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April 16, 2006 - Easter Sunday
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture: Psalm
118:14-24, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” V:1, Assorted Gospels
“Lovers’ Walls
and Ninny Tombs: All the Kings’ Forces, All the Kings Mend”
Praise the Lord – Christ is risen! Hello, walls! Walls of the tomb!
Walls of the cairn that points to the cross! A lot of water has gone under and
over our walls since last Sunday! We move from our Lenten theme “The Walls
in Our Way” to our Easter theme “Our Way Past the Walls.” Where else but
here could we get Shakespeare on lovers’ walls and Ninny tombs this morning?
Walls that lovers refuse to let stand in their way! Lovers who would
rather die than be separated!
We cannot promise an absence of tragedy for the
lovers. After all, we ourselves come to the tomb this morning by way of the
crucifixion of the one we call Lover and Leader, Liberator and Lord of our lives
and our life together! Our story is not deathless immortality. Our story is
death -- painful, public, political death – and resurrection! We are here with
the psalmist to celebrate love that endures all things! Even death. Love that
lives to tell about death! How death has done its worst to us! Yet “gates of
righteousness” -- of justice, of organized active love – may enter through any
wall! For the very stone the builders rejected, the stone of suffering
nonviolent love, has become the head of the corner! Like lovers we ask this
morning of walls in our way, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”
For God has turned every table on death! God has scaled every wall of death!
I asked Thisbe (Jeanmarie Simpson!) to help me
reflect on this lovers’ wall. Her thoughts go to “The Fantasticks,” the modern
musical version (Any-one care to organize a showing of both films sometime this
season?) – where it becomes clear that walls are needed, even as we work past
them – under them, over them, around them, and through them: “No, leave the
wall! Remember, you must always leave the wall.” Jeanmarie relates it to the
lyric “Without hurt the heart is hollow.” How do we know we love, how do we
know we feel, without pain as well as joy? Without walls we may not know the
limits of life -- Neither the risk nor the gain of pushing against and expanding
our limits! Of exploring, discovering and daring to go and to follow where it
seems none ever has been before. “Deep in December it’s nice to remember the
fire of September that made us mellow. Deep in December our hearts will
remember and follow . . .” Camus says it takes depth of winter to reveal the
invincible summer within us.
Remember and follow! Remembering Jesus, as he
commands, every time we break bread and share cup together, every time we wash
feet, perform acts of love, of justice, of mercy toward another – remembering
Jesus is mending walls
-- putting things back together that have been
torn apart and asunder by violence and death. We do it in our own lives, in our
relationships, in our communities, in our world. “All the kings’ forces” would
drive us apart, tear us asunder, divide us and conquer us. It is the nature of
kings and those who are reckless and heedless with power. Only a suffering
nonviolent love can help “all the kings mend” again. There may be walls that
break and walls that mend, walls that harm and walls that heal, walls that give
death and walls that give life. Remembering Jesus this morning is mending not
only the brokenness each of us does, or brokenness done in each of our names --
but also the brokenness each of us is – a “Brokeback Mountain” sort of
brokenness -- of love gone far beyond old walls and limits!
Remembering Jesus challenges us to love “out of
the box,” out of the tomb -- not only persons but also whole peoples – to love
not only flesh and blood but also what the Bible calls “principalities and
powers,” ideologies and illusions of virtue seated in high places – to love not
only individuals but also institutions (Churches, mosques, and synagogues -- for
God’s sake! Schools, banks, prisons, corporations, hospitals, courts,
universities, community organizations, internal revenue and immigration
services, even whole governments and nations!) – to love not only neighbors but
also strangers – to love not only our friends (Anyone can love their friends,
Jesus says!) but even our enemies. Remembering Jesus is forgiving but not
forgetting – remembering as much and as far back as we can stand! Letting go of
a past of misuse and abuse, death and destruction – letting God bring a future
of life and creation, hopes and dreams. As we have heard from the immigration
rallies of a people coming to light, a people coming to life – “Nosotros tambien
tenemos un sueno.” We have a dream as well. We have a dream again. Thank
you!
Irrepressible, Easter-like Texas columnist Molly
Ivins remembers -- “In 1983, I was a judge at the Terlingua Chili Cookoff. . . .
It was ’83 or some year right around there when we held The Fence climbing
contest. See, people talked about building The Fence back then, too. The Fence
along the Mexican border. To keep Them out. At the time the proposal was quite
specific – a 17 foot cyclone fence with barb wire at the top. So a test fence
was built at Terlingua, and the First-Ever Terlingua Memorial Over, Under or
Through Mexican Fence Climbing Contest took place. Prize: a case of Lone Star
beer. Winning time: 30 seconds. “I tell this story to make the one single
point about the border and immigration we know to be true: No fence will work.
The Great darn Wall of China will not work. Do not build a fence. It will not
work. They will come anyway. Over, under or through.” If anything, I say
let’s embrace the “undocumented” (Who was less documented to do what he did than
Jesus?) as missionaries of a nonviolent change among us – changing not only our
work but our life -- our culture, our church, our community. You’re welcome!
