In Praise of Modern Moms

The Late Barbara Billingsly as June Cleaver on "Leave It to Beaver"

I.

The world continues to change and modernize at breakneck speed and with it the roles of all people--at work, at school, and at home. Technology has taken away the need for some jobs and created the need for many new ones previously unimagined. Didn’t the last Western Union telegram transmitter retire several years ago? I think it was in early 2006. There’s very little need for the once-essential telegram in our high tech age even though many of you probably sent or received a hand-delivered telegram that changed your life. Now, with email and house phones and cell phones, there is seldom the need to send a telegram; there are still a couple of companies that claim to offer the service, mostly it seems, in low-tech parts of the world. Anyway, you get my point.

In contrast, solar panel manufacturers and installers are new jobs that we need for the welfare of the planet. Some people are just now finding out about solar panels even though the technology is in its second, maybe third, generation. New job, new roles, ever-new world.

Roles at home have changed too, but what has not changed is the need for, the benefit of attentive parents who love their children with joy and abandon. Naturally, today we look at this matter in the context of Mother’s Day.

It’s much tougher to be a kid today in most places around the world, and that is one reason it’s tougher to be a Mom today. The two other major reasons Motherhood has changed in terms of role, not function, in the western world are the cultural movement that had the nickname, “women’s liberation,” AND economic pressures and demands.

It should be evident to you that I am not and never have been a Mother, though as most of you know I was a single Dad from the time my sons were 8 and 10 years old--one of the great privileges of my life. Because of this, one of my church members in Baltimore who was a single Mom used to send me a Mother’s Day card, though never a frilly silk night gown with matching house shoes. I’d return the favor on Father’s Day by sending her a Father’s Day card and one of the finest imported cigars to be found in Baltimore. On one level our annual exchanges were little jokes, but like many jokes there was a kernel of truth involved. Though we laughed about it, I have to confess that as someone trying to fill roles of both a father and a mother, the remembrance meant something to me.

My ex-wife who decided that neither I nor rearing children were her cup of te...quila is a lovely woman with many gifts and fine personal qualities. Dwelling within the land of reality isn’t one of them. OK. OK. Let me get by with one tacky comment this month. She really is pretty and effervescent; if you met her, you’d immediately like her much more than you like me...for a week or two. I know, so make it two tacky comments this month, and that’s my limit. Well, three; there’s one more. We haven’t been in touch much since the divorce was finalized 15 or 16 years ago; usually we see each other at events of concern to the boys. That works out fine. One day, a few years ago, however, she did phone me about something. I have no recollection whatsoever why, but I do recall that during the conversation she began to reflect on the “why” of our separation, and she said, “I’m tired of feeling guilty because I stopped being June Cleaver.” I bit my tongue, kept absolutely quiet, and let her continue with her reflection. The whole time, though, I was in near-disbelief, but bursting to say, “Oh, honey. You were never a June Cleaver so live your life guilt free.” Nonetheless, I honor her today as the mother of my children whom I adore, and I look back to the early years, when we both were on the same page about bringing up the boys and loving the day to day joys of being a family in which everyone was valued by the others and the children’s challenges and adventures were of paramount importance to both of us.

Some of you will remember the television character, June Cleaver, played wonderfully by Barbara Billingsly on the top-ranked television show of my childhood, “Leave It to Beaver.” June Cleaver was the perfect 1960’s mother, the ideal parallel to the perfect t.v. father, Robert Young in “Father Knows Best.”

June was a stay at home Mom. She kept a lovely, spotless home. She cooked all the meals, and they were never less than delicious. Despite that hard work, she was always immaculately dressed in a dress or a skirt and blouse; there might have been a few pairs of elegant slacks worked into her wardrobe, but I don’t remember them. She was unflappable, even with two sons who got into more than their share of trouble. She was calm and warm and understanding and patient. She was ever-forgiving and had the requisite maternal ESP. She loved her hardworking husband, Ward, and the highlight of her day was when Ward got home from work. She gathered her husband and sons around a beautifully set table ready to present the meal, the preparation of which she’d devoted a significant part of her day.

Everybody wanted June Cleaver for a mother, or, rather, everyone wanted a mother who had all of June’s qualities. I read and heard interviews with Barbara Billingsly across the years, and she spoke of how she would get fan mail from mothers in her viewing audience seeking her advice on how to handle a real-life motherhood challenge.

