Earth Day

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Easter Day, "Resurrection is a this-worldly experience"


B Easter Day BFC 2018
Mark 16:1-8
April 1, 2018

          I think one of the great sins of modern-day Christianity is that it has become an other-worldly religion.  Christianity has become about heaven and hell, judgment and the after-life.  I think the result of this emphasis is that we really don’t need to care about the soil or the atmosphere, even though Biblical faith tells us that we are made out of the deep black and brown of the earth and the wind and breath of the atmosphere.   Instead, we end up with a sky god who seems wholly unconcerned with a relationship to the air, water, and land.  When Biblical faith tells us that the literal translation of the word salvation is “a broad and spacious place for community life and conduct,” we know how central land is to our faith story. The land is the part of the promise, the substance of God’s covenant, the very context for all of our relationships.
          When the Biblical God is made into nothing more than a sky god, then the material bases of life become unimportant.  The imperial narrative tells us to pay attention to the otherworldly battle that is going on to understand why they or we have the authority over life and death, food and land, air and water.  Our gods won.  “So we win,” empire says, “and there is only so much to go around.  Soooooo . . . sorry.” 
Through Pax Romana, Deutschland über alles, and manifest destiny, all of the land that stretches into the horizon is declared the individual property of empire.  We therefore reserve the right to dominate, occupy, colonize, confiscate, and liquidate land first; and bodies second.  The violence of empire becomes like a legion of demons—poisoning the land; spirits--housed in our own bodies.  
We get the message loud and clear.  Empire homogenizes to commodify and divides to conquer.   It tells us that the goodness of God is scarce so you had better get yourself some over and against your neighbor.  First the land and then bodies.  The message is so thick that sometimes we allow the imperial demons to take hold and we experience or do to our own bodies what we hear to be the imperial gospel—dominating, abusing, cutting, starving, drugging, sedating, objectifying—until we can no longer hear God’s voice whisper to us, “No.  Child of God.  Beautiful.  Rich.  Free.  Balance.  Strong.  Kind.”
The resurrection is the disruption to the imperial program.  The tomb is empty.  It’s just empty.  The tomb is empty—a fact that creates great fear for the women because to disturb a tomb, by edict of Caesar, was considered dishonorable, a capital offense punishable by death.[1]  So there is this amazement and this trauma upon trauma, this fear that they could be next.  Is it Rome or God that is ever-present?  In their minds, maybe in the midst of their tremendous grief, even though their friend and teacher tried to convince them otherwise, they just don’t know now.  
Is God or empire ever-present for our soul, heart, mind, and strength?   
There is no great appearance story in the Gospel of Mark--no Mary mistaking him for the gardener; or him walking on the road to Emmaus with disciples; no appearing in the Upper Room to have Thomas put his hands in his side or cooking fish while the disciples cast their nets looking for a haul.  The Scripture passage starts with the Marys headed to the tomb, not even knowing how they will get the stone rolled away.  Rome used crucifixion, like other empires used lynching[2], to not only liquidate the person but to also create so much trauma in the horrific death that they would liquidate his memory as well.  Cut off the head.  Kill the body.  And the memory of Jesus fades.
          But there is some literary wordplay being used in this story.  The word for “tomb” comes from the Greek word for “memory” and the word for “entrance” means “gateway” or “door.”[3]  So as the women wonder who will roll away a stone that is the gateway to memory, the Marys are surprised to find that the stone has already been rolled back.  And so, the door to memory of their beloved teacher and friend has been made possible.  Now they are given permission to re-member Jesus and his whole program, his whole enterprise--over and over again.    
          Notice in this resurrection story that there is no story of Jesus ascending to the sky or some metaphysical experience of Jesus as some other life form.  The person in white who greets the two Marys is not even a divine being.  It is a young man.  And he tells them what the resurrection means.  It means that God affirms the whole project, the whole program.  “Jesus is hoofing it back to the homeland, Galilee” the young man tells them, where Jesus has a connection to the rich black and brown soil, where bread and fish are shared, where demons are thrown out of bodies and off the land, and where the ravages of empire on bodies in sickness and death are healed.   It is not about some otherworldly experience.  Resurrection tells the two Marys that in the gateway to their memories, go and relive the mission and ministry of Jesus back in Galilee—the land that is in every bone and sinew, in every synapse and blood vessel.   Through the resurrection power of God, the mission and ministry in Galilee has a connotation that life is shared, in and out are blurred, and diversity is to be celebrated.  Christ has already started the movement before you—disrupted the imperial occupation and colonization in body to go back to the land and begin the nonviolent confrontation of empire--exorcising demons, creating a mutuality between healing and hospitality, and sharing bread and grape across the table. 
          Activist and professor, Loretta Ross, has said, “When people think many different thoughts and move in the same direction, that’s a movement.  When they think the same thoughts and move in the same direction, that’s a cult.”[4]  From its very beginning, Christianity was intended to be a disruptive movement, the resistance, over and against the violence of empire.  And the early Christian movement was not known for its sameness in belief, ortho-doxy, but for its sameness in practice and direction, ortho-praxis.  As Christianity became an imperial narrative, however, ortho-doxy (right belief) became primary--faith homogenized to lose all of its color, commodified to lose all of its courage. 
          We currently live in a time where we are told that there is scarce justice, scarce attention, and scarce liberation.  We believe we are inevitably pitted against each other such that we worry that what is the worst thing in our lives won’t get the attention it deserves.  “How come your worst thing gets attention and my worst thing didn’t?”  That scarcity is an imperial lie.  In God’s land, in the place the resurrected Christ is going to in Galilee, the common quilt stitched together through the hard work in our diverse lives, there is abundant justice, abundant attention, and abundant liberation.[5]
          Throughout this whole season of Lent, I have asked us to develop attention liberation leading to transformative justice.  I have done that believing we are forever diverted and distracted, seduced to try and win the Game of Thrones that leaves the whole world tattered in chaos and ruin.  We have to stop trying to succeed at the imperial project, pretending we can win it if we just play the right numbers, bet on the right horse, straighten out our lives and look a little more presentable.  Resurrection is not winning.  Resurrection is God saying that even crucified bodies, traumatized peoples, are called to rise up and join themselves to the shared program and plan in Galilee.  God’s empire does not win because God does not play that game. 
The jailbreak has already happened.  We may be scared, terrified, amazed, but, over and over again, Christ is being resurrected to do the work of the gospel.  Come to the empty tomb to enter into re-membrance of who he was in Galilee.  Re-member yourselves, re-member your community, re-member the good earth, people of dark rich soil and holy wind, and then follow.  For, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed.  Amen. 


[1] Bruce J. Malina, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis:  Augsburg Fortress, 2003), p. 383.
[2] That would be our empire.  James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2011).  Contrary to popular belief, lynching was a popular white social activity. 
[3] James Rowe, “Mark 16:1-8,” Lectionary Greek, April 3, 2012, http://lectionarygreek.blogspot.com/2012/04/mark-161-8.html.
[4] Rachell Ravelli, “‘Call In, Call Out’ talk examines current human rights movement,” The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, March 10, 2016.  https://dailycollegian.com/2016/03/call-in-call-out-talk-examines-current-human-rights-movement/.
[5] Really paraphrasing one of my oracles, “Interview with Adrienne Maree Brown:  The World Is a Miraculous Mess and It’s Going to Be All Right,” Yes!  March 17, 2018.  http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/the-world-is-a-miraculous-mess-and-its-going-to-be-alright-20180327.


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