Scripture: Luke 24:1-12 and John 20:11-18
Before I get to Easter, I have some unfinished business I have to attend to left over from last week.
It was Palm Sunday, and I said right at the beginning that it was important not to just skip from one celebration to another, from Palm Sunday to Easter, without acknowledging the story that comes in between. In other words, it’s important to acknowledge the crosses, the cross in the Biblical story and also the crosses in our own lives. And so we were dealing a lot with crosses last week. And there’s a lot to deal with. Theological issues. Questions about violence. Questions of anti-Semitism. Personal issues of avoidance. When you start talking about crosses, there’s a lot to deal with, and we did look at the cross from a whole bunch of angles last week.
When the service was over, just within a minute or two of when the people of God said amen, Archie Thornton said to me something to the effect that “You know as a black person, the cross has always meant something else to me.” I knew immediately what he was talking about. I said, “burning crosses”. He said, “Yes, and the Ku Klux Klan.” I said, “Yes, I understand,” and I did, but I also had not said anything about it in the service.
A little later in the morning Faye Arnold was on her way out, and we were saying good-bye, and she said some words of appreciation for the service, and then she added something to the effect of, “But you know, you didn’t ask me, but I could have given you a different perspective on crosses. You know what they mean to a lot of black people.” I said, “burning crosses and the Ku Klux Klan,” and she said, “yes, and hate, and intimidation”.
Later, after Ava and I got home, we talked about this. Ava had been my planning partner for the service, and in our conversations about the service ahead of time, she had actually brought up the issue of cross burning, mostly as a matter of curiosity, how it came to be that the KKK chose that particular symbol to stand for their particular brand of bigotry and inhumanity. Ava even looked it up on the internet and couldn’t find much more about it than the fact that the Klan has used burning crosses as a means of threat and intimidation, which we knew to start with. Anyway, cross burning had been part of our discussion prior to the service, and even after that, I had not included it in my spoken words during the service. And for me this became an issue that was unfinished business.
You can’t go on to Easter until you have dealt with crosses. Racism is a cross we all carry in this society. I could not go on to Easter until I had dealt publicly with this example of racism in me. This example—my silence last Sunday—is a reminder that racism is not just burning crosses on people’s lawns. Racism is not just about signs that say whites only. It’s not just about telling people they can’t work here, or they can’t live there, or they can’t belong to this club or eat at this restaurant. Racism is not something that applies only to people who are mean, bigoted, or violent.
Racism is also about whose experience is recognized. It’s about whose story gets told. It’s about the subtle ways we think and the lenses we see the world through. It’s about the things we think to think about. It’s about what makes it onto your screen, if you will. And last week, even though I was talking about crosses from a dozen different perspectives, the thought of mentioning burning crosses in the sermon somehow didn’t occur to me. My racism was that I didn’t tell the part of the story, didn’t even mention the part of the story that has affected African Americans so dramatically in this country, a part of the story that occurred immediately to other people sitting in the room, and that Ava and I had even talked about earlier in the week. The thing about racism in our culture is that very often we participate in it without even being aware of it, because not being aware is part of the problem. So thank God for people—Archie and Faye—who keep us aware.
I said at the beginning that I needed to say all that before I got to Easter, but actually in saying all this I think I have been getting to Easter. Easter is about, well, a lot of things, and I don’t think we should be too rigid about what it’s about, but certainly one theme would be new life. For some of us it may be about the new life that we personally need, or someone we love, a very personal thing, a need to have some stone rolled away that is keeping some person in a place he or she is not meant to be.
But Easter may also be about a new life that all of us need together, some new way of life that we all may share in. And in order to get from here to there, we need to name the things that stand in the way of getting to that new place. There is a kind of unburdening that comes when we try to unbury what we need to confront, especially what we need to confront in ourselves, when we refuse to not talk about it, and I believe it puts us on the road to new life. Thus I began an Easter sermon as I did today.
Also, this issue of intimidation that Faye and Archie brought up in connection with cross burning is also something I want to talk about today in connection with Easter. I just happened to be reading something recently that was discussing the passage in the Bible where Jesus told his disciples to pick up their crosses and follow him. The writer was pointing out that in the times of Jesus crucifixion was a common thing. Well-traveled roads were often lined with crosses, crosses with people on them. It was a terrible thing to see and a terrible way to die, and it was meant to intimidate people. It was especially meant to intimidate anyone who had any thoughts of public opposition to the rule of the Romans.
It was the opinion of this writer that when Jesus told his followers to pick up their cross, it was not just meant as a general encouragement to be brave in enduring whatever troubles or hardships might happen to come your way. What Jesus may have been encouraging instead was an explicit act of defiance. Those crucifixions were supposed to strike fear into people’s hearts. They were supposed to give them nightmares, make them cringe and turn their heads away. Jesus said, in this version of things, don’t let them do that to you. Pick up whatever cross is yours to carry. Carry it fearlessly. Follow me. There are worse things in life than death.
That may not sound like the most joyous of Easter messages. It is not exactly the same thing as shouting out “Alleluia! Christ is risen”, or that death has been swallowed up forever, or “ours the cross, the grave, the skies”. This is not a jubilant message. It is, I think we would have to say, a rather more low-key approach to Easter. But sometimes that is the form the Easter message comes in. And for some people at certain times in their lives that is the only form they can hear. There are worse things in life than physical death.
