Blossoms in the Desert

An Easter Sermon in Honor of the Reverend Drew Toler

Gifted Minister, Treasured Friend

I.

Robert Frost, “Peril of Hope”:

It is right in there

Betwixt and between

The orchard bare

And the orchard green,

When the boughs are right

In a flowery burst

Of pink and white,

That we fear the worst.

For there’s not a clime

But at any cost

Will take that time

For a night of frost.

In response to Black Friday and the remembrance of Jesus’ execution, we can share respectfully with others that we are drawn to the Jesus Movement, at least in part, because he lived out love in a world where hatred often tries successfully to snuff it out. Unless you believe that Jesus had to die for your sins to make God happy, which reshapes Jesus’ cruel and unusual execution into a divine necessity and something to celebrate, Black Friday is a sobering day. Without jumping ahead to celebrate Easter, as if the crucifixion didn’t really matter, numerous Christian traditions will gather on Black Friday and force themselves to consider Jesus’ death for the real death, the horribly painful death, that it was.

If you look around enough this season, you will read or hear someone say, “Without crucifixion, there can be no resurrection.” With all due respect to those who believe this: duh! Without crucifixion, there is no NEED FOR resurrection; divine light is undimmed. Our goal in this world, as I see it, is to minimize or eradicate all that loves darkness more than light, all that hates God’s love enough to try to kill it. Until then, there will be the need for resurrections--the rekindling of light and the resuscitation of suffocated love.

The study of the human brain in conjunction with faith experiences has already been established as the newest frontier in the intersection of science and spirituality. The new field established as a result of this arena of hard core data blended with much reflection is neurotheology. The field, which is also known as “spiritual neuroscience,” was at its beginnings, about a decade ago, focused on finding out those parts of or places in the human brain where religious beliefs originate. Now, with dramatically more complex equipment for the study of the brain available, neurotheologians, of which there are very few, dare to study neural activity in the brain during distinctively spiritual activities such as prayer, reading inspirational literature from one’s spiritual tradition, and listening to religious discourse such as a sermon.

One part of neurotheology may be, and not all will agree that it is, the capacity for optimism. Optimism is connected to hope, and most of us, I think, would generally tie hope to faith probabilities or assurances, depending on one’s point of view. Certainly Easter at any level is informed by or bolstered by hope. The writer of the book of Hebrews defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And this is not the only prominent place in Christian scripture where faith and hope are intricately tied together; at the end of Paul’s stirring essay on love, he gets around to saying that when time and the world as we have known them are no more, three realities will still remain: faith, hope, and love. While the greatest of the three is love, faith and hope remain as well. What’s more, the three are strongly related to each other.

The capacity for hope and thus faith, however, can no longer be seen as strictly a “spiritual” matter. So while many of us associate persons of faith with their ability to believe a better day is coming, even against the odds, we now have to recognize that part of their ability to believe whatever they believe is tied to their brain function and/or brain structure. These findings are not entirely unrelated to the discoveries made long ago about how a person’s social experiences along with her or his emotional makeup, influenced to some degree by life events, limit or maximize her or his ability to see God or some faith conviction in a particular way.

So, if “hope springs eternal,” and your favorite song outside Sunday School is from “Annie”: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun,” then your neural pathways make that possible. An agnostic, then, may not have a crisis of faith at all, but rather may have a brain structure that prevents certain faith affirmations including matters related to hope.

There actually are brain clusters that are responsible for optimism, and if your brain lacks these clusters then you are not a Dickens’s Scrooge who comes around to be kind and hopeful in the end; you will remain the Ebenezer Scrooge you are because of the structure and function of your brain. Either you were born without the brain clusters that allow people to be optimistic, or they were damaged in some kind of way leaving them nonfunctional.

An optimist may expect to live longer than others in her or his age group. An optimist may expect to be more successful in a chosen profession than her or his peers. An optimist may play down possibilities for divorce in a marriage or a civil union even though they are unmistakably present.

To find out how the brain generates optimism, some New York University research types scanned the brains of 15 volunteers while they imagined possible future life events, both happy and sad. They might be asked to imagine winning an award of some sort; they might also be asked to think about how it would feel if a very important love relationship ended. The scientists discovered that when the volunteers were asked to envision the positive potential future events there was increased productive activity in the same brain clusters that are believed to malfunction in the brain of someone who is suffering from depression.

We don’t want those optimistic brain clusters to kick into high gear, however; if that happens we can become so optimistic that we allow ourselves to believe in bipartisan political achievements and worse. We can become so optimistic that we come to believe in things that are not possible fro us such as believing we can do something physically that we are not capable of doing; we underestimate the risks and attempt to walk on a tightrope anyway--even though we’ve never tried it before. Critics of faith claims that really stretch day to day reality, as most of us experience it, can step in here and offer similar criticisms on the basis of neurotheology. Someone who believes in any kind of resurrection, say the critics, has an overactive brain section that overproduces optimism leading people to believe the impossible.

A moderate level of optimism is consistently linked to physical and mental health. One of the New York researchers said, “A little optimism helps promote actions that lead to good outcomes. Not everything in life will turn out great, but if you thought everything would turn out bad, you'd never do anything.”

