Easter Joy on Maundy Thursday

 

5-9-21

Grace and peace to God our divine parent, and from our crucified and risen Lord Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What do you think of when you hear the word “joy?” It’s one of “the fruits of the spirit,” from Galatians; it’s one of the four candles on our wreath in Advent; and the first word in one of our favorite Christmas carols. You know the one “Joy to the world!” But is Joy just a “churchy” word we use to decorate Christmas ornaments and hear in Easter hymns?

The world around us, especially lately, doesn’t seem to be contain a lot of Joy – while the vaccine role out is improving in much of the United States, and the covid positive rate in our county has been falling, we are still dealing with the very present realities of the past year – losing family members, losing jobs, losing year of our lives to milestones and plans.

If you are not feeling “joyful” right now, even with things in our lives “going back to normal,” that’s ok. While our state and many communities around our country are lifting restrictions as covid cases go down, we find some distressing things coming back with a vengeance that we’re considered very regular in the before times – mass shooting events, income inequality, and crisis in our mental health.

This is not to mention the personal tragedies and struggles we each experience every day without a pandemic. Where can joy be found during all of these troubles? Joy seems nowhere to be found right now.

In the way of many children’s movies, I happen to love how Joy is described in the Pixar movie from a few years ago called “Inside Out.” According to the movie, Joy is a blue-haired, green dress wearing person of unlimited optimism and the voice of Amy Poehler. Joy, along with Disgust, Sadness, Fear, and Anger, are personified emotions inside the head of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley.

Sadness and Joy find themselves lost deep in Riley’s brain while on a mission to get back some of her formative memories. At every turn, Joy is frustrated by Sadness’s… Well, BEING SAD. Joy keeps being dismissive toward Sadness… that is, until… Joy finds herself trapped in a dark place called The Memory Dump, and needs Sadness’s help. There, Joy discovers that our most joyful memories only feel so joyful because sadness was part of them too. And they forge a powerful, if unlikely friendship, because of the experiences they had together.

In a similar way, is there a possibility that Jesus might be on to something, that joy can also be found in the everyday, mixed up together in the pain and troubles of the world and in our own lives?

Jesus told his disciples “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” He said this back in John chapter 14, at the start of his goodbye speech, on the night that he was betrayed – Maundy Thursday. That’s right, we are “back” in Holy Week even though we are in the sixth week of the Easter Season.

How incredible it seems that here is Jesus, talking about love and joy, just hours before the disciples would scatter in fear and dread… abandoning Jesus to be arrested, falsely tried, and sentenced by crucifixion. On such a night, right before all of this pain was to come to pass, love and joy seem terribly out of place.

Love and joy seem nowhere to be found when your rabbi and teacher says things like he’s leaving you, and that the world will hate you in his name. Love and joy seem nowhere to be found when Jesus tells you that the greatest love, which he commands you to emulate, possibly might mean laying down your life.

But it turns out that Easter Joy is only complete because of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Joy is complete when that Jesus chose to be his disciples a rag-tag band of perfectly flawed human beings, though they be betrayers, deniers, and abandoners.

Joy is complete on the darkest night that Jesus ever had, when he chooses to break bread with US – rich and poor, queer and straight, the power-full and the power-less, with abled and the differently abled, the neuro- divergent and neurotypical, young children and wise elders.

Joy is complete in seeing the beautiful image of God in the faces of people of all faiths, races, cultures, languages, genders, sexual orientations, and ALL family configurations.

Joy is complete when… a synod assembly on the west coast goes unexpectedly awry…. But then chooses to elect the first ever transgender Bishop in the ELCA, the Reverend Dr Megan Rohrer. He was the first transgender pastor ordained in the ELCA, and now he is the first out trans pastor in the ELCA. 

Joy is complete when just when you thought that death had won, joy is that NEW LIFE HAPPENS.

It may have appeared a little odd to still be back to the night that Jesus was betrayed during the celebratory season of Easter. But we know that you cannot have one without experiencing the other. New life cannot happen apart from death. Resurrection cannot happen without crucifixion. Easter cannot happen without Good Friday. Joy cannot exist apart from being open to the possibility of discomfort.

