The First Easter

 

March 31, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

I hope that all of you listening to this message today are having and will have a very happy Easter holiday and I hope that your family and friends have been able to gather around for a splendid dinner together. Whether you have young children who have had a smaller “second Christmas” with new clothes and a chocolate filled Easter basket or if you went to church today to hear, once again, that infamous Easter sermon that my preaching professor, David Buttrick, always ridiculed as the annual, “Yippee! We’re all going to live forever!” sermon, I would like to take this time to give a rather more sober and yet, I hope, more meaningful and at least a more believable account of the Easter event.

 

This is an extra “out of sequence” video that is not a sermon. This is a Bible lecture which, I’m afraid, may be offensive to traditional Christians but I hope that it will be reassuring and instructive for all of you who just can’t buy into the “yippee, we’re gonna live forever” sermons anymore. 

 

Religious people often believe a lot of things that don’t stand up to intellectual interrogation, some absurd and embarrassing things, but they defend those beliefs by calling it “faith,” which, I am convinced, is unfair. The meaning of the word “faith” has a lot more to do with courage than it does with assassinating your brains. “Accepting something on faith” should not be a pass for believing things for which there is no evidence or, even worse, are clearly not true.

So, to begin, let’s just remember that historically, no one in the bible, none of the apostles nor anyone in the first century church celebrated a holiday called “Easter.” Easter was an invention of the second century church; I will not belabor the roots of the word or the correspondence that we have from the second century about it. I’m just saying, it was not an original fundamental of the earliest Christians.

 

A religion is like a language, it is always evolving. That should not be an embarrassment, nor should it be seen as a criticism. It is just a fact. Let me remind you that the Canterbury Tales, written by Chaucer, is one of the first works written in English but English as it existed 600 years ago. It begins this way:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

 

There is hardly a word of Middle English that is recognizable to the untrained ear, just as Chaucer would be totally lost if he could have somehow heard modern English being spoken. Languages evolve. 

 

Christianity as it existed in the 5^th century, once the New Testament had been formulated and the Catholic Church had begun to take a preliminary shape had very little in common with the faith articulated by Paul and the rest of the New Testament and much less to do with the historical teachings of Jesus. Jesus wouldn’t recognize modern Christianity and modern Christians would not think of the religion of Jesus and his apostles as being recognizable. Religions evolve.

 

Again, that is not a good or bad judgement, that’s just how history unfolds but let’s not kid ourselves; the religion we were taught as children, what was handed down to us from authority figures like our parents, Sunday School teachers, ministers, and community leaders was and is a modern invention. It is not the creation of God but rather it is the creation of an ever-changing culture. I am going to drill down on that more next week but today let’s focus on the Easter event. 

 

The four canonical gospels in our New Testament were not the earliest writings of the New Testament. All four were written decades after Paul had written his letters which we also know from the New Testament. All four gospel writers were familiar with and had some or a lot of respect for the letters of Paul and it is impossible to think that Paul’s letters did not influence the content of those gospels, although he clearly did not have any editorial control of them.

 

It needs to also be said that none of those four gospels, as they exist in print in our Bibles, are in their original form. All four of them underwent revisions and updates, possibly within the lifetimes of their original authors, though the process continued for as much as 900 years after they were first written. 

 

For example, the birth of Jesus is recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but the vocabulary and style of the birth narratives were clearly not written by the same person who wrote the body of those works. Again, if you want to know more about that, write to me and I’ll schedule a time to talk about it.

 

But for our purposes today, it serves to specifically note that Mark, the oldest of the gospels, has an empty tomb narrative but it does not have any accounts of resurrection appearances. If you are aware of the Gospel of Thomas, a possibly earlier first century work, you know that it also does not have resurrection appearances, nor does it mention an empty tomb.

 

Matthew and Luke have accounts of resurrection appearances, but they do not agree with one another. Both form resurrection stories to serve their theological needs and purposes, neither is attempting to record history. John is an early second century work with an entirely different theological agenda and we should not take any part of it as being historical, or even based on history. John is an early second century sermon with an elevated Christology. Again, a huge topic for another day.

