The Great Vindication

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Easter Day, March 30, 1997

Job 19 and Luke 24:1-7

These last seven weeks this congregation has looked at "Themes from Job." Today we conclude with one of Job's most fury-filled imprecations at God and his poignant pleas for help. In the passage fromJob we read this morning we see an angry Job ensconced on his trash heap cataloging the consequences he perceives as a violent assault on his body, his mind, his spirit. He finds himself separated from family, friends, acquaintances. One commentator reminds us of George Bernard Shaw's jest on the lips of Don Juan, "Heaven is all right, of course, but for meeting friends and acquaintances you can't beat Hell." A wisecrack, maybe, but underneath a sense that hell is truly solitude among company, estrangement amid others, separation from community. For Job, his clan, his club, his dinner guests, the trades-people caring for his home and gardens, his spouse, his siblings, his closest confidants and mentors--all reject, repudiate, cast him aside. Abandoned, alone, soaked in pus and sweat, his abscessed skin, open and bleeding, Job screams at the heavens.

And then, incredibly, from amid his abject condition he articulates a hope; he sounds a soul-felt conviction. We hear it as discontinuity. It arises ex-nihilo. It emerges from the grime and wounds of despair: "I know that my redeemer lives! I know someone stands for and walks with me. I know someone takes my case. I know, wounded and sickened as I am, an advocate hears my plea, a savior defends me to the very end. Amid this agonizing, solitary mess," cries Job, "I know my deliverer will stand upon the earth; I shall see God; I shall see the one on my side."

I

Well, friends, as one observer comments, "Job's sigh has become the church's song." This Easter Day in a world not at all different from the one beating on Job, we celebrate a redeemer, an advocate, one who takes our case for God. If that testimony we read from Luke a moment ago describing an empty tomb, the raising of one who only three days before died in a monstrous public foul-up, a miscarriage of justice, ending in a bloody mess on a scrap pile outside the city limits means anything, it means the hope Job covets centuries before amid his desolation finds vindication ultimately through the Passion of Jesus Christ. Remember, we call that desolate Friday boiling with mob rule, seething with blood lust, ending with a parched corpse on a cross, a spear in its side--we call that Friday, "Good." The life drained away on that cross, the body carted

away and slammed shut in a garden tomb, through all of that, on Easter Day,  we recognize and celebrate the vindication of the quality and power of that life and death. Every hymn, every prayer, every anthem, every word we speak today echoes Job's cry; they testify to our Easter conviction, "I know--we know--our redeemer, our defender, our advocate lives!"

II

Can we really believe that on this Easter Day? Is that just a bunch of pious gab, a bucket of wishful thinking? I suspect any number of us came through those front doors this morning with a ton of questions about the Easter message. Any number of us came suffering like Job, maybe even more so, with a sense of good Friday in our hearts, some of us bleeding inside, others trapped in a quandary beyond our own control, still others burdened with grief, a sadness where all the escape hatches seem locked from the outside, emblazoned with the sign: "No exit."

I do not know what questions you ask this morning, or how you struggle to answer them. Not long ago I saw a Peanuts cartoon where Charley Brown finds himself discouraged and desolate. There he is standing on the pitcher's mound saying, "Boy, it sure has been bad lately." Linus comes up to him and says, "Don't criticize the world, Charley Brown." And then Linus launches the Divine rhetorical questions facing Job when he made a similar complaint. Linus asks Charlie Brown, "Where were you when God laid the foundations of the earth? Who laid its cornerstone when the stars sang together? Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst from the womb? Charlie Brown, have you entered the storehouse of the snow? Who can number the clouds by wisdom? Who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens (as he holds his catcher's mitt up to the sky)? Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Do you give the horse his might? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars and spreads his wings to the South?"

Charley just stands there on the pitcher's mound wondering, "Do I deserve all this?"

"Don't criticize the world, Charlie Brown," continues Linus as he walks back behind the plate. Then Charlie shouts after him, "How would it be if I just yelled at the umpire?"

