Fifth and Vine (John 15:1-8)

     As I got closer to this Sunday, I couldn’t decide what to write. Jesus’ metaphor of the vineyard—it’s not a parable so much as an image —is one of his more famous, and, perhaps, one of his most famously misused. Mostly, it is used by folks of a a more, how shall we say it, evangelical bent, to push their agenda: to wit, we Christians better be fruitful—defined as winning souls, converting sinners—or we’ll be chopped off the branch—thwack!—and burnt in the fires of, well, you know where that might be. Crackle, crackle, crackle. Never mind the theological inconsistencies, this interpretation of the metaphor is popular and designed to get the hearer off her or his keister and into the streets, asking unsuspecting passers-by if they know Jesus.

And as I said, I was stuck for a sermon . . . the Spirit, which Jesus says blows where it will, apparently wasn’t blowing towards me, so I decided I need a little help, that I needed a little outside inspiration (get it? Inspiritation) so I took a little field trip. And one fine afternoon I got in my car for a drive up Vine Street . . . it begins at the River and goes straight on through the city and out the other side, continuing on into the wilds of Ohio as State Route 4. It’s been around as long as the city itself . . . Today it connects with Walnut to form the approach to the Roebling Bridge; back then it was just a cut down to the river. I stood on the traffic circle that marks that conjunction and tried to imagine the oxen and mules dragging their loads up from the water—dry goods, tobacco, grain, all delivered on flat-boats and barges. Vine and its sister Walnut were arteries carrying the life-blood of the city, distributing it to feed the growing population, which exploded in first half of the nineteenth century.

Shortly after the completion of the Miami and Erie Canal, Cincinnati had grown to 115,000 souls, largely because of its status as the chief hog-packing city in the country, which earned it the nickname “Porkopolis.” Standing at Fifth and Vine, I imagined hordes of terrified, half-wild pigs flowing around me, squeals and rank odor baking in the sun. In no time, Vine became as it is today: the prime North-South route up from the River. And while most towns split East and West addresses based on Main, in Cincy, East means east of Vine and West means west of the same.

Like a lot of streets in Cincinnati, Vine isn’t always Vine. Here are some of its other names, in no particular order: Springfield Pike. Rosa Parks Street. Dixie Highway. Jefferson Avenue. It borders—along with Fifth Street—Fountain Square which, according to Google Maps is a “Civic plaza hosting cultural events” and chicken dances. Ok, I added the last part; after all, chicken dances are cultural events in Cincinnati.

Driving north, I crossed Central Parkway, path of the Miami and Erie Canal and the doomed subway project, and into Over the Rhine, where the poorest of Cincinnatians have often lived. It was ground central in the sorry discrimination against German-Americans in the run-up to the First World War. Their businesses were targeted and streets with Teutonic names rechristened with bland, inoffensive monikers. They were disparaged as “hyphenated Americans,” and President Woodrow Wilson drummed up support for the war in the time-honored, fear-mongering way: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” he said “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic” (Rumors persist that dachshunds and German Shepherds were stoned in Fountain Square, but these are doubtless apocryphal.)

The Germans left Over the Rhine in droves, changing their names and moving to Price Hill or up Walnut to avoid persecution. They were replaced by Appalachians from Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee, driven out of coal country by depression and mechanization to work in Cincinnati’s World War II effort. The construction of I-75 forced thousands of African Americans out of the West End and into Over the Rhine. By the 1960s, industrial collapse, well-meaning improvement projects and absentee landlords had broken the backs of many along Vine. By the end of the decade, those who could afford to leave had done so and the people left were the ones who couldn’t get out.

Fast forward to the two thousands, and in the wake of the 2001 riots, Over the Rhine—including of course Vine—was named the nation’s most dangerous neighborhood, beating out Compton in Los Angeles by a nose. Then something called the “Miracle on Vine” happened. Local industries, in partnership with the city, began pouring millions into the area, and several blocks of pretty mean Vine streets were transformed into upscale eating and drinking establishments. And though the economy has picked up, this gentrification has had the usual effect of driving up property values and driving out residents who can’t afford to pay the freight. Thus creating yet another migration from and infilling of Vine Street.

Well. After Over the Rhine, Vine swoops up the hill toward the University of Cincinnati then along its eastern border, where it’s called Jefferson; I passed the hospital, Zoo and Saint Bernard before dropping into the Mill Valley for the long run up to our neck of the woods. And as I drove its length, I couldn’t help but notice how it connects and nourishes all the institutions of our city—threading its way between Great American Ballpark and Paul Brown Stadium. Gliding past Carew Tower, Fountain Square and the Kroger Building. Past gleaming towers and 19th-century Italianate gems. Libraries, markets and hospitals. Fairgrounds, soap factories and Zoos. All linked, all nourished by the commerce and humanity that flows through and out of Vine.