One other neuroscientific or neurotheological point to note is that, as one researcher said it, “Optimists, and remember that optimism is produced in the brain, get the last laugh.” There are several reasons for this. One is that optimists generally have better overall physical health than pessimists and those who suffer from advanced levels of chronic depression, and in particular optimists have healthier hearts.

The story of the resurrection of Jesus has long given those who believe in it, at any level, hope; their brains, I guess we would have to say, gave them the capacity to believe that somehow in human experience death is not the final word--or doesn’t have to be. Whether it’s a metaphor or a reflection of practical reality or a profoundly theological insight based on an historic act those who accept resurrection reality at whatever level see more positive possibilities in life than those who do not or cannot.

II.

One of the years I lived and worked in New Orleans was brightened by a young man with a Home Mission Board assignment in the inner city where his theological foundations were challenged. Poverty, violence, the absence of a reason to live he saw all around him, and they drastically challenged his tidy doctrinal instruction to that point in his life. He heard about the liberal preacher over at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church and thought maybe he could get some encouragement or guidance or a blessing from that guy.

Well, I was that guy, and I was often called on to provide such ministry to those with fundamentalist theological leanings that didn’t work for them any longer. I liked that role. This young man and I became coffee buddies and then lunch pals and eventually before he left town good friends. I watched his career develop with amazement. He landed in a ministry position where he was a chaplain to children with cancer, providing pastoral care to their families as well--and not infrequently to the medical teams who cared for the children who died. I couldn’t imagine a more difficult position. He did is masterfully. His marvelous pastoral skills were enhanced by his deep love for his own three sons. Eventually, as almost any of us would expect, he burned out; but he had lasted for years.

From that job, he became manager of an organ transplant team, and he works with the families of organ donors or potential organ donors who have died or who are near death. He has thrown himself into this new ministry with gusto. We keep in touch, but some years ago we fell out of the habit of frequent contact. Not two weeks ago, I opened my email box and saw that I had some e-correspondence from him; I was delighted and began to read it immediately. My heart sank after only a few words, though.

I had a scare last month. Right after my long car trip south, I developed a chronic cough. In February it got worse. My primary doctor was treating me for bronchitis, but nothing was working. In March I made an appointment to see an ENT, and a few days before I was to see him, I started having the worst chest pains. I thought it was pleural effusion (inflammation in the lining of my lungs) from coughing so much. One night I was working a case at a local hospital, and as I was finishing up my part, I could hardly talk or breathe due to severe pain radiating throughout my ribs. I drove myself to another hospital’s ER. They thought I was having a heart attack. After blood tests and a chest CT, I was found to have multiple pulmonary emboli scattered throughout both lungs. A neighbor was the ER doc that night, and when I saw the look on his face as he told me what he saw on my chest CT, I thought I was a dead man.

I was in ICU for about 3 days then on the floor for about 3 days. Multiple blood tests were done, and nothing was showing up in the tests with immediate turn around. I was sent home on an anticoagulant. Now home and back to work.

Last week a genetic test came back indicating that I have a genetic mutation where I produce too much prothrombin (protein that helps the blood clot). I probably developed a leg thrombosis on my road trip. Most likely, from the end of January and through February, that clot was breaking off in micro pieces and going to my lungs causing me to cough so much. The longer I persisted the larger the clots got. The pulmonologist does believe that I'll not notice any difference in breathing capacity once I heal the areas and my body removes the clots.

I am better.

Wanted to let you know.

I sent him an Easter wish this week and referred to his story, the one I’ve just told you, as a resurrection experience. He thought he was a dead man, and he knew a lot about death, enough to know it when he saw it. Now, he’s well, and with attentive medical care the chances are very strong that he’ll stay that way.

The complicated part of talking about a resurrection motif in a story such as my friend’s is that not everybody has one. Some people get sick and don’t get better. He’s forty-something, but the children to whom he ministered for years were often preteens all the way down to toddlers. In a way, it seems cruel to talk about someone who made it through, someone who faced death eyeball to eyeball and lived to tell about it because almost all of us know someone, maybe someone very dear to us, for whom that was not the case; having looked death squarely in the face, death won out and walked away with the one whom we loved with our all.

William Law: “Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new--created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing.”

Someone’s optimistic brain sections undoubtedly permitted the idea that even if life must be lost in this world, long before its time, there is resurrection at the end of life, and it’s a better resurrection, if you will, because it’s a once and forever kind of thing. Anyone who wins over death in this world will still eventually be defeated by death; there’s no way around it, but the kind of resurrection that Jesus’ followers said that he experienced was a permanent thing. No death, no more. Period. The catch, though, is that such life cannot be maintained in this world of time and space; it is life for another realm. Even if you take Jesus’ resurrection as historical fact--his bodily resurrection, I mean--he still was connected to the world we know for only a matter of days in that state.

Unfortunately, though predictably, the theologians, eventually, had to run in and try to qualify and quantify Jesus’ resurrection experience as well as to try to tell people what they HAD TO believe about it if they wanted a taste of it. Who could have the same kind of experience at the end of this life, and on what basis would that be decided and awarded? It surely couldn’t go to just anybody and everybody. A significant number of theologians and those who rely on their work couldn’t possibly buy into such a “freebie” notion.