Is that how you came in here this morning? Ready, at least, to yell at the umpire? Ticked off at an unfair and debilitating illness? An assault on your integrity or competence where you work? Downsized, after investing a lifetime of ingenuity and loyalty to an employer? Grieving an untimely and shattering death of a colleague, friend, sibling, parent, spouse? As one bitter and suffering man said not so long ago, "It's a rotten world; you and I have been shafted, and that's that."

That is what those thirty-nine who took their own lives in Rancho Santa Fe this week believed: "It's a rotten world; time to go." We know it is tough in our own lives and beyond. Look at the parade of refugees spilling across the rivers and frontiers of Asia and Africa; the Easter City, Jerusalem itself, today, paralyzed by fury and violence, and closer to home, the perversity of public policy that would, in the name of welfare reform, drive the powerless, the marginal, the sick, and a million children deeper into poverty.

Some years ago Nicholas Woltersdorff lost a young and radiant son in a random and vicious mountain climbing accident. As he brooded over this loss, he asked in a poignant lament: "How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity's song--all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself."

O God, explain yourself!

Easter, my friends, is as close to an explanation from God as we will get.  And the explanation we seek lies not in a proposition but in an event; it comes to us not by reason, but through agony. We gather here on Easter  morning before this great Cross--this empty Cross. We ask our painful question of Divine love and a troubled world here: if God is good, if God is powerful, if God is love--where was God when, on Friday afternoon, the best of human beings died amid lies, bribery, vengeance, stupidity, religious blindness and public perversity? Where was God when they nailed that innocent man to a cross?

Friends, this Cross provides a clue to God's explanation. We see this Cross at the center of our room. As what? As an instrument of death? Of execution? Of injustice? The symbol of the bloody mess we human beings frequently make of our life together? It could be. But it's not. We cannot explain the transformation. We can only witness to it. But friends, we see this Cross as the very vehicle of redemption, a sign, not of cynicism but of hope, not of hatred but of love, not of death but of life--where was God when Jesus died?--we say the love of God, though everything else denies it, the love of God was there all the time. We testify the power of God lies, not in preventing such terrible things--we know that is life and it can be desperately unfair--but in some mysterious and recreative fashion forging, though we may not see it, feel it, comprehend it--the power of God lies in forging out of the worst we can do to one another, hope against hope. Here, in trust and confidence, we confess, as we meet under the Cross and ask our tortured questions about the meaning and underpinnings of our lives.  We confess, against all the bitter evidence to the contrary, we confess amid it all, Love--Love-- bears the last word! As our hymn has it:

The powers of death have done their worst,
but Christ their legions has dispersed;
Let shouts of holy joy outburst, Alleluia!

II

Easter brings us not only the vindication of the love and power of God amid our troubled world, it also brings the vindication of the kind of life Jesus lived.  Remember how Job took it on the chin from his friends and family? Well, the matter of how we treat one another in our all-too-Darwinian world, competing with one another, trying to get a leg up, saving face, climbing to the top of the heap, is a matter for an Easter redeemer, an Easter transformation. The mood and tone of the life of Christ, where service, grace and kindness on a personal basis, and social justice and communal peace on a corporate basis--these components of personal and community life, though they have a tough time in our life together--they are vindicated by the great events of Easter Day.

We know it is hard to live in the image of Christ. Our human nature seems so often to run counter to Christ's image. Let me illustrate. Do you know why we shake hands when we greet one another? Until a month or so ago I thought it had to do with our affability and joviality with a touch and a clasp. Wrong! The handshake started, according to my source, in Medieval Europe. Men shook hands when they met. Women did not. Why did men shake hands? They shook hands to check one another for concealed weapons.

And the clinking of glasses when we toast one another? Such a charming, convivial act. Don't you believe it! After the men checked one another for concealed weapons they went to the dinner table to share some food and drink. They clinked glasses in order to pour some of their wine into one another's cups. They were protecting themselves from being poisoned.

Holy smoke! Some of you entered this church this morning and shook hands with our greeters at the front door. How do you like that: right here in Old South Church? We welcome you here, presuming you guilty until proven innocent, checking you in the narthex for concealed weapons. And I do not know how many of you are going home for an Easter dinner with friends and family, but there may be the clinking of glasses. "Cheers to your health!" meaning really, "I don't trust you, my friend. Here have some of mine; if its poison, you're dead. Happy Easter!"  Our rituals of civility are born in hearts of suspicion.

