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.

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[1] Bernard Brandon Scott, The Trouble with Resurrection:  From Paul to the Fourth Gospel (Salem, OR:  Polebridge Press, 2010), p. 223.

[2] http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prestapes/c4.html

[3] Scott, p. 230

The Fifth Sunday of Easter, "Resurrection is about solidarity"

B Easter 5 OL UCB 2018 (Resurrection)

Matthew 23:37-39; Philippians 2:1-11

April 29, 2018

You may have heard about the new museum the Equal Justice Initiative opened up in Alabama to commemorate victims of lynching across the South.  A museum chronicling African-American history will also be constructed nearby.  I read some of the quotes of white folk in nearby towns and you would have thought that African-American folk were forming a militia in town.  Many white folk in nearby towns think the museum is just stirring up trouble, raising up the dead best left buried.  Memory is a powerful and a dangerous thing. 

In the 2012 movie, Django Unchained, set two years before the beginning of the Civil War, Django, a freed slave, walks directly into the maw of slavery, to free his wife from a Mississippi plantation owner.  The movie is termed a “revenge fantasy”, asking the viewer to consider what might happen if slaves had taken revenge for the violence, cruelty, and death of slavery.  The director, Quentin Tarantino, in his own violent way, reveals one of the nightmares of white America, “What if African-American people rise up using the same violence, cruelty, and death imposed that has been upon them in slavery. Lynching, and mass incarceration?”  With the movie’s release in 2012, right around the time of Easter, one of the actors from the movie, Christopher Waltz, appeared as the guest host on Saturday Night Live.  In a movie short, Waltz did a spoof of Django Unchained titled, “Djesus Uncrossed.” Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ emerges from the tomb, rolling the stone away, saying, “Guess who’s back?”, https://vimeo.com/59975315, (play the movie to 1:07). 

This short seems to ask, “What if the Resurrection meant that Jesus returned in revenge to deal out the violence, crucifixion, and death to the Romans that Rome had done to the Jewish people regularly and systematically every day of the week?  What if the Resurrection is just about who has the political power to deal out their own brand of violent justice?”  Unfortunately, many Christians have interpreted the Resurrection or even the Second Coming of Christ to mean exactly that.   It is a about a struggle for power.   We were the victims but now we’ve won.  You would do best to follow along so that we don’t have to kill your people, burn your women as witches, and crush your culture.  Christ is risen!  We win.  Wait till you get yours!  And doesn’t that mean we get to dictate the terms of surrender? 

In the hands of the dominant culture, without critical engagement, that can indeed seem to be the interpretation of the Resurrection.  But what if the interpretation of Resurrection was intended to be in the hands of some other people?

Resurrection had several different meanings or interpretations within the New Testament, each meaning targeted for a particular context and community.  As related in the introduction to Karen’s reading in the apostle Paul’s letter to the communities in Philippi, we have before us today one of the earliest forms of Christian worship, sharing some of the earliest reflection of what the resurrection means. 

 In this hymn or “praise speech,” Paul compares Jesus’s behavior to that of the ever-present Roman military and emperor, who try to attain or reach God-like status.   So though the Roman military and emperor may have reached for the status of a god, and may have used that status to their own advantage, God super-elevates Jesus over them.  Paul uses a verse from Hebrew Scripture, in Isaiah 45, where God counters the loyalty expected to Babylonian kings and idols to say now that the faithful will only find saving justice from one source—the Living God:  to whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess.  Jesus is placed in that long Jewish tradition to say that knees shall not bow nor tongues confess unjust and foreign rulers who oppress the Jewish people.  Rather, God in Christ, who is humble in healing, kind to the poor, and just shall be treated like a king or emperor.  To that counter-cultural Christ shall knees bow in homage and tongues confess in praise.  And not just the exalted status of a king, Paul writes, but a super-exalted or highly exalted status above king and emperor.