Could it be enough to say that death need not be the final word without detailing the life, no pun intended, out of such a faith claim permitted by the brains of a certain number of people in the world? There is no solid proof, so many of us are drawn to metaphors of life in the face of death, life despite the threats of death, “life” being God’s last word just as “life” was the key word in the developing created order from the beginning.

Jeannette Batz: “If poetic metaphor could kill, maybe a resurrection metaphor could save us. In the way that, when we flounder for meaning, an idea can save us, and when we ache with self-hatred, the memory of being loved can save us. Ideas and memories don’t have literal, physical form; you can’t stick your fingers in their sides. So why should we require a biblical resurrection to have more physical verifiability than love itself?”

Victor Hugo: “Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.”

Arthur Schopenhauer: “Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”

Emily Bronte:

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void:

Thou - Thou art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

III.

There is no account of Jesus’ resurrection anywhere. Jesus’ didn’t talk about it at all, which seems odd if he came back to life after death and hung out with a bunch of people who’d been his cronies before his execution. What we have are accounts of responses of various people to what is taken to have been Jesus’ resurrection. It’s very, very important that we never forget that. From all indications, the oldest written version of responses to Jesus’ apparent resurrection that has passed down to us is what Paul shared with the Corinthians based on what he’d been taught during his long period of study and reflection between his leaving behind his given birth name, Saul, and taking on a new name based on a life-changing religious experience, Paul; between his rejection of hardcore legalistic Judaism to which he’d been utterly devoted and his embracing of a kind of reconstituted Judaism based on personal relationship with God and not on the keeping of religious rules and laws.

The oldest of the four Gospels, those four documents devoted exclusively to painting Jesus’ from four different perspectives (overlapping in places, but not identical representations of Jesus by any stretch of the imagination), is the Gospel of Mark. Paul wrote all that he wrote and was executed before Mark was written and circulated; Paul completed his writing ministry and was executed by Rome in the early 60’s, several years before Mark began to be circulated in the late 60’s, just before the Roman destruction of the grand Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

While chronology doesn’t always make a huge difference in understanding either a person or an institution or a widely held belief, it’s still usually worth considering; and on the basis of that “usually,” we are considering it on this Easter morning. Therefore, I say again, what Paul wrote in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians is the oldest account of responses to Jesus’ apparent resurrection that has passed down to us. Who knows what archaeologists may uncover one of these days, but for now, and for a very long time, this is the way it has been; this is the way it is. Paul’s account, which was based on what someone close to Jesus and his ministry had told Paul, is not only the oldest written account of responses to Jesus’ resurrection we have; ironically, or maybe not, it is also the briefest, no frills attached, written version available to us. Here it is:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

No muss. No fuss. No burial cave. No confusion about who could have moved the huge stone away from the front of the tomb. No discussion of who it was exactly who made it out to the tomb to complete the embalming process with no one or ones in the group of all women who could have moved the heavy stone that sealed the tomb. No mention of one or more divine messengers, angelic or not, chit chatting with the women and giving them encouragement and instruction. All of this, which became so important to so many people and which will be the core of most Easter sermons preached around the world today, was of no concern whatsoever to Paul or, from all indications, to the teacher or teachers who taught him the essentials of Jesus over a multiyear study program.

Paul had some theological affirmations to get across before he got to the few practical details he knew to share. He believed, as did many of Jesus’ early followers, that Jesus’ death was predicted in ancient Hebrew scripture; this could only be affirmed if Jesus were taken to have been the Messiah. Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah or act like the ancients who wrote about the Messiah described messianic actions. Some, plenty of his followers, said he was the Messiah anyway whether he knew it or not; whether he openly admitted it or not. Thus, when Paul refers to Jesus he uses the “Christ” word, which really meant anointed one and nothing more--though it came to be a code word for Messiah.

So Paul buys into the Jesus as Messiah belief, and he buys into the notion that Jesus’ death was predicted by the ancients as was Jesus’ resurrection. Those were the theological issues Paul had been taught and which he felt compelled to pass along to others when he taught lessons about Jesus’ resurrection.

Beyond that, Paul ticked off a list of those to whom Jesus in his transitional body--no longer a biological entity and not yet in a heavenly body if there is such a thing--appeared. The later Gospels will list Mary Magdalene as the first person to whom Jesus appeared in this transitional state, but Paul makes no mention of her. Paul’s teachers had intentionally left Mary off the list, because the group had decided that Peter was to be their key leader in the absence of Jesus in bodily form. I suspect that Paul was only passing along what he’d been taught and that he didn’t intentionally omit Mary. After all, Paul was compulsive and a stickler for details; I think he’d have told everything he knew.

Lots of people, mostly men, are on Paul’s list. Peter is first, and Paul is last; and that’s a stretch. Jesus did not appear to Paul in the way the legends claimed Jesus appeared to others. Paul claimed he had a vision of Jesus and even heard Jesus’ voice when a bolt of lightening struck him, essentially blinding him for the rest of his life but causing him to rethink his priorities and commitments. In that event, Paul came to believe he was on the wrong side of the theological aisle. Instead of persecuting followers of Jesus, he realized he needed to be one. Instead of being a right-wing fundamentalist Pharisee, he needed to be not a libertarian, but more of a theological moderate. Instead of fretting about jots and tittles, he needed to rest himself in the embrace of the God who loved those who kept all the rules and those who did not, those who believed all the right things and those who had no idea what to believe.