It is sad, isn't it? Let me carry this hardness of heart to a personal and communal issue eating up our churches. Some of you may know our sibling denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, has, in the last two weeks, added an amendment to its constitution aimed at banning homosexual men and women from the Presbyterian ministry, and from lay leadership positions in its churches. (The ban will inevitably exclude more people than that, but that is its aim.) In addition, The Presbyterians voted down an ecumenical proposition opening doors to mission and ministry with the United Church of Christ--that's us!--and the Disciples of Christ, another major Protestant denomination, because we will, on the basis of commitment, preparation, education, competence, and faith ordain and welcome into the ministry and into our leadership those who offer energy, regardless of sexual orientation.

One of our members, a gay man and a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ, upon reading of this decision wrote an E-mail letter to the members of this congregation. In that letter he confessed he did not know the details of what he called the "heartrending debate carried on by Christians of goodwill on both sides underlying the Presbyterians' decision." Then he went on to say,

What I do know is that this ban helps codify the notion that God's gay and lesbian children are second class citizens in God's church and that, friends, is a travesty of justice about which we should all be concerned." He continues, "What is clear is that many straight Christians are as yet unconvinced that God loves the love which gay and lesbian people can and do offer each other, their families, their church and their world. That this is so reflects poorly, not upon the spiritual and biblical integrity of a beleaguered minority that dares believe God is at work for the good through such love, but upon that of those who doubt God's ability to choose to do so.

In an accompanying letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, our correspondent refers to double standards, to the profound commitments evident in gay and lesbian partnerships, and then closes this way:

Should it surprise any Bible-reading Christian that God chooses to call as ministers those whom it is the current fashion to despise? Obviously, Jesus felt that tax-collectors, the prostitutes and other sinner folk of his day had what it takes to preach the Gospel of grace, of justice, of mercy. It is a travesty of God's justice that the majority of Christian churches turn away their lesbian daughters and gay sons who are loving people, filled with the spirit of God, and willing to give their whole selves in an ordained ministry.

This is not the first time than an American denomination has come down on the wrong side of a moral issue, but, God willing, it may be the last. Slavery is abolished, women are climbing the long road to acceptance in the pulpit, and I pray it will not take divisive church splits and hundred-year estrangements to discover what God really wanted all along: All God's children to live and love and work together for the realization of heaven here on earth. If that means heterosexuals being ministered to by Christian homosexuals, then, [says our corespondent] we are willing to serve.

Would you take a look at the back of your bulletins this morning? Do you see the box entitled, "A Note on the Inclusive Dimensions of God's Grace."  Picking up the emphasis of scripture we insist we set before you an open door. And welcome to you! Then in the middle of the paragraph we say:  "Following the One whom we believe is Sovereign and Savior, we affirm each individual as a child of God, and recognize that we [in this congregation] are called to be like one reconciled body with many members, seeking with others of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, gender, physical or mental ability, and sexual identity to journey together toward the promised realm of God. On the threshold of Christ's open door, we rely upon the healing, unconditional nature of God's love and grace to be our help and guide as we all move forward with the work of this church in the world."

On Easter day, my friends, we treat each other as Christ would treat us. Beyond our suspicions and hardness of heart, the mutual justice and reconciliation we know in Jesus Christ, through his crossing of the lines separating us by race or sexual orientation, by class, by whatever-- clearly a life-style earning him a death sentence--on Easter Day we celebrate the  universal, indiscriminate dimension of God's grace offered in the all-inclusive embrace of the barrier-breaking, the crucified, the risen,  vindicated Christ.

So friends, welcome to you all on this Easter Day. However you came through our front door, past those hand-shaking greeters, however you felt, whatever questions you asked, let me affirm today we celebrate One who through the worst life can do to us, bears us through. We exult in One who binds us into a community we can finally only call the dominion of love, the realm of Heaven. And together we rejoice:

The strife is o'er, the battle done,
the victory of Christ is won;
the song of triumph is begun,

 Alleluia!