C Easter Day Vocation
2019
Luke 24:1-12
April 21, 2019
For almost all of the Jewish people living in
Galilee and Judea in First Century Rome, it was a time and place of incredible poverty,
violence, and the loss of land— the land, the sign of God’s promise. Jesus’s death typified the Roman response to
anyone who might try to weave together community. Into this matrix, Luke, Chapter 23, ends in
this way, “The women who had been companions of Jesus from Galilee followed
along. They saw the tomb where Jesus’s body was placed. Then they went back to
prepare burial spices and perfumes. They rested quietly on the Sabbath, as
commanded.”
Christ
is crucified. The struggle for a life on
the land that is more human, that might share and heal, lift up the lowly and
cast down the mighty, that true peace might be established between all living
things . . .that heaven might come to earth . . . that is now over. Rome has
won. Greed, injustice, war, and violence
carry the day. The storyteller in the
gospel of Luke relates how every level of society is impacted in this grand
opera of courage and failure. The cosmos
is shaken to its very foundations and is transformed.
Rome
engaged in grisly, public acts of torture, like the historical lynchings that
were the crucifixion, to keep people in place and stamp out any budding acts of
communal resistance, to totally obliterate any communal identity other than how
Rome told the story. Rome, charitably, provided
public works, circuses, and bread.
Praise Caesar!—who allowed you to live for one more day, your scattered
peoples--slaves and scum, scattered and waste.
Rome
depended on the idea that conquered peoples would forget who they were. Amnesia so often leads to despair. And Rome and all the empires before it and
after it want to be seen as immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, unaware of
the possibility for any change, or invested in being unaware. So arrogant in outlook, Rome and its rulers
could not believe that there was a force working underneath the surface that was
bigger and broader and longer than anything Rome had ever done. The Wandering Wind was already at work!
As is
fitting for an event that inverts the first creation story in Genesis, the
story in Luke, chapter 23, ends as
humans survey the destruction they have wrought and then rest on the Sabbath
day. Bright and early on the first day
of the next week, it is women who emerge from the imperial shadows to make
sense of the carnage. They intend to
make sense of all the carnage in the ritual act of remembrance and mending. In doing so, they remember not only the
person that died but the long, historical link to their ancestors--to mend all
of them together in a communal identity.
“This was the work of women, whose domestic work of cleaning and caring
for bodies wove back together the ‘members’ of the body of the community who
had been torn apart by death. . . . Through their strict adherence to Jewish
sabbath law—by waiting to care for the body until the dawn after the
sabbath—they demonstrated that Rome had not succeeded in destroying their sense
of common identity.
“They
also demonstrated significant courage in going to the temple with materials to
care for Jesus’s body, as marking oneself out as a follower of someone tortured
and killed by the state is never a safe move, in any time. Through their
insistence on engaging in the proper rituals of memory, even for a body
destroyed by the state in a demonstration of [the state’s] overwhelming
authority, the women are claiming an authority of their own, a moral authority
whose compassionate, sacrificial care stands in contrast to the blunt, faceless
force of the state. They refused to allow the state to establish the ‘official’
state memory of the event of Jesus’s death.”[1]
Remembering, mending, lamenting, and grieving—seemingly senseless,
ongoing acts of identity--become the first acts to something else. They rest.
And on the first day of creation, they move to the tomb to see what
might be re-created.
Nick
Estes, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico,
writes that “[d]uring the late 1880s—disarmed, hungry, horseless, confined to
concentration camps, the buffalo nearly exterminated, their land broken up and
taken, and their children stolen from them—a new political movement spread like
prairie fire across the West, promising Indigenous rebirth.”[2]
Particularly among the Dakota people, the Ghost Dance emerged as a way
that Native people began to see the end of colonial rule. The ancestors were to return. The buffalo were to return. Dakota anthropologist, Ella Deloria related
the Ghost Dance as an event where the “visions varied at the start, but they
ended the same way, like a chorus describing a great encampment of all the
Dakotas who had ever died, where the buffalo came eagerly to feed them, and
there was no sorrow but only joy, where relatives thronged out with happy
laughter to greet the newcomer.”[3]
After
such an amazing vision, the dancers would wake up to their present reality with
their hearts broken, disillusioned that nothing had changed, but strengthened
that the future of colonialism was certain to come to an end. A new world was to come into being. As Ghost Dancing grew among the Lakotas, the
U.S. government sent the largest deployment of the military since the Civil War
to the Plains to crush the movement.[4] The
U.S. federal government knew. The Ghost
Dance was a definitive religious, sacred, and political act. And it was outlawed because it said to Native
peoples that the worst the government could do to Native bodies, to the land,
to the buffalo, would not destroy the memory of the ancestors, their relationship
with the land, the gift and relationship with the buffalo. The Ghost Dance helped Native people to see
what Creator was working out, intended for Native people.
Because
the Christian faith has been too often appropriated by the imperial narrative, and made into privatism and romanticism, we
are too often unable to see the radical political dimensions of our faith. There is perhaps no better modern metaphor to
the ancient resurrection than The Ghost Dance.