And I wonder: would Jesus use Vine Street as his metaphor of intimacy and deep connection if he were at it today? He was a master of matching the teaching to the audience. To fishermen, he talked about fishing for people. To the religious and political elite he spoke of coins and effigies of Caesar. And to day-laborers and shepherds and agriculturists he spoke of fair wages and sheep-folds and vines. Today, when the majority of Americans have lost their connection to the land, when most live in urban or at least suburban landscapes, I suspect he’d not spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact, or seeking to change things, but meet the people where they are to teach them the mysteries of existence. And the lesson is one of intimacy, of connection, to the divine Christ—who after all holds all things together—and through him one to another.

Let’s try it on for size: Jesus says “I am Vine Street—the artery, the through street—and God is the city planner, who shapes the neighborhoods I feed, sending through me life-giving resources, dispatching them to businesses, houses, schools and families. Through me, God provides services and entertainment and learning. Through me, God remakes diseased neighborhoods, restoring them to vitality and health. Therefore, abide in me as I abide in you, stay connected to me, stay a part of me, as I am a part of you. Just as the community cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in me, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the through street, the avenue, the boulevard, you are the side streets, the communities, the locales. Those who abide in me and I in them bear healthy families, healthy communities, because apart from me they can accomplish nothing.

But though city streets can be mean streets, and people and whole neighborhoods can be intolerant and downright cruel, there is none of that in Christ. In Christ—in Christ who is all in all—everyone is welcome, nobody is shunned, everybody is at home. Amen.

Separation Anxiety (Earth Day; Genesis 1:1 - 2:3)

     How many of you all have heard the saying “I think, therefore I am”? Most of you, I’ll bet . . . it was written in 1636—at the dawn of the Enlightenment—by French philosopher René Descarte, and it sums up one of his major contributions to Western Philosophy. Despite—or perhaps because of—fragile health, his philosophy went on to revolutionize thinking, helping (along with Isaac Newton) usher in modernism and the scientific revolution. In fact, it can be said that science as we know it is based squarely on his notion of the separation of mind from matter. That is, objects are independent of and separate from our mind (or consciousness). Philosophers refer to this as strong objectivity.

This notion is essential to the development of science, that and Newton’s principle of causal determinism , and for the first time, in a Cartesian-Newtonian universe God, for the first time, was not needed to make it all work, although at the time, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was still customary that God be cited a few times in a work of any consequence. This led Napoleon to question Pierre Laplace’s latest work: “Monsieur Laplace,” he said, “you have not mentioned God in your book even once. Why is that?” To which Laplace replied “Your majesty, I have not needed that particular hypothesis.”

Although this marked the beginning of increasingly open scientific criticism of religion, what I want to point out is that in modern thought, objectivism requires a separation between the human self and everything—and everybody—else. There is self—that which thinks, and therefore is—and all that is not self. Which of course is all the rest of creation, including other people, people that aren’t that particular self. For example, I am a self—I think, therefore I am—and you all are not; from my Cartesian point of view, you are objects. Of course, it’s the same for every one of you, you are a self—you think therefore you are—and everything and everybody else is separate. Subject-object thinking separates everything into me and not-me, you and not-you. And given all that, the most natural thing in the world is self-regard, the idea that the highest good is looking out for old number one, often extended, of course, to number one’s immediate family. It’s no accident that another thing that came out of the enlightenment is the notion that rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity, enshrined in the writings of Adam Smith, the father of free-market capitalism.

Anyway. According to the Cartesian-Newtonian world view, the separation of mind and matter or subject and object allows us to stand outside creation and observe it objectively, i.e.,without bias. Further, it allows us to manipulate creation and observe it using the scientific method, which is wholly dependent upon the notion that we are separate—or at least separable—from that which we observe. Finally—and this is the point I want to make on this Earth Day—separation of mind and matter or self and the-rest-of-creation encourages us to view the rest of creation as something separate from us, and thus exploitable. This is the crux of the ecological matter: if humanity is considered separate from its “environment”—that is, the rest of creation—it enables us to much more easily rationalize its use and, almost inevitably, overuse. After all, it’s not us we’re doing it to, it’s other. It’s almost as if God put it there solely for our use.