Not many modern Moms with children still at home can live up to June Cleaver’s standard, and maybe June couldn’t be June if she were a Mom in the real modern world. There are new demands and expectations. Again, I say that the number one reason the roles of Mothers have changed is because of new sets of cultural demands and expectations on their children. While I’m trying to defend Mothers who couldn’t do the traditional Mother thing for whatever reason, I’m also criticizing many Mothers who along with many Fathers have contributed to some of these new demands on kids. Every child today has to be in training for something related to the arts or sports or both before they are as tall as the bat they’re expected to use or before they can hold and manipulate a musical instrument crafted to its true size so we get mini-violins, mini-cellos, and mini-drum sticks.

I’m certainly not opposed to giving kids opportunities to enjoy and gain skills in a sport; I am opposed to the vicious tension related to competitiveness drilled into the heads of little girls and little boys from teeball on. I am absolutely in favor of giving a child who wants it the gift of music; some few of them will know as soon as they begin to play the instrument that, “This is my life,” but all too many of them are pushed along by parents who want successful children so that they, the parents, can receive acclaim as the ones with the vision to get their kids into music at an early age so that they can manage and use for themselves the money that their prodigy-children earn with their extraordinary talent. I could mention Leopold Mozart, Joe Jackson, and a long list of stage Moms who help their children become famous as they help them lose childhood too.

In some of the apocryphal literature about Jesus--that is the literature about Jesus, among others, which was omitted by those who decided what would be in the Bible and what would have to go (Catholics and Protestants coming out differently on end results)--there are stories about little boy Jesus already having supernatural powers and using them to entertain his friends and to kill off bullies. What if those had been historic accounts? They aren’t, of course, but what if they were? And Mary and Joseph had decided to market the powers of little Jesus to their financial advantage? That would make them wealthy, perhaps, and their son famous! Jesus’ whole life could have turned out differently starting with his desire for the spotlight and his preference for rubbing elbows with the higher ups in society. There likely would have been no special attention to the poor and the needy and the struggling; his male and female inner circles wouldn’t have been seen by him as coworkers and fellow-laborers, but rather as members of his entourage whose jobs would have been to keep him happy and looking good.

Mary wouldn’t have been running around telling people in reference to Jesus, “My son means well, but he’s a little crazy,” which we are told in the Gospels that she did. Instead, she’d have been pushing Jesus to be in the public eye more and more, doing what thrilled the people--namely feeding them and healing them--so they’d keep coming back for more, and the baskets being passed around wouldn’t have been food baskets making sure hungry folk were fed, but rather baskets for collecting money to make her rich and famous as the Mother of the prodigy. Instead of keeping all of Jesus’ traits that amazed her silently in her heart and pondering them there, she’d have been on the interview and scroll-writing circuit too at the expense of her firstborn child’s childhood.

II.

Are Canadian Mothers more stressed than American Mothers these days? An article by journalist Erin Anderssen certainly gives the feel that that’s the case. I hope she’s a Mother, or else I don’t think she has the right to write on Motherhood the way she has. While making some very valid, some very important points about modern Mothers, she clearly thinks of Mother’s Day as primarily a day when Mothers stop to say, “I am MOTHER, hear me roar,” rather than a day for honoring our mothers whether or not we ourselves happen to be Moms.

Oh, to be free of the guilt, the worry, the hand-wringing! No more waking up in the middle of the night fretting about forgotten homework. No more calculating the sodium content on a cereal box. No more planning weekends of “enrichment” while eating lunch at your desk. Just this week, researchers warned that children who don’t have family dinners get fat – heartening news to working parents in this country. (The research was unclear on whether sandwiches in the car speeding to soccer practice count as a family meal; let’s assume, this being Mother’s Day weekend, that they do.) But then, as the growing mound of “science” tells us, the misguided Mom has already doomed her child to a beer belly, or depression or violence, or long years on a couch in the basement. Who can blame the Modern Mom for fantasizing about breezy afternoons sipping martinis on the patio with absolutely no idea what her kids are up to. As one 1970s Mom reminisced this week, the conversation used to go something like, “My kid’s a brat. What do you do with your brat?” Today, there are no “brats,” except the ones we whisper about.

So along comes Mother’s Day, a day upon which most women, when surveyed, desire neither flowers nor pancakes in bed, but a break from being Mothers. Who can blame them? Mother-bashing has a long history, but never has the sniping felt so ubiquitous, the advice so dire and conflicting, both inside the Mom circle and beyond. Judging Mothers is not just permissible these days, it’s obligatory, as if a spanking will bring us all around. “We have one day to celebrate Mothers, and then we lay a trip on them the rest of the year,” observes Gillian Ranson, a sociologist at the University of Calgary. In other words, the roses are nice, but they come with (apron) strings attached.