Yes, Jesus is dead, but this is not Creator’s will or wish for the
people. Early Christian doctrine says
that upon Jesus’s death, he descends into hell where he frees up all the
ancestors. It is a jail break and the
beginning of a world of justice is about to pour forth onto the land. Contrary to imperial theology, this is not
some otherworldly vision. This jailbreak
is a countercultural vision which stated definitively that Rome and its Caesar
were not the truth. Resurrection said
there was something longer, broader, deeper, fuller, more rich, with life and community.
Rome
had done its worst. It did not
matter. In their lament and grief, the
women are spreading the news and, but for the men not believing them, the word
is getting out. In their remembering and
mending, the community is being re-woven.
It was a time of great despair
and great hope. So it is in our
time. Author Rebecca Solnit says of the
present day, “This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative
movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full
engagement requires the ability to perceive both.”[5]
Rev.
Laura Everett is a United Church of Christ pastor and the Executive Director of
the Massachusetts Council of Churches.
She has started an alternative, embodied spiritual practice she
references as “The Mending Church.” At one time, she reckons, mending was
patriotic as the USDA sent out mending pamphlets. Now, by imperial decree, purchasing is what
is patriotic. She writes, “Mending is
reorienting. Mending re-centers poor
people, women and people of color as innovators, design-thinkers and problem-solvers.”[6] We have
generated and trashed nine times the amount of textiles that we did in 1960,
over 16 million tons of municipal waste.
Our wardrobes are 400% larger than they were 20 years ago says the
pastor who just picked up new pants and a couple new shirts with my birthday
money.
Most
of all, Everett writes, mending is spiritual practice. Before any stitch is sewn or any patch
prepared, she has to ask herself, “Is this thing in my hands worth repairing?”
When she answers “yes,” mending is an act of devotion. In other words, she sticks with it even when
it is slow and painstaking, even when it might cost her and take time out of
her day.
The
Creator is a mender who sees us a people worthy of repair even when there are
holes at the elbows, a fraying at the cuffs, some stress at the seams. We are worthy of repair—as are our
neighborhoods, our cities, our reservations, and our faith communities.[7] God takes what most of the world considers
disposable, curls up on the couch, looks patiently at what is in need of
repair, and tenderly stitches up what is torn.
We . . . you . . . are not disposable.
Rev.
Everett now holds Mending Church workshops throughout the Boston area to look
for places that need repair. These are
fully embodied acts--acts of resurrection which might recognize we have wounds
and tears and death and trauma as part of our story but the mending remembers
and re-binds us to one another as a people who have a potential for joy and
wholeness and life. We are re-membered
for who we are.
Man,
I hope that is what is happening at this church. When I first arrived at Billings First
Congregational Church, key leaders tried to tell me that this was a disposable
church, something to sell off to the highest bidder so we could follow the
bright and shiny big box churches to the west, churches modeled on malls and
auditoriums, and the latest iterations of City Brew. Creator, I believe, is in the process of
mending, resurrecting, and dancing.
And
with tomorrow being Earth Day, we must begin creating visions of what we cannot
yet see. Time is short. And we need to be rewoven together with our
nonhuman sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins. Knowing that the land is always an extension
of our bodies, we need to be darned, knitted, woven, mended back into
relationship with the land as our rhythm and life. The imperial and colonialist stories of
profit and brute force, disposable people and places, warfare and point-of-view
truth, must give way in favor of healing and compassion, mending and
remembering, courageous, confrontational non-violence and the embodied
spiritual practice of accountability and truth-telling. As a community, we must dance it into being,
resurrect it into being, slowly mend it into being as a form of devotion. We . . . you . . are not disposable. And neither is this good earth.
We
must make a space or hold space for the Native community to Ghost Dance once
again. We must do jail breaks both in
heaven and earth so that our only solution to brokenness is not incarceration. And we must carefully, painstakingly, go to
the places of death in our communities and join in the mending that the Grand
Weaver has already begun. Let us become
so prolific in our mending that every Herod and Caesar quakes in fear that the
world is about to change. It is then we
shall proclaim the resurrection as those women did long ago. And from that point forward, with the Living
God mending the way, who shall stop us?
Who shall stop us?
Hallelujah! Amen.
[1] Christy Randazzo, “Memory and the Risen Christ: Luke 24:1-12,” The Politics of Scripture, April 15, 2019.
[2] Nick Estes, Our
History Is the Future (London: Verso, 2019), p. 122.
[3] Ibid, pp. 123-124, quoting Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp.
81-83.
[4] Ibid, pp. 125-127.
[5] Rebecca Solnit, Hope
in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild
Possibilities, (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2016), p. xii
[6] Rev. Laura Everett, “The spirituality of mending,” Religious News Service, April 10,
2019. https://religionnews.com/2019/04/10/the-spirituality-of-mending/?fbclid=IwAR1Rzl0U-KBeiUfMsa4z_bo8A1g6J6h4jXIPv2uWnC2gI8N3Qg2-AivgLC4. As Everett notes, the words
for social justice in liberal Judaism are Tikkun Olam, repairers of the
world.
[7] Ibid.