The language and symbols in Paul’s letter to the Philippians would have been familiar to the people.  In the First Century, two temples, dedicated to the Emperor’s family, would have dominated the landscape in Philippi.  Another king cult, celebrating a historical King Philip, had an imposing structure in the city. 

Also, in Scripture passages before the one Karen read for us today, Paul used military language in the form of a soldier’s pledge of allegiance to the general and the emperor, language to denote excellence in combat, the image of soldiers standing side by side in formation, and imagery of the battlefield.  Paul used the loyalty and fidelity of Roman soldiers to ask for the loyalty and fidelity of Philippians who found themselves in times of hardship and struggle.[1]  Veterans of the Roman military settled in Philippi making it thoroughly Roman.[2]  Philippi was a Roman Colony, ruled by two military officers appointed by Rome.   People who lived in the colony would have looked all around them and seen “forms” of the emperor as a god on coins and statues.[3]  Remember that this is how the “praise speech” from Paul begins: “Being in the form of a god.”

The Philippian hymn is not some transcendent ode or code explaining the goings on of a far-away divinity.  Rather, the Philippian hymn is a reflection of the everyday reality the average Philippian would have seen and known throughout their city. 

Philippi’s wealth was found in mining.   Gold and silver mines could be found in the Orbelos mountain range nearby.[4]   And slave labor—a filthy, dangerous, and degrading job in the First Century--would have been used to mine the gold and silver from those mountains.

When the Philippians would have read or heard Paul’s letter, picking up on all the language and symbols of the military occupation around them, they would have recognized his references.   Paul writes,  

Being in the form of a god;

Did not consider it a thing to be taken advantage of,

That being equal with a god, But he emptied himself;

Taking the form of a slave;

Becoming in the likeness of humans.

Jesus is then more highly or super-exalted than any other emperor or king, a verb used in the Greek version of Hebrew Scripture or the Old Testament to talk about the “Most High God.”[5]

Paul writes a letter to the Philippians that helps them to identify with Jesus over and against the imperial powers who seek to seize god-like status in the layout of architecture of Philippi. 

This understanding and interpretation assume that Jesus’s message brings with it a certain conflict that cannot be avoided.  There are competing claims in the world, and those claims seem to recognize that his death did not happen by accident.  Christ and his ministry seem to forever run headlong into Powers and people of power who do not like truth-tellers.  These Powers and people of power are the .1% who justify their status by making Divine claims for their wealth and violence.  Christians, then, make sense of their moral universe by saying that Christ and his ministry are affirmed by a God who is not found in the Roman Emperor, the most powerful man in the world, or the Roman military, the most powerful force in the world but in Christ taking his form as a slave. 

More than just super-elevating Christ above emperor or military, Paul was trying to do something else here.  Paul identified Jesus Christ with those Philippian slave miners.  Or . . . Paul identified those Philippian slave miners with Jesus Christ.  You can imagine what a revelation such an identification must have been at that time.  Even in our day, miners, have a shorter life expectancy in what can be a dangerous job.  They emerge from a mine covered in the substance of earth.  In my mind’s eye, I always have a picture of coal miners, faces covered in black coal dust.   I cannot even imagine what slave miners of the First Century must have looked like, how expendable they were considered as slaves in a mine.  I doubt that canaries were even kept in the mine for their protection, one slave just as expendable as another.

Slave miners in Philippi must have looked like and been treated like what naked fisher folk from Galilee must have smelled like and been treated like.  And miners and fisher folk, both at the bottom of the economic scale, were both probably treated like prostitutes and tax collectors, Jewish people who had to resort to marginal professions because of their economic circumstance. 

Paul identifies Jesus with slave miners.  That is in keeping with Jesus, himself, who kept community with fisher folk, prostitutes, and tax collectors.  What the Philippians heard was a Jesus who identified with them, found solidarity with those who would have been considered the very dregs of Roman society in what would have been a popular but dangerous statement by Paul.[6]  Remembering Jesus is to say that God does not divinely ordain oppression and injustice.  No! God identifies with Jesus to super exalt him above any military commander, any king, any emperor. 

