Get Real

Scripture

 The empty tomb Easter morning story is easily dismissed---

It was dismissed even by Jesus’ disciples!

To the early church, it became a sign of God’s power over death in bringing Jesus from the tomb to life. 

Further, they held it as a vindication of Jesus’ teaching.

When the story works in 2004, it’s because it fits with something we already experience---the here and now presence of Jesus in the courage, compassion and power of community!

 

He is risen!  He is risen indeed!

 

Sunday morning early, in order to perform a ritual of respect for their beloved and now deceased teacher, several women who had traveled with Jesus all the way from Galilee up to Jerusalem, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James,

brought spices to the tomb where Jesus had been taken.  The stone had been rolled away from the tomb.  When they went in, they did not find the body.  They were perplexed.  Suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.  Instinctively, they averted their eyes.

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.  As he told you---the Son of Man must be handed over, be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”

 When they reported this to the men, their testimony was discounted---hysteria, wishful thinking, an idle tale.

 

Message

 Let’s stay home this morning dear.

Come on, it’s Easter.  We have to go.  He is risen.

He is risen indeed---but it always bothers me.

What’s that sweetheart?

You know---what really happened?

 

---Hidden Microphone, Sunday Morning

 

Suppose there had been a video camera set up in Jesus’ tomb.  Lights.  Camera.  Action.  What really happened?  This is a question of the modern era, the scientific and technological age of facts, evidence and documentary footage.

 I am going to characterize, caricature even, two common ways of approaching the Easter message.  One way says “the body would disappear.”  The other way says “the camera would record nothing.” 

 After describing these two ways, I will point out their unintended consequences and then suggest a third way, a way which helps me connect with and celebrate the Easter stories of Jesus’ resurrection.

In religious matters, most Moderns have traveled one or both of two paths---fundamentalism or liberalism.  One path, I think, leads to self-hatred and the abandonment of Mother Earth.   The other leads to self-delusion and the death of God.  Both paths are self-absorbed, elitist, anti-social, and, I’m thinking, contrary to Jesus’ way of being in and with the world.

 Modernity hasn’t been kind to Easter.  And, for all its considerable and remarkable accomplishments, it hasn’t been especially healthy for Mother Earth or Father God. 

 Fundamentalism says---                                   

 God created the universe in seven twenty-four hour days (or, alternatively, seven thousand year days)!  Fundamentalism says---Because God loved the Hebrews, he killed all the first born male Egyptians!  Fundamentalism says---Jesus is the only way.  Fundamentalism asserts as really true things which are impossible to know and, in some cases, simply outrageous.  There are the true believers---and the damned.

 Life is the problem asserts Fundamentalism.  Escape.  Have faith, get a ticket to heaven.  “He is risen.  Get used to it!”  Woe to those who cannot or will not believe.  They will be “left behind.”   Fundamentalism makes Easter faith irrelevant to the world in which we actually live.  “Why rearrange chairs on the Titanic?  The ship’s going down.”   

 In the 1970s, Amarillo’s Pantex was the final assembly plant for the hydrogen bomb.  There were weekly Bible studies on site.  Fundamentalist Christian nuclear engineers, scientists, and technicians believed they would be lifted into the sky just in time to join their Risen Lord prior to an apocalyptic global conflagration.  That they were building devices capable of causing planetary extinction was somehow God’s will.  Fundamentalism will die out or be the death of us.

 Liberalism---

 Liberalism leads to a different danger---the extinction of Spirit, devastating in its own way.  When Jesus’ disciples reinterpreted the women’s testimony, they were demonstrating the path of Liberalism.  The empty tomb didn’t fit their world view.  So, it was explained (away).  Left to Liberalism, the good news would have been reduced to an understandable case of hysteria.

 For Liberalism, religious superstition and ignorance causes evil.  This form of Modernity wants to get behind religious language and myth to the underlying reality---political, social, psychological, meteorological.  God didn’t part the Red Sea.  It was a freak storm---unusually low tide.  Jesus didn’t feed the five thousand with five loaves.  Everyone shared.  See?  Ignorance---bad.  Knowledge---good.

 The Easter story, obsesses Liberalism, simply can’t be factually true.  An explanation is called for.  Whether sophisticated and exotic or simple and banal, the explanation serves to explain away whatever is regarded as unacceptable and unscientific superstition.  The heights and depths of human existence are flattened into measurable categories with predictable relationships.  In the end Spirit is driven out.  Hard to be surprised in the sixties then, when Liberalism declared, prematurely as it turned out, “God is dead.” 

 The Human Way---

 There are no pure liberals.  God is not dead.  There are no pure fundamentalists.  Mother Earth lives.  We all, I suspect, have walked at least a little on both paths.  Intuitively, we may have also walked on yet a third path---the way that says “forget about the camera.”