 

We have no written accounts of eyewitnesses. The earliest Christian source we have are the authentic letters of Paul. We have several letters in the New Testament that make the claim of having been written by Paul but what scholars agree on as being the authentic letters of Paul are: Romans, I and II Corinthians, I Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon. The pseudo-Pauline letters are 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, Titus, and 1 and 2^nd Timothy. In the New Testament, Paul’s letters are arrange, not in the order in which they are written but rather they are arranged by length, from the longest to the shortest. Romans was probably Paul’s last letter  but because of its length, it appears first in the New Testament.

It is very informative to read all of the New Testament in the order in which it was written. And, you are in luck because one of the best New Testament scholars of modern times, the late Marcus Borg, published the New Testament in chronological order in his book, Evolution of the Word. You can get it on Amazon for $15 or download it on your kindle for $2. 

 

So, for our purposes, we believe that Paul’s first letters are: Thessalonians, Galatians, 1st Corinthians. And we are in luck because the first written account of the Easter event is found in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Now, bear in mind, Paul never met Jesus when he was alive. He wasn’t around on the first Easter. 

 

Much later, he did meet with Peter, James, and John, but he emphatically states that they did not teach him anything and that everything he knows about Jesus he knows by direct revelation. Again, he talks about this in his own hand in Galatians. So, he is not an eyewitness, but he was at least a contemporary of Jesus and the followers of Jesus.

 

And though he claims to not be in any way inferior to the apostles that Jesus actually chose, it is also clear that Paul did inherit some early traditions from the churches he was associated with…. Their stories, in some cases, their hymns, and their practices. We sometimes have to look past Paul’s arrogance, which verges on narcissism, and try to glean what we can from his accidental historical references.

 

Again, I need to offer this warning, a lot of what church folk think they know about Paul is from the book of Acts. Acts was written by a Paul apologist long after Paul was dead, and most scholars insist that the author of Acts never met Paul and was largely inaccurate in his accounts. For our purposes, let’s allow Paul to speak for himself and consider Acts to be fan-boy literature from a generation after Paul had been murdered by Rome.

 

So, that being said, what is it that Paul says about the Easter event in Corinthians?

In 1^st Corinthians 15, we read:

³ For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures⁴ and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

We learn a lot from this short paragraph. From this we know that by the second half of the first century that a shared experience of a post crucifixion Jesus was foundational to the early church and that several people, if not hundreds, had an experience of Jesus after his death. Also, we see here Paul’s belief that Jesus “died for our sins, according to the scriptures.” A historian would probably say that Jesus was executed by the Roman government for insurrection. We get an echo of that in all four canonical gospels when Pilate asks Jesus if he is the King of the Jews and that is the charge that was nailed to the cross. 

 

How do we get from insurrection against Rome to “dying for our sins”? The key is in the phrase, “according to the scriptures.” The early church looked to the writing of Isaiah, primarily, to interpret the life and death of Jesus. Because of his brutal, state sponsored, murder, he is seen as being the “suffering servant” described five hundred years earlier in the poetry of Isaiah. That’s obviously an absurdly labored reading of an ancient text; Isaiah was no more writing about Jesus than Chaucer was writing about me, unless you are determined to read Chaucer that way but, trust me, Chaucer wouldn’t be proud of you if you do.

 

But Paul accounting for the death of Jesus as having been in God’s plan is how religious people often interpret history as if God is a puppet master in the clouds, controlling human events. I don’t think many of us really think that way, but we sometimes talk that way. We will say that God healed a particular child of cancer without regard for how many children die of cancer, or even that God saved you a great parking place at the mall while allowing tens of thousands to die in the Gaza Strip . . . if it were true, God would surely be a monster, but we say these things out of what the Germans called, “heilsgeschichte” or “salvation history,” seeing everything that happens through a lens of faith. 

 

It is helpful to remember that none of the biblical authors were intending to write a history or a science textbook, they were, essentially, writing sermons and sermons are almost always intended to persuade and to teach faith, not science or history. I personally try to be very careful with facts, but you should assume that most preachers have more in common with fishermen than they do with historians or scientists. 

 

Not in this text nor in any other part of Paul’s writing does he speak of an empty tomb on Easter. It would be very unlikely that Paul would have thought that the tomb was empty. What he describes is a visionary experience. And what is more, he says that Peter, then the twelve, then James and 500 others had the same experience that Paul had, a vision or an experience of Jesus after his death. What was that experience? 