But before you poke your eye out with the pencil that you are currently using to complete your daughter’s science project, here’s some consolation: the Mommy wars may yet shift in our weary favour. Demographics are on our side. More women are becoming the primary breadwinners in Canada – that was the case for three in 10 families in 2004, even before the recession gutted many male-dominated industries. The next crop of Moms, busily surpassing their future husbands in university degrees and ambition, are unlikely to accept the lion’s share of the laundry burden – and more men taking paternity leave suggests fewer Dads willing to be demoted to “assistant” in their children’s lives.

There will be a Father’s Day sermon next month so we will leave those thoughts for the moment and get to two biblical images, among a fairly long list, of inspiration about motherhood.

The first of the two deals with the maternal qualities of God Godself, and take into account what a stretch, perhaps a risk, it was for a writer in a decidedly patriarchal collection of cultures to dare to write of God as having maternal qualities. Well, Third Isaiah dared to do it. We have one biblical book called Isaiah, but there were materials from three different Isaiahs living in very different times from each other whose works were eventually collected onto a single huge scroll called Isaiah. In Isaiah 66:13, Third Isaiah puts these words in the mouth of God speaking to beleaguered Jews, downtrodden and feeling hopeless: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”

Some anti-female biblical interpreters, and there are probably more of them in the world than there are biblical interpreters who fully affirm women, say that God has chosen to speak in this manner because the Hebrew/Jewish men in ancient times didn’t exhibit softer, gentler emotions, which in the eyes of some make them look weak. Thus, say these anti-female scholars, the image of God as female is only used because the people to whom Isaiah wrote would have no understanding of a big butch God who exhibited emotions such as comfort; that was woman’s work, if you will. Really!?

Scholars who say such things either aren’t really scholars, like those predicting the end of time and judgement day in less than two weeks, or they intentionally ignore the obvious. There were plenty of Hebrew scripture daddies who doted over their children. Isaiah didn’t have to manufacture a feminine, maternal motif to give God a means of offering comfort to those regarded as children of God. If comforting those who hurt made God maternal, well, I have to tell you, God was very much maternal. Thinking of God only in masculine, patriarchal ways devoid of sympathy and profound concern for all people is to miss the whole of the message about God in both Hebrew and Christian scripture. It was clearly Isaiah’s God who said, “Children, I am your mother, and I’m going to comfort you when you are discouraged and afraid.” God, our mother.

King Solomon, son of King David, making Solomon the third King of Israel in its history, was--according to legend--an exceptionally wise man. Was his great wisdom connected to genetics, or was his relational life so enriching that he had remarkable dual hemisphere brain functioning, making him one of the wisest people in ancient times? What I mean is, King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Did that enhance his wisdom? The poor Mormon guy on the recently ended television show, “Big Love,” had three wives and I think briefly a fourth; and he just about went nuts trying to keep everybody happy. Well, you can form your own opinions about why Solomon was such a smart guy.

The biblical writer who most wanted to stress and illustrate Solomon’s wisdom, told this phenomenal story. While he was in power, he alone was the supreme court. If lower level authorities couldn’t settle disputes to the satisfaction of all involved, the cases got kicked up to the King himself.

So, the story goes that two women claimed to be the mother of the same child. There were no DNA tests, of course, and evidently the father of the child was no where to be found so the truth rested somewhere in the testimony of one of these women; one was telling the truth, and the other was lying. Women who want children and can’t have their own have been known right in our own day to steal a child from her or his biological mother. Anyway, what was the wise King to do?

He ordered one of his security guards with a huge sword in hand to cut the baby into two equal parts and give each claimant one of the halves. Immediately, the true mother said, “I lied. The baby is hers. Send the baby home with her, and I’ll accept whatever punishment I must for having lied to the King.” Solomon, of course, never had any intention of harming the infant, but he knew that the true mother would do anything not to have the child harmed, even if it meant letting him be taken by someone else to raise. I love that biblical Mom!

III.

I think good Moms have always had to be adaptable, and I believe that remains very much the case for today’s Mothers so I have taken that word, “adaptable,” and used it as an acrostic to describe characteristics of a successful modern Mother.

The first letter, the first A, in the word “adaptable” stands for “AWED.” I see the most successful modern Mothers as having some kind of spiritual searching going on in their lives or some kind of spiritual foundation on which they feel some grounding.

What I have in mind has nothing to do with any set of doctrines or any religion. An effective modern Mother may only be able to think of God, in Karen Armstrong’s words, as the Great Mystery, may only be able to conceive of God as the collective sparks of divinity that rest in all humans. She knows there is something more to life than what we can see; she may have no idea what that “something more” is, but she is AWED at the prospects; she instills in her children the freedom to search for that “something more.”

The AWE may come from something like Patricia Barrett describes: “Connection with gardens, even small ones, even potted plants, can become windows to the inner life. The simple act of stopping and looking at the beauty around us can be prayer.”

