Roger Ray, pastor
March 31, 2013 Easter
Isaiah 65:17-25
17For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 18But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 19I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. 20No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. 21They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. 23They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord-- and their descendants as well. 24Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 25The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
Things are happening so fast these days that I feel almost as if I were tied in chains only being allowed to preach once a week and to write a newspaper column every two weeks. Most days I am limited to shouting at the television as I switch from news channel to news channel, sometimes at a pace that is something like starring right into a strobe light.
There are a lot of topics about which we need to be vigilant. With some fear of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I do have some fear that our economy, especially the economy of the very wealthy, has become predicated on a perpetual state of war and that as the military spending in Afghanistan and Iraq wind down, we are being set up to accept another war in either Iran or North Korea or both.
My heart is breaking over the rapid retreat of those who were willing to work for real gun law reform in the wake of Sandy Hook, as Americans once again demonstrate that their short attention span is the greatest weapon in the NRA's arsenal.
But on the positive side, we now have two cases under consideration by the Supreme Court that many of us who have advocated for the civil rights of the gay and lesbian community have worked for and prayed for these past decades. I remember taking part in a demonstration on the campus of MSU several years ago as the then president of MSU resolutely refused to add sexual orientation to the university's non-discrimination policy. I shouted at the president from the sidewalk below his office window: "We are in the right and we have already won, you just don't know it yet."
For the past 15 years there has been relatively little evidence that I was right, but little by little we have seen progress. Nine states now have legalized same sex marriage. Of course, it is legal to have sex with a horse in 23 states so America still has a good deal of catching up to do when it comes to our maturity in these matters.
Last year, Vice President Joe Biden either very cleverly or very clumsily announced his belief that same sex marriage should be legal, which forced the president to also get over his silly insistence that his views were "evolving". Once the president had sided with same sex couples, the NAACP felt compelled to let their long standing prejudice fall since then we have seen a virtual domino effect in public opinions.
The German philosopher (1788 - 1860), Arthur Schopenhauer, observed 200 years ago that, "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Many of us here have lived through the ridicule and the violent opposition.
Some of our gay members have suffered discrimination in employment and you have been treated horribly by family members, fake friends and mean spirited peers in school. Some of us who have been your supporters and advocates have also suffered damaged careers and strained relationships. Through my years of advocating for gay rights from the pulpit I have turned literally hundreds of Christians into Presbyterians, Methodists and Lutherans. Not that there are not gay friendly Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran congregations in other cities but our YouTube viewers must remember that these broadcasts originate in Springfield, Missouri and though things are changing here, most mainstream denominations are still a safe place to hide your prejudices.
A few years ago, Bishop John Shelby Spong announced that he would no longer give an explanation for his support of same sex relationships because, he said, enough time has passed for everyone to have been made aware of the medical, psychological, moral and biblical issues around this topic and now it is time to put the ball in the court of the people who want to defend the prejudice. They are now the ones who need to explain themselves.
As we have seen in early testimony in before the Supreme Court this week, the argument that tries to defend this prejudice is so shallow, so thin and unsubstantial that we have clearly arrived at a time when the truth has become self evident.
It is not necessarily self evident to all nine of the justices and certainly at least three of them will end up voting to uphold DOMA and maybe four or even five of them will but, regardless of the importance afforded to them in the media or even in the constitution, the Supreme Court doesn't get to determine what is true and what is not true.
I would say to them what I said to MSU's president fifteen years ago..... we have already won it is just a matter of them deciding if they want to be on the right side of history or if they want their legacy to make them look like George Wallace blocking the door to black students at the University of Alabama fifty years ago.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The arc of time is long but it bends towards justice." That fact is not always visible because progress is often very slow. I have, for many years in this community, been labeled as a radical and there are not more than two or three pastors in this city today who are willing to be seen in public with me but things that I said that seemed to be so radical when the church was just sure that homosexuality was a sin and that Jesus really wanted us to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq just don't seem all that radical anymore do they?
Mohandas Gandhi said to his own family, "Never Apologize For Being Correct. Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth. For being correct. For being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you're right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."
On this Easter Sunday when so many churches are teeming with people who have come to be told once again that Jesus died for their sins and was raised from the dead by God so that they will all live forever in heaven, I invite you who have found your way into this very small crowd in this tiny church to set aside that self serving religious message to think about resurrection in a different way.
I do not believe that substitutionary death and a promise of eternal life is what the resurrection meant to the disciples in the mid first century and I don't think that line of thinking will find many adherents in the future, though for now it seems radical to many to contradict that line of thinking.
I believe that Jesus was a preacher of radical compassion who stood up to the religious authorities who condemned everyone who wasn't as pious as they were and he stood up to the empire that oppressed his people and to the economic system that enslaved and impoverished his people and that his message of defiance and radical compassion got him killed by the empire and I do not doubt that he was betrayed by members of his religious community, his family and his school peers and don't we all know something about that?
I believe that the empire killed him to shut him up and the religious teachers of guilt and piety walked away from his tomb thinking that they had ended that message but that his followers believed that what he had to say had a life that could not be held in a tomb and that the truth he represented couldn't be judged by a Supreme Court or a high priest.
I believe that they experienced his living presence among them and they were willing to follow his example, even if it led to their own deaths rather than to cower in the face of Rome's cross and the tomb.
I believe that resurrection means that even if you kill Jesus the gospel is still preached. Even if you kill Gandhi, and murder King and imprison Mandela there are things that prisons and graves can't hold. I believe that the meaning of resurrection is that you, you, you the faith community still stands up to the empire.... That you refuse to give up....
That even though the arc of time is long that we will bend it towards justice even if we have to use our own flesh and blood to do it.
Two weeks before he was assassinated, El Salvador's archbishop, Oscar Romero, said, "I have often been threatened with death. If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality."
Turning Jesus into a God whose relevance is confined to some pie-in-the-sky hope of heaven is, in my opinion, just another way of stuffing him back into the tomb to shut him up. But we are done with that stuff. His blood, like the blood of the prophets who came before him and the saints who have followed him, now runs in your veins. You are the resurrection. You are the prophets. You are the apostles and saints and some of you will be figuratively and maybe even literally the martyrs who make resurrection real.
And so we rise up to defend the people rejected by organized religion. We have risked our good names, reputations and careers to defend those the world would have abused and this year we will see substantial victory in some areas and we must remain vigilant, resolved and very very loud to avoid tragic decisions in other areas.
Though we mean different things when we say it, I will add my voice to the liturgical expression of the church through the centuries...... He is not dead, he is risen..... I see him among you and I will not lose faith.
