Though I’m very glad to hear that our country’s armed forces will begin to deal with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in a new way, I can’t wait for the day when Queer People will be able to serve openly without fear of discovery in our military. Great changes are happening in our society for which I am thankful to God. However, this past week as I’ve read and listened to the news about the sexual abuse of children by priests, and the threat of death for Queer persons living in Uganda, I’ve been perplexed and vexed by many of the comments made by political leaders, elected officials, ordained ministers, Bishops of the Vatican, scape-goating the issues they are really facing by condemning members of the Queer Community or implying that the victims of crimes are the ones to blame for the embarrassment of the Catholic Church. The comments tell me that these leaders seem to feel that if persons like you and I didn’t exist then their lives wouldn’t be so difficult and the issues they have to deal with would be less complicated. The fact is, our absence wouldn’t make any difference in the issues or difficulties they face, they just can’t bring themselves to admit that and so instead of looking critically at their own selves, they choose to attack us instead. Jesus understood this kind of behavior and Jesus understood the way you and I feel when we are blamed and condemned simply for being who we are exactly the way God created us.
This is Holy Week when we focus on the Passion of Jesus and remember his Crucifixion and, more importantly, his Resurrection by God to new life. The religious and political leaders of his day thought that Jesus was the problem and that if they could just get rid of Jesus then they would not have to face the difficulties he confronted them with, nor the issues that he was pointing out to them through teaching and his hands-on-ministry to the people who lived on the edges of society, those people whom the religious authorities felt justified to ignore and exclude.
Jesus, however was a boundary crosser who made it dramatically clear that God loves everyone and excludes no one by eating with so-called sinners and outcasts, by healing the sick and radically pronouncing their sins forgiven. Jesus wouldn’t let the criticisms and threats of those in power stop him from proclaiming God’s Good News and the truth about God’s New Community. Jesus wasn’t preaching about a Heavenly Banquet that everyone would go to someday in some far distant future. They could have coped with that. The far distant future wasn’t a threat to them in the here and now. But Jesus had the audacity to preach about the establishment of a New Community of Hope and Joy in the here and now. That would mean that they would have to change and change wasn’t something they wanted to deal with. So they decided to get rid of Jesus.
One of the commentators I read this week said this: “I keep remembering a little poem called "Anyway": a man named Kent Keith wrote it, but they say that Mother Teresa had it framed on her wall, and she certainly was someone who knew something about suffering and faithfulness (and doubt, we have later come to understand) and, I suspect, resurrection and new life, too. Like Mother Teresa (probably the only way I resemble her!), I too have this poem framed on my office wall, and I really should get up out of my chair and read it more often. It says, for example, "People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway! The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway! Honesty makes you vulnerable. Be honest anyway! What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway! People really need help but may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway! If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway!" Kathryn Matthews Huey
Steward for Public Life Congregational Vitality and Discipleship Ministry Team Local Church Ministries UMC
Dear brothers and sisters, with Jesus as our example, we should never stop trying to bring about the New Community of God in our own time and place. Bold actions on our part are called for, just as bold action was Christ’s way of dealing with his critics.
The disciples had a choice when Jesus died. They could return to their lives as they were before they had met Jesus, before they learned that there was a different way to think about and relate to God than they had previously experienced. And when the news about Jesus’ resurrection began to be told, they still had a choice to ignore the truth as mere rumor and the imagination of grief stricken women or to act on the joy and hope of Christ’s resurrection and begin to bring about the New Community of God.
Yes, they could have remembered what Jesus said and how Jesus acted and they could have stopped right there…just a good old memory that could be taken out whenever you felt lonely or depressed like a modern day photo album. Or they could claim that the resurrected Jesus was the same Jesus speaking the same words of hope and love, the same Jesus touching lives with power and promise, as the Jesus who had walked along with them before the Crucifixion.
We sometimes concentrate on the differences that happened to Jesus with the resurrection, but this Easter I would like you to remember that the same Jesus that walked and talked and cared for disciples and strangers was exactly the same Jesus that rose from the grave and was seen and heard by his followers.
Jesus’ resurrection like his life was very intimate, very personal. Jesus had very special ways of talking and touching, of acting and caring that no one would mistake him for anyone else. Have you ever noticed how you can identify that a friend or co-worker is approaching by the unique click of their shoes on the tile of the floor? Or the way they breathe or cough or laugh? You know those who are close to you by the way they live, the way they act, the way they speak, they way they touch you physically and emotionally. So, too, did Jesus’ followers both men and women.
Mary is distraught with grief. She finds an empty tomb. She is so overwhelmed with sorrow that I don’t think she realized the guys in the tomb that spoke to her were angels. At least she doesn’t act that way and her questions to the man she thinks to be the gardener shows she is still on a quest to find Jesus’ body. If Jesus was really dead then it was very important to her to find the body. It had to lie in the tomb for at least a year until nothing was left but the bones. Then the bones were buried together so that they might take on new flesh at the resurrection at the end of time. If the body was moved or the bones disturbed then might be scattered and that just wasn’t something that was done.