The reason that we have no need for troubled hearts in this troubled world and in our troubled lives is not because Jesus makes the lives of his followers into easy and overflowing with cupcakes and lattes. Being a friend of Jesus does not earn us any bonus points or bragging rights or a ticket to easy street. Just look at the lives of Mary, Peter, James, John, Paul, and the rest, after the resurrection. Their preaching of the joy of Jesus brought them: prison, pain, and persecution.

But when we do the will of Jesus, when we follow Jesus commands to love one another… THAT is where Jesus continues to impact our lives and our world. Like the memories of people who we love who are no longer with us – their love and their memories live on in us, in what we do in their name. And so, even when they no longer here, they are not actually gone. As Jesus said, “Do this, in remembrance of me.”

Joy is complete that Jesus chooses US to be his disciples too, also flawed and imperfect human beings. Joy is complete by being chosen as children of God, and through us our faith is conquering the world in a revolution – not of might and power, but a revolution of peace and love and understanding and friendship. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Paul Spills the Tea

 

5-5-21: Narrative Lectionary - Galatians 1 and 2

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Christ our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

In the New Testament, after the Gospels, after the Acts of the Apostles… we have the Epistles… which is really just a fancy name for letters in the mail! Basically, when we read the epistles, we are reading someone else’s mail, but more like a public blog post, or even “letters to the editor” in your hometown newspaper. All those books in the New Testament with interesting names are letters by early Christian church planters to their congregations, bearing the names of the cities the churches were located in. Romans – Rome, in what is now Italy. Ephesians – Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. Galatia is a region in the middle of Turkey, and boy, did Paul have some things to say to the members of the church he helped to plant.

Paul is one of Jesus’ most famous followers and wrote much of these New Testament letters. But Paul wasn’t always PAUL. In fact, Paul began his life with the name of Saul - a man infamous for his relentless harassment of the early church during this period of persecution early in their history. But while Saul was traveling, a bright light flashed from heaven and Saul fell to the ground, made completely blind and encountering the risen Christ for himself – and this is what he alludes to in the beginning of his letter to the church in Galatia.

After this encounter, and after he was healed, Saul began to be just as zealous in preaching FOR the gospel of Jesus as he was preaching AGAINST it. This Saul, who then transitioned and was renamed Paul, planted churches across the Roman Empire like it was going out of style, then wrote to them when they would inevitably have problems. And most ironic of all, this super-strict, religious Jew who once persecuted Christians, became the champion of the inclusion of non-Jews in the early Christian church.

And that is what Paul is yelling at Cephas – Peter – for: Not for Peter being “too Jewish” but for Peter not being “Jewish enough.” Judaism at its core is not just about following some super strict set of laws, but instead – and I am VASTLY oversimplifying here - obedience to the law comes out of a response to the grace and love of God… I bet that sounds familiar.

Peter’s mistake was backtracking on the freedoms of the gospel of Jesus, just because Peter was afraid of the “circumcision faction.” While this faction has a name that sounds antiquated to our modern ears, we have a modern word for what the “circumcision faction” was doing – Gatekeeping. Controlling who was IN and who was OUT.

And so, by Peter’s hypocritical behavior – by being convinced by a faction of Jewish Christian and refusing to eat with Gentile Christians – Peter was sanctioning some sort of class system based on ethnicity, which is antithetical to both Christianity AND Judaism. Peter’s behavior negates the multi-ethnic and cross-cultural nature of the Gospel, that Paul spells out in further detail in the rest of Galatians.

I think that Paul was particularly sensitive to this issue because of his own story – probably why he was brave or brash enough to call out Peter to his face, and then to spill the tea in the letter to the Galatians. Because Paul knew what was at stake. Paul himself was welcomed as a follower of Jesus, even then the other disciples had every reason to be wary and keep HIM. And now PAUL – once the most rule-following rule follower – is telling the Galatians, and US, that there is no entrance exam to the community of faith.

In the name of Paul, we must ask ourselves – how are we, intentionally or unintentionally being like Peter, gatekeeping the Gospel of Jesus? What are our expectations that we assumed and accepted that are actually hinderances for some? Who are we afraid of disappointing with our truly expansive welcome?

I encourage you to read the whole letter – there is some really good stuff in there. As the rest of the letter illustrates, there are no such things as “classes” or rank, or hierarchy of Christians. Just as there is no ranking of who God loves more, or less, based on the rules – both spoken and unspoken – that Christians are “supposed to follow.” ALL are welcome, just as they are. Jesus tore down all the barriers we have put up between us – the last thing we should do is rebuild them. Thanks be to God. Amen.

