April 20, 2014

Clay Nelson

Easter Day     Matthew 28:1-10

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Easter is always a joyful occasion.  It is at the heart of our Christian faith. But it is shrouded in a mystery laced with questions.  Preachers struggle with how to speak of it in a meaningful way.  This is especially true for us on a progressive Christian path.

There are a number of retired clergy who worship here because they have moved beyond the traditional doctrines of the church.  Their understanding of faith has evolved.  They come here because we are a place that encourages thinking outside the box in which the church has put God and Jesus. I’d like to tell you about one of them today because I know he isn’t here.  He has told us that we will see him most Sundays but never on Easter.  His reason is that he has never been able to swallow the “dead man walking” understanding of Easter and “he died for our sins” interpretation of the cross.

He knows that I have repudiated both of those ideas many times but he also knows that I face a dilemma today.  How can I remain “Christian” and turn my back on the central story of our faith?  How can I as a representative of an institution that has 2000 years of history, and which is littered with faith statements formulated when the world was quite different, be intellectually honest and relevant to the world in which we live and yet stay connected to our tradition?

It isn’t easy, so I sweat blood over my Easter sermons.  For, to paraphrase Paul, if the resurrection didn’t happen, why have we gone to all this trouble to be here today?

We like to claim that Christianity started organised, that Jesus organised it, and that it has been getting more and more organised over time. 

It’s true that Jesus was a superb community organiser, but he was not a particularly committed institution builder. That wasn’t what his ministry was about. And it’s not really what his message was about. 

Napoleon Bonaparte once met with an important cardinal. He grew increasingly frustrated with him as the meeting progressed. He finally erupted, saying, “May I remind you, your eminence, that I have the power to destroy the Church?”

To his surprise, the cardinal shrugged ruefully and then replied, “Your majesty, why should you be able to achieve what thousands of clergy have been attempting and failing at for nearly two thousand years?”

The church is too often tone deaf to the music of Jesus.  Instead, the church wants Jesus to dance to its own tune.

That wasn’t what Jesus had in mind.

There is no evidence Jesus was trying to establish a new organised religion.  Just a quick skimming of the Gospels makes pretty clear that Jesus wasn’t a fan of organised believing.  He flouted its rules and challenged its assumptions.  It didn’t make him very popular with the priests.  Still, he didn’t seem to be bothered by what the religious thought of him, even though he knew that they couldn’t tolerate indefinitely his defiance of their presumed authority.

While Jesus had no love of organised religion, he did seem to have a place in his heart for a disorganised one.  The Jesus Movement was a disorganised band of pilgrims, fluid and ragged, seeking the new way of being they saw in Jesus but did not fully understand.

So, if you are here this morning harbouring doubts in the back of your mind about organised religion, then perhaps, like Jesus himself, you may find that you still have a spot in your heart for disorganised religion. 

If that’s the case, then maybe, just maybe, the Jesus movement is for you.

But movements are funny.  They don’t just gather steam, like a locomotive, chugging towards the future.  They’re more like sailboats in a variable breeze. They glide and then stop dead. They are always changing direction, looking for the next gust of wind.

And people don’t just climb aboard and stay there.  Most movements include people who come and go.  Some come only for a season or two.  Some leave and come back—Peter himself seems to have been a little like that. And the disillusionment of Judas was such that he all but brought the whole movement down with him when he decided it was time for him to depart.

We don’t know exactly what happened after Jesus was executed.  We only have Paul’s account written about 20 years after it happened and the four Gospel accounts, the earliest of which was written about 40 years after Jesus died.  They vary in some significant ways.  Paul doesn’t give us the story of the resurrection, he just testifies that the Risen Christ appears to individuals and groups over time. In the original version of Mark there are no resurrection appearances at all, only an empty tomb.  The witnesses vary, as does the location.  Did the Risen Christ appear in Galilee or Jerusalem?  Did he appear in bodily form or in a more mystical way?  The earliest tradition suggests the latter.  When did it happen?  Mark says he was raised in three days, which would have been Monday. Luke and Matthew revise that, saying he was raised on the third day, which would have been Sunday, the day the early Movement celebrated the day of resurrection.  Yet in John, after appearing to Mary Magdalene, Jesus didn’t show himself to ten of the disciples until a week later, and to Thomas who proclaimed him “My Lord and My God” until a week after that.

Since no one can prove me wrong, here is my theory about the first Easter.  I believe our ragged little band of his followers were so shocked by what happened to Jesus, which was the last thing they expected, they took off for the Galilean hills, terrified.  They returned sheepishly to their homes and resumed their former lives, perhaps with friends and family sniggering at them for being such suckers for another false messiah. 

But once the shock wore off they struggled to make sense of their experience.  They did this by scouring the scriptures where they came to see Jesus more in the mould of Isaiah’s suffering servant than a King David returning to conquer the Romans. 

They remembered Rabbinical teachings that had been around for a century that spoke of a suffering Messiah named Simon who would die a bloody and violent death, but whom the angel Gabriel said God would resurrect in three days that he might liberate Israel. 

They also lived in a Greco-Roman world that had many folk tales and myths about gods that died and were resurrected:  Osiris in Egypt, Dionysius in Greece, Attis in Asia Minor, Adonis of Syria, Bacchus in Italy and Mithras in Persia, to name just a few.  An interesting point about these gods is that when they were resurrected they came back disguised but bore marks that revealed their identity, not unlike the nail holes and spear wound Jesus would show Thomas.

Based on my experience of how we humans process major shifts in our lives, I agree with those scholars who think that it took six months to a year for his key disciples to experience the Easter moment.  I also think the story of the Road to Emmaus explains how they experienced the risen Christ.  You will remember that two disciples not mentioned previously realised they had encountered the risen Christ after a meal where the stranger took, blessed, broke and shared bread with them. It was in loving fellowship around a meal that many might have experienced their Easter Moment.

When those moments occurred, this ragtag Jesus Movement began to discover that hate had not killed love. That the God they experienced in Jesus was in them. Love and compassion could not be dominated or destroyed, even by Rome. When they discovered this they were transformed and had to tell the world about it. These fearful followers suddenly found that there were worse things to be afraid of than death, specifically not being fully alive.

Yes, this Movement began a long ago time in a very different world. But our humanity has remained much the same. We still live in fear. We still know exploitation and oppression. We still know alienation from each other, the divine, and our selves. We still face our Golgothas, where we feel forsaken.  We still need to love and be loved.  When we discover that we are one with the same source of love as Jesus, then we know our Easter Moment has arrived.  We have joined that ragtag Movement. Then we can proclaim, Alleluia. I am risen. I am risen indeed. Alleluia!