I suppose it is human nature that in every age there are jobs or peoples we blame for their economic circumstance.  That was certainly true in Rome.  Slaves, fisher folk, prostitutes, and tax collectors were thought to be morally inept and unclean—even by their own people.  Not unlike Rome, somehow, in this day and age, we seem to have forgotten how the Bible makes sense of the universe and regularly blame the poor or economically struggling for their situation.  “Look!” we scream, “they pay no income tax.”  As if we should ask them to pay for a system and infrastructure that already bleeds them dry, for which they are not able to take advantage.  Perhaps we blame the economically poor  because we are all trying to reach that god-like status, grasp the golden ring, exploit it for our own gain, to which Paul refers to so that we too might be able to use the system and infrastructure for our own advantage.  Though many of us are neither poor nor rich, we look forward to the day when we might get ahead and bend the rules to us.  Identifying with the poor makes little moral sense in the world.  Think of those people in our time, in our culture, who are readily judged as morally contemptible for being who they are:  the deplorables, the economically poor, redneck tea partiers, the chronically inebriated, undocumented immigrants, imprisoned African American men, changing, but still, unwed, welfare mothers.

And yet, here are these Biblical passages, challenging us to think why Jesus was super-exalted by God.  Paul identified him with the economically poor.  Jesus made community with the economically poor. And God super-exalted him for not seeking to become like one of those Roman gods but remembering a faith that began with God identifying with, making community with, and becoming the Deliverer of Hebrew slaves. 

Is this the God we really want to shout out about, bend knee to when we make sense of our moral universe? 

The gospel of our wider world is competition, grasping and exploiting for gain.  Demonstrating our power and divinity to the wider world is the form of Caesars and Roman legions.  We are invited to that competition, grasping, exploiting, and turning it over for profit all the time.

But Resurrection does not mean Christ now somehow triumphs over Rome and gets his revenge.  Resurrection is solidarity . . . with Philippian slave miners.  Resurrection calls us to such solidarity.  The good news before us is that our God identifies with those economically poor who are considered morally inferior.  And all of a sudden our moral sense of the universe is turned upside down, and God super-exalts a crucified criminal.  Paul conveys that resurrection has a particular content.  Resurrection is solidarity.  And memory is a powerful and a dangerous thing.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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[1] Philippians 1:27-30

[2] Joseph A. Marchal, “Military Images in Philippians 1-2:  A Feminist Analysis of the Rhetorics of Scholarship, Philippians, and Current Contexts,” January 2004.

[3] Scott, “The Trouble,” pp. 70-71.

[4] Gordon Franz, “God, Gold, and the Glory of Philippi,” March 5, 2003, http://www.ldolphin.org/pphilippi.html.

[5] Ibid, p. 75.

[6] Scott, “The Trouble,” p. 72ff.

The Third Sunday of Easter, "Resurrection is about hope for . . ."

B Easter 3 OL UCB 2018 (Resurrection)

I Thessalonians 4:13-18; I Corinthians 15:1-9

April 15, 2018

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men,

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

          Educator and author Frank McCourt read this nursery rhyme to his students and then asked them what was going on in this story.  His students respond that there is this egg on the wall, and it falls, and, well, you know because if you know the laws of physics and biology, you really can’t put a cracked egg back together again.  McCourt asks them, “Who says it’s an egg?’

          The students respond with, “Of course it’s an egg.  Everyone knows it’s an egg.” 

          Pressing, McCourt asks, “Where does it say it’s an egg?”

          He can see their minds whirring and ticking, looking for any mention of an egg in the nursery rhyme.  They’ve never had anyone tell them anything else.  Every student in the class seems to be comfortable with the idea that it’s an egg.  Why do teachers have to come along and mess everything up by looking more closely at things?

