Easter 2016: Practicing Resurrection

John 20:1-18

The Rev'd Dr Richard Smith

Today's Easter gospel begins in darkness, at a tomb, a place of death. It ends with the dawn. 

It begins with a woman in tears -- frightened, and grieving, and outraged. It ends in a garden teeming with life and Jesus speaking her name.

But it begins in darkness. 

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a packed courtroom when the medical examiner took the stand. A young man had been brutally shot and killed. The medical examiner had to explain how he was killed. As she spoke, she projected onto a large screen the first of several graphic photos of the young man’s bullet-riddled body. The bullets had pierced his face, his torso, his legs. They had destroyed him.

Seated in the front row were the young man’s mom and dad. At the very first photo, they both gasped.  They had not seen these photos before. His mom, with tears welling up in her eyes, slumped forward, her face in her hands. 

It was too much. They couldn’t bear to watch this. We got up and left the courtroom, went out to the hall to catch our breath. There we sat for the next two hours while inside the courtroom the medical examiner continued with the photos and completed her testimony. 

As we waited in that windowless hallway, the young man’s mom asked me what any mom in such a moment would ask a priest, the question no priest or theologian or guru has ever been able to answer: “Why did God let my son get killed in this way?” 

Last Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week, we remembered of how Jesus once entered Jerusalem on a donkey, bringing with him into that majestic city a crowd of scruffy peasants from backwater Galilee--a motley crew of poor folks and outcasts, the broken people, the ones the world regards as children and madmen and fools. 

And as Luke tells the story, as soon as Jesus caught sight of the city, he wept. I wonder what was going through his mind in that moment. 

I wonder if it was not just for Jerusalem that Jesus wept, but for the whole world. I wonder if he had in mind that young man’s mother in the courthouse hallway, and all the others like her in this crazy world of ours:

• A world where the bodies of young men of color get riddled with police bullets
• Where immigrants and Muslims are vilified, doors slammed in the faces of their terror-stricken and impoverished families
• Where people like us have grieved the loss of good friends and family members over this past year
• Where some of us struggle with our own health, our own natural aging
• And where, as our city changes so quickly around us, we fear we ourselves could be displaced like so many others. 

The tragedy of the human condition, which is to live and struggle in a world where again and again God is not present, at least not in the way we need him. 

And I wonder if Jesus’ tears that first Palm Sunday anticipated the words he himself would soon utter, words of abandonment very similar to those of that mother at the courthouse, words maybe you’ve heard yourself say in one way or another: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”-- a  cry so dark that only two of the four evangelists have the stomach to record it as the last word Jesus spoke while he still had a human mouth to speak with. 

Jesus wept, that young man’s mom and dad wept, we all weep, because even when a person is good, even when that person is Jesus, God makes himself scarce for reasons that no priest or theologian or guru has ever fathomed.

Because for Jesus and for us, Good Friday is inevitable. Given our vulnerability, and our sinfulness as human beings, and the pitiless storm of the world, tragedy is a fact of our lives.

But here’s the thing: If Good Friday is inevitable, then Easter is an unforeseen bolt out of the blue, a surprising and wonderful punchline. Easter is as much a part of our reality as Good Friday. It’s what one writer calls the comedy of grace, not unlike an old Charlie Chaplin movie. “How can Charlie Chaplin in his baggy pants and derby hat foresee that though he is stood up by the girl and clobbered over the head by the policeman and hit in the kisser with a custard pie, he will emerge dapper and gallant to the end, twirling his invincible cane and twitching his invincible mustache?” [Frederick Beuchner, Telling the Truth; The Gospel as Comedy]

It is this unforeseen and surprising punchline we celebrate today. The comedy of grace. In the neck and neck struggle between life and death, life and love and laughter will win. Even when tragedy strikes, as it inevitably will, still, grace will have the final say. 

This good news bursts onto a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few. And who are the few that hear it? 

They are the last people you might expect, because they themselves are the bad jokes and stooges and scarecrows of the world, the tax collectors and whores and misfits. They are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a  miracle to fill the empty place inside them, that it will take a miracle for the world to finally recognize them as brothers and sisters and welcome them home.

The comedy of grace. It’s the miraculous punchline Magdelene stumbles onto when the one she takes to be the gardener turns out to be the one who once exalted in her perfume, who knew the extravagance of her hair, and who now asks her: “Why are you weeping?”

If this morning we still find ourselves in tears, it’s because the story isn’t over yet. We know how the story ends, we know the story has a surprising punchline: The triumph of life and love and laughter. 

We don’t know when or how or what it might look like, but we stake our lives on that punchline.

What began in darkness in the place of death will end with a broken tomb, a garden teeming with life, and a gardener with a smile on his lips as he speaks your name.

