This morning at Parkrose Community United Church of Christ we joined Christians across the globe in celebrating Easter. Our Scripture readings for this morning included Isaiah 25: 6-9 and Mark 15: 1-15, 17-20.
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"Hope Resurrected"
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Related Link: Read the profile of Parkrose Community United Church of Christ - When the people are the church- that ran today in The Sunday Oregonian.
The audio of the sermon is not working. Therefore, I am printing my sermon notes:
Good morning once again. It is a pleasure to have you all here during this time of worship, reflection and celebration.
It won't surprise you to hear me say that we live in uncertain times – a time of wars, terrorism, extremism, manmade climate change and global economic crisis – and these times offer us a stark choice: we can respond with fear, a most natural reaction if there ever was one to the times we face, or we can live out our lives in the hope born in the Resurrection. God’s steadfast love endures forever says the Psalmist. Even in times when humanity has walked away from God the reality is that God has never abandoned God’s creation, with which at the beginning God declared to be “well-pleased.” The moment of the crucifixion of Jesus stands in history as the most profound example of God saying to the powers and the principalities of the day that not even death can silence God’s call for us to be a people of reconciliation, compassion and mercy.
Even today we experience the Risen Jesus in worship, in prayer, and sometimes even in personal moments of revelation. Jesus is still calling to us, like he did to those frightened first disciples, to spread the good news that the Kingdom of God is already here and that hope born out of our experiences with God demands that we seek a create a world where justice, kindness and love of God (Micah 6:8) overcomes evil and turns the darkness around us into the brightness of noon. This is not a time to cower but to blossom.
Before we get to the Resurrection is has to be asked why it was that Jesus was killed?
Princeton’s Paul Raushenbush wrote this week that:
For some, the death on the cross represents the act of substitutionary atonement - Jesus pays for each of our private sins through the shedding of his own blood on the cross. While this is a central belief for some Christians, it is not for me. In this departure I feel a great kinship with my great-grandfather Walter (Raushenbush) who of the substittionary atonement theory said: "it was not taught by Jesus; it makes salvation dependent upon a Trinitarian transaction that is remote from human experience; and it implies a concept of divine justice that is repugnant to human sensitivity."
Paul Alan Laughlin notes, however, that still another theory holds that “Jesus’ obedience and death on the cross was to provide an example for humanity to follow.” To put it another way, Walter Wink in his book Engaging the Powers states:
Here was a person able to live out to the fullest what he felt was God’s will. He chose to die rather than compromise with violence. The Powers threw at him every weapon in their arsenal. But they could not deflect him from the trail that he and God were blazing. Because he lived thus, we too can find our own path.
Jesus came to shake up the world. The Gospel of Luke chronicles the beginning of his ministry:
16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
Jesus was a moral teacher, the Son of God sent to help bring the world back into right relationship with our Creator. He wanted us to learn from him, to follow him, to see the world in new ways. But why did his death have to be part of the lesson? One possible answer comes from Barbara Brown Taylor, the Episcopal priest, scholar and author. She writes in this excerpt from her book Home By Another Way:
Jesus probably died right side up, since all four gospel writers agree that there was a sign above his head. That being the case, he probably died of suffocation, as his arms gave out and his lungs collapsed under the weight of his sinking body. Blood loss is another possibility. Heartbreak is a third. Whatever finally killed him, it came as a friend and not as an enemy. Death is not painful. It is the dying the hurts.
Another thing that was finished was the project he had begun, way back when he first saw what kind of explosion it would take to break through the rock around the human heart. Teaching would not do it. Neither would prayer nor the laying on of hands. If he was going to get through, he had to use something stronger than all of those, and he had to stake his own life on its success. Otherwise why should anyone believe him?
Taylor continues:
Self-annihilating love was the dynamite he chose. “No one has greater love than this,” he said on the last night of his life, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Having explained it to his friends, he then left the room to go do it. Less than twenty-four hours later it was over.
Jesus did not go to the cross as part of some vengeful God’s need for a sacrifice. He went to the cross because the Roman authorities saw his teachings as a threat to their hold on power. Crucifixion was a crime reserved for enemies of the state.