And while the world was young, in the pre-industrial ages, this worked . . . human populations were small enough that the renewal rate of natural resources we—and every other living thing—rely upon was sustainable. The small amount of carbon we released was easily absorbed in the global carbon cycle. Fisheries were utilized at a rate that was easily replenished by fish populations, and human waste was produced at a rate that assimilable by natural means. But as human populations exploded during the Industrial Age—made possible by technology made possible by science made possible by the insights of Newton and Descartes—it wasn’t long (200 years?) before the “earth’s bounty,” which contrary to belief at the time was always a limited “resource,” began to reach its limit. The carbon cycle began to be saturated, due to overpopulation and fossil-fuel-burning transportation technology. The fisheries began to die out, due to overpopulation and rapacious harvesting technology. And the Earth began to fill up with garbage due to overpopulation and non-reusable manufacturing technology.

Note the way we speak of all this—we refer to the earth as a resource, and if you look ”resource” up in a dictionary, you’ll find something like this: “a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively.” So what happens when you call water and trees and fish and rocks and micro-organisms “natural resources?” Their identity as God’s good creation is diminished and they become things to use for human advancement. When you speak of something as a “resource” you automatically consign it to that Cartesian class of “other,” of “not-me.” And it becomes fodder for human growth and well-being.

All this can be seen as a consequence of our separation from the rest of creation; after all, it’s not like we are exploiting ourselves, is it? It’s not as if we’re driving ourselves to extinction, destroying our own habitat at a non-renewable rate, is it? Well . . . not so fast . . . the major world religions have always maintained, at their core, that we are one with one another and inseparable from creation. In the 5th or 6th centuries before Christ, Siddhārtha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, began a worldwide movement that teaches, among other things, the concepts of interbeing and no-self, the ideas that we inseparable—literally—from one another and from everything else. In the Christian canon, Jesus himself teaches (especially in the Gospel of John) that he is in us and we are in him, which implies unity of being, and Christian mystics, from St John of the Cross to Teresa of Avila to Thomas Merton, have taught that the end of Christian spirituality is to realize the unity which underlies all reality.

And now, science is catching up with religion on that front. For the last century or so, the foundational ideas of classical physics have been crumbling. In particular, the proposition that we can separate ourselves from the rest of creation took a fatal hit. Turns out, as observers we have an unavoidable influence on what we observe. Not only that, if we know some things about an object, we can’t know others, and vice versa. This adds up to what quantum physicist Amit Goswami calls “subject-object mixing,” where the supposed separation of material creation into “I” and “thou” has broken down. Finally, non-locality—which Einstein derided as “spooky action at a distance”—has shown that there is a transcendent realm outside of space-time.

For a sometime-biologist like me, one who has always been a believer as well, this is an exciting time. New information and paradigms, such as Goswami’s science within consciousness and the re-enchantment of universe, promise a new integration of science and spirituality. It also gives a new paradigm within which to view the environment and our place in it, when what we do to the least of these—to the blue jay or the oak tree or the single-celled, pond-dwelling microbe—we do not only to Jesus, but literally—not metaphorically or indirectly but literally—to ourselves as well.

As a Christian, there’s one more thing I can say: The more I learn, the more I marvel at the works of the divine. Truly, the heavens reveal the glory of God! Amen.

Ghost Story (Luke 24:36 - 48)

There’s a lot going on in the lives of the remaining eleven disciples . . . three days before, the leader of their movement had been spiked to a cross, he’d been hung up to die, which—on the face of it, at least—had put an end to the whole thing. Not that any of them had actually seen his death, you understand: they’d all run off like scared bunnies when they nailed him up, leaving only the Marys and several other women as witnesses. Now, on the evening of the first day of the week—Sunday, we’d call it today—they were huddled up in an upper room for fear of the religious authorities, as it says over in John, and they were talking about reports that he’d been seen alive, first by Simon and now by a couple of others on their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They told the eleven what they’d experienced, and how they’d known Jesus in the Eucharistic act, when he took and blessed and broke and gave them the bread.

And so it is with no small amount of nervous excitement that the eleven, their companions and the visitors from Emmaus chatter on into the night, and Behold! The man himself appears, or at least what looks like him, and this is way beyond their ken, way beyond their understanding, and Jesus can see that right in this moment, they’re more afraid of him than the authorities, so he says to them “Peace be with you,” just like over in John, “Peace be with you,” he says, wishing them shalom, wishing them to be at peace, both in mind and in body and in spirit . . . and they are startled, and terrified and they think he’ a ghost, a spirit, in Greek pneuma, and everybody knows that’s not a good thing . . . Ghosts were the remnants of human beings, and if they hung round after death . . . well, something was definitely rotten in Judea.

