A Easter 2 BFC 2020
John 20:19-23
April 19, 2020
In an April 3rd article in Financial Times, one of my spiritual directors from afar, a great truth-teller, the Indian author, Arundhati Roy, writes about how we will never be able to use words like “going viral” again without a pause or shudder, with now over a million people infected, over 50,000 dead. She worries about her own country as the leader of India, Narendra Modi, parrots other world leaders by strictly enforcing social distancing, not recognizing that, social distancing applied without imagination in India, this means packing people together, almost certain to lead to untold suffering and death in that country.
Roy writes that the leaders who are
managing this pandemic are openly referring to it as a war. “But if it really were a war, then who would
be better prepared than the US? If it
were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart
bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there
be a shortage?”[1] We were not prepared for care and
healing. All the time we have been
preparing for, giving away our loyalty to, giving our hearts over to violence
and war. We don’t even have the words
for care and healing.
I messaged Tracy a couple days ago that
I didn’t know a time in my almost 60 years of life when the world has felt so
frighteningly fragile. Yet, that seems
very privileged of me, so unbelievably narcissistic in a world where some
people before the pandemic had to worry about their sons wearing a hoodie,
others had to worry that their daughters might go missing, in other countries
whole communities might get disappeared, and knowing that, unless we change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
conservative estimates that we have 10 years before we are headed for
continuing climate catastrophes.[2]
I know that is a bummer . . . and a
downer. Who really wants to come to Zoom
worship and hear the pastor roll out that kind of dour forecast? But
here is my concern. If I don’t share
that Good Friday awareness, I am not sure we get what resurrection stories, like
the one we have before us, must have meant for the early Christian movement,
known as The Way.
In today’s story, the disciples are social
distancing out of real fear for their own lives. These rural, backwater Galileeans know that
to be seen in the local Jerusalem marketplace or on the city streets might cost
them their lives, might end up with more crucifixions. We
should remember that the crucifixions of the Jewish people do not end because Jesus
is resurrected. Appearances of the Risen
Christ, as the story goes, happened before we find the disciples hiding from
the city authorities. The question
remaining for the disciples, locked away and social distancing in an upper
room, is, does anything of Jesus’s life and ministry mean squat in light of
crucifixion? Or does the imperial
violence and narcissism, the lack of bandwidth found among the Jerusalem city
officials, mean that the movement dies with the leader of the movement . . . that
the movement dies when setbacks, violence, obstacles, trauma, and threats come to a people?
What the Scriptural story tells us is that Jesus
comes to the disciples and stands square in the midst of them, addresses them
in the plural, as a community, and assuages their fear. Peace, he gives them, not as the Domination
System gives—through military might, power over, and economic leverage—but in a
way that continues to midwife community.
Jesus does all this in a way that is spiritually embodied.
Biblical scholar Ched Myers reminds us that, as
Christians, we live in a spiritually embodied tradition. This is not a ghostly tradition. Myers writes, in embodied form, he is the
“Executed One, Beat-up One, Famished One, Refusing-to-be-Dead One.”[3] Sanitizing these texts is only available to
the privileged. Those who are not so
privileged know that Good Friday happened and happens. The wounds are still there, the blows and
strikes are still evident. But the Risen
Christ is there to remind them that the work they did, the mission they were on,
it transcends all of that. It’s bigger
and must continue.
The value the Risen Christ asks for here is a
derivative of the Greek verb, pistis.
Pistis has traditionally been too often translated as “to
believe”—a word that connotes intellectual assent or idea. In the Bible, it has even been stretched to
believing the unbelievable. Like, “I
believe the tooth fairy is real! See my
quarter?”
Recognizing that early gospel writers were aware of
the imperial cult and the Caesar-religion, they would have also known that
Caesar Augustus had rejuvenated loyalty or faithfulness as a primary Roman
value using the word pistis.[4] For Rome that verb was much stronger in
connotation than intellectual assent. Pistis
meant loyalty, faithfulness, or what Strong’s biblical concordance
translates it as, “moral conviction.”[5] As Lisa read in the introduction to the
Scripture, I translated it as, “what we give our heart to.” With its repeated usage in this resurrection
story, the word would ring in First Century ears where people are being asked
to give their loyalty to Caesar in small, everyday ways and in large, Roman
centurion ways. Listeners of this story
are hearing the story and being confronted with where their loyalty or
allegiance lies—with Caesar or with Christ?
If you choose not to be loyal to Caesar, in the First Century, it could
mean the decimation of your community or the crucifixion of you and your
family. “Belief” does not capture this
loyalty test.
In this time, in this day, with an authoritarian
despot who considers loyalty to be his primary value, how can we not hear this
passage as a direct challenge to his way, his path, his rule? If you are not loyal, maybe you don’t get enough
ventilators for your state or your community.
