Barrier Breaker

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Easter Sunday, April 7, 1996

John 20:1-20

A darkened garden, an empty tomb, abandoned grave clothes. We begin there. But John offers more. A grief-stricken woman, a foot race between rival disciples, a mysterious gardener. And yes, more. A bolted room harboring terrified men, Jewish all of them, betting and losing on the failed blasphemer and crucified criminal, Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, fearing vengeance from their more orthodox religious compatriots. Then, in that bolted room, the presence of Jesus with words, wounds, a mandate. Some story! What is it about? A ghost? A resuscitated corpse? Is that why we sing and celebrate today? DNA reconstituting itself? The rising into the sky of the executed Jesus, as my grandfather used to say, "body, boots and britches?" Is that what Easter is all about? Is that what resurrection means?

No way! For John, resurrection means a new community confronts our current communities. For John, himself writing from a tight, loving, persecuted commune, Easter--resurrection--means a new realm of mutuality and trust making its way amid this world of brokenness and division. For John Easter means breaking barriers.

John's images tell all. Remember? Mary Magdalene turns from the tomb, she turns to face Jesus, she fails at first, to recognize him. Why? She has known him, loved him, followed him. She fails to recognize him because she turns to face a new quality of existence. She finds him unrecognizable because she looks at an alternative to life as we know it. When the gardener calls Mary by name, she turns again. She turns, first of all, away from our world of tombs and crucifixion. She turns to face life asserting itself against death. In truth, she grasps Christ as true community breaking into the communities and status quo we structure to kill the likes of Jesus and to fragment the loving, trusting, communities he embodies. When Mary joyfully falls into Christ's arms, unity, solidarity, the embracing of human life by unconquerable love asserts itself as victor over death--all that would splinter, throw us into chaos, and separate us from one another.

And yes, there is even more--and it is at the core of the Easter message. The event we celebrate this morning provides us not only with an announcement about unconquerable love binding us together, breaking barriers --reason enough for rejoicing--it challenges us to exercise loving and just community among ourselves. Easter is not some mind-boggling event taking place in a Palestinian garden two thousand years ago. Easter affirms the ground of our hope today, the root of our future as a human community. It challenges us, you and me, to be resurrection community, barrier breakers, in and for the world. It challenges us to live differently for one another now.

I

Our question, then, this morning, as we face the empty tomb: can we live this radical Easter hope? Can we signal resurrection community? Can we bear our discipleship as barrier breakers? Friends, living the Easter hope means, first of all, the possibility of healing--of barrier breaking-- in personal relationships. When our Lord stands among those terrified disciples in that locked room and asserts, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any they are retained"--when John says that, he means that by living the Easter gift we can begin again with one another. No relationship is so injured, no tie so broken, no bond so mutilated that in the dimensions of unconquerable love it cannot be recreated.

Heaven knows most of us need such new beginnings. Our ties to one another are all too tenuous and brittle. We find ourselves in circumstances trying our patience, our tolerance, our good will. Many of us with families can identify with Erma Bombeck who, in trying to hold her family together, finds herself shouting, "We're going to have some family togetherness here--even if I have to chain you to the bed." We live with tensions illustrated by the caustic repartee between Winston Churchill and another Parliamentary representative, Bessie Braddock. Remember? "Winston," says Bessie Braddock, as Churchill emerged from an indulgent dinner, "Winston, you're drunk."

"And Bessie," counters Churchill, "you are ugly. But tomorrow morning, at least, I shall be sober."

Barrier-breaking cleanses our relationships. It forges forgiveness. It heals the wounds bleeding the most among and within us. I will never forget a memoir Alan Paton wrote after the death of his wife Dorrie. Paton remembers a particularly painful occasion when Dorrie bluntly tells him she could never love him as much as she loved her first husband. Paton is crushed. But within the mysteries of human relationships, and under no small duress, forgiveness for the injury is begged for and offered. And as Paton closes his reflection on that occasion, he writes, "What strange creatures we humans are. Just how we come to love one another, and to care for one another for all of our common life, and to grant one another territories on which the other does not trespass, and to bear with one another's foibles and weaknesses and to grow closer and closer till we have but one mind on all the things that matter to us most, and to have children, and to put their welfare and happiness above all other things, and to give them safety and security until it is proper for them to find these things for themselves, how it ever comes to happen in this imperfect world, only God knows."

Indeed! Only God, the truly miraculous barrier breaker, knows.

II

But the barrier breaking of resurrection goes beyond the personal walls we build between and among ourselves. Easter proclaims the radical dissolution of social barriers, as well. The powers of politics, commerce, religion-- those powers finally conspiring to nail Jesus to the Cross--on this Easter day we confess the love of God in charge of them too. The barriers we build, the structures we nurture, the ideologies we pursue cutting us off from one another, marginalizing, dividing, or thrusting human beings into powerless, second class, personally demeaning circumstances have no place within the future of God. Do you remember John's Gospel telling us about Jesus confronting those disciples in a room locked against the world? Christ dissolves locked doors. Christ turns closed societies into open societies. To John, Christ bears the reality of peace born of justice.