And Jesus—being, well, Jesus—knows what they’re thinking, and with a heavy sigh, he goes about proving he’s not what they think he is. “Why are you frightened,” he asks, “and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” And we can see that there’s two questions here (a) why are they scared and (b) why do they have doubts, but they’re not unrelated. In fact, if (b) hadn’t been true, neither would have been (a). That is, if they hadn’t had doubts, they wouldn’t have been frightened. And they shouldn’t have had doubts, Jesus had told them three times, already, that he was going to be killed and rise up on the third day, and if they’d really believed him they’d have known he wasn’t a ghost, and come to think of it, maybe that was Thomas’ problem, too . . . maybe he wouldn’t have felt compelled to put his hands in those scars if he’d believed what they’d been told in the first place.

And I guess a fair question would be: why? Why didn’t they believe that the man they followed, the man they believed to to be the heir of David, Son of God, anointed king and redeemer of Israel would be executed like a criminal then be raised on the third day? Well. As far as the execution bit goes, his followers believed him to be the Messiah—or the Christ, which is Greek for the same thing—and they’d bought into the common Messianic hope, to wit that the Messiah—anointed King in the Davidic line—would redeem Israel. And by redeem, they meant that he would deliver Israel from Roman rule and reestablish it as a glorious, sovereign nation. In other words, the Messiah would be a very human, earthly King, mighty and word and deed, and lead the nation against their enemies. If he were dead, that obviously wasn’t going to happen.

As far as the resurrection goes, the very idea was outrageous: not only was it impossible to imagine, it was repugnant as well. The idea of a resuscitated corpse, running around Judea, must have horrified them, not the least because corpses were considered unclean. And if you touched one, you became unclean as well, unfit to associate with your fellow Jews, not to mention participate in Temple and synagogue activities. Besides, thinking of a dead body come back to life was downright icky, not to mention more than a little spooky.

So while I guess it’s easy to fault the disciples in hindsight—and plenty have done so over the past two thousand years—I don’t know that I blame them, I might very well have been the same way. At any rate, Jesus goes about trying to prove he’s not a ghost “See my hands and my feet,” he says “Touch me and see . . . a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And with that he holds out his hand and his feet, he thrusts the evidence in front of him, asking them to open their eyes and really look, and open their hearts to really see.

And there they are . . . the nail holes, the gash in his side, the mark of the thorn on his head, and yet he is alive . . . it is life that stands before them, indubitably, without a doubt, without question . . . he takes a piece of boiled fish and he eats it, everybody in the Middle East knew that ghosts don’t eat. He has overcome death, beaten it at its own game, and it’s more than that: he has incorporated it into life itself . . . here he is, standing in front of them, clearly alive, and yet there are the nail-holes, there is the sword rip in his side . . . death—embodied by those marks—has not only been conquered, it’s been integrated into life . . . there he is alive, but he’s also dead at the same time . . . there are the marks to prove it. Death has been subsumed by life, it’s been overcome by it, devoured by it . . . standing there, eating a little light lunch, and yet bearing death on his hands, Jesus is the embodiment of this subsumation . . . he is a sign that death is no longer opposed to life, because he has incorporated it into his body, which, as we all know, is life itself. As Paul might say, in death there is no longer any sting, because Christ has restored it to its rightful place as part of existence, part of life itself.

Talk about your Good News for modern man . . . Christ has incorporated death into life, he's subsumed it, just taken it right on over . . . and can you imagine death's relief? No more of that grim reaper stuff, no more skulking around. Maybe he'll be the happy reaper, or the ebullient reaper, wearing not black but bright sky-blue, or tasteful earth tones, or maybe a nice fuchsia top – after all, death knows no gender, you understand. Death’ll be lonely no more, maybe join a singles club, go out once in a while. And all those Ingmar Bergman wannabees will have to pick on someone else for a change, maybe Mother Earth or somebody, ‘cause death won’t have to mope around in whiteface any longer . . . death is no longer fearsome, no longer terrifying, it’s part and parcel of existence, just a friendly gatekeeper on the road to the next stage.

But by showing his nail-scarred hands, Jesus does more than just prove he’s not a ghost, more than just show he’s subsumed death. By showing that his resurrection is bodily, he affirms the goodness of that body, and by extension, the goodness of our own as well. In part, this was a natural outgrowth of Jewish theology, which views the body and spirit or soul as inseparable, integral parts of one another. One of my professors, the redoubtable Walter Brueggemann, would beat us about the head and neck if we translated the Hebrew word nefish as “soul,” as almost every English Old Testament translation does. To the Jews, there was no separate soul.