The “D” in “adaptable” reminds us that effective modern Moms are DILIGENT in the practice of parenting. They should get breaks; they need breaks, but they never stop being Mother to their child or children. Motherhood has nothing at all to do with what is casual or happenstance. Strong Mothers do not sit back simply hoping that the wind will always blow their children in the best directions.

Good Mothers, and I’m very grateful that most of the Mothers I know personally are good Mothers; good Mothers catch on very quickly that in additions to all the joys and all the richness that accompany the privilege of being a parent, there is much hard work. That work changes over time as the child matures. The early maternal sleep deprivation needed to tend to a baby’s needs day and night gives way to practicing basic first aid skills. Then, along comes the work required to help a child learn to socialize effectively while understanding the critical capacities for staying safe at every level. Don’t walk too near the street, and don’t ever give strangers your name. These are just beginning points.

A high quality modern Mom is APPROACHABLE; the second A in the word “adaptable” has us thinking about how important it is for a Mother to be APPROACHABLE where her children are concerned. The groundwork for this is laid in very early childhood where a child learns that her or his questions and needs are not secondary to anything and everything else a Mother might be doing.

Not being able to interrupt an important phone call or refusing to allow a child to butt in to a conversation in which the Mother is already engaged are not signals to a child that her or his Mother is now and will forever be unapproachable; however, if the Mother always seems to have something more important to do than stop and give her child her undivided attention, then the child will learn that Mom is not approachable.

My Mom used to say to my sister and brother and me from time to time, “Please don’t out and get in trouble, but if you do you hurry right home and tell your Daddy me. We may not be pleased with what you did, but we love you; and we’re going to help you.”

The P causes us to keep in mind that a great Mom is PROTECTIVE of her children. There’s a difference between “protective” and “over protective,” and we’re talking about PROTECTIVE here. The potential dangers to children are unprecedented in our high tech world. A Mother, a parent, must be PROTECTIVE. There is no environment in which children are automatically safe. Some children are not safe in their own homes. Some children are not safe at their churches or in their schools. Some children are not safe spending the night with a friend.

We can’t leave our children in the care of any person or group unless we know those into whose care we entrust them. As children grow up, they become annoyed and get embarrassed that their Mother is so nosy about every place they want to go and which friends they want to hang out with. Sad to say, nosiness may be the only thing that keeps a kid safe--away from those who would do them physical harm, who would draw them into the world illegal drugs and drug addiction, who would steal them from their parents and put them to work as street or internet prostitutes.

Effective Mothers are TRUSTWORTHY. You don’t tell your child one thing and do another. You don’t make promises to your children that you don’t keep; same for Fathers, but this is Mother’s Day. My impression is that children who find their parents untrustworthy will find trusting others for the rest of their lives difficult or impossible. That’s a serious wound--a very serious wound because ultimately to get along in this world we have to trust at least a few key people.

Steve Kroening makes three excellent points about what happens to kids whose parents break commitments they have made to their children. First, this behavior teaches the children that it’s ok to do what they see their parents doing so from there on out those kids who become teens and then adults still believe it’s ok to make commitments and not honor them. Second, breaking commitments made to children steals their hope; world events and circumstances make it hard enough to hope in this world. Third, and this is the worst, breaking commitments made to children teaches them that they don’t matter.

An effective modern Mom is AUTONOMOUS; she is an independent woman. She doesn’t lose herself in the relationships in which she is involved, even in her relationship with her children. When I think of adult relational autonomy, I think of self care. To use an overused example, on a plane, just before takeoff, the flight attendant lists steps to take in case of unforeseen developments. If the cabin pressure drops, oxygen masks automatically drop, and parents or other adults responsible for children are told to get their oxygen first and then make sure the child gets her or his oxygen. The two most obvious reasons for this are that the child needs less oxygen than an adult and that if the adult konks out she or he will not be able to care for the child.

An AUTONOMOUS Mother, if she is married or partnered, doesn’t take orders from partner or spouse. Couples who love each other negotiate--some more loudly than others. An AUTONOMOUS mother also does not take orders from her children; she honors their respectful requests. She can only be the best Mom she can be when she is clearly the master of her own fate.

I think a successful modern Mom is BOLD. When I use the word “BOLD” here, I have in mind appropriate assertiveness. There are too many bullies and too much red tape in which any one of us can get lost in this country, in this world. Those best able to be heard and seen are those who speak up for themselves or who have someone to speak up for them, a parent for a child; a friend or relative for someone who is ill.

When someone does you wrong, you don’t need to burn down a house, but you should let the person know that you’re not pleased with it; and by the way it had better not happen again. Children can only learn to be bold and assertive by observing their parents being appropriately assertive or by watching “Judge Judy” every week day afternoon, of course.