          McCourt assures them that he is not trying to destroy or mess anything up, he just wants to know where they got the idea of an egg.  Because, Mr. McCourt, it’s all in the pictures and the people who drew the pictures must have known the guy who first came up with the poem, and that person must have known it was an egg.

          McCourt relents, a little.  He tells them he will let it go, but that the future lawyers in the class will never accept the idea that it was an egg when there is no evidence anywhere for it being an egg.[1] 

          Humpty Dumpty illustrates the situation the church faces with the resurrection of Christ.  Once a tradition becomes fixed, it gets repeated in such a way that we know what the standards are and what the variations are, and they become the lens through which we see everything.  The tradition becomes common sense.  Even as we look at the evidence, we may pass over it in favor of the traditional tale that has been repeated so often that it makes sense.[2] 

          We do this with other Biblical stories as well.  Some of you have heard this Biblical criticism.  How many Magi or Wise Ones brought Jesus gifts at his birth?  Many of you might say “three” because that is the way it has been portrayed in every Christmas play or pageant since our birth or because we know that the Magi brought three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  So, naturally, through common sense, we assume Three Wise Ones, right?  Well, we don’t know.  The Bible doesn’t really say. 

          So it is with resurrection.  We read into the Bible a tradition that has become so common place we assume it makes common sense. 

Writing out of his own tradition, Paul calls into question the physical resurrection of Jesus in one of his letters to the church in Corinth.   That seems odd because our Christian tradition and creed has come to affirm the physical resurrection.  If the egg truly is not there, how do we say the nursery rhyme without seeing it as an egg?  If there is no evidence for physical, bodily resurrection, how do we keep it out of view so that we can see what the apostle Paul truly says about it—resurrection in general and the resurrection. 

           We begin with the apostle Paul because his letters are probably some of the earliest source material we have in the New Testament.  Scholars place Paul’s letter, 1 Thessalonians, in about the year 50 C.E., probably 20 years earlier than the Gospel of Mark who makes reference to the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E. That’s where we begin to ask, “What does the resurrection and the resurrection of Christ mean to Paul and his letter readers and listeners?”

          Even though surrounding cultures readily used resurrection as part of their theology, Jewish theologians and teachers resisted it for thousands of years.  God’s favor was communicated by a long and fruitful life.  When foreign empire after foreign empire killed the most faithful Jews, however, Jewish theologians and teachers have a God problem.  If a long life shows God’s favor, and it appears that the most faithful and good die young, then is God sitting back on the couch, eating bon-bons, and binge watching “Stranger Things” on Netflix as the people undergo tremendous persecution and death?  Jesus echoed the cry of so many Jews through the centuries when quoting from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” So Jewish thinkers borrow from other religious faiths to detail the activity of God as the truly good die young.   The Greek word used for resurrection, anastasis, literally means to stand up again.  In the face of persecution and oppression, God stands up again just, righteous, and faithful Jews. 

          Understand that this is not about going in or getting to heaven.   The Jewish people are trying to rectify a just, good, and loving God with just, good, and loving people executed by empires which demand loyalty by ending the practicing of the Jewish faith.  When a faithful Jew continues to practice their faith, edict, order, and command demand that they be executed.  The problem of God in Jewish martyrdom creates the need for resurrection.  This ain’t no bon-bon eatin’, binge watchin’ God.  This is a God who is meeting with the midwife every day to work out the transformation of this good earth. 

          Going on in I Thessalonians, in chapter 4 we read for today, a new problem emerges as the Jewish people try to understand resurrection.  What happens to those good, faithful, and just Jews who are already dead when Jesus (referred to as the Anointed—the literal meaning of Christ or Messiah), what will happen to the already dead when Jesus returns?  Are the dead somehow at a disadvantage?  Paul seeks to calm the anxiety of the living over their dead loved-ones.