Unlike in Platonism, one of the dominant philosophies of the day, which held that matter—the body and all of creation—is an imperfect copy of ideal forms or archetypes, entities in the Divine realm. And because they are imperfect—no Memorex in those days—the job of the soul, upon death, was to ascend from matter to a “higher” plane, the realm of the archetypes. And in the latter part of the first century, Christian thought became infected by platonic ideals, you can see some of it in the writings of Paul, and in the later New Testament epistles. And while there’s nothing wrong with Platonism per se, the notion that the body is an imperfect copy of some ideal, and that the aim of everything is to get to that ideal, has been perverted to support all kinds of oppression. The conquistadors in Latin America would baptize their conquests before slaughtering them, because it was better to be a dead Christian—ascended to the heavenly realm—than a live, bodily heathen. A similar argument has been used to keep abused women with their husbands—‘cause marriage is sacred and the man is its head—because they will get their reward in heaven for being an obedient punching bag on earth.

But by insisting on a bodily resurrection, Christianity affirms the worth of the human body and, by extension, all bodies. Indeed, as Teilhard de Chardin would point out, all matter itself has innate worth and beauty. It signals to us all that creation is not fundamentally flawed, it’s not a sub-standard copy of some heavenly reality. As we learned “in the beginning”—and in modern physics texts—matter was created out of nothing, it was something from nothing. Why else would God call it “good?” Amen.

After the Murder (John 20:19 - 31)

We preachers get a fair amount of mileage out of poor old Thomas—we call him “doubting” for one thing—and we find it inherently funny, somehow, that he felt he had to have proof.  We say “maybe he was from Missouri” or “maybe it needed to stand up in court” or any number of smarmy sayings that malign Thomas the Twin—for that’s what he’s called in the Bible—that malign him unreasonably.  It should be noted that in the end, he doesn’t have to actually touch Jesus’ hands and his side, just seeing him turns out to be enough to make him confess “My Lord and my God!”  But still: Jesus uses the poor guy for an object lesson: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

And there’s another thing that I think needs to be said, or needs to be questioned, and it’s this: “Is he really so different from the rest of us?”  How many times have we refused to believe something because we haven’t seen it with our own eyes?  Even though Paul Simon wrote that these are the days of miracles and wonderment, it goes only as far as our puny special effects departments and computer graphics can set it up.  Of course, humans are a superstitious lot, by and large, but we pick and choose which things to put stock in.  People who would put no credence whatsoever in “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” have no trouble believing in space aliens or spirit children or angels watching over us from on high.

Pastor and theologian Michael Hardin reports seeing a bumper sticker which reads “Only in America could God be dead and Elvis alive.”  And that’s true, though it’s not just in America:  we pick and choose what kind of supernatural stuff to believe in.  Certainly the opposite is true as well:  a lot of us believe in God—who by definition is super (above) natural—but pooh-pooh the thought of demons, or miracles.  Bishop John Shelby Spong—who somebody once called “Howard Stern in a collar”—made a tidy extra-curricular living by making fun of people who believe in demons, and who take the miracles in the Bible literally.  He apparently does not see the irony in the fact that he believes in one supernatural thing and denies the existence of another.

Most humans believe in the supernatural to one extent or another, they just like to pick and choose what things to believe in and which to call pure-D poppycock.  Kind of like the Romans—who were hardly Pagans: they believed in Gods, all right, that wasn’t the problem.  And one of the cardinal rules in their Empire was to let the locals worship whatever they liked, and then to incorporate those local gods into the Roman pantheon—pan meaning “all” and “theon” means “god,” all gods.  The only thing that bothered the Romans was putting one god over and above others and, especially, pledging allegiance to that God over the Emperor.

But one thing that they didn’t believe in was this resurrection thing-a-ma-bob.  Neither did any of the authorities that Paul dubbed the powers that be, that complex of spiritual, governmental and religious systems that ran the life of the average Judean.  In fact, they didn’t give the murder of Jesus much thought, other than that killing one man would save a whole peoples from Rome having to come down on them, it would quell the building unrest via the well-known mechanism of the scapegoat, wherein an innocent person or thing or group is sacrificed to mollify a riled-up people, and so the danger of and uprising would subside.  So the powers thought “Cool! the danger is over, kaput, done-with.  The man is dead, in the ground, over and out, we can go home to our sausage and beer.”