There will come that day, joyfully anticipated by some and thoroughly dreaded by others, when the kids will leave home and work toward independence at all levels of adulthood elsewhere. The best skill that can be packed up and taken along is a comfortable BOLDNESS learned by observing Mom or Dad.

The best Moms are LOVING Moms. One wonders if the words “Mom” or “Mother” can or should be used for one who births a child only to be unwilling or incapable of showing the child any love. Maternal LOVE is both a necessity and a given. A Mother doesn’t have to work to LOVE a child; a Mother can’t help LOVING her child, and in many, many cases a Mother would or has put her own life on the line for the wellbeing of her child.

Great American novelist, Washington Irving, wrote: “A Mother is the truest friend we have. When trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavour by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.”

LOVE does not, cannot forsake. I have visited a few people in prison--friends, church members, and so on; in those lines for visitation, I believe I have seen more mothers lined up to see an incarcerated child than visitors of any other stripe.

A great Mom is an ENCOURAGING Mom. ENCOURAGEMENT isn’t the same as love; some loving Mothers don’t have it in them, don’t know how, to ENCOURAGE. Perhaps they lacked paternal ENCOURAGEMENT in their growing up years. These are Mothers who seem never to be able to celebrate an achievement with her child or say to a discouraged child, “Go out there, and try again; I know you can do it, and I’m behind you all the way.”

Kids of all ages, you might do well to remember that Mothers need encouragement too. As time moves on, you may well do much for your Mother that she, somewhere along the way, did for you. One thing you cannot do for her, however, is to give her life the way she gave life to you.

Amen.

Marc Chagall, "Moses and the Burning Bush"

I.

Historians of American constitutional development report that the original version of the Constitution was believed, by those who wrote it and endorsed the content of what had been written, to have contained absolute clarity about the protection of the rights of Americans. Not everyone agreed. In fact, there was a stir because specific freedoms were not specifically articulated so that, as the first critics demanded, there could be no room whatsoever for misunderstanding the full freedoms the founders and framers intended for every American to exercise as she or he saw fit. Assumptions, in other words, were both inadequate and potentially dangerous. So, why allow for the possibility of ambiguity when with a little more ink the details could be spelled out?

We have a nation in 1776, but we do not have a full-fledged Constitution. In 1787, when the presumed final draft of the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, it was largely not embraced for the reason I’ve just stated.

The first rumbles of rejection came from Patrick Henry and Virginia insisting that the specific rights and freedoms of the American people must be specified in writing. Other states demanded that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution, and some few states ratified the Constitution provisionally, withholding full support until the freedoms of American citizens were enumerated. There must have been some forebears of present Silverside members in the midst of that process, which explains why we here handle constitutional issues so comfortably and so gracefully. More on that subject later--much, much, much later, I hope.

So, the Constitution before having been fully accepted, fully ratified was already being amended, and the first ten amendments to the Constitution came to be called “The Bill of Rights.” Authored and presented by James Madison, in final form, the rights begin with the freedom of and conversely the freedom from religion then moves quickly to deal with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly along with the right for the individual citizen to petition the government about whatever concerns she or he may have.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Right now, for the sake of completion, but without comment, I’ll tick off the other nine rights or freedoms belonging to Americans, but I will come back to the freedom of religion because I think it may be the one most threatened in our country today

The second, is the right to form a militia to protect a free state and with it the rights of individuals to bear arms.

The third right gave owners of homes the right to permit or disallow troops to be housed and fed in the homes of these private citizens during war time.

The fourth right is protection from unreasonable search and seizure of one’s home or property.

The fifth freedom guarantees someone accused of breaking a law due process including the assurance that no citizen may be tried for the same crime twice if the death penalty is a possible or probable punishment in the event of a guilty verdict. The citizen is free not to incriminate herself or himself, and a citizen may not have her or his land and any buildings on that land taken for official use unless she or he be compensated justly.

The sixth freedom guarantees a citizen accused of some crime the right to a speedy trial, presided over and heard by an impartial judge in the setting of a public trial and the right to competent legal counsel.

The seventh freedom the Bill of Rights guarantees is that some of those who have been charged with a wrong in place of judge only a trial by jury presided over by a fair and competent judge.

The eighth freedom ensures that any bail that is set for someone held in custody cannot be excessive, and if the court finds a citizen guilty the punishment may not be cruel and unusual.

The ninth right or freedom: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words, the list of ten may be broad-based and thoughtful, but may not be comprehensive. There may be related freedoms to which we are entitled not described in particular.

