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This is an audacious sermon title, so I will try to explain.
First, I owe much here to John Dominic Crossan, and his books and lectures of the past two decades, especially In Search of Paul, God and Empire, Render Unto Caesar, and everything else.
Only once did I preach a sermon which caused people to walk out of the worship service.
It was a sermon against guns, after John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980.
That probably means that none of my sermons since then were challenging in any meaningful way.
If you choose to walk out today, at least listen to Jesus and Paul.
I observe that most Christians find it difficult to express what they believe about God and Jesus,
the resurrection, the Trinity, and all the other stuff we talk about in church.
I’ll bet most of you would be hard pressed to explain to others what you believe.
It’s not your fault.
Christian teachings and beliefs are complicated; and some don’t make much sense.
I have an easy and quick fix to this: Christianity isn’t or shouldn’t be about belief.
Christianity should be about following Jesus.
That’s how it began, with Jesus asking men and women to “follow me.”
But how do we follow Jesus? The answer might cause some to walk out today.
This is the season of Easter, so I will focus on the resurrection today.
We can observe that the four gospels have a hard time explaining the resurrection,
so I skipped them this morning.
Here is why:
The first or earliest gospel, Mark, doesn’t have much resurrection at all.
It tells of women going to the tomb of Jesus.
They found “A young man in a white robe... who said to them,
‘He [meaning Jesus] has been raised; he is not here.’
They fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them,
and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
That’s how the gospel ends; the other things you will find there at the end
of the chapter are commonly understood to be later additions.
The truth is that the gospel writers didn’t know how to explain the resurrection.
The first followers of Jesus experienced him as alive even though he had been crucified.
How do you write about such an intense experience?
So they told of an empty tomb and of appearances of Jesus to some of his followers.
It wasn’t until 400 years later that artists began to depict the resurrection.
They showed sleeping guards, an open tomb, and a risen Christ.
Later artists added women to the scene.
Within another 200 years the Eastern Orthodox churches were using an icon, a painting on wood,
a sacred image used for worship and teaching,
Crossan directs us to the icon entitled “the resurrection” or “h’anastacis.” in Greek.
(The Russian girl’s name Anastasia means resurrection.)
This icon gives an idea of resurrection that we find unusual
in our Western, Catholic or Protestant churches.
In the Western artistic tradition, Jesus emerges from the tomb alone and victorious.
This famous icon shows two empty coffins from which Christ is pulling Adam and Eve
by the hands, up and out of hades.
On the left of the icon, are David and Solomon,
representing those who died before Jesus’ crucifixion.
On the right side of the icon is Abel, the first person to die as a result of Cain’s violence,
with John the Baptist, Jesus’ teacher.
[wow- Abel is remembered!]
The Eastern Churches emphasize the resurrection of all humanity, symbolized by Adam and Eve,
whereas in our Western Churches, it is everyone for himself or herself as individuals.
The icon focuses as much on us as on the Christ.
The resurrection is about our liberation.
We are important, and we have to ask, “What happens to us, to humanity now that Christ is raised?”
What did the earliest Christians think would happen to them after the resurrection of Christ?
We can imagine much confusion after Jesus’ crucifixion.
The leader was dead and gone, or he had appeared to a few, but not to everyone.
All of us since then still behave badly, suffer, and die.
So the author of Luke and Acts speaks of our living as in an “in-between time,”
between the crucifixion and an expected return of Christ.
I think Jesus had another idea, one that escaped most of his followers.
Mark had it just about right.
Some scholars who study Mark say that his message is not comforting.
If we read that short gospel story without the endings added later,
we get the idea that if we are to follow Jesus after he has gone,
in the way of his life and death, we will probably be killed.
If we want to faithfully follow Jesus, we will die.
Not a comforting message of earthly success.
So the resurrection is about our living in new ways because Christ is risen.
I saw a sign on a church board last week, proclaiming “Happy Easter!”
In so much as Easter is a symbol of new birth and the return of spring, that’s great.
But maybe the sign should say “Christ is Risen. This is scary.”
If we think about these things, then some of Jesus’ teachings
and the crazy rants of Paul begin to make sense.
“Turn the other cheek, Love your enemies, walk an extra mile.”
These are basic teachings of Jesus from the sermon on the mount,
and they are actions that would get you in big trouble.
The truth is that the teachings of Jesus and Paul are the ways of non-violent resistance to power.
Jesus was opposed to the Roman Empire, but did not participate in violent resistance like the Zealots.
Rome killed Jesus because he preached about God’s Empire as opposed to Rome’s,
and led a group that followed Jesus and not the Emperor.
“When Paul says ‘you have been raised with Christ,’ he means ‘you should be living risen lives.’”
A risen life is one that is not afraid of death
because you have the faith, the trust, the confidence of Jesus.
It is a life totally committed to the teachings and example of Jesus.
A risen life is different from the lives that almost all of us live.
I preached here last year about Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one
who discovered in himself this faith and this commitment in his opposition to Hitler.