And the disciples—former disciples, or so they thought—were no better, and actually they were worse: they’d been told by Jesus himself that he was going to be killed and rise again, and they’d even heard this incoherent story from Mary about Jesus appearing to her in the form of a gardener—as if he’d ever take that lowly a position—and they knew that Mary and Jesus were close, and so they thought she might have been just a little, uh, how shall we say it?  distraught and it hadn’t even occurred to them that he might actually have risen, it hadn’t sunk into their pointy little heads, and so they thought it was over, too, when behold!  There he was, amongst them, and the door had been locked, for goodness sake, but there he stood, big as life, risen from the grave.

Do you believe in the resurrection?   The literal, gods-honest-truth resurrection?  A lot of modern theologians and religious studies types don’t.  Bart Ehrman at the UNC Chapel Hill doesn’t, he argues that Jesus passed out and woke up later, and stumbled out of the cave where he’d been buried.  Marcus Borg—who unlike Ehrman is a believer—puts a slightly more moderate spin on it.  He argues that whether or not the resurrection really happened doesn’t matter, in the end, because the important thing is that Christ is alive today.  He also asserts—like John Dominic Crossan—that it would hardly be fair for God to raise only one guy up.  What about all the rest of us?

All of these beliefs represent—to me, at any rate, your mileage may of course vary—they represent to me a rather amazing lack of imagination, a critical lack of spark, of curiosity and it plagues academic theology and biblical studies today.  It can be traced back to the enlightenment, which began our march toward reason as the only barometer of truth.  The rise of scientific investigation—using a collection of techniques designed to produce new knowledge through rigorous testing—has led to the widespread notion that unless something is observable and repeatable, it must not be true.

Even many of those who believe in God, especially in theological circles, lean toward the Deist end of things—they believe in a clockwork world that God has wound up and set a-spinning, they argue that God—for the sake of justice or something—won’t violate God’s own rules of the physical universe that God’s own self created, that once God set them up, it would be somehow unfair or un-God-like to do so.  Sort of like changing the rules in the middle of the game or something.  But this—as well as other arguments—misses the entire point: the resurrection is a beginning, as scholar Tom Wright puts it, it is “a seed being sown, a tune being composed which everyone now gets to sing.”  God is doing something completely new in the resurrection of God’s only son, something that is already here, already working itself out.

Denying the resurrection—as well as other miracles—denies God’s ongoing work in the world, it in many respects negates the doctrine of creation, which holds that God creative activity is ever green, ever new, ever happening.  It limits God to our puny way of understanding, which says that unless we can see it, unless we can repeat it, it must not ever have happened.  And with historical criticism—which I use daily in my studies of scripture—with historical criticism, we have applied that limited way of imagining our world to more than just helping us understand the people who wrote our scriptures, we’ve expunged the God out of them, the supernatural out of them.  They might just as well be treatises on dog-shows in America as documents about the wondrous actions of an ineffable Divine.

And here’s another way to look at it.  Ask yourself: where would Christianity be without the resurrection?  An itinerant preacher, the son of a working-class carpenter, a man on the outside of all the structures of power, is killed to help prevent rioting and possible revolution, and that is it.  The disciples are broken up, the movement is dead, he’s just one more victim of the powers that be, one more dead, would-be revolutionary.  They were a dime a dozen in those decades leading up to the Jewish revolt.  But something happened in the days following the cross, something happened that was multiply-attested and witnessed by many people, and it propelled Christianity eventually onto the world stage.  Without the resurrection there would be no Christianity, no world-wide movement.  It is one big pointer to Jesus’ life, it’s a marker, it calls attention to the life and death of Jesus Christ.   Without it, he’s just another dead Judean . . . with it, he is savior, prophet, and king, all rolled into one.

Although in orthodox theology it’s the crucifixion that atones, the sacrifice that saves, it is the resurrection that gives it meaning, and points to the changed reality that is upon us.  And just what is that changed reality?  Why nothing more—or less—than what Paul says, that death has lost its sting, the grave its victory.  The new reality is that human societies are no longer under the thumb of death and destruction, or at least need not be.  Out of winter comes spring, out of despair comes hope, out of pain comes comfort.

Or as Jesus put it there in the upper room “Peace be with you.”  That sums it all up nicely: Christ’s peace is not only a refusal to retaliate with violence, but it announces the beginning of the end of death’s hold on us all.  Out of Christ’s death comes not war, not what the Powers and principalities would have, retaliation and consolidation of power, but peace, for peace is life, and violence, war, retribution is death.  Out of Christ’s death comes victory, out of Christ’s death comes renewal, out of Christ’s death comes life.  Christ is risen.   He is risen indeed!  Amen.