The tenth amendment to the Constitution-right-out-of-the-gate was: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” States by the confines of their own laws and federal laws, constitutional laws, have the right to shape themselves. If states want to kill off their citizens with unbridled pollution, to a large measure they have that freedom. Similarly, if a state wants to embrace a state board of education that wishes to have blatant lies written and published as fact in textbooks used by the children in the public schools of that state they have the freedom to do that. In no time at all religiously skeptical deists like Thomas Jefferson who, despite his great skills in statesmanship and understanding of how freedom might or might now work on a large scale and who held slaves having a long time sexual relationship with at least one of his female slaves, can be turned into a rightwing Bible-believing, Bible-toting Christian in conservative churches every Sunday screaming out, “Amen,”and, “Praise the Lord,” every time the preacher pleased him. No, friends, this wasn’t Jefferson at all--the guy who edited out most of Hebrew and Christian scripture to create his own very limited version of the Bible. In Texas, if the state Board of Education has its way, and they do have the freedom to do this, Jefferson can be written up in the textbooks the state is willing to purchase as the rightwing fundamentalist Christian I’ve just described who looks more and sounds more like the typically ill-informed Mike Huckaby than THE Thomas Jefferson.

A majority of early Americans wanted stipulations of freedoms in writing, not just in the hearts of well-intentioned elected leaders or in the hearts and minds of every citizen. Don’t answer this now, but you can answer it if you like in Sermon Talk Back: if you had to give up one of these ten freedoms, which one would it be?

Johann Neen has been writing about the facts that many US Americans are worried that the so-called Christian heritage of the United States is being threatened all over the place and in all kinds of ways, some obvious and some subtle. Neen says that even if this supposed threat is more a matter of perception than a matter of fact, there has been sufficient fear to mobilize influential and powerful religious leaders and well placed politicians to begin loudly questioning the wisdom of the first amendment to the Constitution: should there really be separation of church and state? The rightwing hardliners, religious or not, are saying that this principle really doesn’t work and should be reversed or undone so that our democracy becomes a theocracy. However, and listen to Neen very carefully on this point: “In challenging the separation of church and state today, many American Christians are threatening America’s Christian heritage.” Catch it, and carry it home with you; it is the contemporary Christians themselves are becoming the most threatening enemies of our nation’s Christian heritage.

II.

Maybe you’ve heard of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. It is an

independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission. USCIRF Commissioners are appointed by the President and the leadership of both political parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives. USCIRF's principal responsibilities are to review the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress.

On this past Friday, April 29, released its annual report of CPS’s: countries of particular concern in the religious abuse department. Most of countries on this year’s report are repeat offenders; at least one is glaringly new. Here’s the list: Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. This year has been the first year in the existence of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom that Egypt has been on the list of countries of particular concern.

USCIRF Chairperson, Leonard Leo, said in a press release:

CPC’s are nations whose conduct marks them as the world’s worst religious freedom violators and human rights abusers. In the case of Egypt, instances of severe religious freedom violations engaged in or tolerated by the government have increased dramatically since the release of last year’s report, with violence, including murder, escalating against Coptic Christians and other religious minorities. Since President Mubarak’s resignation from office in February, such violence continues unabated without the government’s bringing the perpetrators to justice. Consequently, USCIRF recommends CPC designation for Egypt.

There is also a “watch list” of countries under suspicion, but not yet on the list: Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Laos, Russia, Somalia, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Venezuela.

The Cornell University Law School has a Legal Information Institute, which recently published this startling news:

More than one-half of the world’s population lives under regimes that severely restrict or prohibit the freedom of their citizens to study, believe, observe, and freely practice the religious faith of their choice. Religious believers and communities suffer both government-sponsored and government-tolerated violations of their rights to religious freedom. Among the many forms of such violations are state-sponsored slander campaigns, confiscations of property, surveillance by security police, including by special divisions of “religious police,” severe prohibitions against construction and repair of places of worship, denial of the right to assemble and relegation of religious communities to illegal status through arbitrary registration laws, prohibitions against the pursuit of education or public office, and prohibitions against publishing, distributing, or possessing religious literature and materials. More abhorrent, religious believers in many countries face such severe and violent forms of religious persecution as detention, torture, beatings, forced marriage, rape, imprisonment, enslavement, mass resettlement, and death merely for the peaceful belief in, change of or practice of their faith. In many countries, religious believers are forced to meet secretly, and religious leaders are targeted by national security forces and hostile mobs.

So are these scary acts of religious persecution limited to the big bad countries on watch dog watch lists? You know very well that this is not the case. There is religious persecution on our continent as well, especially in the United States and Canada. In most cases, perhaps, death of violators is not involved or, at least, unintended; still, the government gets involved in limited ways to block certain religious practices, usually out of a concern for the well-being of participants who may not understand the risks they are being asked to take when they follow the teachings of a group or a cult leader.