The information that Paul passed along about responses to Jesus’ apparent resurrection wasn’t given as something on a required list of beliefs for those who wanted a relationship with God not only in this world, but also in the next--though Paul himself certainly thought those who rejected Jesus’ resurrection as fact had pita for brains. The information was given as a foundation for hope, hope that if death wasn’t the last word for Jesus, neither would it have to be the last word for anyone who wanted more of God and more with God than this world could afford.

The passage from First Isaiah read for us earlier is a joyful and picturesque passage. If you didn’t know already, you’d never guess that it follows one of the darkest, most gruesome segments in Hebrew scripture. What comes before our joyful passage is a passage of dark symbols describing what happens to groups and nations who reject the ways of God. They bring doom upon themselves, and the milieu in which they are thereafter forced to live is nothing more than the most barren of deserts. Life has been replaced with lifelessness; then, all of a sudden, without expectation or probability, beautiful life sprouts in the most barren of desert places. This can’t be! But it is!

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad. The desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.” Resurrection. Life overcomes lifelessness. Life overcomes death. Death loses; life wins. “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.’” Resurrection. Weakness gives way to strength. Fearlessness overtakes fearfulness!

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water....

Resurrection. What was dead is enlivened. Usefulness wins out over uselessness. What is parched and cracked is replenished with ever-flowing streams. “The desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly!” Amen.

Perishing Beauty: A Maundy Thursday Sermon Meditation by David Albert Farmer

An African Jesus at the Last Supper

jesusmafa.com

Maundy Thursday Reading (from James 1)

2My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, 3because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; 4and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing. 5If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. 6But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; 7for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 9Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, 10and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. 11For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.

Prayer (borrowed from the Center for Liturgy, St. Louis University, adapted)

Jesus washed

his disciples’

feet.

Gracious God, we would

learn that you, the Infinite, all-powerful God,

the God of inexhaustible love,

are at heart, a

servant

of all.

Let

us not

ignore or just

tolerate our neighbors.

Let us wash, like Jesus did, their feet

and give to them their food and drink. Amen.

I hope this part of our reading from the book of James caught your attention:

Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.

A few things to note here. First, as the ancient Hebrews first noticed, God is a God of reversals; the world tends to set things up one way, and God seems to think that the opposite arrangement is best. So, James expects that those who are regarded as lowly in this world will not always be lowly; in time, and in God’s way, the lowly will be exalted. Similarly, James expects that the rich of this world will be brought low along with all the power and prestige that went along with the high-ranking status their money bought for them.

Keep in mind, in both cases, that James does not likely have individuals in mind, but rather groups. The lowly as a group will be exalted, and this isn’t a one time thing nor does it happen to all the lowly-regarded at the same time. Same with the rich; not all the rich are brought low; nor does their loss of prominence happen to them all at the same time.

Second, the lowly are never lowly in God’s eyes and should not be lowly in the eyes of those who take their cues from the God about what we learned in the life, teachings, and ministry of Jesus from Nazareth. The poor, the sick, the homeless, the helpless certainly suffer in this world; even so, in their this-worldly plight they are like seeds planted who end up, against the odds, sprouting into flowers with beautiful blossoms. And the rich and powerful of this world who buy their beauty will lose their perfect petals and, eventually, fade into nothingness. This is not because God wishes harm on them since God loves all people, all of us, unconditionally, but because they have built anti-human and anti-humanitarian empires that abuse so many people that those no longer willing to be abused strike back and, in the process, shatter and scatter the once-beautiful petals of the power people. The book of James calls this “perishing beauty.”

Wasn’t Bernie Madoff’s lavish lifestyle a pretty picture for a long while? There

is no lovely flower to his life in his prison cell. Same with Mubarak and Gaddafi; one down and several to go, but Gaddafi is likely the next one. Power, prestige, privilege fading in the hot sun of people who have had it with oppression and who are determined to get hold of freedom or die trying. On the inside, there may never have been much beauty, but on the outside respect, order, and accomplishment looked lovely. No more; now there are faded flowers after faded flowers. New flowers will bloom in their places, flowers planted in sand rich with respect for human dignity and worth.

Our country had better be opened-eyed about these uprisings for freedom in Arab countries. The politics we praise and utilize here are a long way from the utmost respect for every citizen embraced by those who brought this country to birth. More and more people are seeing the beautiful flowers of their freedoms fade in the scorching heat of celebrity and power plays laughingly called “representative politics.” The downtrodden won’t forever remain downtrodden. Perishing beauty will often lead to beautiful and new blossoms as the previous plants fade into oblivion.

Third, there is so much exaltation of Jesus during this season, but in his cultural and historical time and place, he was one of the lowly. Certainly, the power people won out over him, and they got rid of him--well, for a time, kinda sorta. Now, few people remember the Roman hierarchy who stood behind Pontius Pilate when he ordered Jesus’ execution, and there are few people in the whole who haven’t heard of Jesus, whatever their theological take on him. Who are the beautiful blossoms now? Pilate and his Caesar Tiberius or Jesus? The answer is clear, isn’t it?

We most of us can’t keep from seeing power, prestige, and privilege as things of beauty, but they don’t last. A lowly carpenter and part-time preacher, a perennial that keeps blooming beautifully century in and century out, more widely remembered worldwide than any of the leaders of the mighty Roman Empire, perished beauty.