He Is Not Here (Mark 16:1 - 8)

      I may have mentioned this before, but I visited an old African American woman during one of my hospital rotations in Atlanta . . .she’d been a holiness preacher for fifty years, for half a century she’d labored in the vineyards of the Lord, and now here she was, the victim of a stroke, on the fifth floor of Grady Memorial Hospital.  She talked about her life, her alcoholic children and cheating husband, and her church which, despite her being a preacher and all, wouldn’t let her divorce the guy because they were against it.  Her life was full of great heartache and acute joy, and she represents as well as anybody the life from death we celebrate this day . . . her greatest joy was a trip to the Holy Land she’d scrimped and saved for over the years, and she told me about the time she visited Jesus’ tomb, and her voice was urgent, immediate, as if she were reliving the experience  “I walked up to that tomb,” she said, “and stuck my hand all the way in – it wasn’t very big – and there was a sign on it said ‘He is not here,’ and you know what?”  I said “What?” she said “He wasn’t!”

      That sums up the Easter story in a nutshell . . . he is not here!  The women have come into the garden graveyard, talking and wondering who would help them roll the stone away, and they find it already gone!  And then inside, the young man in white – they just knew it was an angel – proclaims it to the now-petrified women – he is not here.   He’s not in the grave, not in the carved-out, rock-hewn hole in the garden wall where he’d been laid.  And it’s hard to know what shocked the women more, the angelic visitor in white, or the stark, terrifying fact of Jesus’ absence.  He just wasn’t there.  “Do not be alarmed,” the angel said, “He has been raised . . . if you don’t believe me, Behold!  There’s the place they laid him.”

      And that’s the end.  There is no more to Mark’s gospel, at least in its original form . . . if you look in your pew Bibles, you’ll see that there are two additional endings, and neither of them were in the original, first-century version – they were added at least 100 years later than the original . . . and to Mark, verse eight was enough – the women went out and fled from the tomb – like the disciples from Gethsemane at Jesus’ arrest – they “fled from the tomb . . . and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  And that’s an understatement—the Greek implies trembling, amazement.  Terror had seized them, it had taken them in its clutches as like a beast.  They were so frightened that they shook uncontrollably.  And that’s how the gospel ends, just hanging there, on the fear of Mary, Mary and Salome.

      About ten years after Mark wrote his version, Matthew adds some of the appearance episodes to his version . . . a meeting with the women on the way home and the famous scene on the mountain, where Jesus personally gives the disciples – now only eleven – the great commission. Luke and John add even more, like the appearance on the Emmaus road and the upper room where he ate and drank and they touched him . . . and that final scene in John, where he cooks the disciples a little fish breakfast. 

      But Mark includes none of those, and in fact, he leaves us in silence . . . the women, he says, tell no one, but of course, we know they did eventually, because they were the only witnesses to the empty tomb, and they had to have told somebody about it, or we wouldn’t have heard about it . . . and this ending in silence and fear struck some anonymous scribes so hard that they felt compelled to tack some of the appearance stories they’d heard onto the end of Mark a century later, and those became the extra endings . . .maybe they felt the need for closure, the urge we all feel to know the end.  Everybody likes closure . . . have you ever sat through a movie, only to have it end ambiguously?  Maybe the hero’s in the hospital, hanging on by a thread, and his wife or girlfriend is crouched over the bed, sobbing, and instead of a doctor coming in, telling them he’s going to live, or maybe the hero breathing his last, the camera pulls slowly back and the credits roll, and you don’t know what happens?  Or the romantic comedy, where the man and woman meet cute, and go through all the usual ups and downs and ins and outs, but in the end, it’s ambiguous, they’re just friends?  Don’t you just hate that?  You just want to strangle the writers . . . maybe that was the impulse at work with the folks who added onto Mark.  Perhaps they just couldn’t stand to leave it hanging, and so they added incidents from the other gospels they knew to be true.  Or maybe it was to prove somehow the resurrection of Jesus, to prove that he is what he says he is – see, he has conquered death, he must be who he claims.  Behold!  What the angel said turned out to be true!  Jesus did appear to the disciples, to Mary Magdalene and the remaining eleven, just as we were told.  A satisfying ending, all tied up in a great, big bow.

