Rector's Reflections - May 2007

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

As I was watching the story unfold of the massacre of students and faculty at Virginia Tech, my heart ached for the loss of life, the grief of students, faculty, parents. And also for the tragic life of the perpetrator. To read about his life is to read about a person who could never make contact, could never relate, to even one single person. As a child, he could not or would not speak, could not form relationships. No one knew him in high school or college. He was the perpetual outsider, the essential loner.

Finally, all of his rage exploded, and the ensuing violence in Virginia was the result. Miroslav Volf, in his profound analysis of reconciliation, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, 1994), connects the pattern of human sinfulness with the activity of exclusion. He writes:

Sin’s more immediate goal is not so much to undo the creation, but violently to reconfigure the pattern of its interdependence…Exclusion can entail cutting of the bonds that connect, taking oneself out of the pattern of interdependence and placing oneself in a position of sovereign independence. The other then emerges as an enemy that must be pushed away from the self and driven out of its space as a nonentity. (pgs.66-67)

Violence is often the result of rage, the rage of being excluded, of being made a nonentity by others. The one excluded then becomes the one that judges and punishes, causing pain to those who, rightly or wrongly, have taken part in his/her feelings and experiences of exclusion.

To see sin in this way is to also see the way that redemption, in the Christian tradition, offers hope and new life. The One excluded from the human community, Jesus, in his death on the cross, explicitly pronounces acquittal, not judgment, for the human race. Jesus forgives those who have excluded him. In addition, John’s gospel shows him connecting his mother, Mary, with the “beloved disciple” when he says, from the cross, “Mother, here is your son.”

The churches that are a part of his body, therefore, become places of radical inclusivity. In his name, through his example, by his grace, that is what we at St. Alban’s are called to become. From our hospitality to strangers on the first day they visit, through their fullest participation in our community, let us recommit ourselves to becoming more welcoming, more inclusive, more fully accepting and loving of one another.

Who knows what lives we might change? What lives, with God’s help, we might save?

In Christ’s love,

(The Reverend) Susan W. Klein