“Resurrection is not a Fact, it is an Opportunity”
Today's Easter message consists of 4 vignettes coupled with 4 original musical compositions of David Greathouse. Hearing all four will require clicking on four different videos or podcasts. Our YouTube channel can be found at CCCSPRINGFIELD and our iTunes channel is called Progressive Faith Sermons. The link provided here takes you to the first of the 4 vignettes.
Easter – April 16, 2017 Community Christian Church of Springfield,
MO
Roger Ray, pastor
I know very well that in churches across our nation, throughout
the Americas, as well as in Africa, Australia, in Europe, Great Britain, Asia,
and the Indian subcontinent, churches will gather to hear the Easter story
recounted as a promise of eternal life after our mortal deaths. This is one of
a small fraction of churches where we will not take that approach though I want
to talk about resurrection in several ways that are meaningful to us and to me.
From the dawn of human consciousness, there has been a fierce
resistance within us to the suggestion that one day the universe will go on
without us. Trees are cut down and burned in our fireplaces. Chickens, pigs,
and cows are harvested for our meals and all of that seems normal enough. But
we can’t accept our own demise as easily.
The oldest story we know of comes to us from Sumer, it is the
Gilgamesh Epic. Gilgamesh was a Herculean character who was so strong that no
one could restrain his lusty and gluttonous habits and so the people called out
to the gods to send a champion, someone who could rival Gilgamesh in strength.
And so the gods sent Enkidu. I’ll spare you the details but after some rather
earthy battles, the two became great friends and went on superhuman adventures,
but then, mortality strikes and Enkidu is killed.
Gilgamesh, the poem says, grieved so that he could not even leave
the side of the fallen Enkidu, sitting there for days until, and this is the
sort of detail you get in an ancient Sumerian poem, a worm fell from Enkidu’s
nostril.
Hold onto your breakfast! Unable to accept Enkidu’s death,
Gilgamesh sets out to find the place where the dead go that he might find the
secret of resurrection, of eternal life. Again, sparring you a lot of details
of the story, the upshot of this grand journey was the message that death was
both inevitable and final… religious people keep trying to find a loop hole in
that narrative and many say that they have found it but whenever some cult
comes along that believes it with enough certainty to commit suicide to embrace
the next life, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus all say that they were
crazy, a cult, or a heretic. As Sean has sung for us several times, “everybody
wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”
Resurrection may be a religious denial of the reality of mortality
for most church going folks but for me resurrection is a fierce, a bold, a
determined, facing of reality. There are a lot of things that take life away
from us that don’t kill us. People can acquiesce to a hostile and meaningless
marriage that sucks life out of you one day at a time. You can trade your life
for a meaningless job that ruins your health and seals your hours while filling
you with boredom and drudgery.
And, of course, there are deaths that come unbidden from external
sources…. Warfare, corrupt governments, chronic poverty, and personal deaths
through illness or inescapable poverty.
David’s song, “Purpose in the Pain” takes the various deaths of
life seriously and asks the question that Job asked of God, “Is there a reason
for all of this?” Is there some purpose to so much suffering, so many
deaths?
On the one hand I am inclined to say that we live in a capricious
universe. The world is sometimes just mean and senseless…. Or as the bumper
sticker said:
Stuff happens. But on the other hand, suffering can be
instructive, it can be transformative, it can, in fact, be redemptive.
Ten years ago I was fired by a denominational church that I had
given a huge portion of my adult life to. The end of that ministry was a
nightmare. People I had loved sat back and watched, people I had trusted lied,
people I had believe, with good reason, could be counted on to do the right
thing in almost every situation, apparently lost all connection to reality or
morality.
What I can say about that now, though it felt a lot like a public
assassination, the experience has ended up being very educational, even
transformative, and dare I say “redemptive?” It liberated me from the last
vestiges of a dying and sick theology. It set me free to follow the path of
reason to truth wherever truth could be found.
That does not retroactively make what was said and done in those
dark days a morally neutral event… far from it, but a kind of resurrection can
make the memory of the pain less and less significant.
Even the resurrection narratives in Matthew, Luke, and John,
insist that Jesus came back to life with all of his scars intact. We don’t have
to deny our wounds, we just have to deny them the right to define us. We don’t
have to keep renting space in our skulls to the person we used to be married
to, the person who didn’t keep their promises, or to the employer, the school,
the church, that did us wrong.
I will offer a few images of resurrection that are rooted in this
world, in our mortal existence and we will punctuate these short stories with
music by our local singer and songwriter, David Greathouse…. Or we will
punctuate some of David Greathouse’s music with some prose offerings from me….