 

Again, if you can chase the dramatic gospel accounts out of your head, let’s let Paul speak for himself. I hate to sound like a broken record, but most of us have carried around images of Paul’s Damascus Road encounter with Jesus in our memories but Paul never mentions this experience. This is a literary creation of the author of Acts who is trying to describe Paul’s experience in concrete terms, but you have to wonder, how does Paul describe his experience of Jesus?

 

Again, we do not have to leave this up to conjecture. In Paul’s 2^nd letter to the church in Corinth, in chapter 12, Paul says:

If It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. ² I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. ³ And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— ⁴ was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. ⁵ On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. ⁶ But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. 

What kind of image do you get in your mind from that bit of prose? Nothing, nothing at all, right? Paul is describing what mystics have described in every century in every religion. Somehow, whether physically or just in his mind, he was taken away from normal life up into the presence of God, and Paul says that he saw things that can’t be described and heard things that cannot be repeated. That is how Paul describes his conversion experience in his own words. The way Paul describes his mystical experience is similar to ecstatic experiences described by Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. 

 

Mystics have life changing, indescribable, profound experiences, and they naturally express them in the language that is available to them. If Paul had this experience in India, he might have said that he encountered Krishna. If he had this experience in China, he might have said that he met Buddha. Just as children in Latin America, when they have an ecstatic experience, describe it as having seen Mary. Everyone uses the language and terminology that they are prepared for by their culture. Again, this is not a good or bad judgement. This is just how human cognition and communication works.

 

Now, the words of the book of Acts are full of images, even addresses, it happened on this road, he saw Jesus, he had a short conversation with him, he was struck blind, he later had scales fall from his eyes. 

You could make a movie script out of Acts, you could paint a picture of it . . . in fact, many movies and many paintings have described this event but what they are describing would not have been familiar to Paul because nothing like that ever happened to Paul . . . if it had, he would never have stopped talking about it!

We let the Acts narrative become so powerful in our minds that we elaborate on it and convince ourselves that it is real. When I was at Harvard, I took a class under the now late Peter Gomes, and he was talking about Paul’s conversion in his typical excited story telling way and he exclaimed that Paul was knocked off his horse and was surrounded by light as he laid on the ground. After class, I mentioned to Dr. Gomes that there is no horse in the Acts account. The text just has Paul walking when he was knocked to the ground. There is, however, a horse in many Renaissance paintings of the Damascus Road event. That was the day that I learned that it was never smart to correct Dr. Gomes.        

 

Still, it is easy to get these details confused. What Paul says that he experienced, was a mystical moment in which he cannot recount what was said nor can he even say if he was in his body or out of it when it happened and that, I contend, is the experience that Paul is saying that Peter, the twelve, and James, and hundreds of church members had the week of Easter, the way a tent revival can crank up hundreds of people into having an ecstatic experience . . . an experience which can be very real and even life changing for them but it is not evidence of a resuscitated dead person, or an empty tomb, nor anything of the kind.      

 

When you read the works of the New Testament in the order in which they were written, you can see how the accounts grew and evolved. Paul’s account of being taking up into third heaven, whether bodily or as a vision, becomes, 40 years later, the rather elaborate Damascus Road event we read about in Acts. The mystical vision of a post crucifixion Jesus that Paul describes in II Corinthians becomes a bodily resurrection in Matthew and Luke. 

There are hints of sermonizing even in those resurrection stories in the gospels. I would challenge you to notice that all of them happened on a Sunday. This is, if you miss church, you also don’t ever see Jesus. . . a lesson that Thomas learns all to well, everyone else saw Jesus one Sunday but Thomas went fishing that day and just heard about it. He learned his lesson and went to church the next Sunday and saw Jesus.

 

In Luke’s Emmaus Road account, disciples are walking to their church gathering and Jesus is somehow walking with him, but outside of community, outside of the gathered church, they don’t recognize him. When do they recognize him? Remember the story, it wasn’t until the community was gathered and he broke bread with them. It was communion, only in the community’s observance of the Lord’s Supper did the fog lift and they saw him in their midst, just before he disappeared. 