So one of several points Jesus reminded his disciples of at his last earthly meal with them was that the values of the world were likely to remain in conflict with the values of God. There’s nothing wrong with being someone whom society at large regards as lowly. In fact, if sufficiently influenced by the ethics of Jesus we do not long to be above those whom we are called to serve; God will take care of recognizing our beauty when the time is right.

The disciples, thus, were to have a sip of wine and a bite of bread--the most basic food and drink utilized in their world; then they were to go out and minister to everyone--those who might be able to help their cause along and those who were in a “take only” position because they had absolutely nothing to give in return.

Someone told me the other day about another of Bill Perkins’s stirring acts of ministry to Wilmington’s destitute. I did not know that Bill has been known to recline beside a homeless person dying on the street and embrace that person as she or he moved out of this realm of poverty and into the realm of God’s riches. That flower will not fade.

Where will these elements of remembrance take you in Jesus’ name? To perishing beauty or to permanent beauty by God’s standards?

The Message that Cost Jesus His life

I.

It’s Palm Sunday today--or Passion/Palm Sunday as it came to be called in some traditions several years ago. Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, what would be his final entry into the Holy, Jewish City, when a handful of easily excited fellow Passover pilgrims got all up in the air about the possibility that he was their long-awaited Messiah. In their excitement, they threw plant cuttings of some sort across the pathway on which his little borrowed donkey colt carried him into the Holy City to celebrate with as many Jews as could come to and squeeze into Jerusalem how their forebears had been led out of cruel slavery into a long wilderness sojourn and ultimately to freedom in a land they called “the Promised Land” because they said God had promised it to them and provided it for them in exchange for their faithfulness to God. Perhaps as the details of the theo-historical events were remembered by the Hebrew storytellers, everything came across a little more dramatic than it actually had been. For example, the whole lot of them hadn’t always been paragons of piety though many of them had suffered greatly to make it all forty years from escape out of Egypt to entry into the Promised Land; many of them, though, if they even made it all the way, were mostly angry with God during the forty years of walking in circles and repeating the same hopeful routes over and over again--naturally, without success. If a route doesn’t get you where you’re going the first time, it’s not going to get you there the second time or the twentieth time.

When the construction of the interstate system in Knoxville, Tennessee, the largest “big city” near Halls Crossroads, which was my home town, had just been finished, we had to go pick up Dad from work late one night because he worked overtime and therefore wasn’t able to leave with his carpool. By “we” I mean Mom, my sister Kim, and myself; my brother Greg would come along for several more years. Dad worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the Atomic Energy Commission, but the city of Oak Ridge is more frequently remembered by American historians as the home town of Martha Ellen Ralls, the gutsy lady whom WE today call “Martha Brown.”

There were no shortcuts between Halls and Oak Ridge in those days; these days some segments have been shorted a bit by new road construction. Anyway, Dad called Mom to tell her we needed to come to pick him up and that she could shave off about ten minutes of her drive if she’d get on the new interstate near Fountain City and take the first exit she came to, so that’s what Mom tried to do. This story probably goes back 50 years as I was about 7 when it happened, maybe a little younger, and I’m now 57.

Mother did everything Dad had told her to do regarding navigation, but for some reason every time she took the exit it looped her right back up onto the interstate. It wasn’t clear how one was supposed to merge out of the far right lane into another lane that would take one to the road she or he presumably wanted to get to. Lots of passengers in cars pay very little attention to what’s going on outside the car, leaving that to the driver, but after a long while of everything looking exactly the same every time I looked up, I said to Mom, “Things really do look exactly the same out there,” and Mom started laughing almost uncontrollably. She said, “They sure do, and that’s because we’ve been driving around in circles for half an hour. I can’t get off this crazy interstate. Your Daddy is going to kill us when we finally get out there.” There were cell phones, no service station that she could figure out how to get to, and practically no other drivers to think about waving down for help.

I have no recollection at all as to how she finally got herself out of that repetitive mess, but once she did she announced that she’d never drive on the interstate again. Only rarely has she broken that vow. For your information, Dad wasn’t the least bit amused by Mom’s story when we finally arrived at the X-10 plant where he worked. He kept asking, “How in the world could you just keep going around in circles for more than thirty minutes?” She had no suitable explanation for him, but when she tried to say something, she repeatedly laughed so hard there were no clear words.

So the ancient Hebrews had the same kinds of experiences over and over again during their forty years in the desert; no matter how many times they walked the same pathways they saw no sign of civilization and ended up right back where they’d begun.

The cultural storytellers who remembered and told these stories to subsequent generations forgot about wasted steps and wrong turns. The further removed they were from the actual events, the more determined, resolute, and pious all the Hebrews getting out of Egypt were. It wasn’t so; several of my Mother’s spiritual forebears were out in that Sinai dessert laughing their fannies off at the fact that Moses who loved a lot about being the big boss kept taking them over the same wrong pathways over and over again.

Laughter aside, there was a powerfully sobering side to the Jewish feast of the Passover. They did, in fact, escape the Pharaoh’s cruel slavery, but their lives were at risk.

