Earth Day

Monday, April 6, 2015

Sermon for Easter Day!, Sunday, April 5, 2015

Easter Day B BFC 2015
Mark 16:1-8
April 5, 2015

            In the gospel of Mark, the Jesus movement begins in Galilee, one of the breadbaskets of the Roman Empire, an agricultural area.  Mark says that Jesus comes from Nazareth a satellite to the Jewish rebellion city of Sepphoris, Nazareth a rural peasant community four miles outside of Sepphoris.  Cities like Sepphoris and Emmaus had been reduced to rubble around the time of Jesus birth, Roman soldiers killing all the young men for miles around and raping all the young women.[1]
          Peasant peoples can endure much.  And they will often endure exploitation, avoiding direct confrontation, as long as they can maintain life at subsistence level. Peasants can maintain their honor as a village community and their ties with their kin farming and fishing on their own little plot.  Jewish peasants losing that little plot of land and their hold on the covenantal promise established in the land would have been in crisis in 1st Century Rome.[2]  Subsistence farmers and fisherfolk would have been pushed to the brink at this time as the wealthy chose to invest in land or loans, royalty taxing ever more to build and re-build cities, leveraging debt to squeeze the peasantry from land ownership to tenants (adding insult to injury by being a tenant on what might have formerly been their land).  And squeezing even harder to move tenants to day-laborers or even slaves.[3] 
          In looking for leadership, Jewish peasants would not have found solace in the religious leaders and authorities from Jerusalem.  Taxes to supplement the commercialism of the Jewish Temple and land grabs by the religious elites themselves would have left Jewish peasants in Galilee sour on the idea of finding leadership from well-placed, traditional religious leadership.[4]
In Galilee, breadbasket to the Roman Empire, Jesus begins his ministry teaching that the Empire of God is at hand.  With his opening line, using the word “Empire” and declaring that Empire for a God other than Rome or its Caesar, Jesus declares that his mission and program will be full of danger.  By using the word “Empire” to define God’s activity, Jesus and his followers are to be understood as counter to the already existing Empire, as anti-Empire.  The mission and program begin in Galilee with exorcisms, healings, communal meals, and teachings. 
As I shared in my first sermon about the gospels, the Gospel of Matthew defines Jesus as a “Righteous Teacher” following the tradition of Moses. Luke defines Jesus as “the Center of Time” between the Law and the Prophets and the age of the holy Spirit. And the Gospel of John defines Jesus as the divine “God” or “Son of God.”  Mark, believed to be the earliest written gospel, defined Jesus as an exorcist.  Jesus spends his time casting out the oppressive demons of Rome who possess the Galileean land and the Jewish people who live on that land.  While I was always perplexed as to why this good and peaceable Jesus might be crucified in the Christianity of my childhood and youth, the author of Mark makes it clear that Jesus knew such intentional opposition to Empire would lead to his execution.
The Easter story we have before us in Mark today has no resurrection appearance like Matthew, John, or Luke.  Almost all good study Bibles will let you know in their notes that the gospel of Mark originally ends with verse eight of chapter sixteen—the verse we have before us today.  The tomb is just……empty.  One interpretation of this Scripture verse ends abruptly with “talk about terrified” as if the ending to the gospel has yet to be written. The whole passage ends in a prepositional phrase, as if the gospel is not finished.  And maybe that’s the point.
The telling of this gospel story reminds me of the circular essays Ms. Bullock had us write in our high school sophomore creative writing class.  The gospel ends where it began.  The young man sitting on the stone tells the women to round up the disciples and go back to Galilee.  In other words, the mission and the program of Jesus now start over again.  Death, this political execution, does not stop the movement, does not end the story.  Begin again.  Exorcise oppression and domination, heal the sick and dying laid low by their poverty, share food with one another to preserve community, and teach and preach nonviolence to counter the violence and death you see all around you.  Jesus goes ahead of you and the activity of the Empire of God continues.  The message is that simple.  The message is that radical.
The author of Mark writes about the circular activity of God throughout the gospel.  John the Baptist preaches in the first chapter of Mark and is delivered up.  Jesus follows him in preaching the gospel and then talks about how he is to be delivered up in chapters nine and ten.  So it is, the author of Mark writes in chapter thirteen, that Christians are to take up preaching and will be delivered up.  When this act is culminated in the imminent future, the full drama will play out and Jesus will return.[5] 
