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April 8, 2007 - Easter
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah
55:1-2, John 20:1, 11-18, Assorted Resurrection Appearances
“Garden Variety
Mary: For the Love of a Place and a People”
We so much in need of a Jesus who lives! A
Jesus who deals with real lives! In a real hurting world all about us! We are
surrounded by so many dead versions of Jesus -- Jesus wrapped up in churchly
security, left in a box to be brought out to show off a few holy days of the
year – Jesus frozen in time as personal savior to the select chosen few – Jesus
made safe and palatable.
We need a Jesus who’s free! A Jesus who
leads us from inside out! A Jesus who seeks no defending, no protecting by our
self-righteous pontifications. A Jesus who’s guilty of blasphemy, guilty of
treason as charged! Because blasphemy and treason are all that get the
attention at last of a church and a state cut off from the needs and the hopes
of the people. A Jesus guilty – literally -- as the hell he has raises this day
-- in the name of heaven on earth. The church’s tradition is in the three days
since Friday, Jesus descends into hell to save all the judged and condemned.
The Easter word is, We cannot find heaven without raising hell.
All four of the gospel accounts of this day begin with the women who come to
the tomb – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, Salome and other
women experience the first Easter message. Ironically, Roman soldiers
guarding the tomb could have been the first witnesses! Jesus told his
friends he would rise on this day. His friends, like us, do not believe
and are hiding out frozen with fear – no way to imagine at all this promise of
resurrection. But the chief priests and scribes and powers of both church
and state imagine only too well! While Jesus’ friends are woefully
“off-guard,” his enemies remain resolutely “on guard!”
In fact they go to Pilate to demand extra troops and a “sealing” of the tomb!
To them the only guarantee of death is more death! More force, more
threat, more security. Just like today, the soldiers on the ground know in
their hearts more violence will not end the war, will not stop the resurrection!
But just like today the soldiers are loyal to the end. So Pilate “seals” the
tomb with Caesar’s own seal. It is a legal lock on the tomb. To move
the stone and break the seal is to break the law!
Yet Jesus has spent these past weeks showing
us that “brokenness” leads us toward wholeness -- that lostness leads us to be
found. Sometimes we have to “break” with everything past – with all we
have ever known and believed -- for anything new to happen. Last Sunday
Jesus “breaks into” public awareness of who he is, what he’s coming for --
riding a humble donkey into the city as if he were a conquering king. He
“breaks up” the money-exchanging and exploitation of prayer in the temple.
He sanctions the “breaking open” of expensive perfume to anoint him for
death. He “breaks cover” to arrange a place for the Passover Meal.
There he “breaks” the bread as his own “body broken” for us. He further
“breaks rank” to wash our feet which not even a slave could be required to do.
He “breaks friendship” to send Judas to arrange for his arrest. He “breaks
trust” in us who cannot stay awake and watch for him while he prays. He
“breaks down” and asks that the cup of his death pass him by. By the time
he is murdered on Friday, even his spirit is “broken” and forsaken by God he is
so close to as to call “abba, daddy.” How can we help but seen every
barrier and separation between God and us “broken” beyond repair. In Jesus
God has “gone for broke” to save this world.
So we have little to lose by “breaking the law” this morning. We need
to break every law that flaunts death -- that promotes the power of might as the
power of right -- that seeks to control us by fears of the loss and the grief of
death. We tried to say last week that the crucifixion is not about us --
not about “atonement” for how evil we are – not about God sending God’s child
Jesus to die in our places. The crucifixion is about Jesus’ life not his
death -- about Jesus’ courage to reach and touch those whom no one else will --
his courage to stand with and for right and need of every person to be known and
treated as pure child of God.
This week, by contrast, the resurrection is
not about Jesus. It is about us!! Last week Jesus saved us. This week we’ve
got to save Jesus. Save Jesus from certain deadness if he is not kept alive in
the real and everyday loves of believers. American Indian author and comic
Sherman Alexie spoke for the Nevada Humanities series this week. He said
Indians worry about us white people. We seem so confused about who we are, what
our tribes are. We keep coming to Indian churches, looking for Indian
spirituality. He told us to go back to our own churches! They have been taken
over by those who want to keep Jesus dead! Who want to keep Jesus sealed far
off from real questions of real life in a real world. But who want use Jesus as
a weapon of judgment and an instrument of division and exclusion. Go back and
save Jesus, he pleaded with us!
Some of it is that women are taking the lead
– just as on this Easter morning. I am tempted to say -- and I usually cannot
help but say what I’m tempted to say – I am tempted to say of this morning,
“The women are in the House! God save the men!” Nancy Pelosi has been in the
House this week! Makes me proud to remember her colleague Barbara Lee, their
predecessors Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, their forebears Margaret Chase
Smith and, of course, Jeanette Rankin! (That’s three Democrats, an Independent,
and two Republicans, by the way!) With the “pots and pans” spirit of Molly
Ivins alive and well and banging away for us all! Beginning with Mary this
morning, the women are in the House! The women are in the Garden! The women
are at the Tomb!
