Biography
The Rev. Dr. Wesley Avram is Assistant Professor of Communication at Yale Divinity School and the Institute for Sacred Music at Yale. He was formerly pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Wilmette, Illinois, and served as chaplain at Bates College. Avram is contributing editor to Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities and the soon to be published, Where the Light Shines Through. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Peace at Last? Peace at First!" 
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, the doors of the house where the Disciples had met were locked for fear of the authorities. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the Disciples rejoiced when they saw him and Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven them. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” A week later, his Disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and again said to them, “Peace be with you.” Amen.

For just a moment, feel what it’s like to live inside your face. Just below the place of your eyes; maybe even a little behind where your vision lands outside of you, feel your breath. It is one of the first signals of your relationship with the world. If I startle you right now, your heart may race, your pupils may dilate, your hands may go up into a defensive pose, and you may turn your head to protect your eyes. But before these reactions, as if to trigger them, you’ll respond at that place of breath. Or if I welcome you with open arms instead, with an accepting spirit, your senses may react in kind then, too. And so your breath, when welcomed...releasing as if guiding your other senses outward toward the other. Breathing so vital and effective.

You can also move backwards with breath, from response to feeling. It’s easier to do this with breath than any of the other sensations. Start breathing in quick, halting gasps and you can manufacture that sense of fear. Or practice the art of slower, attentive breaths, exhaling longer than you inhale, and your body may follow into calm—even in the midst of strife. Herbert Benson wrote this up into a self-help book called The Relaxation Response and had a best seller on his hands. But the knowledge is ancient. It’s central to meditation, Christian and non-Christian alike. And it’s known in every culture.

Breath. Potent and underestimated. Readers of the Bible find a story about breath at the very origin of things. The breath of God moving. Breath making voice and God speaking the world into being with that voice. The only word that was ever pure and unrestrained. The only word, full of breath, that creates its hearer from nothing.

Even Jesus breathes, and not just breaths to collect oxygen and eliminate waste. Jesus breathes an incarnation of that creating breath, in a voice that gives something new, with a tone that draws a different kind of attention, and a timber that reverberates through all that is—so the church believes. And yet his breaths are also as human as yours.

I was talking with someone recently about the passage from John I just read. “I like it,” she said, “except for the part about the breath. Jesus breathing on the disciples. Just, ah, not for me. I’m not really one for exchanging breath with people.” Fair enough. I’m not entirely up for it myself and if you approach me on the street I’ll likely put myself at just about the right distance from you to be sure that we can sense each other’s presence and hear each other’s speech, but not share each other’s breath. Germs, you know, and other unpleasantries. The once very ordinary sensuality of human relating is gone forever in the discovery of hygiene.

Yet the peace Christians often share in their worship, that peace, usually with a courteous handshake and a word of blessing: “Peace.” “Peace be with you.” “Peace of Christ.” “How are you?” This passing of peace actually began in the liturgy as a kiss, and as a kiss marked by just such exchange of breath. To “conspire,” meaning to breathe together in a kind of co-mingling that the church recreates as the passing of peace, remembering Jesus.

Christians like to say that the church began at Pentecost, a couple of weeks after Easter, but I believe the church began in the house where the disciples were right after Jesus was executed. There began the Christian conspiracy. Doors locked, shades pulled down, lights kept off for fear that the Humvees on patrol would notice their movement inside and come crashing in at the darkest hour to haul them away, night goggles glowing. You know them in our day: the house churches of China, the base communities in Guatemala, the Evangelical congregations under threat in Pakistan, the black churches burned down in the South, the slowly crumbling mainline churches in our own cities—built for a thousand and now protecting thirty or forty, the lavish buildings in our suburbs—filled and apparently open, but sometimes so compromised to culture that they too live in a kind of locked-down fear.

And Jesus came into that house saying, “Peace be with you.” He showed the marks of his wounds and, even as they shouted their pleasure, he said again to them, “Peace be with you.” But he added another part of that peace, “As I have been sent to you, so I send you out.”

Out. Into those streets? Have you seen the pictures? Not those streets. Not me!

Yet the Scripture doesn’t make the kind of pause for hesitation I just made. It says that just when Jesus gave this peace, and sent them out, he also breathed on them. He was that close: “Receive the Holy Spirit” with a voice filled by breath. And what does this Holy Breath of Spirit do, wrapped up as it is with peace and part and parcel of being sent? It gives a kind of power. And it gives a kind of power that, like breath, can by its work completely change things—taking fear and harm to itself, and making for peace.