"Fill-Up on Easter"!

4-21-21

Narrative Lectionary: Acts 8:26-39

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

When I was in seminary, the church I was assigned to for “field education” for my first 2 years was Trinity Lutheran Congregation in downtown Minneapolis, which met at Augsburg college.

This congregation was very special. Half of the congregation were former hippies and the other half were first- and second-generation families from Ethiopia and Eritrea. There is a strong Lutheran presence in Ethiopia called Mekene Jesus, and an even longer history of Orthodox Christianity present there, from which the Mekene Jesus Lutherans borrowed heavily. So, in this congregation, we celebrated Easter Sunday twice – once on “Western Easter,” and the 2nd one on Orthodox Easter a few weeks later. It was awesome, because you can really never have “too much” Easter!

I learned a lot from this wonderful congregation, and much about checking my own privilege. One year on a women’s retreat, I learned that after marriage, women in these 2 countries traditionally retain their maiden names and laughed at the assumption of American women to take their new husband’s last name. These Ethiopian and Eritrean women thought the irony particularly funny – that the United States claims to be so forward thinking in ideals but seems so backward in practice. There is so much that I thought I knew, but turns out I actually didn’t.

Like the Ethiopian Court Official from Ethiopia. We know a few things about him – He was from around or near the area of Ethiopia and Eritrea, he was an extremely powerful, wealthy, and well-educated court official for a queen in that region, he is a serious follower of Judaism, and he was an outsider in the ancient world because of his status as a eunuch.

While it is none of our business HOW this person became a eunuch, but the truth is, the state of his body fell outside of the accepted norms. He did not fit into the accepted gender or sexual binary, and therefore he was also an outsider in many aspects of life. I wonder if his pronouns were even “he/his”? Maybe if given the choice, they would be They/Them?

We know that Philip had no qualms about sharing a close space with this person. When invited into the chariot to help them decipher the passage from Isaiah on the scroll they were reading, Philip hopped right in. Philip didn’t wonder what it would be like to share a chariot with a queer person. Philip didn’t refuse and demand that “only real men can drive chariots.” Instead, Philip sat down, read with them, and told them about Jesus.

The Ethiopian court official must have felt a resonance with the passage from the Isaiah text they were reading, and I imagine hearing that Jesus went through similar humiliation and suffering must have felt like a huge relief. Perhaps this person finally felt seen and loved and affirmed, perhaps for the first time in their entire life. It must have felt too good to be true.

Philip’s divine transportation – being snatched away in the spirit - wasn’t even the most miraculous thing that happened in this text. When they came upon a body of water, the court official asked if anything prevented them from being baptized. The miraculous thing was that Philip said nothing…. Because NOTHNG prevents us from being loved and claimed by God in the waters of baptism. Not gender, sexual orientation, race, or social status. All are welcome, all have access, and all deserve this grace upon grace. There is no barrier, human or otherwise that can prevent us from being God’s beloved child.

Jesus didn’t suffer death, defeat it, and burst from a tomb three days later only to allow us to deny abundance and joy-filled life to anyone. Jesus taught, lived, died, and was raised in order to show humanity that God’s love centers on the very people we push to the margins. God’s love is expansive, and limitless, and cannot be contained to only a few people.

Therefore, let’s not limit celebrating the resurrection to Easter Sunday, or even just an Easter Season. The more inclusivity, the more love, the more celebration, the more Easter, the better! Thanks be to God, amen.

New Pants and New Paradigms

4-18-21 -3rd Sunday of Easter year B

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our crucified and risen Lord and savior, Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Do not adjust your computer. You are not hearing things, and your technology is not haunted or playing tricks on you. You DID just hear from the Gospel of Luke in the Year of Mark with John sprinkled in. You have not entered the Twilight Zone… but you HAVE entered The Resurrection Zone, also known as the Season of Easter. Two weeks in, and things have gotten weird. Jesus is walking through walls, talking about ghosts, mind reading, and … eating fish?

Like the disciples, post-resurrection, we are currently in a partially open, partially vaccinated reality that is equally terrifying and confusing, with unreal things unfolding in front of our eyes.