 

I’m not trying to disparage these accounts, I’m just pointing out that to understand them you must let go of thinking of them as being historical and think of them in the context in which they were written, as sermons, as teaching tools within the community of faith.  They were very important within the early church, but they do not record or convey history.  

 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke were not liars. They were evangelists, just what the church has always called them. They were preachers. They exaggerated the mystical experience of the early saints, making it more concrete and colorfully descriptive for the congregation, but I do not think that they intended these accounts to be solely interpreted as a promise of resurrection for all of us. Paul does articulate that belief among other beliefs but look at how literature treats the dying and rising savior in later centuries. 

 

The resurrection story has power for anyone who is moving from addiction into sober or chemical free living. It has power for anyone who walked up to death’s door with cancer and chemotherapy and has managed to recover health and strength. I can tell you from personal experience, that it has power for someone who has gone through a devastating divorce that felt worse than death but managed, week after week, month after month, year after year, to regain strength and hope for a new life, maybe even a new love.

 

Resurrection in any of these contexts are not insignificant, in fact, that can be life giving, just not in the “yippee, we’re gonna live forever” mythology.

 

Again, it is not my intent to offend people of traditional faith. It is my purpose to offer an academic and critical way of seeing the faith we inherited. As Scott Peck has said, “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.” You may have heard what I said about the first Easter and choose to dismiss my arguments and go on believing what you learned in your youth in church, but I am grateful that you had the courage to examine your faith and test its claims. 

 

Next week I will talk about how the Christian religion of the 20^th century was shaped by 19^th century revivalism and consider how it might change again into a more progressive faith in the 21^st century. And I promise, I will try to make it shorter than this presentation.         

“This is Not Normal”

“This is Not Normal”   March 24, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

Jimmy Carter was still in the White House when I started grad school at Vanderbilt. I chose Vanderbilt because it was the most liberal school I had access to in the south and I thought of myself as a liberal, although, I was not prepared at the tender young age of 24 for just what it meant to be “woke” forty years before people started talking about being “woke” as either a good or a bad thing.

 

At orientation, we entering students in 1980 were rigorously indoctrinated into gender inclusive language. It was a brand new concept to most of us and it was controversial on two fronts. We had all used the pronoun “he” to reference either a man or a woman in any non-specific sentence. It was correct grammar at the time to say something like, “The next voter in line must present his ID.” Now, we were told, we must say it, “The next voter in line must present his or her ID.” It seemed to be unnecessarily cumbersome and there was no small amount of grumbling about it but the other issue was considerably more powerful.

 

We were, after all, grad students in theology, we were ministry students, future biblical scholars, and the Bible clearly referenced God as “Father,” and Jesus, who, in our minds, could hardly have been wrong, called God “Father.” We, however, were no longer to call God “Father,” and if we did in any assignment, the paper would be returned for correction and if left uncorrected, the paper would be given an “F.” That struck us as being arbitrary and heavy handed. 

 

Vanderbilt, as a liberal school, even in 1980, accepted women and men, gay and straight, and all races of students. We had believers and atheists, biblical literalists, Catholics, and Unitarians. In fact, we were free to believe anything we wanted to believe, there was just one thing, there could be no references made to God using male centered language. So, we invented pronouns; rather than “Himself” we would write “Godself.” And we stumbled and fumbled around with how to relearn how to speak our native tongue until, after a few years, it would have been jarring to hear someone reference God with male language.

 

The point of the Divinity School faculty was that words do more than just communicate. Words, in fact, create categories in our minds. Words don’t just convey what we are thinking, they can help to shape what we are thinking. In 1980, women were allowed to go to seminary in most mainstream denominations. They could apply for ordination, but, sadly, they almost never got hired. Or if they did get a church job, it was to be in charge of Sunday School, children’s ministries, or to be a women’s minister or chaplain. It was rare, very rare, for a congregation to accept a woman as a preacher. 

 

Of course, tradition formed most of that barrier but at least a part of it had to do with language. Religion was a male bastion and laws that made gender discrimination illegal in the workplace did not and could not, and still do not, apply to churches. Churches can legally discriminate all day long because of the separation of church and state. 