There’s more that lacks any possibility for humor. The very name of the Jewish feast commemorated to this day as a necessary part of remembrance for them is bone-chilling and tragic. As a part of the lore of how Passover came to be, there were memories of how the Pharaoh refused to let his Hebrew slaves go free. According to the ancient Hebrews there was a whole series of plagues that God Godself sent on the Egyptians to force open the Pharaoh’s ironclad clutch on the Hebrews. None until the last one worked. The final of these plagues was the most blood curdling. All the Hebrews in Egypt knew to splash the blood of a sacrificial animal above the entrance to their homes; this blood-sign protected them from the angel of death who came throughout all of Egypt at God’s command, they said, and killed all the first-born sons in homes lacking the splash of blood over their entranceways. You know who lost big time, don’t you? The Egyptians, of course, because, as the story was told, the Hebrews were God’s people, and God warned them to protect themselves with the splash of blood. None of the Egyptians knew so the angel of death killed firstborn Egyptian son after firstborn Egyptian son. The angel of death “passed over” (thus, “Passover”) all the Hebrew homes with animal blood splashed on the fronts of their dwellings.

I’m so grateful that we live in a time where we are able to look at a story like that and see it as a part of culture’s lore rather than an historic account that describes the nature of an angry god who works through, among other sources, natural acts such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and famines to communicate a divine point or as a way of stomping the divine feet to punish those who fail to live up to the divine standards and rules.

In any case, as the story went the Hebrews ate their last meal on the way out of Egypt in a hurry because they knew they had to go the very second Moses said so. Even in their grief, though a bit slow, the Egyptians could relatively quickly marshall forces to attempt to capture the escaping Hebrews. The Hebrews had to strike while the grief was hot, you could say.

I call the food the Hebrews ate while hurrying out of Egypt on their way to a place where they could be their own people “freedom food,” and we’ll be eating modern freedom foods at our Maundy Thursday meal this coming Thursday, a dish from each of several countries and cultures in the world struggling right now for a way to freedom.

This is what Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to celebrate with his sister- and brother-Jews as he rode into Jerusalem on the donkey colt. It was an annual event that they believed they dared not forget. Even if some of the details of the ancient story were tampered with and dramatized to try to make them more memorable if not more cliffhanging, the core is almost certainly true. The ancient Hebrews were enslaved, and they had to put their lives on the line in order to try to reclaim their freedom.

As Jesus rode the little donkey into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, he didn’t enter as a free man; to the contrary. He and his sister- and brother-Jews were under the thumb of the mighty Roman Empire who gave them some religious freedom, but hardly a complete religious freedom; and certainly not widespread, full-fledged freedom. For Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, freedom was more an ancestral memory and a hope than, for them, a present reality.

II.

Many of us Silversiders celebrate today with our sister- and brother-Delawareans who saw a brighter relational future for themselves signed into law this past Thursday when the Delaware House approved a law already given thumbs up by the State Senate that will allow same gender couples the rights of Civil Union. It’s not an approval of same gender marriage, but it is the younger sibling of same gender marriage.

The First State became the eighth state plus the District of Columbia to take a stand on relational freedom for lesbian and gay persons. Throughout its 150 year history, Silverside Church has always celebrated and rejoiced the realization of any and every act of justice. Gay and lesbian Delawareans are freer today than they were at breakfast on Thursday morning. They will be freer still when Governor Markell, who openly supports the move, signs it into law. And they will be freer still come January when all authorized marriage officiants in the state--clerks of the peace, clergypersons, ship captains, and judges--will be able to seal a Civil Union when both individuals are of the same gender. I very much look forward to that day.

Coming this far has been a long and arduous journey for many same-gender couples in our state. I have a very fine therapist with whom I consult when life begins to feel a little too heavy at times. She is very good at her job. Her name is Frann Anderson; she is a clinical social worker. She is a lesbian, and she and her partner have been together for a quarter of a century. The two of them have been working for full civil rights for Delaware lesbian and gay persons for sixteen years. She called me on Friday and said, “It’s a great day to be gay in Delaware.” Of course, she was responding to what happened Thursday in Dover.

This is what happened as Reuters reported it:

Delaware governor Jack Markell is expected to sign into law a bill that will make the state the eighth to recognize civil unions for same-sex couples, his office said on Friday. The Delaware House of Representatives passed the previously approved state Senate bill 26-15 on Thursday. The legislation amends the present code on civil unions to include two individuals of the same sex. It stops short of extending the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions, nor does it require religious institutions to conduct ceremonies for same-sex couples. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, Nevada, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia recognize at least some of the legal rights of domestic partnerships.

Silverside Church has always, always, been on the side of justice; equal rights for all people including relational rights for all consenting adults are justice issues. I’m delighted that our church welcomes lesbian and gay as well as straight participants. Wanting and helping people to be free is at the core of what we’re about. I would not serve as pastor of a church that refused to welcome homosexual persons into full participation in every aspect of the church’s life, just as many of you--straight or gay--wouldn’t participate in a church that discriminated in any way against gay and lesbian persons. As we celebrate this just act, let us not imagine that homophobia died in our state on Thursday.

I was giving last minute pointers to my basic speech students who are preparing their final speeches of the term; the final speeches happen to be persuasive speeches. I was showing the class how Dr. King introduced his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which public speaking professionals routinely classify as the greatest speech delivered in any venue in the United States during the twentieth century. The speech is truly a work of rhetorical art.