We read in Matthew 22:36-40 as Jesus is asked by a Roman sympathizer:
36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Jesus would pal around, if you’ll excuse the modern slang, with women, with lepers, with the poor, with tax collectors and with children and say to them that the Kingdom belonged not to the rich and the powerful but to the lowly and the outcasts. His way threatened to turn the Empire upside down and the religious authorities who conspired with Rome to keep their positions and their comforts were quick to hand Jesus over to the cross. This is where, tragically, the myth built up that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. But all religions, including our own Christian faith, have had leaders who have abandoned God for the favor of emperors and even presidents. In reality, we need to remember that not only was Jesus was Jewish but that so were his supporters.
We heard in the reading this morning from the Gospel of Mark that after it was over and all the male disciples had scattered in terror three women followers came looking for his body. But on hearing that Jesus has risen from the dead the women, like the men, fled, “for terror and amazement had sized them.” You’ll note that when you read the Gospel of Mark there are two endings. This morning we read both endings. In the first, the ending is stark and hope seems lost.
C. Clifton Black notes that much later another ending was added to Mark in which all the disciples behave a bit better but he writes “whether the Gospel was unfinished, or its original ending was lost, or Mark intended such a provocative open finale remains an issue of considerable debate.”
The original ending was like the final episode of “Dallas” when everyone is left wondering who shot JR or in Star Wars when they ended the “Empire Strikes Back” with Han Solo frozen in carbonite with little hope left for the rebellion.
Biblical scholar Mary Ann Tolbert has a theory. She writes:
To end the Gospel on such a resounding note of failure is very upsetting from a modern perspective. After observing Jesus’ continual struggles to make his male disciples understand his teachings and seeing their ultimate failure, readers want so much for someone in the story to prove faithful to Jesus. It is devastating to watch those who have already demonstrated more faithfulness than the Twelve fail as well! But from an ancient perspective the very point of the Gospel of Mark may rest with this painful ending. Ancient writing was intended to do things, to make people act or believe or change their behavior, not just to entertain them with a suitably literary experience. ..
The expectations raised and then crushed by the end of the Gospel are intended to move the hearers of the Gospel to action, Tolbert writes. If the women do not carry the message, is there anyone else who can? Is there anyone else who has heard Jesus’ preaching, seen his healings, and listened to the wondrous announcement of the resurrection? The audience of the Gospel has heard all this. At the end and indeed by means of the end itself, the audience of the Gospel of Mark, both women and men, are challenged to become themselves faithful disciples, carrying the message to the world, doing what some characters in the Gospel have not proved worthy to do because of their subservience to social conventions or their desires to status, wealth, fame, or power. The ending of Mark intends to arouse the emotions of its hearers on behalf of Jesus and the “good news” he came to preach.
And in many ways that is exactly what has happened in the two thousand years since. Walter Wink writes that:
Killing Jesus was like trying to destroy a dandelion seed-head by blowing on it. It was like shattering a sun into a million fragments of light.
That light shown on the original disciples and rekindled their courage as they experienced the Risen Jesus telling them once again to preach the good news. Theologians and lay people debate to this day whether or not Jesus was physically raised or whether the disciples (and later Paul) interacted with the spirit of Christ. Like Marcus Borg and others, I think that debate asks the wrong questions. It doesn’t matter. What matters that in ways that may very well surpass human understanding Jesus revealed himself with the ones he taught and loved and that his spirit still moves many today to wondrous ways.
Yes, Christianity has been perverted on too many occasions with disastrous consequences. When, however, the faith is grounded in the teachings of Jesus and people are guided by the Holy Spirit, the results are astounding. Faithful Christians have helped bring ends to wars, worked to non-violently bring down regimes that governed with violence and oppression, helped lead the Civil Rights movement, built homes and medical clinics for the world’s poorest people, and today Christians across the theological spectrum are working to bring an end to the human practices that produce climate change and threaten all that God has created on Earth. All of this in response to Jesus. All of this out of love for God.
In the end, Mary Ann Tolbert had it right. The Gospel of Mark leaves readers “challenged to become themselves faithful disciples, carrying the message to the world, doing what some characters in the Gospel have not proved worthy to do.”
Yes, these are uncertain times, but hope was resurrected along with the Jesus. Let us take that message from this place and aim to do nothing less than change the world. It’s what God is calling us to do.
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