What a difference the Easter hope of peace through justice would make in our world, our nation, our city! A week or two ago, the New York Times carried a front page article dealing with what it called the terrible crisis in child welfare. In the article one judge in Illinois calls it a "bleak and Dickensian picture." Another is shocked by what he labels "outrageous deficiencies in our oversight of children." A hospital attendant is stunned by a child asserting he hates himself, then climbs into a trash can and asks to be thrown away." Senator Moynihan remarks with all of his passion and dignity, "In the fifty years since the Social Security Act was signed, we've never had a time that slowly, but suddenly with much greater force, this country is deciding that we're spending too much money on children." You are all familiar with the statistics. Low income children are 3 times more likely to die during childhood, 1.1 times greater for cancer, up to 5 times greater for infectious diseases and parasites; 2 times more likely to be deaf, 3 times more likely to find themselves hospitalized because of injury, 2 to 3 times more likely to suffer fatal accidental injuries. And on it goes.

Marion Wright Edelman, that searing, passionate prophet in our time, the President of the Children's Defense Fund, tells us bluntly,

We've been preparing for and waging the wrong wars over the last three decades and still are. When 1.3 million Americans, including at least 50,000 children, lost their lives to guns at home between 1968 and 1991 in a period when 31,000 soldiers lost their lives in wars abroad, does it make sense that we spend $767 million a day, or $23 billion a month, on our defense budget while we ignore needed investments in Head Start, child health and nutrition? Where are the greatest threats to America's children? Are they outside our borders? Or are they within our homes and deteriorating schools and neighborhoods plagued by violence and guns and greed and family breakdown? How can we claim to be fighting these threats when real per capita federal outlays on discretionary programs for education, employment, and social services (a category that in includes Head Start, Job Corps, summer jobs, and child abuse prevention) have fallen by 27% since Fiscal 1980? How can we maintain that we can't afford to combat child poverty when we gave away 39 billion in 1990 alone to the richest 1 percent of Americans in new tax breaks enacted since 1977? Has America reached a depth of purpose no bigger than our individual wants? Is our legacy to the world the Marlboro Man, Rambo and an overwhelming nuclear weapons stockpile that now serves little conceivable constructive purpose? Or is there opportunity for new vision and moral and economic leadership?

The cover story on Newsweek Magazine this last week pictures Jesus rising from the dead and features articles entitled, "Rethinking the Resurrection." There you have it! To rethink the resurrection is not to come up with some new religious dogma, a fresh canonical doctrine, an esoteric formula proving biological resuscitation and historical details fit for a high school textbook. Far from it. To rethink the resurrection is to reshape and redirect our ethical commitments to the vulnerable, the poorest, to commit ourselves as did the crucified in behalf of those against whom the powers-that-be build barriers, treat with contempt, consider invisible, trade off for tax breaks. To celebrate Easter's Barrier Breaker, to be sure, is to join as we are now and to sing the great Easter hymns; it is to rejoice together on Easter morn in astounding good news of the empty tomb. But it is also to plow through the barriers killing other people. It is to stand for life, redemption, justice grounded in unconquerable love. We dare not sing Easter hymns celebrating barrier breaking without ourselves surrendering to and serving as ambassadors of the Barrier Breaker.

III

 And lastly, we confess on this Easter day a God who finally breaks those barriers splintering the human race into creeds and tongues, races and nations. We reaffirm the glory of creation designed as rainbow. If the Easter promise and its barrier breaking means anything, it transforms the human race into the human family.

Friends, I do not know a great deal about Ronald Brown, the Secretary of Commerce who died in the plane accident outside of Dubrovnik, Croatia, this last week. I am unacquainted with the civil servants and business people who accompanied him on his trip to the Balkans. On this Easter day one thing we can testify to is our conviction that he and his colleagues remain in the hands of One whose love under even these random and tragic circumstances will never let them go, One whose love breaks this ultimate barrier of death and whom on Easter day we know affirms life. And even as we remember these American lives lost in the Balkans, we recall their mission, as President Clinton said to the mourners at the Department of Commerce last Wednesday, "to use the power of the American economy to help the peace take hold in the Balkans, to help people in that troubled place, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats at each other's throats--to help the people in that troubled place have the kind of decent, honorable and wonderfully ordinary lives we Americans too often take for granted." That effort, to bring well-being, reconciliation, peace with justice and integrity to the global village truly represents the taste of an Easter mission for all of us. Whether it be the welcoming of immigrants, the dissolving of racism, the tearing down of homophobia, the evaporation of nationalism, the honoring of all human beings--the promise of risen Christ--how else can we say it--this barrier breaker at Easter, confirms each of us, all of us as children of grace.

Maya Angelou expresses it best in her ingenious fashion through a reflection entitled, "Human Family." She writes:

I note the obvious differences
in the human family.
Some of us are serious,
some thrive on comedy.

Some declare their lives are lived
as true profundity,
and others claim they really live
the real reality.

The variety of our skin tones
can confuse, bemuse, delight,
brown and pink, beige and purple,
tan and blue and white.

I've sailed upon the seven seas
and stopped in every land,
I've seen the wonders of the world,
yet not one common man.

I know ten thousand women
called Jane and Mary Jane,
but I've not seen any two
who really were the same.

 Mirror twins are different
 although their features jibe,
 and lovers think quite different thoughts
 while lying side by side.

 We love and lose in China,
 we weep on England's moors,
 and laugh and moan in Guinea.
 And thrive on Spanish shores.

 We seek success in Finland,
 are born and die in Maine.
 In minor ways we differ,
 in major we're the same.

 I note the obvious differences
 between each sort and type,
 but we are more alike, my friends,
 than we are unalike.

 We are more alike, my friends,
 than we are unalike….

An Easter Barrier breaker! For you, for me, for this troubled, yet glorious world of God's, What can we say but "come ye faithful raise the strain of triumphant gladness!" - in gratitude, in service and in joy!