Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Sixth Sunday of Easter, "Resurrection is about vindication of a righteous life"

Friday, May 18, 2018

Sixth Sunday of Easter, "Resurrection is about vindication of a righteous life"

B Easter 6 OL BFC 2018 (Resurrection)

Psalm 90; Luke 24:31; Matthew 28:19-20; John 21:13

May 6, 2018

I began this sermon series by talking about what happens when only the good die young, particularly among a community of people. What happens when those who are most faithful are murdered? One of the other big faith questions is, “How do we explain the existence of evil in the light of a good God—and not only the existence of evil, how do we explain evil triumphant?” What does that say about God’s power and justice?

I included verses from Psalm 90 in our Responsive Affirmation for today because I believe this psalm reflects a turn that is beginning to happen in Jewish thought and theology. The people are in the midst of oppression and persecution. They believe that the Almighty God runs the world. But what is this? Is it God’s wrath that leads to our persecution and oppression? Why do we suffer so much as a people? Our days on the earth are short. Why is God kindled against us? How long, O God, how long? How long do we suffer in this persecution and oppression? When will your wrath be done with us?

Then . . . the turn to a God who may not be responsible for the people out of control but through a different value. “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love.” Let our good days be as many as our evil days. If we are working on behalf of you, O God, prosper the work of our hands.

There is this question hanging in the air—unspoken but, I believe, felt deeply in Psalm 90. Is God fair? Is God just? And Psalm 90 seems to be hanging on the tip of that question. Would God indeed make our days evil even if we continue to work on behalf of God?

I have tried to include the full turn made by Jesus as a Jewish prophet in the “Prayer of Approach” for today. “Is the world the way that it is because you will it to be so, Just One?” I believe Jesus answers an emphatic, “No!” And Jesus then asks for our labor and collaboration to complete the transformation of the world, to do as God wills.

Is God fair? Is God just? Would God indeed make our days evil even if we continue to work on behalf of God?

As the Jewish people experience empire after empire, the resulting persecution and oppression, resurrection becomes the answer to those questions. God raises people, even a nation, stands them up in their graves to vindicate and validate the work of their hands.

Remember that Rome crucified faithful Jews as a way of saying that Rome decided what was morally right and wrong, whom the gods favor and whom the gods see as barbaric. If state violence was used against you, knowing that the gods had brought Rome its military victories and imperial wealth, the gods had effectively passed judgment against you. No matter what the State did to you, it is YOU who are the lawless, the barbarian. Your life held no value. We have effectively liquidated you and hope we liquidated your memory. Your life was wicked, wrong, and immoral. The gods have spoken.

Resurrection is a way of responding to say, “No! This is not the end. What you thought was true, the official press release, the conviction and execution of what you considered a criminal.” The Living God has the final word and where Rome interpreted evil, God sees good, an authoritative life.

Let me illustrate with an example. Way back in 1999, a movie with one of the best surprise twists was the talk of the town. “The Sixth Sense” was all about a six- year-old boy, Cole Sear, who has an extra perception or ability, to see dead people, and the dead people don’t seem to know that they are dead. Cole, as a little boy, is quite naturally terrified by the resurrected, thinking they are evil and meant to bring him harm, and they are made even more terrifying because these dead seem to be so ardent about communicating with Cole while they manifest to him the way that they died--one has an axe still lodged in his skull, a bike rider still has the blood trickling down his forehead from his accident, and a young girl repeatedly vomits in his presence.

With the help of a child psychologist, Cole, begins to communicate with these dead people. The young girl vomiting wants Cole to know that her little sister is slowly being poisoned, as was done to her, by their mother putting radiator fluid into her soup. Cole must courageously engage the dead girl, who cannot stop throwing up, retrieve a video she made of her mother doing the poisoning, and give the video to the still grieving father at her own wake. Cole must save the dead girl’s sister from the same fate. Cole learns that although resurrection can indeed be terrifying, once he befriends those resurrected, he is able to help the universe return to its just, moral axis. These resurrections are a moral vindication of their lives.

Throughout the movie, Lynn Sear, Cole’s mother, a single mother, has been fighting like heck to save Cole. She is frazzled by all of life. And struggles to keep all that she juggles up in the air—the bills, her home, her two jobs, and her dear, dear son. Lynn Sear loves her son, Cole—desperately. But how do you believe that your son sees dead people come back to life? No matter how much you want to believe your six-year-old, how do you believe that? Though Cole tells her he sees dead people and talks to them, Lynn Sear adamantly refuses to allow her son to think of himself as a freak. She loooooooves this boy.

One of the most tender moments in the movie is when Cole and his mother are stuck in traffic, Cole sitting in the passenger seat beside his mother. Cole has come to terms with his gift and now turns to reveal to his mother what his dead and resurrected grandmother has told him.

“She wanted me to tell you . . .”

His mother, not sure about Cole’s gift, and not wanting to come to terms with his gift through her own mother thinks now he has gone too far in bringing up someone so close to home . . . “Cole, please stop.”

Cole forges ahead. “She wanted me to tell you she saw you dance. She said, when you were little, you and her had a fight, right before your dance recital. You thought she didn't come see you dance. She did. She hid in the back so you wouldn't see. She said you were like an angel. She said you came to the place where they buried her.” Cole vindicates his grandmother and her life from a time when his mother believed that her mother, in moral judgment, was not there for her. Cole continues to vindicate the care and love of his grandmother.