Mark is written just before, during, or after the Romans are leveling the holy city of Jerusalem and the holy Temple.  In the year 70 C.E., Rome was starving Jerusalem and laying siege to the city.  The Romans were crucifying upwards near 500 Jews a day, ringing the city with their crosses, as a way of robbing the inhabitants of any hope that their God was at work to save them.  And we know that Jesus did not return during that time.  At least, in a way that would have saved faithful people from their torture, execution, and death.  Later gospel writers, like Luke, had to come to grips with this reality—wrote about the church going on in the age of the Holy Spirit.
Mark knows none of that.  The author of Mark defines faithfulness as our willingness to imitate the life, ministry, and mission found within the gospel.  Indeed, we must decide what that means when the tomb is merely empty, there are no angel chorus “alleluias”, and Jesus has not returned.  That is important, because to Mark, the earliest gospel written, resurrection only happens when we return to Galilee to start Jesus’ ministry all over again.
Biblical scholar N.T. Wright has argued, what else could plausibly explain “the rise of the early Christian faith as we know it” but the literal resurrection?[6]  Wright goes on to suggest that no other explanations but the literal resurrection are adequate, so that the literal resurrection remains the truth “however unlikely.”[7]
Talk about robbing the mission, ministry, and program of Jesus of its power.  I would suggest the rise of early Christian faith happened because Jewish peasants in Galilee became animated by a way of life that emboldened them to challenge assumptions in the Roman Empire by understanding themselves as the Children of God, cutting across the grain of their divisions to touch, heal, and share meals with one another, and finally, to teach an alternative lifestyle that not only allowed them to survive at subsistence but to thrive in community.  As Dr. Stephen J. Patterson wrote this past week, “Easter is not an historical fact that gives Jesus and all his followers the final victory.  It is a myth expressing the hope that Jesus’ death was not the end of Jesus’ vision, and the daring thought that the triumph of his reign of love and peace might still live out there somewhere in the near or distant future.”[8] 
I sometimes think we rob the gospel of its power when we say only the miracles matter.  What great power the author of Mark saw to be in the everyday struggle to confront, to heal, and to live in community.  We want resurrections, miracles, and second comings that do not depend our willingness to enter the struggle.  Mark’s world is a little too real, devoid of happy endings, to suggest that miracles save the story.
To confront the everyday violence and war preached by systems of domination is hard work.  To engage others and the world at the place where suffering and death occur is hard work.  To live in community with all the diverse personalities, cultures, and understandings is hard work.  But the good news of the gospel says that this hard work has the possibility to not only bring about life but to bring about life abundantly. 
To focus on the resurrection of Jesus as the be all, end all of Christian faith robs this radical Jewish movement and story of its power.  I believe the Gospel of Mark indeed says is that if the resurrection of Jesus is going to be real and possible, it will have to happen through the disciples who return to Galilee to live out the gospel again and again. 
For empty tombs and resurrection stories were a staple of Greek and Roman romance novels.[9]  In Jewish mythology, resurrections meant that a person was a righteous Jew or was a vindicated martyr.  The most widely known Son of God in the first century was Octavian Caesar, later taking the title, Augustus Caesar, “Augustus” meaning the one to be worshipped.  You may not be surprised to know then that the most widely known resurrections in the first century were Julius Caesar, uncle and adopted father of Octavian or Augustus, and Augustus himself, both their souls transported to the divine heavens, Julius through a comet and Augustus through flames.[10]   In a wider cultural context, resurrections meant that the program and mission of the deceased person continued.  Julius and Augustus, their program and mission of military might and economic domination, continued to live on as Rome ruled. 
So the question for any Christian community is whether the program and mission of Jesus continues to be rehearsed and replayed year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day.  Is Jesus resurrected through us?  Does the program and mission of Jesus continue to be rehearsed and replayed at Billings First Church?
Martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero understood this meaning when he said, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the El Salvadoran people.”  And to date, there is no question but that Romero has not only been resurrected in the El Salvadoran people’s non-violent struggle for justice but in non-violent justice movements throughout all of Latin America.  It is a meaning conveyed by Irish philosopher, Peter Rollins,