But we know little about nonviolent resistance.
It is not a large part of our experience and we are not taught it.
We are taught that war and violence are good or to be accepted.
We do know that Martin Luther King, Jr. taught and led people in non-violent action.
But we may not know of Bayard Rustin to taught non-violence to King.
[Check out the film, Rustin on Netflix.]
We have heard of Mahatma Ghandi,
but we may not know that Ghandi learned it from Leo Tolstoy,
who after writing such big books as War and Peace and Anna Karena,
wrote many short stories about living simply,
peacefully, and non-violently as Jesus taught.
Non-violent resistance has a long history, but it is not popular to say the least.
In fact most people are opposed to it.
It seems like suicide and failure to protect our families and our nation.
We have been taught to prefer violent retribution in response to violence.
This seems reasonable when we consider the attack on Pearl Harbor and our response to it.
Our response in that instance seems understandable, but it was explicitly vengeful.
What we believe today is the same thing that the Romans believed:
That violence produces peace.
When Jesus spoke of peacemaking, he spoke of love and forgiveness,
but we see nothing odd about naming the Colt .45 repeating pistol “the peacemaker.”
[BTW, The Pentagon and the US Army has long struggled
with the concepts of “peacemaking” and “peacekeeping,”
settling on achieving stability (operations to restore order) with violence,
and remaining neutral with policing.]
War does not make peace.
We have been taught to believe that an eye for an eye is a summary of Jewish law. It is not.
Love and justice are OT law.
We have been taught that God exacts revenge on God’s enemies,
but that is only one strand of the Bible.
We have two images of Jesus; one on a donkey as a messenger of peace on Palm Sunday,
and one on a warhorse bringing violence to sinners in the book of Revelation.
Because of the way the Bible was written, edited, and assembled
we are led to believe that the teaching of the book of Revelation
is superior to the teachings of Jesus in the gospels.
This leads to images of Jesus carrying an AR-15, presumably to set right all the wrongs in the world.
Jesus, however, was about forgiveness and loving our enemies,
but mostly we do not do those things.
Paul offers this suggestion, shocking your enemies by helping them:
“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, if your enemies are hungry, feed them;
if they are thirsty, give them something to drink,
for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”
“Heaping burning coals on their heads”
is a violent image to explain shaming those who are violent to us
by demonstrating our unwillingness to do as they do.
Or maybe it is an image of someone’s face “turning red,” blushing, in shame
for what they know they have done wrong.
Doing good to those who do us wrong
prevents us from allowing others to control us and our behavior.
When we respond to violence with violence
we are doing what the other wants us to do.
Jesus and Paul were teaching non-violence
but it is not easy to see when everyone has told us otherwise
that Jesus supports us in going to war.
“Presenting your bodies as a living sacrifice” is non-violent resistance,
risking our lives for what we believe.
Paul says “Do not be conformed to this age” of Roman values and violence,
“but be transformed by the renewing of the mind,”
He means for us to learn and practice active, organized, non-violent resistance.
This is what many Jews were doing before and after Jesus.
One great example was the Roman plan a few years after Jesus was crucified
to install a giant statue of Caligula as Jupiter in the Jerusalem temple.
A general strike was called.
Tens of thousands of Jews showed up for “sit-ins”
offering themselves for death if the statue was set up.
The Romans relented.
There are dozens of examples through history, many in our own time,
of non-violent protests bringing about dramatic change
in government policies and the governments themselves.
The extent that Jesus and Paul were practicing and teaching
non-violence was not well understood until recently.
There are a number of good books on this
A search on Amazon or at the library will uncover them.
All of this is personal for me because I became a Christian in 1966,
which led me to protest the American war in Vietnam.
As a Christian, as a pacifist, in witness to Jesus, I refused induction into the army, twice.
I prepared to go to prison, but I entered seminary, and a year later
I won a lawsuit against the Selective Service System and the Attorney General.
I did not enter seminary to become a pastor, but to learn how to be a Christian in the world.
I failed in this because I did become a pastor, a “professional Christian”
and was no longer “in the world” without the backing of the church.
I failed in peacemaking, too, because over the years I left peacemaking behind,
believing that I had done my part.
When I wrote my memoir a few years ago,
I thought that peacemaking might be the central theme of my life.
But I realized that it had occupied only a few years of my life.
I did not live up to the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
I reclaim it today, but I realize that few have lived up to those teachings, and few will.
This failure of Christianity to live up to Jesus is the tragedy of the way of the world
and the way of the churches.
The world will not succeed in its greedy and violent drive for ever increasing wealth and power,
because the world is busy destroying itself in its search to elevate the self over others.
And the churches, failing to understand Jesus, continues to seek salvation as rescue
rather than as healing and making individuals and society whole.
The denomination put out a poster in 1973 and I put it on a wall in our church fellowship hall.
It said “For Christ’s Sake – Do something!”
The Session said it had to come down.
I still want to know why.
