| “Amen! Alleluia! Amen!”
These words are on our lips this Easter morning. They are words of
affirmation that Christ is Risen, that Love has been victorious, and that
Life has had the final say. We also exclaim “Amen! Alleluia! Amen!”
as we conclude this series on the Apostles Creed. (I really say “Amen!
Alleluia! Amen!” to that, too!) At the end of the creed there is a
single, simple, vast word “Amen.” That single word affirms all that
has been spoken, all that “We believe.” It is a “Yes” with an exclamation
point to that which anchors us in the Christian faith. The creed, we’ve
discovered, is not an “index of dogmas” but rather a “catalog of choices,
an inventory of possibilities, a roster of visions.” (Chittister, In Search
of Belief, p. 198.) And what we believe does matter because it shapes
our life and our actions. To believe in a Creator God implies that the earth belongs to the Creator, not to us; and that ours is the responsibility to care for it, not to exploit it. To believe that Jesus Christ is God’s best “show and tell” is to believe that God has shown us the way, the truth and the life in human form and expects us to model that way and truth and life by being what Jesus was to the world. To believe in Jesus’ crucifixion, death and resurrection is to see all of life through the lenses of Divine Hope and Promise. And to believe that the Holy Spirit is among us is to give thanks for the church, it’s birth, it’s fellowship, and its calling to risk-taking discipleship that requires forgiveness, justice-making, and a constant response to systemic sin and evil in our world. And to all of this we are bold to say “Amen!” At the heart of the creed and at the heart of our faith is the Resurrection. This is the defining moment of our Christian tradition. On that first Easter morn, the women found the tomb empty. They had brought their spices to embalm Jesus’ body. Instead, they were told that transformation had happened! And later on that same day, their beloved Jesus appeared to them! Jesus resurrected body, in whatever form it took, signaled God’s intentions that life, not death, claimed the ultimate victory. And it is to that victory that we say “Amen! Alleluia! Amen!” But the resurrection is not merely about Jesus. As Chittister remarks, “The real proof of the resurrection lies not in the transformation of Jesus alone but in the transformation awaiting us who accept it.” (p. 134) Transformation calls us to new possibilities, it reverses our direction, it challenges us, it literally gives us new life. Only three days ago we shared the Last Supper with Jesus. We prayed with him in Gethsemane; we walked the Via Delorosa and watched him mocked and scourged; we witnessed his non violent response to his violent death on a cross. And we could all relate to the darkness of a Good Friday world. Death, war, violence, murder, rape, abuse fill the news. Contemporary crucifixions haunt us from every angle. Christine Smith, in her book Risking the Terror, illustrates the human reality of contemporary crucifixions when she describes these faces of death. One haunting story takes place in Brazil. “I was drawn one day by curiosity to the jail cell of a young woman who had been apprehended for the murder of her infant son and her one-year-older daughter” writes the author. “Rosa, the mother, had become the central attraction in her little village, as both rich and poor passed by her barred window. People shouted at her: ‘Animal’ she was called, ‘unnatural creature,’ ‘shameless woman.’ Face to face with the withdrawn and timid slip of a girl, I made myself bold enough to ask the obvious: ‘Why did you do it?’ and she replied ‘To stop them from crying for milk.’”(p. 30 Risking the Terror) Our Easter faith reminds us that Christ’s resurrection from the dead has the power to put an end to crucifixions. And so I say to you this morning, that if we are serious about saying “Amen! Alleluia! Amen!” to our resurrection faith, then it is not enough for us to simply celebrate the resurrection this morning. It is not enough to think about resurrection in terms of Easter lilies and tulips, egg hunts and sumptuous Easter dinners. Celebrating the resurrection is simply not good enough. We must practice resurrection if we are going to be faithful to the Risen One who points the way for us! Resurrection is a process. It is hard work. It takes courage to address systemic sin and evil. It means acting so that contemporary crucifixions can be transformed into new life. It means putting an end to hunger and poverty so that crying babies do not drive their mothers to killing them rather than letting them starve to death. It means waging peace instead of war. It means addressing economic imperialism and putting an end to the scandals of oppression in our world. It means acting on behalf of those who cannot act for themselves because it would put them in too much danger. That is why our church sent a team to be trained at Safe Havens around the issues of domestic violence. We are a community ready to assist teens or women or men who are being abused in any way. It is a sign that we practice resurrection! Alleluia! Amen! That is why our church voted to be an inclusive and reconciling congregation. We are a community eager to welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons into the life of this church, recognizing the oppression and prejudice that many of them have experienced in the Christian family. It is a sign that we practice resurrection. Alleluia! Amen! We are a community that drinks fair traded coffee, that has encouraged every household of faith in Lexington to drink fair traded coffee, that has petitioned every United Methodist Church and organization in our annual conference to drink fair traded coffee, and that has sent legislation to this year’s General Conference asking the whole United Methodist denomination to join us in this effort so that coffee farmers