Roger Ray, pastor
April 8, 2012 Easter
John 20:11-18
11But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." 14When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." 16Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
I'm not sure it is an apology but I at least want to acknowledge to our visitors today and to those of you joining us on YouTube and iTunes that this may be about the strangest Easter sermon you have ever heard.
I remember hearing a lecture delivered by Brite Divinity School homiletics professor, Joey Jeter, several years ago in which he was berating preachers for delivering such dull and horrible Easter sermons when, in fact, Easter is not only the church's traditionally largest crowd but also the central witness of the faith. Frankly, I couldn't have agreed with him more. I had heard a lot of bad Easter sermons and I had delivered a lot of bad Easter sermons. In fact, I had heard Joey Jeter deliver an uncommonly bad Easter sermon.
The problem was not that every preacher in the room was so intimidated by the larger crowd but, in fact, the problem is the message itself..... when you start with the premise that we are all so bad that God had to kill himself and then rewards us for being willing to believe that outrageous claim with eternal life in heavenly bliss, then your sales pitch is already on pretty shaky ground.
You cannot reasonably fault the gathering of preachers for not being able to successfully sell that story to a modern audience. The whole notion of substitutionary death, which may have appealed to an ancient culture still familiar with animal sacrifice to appease demonic gods, only stuck in western culture because we spent centuries promising children that they would burn in hell if they didn't believe it and that form of cruel mistreatment of children just doesn't have legs in the modern era and for that we can be thankful.
But the traditional church, faced with the fact that its central message was losing its power in our generation decided to try to reinvigorate the church by infusing the old message with fresh contemporary religious music and to illustrate bad theology with video clips and a little high tech razzle dazzle, supplemented with a great basketball program and a Starbucks in the lobby.
All of which rather reminds me of mortuary sciences. You know, when you walk up to the casket of a deceased neighbor and someone says, "They look just like they were sleeping,"..... and you are not allowed to say, "Actually they look dead to me and more than that, it looks like he is wearing way too much makeup!"
The church tried to switch a dead message with a different body.... Or to gussy up the old cadaver with convincing lighting and makeup and, by and large, discerning people just aren't buying it.
The cover of this week's Newsweek magazine shows an image of Jesus wearing casual street clothes and standing in a busy New York street. The cover bears the caption, "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus" which is the choice more and more of us are making.
Historical Jesus scholarship of the past 200 years has left us with little doubt that the real Jesus was killed by the Roman government, not because he was a divine blood offering but because he was a threat to the security and authority of the state. He was an advocate for the poor. He was in conflict with the economic and government systems which abused the poor and vulnerable, the sick, the widow and the orphan. He challenged the dominant religious system's focus on piety and instead taught radical compassion, forgiveness and love.
The later church and the much later empire all but extinguished the real message of Jesus that got him killed and replaced that message with a lot of religious doctrines about atonement, redemption and after-life salvation but that is not the message of Jesus and those of us in the progressive movement are tired of trying to square the message of Jesus with the message of Constantinian religion.
The real message of Easter, if you take the metaphor seriously, is that the empire killed Jesus but the message did not stay in the tomb. The message of Jesus cannot be killed. You cannot kill an idea. You cannot imprison a message.
You look at the creeds that emerged from the Empire's meeting at Nicaea.... It is all about the virgin birth, the crucifixion and the resurrection but not a word about what Jesus taught. They could not keep the message in the tomb in Jerusalem and so the empire put it in a much more secure tomb, the tomb of the church, the tomb of the creeds.
In his Newsweek article, Andrew Sullivan, references the opinion of Thomas Jefferson; that the teachings of Jesus were buried in the embellishments of the evangelists like "diamonds" in a "dunghill," glittering as "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered" to the world.
What was literarily obvious to Thomas Jefferson has been more substantially proven by later Biblical historians. And even if you are reticent to reference the miracle accounts and all of the substitutionary death, incarnation and creedal beliefs of both scripture and the church as a dung heap.... Still, you have to at least treasure the diamonds that are the teachings of Jesus.
We don't have a big beef with traditional Christians if only they will also listen to what Jesus taught.... But, to use Jefferson's words, most of the church keeps trying to preach the dung hill while they ignore the diamonds..... and that's something we're not willing to even play along with any longer.
Jefferson cut those "diamonds" out of his Bible and pasted them together as a much slimmer version of the Christian message and it was not just for his own purposes but he had his heavily edited version of the gospels reprinted at tax payer expense and copies were given to every member of Congress.... Something that would have led to impeachment in our era but people were much more open minded 200 years ago than they are now.