As we came across his reference, in his introduction, to that massive gathering in Washington, DC, in 1963, Dr. King called it the event that would go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom for all people in American history. This class met Friday morning, and the events of Thursday were fresh in my mind. I spoke of the approval of Civil Unions for lesbian and gay persons as an act of freedom for one group in our society running behind persons of color in terms of full freedom. At that point one of my students who is rather gifted as a speaker and who happens to be African American said in a way that sounded mocking and condescending of gay and lesbian persons, “Well, there sure are a lot of them around here.” The professor and the other students froze. I didn’t know what to say at first, and when I thought of what I wanted to say, it would have been the wrong thing. What I thought to myself, though, was, “Young lady, just a few, few years ago you wouldn’t be allowed admission into hardly any institution of higher learning, and when that opportunity would come to you you’d be sitting in a classroom with all your classmates and your professor being African American only because you would not be thought of as someone who had the same value as a white student. I wonder when rights for persons of color began to be fought for seriously in this country, if some racist in the deep south, in my home town for example, didn’t say in response to any legal victory for African Americans, “Well, there sure are a lot of them around here.”

Freedom is something to celebrate. Justice is something to turn backflips about. They are never possibilities or realities to sneer at and only affirm when their realization benefits you personally. “There sure are a lot of them around here.” How rude!

True enough, though. Not everyone in Delaware or around the country began celebrating Thursday.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a Freedom Document, but it didn’t stop slavery in its tracks. It started a domino-like process that took a long, long time to get around to every state in the union; even then, with slavery made illegal, the Caucasian majority limited the rights of persons of color for years and years and years. Still, even now with full civil rights for persons of color both guaranteed and protected by the laws of the land, racism is far from being an ancient relic displayed behind thick glass as a museum piece to go and have a look at what once was. Slavery is no more in this country, but racism is as ripe as the apple you savored the other day.

James Weldon Johnson was an amazing American who happened to be a person of color. Talent and intelligence seeped from him whether or not he was trying to demonstrate or use them or not. He wrote a poem about the long, hard struggle for full freedom people of color in this country had to endure, and it was written long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was first presented publicly in 1900 when 500 students of color at a segregated school where Johnson happened to be the principal recited his poem to celebrate President Lincoln’s birthday and to welcome a distinguished guest to their school, Booker T. Washington. James Weldon Johnson’s brother, Joe, set the stirring poem to music in 1905, and in 1919 the NAACP named it the “Negro National Anthem.” I love the the music and the words; it’s in our hymnal, but I always feel uneasy when we sing it because most of us Caucasians know nothing really of the struggle of people of color; and I think we white folk might do better to listen only to this one. Or maybe the song could be adapted in focus with Professor Johnson’s blessing, were he still living in this realm, for any group of people who ever had to fight for a freedom that was withheld from them because of a fact of their birth that couldn’t be changed: ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical or mental limitation--anything that would allow a power group to rob someone of her or his full freedom because of something over which she or he could have absolutely no control.

Lift every voice and sing,

'Til earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on 'til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chast'ning rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

'Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,

God of our silent tears,

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light,

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

.....

III.

Jesus didn’t have to die to win God’s favor on behalf of the rest of humanity, those who came before him or those who would come after him. The fact is, Jesus didn’t have to die at all, from God’s point of view. God did not will Jesus’ death.

The fact is, Jesus didn’t have to die at all until he reached the end of his body’s ability to sustain necessary biological functions. In other words, he should have lived to a ripe old age.

Jesus’ death was a repulsive, unjust execution by a half-competent bureaucrat with deeply ingrained prejudices against all Jews. Pilate, the Roman-appointed governor over the Jews who lived and visited in Jerusalem, was in Jerusalem at Passover time because his job required it of him. The Emperor, Tiberius Caesar, required it of him. To him, Jesus was one more worthless Jew; they were all the same to him, seriously.

Jesus didn’t die to save us from our sins; what a horrible, ghastly, sickening notion. Jesus died because Pilate became convinced that Jesus had the ability to instigate a Jewish uprising against Rome while so many Jews were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.

Jesus preached a message of freedom to a people who were not free people, and in order for them ever to become free they would have to take on Rome militarily speaking; or, at least, that’s the only way Pilate could imagine it could happen. He knew for a fact that Rome wasn’t going to give the Jews their freedom as a gift for good behavior. Honestly, the more rabble rousers he could be rid of, the better for the Roman Empire, and maybe the Emperor gave him perks for doing away with the trouble makers.

Jesus wasn’t your average troublemaker, though. He was more like a persistent thorn in the side of people and an institution that wanted to sustain and justify that absence of justice robbed from the Jewish people, though they did give the Jews some limited freedoms as long as they didn’t interfere with or interrupt anything beloved or protected by Rome. Therefore, Jesus didn’t really disturb the Romans until he began preaching the possibility of freedom to a people who weren’t free.

Jesus was in a long line of such bold and brash risk takers and dreamers.

How dare you, Moses! How dare you tell the Hebrews that they didn’t have to be slaves to the Egyptians any more.