will realize their fair share of profit while the unjust economic system that undergirds coffee growers will be changed. It is a sign that we practice resurrection. Alleluia! Amen! We are a community that has sent scholarships to students in LaBorgona for a dozen years, awakening new possibilities in the lives of dozens of young people. It is a sign that we practice resurrection. Alleluia! Amen! We are a community that has sent representatives to affordable housing meetings so that those who live on the margin have a chance to gain a bit of financial equity in their lives and provide a home for their family. It is a sign that we practice resurrection. Alleluia! Amen! Practicing resurrection means saying “No” to death and “Yes” or “Amen” to life. It is not easy business. In fact, it is much more comfortable to be satisfied with our own abundance, our own status quo. Jack Pantaleo offers an extraordinary image of resurrection when he writes about Jesus’ death and resurrection. He tells of Jesus’ extraordinary sacrifice of life. “Yet,” he claims, “(his death on the cross) was not the ultimate sacrifice, for if Jesus had stopped there, he would be remembered only as another nice teacher who spoke about love…Jesus revolutionized creation because he had the nerve it took not to remain dead. Christ went beyond sacrificing his life. He sacrificed his death. He voluntarily let go of the comfort of death and fought to rise above the grave.” (Pantaleo as quoted in Smith’s Risking the Terror, p. 82.) What an extraordinary thought! Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice is his sacrifice of the comfort of death to return for a time to those whom he loved. And while he was with them he asked them to let go of the comforts of denial, and apathy, and status quo living – all of which were the equivalent of death. And he exhorted them to practice resurrection: to speak and work, pray and act so that crucifixions would end and victims would be transformed and know the gift of abundant life. Barbara Kingsolver, in her book Small Wonder, tells the story of yet another child that needs milk to survive. This child becomes lost in the oak-forested hills of Lorestan Province in Iran. The story begins with the child’s parents walking home from a morning’s work in their wheat field. Suddenly, they are stopped cold by the sight of a teenage girl hurrying toward them. She is the one who was left in charge of their babies. She runs to meet the parents to tell them in frightened pieces of sentences that he’s disappeared, she has already looked everywhere, but he’s gone. This girl is the neighbor’s daughter who keeps an eye on all the little ones too small to walk to the field, but now she has to admit that their little boy had wandered off while she was taking care of another child’s needs. Of course they refuse to believe her at first. He is so young, only sixteen months old. He took his first steps only a few months ago. He can’t have gone far. And so with fully expectant hearts they open the door flap of their yurt and peer inside. They look in his usual hiding places – but no, he’s gone. And so they begin their search for their missing child. First their own village, turning every box upside down, turning the neighbors out in a party of panic and reassurances, but as they begin to scatter over the rocky outskirts it grows dark, then cold, then hopeless. He is nowhere. He is somewhere unsurvivable. A bear, someone says, and everyone else says No, not a bear, don’t even say that, are you mad? Some people sleep that night but not the child’s mother and father or the neighbor’s daughter who lost him. And early before the light of day they are out again. Someone is sent to the next village and larger parties are organized to comb the stony hills. Another night falls, another day, and some begin to give up. But not the father or mother, because there is nowhere to go but this, to bang and bang on the door of hope, not wanting to believe that no one is home. The mother weeps. The father finds several men willing to go all the way up into the mountains. Into the caves. Five kilometers away. The mother exclaims that he can’t have walked that far, he is too little, too unsteady on his feet. Everyone knows this, but still they go. At the mouth of the next cave they enter – was it the fourth or the hundred and fourth? Nobody will know this detail. What is remembered is that they hear a voice. It’s a cry, a child’s cry. Cautiously they look into the darkness and ominously, they smell bear. But the boy is in there, crying, alive. They move further into the cave. Then they see the animal – the thick-furred she-bear lying against the wall. And then they see the child. The bear is curled around him, protecting him from these intruders in her cave. What happened next is lost to the oral story. Whether they killed the bear or simply rescued the child is unknown. News sources in Arabic and Farsi recount the tale. This is not a fable or a hoax; this happened. The baby was found with the bear in her den. He was alive, unscarred, and perfectly well after three days – and well fed, smelling of milk because the bear was nursing the child. (Kingsolver, Small Wonder, pp. 1-4) Oh! the practice of resurrection. It is possible for the lion and the lamb; the bear and the child; the Israeli and the Palestinian; the black and the colored and the white of South Africa; the conservative and the progressive Christian; the gay and the straight; the Iraqis and the Americans; the Christians, Jews and Muslims to make peace. Resurrection is a process. Resurrection needs to be practiced if there is any hope of transforming crucifixions to new, abundant life. It’s Easter. With loud acclamations we shout “Amen! Alleluia! Amen!” The Risen Christ is among us! And with him, we, too are challenged to sacrifice death, practice resurrection and transform life around us. So be it! Amen! Alleluia! Amen! |