In fact, I’m afraid that we are about to head into another pandemic, if it’s not already here. It was already bad before Covid even existed. As some of us emerge from the Covid cocoon, we are trying on clothes that have not seen the light of day in an entire year… and discovering not everything fits the way it used to. I see post after post all over social media lamenting how our bodies have changed during the pandemic, and now we might need a new wardrobe.

Body shaming existed well before Covid, but we seem to be in a particularly virulent strain at the moment – body shaming on overdrive. To my horror, I recently read about a segment on NPR guiding parents on how to“fix” their children’s pandemic weight gain, spearheaded by “concerned doctors.” Lord have mercy, these poor children have lost their routines, access to their friends, and even family members to Covid… Let’s just TRY not to traumatize them further with diet culture, ok? Even this act from a place of care can compound an already traumatic year.

We have all been surviving a pandemic in one way or another. Some of us baked cakes. I turned to YouTube and watched countless videos about women’s 19^th century European and American fashion. And let me tell you what I learned. For the past few hundred years, women’s fashion was not JUST about corsets and hoop skirts. Women of all shapes and sizes not only existed in history, but it was proportion, not size, that mattered in fashion. Also, up until most recently, garments were expected to be tailored to each person, or adjusted on a yearly basis, and thanks to things like gathers, laces, ties, pins, and drawstrings, our inevitable and natural body changes could be easily accommodated.

Fast forward to now, our bodies by themselves are supposed to just naturally be that perfect shape AND a perfectly small size.  We wear inflexible synthetic garments that are mass-produced. This, plus the bombardment of ceaseless advertising, tells us, “our bodies are imperfect and flawed. Our bodies are not enough. “

But is not your body that is “wrong.” It never was. We have all been set up to fail. But you were never the problem. Your body was created by God, and it is good.

In the beginning, God created people – matter and breath – and it was good. God gave us Jesus, who was born in blood and afterbirth. And,  Jesus was resurrected in a body - not a “perfect, aesthetically pleasing” body. It was a body still marked by the trauma of crucifixion and death. Jesus still carried the marks of the wounds he suffered on Good Friday. And, maybe Jesus still had a pallid look of death about him, and that is why the disciples also thought he might be a ghost.

Luke writes these seemingly insignificant details, because turns out, a common heresy that floated around post-resurrection was that Jesus did not rise bodily, but become a ghost. Some took this even further and said that Jesus never had a body at all – he was a phantom. After all, how scandalous and icky for God’s son to be saddled with something as “gross” as a human body that got hungry, needed sleep, cried, got hangnails, and presumably had a gut biome. And how shocking that God’s son actually died.

The fact that Jesus lived in a body MATTERS.  The fact that Jesus really suffered matters. And the fact that Jesus was resurrected in a body … a body that did not transform into something aesthetically perfect… says that our God is not about some human idea of perfection. We are not, as you may have heard floating around “You are a spiritual being having a human experience…” Instead, we are human beings experiencing the love of God, in all the glorious messiness of being in a human body.

Your body got you through this pandemic, but it might not be quite the same as it was when we started. And that’s ok. Not all of us experienced the same trauma during the last year, but we all experienced something. On the night he was betrayed, a night full of trauma, Jesus broke bread and shared it to his disciples. Now, Jesus receives something to eat in the presence of his disciples… as one theologian writes, “expressing physical hunger and accepting bodily nourishment, Jesus turns trauma into communion.”

Bodies eat… but bodies also bear witness. And we are witnessing how other pandemics are still raging – sexism, homophobia, racism, and our obsessions with guns, just to name a few. News of one tragic death is interrupted by news of another. Some kinds of bodies are bearing the sins of the racism and white privilege of others.  The body of Christ is hurting right now. And we are called to be witnesses, but not to stop there.

Witnesses also share what they have seen. Jesus also calls us to put our bodies on the line – to call all people to repentance, and to be forgiven of our sins. Until we live in a world where all bodies are treated the same, we who have privilege and voice must speak up when we witness injustice against other members of the body of Christ.

We’re living that moment now – post-resurrection but pre-heaven, post-vaccine but not yet post-covid, when we are need of both new pants and new paradigms. This is our moment to make a difference, so let’s not miss it. It’s time to clean our closets and check our privilege, so that we are ready for God to open our minds and hearts and eyes to this new reality, right now. Thanks be to God. Amen.

FOMO Thomas

 

4-11-21

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our crucified and risen Lord and savior, Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! It’s the Sunday after Easter, and what about the world has changed, besides everything and nothing?