I’ll let you be the judge of which is the correct perspective….
DG’s song, “Purpose in the Pain”
If I had to do it all
again you know I wouldn’t change a thing
But I’d like to know the
reason for the sunshine and the rain
And I’d like to know the
purpose in the pain.
As another day is laid
to rest the city cries herself to sleep
And her children do the
best they can
To make it on the
streets
And in the midst of all
her darkness
There’s a light on in
her eyes
That searches reams of
reason and begs to be told why
Why’s it all so hard? Is
there anyone to blame?
And if He counts us all
as equals Why aren’t we all the same?
Where is it we go to? Do
we ever begin again?
What’s the motive for
the madness? What’s the purpose in the pain?
I live my life in wonder
and I love to laugh and sing
If I had to do it all
again you know I wouldn’t change a thing
But I’d like to know the
reason for the sunshine and the rain
And I’d like to know the
purpose in the pain
********************************************
DG’s song, “The Sound that Love Makes
In the time in between
it is fleeting and faint, it just seems to have little to say
Like whispers awash in
the wind it is lost in the noise of a world disarrayed
It laughs like a child
for the lovers, cries the lonely to sleep in its arms
It flies on the furious
wings of the scorned and it tries to make sense for those harmed
Reason denies it. Belief
amplifies it. But nothing can keep it at bay
There’s the sound that
love makes when it triumphs. There’s the sound that love makes when it fails
And the sound that love
makes is abundant and free like adventure-bound wind in your sails
There’s the sound that love makes when someone falls in it or when
someone gives up and dives in
There’s the sound that love makes when discovered and there’s the
sound that love makes when it ends
It is the sight in the eyes of the blinded and might in the fight
for the weak
An anthem of hope for the hopeless defeated and a voice for a
choice that can speak
It’s vespers and pslams, fettered dreams of the longing set free
to become what they seek
Its melody carries no memory and its harmony knows no regret
Its rhythms can drive the meek into wild and the mild into
passion’s duet
Symphonies soar for it. Poets adore it. But no one has captured it
yet
There’s the sound that love makes when forsaken. There’s the sound
that love makes when it flees
There’s the sound that love makes when it’s taken for granted like
a stone thrown into the sea
There’s the sound that love makes to preside over grieving like
the sweet singing comfort of rain
Seeping in deep to remember the receiver ‘til they’re ready for
laughter again
There’s the sound that love makes when forsaken. There’s the sound
that love makes when it flees
There’s the sound that love makes when it’s taken for granted like
a stone thrown into the sea
There’s the sound that love makes to preside over grieving like
the sweet singing comfort of rain
Seeping in to redeem the receiver ‘til they’re ready for laughter
again
There’s the sound that love makes when it blunders and the sound
doesn’t make any sense
And the sound that loves makes roars like thunder when the sound
that love makes is incensed
It holds all hope for the future and releases regret from the past
And all that is worthy of memory is shared with any who ask
It speaks in the echoes of laughter and it rings in the halls of
the heart
Its mercies are tender and heal the surrendered but bitter when
broken apart
The source of forgiveness, a recourse for weakness, and, of
course, it is peace at its core
The sound that love makes resounds unabated with boots on the
march against hate tolerated
You can hide. You can fly. But you can not evade it
It will fill up the world ‘til it’s past saturated and every last
soul is soaked through
With the sound that love makes.
Before we were able to buy this building, we met in rented space
in an executive conference center. I had an office that doubled as a storage
room, which is basically what I have now in this small building. But during
those months I had two young men in counseling for addiction issues. Although I
did my master’s thesis on addiction treatment, I really don’t like doing it
because the success rate is not very high. I often find myself wanting my
client to succeed more than he or she wants to succeed. I pour my heart and
soul into their sobriety only to see them relapse and sometimes relapse
repeatedly until they die.
In those days when I moved carts loaded with hymnals, and a
roll-away piano aside to make room for them to sit down next to me, I feared
that neither one would survive. The first young man, I’ll call Adam, was living
with his grandmother after his parents had kicked him out for stealing from
them and for lots of arrests. He began stealing from his grandmother and
graduated from alcohol to meth.
Adam died one night in Joplin when, while partying with other meth
addicted friends, the police were called. Adam was non-compliant which is
fairly predictable when you are high on meth. The police, in their testosterone
driven enthusiasm, repeatedly hit him with their Tasers until he died on the
scene from a heart attack. He was 21 years old.