So, with insight that was initially difficult for me to believe, changing the language eventually began to change the prejudices that made churches think that religious leadership always had to come from a man. When I started in ministry, only about 2% of American preachers were women. 30 years later, nearly one/third of preachers were women. I suspect that the current statistic would be a lot higher, especially if you factored out the Catholic Church, which, in most matters that require thoughtful reflection, I always do dismiss the Catholic Church. 

 

We are often asked to take care about matters of language, especially as it pertains to race. We call people from Asian countries “Asian,” even though it was common a couple of generations ago to just as easily call them “Oriental.” Initially, there was no insult intended by calling someone from what was called “the Orient” “Oriental.” But it came to imply an object more than it did a person. A tea set might by oriental, a rug can be oriental, but my Korean daughter is an Asian. 

 

The “N” word that no decent person would now use was not especially insulting when Mark Twain used it in his novels. The word “Colored” was in common usage when I was a child and it is still enshrined in the NAACP which is, as we know, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. There have been members clamoring for a name change for 50 years but the title has stuck, just as the word “Negro” is still a part of the United Negro College Fund though it would be a rather insensitive person who would use common speech today.

 

As Blacks in America have continued to suffer from racial discrimination, people who are trying to advance civil rights are regularly trying to massage our terminology to affirm the full humanity of black citizens in this country. And, I would say, albeit cautiously, that there has been considerable progress, even though it isn’t time to pull out George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

 

The trans community has been asking us all to adapt our use of pronouns to be more inclusive of those who do not want to be tied to either gender. Many registration forms now ask us to include with our name and address, our preferred pronouns, “he, or him,” “she, or her,” or “they, or them” using they and them as a singular pronoun…. Which is as awkward to me as avoiding calling God “Father” was in 1980 but I am determined to get the hang of it because I want violence and discrimination against trans people to stop and I know from experience that changing the way we talk can change the way we think. 

 

The grammar change can seem trivial, but the desired outcome is a crucial issue. What is common language can become the barbed wire fence of the status quo. When a concept gets rooted in acceptable language norms, then the idea, itself, can be difficult to uproot. 

 

Those of us who dream of a more just world, a friendlier, more loving, more safe world, often find ourselves being gatekeepers on dangerous ideas that are trying to edge their way into normal ways of speaking and thinking. Look at how the anti-vaxers during the pandemic managed to normalize and anti-science mentality so that people who made C’s and D’s in high school biology could assert that they knew more about virology than Dr. Anthony Fauci.  

In fact, the governor of my newly adopted state used Dr. Fauci’s name in place of the more common “F” word vowing that the government wouldn’t get to “Faci Florida.” And, thanks to Gov. DeSantis’ anti-science policies, Florida had one of the highest death rates from Covid-19. . . a fact that the anti-vax crowd likes to call, “fake news,” because they still think that math is a matter of opinion. 

 

And now independent presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leaning towards an anti-vax running mate, and if he chooses the New York Jets running back, Aaron Rodgers, he gets both anti-vaxer and someone who claims that the Sandy Hook School shooting was a hoax. 

A conspiracy theory that you might of thought would have lost popularity after the talk show host, Alex Jones, was ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars to victims’ families by a Connecticut court. If Aaron Rodgers has any friends, I hope that they can talk him off the ledge before he loses whatever he has left from his pro football earnings. 

 

Maybe I should be more worried about RFK and Aaron Rodgers but they seem to be enough out on the fringe to be a minor concern but what has really been chewing on me was an election that was reported on “Super Tuesday.” Not the Trump or Biden votes which were entirely predictable but rather the election in North Carolina for a gubernatorial candidate. 

 

North Carolina, voters will elect a new governor this fall and the candidate who won the GOP battle on March 5^th was their current Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson. 

Four years ago, Robinson prevailed in a field of eight candidates to become the first black Lt. Governor in the state’s history and now he is poised to become the first black governor of the state. 

 

But Robinson’s nomination is no cause for celebration. This is not an instance of progress in racial diversity. Robinson is a fascist who claims that the Nazis were “not that bad,” that the accounts of the holocaust are just “hogwash,” and he is radically opposed to gay and lesbian rights, abortion rights, and, well . . . this is a frightening man whom Donald Trump has described as being “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Of course, Donald Trump is, and I must beg your forgiveness for using technical psychological terminology here, but Trump is a racist moron who can only see that Robinson is black and would have no way of understanding that Robinson is the opposite of everything that King was. 

