Challenge
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Easter Day, April 4, 1999
The gardener! She supposes. This person so familiar to her Mary now mistakes for the gardener. "Did you snatch his corpse? Where did you hide it?" she demands. The gardener calls her by name. She recognizes the voice, the presence, the person. Not the one she knew. No longer flesh and blood. No longer the countenance familiar from those halcyon days gathering crowds across Galilee and Judea; no longer the one hounding the religious types in their sacred precincts; no longer the one bringing succor and healing to those deemed outside the pale; no longer the parched and dying figure hanging from the Cross on that little spit beyond the city wall. Mary turns from the tomb. She directs her gaze from the world of death and crucifixion and confronts—what?—a discontinuity, a new quality of existence, an alternative to life as we know it. In this Gospel, through rich metaphor, John shows a dramatic, decisive, radical change breaking in among us. He shows us an alternative world to one where the likes of Jesus can be crucified. He tells us of a world where human life—yours and mine—rests, finally, on love and trust. When Mary joyfully acknowledges and rejoices in this new presence, unity, solidarity, the embracing of our lives by unconquerable love asserts itself as victor over a world laced with the likes of crucifixion—love triumphant over all that would splinter, separate, divide, set us against one another, yea, do us in, kill us.
And yes, John's startling images not only assert and depict such fantastic news, they challenge us to become right now that radically new, loving world-community among ourselves. This narrative challenges us, in a new world, to live differently for one another. Now.
I
Live differently? In what way? Resurrection community means, first of all, dissolving the walls separating us from one another. If anything, the radically new presence of Jesus in John's narrative affirms a promise that we can begin again with one another. What is between us, hobbling us, crippling us in our relationships with one another can be healed, renewed, reclaimed. No relationship is so injured, so broken, so mutilated it cannot be recreated. Talk about Easter challenge!
Take forgiveness, for instance, for many of us the most difficult challenge of all. Anne Lamott in her recent little jewel entitled, Traveling Mercies tells us she "was never too heavily into forgiveness until it became too painful to stay that way." She writes she began to feel "not so much punished for her sin as punished by her sin," and she began to feel severely punished by her unwillingness to forgive. She goes on, "By the time I decided to become one of the ones who is heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a middle distance runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or I laughed a little too hysterically. I tried to will myself into forgiving various people who had harmed me directly or indirectly over the years— four former Republican presidents, three relatives, two old boyfriends, and one teacher in a pear tree—it was 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' Meets 'Taxi Driver.' But in the end I could only pretend that I had (forgiven). I was starting off with my sights set too high. As C. S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, 'If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo." (And on this opening day of the Baseball season, for us Red Sox Fans, perhaps someone easier than Dan Duquette.)
Someone easy, she says. Erma Bombeck tried her husband. Someone once asked Ms. Bombeck how she endured her husband for half a century, to what could they attribute marital success. She replied, "I am a forgiving woman. I forgive my husband for not being Paul Newman. Paul Newman," she continues, "never carries out the garbage, never has a fever blister, yawns, blows his nose, has dirty laundry, wears pajama tops, carries a thermos or listens to a ball game." A lot of us in this room know that kind of forgiveness, and how it makes for new beginnings every day of our lives.
But forgiveness can be a tougher matter. Did you happen to see Eileen MacNamara's story in the Globe this last week? She entitled it, "A Troubled Child and Few Options." It begins like this. "He set his clothes on fire. He bit and battered the family puppy, finally fracturing the dog's skull by smashing a computer keyboard on its head. He tried to force pink prescription pills down the throats of his cousins, ages one and three, after trying to strangle one of them with a belt. When the boy's distraught aunt, his legal guardian, took him to the local emergency room for help 10 days ago, the doctor on duty was confronted with a 9 year old boy he described as a maniac, who was 'very, very dangerous.'"
The boy comes from Ohio, neglected and abused by his mother, his father a convicted rapist. "When we first got him," continues his aunt "he was four years old. He couldn't talk and he wasn't potty trained. It took me months just to get him to sleep in a bed. I want to help him, but I'm stressed with my own father sick, and my two little girls. I was afraid he might be taken away. . . The last thing I want him to feel is abandoned."
Oh Auntie, what a magnificent woman you are! You've got it right. Rejection. Abandonment. No forgiveness. No way out. A catastrophe!
I have never forgotten a story Reinhold Niebuhr told of a little boy kicked around from foster home to foster home, incorrigible, a threat to life and limb, a toxic terror. Finally, assigned to a home where he exercised the worst he could muster, tearing the living room apart, making a mess of everything he touched, hurling insults, throwing tantrums, and his new adoptive father in a decisive encounter taking that boy in his arms and telling him, "No matter what you do we're never going to let you go!"
Hear that? "No matter what you do we're never going to let you go!" The boy settled down. Is it any wonder? That father's passionate loyalty echoes the Easter promise. The presence in the garden of the resurrected Christ following the Good Friday debacle confirms a Divine promise: "No matter what you do, I will never let you go."
