opinion/amanda-gorman-uvalde-poem.html?searchResultPosition=1.
