Memorial of Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
I just finished reading a fabulous book—The Class of ’65: A Student, A Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness—by journalist, Jim Auchmutey. It tells the story of Greg Wittkamper, an adolescent who grew up in Koinonia (a term borrowed from the ancient Greek that means fellowship, partnership, community), a community located not far from Plains, Georgia. It served as the origin of Habitat for Humanity.
Greg’s story is a powerful one. While he grew up in an interracial community in the 1960s in rural Georgia, he attended a high school that was anything but interracial. Segregation was the order of the day. And Greg and his community were seen as a profound threat to the majority community’s “way of life.” Koinonia was seen as a problem regarding race. They were also tarred as communist. They were not. Never mind truth. Ideology and the rhetoric of us-versus-them was what counted.
He was bullied. He was demonized. He was beaten up. He had, not surprisingly, few friends. Being of that community at that time cost him a lot.
I bring up this story because I think that it parallels what the Scriptures are trying to say to us today. The early Christians were trying to follow Jesus. They weren’t perfect, of course. But they were trying.
What they knew was that the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached about is different from the Kingdom of the World (for a great book on the difference between the two, see Donald Kraybill’s, The Upside Down Kingdom). They knew that the followers of Jesus are neither Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. They are brothers and sisters in the body of Christ.
These folks in the Koinonia community bought it. And they paid.
What is amazing in this story is that 41 years after Greg graduated, fellow graduates—students who had harassed him and beaten him up, students who couldn’t stand the sight of him, students who only understood him as a profound threat, students who, perhaps, would have hung him up on a tree if they had had the chance—wrote him letters. Asked him for forgiveness.
And so he dared to attend their class reunion and to meet his former harassers face to face.
It turned out to be a moment of reconciliation. The Holy Spirit was all in, to be sure.
They confessed. They talked in specific terms about the harm they had unleashed upon him. The trauma. They made explicit all the reasons why he fled the state of Georgia when he had the chance. And they repented. They talked about hating themselves for what they had done to him.
And he forgave them.
Jesus has so much to teach us about how to be a good human being in this world of anger and violence and pain. I pray that I have internalized his lessons. I make no bets. I just pray.
Amen.
—Susan Trollinger