Pardoned! So what? In gratitude we offer pardon. It is an Easter challenge.
II
And what about Easter and this tragic and shocking war in Kosovo? My soul! Talk about Easter challenge. Talk about Good Friday and a bloody mess at Calvary, what do we see here in Western Christendom two thousand years later? In Holy Week, no less! On Easter Day! Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, and their nations assaulting one another, villages burned to the ground, fathers massacred in front of their children, families smashed, miles and miles of refugees driven by intimidation and terror born of an absolutely perverse, demonic, national and racial policy called ethnic cleansing, and the chaos of war running amok with its unpredictable and uncalculated brutalities, its cruise missiles, slaughter of innocents, gross propaganda, its lies, wounds, its brutally wild and counterproductive strategies. What is this? An Easter farce?
When President Clinton closed his address to the nation two weeks ago, explaining the necessity to engage Slobodan Milosevic and to put the brakes on this staggering crisis of population displacement—this ethnic cleansing—he closed by invoking the prayers of the nation for our armed forces, the men and women who take on this Balkan mission, as he said, "for the sake of our values and our children's future. May God bless them and may God bless America."
We surely understand his sentiments. We identify with his concerns. But our prayers are not the only ones wafting to heaven on this Easter Day. Muslim prayers, Orthodox prayers, Catholic prayers, Protestant prayers follow Serbs, Albanians, the men and women of the NATO allies to the theater of war—all our prayers—a cacophony in the Divine ears. We need be careful, careful for what we plead for in God's blessing, careful with our prayers. Mark Twain caught the tragic irony of our praying amid warfare. Remember? He wrote his "War Prayer" in 1905 when Americans grasped for a secure stepping stone to Southern Asia by conquering the Philippines. And Mark Twain, incensed over the tendency to join God with national and ethnic interests, wrote a satire depicting the horror of war-prayers—answered: He wrote,
O Lord, our Father, our young Patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in Spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of the sun-flames of summer and icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes who adore thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him who is the source of Love, and Who is ever the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset, and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
That is war! What does the Easter hope say about it? Friends, we dare never forget the Easter moment follows the Good Friday catastrophe. What happens on Good Friday reminds us that our human condition bears a tragic and persistent tendency to have a go at one another. If anything, the crucifixion of Jesus shows us we are capable of doing horrible things to each other—and those bleak, grieving, stunned Kosovar faces peering at us out of railroad cars, staring from the front pages of our papers, weeping as all is lost tell us again and again of what we can find ourselves capable, of the terrible traps we can stumble into or consciously set for one another through malice and self deception. The drama of Good Friday and this current European horror of ethnic cleansing—this policy of bombing for peace—a tragic necessity? A tragic choice? which is it, or is it both?—struck again by Senator McCain's observation, "In war things go wrong," our President, our NATO allies, ourselves facing a terrible moral dilemma and deciding, in fear and trembling: war, perhaps to be a lesser evil than tyranny—all of this showing us vividly our fallen and tragic human condition.
A denial of our Easter faith? A mockery of our music, our prayers, our lilies, our Easter joy today, this grievous and bloody mess in the Balkans?
Not on your life! You see Calvary and Kosovo demonstrate from what condition we need desperately to be saved. They illustrate the contradiction we present to the kind and quality of life the God of Love wants for us. They show us no one can claim innocence or clean hands; that, if anything, we stand in desperate need of Divine mercy. Oh, surely we need be inspired, urged, even commanded to love one another, but the Gospel—and this is what makes it "good news"—the Gospel recognizes that love one another, we don't. It understands we stand in need of mercy, of forgiveness . . . something we cannot do for ourselves. It offers a Savior who can take the worst we can dish out, and yet through love that will not let us go, heal, reconcile, restore us to friendship with Him our God, and with each other. What a revelation! The Gospel reveals One who weeps over our condition, who shares it with us, One whose grace lies in bearing the worst with us, carrying us through, granting us courage, trusting us, loving us, sticking with us, giving us another chance—and another and another—as we muddle and stumble through the lies and brutalities of the likes of Calvary and Kosovo. You see, the Easter moment, that startling presence in the garden after the slaughter of Good Friday, confirms One who hangs in there with us through the dilemmas, the sickness, the blunders, the tragedy of our common life.
But more—and here lies our hope: encountering on Easter Day that transfigured Jesus, broken from the tomb, different, a new creation—we find ourselves grasped by the presence of new community grounded in love issuing in peace with justice, mutuality and grace; a new community we in faith—in faith because of this garden encounter—we now know is real; a community we, in hope, prepare ourselves patiently—patiently! (hope and patience are like this)— to invest in and work for; a reconciled, restored community we, in love, risk and offer ourselves to make visible now in our families, our churches, our city, our world. In our time and always, an Easter challenge.
The gardener, she believes. No, Mary, a new world of pardon and reconciliation; a new community embraced by Divine mercy, renewed by your—by our—commitment: compassionate, patient. A glorious, radiant, Easter challenge!
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