When I was in college about a hundred years ago, there was a freedom of religion fight going on a ways up from Knoxville, in Newport, Tennessee, which had become a kind of regional headquarters for literalists who zeroed in on literally living out what they took to be proofs of true personal faith, which happen to be listed in what scholars call the “longer ending of the Gospel of Mark,” an ending appended to the original odd ending as the author or authors left it. This is how the writer or writers of Mark’s Gospel intended for their little literary masterpiece to end:

As [the women who had gone to anoint Jesus’ body] entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

What a magnificent ending, literarily and theologically! But the later handlers couldn’t leave it be. They wanted a more dramatic ending, one that they thought would draw more people into the movement. This is PART of what they came up with, adding to Mark’s original masterful and mysterious ending:

Later [Jesus, in his transitional body] appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; will speak in new tongues; will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

The devout folk in the Newport area were especially focused on snake handling. If, in a religious service, someone handled a poisonous snake, and the snake didn’t bite her or him, that was a low-level sign of “advanced faith.” If, the snake bit, however, and they lived, that was the sign of the height of faith; if the snake bit you, and you died your faith was weak. Too bad there was no more opportunity to work on strengthening that faith.

The government was trying to make snake handling in worship illegal, and the Newport snake handlers were fighting back. My college philosophy professor came to class one day and said he had no interest in handling snakes at church, at school, or at home; but he’d seen many a snake handler at carnivals and circuses never challenged in any way by the government. If it’s OK for side show performers (even though their snakes might have been drugged and defanged) to handle snakes for fun and profit, how can people trying to express their faith be told that they can’t?

More recently, the US government has prosecuted or tried to prosecute Indigenous Americans who, like their ancestors did for centuries, used peyote in religious rituals. It once was legal, but now it’s illegal--even if used exclusively in religious gatherings.

There’s a religious sect in Hialeah, Florida, the Santerians, that sacrifice chickens and other small animals as part of ritual sacrifice. The government says they can’t sacrifice these animals as a part of their religious practices even though poultry producers kill chickens for us to eat, and hunters chase down and shoot the other small animals for food or for sport.

Numerically, the most common serious religious-based attacks appear to be antisemitic actions by skinheads and a handful of extreme right wing political and religious groups. Usually, attacks take the form of desecration of synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and so on. Islamophobia may be getting the Jews off the hook a bit these days as some of the same thugs divert their attention, or some of it, to try to frighten and physically hurt Muslims. Their mosques are desecrated. They are robbed. Their children are threatened. They are beaten and left bleeding in the streets--often in the name of the God of Jesus.

There is a small group of so called Christians attacking those who name themselves Neo-Pagans and who openly practice their faith. The only somewhat recent religiously motivated lynchings and attempted mass murders in the United States have involved these two groups, the Christians out to kill some Neo-Pagans.

There are also deaths, though most are unintended, during certain exorcisms where the person thought to be possessed by demons is beaten in the hopes of driving the demons out of her or his body. In these cases, religious persecution only occurs if the person believed to be possessed is exorcised against her or his will.

III.

Some of the most compelling stories in Hebrew and Christian scripture are set in the wilderness. The Hebrew slaves wandered in the wilderness for forty legendary years on their way out of Egyptian slavery to the land they said God promised them as the place wherein they would be able to live out their freedom. Jesus spent forty days in the literal wilderness or in the wilderness of his mind pondering how in the world he would serve God. John the Baptist lived and preached in the wilderness.

The story from scripture on which we focus today is yet another of the vitally important wilderness stories. Perhaps it is a prelude to the wilderness aspect of the Hebrew slaves’ escape from slavery into their long wilderness sojourn.

Moses is the key figure in our story. He has his father-in-law’s flock trying to guide them to some grazing land and water, but finding mostly desert and wilderness everywhere he turned. Everything looked the same.

Moses was wide-eyed. He wasn’t a lame brain, and he did want the very best for his father-in-law’s, Jethro’s, sheep. He did not want the animals to suffer for several reasons.

They, he and the sheep for which he had responsibility, happened to pass by a mountain, which to many of us in our part of the world would have looked much more like a hill, but to them it was a mountain, Mt. Horeb, which had a nickname, “the mountain of God.” Over somewhere away from the mountain, his eye caught a bush on fire. I’d think something on fire in the desert wouldn’t have been an unusual sight, but in this case it was unusual since fire didn’t consume the little bush in a flash, so to speak. The bush kept burning, but it was not consumed by the flames. Now that was something to take note of.