I don’t know about you, but I feel like it’s been an entire month since Easter. Probably because this is our second Easter dealing with Covid – still wearing masks and socially distancing, but now also waiting to get vaccinated, and wondering when or even IF life as we know it will ever resume and what it will look like when it does.

We are not unlike the disciples, one week after the very first Easter morning, the second Sunday after Easter… AKA “Doubting Thomas Sunday.” Poor, poor, Thomas, forever to be saddled with the nickname “doubting.” But Thomas is not actually the most egregious “doubter” of the disciple squad. The true doubters are the other 10 disciples.

I think this last year, we understand the disciples just a little bit more. We have spent a year in our own homes, physically distant from others, because of some very real concerns over a very contagious and deadly virus. While we have sealed ourselves off from one another to keep each other safe, it does not buffer us from the very real fears we might feel about how our world has changed around us in the last year.

But that doesn’t get them off the hook: Their Lord was alive! He had risen from the dead! Mary SAW him, and then later the rest of the disciples got to see him too. And what do you think happened next? Did they start running around, telling people the good news? NOPE. On Easter evening, they locked themselves in a room. It was after Easter – but the disciples were still stuck in Good Friday.

And so that is where Jesus found them that first time, when they were all together, except for Thomas, clinging to the familiarity of the locked room, when he burst INTO that room, just has he had burst OUT of the tomb.

But after other ten disciples saw Jesus for themselves, a week later - one week after Easter – where did Jesus find them? Yet again, they were sealed up in their familiar, safe room. And so, Jesus had to bust in YET AGAIN.

Given this context, who was the more unbelieving and doubting? Sure, Thomas has FOMO – the “Fear of Missing Out.” But he just wants what the other disciples already experienced. This might come across as demanding or whiney to the other disciples - and to us - but really, he just wants his own turn to see the Risen Jesus.

Sort of like the phenomenon many of us are experiencing – vaccine envy. For the last two months, I have seen my social media filled with “vaccine selfies” from my friends. And take it from me, nothing is more annoying than seeing the SECOND vaccine selfie from your friends while you yourself are not even eligible in your own state. I’m glad that so many people I know are able to get vaccinated, but for a long time I wondered when I would get to be a part of that club.

As I dream of having my first indoor haircut since January of 2020, I also am painfully aware of the inequity of this whole process. A pastor friend of mine serving in my home state of Wisconsin showed me two sobering maps: one tracking covid 19 deaths, and one tracking rate of covid vaccination distribution. Frighteningly, the locations with the highest rates of covid deaths tracked almost exactly with the lowest vaccine distribution rate. All converging in the Milwaukee area, which has the highest percentage of African Americans in the whole state.

While so much of our world has changed, so much has remained the same. We are still locked in rooms of inequality, systemic racism, distrust of our neighbors, and attitude of scarcity.

So, we ask ourselves: What’s now? What is the way forward? How do we walk through these uncertain, in-between times? Are we going to use our new-found freedom to just to do more of the same as we did in the “before times”? Does the vaccine exist so that we can go back to our old dining, shopping, and travel habits? Have we been freed to just go back into locked rooms of the “same old, same old” attitudes and ways of living? 

The Good News of Easter, which is just as true today as it was a week ago, is that Jesus has busted open the stone door of whatever tomb you are trapped in; he has ploughed through the doors of your locked rooms as if they were butter. He stands on OUR side of the wall, reaching out to take your hand, showing you the marks of the crucifixion that still remain on his body resurrected body.

The time he spent in death has marked Jesus forever. Just as our time during this Year of Death has wounded us in ways that we will be untangling for years to come. His wounds did not kill him forever, but they have become part of who he is – the one who was wounded so that we would not have any FOMO – we won’t miss out on abundant life at the hands of our own wounded and brokenness.  

We have seen and heard what Jesus does with the bondage of the familiar, with the sting of death, and the captivity of our woundedness. We have seen and heard what Jesus does with sealed tombs and locked doors. New life begins here, shut away, but it doesn’t stay there. Nothing can hold it at bay and keep it from transforming our lives forever.  

Fortunately, Peter, Mary, Thomas, and the rest of the apostles DO eventually get out of the locked room. And someday we too, will be able to leave our locked rooms, and we can still witness to what God was up to in our lives even as we were social distancing and under quarantine, or waiting for the full effects of getting vaccinated.