 

I have spoken in churches in North Carolina. I have vacationed in North Carolina. I believe that some of the most beautiful places on earth are in North Carolina, but, folks, North Carolina has become fertile soil for some of the most dangerously crazy ideas in America. Robinson won the GOP nomination by a margin of 43 points, a landslide. Even though he does not believe that women should be allowed to have an abortion, or, for that matter, he doesn’t think that women should be allowed to vote. He has threatened to use his AK-47 against the government. He also believes that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the music industry is run by Satan. 

 

North Carolina has tended to be a purple state, passing the office of governor back and forth between the parties. If Robinson is elected, he will be the state’s first black governor. However, this holocaust denier is running against democrat, Josh Stein, who, if elected, will be the state’s first Jewish governor. You would think that this wouldn’t be a tough choice for North Carolina, but current polls indicate that the two are in a dead heat. Which means that for nearly half of the citizens of North Carolina, ideas such as antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and even disrespect for families with children slain in the nation’s worst school shooting, are now part of the acceptable status quo and that, I submit, is horrifying.

 

Please, listeners in North Carolina, get me booked into your churches as a guest speaker as soon as possible. I would like to say in your pulpit what your permanent pastor may not want to have to say. These sick ideas did not become part of mainstream language in North Carolina or in other conservative pockets in America over night. They slip into office chatter, into conversations at church pot-lucks, and between pickleball matches at the senior center. And what is worse, most of Robinson supporters are under 50. How have younger voters become so vulnerable to the most insane and idiotic conspiracy theories?

 

Somehow, this violent, prejudiced world view crept into the language until it became sufficiently normative that now, the next governor of North Carolina may be even more dangerously sociopathic than the GOP’s nomination for president in this fall’s election and that, men and women, is a mouthful. 

 

You can’t see it in the video but the caption on this banner behind me, the banner we had made for our church when we started in 2008 is a quote from Elie Wiesel. It says, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” Wiesel said that the holocaust would never have happened if only the people of that time had not stood back, even in horror, but they stood back and allowed it to happen. 

 

Now, in 2024, racism, antisemitism, anti-women’s rights, anti-gay rights, and anti-science thinking is threatening the western world, it is threatening liberal democracy, it is threatening all of us with a world we do not want to live in. You cannot stand idly by in this time of crisis. Speak up. Get involved. And please share this video with your crazy uncle who needs to know where you stand before those family cookouts start up this summer because it is going to be a long, hot, election year!

 

“Redemptive Suffering”

Click here to see the video

“Redemptive Suffering”         March 10, 2024     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor                 

https://youtu.be/26tc9osy0Hw?si=yUWeqEisiRW_-4DH

 

Just a few days ago, on Friday, March 1^st, huge crowds gathered in the streets of Moscow to attend the funeral of Alexey Navalny in spite of government efforts to stop any public display of grief for Navalny. Dozens were arrested and hundreds were detained by police but still the crowd grew, extending more than a half a mile down the street from the church where the funeral was held. Putin had withheld the body for two weeks, hoping to avoid this public display but the people of Moscow and many other communities have shown tremendous courage in response to Navalny’s death, which seems, unavoidably, to have been caused by his captors. 

 

I have not heard anyone express any surprise that Navalny was murdered in the remote prison he had been sent to. My own surprise was that he lasted this long. He has been Russia’s most outspoken critic of the abuses of Vladimir Putin. Twice in 2017 he was attacked with a green dye that stained his face and nearly blinded one eye, making it nearly impossible for him to hide. He was clearly marked for assassination.  Navalny has been poisoned 2020, arrested, and imprisoned and yet, against all reason and natural self-preservation, he kept up his good humored ridicule of Putin’s administration and even after he had been taken to Germany to be saved from the nearly fatal poisoning, as soon as he was able, he boldly returned to Russia. 

I could only wish to be so brave. I know that I couldn’t have done it, but Alexey did, and I want to invite us all to spend a few minutes thinking about that fact and what it represents. Why did he do it? What does his sacrifice really mean? Was it worth it?