So even now, perhaps with tears still in our eyes, we practice resurrection, anticipating the life and the love, the justice, the joy and laughter that we know will have the final say: 

• It’s why we in this parish stand with those young people of color gunned down by violence, and with immigrants, and people who are homeless, and people who need food, and people in Nicaragua who need clean water. We’re just practicing resurrection.
• It’s why we fight the political and economic forces in this city that have driven so many of our neighbors from their homes and threaten to displace us and many others as well. When we do this, we’re just practicing resurrection.
• And it’s why, on this Easter morning, we celebrate with family and friends and great food, bring back the Alleluias, put on an Easter egg hunt for our kids, and the braver among us so proudly don our homemade and slightly tacky Easter bonnets.

Because today and everyday, we’re caught up in this comedy of grace, we remember how the story ends, we know the punchline, and so today we’re just practicing resurrection.

Palm Sunday 2016

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

March 20, 2016

You may remember the powerful scene in the movie Gandhi. The Hindus and the Muslims have been locked in violent combat. To persuade them to stop the fighting, Gandhi begins a fast. Several days go by, the violence continues, he is pale and emaciated. Into his room comes a distraught young Hindu man. He says to Gandhi, “I'm going to Hell! I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall.” Gandhi asks “Why?” The man says “Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my son!” (Raises his hand to show the height of his young son)

Gandhi says, “I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child about the same age and height as your son, a child whose mother and father were killed, and raise him as your own.

“Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.”

It’s a powerful moment that speaks to the difficult choices we must make in a violent world, whether to render and eye for an eye, or to follow a different path. What Gandhi counsels in that film, and what Jesus counsels in Luke’s telling of the Passion are the same: To meet violence head on with love.

Not so easy in the real world. In 2015 there were 53,030 gun violence incidents, including 330 mass shootings. Twelve hundred people were killed by police last year. Our country has killed many innocent civilians through drone strikes alone. Just a few steps from our front door, young men like Richard Sprague, Bennie Martinez, Hector Salvador, and Jose Escobar were violently murdered. Donald Trump continues to exhort violence not only against protesters at his rallies but also against people around the world, hinting at riots should he lose the nomination.

All this violence makes us very sober as we enter into the Passion story this year. We are not disinterested bystanders in this story.

Toward the beginning of the story, in the Mount of Olives, Jesus tells the disciples, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” This is the very  same prayer we make in the Lord’s Prayer: “Save us from the time of trial.” (The King James version has it “Lead us not into temptation.”)
Question: What is “the time of trial” he wants the disciples and us to be saved from? What is the temptation he does not want us to be led into?

Some scripture scholars believe Luke has a very specific kind of trial in mind here. It is a temptation that was very real for the early disciples: the temptation to resort to violence in defending Jesus when he was violently attacked by the Romans. “Pray that when they come for me,” Jesus is telling them, “you will not defend me by resorting to violence.”

To flip this around, Jesus is telling them that if they do not pray, they will be tempted to give in to violence.

When we pray, we are connecting with our own deepest selves, with who we most fully are, creatures made in God’s image with an infinite beauty and dignity. When we pray, we are connecting to our very centers where we are deeply united to God. And when we speak and act out of that space of prayer, our words and actions reflect God’s mercy and compassion and love.

There, in the garden with Jesus, the disciples do not pray. They fall asleep, they become numb to life with all its joy and pain, they lose touch with their deepest selves where God speaks. And so, when they awake and see the aggressive, armed crowd coming toward them led by Judas, when they see all that is headed their way, fear and anger overtake them, and they immediately ask, “Lord, shall we strike with the sword?” And before Jesus can even answer, one of them grabs a sword and lashes out, cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave.

“No more of this!” Jesus replies.

Jesus, who did pray all night in the garden, who entered deeply into his own heart where he is closest to God, this Jesus lives and speaks and acts in accord with his deepest identity. “No more violence,” he tells them. He reaches out to heal the wounded slave, because that’s what Jesus, the man of prayer, does. When he is beaten and falsely accused, he does not strike back or lash out bitterly. When he hangs from the cross, he forgives his executioners. That’s what he does. Because he prays.

And today on Palm Sunday, with all the violence around us, we have to choose how we want to proceed from here--whether to let fear and anger and depression govern our hearts and our actions, or to become, like Jesus, people of prayer.

Our tradition offers many forms of prayer--some with music and dance; some with a candle before an icon or a crucifix; some with the Jesus Prayer whispered in sync with our breath, or rosary beads; some with the Daily Office; some with entering the stories of scripture through the imagination.

But, for us Christians, our most profound prayer is the simple meal we share each week at this table. It’s here that all the movements and mysteries of this week are gathered to a peak, where bread, like the body of Jesus this week, is blessed, broken, and given. It’s here that Jesus says, “This is my body given for you, my blood poured out for you.”

This meal is more than a ritualized re-enactment of a two-thousand-year-old event. When Jesus tells us,  “do this in memory of me,” he’s asking for much more than a ritual. He’s asking us to give our bodies to be broken as he did, our blood to be poured out as his was.

Do you know what you’re saying when you share this meal? When we celebrate this liturgy, each of us is saying to each other and to the world, “This is my body given for you, my blood poured out for you.” You, as a follower of Jesus, are re-committing yourself to do, in your own way, precisely what Jesus has done before you: giving your body to be blessed, broken, and given so that others can live.

This is what we, people of prayer, do once again this Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week.