The way forward is unknown, but well-traveled before us:  Thomas, other 10 disciples, and Mary Magdalene, and the other women at the tomb. We will never miss out on the Love of God, that leads us and shows us the way, by the hands of Jesus the still bear the scars of death defeated, this Easter season and always. Thanks be to God. Amen.

More Roads to Explore

 Wednesday 4-7-21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

What kind of road have you been walking lately? Has your road been like a narrow path in the woods, overgrown and hard to find? Is your road uneven and full of rocks? Is your road forked with a choice
you have to make? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, but you are wondering if it’s a train or not?

Easter just happened, and now we celebrate for the 7 weeks that follow. This is my favorite post-Easter story, called, for obvious reasons, “The Road to Emmaus” Two of Jesus’ followers are walking the long road home from Jerusalem on Easter afternoon. Theirs is a road of bitterest defeat. It is no wonder that they didn’t recognize Jesus when he began to walk with them - the cloak of sorrow around them was thick and heavy. It wasn’t until the travelers invited Jesus to stay with them for the night, to rest at their Air BnB with them, and to share a meal, that they truly saw Jesus. In their excitement, they jumped up and ran BACK the seven miles they had already traveled from Jerusalem, so that they could tell the rest of the disciples, “It’s true! We saw Jesus alive!”

The actual road these followers traveled from Jerusalem to Emmaus was likely a dusty afternoon’s walk, and pretty much the same distance from my house to Emmanuel, which by car is about 20 minutes. But they not only journeyed a literal road, but also an emotional one. Over the course of seven miles, they traveled from darkest despair to soaring hope, all because they had encountered the risen Christ along their way.

In contrast to the rest of the disciples, who were presumably still locked in a room in Jerusalem, THESE TWO took Jesus’ message to heart. They heard the word and acted on it. They welcomed a stranger into their midst and sought to create a new relationship. They practiced what Jesus preached. They embraced radical hospitality. They created space in their hearts and in their lives. And remember, at this point, they didn’t know yet that is WAS Jesus. 

But isn’t that what being a disciple on the road is all about? Welcoming one another, creating space for each other for all of our stories and all of our experiences… not just because these people MIGHT be Jesus…. But because these ARE JESUS. They are where we meet the risen Christ – in the faces of one another.

After all, Jesus told us that whatever we do to the least of these, we are doing to him. This means things like continuing safe practices for our non-vaccinated friends and neighbors, even if we ourselves are vaccinated. This means carefully choosing which of the former things we want to resurrect, and carefully burying what should be left in the tomb. This means thinking about ways to be the body of Christ in a post-resurrection, post-vaccination, post-pandemic world.

When we see Jesus in one another, we invite, we welcome, we reach out, and we go out. Be the Church, not “go to church.” Create deeper relationships, not packed calendars. Open not just our doors, but our homes, and our hearts as well. Not to go back exactly the way things were before. Because for us, like for these two travelers, even if the road they traveled was the same, THEY would never be the same again.

Like the two on the Emmaus Road, where have YOU encountered the risen Christ?

Where have you seen Jesus on the road with you? How has Jesus shown up in unexpected ways along on your dusty highways and byways? Or, where have you missed seeing him, only to recognize his handiwork in hindsight?

What would make you run seven miles in the dark? Would it be for something that you didn’t expect? What has caused you some “holy heartburn”?

This Easter season, what questions do YOU have for the risen Lord?

These two Easter travelers asked themselves, “where not our hearts burning within us?” As with this past Lent, our questioning faith continues to challenge us with questions and "holy heartburn," even after the seeming certainty of the resurrection. Because were we though to find certainty, instead we find more wonder, and more roads to explore. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Man Murdered on a Tree

Good Friday Sermon 4-2-21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Christ our rock and our redeemer. Amen

Last night, Jesus broke bread with his disciples in his last meal before his death. In Gethsemane, he prayed in agitation and dread of this very day. His closest friends could not keep awake with him, and later deserted him altogether. Judas, one of his hand-chosen twelve, betrayed him to the religious leaders who sought his death. These chief priests and scribes, in turn, handed him over to their Roman oppressors, who in the end were all too willing to put him on a cross.

Here was a man, cut off from every imaginable means of support. Here was a man, abandoned by his people, abandoned by the rule of law, abandoned by his own friends, abandoned seemingly even by his God.

