We observed Holy Week by attending a social justice themed Good Friday stations of the cross through New Orleans. I cried through the whole thing. When you find a group of really liberal Catholics you almost, stressing the ambiguity of almost, begin to think of being one. It was fantastic. Holy Saturday was spent with the kids while the missus peddled her wares at the Freret St. Festival. The kids and I stopped by at the festival; we had a donut, ate some jambalaya (not with the donuts). Afterwards we headed to the library to stock up for the week and checkout #1's favorite movie of all time: The Sound of Music. It was a great day.
Easter was a calculated day. The missus and I talked it over and over, finally we decided on a bold move: we skipped Easter. I reckoned that my next 25 to 30 Easters will be accounted for. So we decided to celebrate in a once in a lifetime way, we went to the French Quarter. We put on Easterish clothes (the ladies decorated their hats) and headed to Cafe DuMonde for beignets and coffee and to catch a parade. But while we were eating fried dough and powered sugar the parade came and went. Oh well. The kids climbed the trees in Jackson Square and I marveled at the wise wardrobe choice I made for eating beignets. You see reader, if you have never eaten this delectable delights in the fine establishment, Cafe DuMonde empties a 60lb bag of powered sugar into a dispenser for your beignets every two hours. After an order, despite your best attempts, you end up wearing a good portion of that 60lbs. See the picture for my wise choice. After the FQ we headed to a friend's house for supper, conversation, and wonderful NOLA weather. It was a great day but I gotta tell you - I missed Easter, so much.
Since I didn't write a sermon this year I am posting my 2011 Easter message. If you weren't here or have forgotten it already...enjoy.
So here we are just you and I
trying to figure out this crazy day.
Maybe you are here under duress, forced to dress up in clothes you don’t
like and urged to sing songs you’re not in the mood to sing, maybe you are here
for the first time, or for the first time in a long time, with curious intimations,
maybe you are here for the 75th time knowing for sure you have heard
the old, old story in just about every manner and every which way but loose, or
maybe, just maybe you are hoping to catch a glimpse of some good news, enough
to help you make it through the day.
Let us pray,
O God
take our hands and work through them
our
eyes and see through them
our
minds and think through them
and
take our hearts and set them on fire.
Amen.
On
the comfortable night of Christmas with the birth of Joseph’s and Mary’s babe we
were given the promise of Immanuel, God is with us. And for 33 odd years the promise rang true. Then it all ended on Good Friday with
the death of Jesus. In a Nazi
prison cell, awaiting his own execution, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer
offered this poetic interpretation of the Christmas promise and Good Friday, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world
on to the cross. He is weak and
powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which
he is with us and helps.
I
find in Bonhoeffer’s words a strange comfort, especially on Easter morn,
especially as we hear Jesus’ word of Greeting. His greeting is not of this world, the world of power and
politics, the world of greed and commerce, the world of war and hate, forced
out of “that world” onto a cross and into the real world undetected, anonymous,
subterranean; the real world of love, grace, peace, healing, and religious
affections. This morning let us
set our hearts on the intimations in Jesus’ first words from the grave as the
sign for how God re-initiated the relationship with the disciples, with
creation and this morning with us.
For
three years Jesus walked, talked, ate, slept, cajoled, loved, graced, healed,
taught, lifted up, challenged, questioned and formed the men and women we call
disciples. For three years he shared
out his heart, mind, body, and soul with them, sparing not one ounce of his
love from them. And then…and then
on Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion, the day of his execution, the day
of his death they were nowhere to be found, seen or heard from. And then…and then he appeared on Easter
morn with his first word, Greetings!
Hello!
It
is subtle yet remarkable new beginning but then this is Easter.
In
and out of the past 40 days of Lent we have been churning in the waters of sin,
the waters of the Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy,
and, pride. The list was designed as
a teaching tool by the church fathers and mothers to educate believers about
sin; to give concrete examples of how sin is not just harmful but lethal; how
it destroys human life and human community. The Seven Deadly Sins offer us a prism to refract how sin
weaves, works, and slithers into our hearts and minds. At first glance the list seems dangerous
but not deadly; the sins seem too personal to cause societal harm. And that is their paradoxical genius
they are so personal they are societal.