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think. I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system. However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.[11]

The Gospel of Mark knows this understanding of resurrection.  Nowhere, nowhere, is the more commonplace nature of resurrection in first century Rome made more evident than in the Gospel of Mark itself.  In Mark chapter 6, verse 16, King Herod is quaking in his boots because he believes John the Baptist who he had beheaded has been resurrected in this Jesus of Nazareth.  Herod fears that John has come back from the dead.  For those who preach the everyday violence and war of the domination system, authentic resurrection strikes fear into their hearts.   For those who have forgotten the earth given as a gift and the land as covenant promise, authentic resurrection threatens them with the creative and re-creative powers of God.  For those who spew hatred and venom in the name of their own private freedom, authentic resurrection seeks to transform their hearts.  For those who seek to limit God’s abundance to the wealthy few and cast out the hurting and the poor, John and Jesus are resurrected and the Herods of the world tremble.
And let the Herods of the world quake!  Alleluia!  God is at work in communities like ours to exorcise violence, share meals, tend to the sick, and seek righteousness and justice for those in sore need of it.   And today, this day, our whole world is in sore need of it.  Christ is not dead.  The words of Galilee resound.  Resurrection is happening.  Our world is in crisis and leaders are needed.
Today is a day when we say that God is still active, that the Jewish movement and story initiated by Jesus and his community begins again in Galilee, in Columbus as fires raged and in California where drought becomes the norm, in Crow Agency, Tanazania, and Chiapas where poverty and racism and ethnocentrism still hold sway, in Billings and Indiana where hate seeks to deny and discriminate against love, in Kenya, the Middle East, and in seemingly every American city where everyday violence and war gives exponential rise to more violence and war, in Sidney and in Texas where fracking threatens to despoil the land given in covenant promise.
So sisters and brothers, in the midst of the violence and war perpetrated by Rome on the peoples, hear the good news.  I say that the way back to God is possible.  Among those communities who do the hard work to confront the violence and war preached by systems of domination, Jesus is vindicated, and Christ is risen!  Among those communities who do the hard work to engage the world where suffering and death occur to bring about healing, Jesus is vindicated, and Christ is risen!  Among those communities who do the hard work of communal sharing and reaching across the great divide of ethnicity, race, class, and gender, Jesus is vindicated, and Christ is risen!
Jesus goes ahead of you and the activity of the Empire of God continues.  Not only in Galilee but just outside our door.  Today, this day, we proclaim that the resurrection of Christ happens because Billings First Church goes to school . . .in Galilee and once again re-lives the mission and ministry of Christ in our world. 
The world is in crisis.  And the resurrection only happens through people who are willing to lead as Christ led.  And I say today, through you, you beautiful, beloved, Children of God, Jesus is vindicated.  And Christ is risen!  Alleluia!  Amen. 




[1] In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus casts out the Roman legions from the Gerasene demoniac.  The ancient Jewish historian Josephus recounts that, in the year 60,  in response to Jewish revolt, the Roman legions took the town of Gerasa, the setting for Mark, Chapter 5, verses 1 through 20.  The Roman military swept in to Gerasa in the late 60s, killed a thousand young men, held their families captive, plundered their property, and set their homes on fire.  Found in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man:  A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, (Maryknoll, New York:  Orbis Books, 1988), p. 191, quoting Josephus, War, IV, ix, 1.
[2] Werner Herzog, “Why Peasants Responded to Jesus,” A People’s History of Christianity:  Christian Origins (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2005), pp. 51-52.
[3] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus:  The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 222.
[4] Herzog, “Why Peasants,” p. 51.
[5] Norman Perrin and Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament:  an Introduction (New York:  Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1998), p. 238.
[6] Richard N. Ostling, “Did Jesus really rise bodily from the grave?” The News-Gazette, Friday, April 14, 2006, C-8.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Dr. Stephen J. Patterson, “Three Myths of Easter,” http://www.stephenjpatterson.org/posts,   March 31, 2015.
[9] Robert Price, Deconstructing Jesus (Amherst, New York:  Prometheus, 2000), pp. 214-215.  Some examples, occuring in such stories as Chaereas and Callirhoe, Xenophon's Ephesian Tale, Leucippe and Clitophon, Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre, Iamblichus' Babylonian Story, and in places in Apuleius' The Golden Ass.
[10] Gary R. Habermas, “Resurrection Claims in Non-Christian Religions,” Religious Studies v25.n2 (June 1989): pp.167(9).  Cambridge University Press, citing,  Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957), 1.88, II.100
[11] Peter Rollins, “My Confession:  I Deny the Resurrection,” January 1, 2009.  http://peterrollins.net/2009/01/my-confession-i-deny-the-resurrection/

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