 There has always been a third way, a third way of interpreting Easter, a third way of being in the world.  It’s neither primitive, post-modern, nor anti-scientific.  It is biblical, I think, and deeper than either fundamentalism or liberalism. 

 It is simply a human way.  It accepts human limitation.  It accepts that we know only in part.  It accepts uncertainty (and in this it is compatible with those who think in terms of chaos and complexity.)  Without asserting that humankind is incapable of goodness, the human way accepts human fallibility (in this it is modest, open to new insights, needs, solutions.)

 The human way finds Biblical expression in St. John’s poetic assertion that “the Word became flesh.”   Transcendent and divine, God chooses to live in the human experience.  This divine inhabiting of humanity impacts both God and humankind. 

 

• God experiences and appreciates human limitation. 
• God learns what it is to weep, be ecstatic, uncertain, to rage, to wonder.  
• Humankind, in turn, aspires to and experiences the kingdom of God. 
• Humankind learns what it is to love unconditionally.

 In the human way, a story or myth is powerful, life-changing, and community forming in its own right.  It’s a part of the human experience.  Stories are our tools for integrating life experiences.  They are neither to be taken literally nor reduced to something else.  Stores (and paths) are to be judged by the fruit they bear---alienation or community, death or life.

 The Human Way and Easter

 The Easter stories were put into written form, if not actually conceived, many years after the time of Jesus’ death.  They had currency in the context of an ongoing community life.  The community testified that it experienced Jesus as the shape of God present and powerful in their gathering, in their mission.  “A Jesus-shaped-God-presence” is my name for their experience of divinity within and within their midst. 

 Three words describe the Jesus-shaped-God-presence pictured in Luke’s Gospel, especially in Luke’s Easter story---purposeful, vulnerable, and irrepressible. 

 Purposeful. 

 Jesus continually seeks the kingdom God---“Shalom” in Hebrew, meaning community grounded in justice and peace with joy in the Holy Spirit.  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.  I am anointed (I am messiah-ed) to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, release to the captives and to proclaim universal debt forgiveness.” 

 To his disciples he says, “as I have been sent (apostle-d) to evoke God’s reign on earth, so I apostle you.  Go and do likewise and vaya con Dios.”  The Jesus shape is purposeful.  When Jesus is present in community, the community is filled with divine purpose. 

 “Do this is remembrance of me.”  Our communion practice confronts the reality of forgetfulness.  We tend to forget our purpose.  Forgetfulness is all but inevitable.  So much in life disheartens, discourages, dis-empowers.  Am I wrong?  Is it not common to find ourselves sometimes saying “Why do church?  “Do this is remembrance of me,” says Jesus, “Remember---remember our purpose!”

 Vulnerable

 Jesus was arrested, perjured against, beaten and executed.  “Put away the sword,” says Jesus.  He would not injure his attackers nor would he defend himself.  Better to die than take life.  The Jesus shaped presence of God in the community was vulnerable.  Neither the women’s faith’s witness nor that of the ongoing faith community, however courageously or forthrightly given, was necessarily going to be believed.   Christians have been, and still are, alternately martyred, co-opted, ignored.

 Our nation knows something about vulnerability.  Homeland security measures are needed and appropriate.  Global policing as part of an international consensus is appropriate.  Accepting infotainment in place of information, however, is not appropriate.  Allowing the invasion and occupation another country on the basis of false and deliberately misleading information is not appropriate. 

 Vulnerability is part of the Jesus-shaped-God-presence.  It is an invitation to persevere and have courage.  It is not a reason to imprison strangers without trail or right to representation.  It is not a reason to falsely accuse.  The church has already learned these things the hard way and, undoubtedly, will have to learn them again and again.

 Irrepressible 

 Jesus presented himself for baptism in the Jordan.  “Into your hands O God I commend my spirit.” 

 It wasn’t finished.  God’s Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested.   “Into your hands O God I commend my spirit.” 

 It wasn’t finished.  In the hometown synagogue, Jesus accepted his anointing to evoke the kingdom of God.  “Into your hands O God I commend my spirit.” 

 It wasn’t finished.  From the cross he said, “Into your hands O God I commend my spirit.” 

 It wasn’t finished.  “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here.  He is risen.” 

 He is the watch that “takes a beating and keeps on ticking.”  He is the “the cat that came back.”  He said he must rise again and he does, again and again.  God’s irrepressible Word becomes flesh and dwells among, within us---a Jesus shaped presence of God---purposeful, vulnerable and irrepressible. 

 And we are called.  And we are called.  And we are called again from life to death, through the valley of the shadow of death, through danger, toils and snares. 

 “Into your hands O God we commend our spirits.”