by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher
at St. Paul's, Stockbridge, MA (St. Paul, St. George, St. James, Good Shepherd Episcopal Churches)
Good Evening—or is it Good Morning? I’m not quite sure. I’m kind of dizzy from all the time travel we’ve done this evening from the beginning of creation to Matthew’s empty tomb.
These and all the other stories in the Hebrew Scriptures are the rich record of a people who heard the voice of a God different from their friends, families, and enemies. They all began, about 4000 years ago when our forbearers—the elderly Abraham and Sarah--left their fathers and the idols of their fathers to follow the God of Love wherever faithfulness to this God would lead them.
And what a journey it has been with this God who was gradually shorn of violence and sacrifice and discovered to be the one, true God of Love! These are holy stories of the spectacular ups and tragic downs of a people remembering and forgetting who and whose they were. Desire for mammon. Desire for God. Temples built, destroyed, rebuilt. Humiliating defeats and painful exiles. Feasts. Famines. Self-serving retribution. Gracious benevolence. Eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Joseph, Job, Esther, Jezebel. Judges, Kings, and Prophets. Laws and punishments. Treachery. Lies. Murder and salvation.
Think of it! All those stories have brought us here to sit in this lovely sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 2011 years this side of a Passover Feast in Jerusalem, when human desire went wrong (again) and converged in a vortex of violence that ended in a tomb of a murdered man.
A murdered man, who if we are to believe our witness Matthew, emerges from that tomb of tombs and says to the first people he meets, “Greetings!” Imagine that! “Greetings!” “Hi!”
That just slays me! I mean isn’t what we expect from a murdered man something like, “Wooooo, I’m going to get you!”? Something like the ghost of John the Baptist that visited the guilty Herod?
No. Matthew clearly does not want us to think that this is a ghost, for he writes: “And they--Mary Magdalen and the other Mary--came to him, took HOLD of his feet (!), and worshiped him.” You can’t hold on to the feet of a ghost.
This realness that Matthew and all the gospel witnesses insist on, is how they are saying to us that even though they were with Jesus for three years and hung on his every word, they were not able to piece it together and really know Jesus and what he was doing in any real way until after the events of that horrible, wrenching week in Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! The city that kills the prophets”1 was a city on the brink of disaster then: a brutal occupying Roman army, rival factions at each other’s throat about how to deal with it, a volatile mob tired of it’s most recent celebrity, bitter memories of captivities and exiles, and a handful of desperate leaders whose only common interest was to quell the surging waters of violence that threatened to overflow and destroy them all.
They succumbed to the temptation, not unreasonable, of selecting a common enemy to draw all the violence in one direction. “It is better that one man should die for the many.”2
Who better, then, for the accusing finger to point to than that charismatic young rabbi whose life for the past three years had been a living interpretation of their own holy scripture—their holy stories of being called out by Love on a journey to a Promised Land where no one’s life or dignity or well-being would ever be sacrificed for the good of the order.
So then, the shameful spectacle of trumped up charges and trials. At no point did the young rabbi run away from his teaching of absolute non-violence. Not even in the face of empire, temple, crowd, and faithless friends.
The brutal public execution and burial in a sealed and guarded tomb brings us just this side of something extraordinary. Matthew sets the scene:
Earth-quake! Angel that looks like “lightning! Fainting soldiers! Angel rolls back the stone of the tomb. Waits for two Marys. Tells two Marys, “don’t be afraid, look inside, and run tell the disciples that Jesus will be waiting for them in Galilee.” Two Marys dash off to Jerusalem. Two Marys met in road by Jesus.
And then--after all the tortured, wretched, sorry business of the past three days—Jesus tosses out the word that sets the world in forward motion again, spinning out Love’s light from the abyss of the tomb of tombs, so that we, each and every one of us since then—betrayed and betrayer, tortured and torturer, slave and enslaver, liar and lied to—is miraculously back on the road to the Promised Land, inconceivably forgiven and loved.
“Greetings!” The word, evacuated of anger, reproach, even triumph, that gives us—we who have turned out to be wrong!—a very soft place to land. A soft landing where our nervous systems can relax.
Surprised and gentled by the infinite friendliness and patience of this forgiveness, we can feel the tension draining away, and it becomes possible for us to love others back into their dignity, as well.
“Greetings!” he said then, and still says to us today,
“I know your pettiness, your distorted desires, your tightly held grudges, your pride and your prejudice. I like you anyway! Now, go. Be on your way, and play your part: Tell everyone I’m coming, because, My Dears, when you waste Forgiveness and Love on them, I will already have arrived!”
AMEN.
1Matthew 23:37
2John 18:14
The preacher gratefully acknowledges:
James Alison, http://www.ravenfoundation.org/projects/making-religion-reasonable/james-alison-s-forgiving-victim-dvd-series
Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian, O-Books, 2011
Nina Simone who preached it in song at Montreux 1976 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dlrXCYrNYI&feature=related
No comments:
Post a Comment