In contrast to the immortality of the soul, the Greek understanding that death never happens, Paul relates that these dead are buried in the earth, again asleep, already becoming dust, when God raises them first, before you the living.  Never fear. Your loved-ones are resurrected because they belong to the Anointed.  It hearkens back to the creation story when humankind is created from nothing but the dust of the earth.[3]  “Resurrection is the restoration of creation to the state in which God intends it.”[4]

This return of Jesus uses the Greek term that is commonly employed to describe the entrance of a king or an emperor into a city.  The city prepares and welcomes the king or emperor as if he were a god.  But in this Scripture passage, it is not Caesar, not Herod, not Pilate, but Jesus, the Anointed, shall come to the city seeking out those who are asleep.

We begin to see how Paul is working out the universe.  Resurrection, this waking up from sleep, is not so much used to indicate heaven and an afterlife, but to grant hope to a people who experience the persecution and death of empire.  The language, the vocabulary, used by Paul suggests that God works in a realm which empire cannot reach.  And God and God’s Anointed begin a general resurrection that signals the end of empire and the beginning of the transformation of the earth. 

In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes about the Anointed following through with God’s plan in two parallel phrases. 

“Anointed died for our sins  . . . in accordance with the writings.” 

“That he was buried, that he was raised up on the third day . . . in accordance with the writings.”

Not unlike resurrection, I think we have heard about Jesus dying for our sins so much that we scarcely know that phrase’s real context and meaning.  Remember that the Jewish people largely believed that their sin, often seen as idolatry, and spoken by the prophets as violence and injustice, resulted in God placing them under the subject rule of these empires.  So if the Jewish people were to be free to pursue their own liberation, the sin that landed them under the foot of empire would somehow have to be resolved.  Jesus dies at the hand of the people’s sins of violence and injustice.  In the forgiveness of those sins, the relationship with God is restored and the people are now free from their sins and free for moving on the violence and injustice of Rome.  That Jesus dies and is raised up by God in accordance with the writings makes all of Israel’s story available to those loyal to the Anointed.  Those loyal to the Anointed can see Israel’s long story in their story, and they can begin to see their story in the story of Israel.[5]  Paul wants the communities he writes to . . . to see their lives as part of the ancient story and to see the ancient stories as their lives . 

Let me give you an example.  Good politicians know what Paul is trying to do here.  When Barack Obama first announced he was running for president some time ago, where did he go to make that announcement?  Springfield, Illinois.  Why?  As an Illinois native with a son named “Abraham” you better believe I knew why.  Obama had no political base nor history in downstate Illinois.  But the State of Illinois and the American people do.  Springfield is considered the common place for Abraham Lincoln’s home and burial place.  President Obama wanted the general public to see his story in the long line of stories we tell about Abraham Lincoln and our story as a nation.  He also wanted the story of Abraham Lincoln seen in his run for the president—an Illinois boy, something historic about it all, the Civil War, Civil Rights, and an African-American man running for president.  Obama wanted all of us to make the connection with Lincoln as common sense.

In the same manner, Paul wants Jesus’s story to read in the long line of Jewish history.  He also wants the long line of Jewish history to be read into Jesus’ story.   Man, that is what I so hope I am doing every week here.  I hope and pray I am helping you to see your lives in the story and the story in your lives.   

This language and metaphor, “for our sins”, on our behalf, is found also in the martyr stories from the 2^nd Century BCE within the Maccabean books contained in the Apocrypha, a set of books in many Roman Catholic Bibles just making their way into mainline Protestant Bibles.[6]   Twenty-five years ago, when I was in seminary, we were just beginning to study these books to interpret the New Testament gospels in a much broader context.  .  Some of that context comes from concepts like “noble death” and “martyrdom” at the hands of the Syrian Empire and Antiochus Epiphanes, Epiphanes literally meaning God-Manifest.