Jesus did not come to earth to be a sacrifice for our sins but he was killed because he fought against the poverty, injustice, judgment and the cruelty of the world and if you are willing to be a follower of Jesus then you can expect some of the same treatment that he received. Thankfully, crucifixion has gone out of vogue but imprisonment and persecution have not.
The application of the teachings of Jesus to our day, once rescued from the dung heap of religious language and superstition, drives the progressive church to be concerned about matters of international peace, about poverty, about prejudice and oppression and violence and about protecting the environment. We will either address the teachings of Jesus to those issues in the 21st century or the church will go out of existence and, frankly, if we fail to aggressively address those issues, we should go out of existence.
But we can expect to meet fierce opposition. Many of you are familiar, I am sure, with the case of Tim DeChristopher, an environmental activist in Utah. In 2008, at the end of the Bush administration, the Bureau of Land Management was holding an auction of oil and mineral rights on federal lands near national parks.
DeChristopher and others became aware of the auction which had been set up in disregard for the legal standards governing those lands, so DeChristopher attended, registering himself falsely as a bidder and bid nearly $2 million dollars for some of the mineral rights.
Of course, he didn't have any money, he was just trying to call attention to the illegal event. He embarrassed the Bureau of Land Management and so, even though bidders often can't come up with the money they pledged, they decided to make an example of this environmental activist and he was charged and sent to prison. His continued writing and testifying to the press has now resulted in an undisclosed member of Congress having him secretly moved into solitary confinement so that he can no longer leak stories to the media.
The people DeChristopher was outbidding for these illegal oil and mineral rights were none other than the infamous Koch brothers of Kansas.... Whose political clout is suspected of being behind having DeChristopher denied his rights as an American citizen. As I said, crucifixion is out of vogue but they keep trying to put the message back into the tomb.
I hate conspiracy theorists and I have walked out of very many liberal political meetings when people start to go off the deep end. The only good reason to be a liberal is to be open minded enough to embrace the truth, no matter what the consequences may be but no one should be so open minded that their brains fall out. Scaring one another with outrageous rumors of political power abuses only serves to marginalize the movement.
But I will tell you something today that is absolutely true. Last month President Obama signed an innocuously named bill, HR 347, entitled, "Federal Restricted Building and Grounds Improvement Act." That sounds kind of like it is all about trimming hedges and mowing the grass around federal buildings doesn't it. But it is better known as the "Anti-Occupy Bill" because it appears to have been aimed at giving police the authority to arrest and imprison anyone involved in the Occupy movement. This year, as spring brings back the protests against the massive income disparity that is turning America into a third world economy with a tiny aristocracy and a massive peasant, protests that we participated in legally last year are now deemed to be illegal.
In Jefferson's day, which was certainly more dangerous than our own, democracy was protected by a bill of rights that guaranteed freedom of speech.
Now, in the 21st century, the right of citizens to peacefully assemble and protest was taken away by a nearly unanimous vote of Congress.... Only three votes dissented.... Republicans and Democrats alike are afraid of the Occupy protests that will certainly resume this spring.
I would have like to have believed that our own Claire McCaskill might have helped to lead the Democratically controlled Senate to vote against this violation of free speech but it passed by general consensus in the Senate, avoiding a roll call vote that would have recorded how each member of the Senate voted. And President Obama signed it.
There will almost certainly be people arrested this year in peaceful demonstrations, protesting the corporate control of our economy and our government. Because, men and women, the Empire always wants to keep Jesus in the tomb.
The empire will let us out if we promise to keep the diamonds of the ethical teachings of Jesus hidden in a dung hill of bad boring hymns, incomprehensible dogmas, prayers, rituals and magical incantations but if you try to take the compassionate message of Jesus into the streets of the United States, the nation that wants to believe that it is the most freedom loving nation in the world, you may very well get to see the inside of prison cell this year.
They can imprison a corpulent cleric but they cannot entomb the truth. We will not stand idly by and give silent consent to the abuse of the elderly, the poor, the sick, the immigrant or the mentally ill. Protests that many of us participated in quite legally last fall may now be considered to be federal violations of law so a lot of people will be intimidated into silence.
I promise you that I will not be intimidated into silence, though I have no special desire to be arrested or imprisoned and I certainly hope that those of you still walking around outside won't forget about me and let them move me into solitary confinement as they have Tim DeChristopher.
The meaning of Easter is that the message of Jesus cannot be crucified, entombed, imprisoned or silenced as long as there is a community of faith that has the courage to rise up from the tomb and walk away from the irrelevance, magic, superstition, and ignorance that the empire wants to saddle us with. You are not dead so, I invite you not to act like you are.
Believe the good news of the gospel. The tomb is empty.... The tomb is empty because the church refused to play dead!