Authorities thought this week that a cross and a
tomb would serve the same cause as a fence. Especially if they rolled a huge
stone in front of the tomb, and posted a Roman guard all around it. But if God
has decided that Jesus is coming out of the tomb, like Israel out of Egypt, or
Jesus through the locked door to the room where we his friends are cringing with
fear for our lives on this day – then the deepest of tombs and the hugest of
stones and the best-armed of guards are not stopping God! God will go under,
over, through – to see that nothing, nothing, nothing ever separates us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!
So who’s here to roll away stones this morning? Who’s here to look into
open tombs? Who’s here to enter in – where no one ever has been before –
to see and to believe – Jesus is risen! He is not here! Who’s here
to ask, why do we seek the living among the dead? Why are we so resigned
that death will have the last word? Why are we so intimidated, so
controlled by our fears of those who think, who act as if they are in command
and control of our lives? So that we routinely, unquestioningly (I very
much included!) pay our taxes this time every year – knowing full well how much
of them will go towards more death and destruction? As of February this
year, some $315 billion had been appropriated in taxes for the war in Iraq!
That’s $2.7 billion from Nevada and $218 from each resident of Reno/Sparks.
Can we make an Easter pact this morning, that if we do not end this war by this
time next year, we will make some kind of response? Register some kind of
protest together? Find some way to say a “yes” to life?
As we have been seeing in words and in manzanita
branches by the Fellowship Hall this season, “What . . . keeps us bound? . .
Holds us down? . . Walls us in? . . Hangs us up? . . Go out on a limb! Leave it
here on the Lenten Tree!” Where Jesus is willing to die before he is willing to
kill, or for anyone else to kill in his name. Where Jesus is willing to pay the
full price of all that it means to be human – not only though certainly as one
single solitary seemingly supernatural individual –but also most challengingly
as one baptized into solidarity and shared struggle for shalom – peace with
justice -- in the whole human community! It’s not just Jesus who hangs on that
tree – it’s all who would be fully human, fully alive to the possibilities and
opportunities, hopes and dreams of what life in this world might become for us
all! When people ask me if I believe in resurrection, I answer as I do the same
question about evolution – We had better believe in evolution! We had better
believe in resurrection! We had better believe, had better hope, that God is
not done with us yet!
Believing is just the beginning. It takes fifty
days of Easter and many encounters with the risen Jesus for us to “receive the
Holy Spirit” as he commands us this very night – bursting through all the locked
doors and barbed walls of our lives. We observed again watching “Jesus Christ
Superstar” Friday night how little the films of Jesus make of the resurrection.
How little we make of the resurrection! How little we seem to believe all
things are possible with our God! It takes time for us to learn to trust in the
power of forgiveness – our very own forgiveableness – as the power of God for
the life and the love of the world. Forgiveness is the most powerful power
of all! Easter fulfills the promise of God for those who die premature,
untimely, even unnatural deaths. The ultimate triumph of Easter over death
itself is God’s way of making up for our “lost time.” No one is lost in
sight of the God who loves us no matter where and how hidden we are! And
we know the difference. We know the role of “natural death” in fitting
perpetuation of life’s fixed cycles. We remember, dust we are, and to dust
we shall return!
We know the difference, for instance, between our sister Thelma Smith dying
gracefully in her eighties surrounded by loving, caring family with whom she
spent the last seventeen years of her life – and any one of the 30,000 children
who die preventable deaths in the world everyday. We know the difference.
We know what deaths we are here to protest, to say “no” to this morning.
We know the deaths that are ordered and organized by powers of state and
religious authority. We know who it is that dies in our wars. We
know it is our love of Caesar before God that leads to the death of Jesus – and
of so many others who follow in his spirit – the doers of justice, nonviolence,
and love – so many of them named by Don Baldwin’s peace sculpture in the parlor.
We know the difference!
William Sloane Coffin died this week – former
chaplain at Yale, former pastor at Riverside Church, former director of
SANE/Freeze for disarmament. Yet for all of his prophetic life and work, his
witness service for justice and peace in the world , what I remember first of
him is the pastoral peace, the forgiveness he received from God through so many
others, at the time his 24 year-old son Alex died in a car accident. He says in
the eulogy, “God is dead-set against all unnatural deaths. And Christ spent an
inordinate amount of time delivering people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy,
and muteness. . . . The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is
‘It is the will of God.’ Never do we know enough to say that. . . . When the
waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first heart to break.”
“Like God herself, Scripture is not around for anyone’s protection, just for
everyone’s unending support.” For everyone’s unending support. What else is
Easter but God’s unending support for us all? God’s refusal to give up on any
last one of us? Those who visit with us today, please stay with us this Easter
season – to Pentecost, and beyond! To the Trinity, and beyond! To see if “the
walls come tumbling down” at last.
“Going under the water was a burial of your old
life,” Paul tells the Colossians. “Coming out of it was a resurrection, God
raising you from the dead as God did Christ. When you were stuck in your old
sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive –
right along with Christ. Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped
clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. God
stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at
the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” Praise the Lord – Christ
is risen.
Amen.
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