We have committed all seven of them, as has our society. We have witnessed lives and societies
torn asunder by them. We have been
victims of the effects of these sins. We live in a society that perpetuates and
enables these sins over, and over, and over again. Sin is both a personal action that we commit and a condition
that our world lives with.
What
we talk about when we talk about sin is idolatry – the conscious and unconscious
decision to swap the Living God for a false god(s). The swap is never plain and simple like declaring one day to
your family and friends, I am now a follower of Thor. Instead, the swap takes place slowly over time whereby the
false gods of our day infiltrate their destructive and damaging ways.
The
Seven Deadly Sins, not generic sin, names the destructive patterns and methods
of sin in our lives. By naming the
sin and describing the action of sin we are able to illuminate them and,
hopefully, begin to lifelong process of loosening the bonds of sin on our
souls. The list provides us with a
way to understand how sin, which Martin Luther, defined as a heart turned
inward on itself. The list also
provides us for a way to understand the full effect of sin which Nathaniel
Hawthorne described as the withering of the human soul. And the list provides us a way to
experience Easter.
On
Easter morn, one word, greeting encapsulated the way of God’s heart. In that one word our internal compass
began to point to true north. Sin’s goal is to turn our hearts and minds inward
to focus only ourselves; sin does not seek to increase among creation the love
of God, love of neighbor, and love of self. Jesus’ goal was to live a life with a heart turned outward
to the world to increase the love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self
among men and women …and God honored that life on Easter morn.
After
the Resurrection there was no room in Jesus’ heart for bitter anger or
resentment directed to the disciples for their abandonment of him in his great
hour of need, there was only room to start the relationship over in a new and
deeper way, Greetings.
For
the most part we prefer to define one another according to sin rather than
according to God’s grace. But God
will not let us get away with this type of understanding. Jesus’ greeting to the disciples on
Easter morn stands in our way. Despite the failings of the disciples, despite
our failings God in Jesus Christ did not/does not give up on us. Greetings! This morning we are reminded that God does not give up on
us.
You may have
heard G. K. Chesterton’s famous quip, It
is not that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult and not tried. For the most part he is right, most of
us simply cannot go through with the demands of Christianity then along comes
someone who just doesn’t or doesn’t know about the difficulty and everything
changes, instead of silence or bitterness there is a Greeting.
In
recent years it seems every major leader of the Revolutionary period has been
the subject of a major biography, just this past week Ron Chernow won the
Pulitzer for his work on George Washington but there is another person of the
same period who had the courage, the capacity, and conviction – Easter
conviction who did far more for our nation than Washington, Adams or
Jefferson. His name was John
Woolman born in 1720 near Mount Holly, NJ. The way he sought to abolish America’s original sin of slavery
illustrates a life of Greetings, a heart turned outward.
For
the first 36 years of his life he lived a normal American Quaker
existence. In 1756 he left his burgeoning
merchandise business, he felt it was pulling him away from following God’s
“openings.” He began recording the motions of God’s opening in what is now the
thin volume entitled, The Journal of John
Woolman, second only to the Bible as the longest in print book in
America.
In
1746 while visiting Quakers in North Carolina he came face-to-face with the
evils of chattel slavery. He knew
he had to do something but what?
Society was not interested in abolition, slavery kept the plantations in
the South prospering, the merchants in New York supplied, and the Yankee rum
industry fermenting. He could not
turn for help from his brother and sister Quakers. In 1730 they flatly squashed any and all debate of an
anti-slavery campaign. Fellow Quaker
Benjamin Lay, an Englishman via Barbados had emigrated to America to take up
the anti-slavery cause but instead of finding a welcome home among Quakers in
1730 they expelled him from the Society of the Yearly Meeting. Woolman had to find his own way.
He
did what he did best, he traveled and he talked. A few weeks each year he would travel up and down the East
coast to visit with Quakers who owned slaves until his death in 1772. He was persuasive, not confrontational. His effort was a household by household
ordeal. Some hearts were changed
by his words, most were not. His
life was a life of Greetings – an incarnate means to increase the love of God,
neighbor, and self. Once God said
hello to Woolman in the manner of an Easter Greeting, he knew that in this new
world slavery had no place. By
1787, without notice or fanfare, 15 years after his death, no American Quaker
owned a slave, largely because of his quiet loving work and his enduring legacy.