The other young man, I’ll call Cain, had, in my opinion, showed
less promise of recovery than had Adam and his relapses were the stuff of
legend, often reported in TV news segments and newspaper stories. Like Adam, he
was surrounded by family who loved him, who encouraged him, who refused to see
him as an addict and a failure no matter how much he tried to convince them
otherwise. Cain survived. More than survived, he thrived, and became not only a
successful person but a loving person who contributes to society… he married,
he became a father, a true friend to many, and a real live piece of evidence
that even though resurrection is not a certain promise, it is a potential. This
is not a religious story. This is a real life story of resurrection.
David sings about the sounds that love makes. Not all of those
sounds are sounds of passion or poetry of lofty affection.
Sometimes it is the sound of a heart breaking when a recovering
addict has a slip and then another slip, and usually a third one and a fourth
one.
I know the statistics about spouse abuse…. That a woman will leave
a violent relationship and return to it about seven times before either leaving
permanently, to freedom or to a coffin. I know the numbers but what makes it
hard is that I also know some of the
names. I have had to share a meal with a woman, begging her not to go
back to her abuser…. I’m a pastor so they will usually lie to me and tell me what
they think I want to hear, but I know from the posture and the darting eyes
that they are going back, and I have to let them. Sometimes love just makes the
sound of a sigh.
For those on the outside, it seems like the addict can just stop.
It seems like the domestic violence victim could just leave. But for those of
us who love someone on the other side of resurrection, well, it is for us to
keep making the sounds of love. It doesn’t mean enabling or even believing the
lies. But it does mean having faith in the potential of resurrection.
DG’s song, “Black Snake”
In the name of the
progress of man
His fatal addiction,
this ancient prediction
Comes slithering,
ushering days to an end
And the inky black god
of the filthy black crude
Dictates the dogma
that's spouted as truth
Brandishing ignorance,
as the ignorant do
The death rattle of
reason in a dark age of fools
There are toxins in the
aquifers
Moccasins crossing
sacred waters
Poised to strike our
sons and daughters
May, someday, they
forgive their fathers
Oh, the black snakes
come oozing from the tar and the silt
Coursing through leaky
extrusions we built
Bringing rivers of
riches to thieves free from guilt
For the rape of a nation
they'd just as soon kill
An unslakable avarice
strikes from the black abyss
Armored by pious
purveyors of grift
And the ancestral bones
of those who resist it
Are bulldozed and broken
in its wake as it hisses
And the servants the
serpent has charmed
Revisit the past on the
peaceful, unarmed
Trespassing on trust of
unheeded treaties
And driven by lust of
the bloated and greedy
There are toxins in the aquifers
Moccasins crossing sacred waters
Poised to strike our sons and daughters
May, someday, they forgive their fathers
When the water is poisoned and black
There'll be no bringing paradise back
Explain that to the pleading, young eyes of the offspring
Bequeathed the depleted and fracked
We left toxins in the aquifers
Moccasins in the sacred waters
Waiting for our sons and daughters
Can they ever forgive their fathers?
Toxins in the aquifers
Moccasins in sacred waters
Bound to strike our sons and daughters
I am one of the nostalgia suckers who goes to see all of the comic
book movies… the good ones, the mediocre ones, and the really really bad ones.
I go because these films are all of a piece of cloth. They depict the battle
between good and evil and the good always eventually wins…. Which, as exciting
and entertaining as that narrative can be, it has absolutely no root in
reality.
Reality is a very uncomfortable blending of good and evil. The
people who do the worst things in the world often also have amazingly redeeming
qualities. Some of the most laudable heroes of righteous causes also have
horrible flaws and limitations. I have done relief work in Ecuador and
Nicaragua, and have paid bribes to government officials in both places just to
be allowed to deliver medicines to sick people.
I made eight trips with teams of volunteers to help the victims of
Katrina on the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi and though we did a lot of
good work in that tragedy, I am not unaware of the theft and corruption all
around me, taking advantage of the good will of donors and volunteers. I have
participated in relief efforts here in Missouri following ice storms and the
Joplin tornado and have seen how institutions like the Red Cross and United Way
have exploited tragedy for profit.
Last year we were transfixed by the gathering protest at Standing
Rock, North Dakota, as first nation peoples and their friends stood up to the
construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Thousands of people
representing some 200 different Indian tribes, Veterans, and persons of
conscience not only from America but from native tribes from the Middle East
and Europe came to suffer peacefully from the abuses of police and security
guards as well as the weather itself, from the blistering heat of summer to the
outrageous blizzard that Dan and I endured there in December.
It was a beautiful and heroic peaceful protest that demonstrated
daily the difference between the self-sacrifice of the protesters and the
violence and greed of the pipeline company. Still, I knew when I headed north
into the blizzard with a load of cold weather supplies, that the pipeline
company would eventually win. Trump had been elected, three billion dollars had
been spent, and there was no way around the fact that the pipeline would be
finished.