 

In theology, we have a term to describe this kind of martyrdom, it is called “redemptive suffering.” A great deal of our spiritual energy is focused on preventing or ending avoidable suffering. For example, hunger, in general, is not a matter of there not being enough food, it is a matter of distribution based on profit . . . and so we are against hunger. But in certain circumstances, we might choose to suffer in order to correct or redeem a certain social ill.

 

 Several students at Dartmouth went on a hunger strike this past month to protest the colleges’ investments in Israel, demanding that the college defund the Israeli war on the people in Gaza. 30 students at Harvard went on a 12 hour hunger strike, which is kind of embarrassing…. That’s just interval fasting, but several students at Dartmouth were on strike for a week and some went as long as 12 days and they were hospitalized. The strike is over now and the success of their effort is not yet clear, but they courageously chose hunger to make a point. Whether you agree with the protest or not, you can see that it was a noble effort at redemptive suffering. 

 

History is littered with examples of people who changed their culture through personal sacrifice, through choosing a form of suffering that made people think and change the way they acted.

A strong case can be made that the gospel accounts of the passion, which started with Mark, is offered in praise of martyrdom. Not that Jesus died for our sins . . . I don’t know about you, but even though I am far from perfect, I haven’t done anything that requires capital punishment or a blood sacrifice to atone to even a blood-thirsty, psychotic god. Jesus died in rebellion against a punitive and evil system while leaving us an example of radical compassion. 

 

More recent examples may be easier for us to get our heads around: 

Let me ask you to consider the case of Nelson Mandela. Though Mandela was heralded as a hero of the end of Apartheid in South Africa, for most of his life he was on America’s terrorist watch list. He was a Marxist and though he had personally been non-violent, he maintained that black Africans had a right to pursue their freedom through militant action. He was involved in the ANC, the African National Congress, and was an active revolutionary in trying to bring down the apartheid government. 

 

He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962 for his anti-government work and he was sent to prison for 27 years, 18 of which was spent on that rock in the sea, Robben Island.  Prisoners worked in the blinding sun in temperatures over 100 degrees. He was provided with a bucket in his cell for a latrine. He was rarely allowed a visitor and the prisoners had no access to news or mail. 

 

He could have been released at any time had he been willing to publicly swear off violent means of overthrowing apartheid. He chose suffering to redeem his people.

He didn’t know if anyone noticed his suffering, he could only hope that by choosing to suffer under the heavy hand of the racist government that he was drawing worldwide attention to plight of black South Africans. He only knew from whispers that there was a “free Mandela” movement. 

 

27 years. Forgive me for making this comparison, but when Mandela was freed in 1990, I made the observation to my congregation that the church speaks voluminously about the crucifixion of Jesus, an admittedly torturous death but, and maybe it is wrong for me to say it, but his suffering was over within a single day. Mandela spent 27 years in a cell, doing hard labor in blistering heat, to the point that he was nearly blinded from the sunlight by the time he was released, pooping in a bucket and wondering if it would ever end. . . 27 years of suffering to redeem the plight of his people. 

 

I don’t think that I could have done it for a month, or a week. But he came out of that cell to accept the Nobel Peace Prize and to become, not only the first black president of South Africa, but the first president to be democratically elected by the whole of the population. He served one term and then devoted the rest of his life to working to eradicate poverty and HIV from Africa. South Africa still has serious problems but the fact that Apartheid was ended without a bloody civil war is due, in large part, to the fact that Mandela was willing to suffer for his people and in the end, to work with their white oppressors to turn the nation over to the majority population in a democratic government. 

 

I wish that Alexey Navalny’s story could have ended with his release from prison and being elected to be the president of Russia but it didn’t.

 

Nelson Mandela didn’t know that his story would end any differently from Navalny’s, thankfully, it did, but was Navalny’s death of lesser value because he was murdered in prison? We don’t know yet if the courageous crowds in the streets honoring Navalny will maintain the protest. We don’t know if time will dilute his influence, but I am convinced that his cause was right and his courage is admirable, and I hope that he has seeded the hearts of the Russian people with a vision of what his widow now calls, of a beautiful Russia. 

 

Folks, dictators have power, autocrats stay in power for one reason, because the majority of the population allows it. Those students at Dartmouth believed that most people would not tolerate the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza if they only knew about it, if only they were paying attention.