How dare you, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs! How dare you tell your sister- and brother-Germans and through them the rest of the world that same-gender love is normative for some in the human family years before anyone had ever penned the word “homosexual”! How dare you tell them that the world doesn’t have to be a world in which gay and lesbian persons must be second class citizens and the butts of crude jokes and hidden in the shadows to be kept away from respectable heterosexuals! How dare you cause them to believe that there are societies where their freedoms can be full and complete, not limited and compromised!

How dare you, Harriet Tubman! How dare you tell slaves, legally owned by White and Black Americans, that they could be free!

How dare you, Jocelyn Andersen! How dare you tell fundamentalist Christian women that they are not bound by God or by scripture to submit to or return to physically and emotionally abusive husbands!

How dare you, Demi Lovato! How dare you tell kids who don’t fit in where they are that they don’t have to tolerate bullying ever again. You’re just a kid yourself with problems of your own; go away and take care of those. Don’t you dare make these misfit kids and teens believe that they have the same rights all kids have!

How dare you, Mohammed ElBaradei! How dare you tell modern Egyptians that President Mubarak’s freedoms are being dolled out to the few and not to the masses! How dare you tell the masses that they, too, can be fully free!

How dare you, Jesus! How dare you make your contemporary Jewish sisters and brothers believe that they would not forever be bound by Rome and that the love of God, yeah the Empire of God, would be one day overtake Rome and call all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, to be fully free--spiritually, politically, and in every other way. How dare you!

This was the message that cost Jesus his life! If you want to know why Jesus died, I’m telling you why right now. There was no other reason. He did not die for your sins or to save you from your sins. He died because he wouldn’t stop preaching the possibility of freedom for all people, including the Jews along with him held captive by Rome.

We have this horrible human trait. It shows up again and again in history, ancient and modern. The free folk want to limit who gets to be free with them. The leaders and the rulers at the top of the heap want to protect all their freedoms and then limit every person or program who might now or in the future interfere with their privileges. If you don’t believe I’m telling you the truth, I want you to read a summary of the budget cuts being proposed by our government leaders over against the programs they will happily let slide if they can at all. I’ve never seen a more self-serving process since Jim and Tammy Faye were begging for money on television so they could live like royalty and even air condition their dog house with money that was promised for the poor. I’m all for animal comfort, and anyone who knows me knows that’s absolutely the case; but their dog or dogs could have lived in their mansion in their own room and never interfered with the high old life the Bakkers were living with the dollars they were raising supposedly to support the needy around the world.

Listen again to what the God of the prophet Hosea said to his errant fellow Hebrews. God wasn’t eternally angry with them and planned no eternal punishment for them. The God of Hosea knew nothing of a hell; that was a concept dreamed up much later by those who didn’t think a painful death was adequate punishment for the despots and the serial killers of the world.

The people to whom Hosea preached, and certainly Hosea himself influenced the preaching of Jesus, were people who would know freedom again despite the circumstances in which they found themselves. The heart of Jesus’ message sounded a lot like much that Hosea said:

I will heal their disloyalty; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily [which should be translated “iris”], he shall strike root like the forests of Lebanon. His shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive tree, and his fragrance like that of Lebanon. They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

This is a beautiful message that says all of God’s people who have ever lost their freedom because of something they did that was clearly their fault or because of forces completely beyond their control will have it restored. Hosea’s God even says, “I will heal their disloyalty, and I will love them freely.” In other words, God will not wait around in a snit for people to fix problems to which they contributed individually or collectively or problems that others created for them. God will fix the problem, even if the problem has been disloyalty to God and will love the culprits as well as the innocent victims freely.

People who know they’re loved can be free; those who believe that are not loved can never be free even though their laws may say they are. Hosea’s God said, the people whom God blesses will be like the dew that falls over the whole nation of Israel. What could be freer than the morning dew, and what could there be more of than dew that covers everything on the ground of a whole nation?

All the images from the prophet Hosea here are of free and joyous people, people who flourish like young olive trees sprouting branches, like wild irises sprouting up all over the place. Ethel Merman’s great-great grandmother is singing, “Everthing’s coming up irises; let’s give thanks for all that is!”

Rome said, “The Jews may never be free. We are eternal, and the Jews may serve our needs eternally. If they are ever free, it is ours to say. This rabble rouser who is preaching a freedom that exceeds what Rome controls should be done away with; any excuse will do, really. A complaint from a few Jewish leaders that Pilate normally would have ignored all together he turned into a charge of insurrection and treason, crimes punishable by death--crucifixion to be precise. There was no theological reason for Jesus’ death; it did not make the world a better place and did not win many more people to God’s causes.

Jesus’ death was a tragedy, not a triumph. God would say that death wouldn’t be the final word about Jesus or about any of us relationally tied to God, but only misguided, however sincere, folk venerate the death of Jesus, his execution by crucifixion, which he suspected he faced soon after he rode his little borrowed donkey into Jerusalem. That did not slow him down, however. He would preach freedom as long he had breath. That’s why he died.

If Jesus’ died with the message of freedom on his lips, though political freedom was denied him throughout his lifetime, should anyone who embraces the principles of Jesus as best we can understand them have to live without freedom? The clear answer is no. Notice that Jesus didn’t put military forces in place to gain anyone’s freedom, including his own. We might learn a lesson from that; there are other ways to win freedom.

Amen.