Many of us, especially in the past year, have felt what it’s like to cry out to God by day and night, but receive not answer. Our friends betray us, our family abandons us, and God seems nowhere to be found.  We have been living in year-long-Good Friday.

This year we witnessed the deaths of more than half a million people in our own country by Covid-19, sacrificed on the altar of the economy. This year we witnessed the known and unknown deaths of African American people, handed over and betrayed by a nation who forced their ancestors into bondage. Then there have been the recent deaths from gun violence.  This year, we witnessed so much trauma, so much death.  

But really, is this year any different than other years, expect for the order of magnitude? The first victims of the coronavirus were the elderly, who in my experience are often sequestered in care facilities, out of sight, by their families who rarely visit, already isolated and cut off before the cruel realities of quarantine. And before the pandemic, mass shootings were scarily commonplace.

And while we do not have crucifixions dotting the landscape as the Romans did thousands of years ago, we still live in a nation where capital punishment has not been outlaw across the country. There is progress – the state of Virginia very recently made the death penalty illegal – the first state of the former Confederacy to do so. However, we are still burdened by a criminal justice system that is laughably unjust, especially for many of our fellow citizens.

And while this nation never executed someone on a cross, we have our own version of murder on a tree glaringly in our history, which really was not all that long ago, in living memory still. There may not have been nails involved, the there was a tree, and some rope, a jeering crowd, and more often than not, an innocent victim of an oppressed race of people, executed for the crime of simply being at the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jesus was also the victim of senseless, state-sponsored violence. In his ground-breaking book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” theologian James Cone reminds us that, in a similar way “… Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence,” and this is not all that different from what happened at the hands of white mobs in “in the name of God and in defense of segregation… and white supremacy…”

The cross was a humiliating torture reserved for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists. The cross, along with the lynching tree, sends a clear message: fear, intimidation, as a deterrent, a sign that speaks without words: “This is what happens when you step out of line.”

This is the symbol we decorate our churches with and wear around our necks as jewelry. As Cone writes, “one has to be a little kind of mad… to find salvation in the cross, victory in defeat, and life in death.” (25)

The cross was not always one of them most recognized symbols of our faith. As we read about what state-sponsored violence did to Jesus, we remember that this era in our own history is not over. As we hear about Jesus being murdered on a tree, we remember, Jesus told us that what we do to the least of these, we do to Jesus.

When we behold the cross, we behold the wounds of Jesus, but also all the wounds of the least of these who are disempowered – those on death row, the wrongly accused and unfairly imprisoned, those who can’t get access to the vaccine yet are dying record numbers, those denied adequate medical care, the harassed and the raped, the homeless, all those who’s suffering we’ve minimized, denied, or looked away from in discomfort. It is only by seeing their wounds in the wounds of Jesus that we can see the true revelation of the good news – Jesus chose to be found THERE. On the crosses of our own construction.

Theologians Duo John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg reflect that it is Jesus’s passion that caused his death. “[Jesus] was filled with passion – his passion was spreading the message of the kingdom of God, and God’s justice. His passion led to his ‘passion’.”

Behold Jesus’ passion, and his passion – us. When Jesus told his disciples to deny themselves, to take up their crosses to follow him, those were not just idle words. And so, to show us the way, he went first, alone, taking up his own cross. He cleared the path that he calls us to follow.

Tonight, we remember that we worship this suffering God, and we follow this man murdered on a tree. Jesus shows us that God is willing to take on the worst the world has to offer, and Jesus is willing to take on the worst that WE have to offer – our selfishness, our fear, the broken mess we’ve made of our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings – to transform that too into something beautiful and precious and to be repurposed as beloved by God.

Though we are tangled up in the fraught history that is being a Christian in the United States, all Christians tonight are bound by a common faith and a common hope: that Our “beauty is more enduring than our brutality,” and that Jesus’s death shows us death is not the end.

The cross is not an end. It is a beginning. Because the cross is empty, just as the tomb will be. Just as death and everything the leads to death in our lives is empty of their ultimate victory over us.

Good Friday was a long time ago, but it is also today and every day. It takes courage to see the cross and to follow where it leads … but we have what it takes. Jesus is already there. Jesus makes a way from no way, even in a year of Good Fridays. Thanks be to God. Amen.