“Resurrection
Celebration!”
Sermon for MCC
New Haven
April 20, 2014
Rev. Brian
Hutchison, M.Div.
Henri
Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift
“The
resurrection does not solve our problems about dying and death. It is not the
happy ending to our life's struggle, nor is it the big surprise that God has
kept in store for us. No, the resurrection is the expression of God's
faithfulness to Jesus and to all God's children. Through the resurrection, God
has said to Jesus, "You are indeed my beloved Son, and my love is everlasting,"
and to us God has said, "You indeed are my beloved children, and my love
is everlasting." The resurrection is God's way of revealing to us that
nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste. What belongs to God will
never get lost.”
John
20:1-18
My
mother just turned 65 years old in March. She recently told me that in her
office, they installed defribulators in her office. She said, “They must think
we’re all a bunch of old coots!” I’m glad that life-saving devices are
available to save my mother’s life should she have a heart attack, but it makes
me wonder about Jesus. I know for sure that these devices were not available to
the disciples to resuscitate Jesus after his crucifixion. According to the
gospels, Jesus had been publicly executed by the extremely cruel means of
nailing his hands and feet to two beams of wood, essentially suffocating him by
gravity. It was not an easy death. It was the difficult death the Romans used
to show the occupied population that Rome had absolute control. Remember that
as Jesus entered Jerusalem on the day we call “Palm Sunday,” numerous people
were being crucified on outside of the city walls as a sign to all that anyone
who opposed the Roman Empire would face the same fate.
Jesus
spent his last days with the ones he loved, his own family of choice. His
father Joseph had disappeared from the story after his birth, so either he had
died or he had left the family because of the shame of Jesus’ public ministry.
His devout mother Mary remained as a disciple through his life. How many queer
folks know this to be true in our lives? Family members just leave the picture.
Jesus transcended gender. Maybe that made his father Joseph desert him, just as
our patriarchal culture calls fathers to desert their “sissy” sons. I don’t
want to make assumptions, but we will never know.
Either
way, Jesus met with his family of choice in the Upper Room for what we know as
the “Last Supper.” It is the meal that we remember every week as we celebrate
Holy Communion. It was not as Leonardo da Vinci depicted it in the 1490s. There
were women there. It was a group of subversive peasant Jews that followed Jesus
to the end. They were friends, lovers, family. They knew that Jesus was in
trouble, and yet they were there. Can we say the same of ourselves? Can we say
that we can sit next to Christ at the Communion Table and accept his call to
love each other unconditionally regardless of whom he chooses to invite? And
even further, can we say that we would stay awake while Jesus prays in the Garden
of Gethsemane, or as a recent cartoon showed, will we be busy texting,
emailing, and following social media?
Can
we stop fighting with our spouses while Jesus prays? Can we stop focusing on
making money while Jesus prays? Can we stop looking at our smart phones while
Jesus prays? How are we asleep like the disciples in the garden? Since unlike
the disciples we know what soon happened, how can we be truly awake for him?
Ultimately,
we know that Jesus was arrested, beaten, and crucified. He did not have an easy
death. The gospels tell us that his body was placed in a rich man’s gave, but
his plight would be to be thrown into a communal peasant grave where vultures
would pick at his flesh. His body would have been thrown into the dump to
disintegrate unceremoniously. After all, he was not the actual King of the
Jews, he was a rebel leader of some peasants.
But
God saw differently. God had sent this Child into the world to be the savior, the
liberator, the one who would raise the consciousness of the people of Israel. God
did not wish for the Chosen One to die a terrible death. God did not require a
bloody sacrifice. Rather, God chose a beautiful, passionate child to face
Empire as no one had faced it before. The Jewish people had had enough. They
had endured oppression for too many generations. And Jesus, Yeshua of Nazareth
chose to live out the Gospel that he had been given. Jesus knew from a young
age that he had a message to preach. It didn’t officially start until he was
thirty years old, but he held the Gospel inside him. And when it came time, he
let the Gospel loose. He preached, he healed, and he performed miracles.
It
was certainly not the message that the people expected. The people expected him
to preach against the Empire in a way that would start a rebellion. But Jesus
was not about violence. He was about non-violent resistance. That is why he led
non-violent residence until his public execution.
The
same crowd that shouted “Hosanna,” meaning “Help us, save us,” came to shout “Crucify him!” Is that not
our world today? If someone does not help us in the way we expect him or her
to, we call for their demise. We want salvation on our own terms. We think we
know what we need, but we really don’t. We think we need a feeding miracle, but
all we need is generosity. We think we need healing miracles, but what we need
is fair health care. We think we need Jesus of Nazareth to be here in the
flesh, to come again. But what we haven’t realized is that he already has.
Jesus
rose again one the third day. His beaten and bloody body was not resuscitated
like someone in our modern world on an operating table. No one took an electric
eel and pressed it to his chest like in a Flintstones cartoon. Rather, Jesus
lived on as the Risen Christ because the Gospel lived on. Jesus had loved his
followers back to new life, into a higher consciousness that had yet to be
experienced. The people had been bound by oppression under legalism, but Jesus spoiled the system. Jesus had made a
mess of religion, and the piece of art that he created was beautiful.
We
continue to contribute to that piece of art to this day. Many want to freeze
moments in the past, portraying biblical events as Hallmark moments somehow
filled with clean, proper, Stepford, white folks… in the Middle East. Well if
they can see themselves in the Gospel narrative, so can we! We can see a
lesbian couple showing up to the empty grave and clinging to each other in
fright. We can imagine Jesus’ Beloved Disciple as a man who couldn’t bear to look
for his lover’s hate crime-beaten body when he gets to the morgue. We can even
imagine the crucified Christ as a young Black man crucified by police brutality
and yet risen in the hearts of strong people of faith in his community.
Retired
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong writes in Eternal Life, A New Vision, “Our question is not, Did Jesus rise
from the dead? but, What was it that these gospel writers were trying to
convey? What did “experiencing Jesus alive” mean to them?” A resuscitated body
doesn’t mean much on a grand scale. But a resurrected life means everything. When a crushed spirit rises
again to take on a life of joy, that is resurrection. When someone lost in
addiction fights their way to a new life of sobriety, that is resurrection.
When a religious bigot chooses God’s unconditional love over xenophobic fear,
that is resurrection.
There
is no need to debate whether Jesus’ body was literally brought back to life or
not. That has no consequence on our lives today. What matters is that in the
words of Bishop Spong, “The meaning of God was forever altered because Jesus,
by sheer force of his being, had imprinted his humanity onto the definition of
the divine. The external God had been discovered at the heart of the human… The
presence of the holy that they had found in Jesus they now discovered in
themselves.” Can we believe that today? Can we stop thinking of ourselves as
evil sinners long enough to see that a spark of God lives within us?
Finding
that spark within is no threat to God. God never intended for people to think
that She was somewhere far away, above the clouds. Perhaps that was the
original sin, that people would dare to think that we are separate from the
Creator. But Jesus turned that wrong thinking upside-down, slaying the ego and
resurrecting the highest Self.
A
Course in Miracles gives us an illustration. We have our hands open before us
with an item in each hand: a crown of thorns and a lily. Both of them are
gifts. Each day, we have the decision of giving to the world the thorns of
suffering or the lily of unconditional love and resurrection power. Many
confuse the two, thinking that giving thorns will somehow teach people to love.
But to God, only the lily is the perfect gift. Even if you don’t have a dime to
your name, you can always give the gift of resurrection. And in the giving,
maybe just maybe you will receive resurrection in return. Amen.