 

The majority of Americans want sensible gun laws, restrictions on the kinds of weapons citizens can own, who can own them, as well as proper training, insurance, and storage. Why, with an outrageous death toll from mass shootings, domestic violence, and suicide, can’t we get some kind of sensible gun reform? Only because the public tolerates it. We get upset when school children die in a mass murder but we don’t stay concerned.

 

I like to blame the NRA and Republican legislators bought off by gun lobby donations, but really, seriously, if you want to know who to blame for the fact that you are now more likely to be shot and killed than you are to die in a car crash, as V in the famous Vendetta movie says, “you need only look in a mirror.” It is our acquiescence to an insane set of gun laws that keeps this blood bath going. 

Jesus was murdered by the state, Alexey Navalny was murdered by the state, Nelson Mandela was nearly murdered by the state, as John Lewis was nearly murdered on the Edmund Pettis Bridge by the state. But redemptive suffering is not always played out at the extremes. We are not often asked to run into a burning building to rescue an infant. We are more likely to accept the imperceptible sacrifice of supporting school lunches and healthcare for economically challenged families. 

 

Let me give you another example from just a few years ago:

 

In 2020, the Culinary Workers’ Union in Nevada, rejected supporting Bernie Sanders’ as a presidential candidate because his “Medicare for all” would mean that their members would lose the premium health care that the union had fought for over the past several years. In fact, on the morning of the Nevada primary, the union was sending text messages to members encouraging them to vote for anyone but Sanders. However, when the Nevada primary was held, the rank-and-file members actually voted for Sanders in a huge majority. 

 

Those who bucked the union leadership explained themselves in plain moral language . . . while they appreciate having really good health care coverage, they are aware that keeping a system in place that gives some people great coverage while leaving millions of others without care is morally reprehensible. They were willing to give up their enviable status if it would mean that their relatives, neighbors, and friends who were sick but who had no coverage, could at least receive basic care. 

Of course, Bernie didn’t win the Democratic nomination, because both Democrats and Republicans labeled him as being “crazy” because he thought that the USA could have the same kind of universal healthcare that 32 of 33 developed nations already have but still, these union members knew how important healthcare is and they were willing to have less if everyone could have some. This, at least in my mind, becomes the major dividing line between the conservative and progressive political wings of our nation, of our churches, of our economic system, and everything associated with it. There is the fear and greed-based perspective of “I’ve got mine, I earned it, I deserve it, and I don’t have to care about anyone else,” I don’t make that sound very nice but you get what I mean. And, again, from my perspective, the progressive view is that our whole society is connected to one another and we all have to make personal sacrifices for the good of the whole society. 

I would love to believe that this goes without saying but our recent experience with a global pandemic forces us to realize just how self-centered we can be. I mean, do you remember the run on toilet paper early in 2020? I never understood the connection between a respiratory virus and toilet paper but I know that when they finally got resupplied at my local box store that I had to stand in line to get my ration. I was probably the only single man with a bidet seat installed on my toilet in southern Missouri but I was all out of options! 

 

As in most things, not many of us are made of the kind of stuff to become an Alexey Navalny, or a Nelson Mandela, or a Martin Luther King, or a Gandhi, but we can learn from them, we can strive to be more like them, and we can resist our innate desire to be concerned only with ourselves.

We come into the world screaming and crying to be fed, changed, comforted, held, carried . . . I’ve never understood the saying, “I slept like a baby,” because babies don’t really sleep all that peacefully . . . ask anyone with a newborn in the house. We come into the world screaming and crying to have our personal needs met and, as the pandemic revealed, a whole lot of us never grew very far past that. To become better than that, we have to choose to be better. We have to choose to consider others, even those who will live on when we are gone.

 

I have this piece of good news, a bit of wisdom I got from Henry David Thoreau many years ago, a quote that I have carried with me in my collection of quotes for more than 40 years now. Thoreau said, “I know of no more encouraging fact than our unquestionable ability to elevate our lives by conscious endeavor.” 

 

I am in awe of Alexey’s courage and moral sacrifice. I am no Alexey Navalny but I want to choose to become more like him and I want to invite you to, by conscious endeavor, choose to be more like him too.