And, to be honest, there were some horrifying aspects to the camp
of protestors where there was rape, sexual harassment, and a lot of theft and
con artists. If you went to the Standing Rock Camp looking for an idyllic
utopia of principled protestors….well, you would have had moments of tremendous
reward but you would have also been heart broken in a lot of other moments.
Marvel comic movies have good guys fighting bad guys but, folks,
that is the stuff of comic books. In the real world the good guys have flaws
and the bad guys sometimes do good things. The real battle of ethics is always
fought in a fog and if there is ever any real clarity, it comes only after the
battle is over. If you set out to do good things in a world torn asunder by
greed, violence, prejudice, and abuse, don’t expect to finish the day without
getting your hands dirty.
In the weeds of the particulars, there are a lot of convoluted
motivations. But when you look at the big picture, that is when it starts to
become clear. There were rapists, con artists, and lazy beggars among the
protestors but on the other side of the barricades there was a pipeline company
that was willing to put the water supply of millions of people at risk for a
very temporary profit.
The pipeline was what the Indians called metaphoracially “the
black snake” – a mythic character that threatened to eat the earth. Beyond all
of the particulars, this became a battle between a corporation that was willing
to eat up the earth along with its soil and water for profit and a people who
were willing to use their own bodies to protect the water and the earth.
That’s a noble cause, right? That is the kind of battle that if
Marvel was doing a movie about it, the Indians would win and the pipeline would
have been destroyed. But in the real world, the pipeline was finished and it is
now pumping toxic crude oil under the Missouri River and the protestors are
dispersed. So we lost…. We were defeated…..well, maybe yes and maybe no.
During the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, Native
Americans never managed to get organized enough to have a voice. The plight of
Black Americans was greatly improved in that time…. Prejudice was not swinging
from a scaffold and integration is hardly complete but there was a lot of
progress. But the plight of Native Americans was not much changed.
The victory at Standing Rock, if I may dare to call it that, is
that dozens and dozens of tribes actually stopped fighting with each other and
they worked together in common cause to protect water and the earth. And they
brought indigenous people from Finland, Holland, and Palestine, and they
brought white people from all over America, to sit around sacred fires, to
pray, to chant…. You should have seen Dan when a grandmother came over with a
smudge pot to purify him…..
it was new for him…. Weirder things have happened to me but it was
new for Dan to throw a little sage and tobacco into a sacred fire… but you
don’t leave that experience unchanged.
We went to North Dakota to stand with our Sioux sisters and
brothers in the face of the Black Snake and maybe they won this battle but, I
believe, the seeds were planted to win the war. Resurrection doesn’t always
happen all at once but I believe that I see the beginning of an Easter Sunrise
for America’s first nations. DAPL was finished and it is pumping poison through
the Missouri River but I would be willing to bet that it represents the end of
an era because there is now new cooperation, new awareness, new partnerships in
a resurrected Native America. I’m not always right, but on this one, I am
surely not wrong.
Who is a Refugee?
DG’s Song, “Shine On”
Did you light burn the eyes of those souls in the dark?
Is that why they tend to extinguish your spark?
Because one little light doesn’t pose any threat
Unless you’re the darkness
that bans lanterns lit
Chorus
Sine on little light, too bright for sorrow
Shine on little light. Remind us we’re bright lights too
Shine on with the light redefining tomorrow
We mold in the strengthening hands
Demanding the future is not only man’s
Shine on little light. Delight in your wonder
Shine on ‘til the old walls, asunder, fall
Crack the night with the light that prefaces thunder
Abandon illiterate fears and luminous wisdom appears
Shine on little light. Shine on!
I’m not a musician and I cannot claim
to find my fingerprints on much in the musical world except for when Sean sets
one of my prayers to music or when we play fast and loose with someone else’s
lyrics. But this song that David sang may be a byproduct of a sermon I
delivered a few years ago.
David and I have a mutual friend, Tim
Piland. Tim likes to write plays and one sleepless weekend, Tim stayed up all
night listening to my sermons on YouTube and he heard one in which I talked at
length about my hero, Malala Yousafzai. Tim decided to write a play about
Malala and he turned to David and asked him to write music for the play and
“Shine On” is at least a first installment. I don’t know if the project has
progressed from there but I insist on at least an honorary mention in the
footnotes.
Malala is now a refugee from Pakistan
living sometimes in the UK and sometimes in the USA. There are now more than 5
million refuges who have fled the civil war in Syria, one of whom will be our
keynote speaker at our August Conference this year. But not all refuges are
fleeing from war or terrorists or the threat of death.