And this morning we all are here – in this
house, this garden, this place – so enriched by the people we love. There is
nothing we will not do for the places we love and the people enriching our
lives! That is the name of the capital campaign this congregation launches
today. We welcome Rev. Bob Olmstead, leadership chairs Sheila Linn and Gary
Ray, and prayer coordinator Helen Nolte to consecrate this ministry next
Sunday. We call it, “We Love This Place and the People Who Enrich Our Lives.”
This is a place, we are a people, of life and death – yes – but also of
resurrection! Also of resurrection. This place, this congregation, is life in
the living body of Christ made up of those who enrich our lives and our life
together as every last part and member of that body.
Even before we find the tomb empty, or Jesus
appears to us, love already is stronger than death -- just because we dare to
get up and come to and confront all the tombs of our lives! All the places
where “nothing can possibly save us,” says the poet Auden -- Places where we
demand miracles! We pray in words of Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki’s “Prayer for the
Decade of Nonviolence for Children” -- “May my imagination overcome death and
despair with new possibility!” We pray to imagine a life beyond every death in
and for this world – a hope beyond every destruction, every despair. We need
church to be as “poetic community” for us and through us -- community offering
“explosive, concrete, subversive, critical image” around which we can reorganize
our lives.
For that is what Resurrection requires of us
– complete reorganization of all that we are, of all that we ever have thought
about life and death, of all that we have accepted as limiting our imaginations
and our capacities to change our lives, this church, and this world! Are we
ready for total reorganization? Starting one day, one step, one bite at a
time? Are we ready for what Annie Dillard says of our worship, our lives, on
such a day as this? Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we
so blithely invoke?. . . It’s madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats
to church; we should be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life
preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping
god may awake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to
wherever we can never return.
It comes of facing our brokenness and our
lostness, honoring our pain and our grief. Just as the women come to the
tomb this morning to honor their grief for the loss of Jesus among them, I pause
this morning to honor the grief of this congregation – our painful awareness of
persons among us living with deadly disease. There is no use pretending
that love of this place and the people enriching our lives does not hurt. One
of the questions haunts me from our many moving witnesses to Jesus’ last words
from the cross Friday night – What’s worse? A mother watching her son die?
Or a son watching his mother watching him die? Such love between and among
us makes part of our reorganized witness this morning the pain we take seriously
in one another! On such a bold morning as this, let there be no shying
away from or glossing over with easy answers the pain each other brings to this
place, this garden, even this tomb.
Easter is God’s new Exodus. We meet God in our own agony -- enduring
our pain and our helplessness to move on with our lives. We need most to
know we are not alone in our struggles, however long they take. We meet
God when Moses hears how God’s love is born of our pain: “I have seen the
affliction of my people who are in Egypt, I have heard their cries. I know
their suffering.” God becomes compassion for us, solidarity with us – resistance
to every oppression, and refusal ever to leave or abandon us -- anywhere,
anytime in our whole lives.
A Hasidic tale tells of one person asking the other, “Do you love me?”
“Yes, I love you very much,” the other responds. To which the first person
then asks, “Do you know what causes me pain?” “How can I know what causes
you pain?” responds the other. “If you don’t know what causes me pain,”
says the first, “how can you then say that you love me?” Jesus is among us
as the one in whom God gives such loving attention and creative response to the
pain of the world.
That is what we try to express when we say of
this past week that Jesus takes all the sin and the death of the world on
himself! It has been said, “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole
universe.” That is the heart of Jesus for us. That is the heart, the love, we
remember this day – the love that is stronger than death. We are those who
remember in a world where the powers of both church and state count upon our
fears to forget and neglect the world’s pain and grief.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, author,
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, tells how, as a small boy in Auschwitz, he
discovered “the kingdom of night.” That small boy now asks him – and asks us,
since now we know! -- “Tell me, what have you done with my future? What have
you done with your life?” Wiesel responds, I tell him that I have tried.
That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who
would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And
that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure
suffering and humiliation . . . . No one is as capable of gratitude as the one
who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a
moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray
them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who
desperately need us.
All those who desperately need us. And the
one who rises as the victim for all on this day – who breaks everything, even
his heart, to include the whole world – this Jesus of Nazareth, Christ of the
Cosmos, asks of us, “This is my body, broken for you. Do this,
remembering me.” Do this re-membering me. Praise the Lord, Christ is risen.
CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED!! Amen.
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