His life and his work are refractions of Easter, of Greetings, of a heart
turned outward towards the world.
The
writer(s) of the book of Hebrews gave some instruction about how we are to live
this life of Easter, they are not easy words, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to
strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it is.” Those words are an imperative for Easter living, live a life
with the full commitment of increasing the love of God, neighbor and self with
every individual you come in contact with, not just some but all.
On
an August night in 1962 Fannie Lou Hamer attended a mass meeting at the
Williams Chapel Church in Ruleville, MS to hear one of Martin Luther King’s right
hand men, James Bevel. Bevel
delivered a short sermon based on the Sermon on the Mount that with a
proclamation, the time had come for blacks in the Mississippi delta to organize
to register to vote. Fannie, a 44
year old woman, answered the call.
At the end of the month she and 17 other people boarded a bus and rode
30 miles to Indianola, so they could register. After waiting all day the clerk rejected her attempt. The 18 boarded the bus and started
home. Barely out of city limits
the bus was pulled over and a citation was issued. Everyone on the bus was scared to death until Fannie began
singing, Have a Little Talk with Jesus, This
Little Light of Mine, and Down by the Riverside.
From
then she was known as the voice of the Sunflower County movement. Despite losing her job, her house, her
network of friends and security, despite having the room she slept in littered
with shotgun blasts, she preserved as a foot solider for justice. Then there was Freedom Summer in Greenwood,
MS in1963.
After
a mass meeting Ms. Hamer and others were arrested as they traveled home. The police took them to the county jail
instead of the city jail. Three women were singled out for a beating. Fannie was last. The police got two African-American
male prisoners whiskey drunk, ordered Fannie to lay face down, and instructed
the men to beat her without mercy as they watched. When the ordeal ceased Fannie’s back was so bruised and her
body so disfigured, she could not lay down on her bed and she could not
speak. It would take her over a month
to recuperate, she was left with permanent kidney and leg walking damage. A decade later as a result of complications
from her beating she would die from breast cancer .
Somehow
she was able to compose and reinsert herself as a mother of the movement. The following summer of ’64 at the
Democratic National Convention Senator Humber Humphrey, who was campaigning for
Vice President, would call her “that illiterate black woman.” The wounds on her
body, the haunting memories in her mind, and the raining insults could not stop
her Greetings to the world, she found the strength to turn her heart
outwards. She was living in a new
world and no one could tell her otherwise. She stated time and time again that civil rights had to be
an inter-racial movement. She
stated time and time again that unless justice and freedom were extended to all
then justice and freedom were useless principles.
The
Civil Rights Movement is full of tragic and triumphant stories, which for me,
stand out more than others in Christian history because they are full of Easter
stories: human flourishing and abundant life were so close, repentance &
metanoia were so close they could kiss, racial reconciliation and non-violence,
and peace were wedded, truth and transformation could not be untangled.
If
Easter is to be the day that transforms our lives, that reorients creation, and
turns our hearts outwards to the world then it must be the day when we too feel
the pull of God’s arm when God resurrected Jesus from the dead. It must be a day that enlivens us to
continue our work despite the lack of progress or relevance. It must be the day that we hear with
our ears and feel in our souls Jesus’ Greeting.
In
closing, it was the Rev. A. J. Muste who everyday during the Vietnam war stood
outside of the Whitehouse with a candle holding vigil until the war
ceased. One night in the pouring
rain a reporter asked him what he thought he was accomplishing with his simple
act of protest, did he really think he was going to change the world? Muste responded, Oh I’m not doing this
to change the world. I’m doing
this so the world doesn’t change me!
This
morning brothers and sisters we are called to live our lives as Easter people,
to say Greetings to the world over, and over, and over again so we can change
the world and the world does not change us – regardless if anyone ever takes
notice of our efforts and attempts to heal the world, to mend the brokenness of
creation, to increase among men and women the love of God, the love of neighbor
and the love of self.
We
are Easter people to whom God has extended his greeting, a hello which in a
physical way states God’s grace is greater than all our sin. Brothers and Sisters, allow God to turn
your heart inside out, for we are Easter people and Alleluia is our song. Amen & Amen.
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