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.
No comments:
Post a Comment