Moses heard a voice coming to him out of the burning bush, and he took this voice to be the voice of one of God’s messengers with a message for him. The storyteller says that God spoke out of the bush; Moses took the voice to have been the voice of a divine messenger speaking to him; in either case he was confident that the God whom he worshiped and longed to serve was getting a message to him. God was taken with the fact that Moses stopped his search for food and water for the animals for which he was responsible to ponder a burning bush. Not everyone would have stopped to see what it was. As I said before, things burning in desserts weren’t uncommon sights, and neither were hallucinations rare in the extreme heat.

From the bush, his name was being called out, though: “Moses, Moses! Take off your sandals and come no closer because you are standing on holy ground.” People in Moses’ day didn’t wear shoes at home and when they gathered at a holy shrine of some sort. Without a doubt, shoelessness was a sign of respect and honor in the presence of someone deserving of homage just as keeping one’s distance from what was taken to have been divine was respectful.

We presume Moses complied with the requests, but we aren’t told that he did. Whether the storyteller wants us to hear the voice of God Godself speaking to Moses or a divinely ordained messenger speaking on behalf of God, Moses caught on rather quickly that the Creator was speaking to him. He hid his face in the folds of his sleeves both out reverence for God and because he knew he wasn’t supposed to look at God; word was, if you looked at God face to face, you died on the spot. Moses wasn’t ready for that.

God was tapping out Moses to be the one to lead the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage. Moses said, “But, God, they aren’t going to follow me.”

God said, “They will when you tell them who has sent you. Moses, I have heard their cries in the pit of their repression and abuse. They are willing to do whatever is necessary to reach for freedom, even if their lives are at risk.” We must never underestimate the power of people sick of abuse and oppression and repression who join themselves to the loving God who wants no person put down, kept down, robbed of freedom to be who she or he dreams to be or aspires to be under God.

“OK, OK,” said Moses, “but they’ve been introduced to lots and lots of goddesses and gods while they’ve been in Egypt. I’m going to have to tell them which God it is who wants to have me lead them out of Egypt.”

“You tell them I’m the true God, the one and only, and because of that I have no name. I Am Who I Am. Tell them the Creator God sends you, the one who will act in the future the same way divine actions have been done in the past.”

“Well, I’ll tell them whatever you tell me to tell them because this burning bush is no joke, but the most popular gods and goddesses are the ones with impressive names. Some of my sister- and brother-Hebrews are going to write me off when I come and tell the god with no name has given me the responsibility to lead them out of their captivity. They’re going to think, ‘Hallucination. Been to the desert with a god with no name....’ That will just make it tougher for both of us, O Great One Who Will Be Who You Have Been.”

“Work with it, Moses!”

James Cone teaches up the road from us, up in New York City at the Union Theological Seminary. No voice for uprooting the racism that chokes people of color has been more powerful except Martin Luther’s King Jr’s. King attacked the problem nonviolently in the streets, Cone from academia--not to say that all he did to fight racism was sit in his comfy office and do “the pen is mightier than the sword” thing.

Professor Cone believes, and was joined in this powerful insight by his late colleague, Paul Tillich, that theology is no more universal and necessarily applicable in all times, places, and circumstances than are ethics. Ethicist Joseph Fletcher made the case for “situation ethics” before I started my undergraduate studies nearly forty years ago. Theology is by no means universal, but rather is tied to specific historical and cultural contexts. Any universal theology is an abstract theology, and abstraction rarely makes a difference when someone’s life is being eaten up by evil. Thus, Dr. Cone formulated a theology of liberation based on the experiences of Black people in this country. The original liberation theologies were Latin American, and Cone had to be, to some degree, influenced by them. So it wasn’t rich, white, first world church goers who initially noticed that Jesus was preoccupied with and spent most of his time with the poor and the dispossessed. The Latin and Black liberation theologians were the first to notice this trait of Jesus with clarity.

Cone says that God identifies with whoever is being downtrodden and, for example, robbed of basic human freedom. For Cone, as a Black man, he realized that God identified with his Blackness.

Quoting Cone here:

The black theologian must reject any conception of God that stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism....The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God’s own condition. This is the essence of the biblical revelation. By electing Israelite slaves as the people of God and by becoming the Oppressed One in Jesus, the human race is made to understand that God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering...Liberation is not an afterthought, but the very essence of divine activity.

Therefore, my friends, when repression and captivity have robbed certain people of all the life they are willing to have lost by such wasted means, the day will come, and we are seeing it in many places around the world today, where the unfree have had enough. In the spirit of Patrick Henry whom many of today’s freedom fighters, not all fighting with weapons thank goodness, know nothing about, they are saying, “Give us liberty or give us death; to this degree anyway, God is clearly with us!”

Amen.

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.