Some are just trying to escape
insanity in order to breath freely and to give their children a chance to have
a normal life. One of those is a listener of ours:
Mikhail Lipyanskiy is an
adjunct instructor in Comparative Literature at Queens College and John Jay
College.
No, we did not come from a war-torn country. No, we did not
escape bomb threats and militants. But we are refugees. We came seeking shelter
and opportunity – to the land that was the epitome of both. I should not need
to exonerate my status by debating the conditions of pre-and-post-perestroika
Ukraine. We knew well enough who we were. It said so on our passports, on our
birth certificates and, let’s be honest, on our faces. When in the third grade
I was accosted by a bully seven years my senior who came up to me, as I was “on
duty” in the halls of our school – I was not surprised. Not by the attack, not
by the “Save Russia, kill the Jews!” that he yelled as he punched me right in
the stomach…No, that was expected. It had happened before, whether physical or
mental – discrimination was ubiquitous. Whether it was in schools, or at work,
in colleges or in the army. It was not our religion we were despised for; it
was not even our blood. It was simply our “otherness” that was so easily
scapegoated. We were the “enemy within” – a target for those who could not
understand why their own life was terrible.
There is an old Soviet joke – a truckload of bread was promised
to be delivered to a local store. By 6 AM there was a line of people patiently
waiting for bread. At noon the director of the market came out and announced
that the truck will be late, and the shipment smaller than originally promised.
No Jews will be allowed to buy bread. At 6 PM, there was still no bread, and
the director once again came out to make his announcement. The truck will be
later still, and the shipment even smaller. Only veterans of WWII will be
allowed to buy the bread. At midnight, the director finally announced that
there will be no bread today. The grumbling crowd dispersed, and one person
could be heard telling another “Did you see? Again the Jews lucked out! They
didn’t have to wait!”
And so, we came here… not so fast. Let’s take a step back. Came
here how? Refugee vetting is no simple matter – “extreme” or not! First, one
must gather all the documents, in several copies, with English translations. Oh
– that is the easy part, right? Do you think the clerk didn’t know why you
wanted the copies? Do you think they didn’t hate you for “getting out”? Surely,
they did…And you needed them to like you, to be your friend. Thus you begin to
sell things, books first, then heirlooms, then whatever is left. To the last
penny. And you lie. A lot. At school, at work, at home…even to your friends…
because “who knows?”
What if you don’t get the status…what then? A year and a half
later, after an interview in Moscow, after bowing and scraping, after multiple
boxes of chocolate and cognac with envelopes full of “gratitude” to every clerk
that had to stamp or copy or print some basic document, you are finally granted
that magical status of a “refugee”.
You are now free to gather your bags. Nope, sorry, your bag.
Only one, per person – that’s it, basta! Put your life in that suitcase,
but leave room for a pillow and a blanket (because those, we are told, are
expensive in “Amerika”). Tell your children they can have one stuffed toy to
bring. Maybe two… maybe a few plastic soldiers. Then you sell everything that
is still left, everything you can – perhaps you will gather enough for a
month’s rent in that magical country that you are hoping to get to… You sell
your apartment too, for a sliver of what it is worth, to a man who makes sure
that you understand he is doing you a huge favor; he takes all
the risk (oh the martyr) by buying an apartment from a “traitor”. And you get
yourself to Moscow.
The last goodbyes from friends and relatives, the last
humiliation too, as the border agents take anything they can from your already
pilfered possessions. They tell your children that the toy in their hands does
not fit into the suitcase and thus will not be allowed through, too bad. And
then – only then – do you board that plane to freedom…
I cannot imagine the terror in the hearts of those refugees who
were “turned back”. Stop. That’s not true. Yes I can. I can imagine
– because I am not afraid of empathy. I am not afraid to remember the fear and
the excitement that “Amerika” represented to us, to refugees. I will not be
suckered into the “chaos vs order” narrative. I will not buy the false
civilizational mythology of survival. We are not separate civilizations. “They”
are not agents of chaos.
When the militants destroy ancient artifacts in Iraq – it is not
“their” history being destroyed. It is mine, ours! Where would
we be without ancient Mesopotamia? Without Ur, Babylon, Ashur and Nineveh? What
about the medieval Damascus? The centers of science and literature and law… Our
civilization does not depend on their destruction. It never did. Our
civilization has moved past that myth of survival. Look around – we are all the
same. We are all refugees in this land. We came seeking shelter and
opportunity. We came to earn a better life, not to take it. I am a Refugee. I
am an American. I am a Jew. I am a Muslim. I am you.