And so the Holy Breath gives the power of release. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained,” Jesus tells them.

I hear tell of a man who used to say that we should each make a sign for ourselves and place it right on top of the mirror in which we first see ourselves every morning. And that sign should say, simply, “Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.” Not “permit,” for forgiveness is not permission-giving. I must note that in a world where preaching too often implies that forgiving is the same thing as allowing, no, no, no. This forgiving is a kind of bearing of weight, so you can name the sin that must be purged, or must be fled, while you still refuse to be overwhelmed by it, and still refuse to return revenge for it or bring down eternity against it. For the forgiveness that releases into eternity would heal, not harm. And that eternity is the release we all would share in this holy gift of peace. We have the power to bind up and keep down, and cling like a prisoner to the shackles of ours and others’ sins. Yet we’ve also been breathed with the power to let go, and release to God those very things that do such harm—to calm our spirits in the rhythms of an eternal breath.

So here’s the logic: what Christians call faith cannot be known outside of the peace that God gives. And the peace that God gives in the resurrected Christ is a breath of power, blowing us away from our prisons of fear and into the work of release, the sharing of hope, the mending of wrong, and a waiting on eternity, and the recovery of peace again.

And so it all happens the very next Sunday, this new little church gathered in the same house in which they met the resurrected Christ the week before, but now there’s no word about the doors being locked. And the person in the group called Thomas, who wasn’t there the week before, is with them now. But he won’t believe the kind of outrageous peace they shared, so Jesus comes again, showing the wounds of the world on his hands and in his side, and breathing again his peace.

You have not believed because you have seen it and so know enough to be worthy of it. You have believed because you have felt the heat of its breath, conspiring as it does to mingle Holy and human desire with a new kind of power that can heal the cycles of destruction. It can send you out finally free of the fear that would control you. Blessed are you who believe this way, the Christian scriptures say.

Peace be with you. Amen.

Interview with Wesley Avram
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Wes, you talked about a gentleman who had a sign on his mirror: “Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.” Is there any kind of sign we could put at the top of our mirror that would start us off each day that would tell us ultimately to seek peace?

Wesley Avram: A good question, Floyd. I wish I knew who actually recommended that, but it has stuck with me since I heard it. I think that part of what the New Testament does is bring forgiveness and peace together. We like to think that peace begins with calm or is a kind of calm. But I think that calm comes as a product of peace and that peace begins in the ability to learn how to forgive.

Brown: Peace and calm are almost synonymous is what you are saying. What is the ultimate incident of peace that happened to you and when did it happen?

Avram: I have memories of—I must have been about ten—when I cut with scissors an article out of the newspaper. I think it was the Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Michigan. For whatever reason this article stood with me and stayed for years in my top drawer. I went back and found it years later and read about it again and remembered. It’s a story about a young girl who was brutally murdered in a woods near my home in Royal Oak. This article was about the parents of this young girl who, when the young man who had committed this crime was caught, were interviewed. They said, “We’re Christian people and we seek justice to be done, but also know that Christ calls us to forgive and to there find our peace. We hope one day this young man would know the same peace that we know and that one day we might even sit at table in the beyond with our daughter and with him knowing that it is Christ who is our peace and that justice leads to mercy.” Reading that article at ten years old, I realized there was something about faith that’s different than what the world would teach me. I had to figure out what that was.

Brown: At ten years old you were asking the question. What about your adult life? What has happened in your adult life that has given you peace or helped you find more?

Avram: Well, to help me find more would be a good way to put it! I don’t know if I have it yet. I remember living for a period of time, now almost twenty years ago, in the Middle East, on the West Bank and coming to know during those years Israelis who were very active in the peace movement and Palestinians who were involved in the midst of a decades long terrible conflict of bitterness, recrimination, anger and revenge back and forth. To watch these people who were committed to peace—a peace that was born in the midst of conflict—come together and find ways of remaining calm and finding non-violence in the midst of that, I think I saw a glimpse of peace there as a kind of work which is a work that is a giving over to other people. It was a remarkable experience and I think from those people we learn.

Brown: We certainly do. Can you imagine living a life where you are seeking peace but ultimately wonder if you will ever have it until the Kingdom of God? Thank you so much for your message.