Several years ago, in my first Easter sermon here at Sojourners, I remember talking about a time in my life when I was seriously depressed for a long period of time. Not just sort of “down”, or subject to periods of sadness, but seriously depressed in an unrelieved way for a long period of time. When people are in that situation, they feel powerless. When I was in that situation, I felt powerless. It was not something I could talk myself out of. And when I began to emerge on the other side of that depression, I felt it as a miracle. When I began to come out of the tomb that depression had put me in, into the light of day, I couldn’t feel it as anything other than the work of God. God reaching down into some very dark place and finding the “me” that had been hidden under the heaviness I had been living with. Though it didn’t happen quickly, I felt it as an experience of resurrection, and I will always think of it as a miracle, without human explanation.
What I didn’t say then, and what I want to say today, is that I now think that I had begun to hear the message of Easter even before I began to feel like I was going to make it to the other side of this time of depression. In the midst of the depression, I began to feel and actually felt for quite some time, that I didn’t care a whole lot whether I lived or died. It’s not a good way to feel. I don’t recommend it.
But somewhere in there I received a gift. Having been to a place where death didn’t seem such an awful thing, when I began to want to live again, death still didn’t seem like such an awful thing, and miraculously many of my fears, though certainly not just magically wiped away, didn’t seem quite so important, quite so controlling or intimidating as they had before. I don’t make any great claims about this even to myself. Depression is never not a possibility to return. Nor is it ever not a possibility that fears of all kinds, of some unsolicited and unsuspected kinds of fears, can rise up and take control of your life.
But there is a big difference, and we all know this in one way or another, between fears that intimidate us, that change the way we live and limit the way we live, and fears that are just there, but not in control. In a world, in a society where so many of the messages we receive are either blatantly or cunningly based on fear, it is a resurrection gift if we are able not to be intimidated by our fears. I should say it is both a resurrection gift and a resurrection calling to us to resolve not to give in to the messages of fear. We do have a role to play here, but I don’t believe we are liberated from the power of our fears without the intervention of God.
There’s one more kind of intimidation I just want to mention this morning, and it’s a kind of intimidation that in a way I’ve trying to speak to all morning. What I’m thinking is that in a way Easter itself might be sort of intimidating. What are we supposed to be celebrating this morning? What are we supposed to believe in order to be celebrating this morning?
I don’t mean intimidated in the really serious sense, of course. You’re not intimidated or you wouldn’t be here. But I’m guessing that there are at least a few people here who feel just a teensy little bit like imposters. We aren’t sure we really belong here celebrating Easter in a Christian church. Many of us, I’m sure, come with questions or doubts. We aren’t so sure what we think about this resurrection stuff, Jesus’ resurrection…or our own for that matter. What are we supposed to think about Jesus, this story in the Bible that speaks of an empty tomb and a conversation in the garden after he’s supposed to have been dead? Is this an idle tale, as Luke puts it? Or does it contain truth, and what is that truth for me? What about life after death for any of us? What are we supposed to believe about that? There are lots of questions and lots of ways to word them, and I don’t guess, I know that they are troubling questions to some of us. And if, on the one hand, Easter seems like a good time to put questions aside and just say alleluia, on the other hand for those who can’t do that, it may make the questions even more pointed.
I really hope no one, or very few people, feel too much like imposters at Sojourners. We work pretty hard, I think, at communicating the idea that you don’t have to be someone other than who you are to be welcome here. You don’t have to pretend to a sexual orientation that is not yours. You don’t have to pretend to beliefs that you don’t have. Our understanding of faith here, reflected in our name, is that faith is not a matter of having a set of settled propositions to agree to but instead a growing and changing relationship to God, as one of our early statements says. Questions are not only ok; they are an important and necessary part of the journey.
But I’ve been thinking too about how important believing is. Questions are ok, even important and necessary but they are not what brings us to life, gets the blood flowing within us, puts us on the road to the new life we seek. Questions by themselves don’t fill our lives with joy. Questions by themselves don’t help us to love beyond reason. Believing does that, does all those things, brings the abundance to our living. The problem may be that our ideas about what belief is may be too small. The problem may be in what we believe about belief.
For instance, maybe we think that if we believe, we’re supposed to have words for what we believe, precise words, just the right words, preferably beautiful words, words we can use to convince someone else that what we believe is right. Or maybe we have some image of what’s supposed to happen or what we’re supposed to feel like when we pray. Or maybe we think that we’re supposed to agree to certain statements about God or about Jesus or the Bible or something. Or maybe we think we’re supposed to be perpetually serene, or thankful, or patient, or willing to be helpful. Maybe we have all these images of what a believer is like, and because we don’t measure up in some way, we tend to dwell on the questions and what we perceive as our shortcomings in matters of belief.
Or maybe many of us are more believers than we think we are. Just as we look gloriously different from one another as we look around the room, so our beliefs will have a different appearance for each of us. And many of us consider ourselves believers already. But maybe others of us are more believers than we think we are.
Because somewhere inside there is a voice that says that God has a vision for us, for each of us and for all of us together.
Because somewhere inside us there is a voice that says that there is a beloved community that is worth striving for even if it sometimes seems very far away.
Because somewhere inside us is a voice that can call us out of some place we may find ourselves that we don’t want to be and miraculously put us on a road to new life.
Because somewhere inside us is a voice that says that love is stronger than death.
Because somewhere inside us there may be a voice that calls us by name and that at any time can begin to turn tears to hope. Because somewhere inside us is a voice that says that the journey we are called to take up again is a holy one.
Because somewhere inside us is a voice that says that the people all around us are holy, even the ones we don’t get along with so well.
Because somewhere inside us is a voice that says, in the words of one of my favorite poets, that beyond the limits of our little prayers and careful creeds, we are not meant for dust and death, but for dancing life and silver starlight.
May such voices, these or others that may speak more in the language your heart understands, may such voices strengthen us in our believing, bring us new life in whatever way we may need, and inspire us to continue seeking new life for God’s world. And may we know ourselves blessed in our journeys. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 20, 2003