You asked her a question? She said the answer is, “Every day.” What did you ask?

The truth of the resurrection and her mother’s love dawns on Lynn Sear. Cole has given his mother an incredible gift. He has vindicated the love of a mother for her daughter and God, or the world, is set right. God is just. In her tears, Lynn Sear states the question, “Do . . . do I make you proud?” And the answer from her resurrected mother is, “Every day.”

Show the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qqVQcZxpqA.

This is the true meaning of resurrection. Resurrection is meant to vindicate, validate, and give authority to life and relationship already lived. The life and relationship already lived provide the total context for the resurrection. The gospel writers say as much in their stories. In the gospel of Mark, the young man tells the three women that the disciples are to go back to Galilee and find the risen Christ there. Start the enterprise all over again. In the gospel of Matthew, the disciples are to go back to the place where Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount and teach what Jesus taught. There, on that mount, Jesus began teaching with the Beatitudes. In Luke, the Risen Christ is not recognized by disciples and apostles even as he walks and talks with them. He is only recognized when he shares bread with them. In John, the Risen Christ appears to the disciples and they are terrified, not unlike the six-year-old Cole Sear. Jesus manifests to them the way that he died by showing them the nail prints and the wound in his side. In John, Christ’s appearance was a reminder to the community that he would continue to be present with them.

This is what is so disheartening about the way the resurrection of Jesus is taught in our day and age. Nary a thought, belief, or commitment is given to the way Jesus lived, taught, shared, or was present. Violence is done, crusades are undertaken, and wars are waged by those who proclaim themselves to be Jesus’s most ardent believers. And yet, during his life, facing tremendous violence, oppression, and persecution against his people, Jesus preached and lived a way of creative and confrontational non-violence. Today, poverty and being economically poor is considered a signpost of our sin by those proclaim themselves to be the best of Jesus believers. Yet, Jesus regularly taught and healed in such a way as to bless the poor and blame the system that created poverty, sickness, and death.

We live in a time when wealth and power cover a world of sins and indicate God’s favor.

In a world that often demonizes Jesus’s life, teaching, sharing, and presence, we should be terrified of Jesus’s resurrection. If we have experiences of that resurrection, those experiences may be God calling us, asking us for a transformation of values. The Roman Empire made sure their presence was felt throughout all of Galilee. The Empire or Kingdom of God taught by Jesus had decidedly different values.

New Testament scholar, Bernard Brandon Scott writes,

Rome crucified Jesus, and Jesus’ group still continued to experience the empire of God. To explain this, the turned to their tradition—to the stories of their ancestors. “He has been raised up,” “he has been seen for,” “he has been exalted to the right hand of God.” All of these formulaic confessions are ways of saying that Rome’s apparent victory was futile and that the empire of God is here.[1]

Resurrection affirms the life lived and affirms that God is actively working to make the world right again and the empire of God, the empire of God is where that work to set the world right is taking place.. The innocent may perish but they do not stay dead. God is just. For Jesus’s followers, Jesus’s resurrection was the beginning of the transformation of the earth in keeping with the way not only of Jesus but the community that developed around him. Resurrection was a definitive rebuke, a “no” to Rome’s belief that the gods had spoken, and Jesus and his followers were morally corrupt, worthy of state torture, violence, and death. Throughout history, state power, governments, have tried to tell us who is immoral and moral through imprisonment, violence, torture, and death. If that violence, torture, and death does carry the day, how would we possibly know God to be just?

In the end, our holy Scriptures tell us this is about a difference in values. Rome declares that their wealth and power is indicative of their moral superiority, that the gods favor them. The community that declares a Mediterranean Jewish peasant resurrected does so out of a fundamental belief that God is just, non-violent, and has a heart for the poor.

I believe this is the very narrative playing out in the Christian Church and in our country. But there are more recent examples that resurrections are afoot.

It was the killing of a friend, Father Rutillio Grande in 1977, a champion for the rural poor, that led El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero to begin pleading for justice, for which he was imprisoned, to write Jimmy Carter to end the shipment of U.S. arms and end support for the El Salvadoran military, to ask soldiers and police to halt the killing of civilians seeing them, he said, “as your sisters and brothers.” It was Romero who said, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” The El Salvadoran government and military believed they had the last word, believed that they had silenced the voice of Oscar Romero. Did they?

It is Dr. Martin Luther King saying from the State capitol steps in Montgomery, Alabama, “I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long. Because truth pressed to earth will rise again.”[2] It is the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina whose children were disappeared during the State reign of terror from 1976 to 1983 and show up to say that the universe is moral, and you cannot make us believe that our children deserved such a fate. We will meet your force with a soul force. Every week, like spiritual practice, we will march. Beginning in 1977, they have marched every week, over 2100 marches, many now using wheelchairs.

“The raising up of Jesus implies a story—the death of the martyr, God’s vindication of the martyr, the ultimate vindication of God’s justice.”[3] In every age, we are asked to decide if wealth and power cover a multitude of sins? Are winning, numbers, and Wall Street indicative of righteousness? Or is Jesus resurrected. Is he vindicated? Is God just? I so want to believe that my life proclaims the latter. Resurrection is vindication of those who struggle for justice, love the poor, and confront the powers and principalities non-violently. Is Christ risen? Is God just? In every age, what is our answer? Rome crucified Jesus to liquidate the memory of his life, teaching, and ministry? Did they? Amen.