As Jesus sends the disciples out into the world with
a countercultural allegiance, the story borrows from the first creation story
in Genesis. In that creation story, God
breathes into the fertile topsoil, breathes into nostrils to animate life. Humankind comes into being. God’s inspiration becomes humankind’s
respiration. Repeating the Genesis
story, Jesus re-animates the community movement and sends them back out into
the Domination System, full well knowing that violence, authoritarianism, and
class warfare will continue to be a part of the wider narrative. You must continue to be different. You must continue to speak another
language. The community comes back into
being. Divine inspiration becomes
community respiration.
Three
of the gospel writers have resurrection stories. All of the gospel writers either imply or
state plainly that if the resurrection is to be a reality it must be because
the community of Christ continues the work begun by Jesus and his
community. In other words, the gospel
writers all indicate that the resurrection only happens if Christ’s community
continues the ministry.[6]
The Risen Christ re-creates
the disciples by breathing on them a holy spirit. He then gives the disciples, often
representing the divergent churches or traditions within the gospels, the power
to determine what will be considered sinful and what will not, what will be
forgiven and what will be not, who will be in and who will be out. In this way, the author of John suggests that
what the disciples, what the divergent churches decide on earth will be the
divine decision.
The author of John
offers an incredible freedom to the early church. The author of John offers an incredible
responsibility to the early church.
Whatever you decide, it shall be so.
The early church is charged with an awesome responsible freedom to
discern how God shall be still speaking, how the Risen Christ shall still act.
We are also charged with
that awesome responsible freedom. The
world needs to hear God speaking through us as Billings First Congregational
Church—not as divergent individuals, but what we have decided as a community
collectively. If we are not able to
share what God is speaking in this day and age, we know other church
communities who will tell us what God has to say. We may laugh at them or chide them for
assuming that they can speak with clarity and confidence about what God is
saying, but how would anyone assume that God has to say anything any
different—about who is sinful and who is not, about who is forgiven and who is
not, and about who is in and who is out?
How would anyone assume that God has anything different to say if other-hearted
people of faith have nothing to say? If
we cannot get together and decide what our baseline is, what our core values
are, how do we would expect large issues like world peace to be brokered,
racism to be healed, or that national male leaders might step back so that
women might have basic rights like equal pay for equal work? This
congregation is a manifestation of the Divine seeking to re-animate community
and what God would will and want for the wider world.
Collective discernment
is hard work. To be responsible in this
freedom God gives a very divergent people, we would have to sit down at the
dialogue table, use the language of faith, and show a willingness to share how
God is speaking to us and be willing to hear how God is speaking to
others.
The world so needs to
hear the voice of Christians who love this good earth, who cherish its peoples
and animals, and who hold values in keeping with deep values in our tradition of
justice, compassion, hospitality, solidarity, and protest. The Risen Christ moves into our upper rooms,
where we have been locked in fear, pronounces peace, and breathes on us—this
group of divergent disciples. Today let
us be re-created for the way God is still speaking in the world. The
violence, domination, and inequity in our wider world do not mean the movement
dies. It means that our work will be often difficult
and challenging. Where will our
loyalties lie?
As the Divine blows
through our community, we are called to speak another language. Crucifixions of the First Century reminded
people that the world could not continue with the same loyalties and
allegiances, that world transformation was necessary. Arundhati Roy writes of the current pandemic
we are living as a portal to something else.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has
made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”,
trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the
rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it
offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.
Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have
forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is
no different.
It is a portal, a gateway between
one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the
carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead
ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through
lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to
fight for it.[7]
In each
age, we must be willing to acknowledge the immense suffering and death,
violence, domination, and inequity that occur.
As people of faith, however, our story tells us that the Risen Christ
stands in our midst again and again, to let us know that these death-givers do
not have the final word. Breathe
deeply. The pandemic is a portal. Christ is once again re-animating us to other
loyalties, another language, ready to imagine another world. He is sending us out into the world ready to
struggle for the peace, not as the Domination System gives, but as he
gives. Let it be so among us. Amen.
[1] Arundhati Roy, “The
pandemic is a portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.
[2] Jonathan Watts, “We have
12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN,” The Guardian, March
8, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report.
[3] Ched Myers, “Four Brief
Meditations on the Way to Easter – Part IV. Easter Sunday: The Somatic
Traumatic and Pandemic Lockdown,” chedmyers.org, April 14, 2020, https://chedmyers.org/tag/bible-study/.
[4] Focus of the book by Matthew
Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the
Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2016); detailed by
Richard Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial
Society (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 1997), pp. 149ff
[5] Strong’s “pistis,” #4102, bibletools.org,
https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Lexicon.show/ID/G4102/pistis.htm.
[6] Brian P. Stoffregen, Exegetical Notes at CrossMarks, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/john20x19e2.htm
[7] Arundhati Roy, “The
pandemic is a portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.