      The great theologian and mystic Howard Thurman tells a story about the time he and his wife were on their way to a round of speaking engagements when they received word that the caretaker of their aged grandmother had just died, and someone would have to go take care of her for the summer.  As they talked it over, it became apparent that Thurman and his wife couldn’t get out of their speaking engagements, which meant their two daughters would have to take turns caring for their grandmother until their parents were free.  With that, the youngest daughter burst into tears and ran upstairs to her room.  When Thurman followed, he found her sprawled face-down on her bed, crying her eyes out.  He sat on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder, and he said “I didn't come up here to urge you to stop crying. I came to explain to you why I think you are crying. I don't think you're crying because you don't want to go away for the rest of the summer and miss the fun with your friends. You're crying because for the first time in your life the family is asking you to carry your end of the stick as a family member. Something inside you knows that when you get on the train tomorrow, one part of your life will be behind you forever. You'll never again be quite as carefree and unaccountable as you were before.”

      Could this be why Matthew and Luke and the unnamed scribes were dissatisfied with the ending?  Could it be that they couldn’t stand the thought of being on their own?  It’s a scary, scary world out there, to be on your own . . . and the disciples and the women were spiritual children, immature, whose parents seemed far away . . . they didn’t understand what had happened, they never had, and now they were alone, and no amount of stories of Jesus out and about could change that.  And for Mark, writing at the time of the failed Jewish revolution, it must have seemed doubly frightening . . . his community, far from Jerusalem, had never experienced the risen Christ in the flesh, and for him, this was the reality, the empty tomb and nothing more . . . Christ’s disciples found Jesus gone, and now it’s time for them to grow up  – it’s left to them to continue the work of Christ on Earth without his physical presence.

      Is that all there was for Mark, an empty tomb, frightened women, fearful disciples and only memories of the teachings of their crucified master?  Is that all there is for us?  Of course not . . . what the angel says to the women applies to us all.  “Tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of them to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  Jesus will be with you, just as he said.  He will go before you, to guide you and help you . . . he will be with you.  And for Mark, it isn’t an empty tomb, or stories of a resurrected Christ, but the words of Jesus himself.  After all, there at the Mount of Olives Jesus had promised them “after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee,” and for Mark, that was e-nough.  For him, and for his community of Christians thirty-five years after Christ’s death, it had to be enough.  Jesus had said it, Mark  believed it, and that settled it.

      John tells us that when Thomas beheld the nail-scarred hands and the pierced side of the resurrected Christ, he cried out “My Lord and my God!”  But Jesus, far from congratulating him on his insight, chided him instead – “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  Jesus knew that soon enough, they wouldn’t be able to touch him, wouldn’t be able to talk with him or walk with him or have breakfast with him.  And when that happens, all they’ll have is the word, all they’ll have is the recollection and experience of those who’ve gone before.

      And it’s the same for us today as well – belief in the resurrection is still a matter of Jesus’ word, it hasn’t changed in the two thousand years since Mark wrote his gospel.  Nobody in this room has seen him in the flesh, nobody has touched him, yet still we believe, still we have faith in the resurrected Christ.  As Paul put it, “we walk by faith and not by sight.”  And this faith itself comes from the Word, it’s nurtured by it, nourished by it.  Our faith was born in those words spoken in the Garden, and repeated by the angel – I will go before you to Galilee, I will be with you unto the ends of the earth.  It’s recorded in the pages of scripture, but also burned into the experiences of countless Christians – like Mark and Augustine and Howard Thurman – over the millennia.  As Paul says “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.”

      When the women came to the tomb, they were reminded of those words by the man in white, they were reminded of what Jesus had told them, that he would go before them to Galilee, as he had promised . . . and they fled, they ran, just like the disciples after Jesus’ arrest.  When the angel said “he is not here,” they took it literally, as if they were abandoned, and they ran off and told no one, because they were afraid.

      And when that holiness preacher put her hand into that same tomb, she was told the same thing as the Mary’s and Salome – “He is not here.”  But the preacher’s faith – unlike the earlier women – was strong, it had been nurtured by over half a century of prayer and reading and listening to the words of Christ.  She knew that it meant what it said, no more and no less –  he isn’t here physically, his body isn’t in the tomb.  She knew where he wasn’t – the sign told her that much – and her faith—her unquestioning belief in the word of God—told her where he was as well.

Brothers and sisters, we know where Christ is too, don’t we?  We know he’s not in the ground, not in the tomb . . . we know he’s not up in some celestial mansion somewhere, as romantic as it may be to think so.  By his resurrection from the dead, we are assured that he is alive, and by his absence from the tomb, we know that he’s right here, with us, all around us, in fact, in our hearts and in our minds and in our lives.  Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!  Amen.