Mary is intent on giving Jesus a nice burial and making sure that his bones aren’t disturbed. I get it. When my daughter died I kept getting phone calls from family and friends asking me when we were going to put the headstone in place on her grave. They didn’t like it that we didn’t erect the monument to her memory as fast as they thought that we should. Their memory of her was important to them and they wanted a place to go where they could pull out the mental photo albums and replay her life in their minds and in their hearts. That’s what Mary wanted to do, too. It’s part of how we deal with grief as human beings.
But Mary doesn’t need that kind of a place to go to remember Jesus. Mary hasn’t yet comprehended the fact that Jesus’ missing body is telling her a very different story than the one she has imagined as being the truth. Mary doesn’t even see that the man speaking to her is Jesus. Perhaps her eyes are so blurred with tears of grief that she can’t focus them and really see Jesus.
I understand that kind of grief. I’ve buried a parent a daughter and a daughter in law. I’ve grieved with four of my grandchildren at the deaths of their mothers. Grief makes you oblivious to anything and anyone else. But when Jesus speaks here name, the same way she has heard him call her name many times before, the truth sinks into her deeply and she responds by calling him, “Great One.” Mary identifies the Living Christ as the same Jesus she knew before the Crucifixion. Can you imagine her joy? Peter and that other disciple may have ignored poor Mary in her grief, leaving her in the garden to cry alone. But Jesus didn’t ignore her. However, I bet those same disciples couldn’t ignore her when she burst into the room that second time that morning shouting, “Hallelujah, I have seen the Great One. Jesus lives!”
Jesus used this intimate way of identifying himself to those who knew him intimately more than just one time. That same day on the road to Emmaus two of the disciples, fleeing Jerusalem and the terror they had experienced, filled with grief, meet a stranger on the road who walks with them for several miles without recognizing. He teaches them about the Christ from the scriptures. When they arrive at their home they invite him into their home. Then when he breaks bread and prays with them before their meal…exactly the same way Jesus had broken bread and prayed with them many times before their hearts and their eyes were opened and they realized that the Jesus they had known before the Crucifixion was the very same Jesus that was breaking bread and praying with them that night. They, too, like Mary were filled with Joy and Hope and they got up and ran all the way back to Jerusalem in the middle of the night to tell the other disciples that Jesus was alive! Can’t you hear them shouting as they pounded on the door in the middle of the night, “Hallelujah, Jesus is alive!” What a joy filled place that house must have been!
Part B: The political and religious powers of ancient Israel and Rome thought they had given the final word about Jesus by condemning him to death. Now they were sure that everything he had represented and taught would die, too. They dusted off their hands and thought that was the end of the matter. Kill the man, kill what he taught and represented. But God had something very different in mind. And when they killed Jesus and buried him, thinking him no longer a problem, no longer a nuisance, God boldly said, “NO! I don’t think so! That is not the end of this story!”
God resurrected Jesus to continue his ministry and his life, to encourage his followers to keep on working to see that New Community of God would come into existence through God’s power and God’s presence living in and through them every single day of their lives.
We may not like what some politicians and religious leaders say about us. We may not like how easy it is for them to reject and condemn whole segments of our population on the basis of sexuality, gender, race, ethnic background, political persuasion, economic power, age, or mental or physical abilities. But those self-righteous politicians and religious leaders don’t get to have the final word on the matter. God does! And God says to all of us, “I am not done with you yet.”
And how will God have that final word? Through you and me when we speak up and act up on behalf of those who aren’t given a voice in the world, who are ignored and excluded, unemployed and homeless, handicapped and unable to work, or arrested and condemned simply because they are different from those who are in power. Stand up and be counted! Speak up for God and God’s people. Act up for God and God’s people!
How do we celebrate Easter? By praising God for God’s actions, of course. Yes! By thanking God for rising Jesus up from the grave to new life everlasting. Of course! But also by taking bold actions ourselves on behalf of God, for the purpose of building the New Community of God in the here and now.
How did the disciples react to Christ’s resurrection? Read the rest of their story in the Book of Acts. Read how they began a movement that includes you and me today, two thousand years later. They didn’t just go back home unchanged. They set out to change their world so drastically that others said they had ‘turned the world upside down.’ I’d like to think they finally turned it right side up by Bringing God’s kind of Love, Hope, and Joy to all people.
Today, dear friends, today is the day of Resurrection! Today, brothers and sisters of Christ, today is the day of Gods kind of Love, Hope, Peace and Joy! Will we act like it tomorrow? Or will we just go back to our own lives as if it never happened, as if nothing is different? Will Easter become merely a good old memory that we take out every once in awhile like an old photo album to relive the moment again? It’s not enough to remember the good ol’ days, we should be in the business of creating more good ol’ days for those that come after us.
How do you know that Jesus is alive? By the way Jesus touches people through your hands, your voice, and your life. There is an old hymn that begins, “Let others see Jesus in you.” Today, decide to let Jesus live through you. Let Jesus minister to those who need Christ’s touch in their lives through you. And, while you are at it, don’t forget to let us be Christ to you, too!
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