Bernard Brandon Scott writes,

In the martyr tradition burial in the earth is an important aspect of the martyr’s being raised up from the earth, from the dead.  It demonstrates that God’s enemies will not triumph by killing the martyr.  The amount of time in the earth is unimportant; having been in the earth, among the dead, is what counts.  Burial in the earth accents God’s creative power, the ability to create from nothing, a notion that, as we saw, arose in Judaism in connection with being raised from the dead.[7]

Scott goes on to say that Paul uses the past tense for the verbs dead and buried, in the letter to the churches in Corinth, indicating a completed action.  But that Paul uses a verb tense for “He was raised up” that indicates a past action with continuing effect.  God had Jesus stand up and that standing up continues to move on the world. 

          The appearances of Jesus to this list of people Paul details in his letter all indicate that the appearances happened “for” or “on behalf of” the person or persons:  “for Cephas”, “for the twelve”, “for James”, “for all the apostles.”  The meaning is that God is causing Jesus to appear for this person or these persons. 

          God causes Jesus to appear for these people so that they might have hope that the empire cannot kill who and what the Anointed was and is.  Over and over again, Paul makes it clear that resurrection is not about heaven, not about the afterlife, not even and only about Jesus as the Anointed.  For Paul, the resurrection was a part of a long line of struggle by God to transform the world.  Resurrection affirmed and vindicated who Jesus was in life, what he preached and taught, the way he moved and ministered in keeping with a long line of Jewish tradition that interprets God’s primary value as social justice. 

          Rome did its absolute worst to Jesus the Anointed and sought to proclaim what he said and did as over and done with, that the Jewish God’s justice could be executed and buried.  Oh but, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, have hope, the long line of writings and scriptures tell us, because according to the writings and Scriptures, God has other plans.  God can raise up justice from the dust. 

          At the beginning of this sermon, I related that after years and years of tradition and re-telling, the resurrection has become only about Jesus, affirming his bodily resurrection and about getting our individual souls into heaven.  As if Jesus always pointed to himself.  But no matter how many times we read Humpty Dumpty, there is no egg there.  For Paul, there is no evidence that Jesus’ resurrection had anything to do with believing in the physically improbably and an afterlife.  Through Bible study, in looking at Paul’s letters, we see that the resurrection was about countering imperial power, death, and violence.  Paul used the martyr’s story found within his Jewish tradition to reflect upon the life of Jesus and proclaim that God had raised him.  Even those dead belonging to the Anointed would go with him in resurrection when the Anointed one, as opposed to some Roman ruler, returned to the city.  In fact, as a way to comfort those who worry about their dead loved ones, Paul states that they will be taken up first by Jesus.  Rome did its worst, could do its worst.  God would raise the faithful up from the dust.

          These resurrection stories put a critical question before us.  Are we so invested in our individual salvation and getting to heaven, in believing credal formulations, that we ignore the plain meaning Paul gives to the resurrection?  Are we willing to confront the power, violence, and death of empire believing that God will raise us up?  May God have Jesus appear for us, individually, and also as a community, Billings First Congregational Church, so that we might have hope, and continue the life, ministry, and mission of Jesus.  May we be part of the long tradition in which Paul placed Jesus.  Let it be known that no empire can execute and bury the justice found in the people and program of Billings First Congregational Church.  Rome did its worst to Jesus, and God raised him up.  In the same manner, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, God will awaken and quicken us too.   Out of dust, we will be raised.  Out of dust, we will be raised.  Alleluia.  Amen.

         

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[1] Frank McCourt, ‘Tis.  (New York:  Scribner, 1999),  pp. 353-354,  found in Bernard Brandon Scott, The Trouble with Resurrection:  From Paul to the Fourth Gospel  (Salem, Oregon:  Polebridge Press, 2010), p. 3.

[2] Scott, The Trouble, p. 3.

[3] Scott, “The Trouble,”  pp. 39-45, p. 89.

[4] Ibid, p. 230.

[5] Ibid, p. 88-89.

[6] Ibid, p. 89.  4 Maccabees 17:22.

[7] Ibid, p. 89.