Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Hallelujah!
You have come to know that I love audience participation, I love a call and response, and on this holy and blessed night, we are invited to rejoice and to sing praise to our God, to shout “hallelujah” over and over again, because the power of sin and death have been overcome by the glorious resurrection of Jesus the Christ. It’s finally here, beloveds. This is the night.
This is the night when we get to ask my favorite questions, brought to us by the prophet Hosea and the Apostle Paul, “Where, O grave, is thy victory? Where, O death, is thy sting?” Not here. Vanquished.
This is the night. This is the night where we do not fear the darkness, for it, too, has been vanquished.
This is the night. This is the night when we hear stories told from throughout the history of God’s people. In the full and exhaustive Great Vigil of Easter, we would have heard a dozen stories, which would have carried us from the darkness of the tomb into the resurrection dawn. As we are a modern and practical community of faith, we have heard merely six stories this evening, and they have been good ones.
Voices from throughout our congregation have told us of the creation of the universe; of the exodus and Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea; prophecies about what it is to live and to breathe as a community. The Apostle Paul insisted that we are moving from death to life. And the women gathered at the tomb of Jesus, looking for the living among the dead.
We heard poetry, we heard prose. We heard history, we heard allegory, we heard prophecy. We heard hopes and dreams and visions. We heard assurances and admonitions.
The Great Vigil of Easter invites us to listen for the whole story.
Somewhere along the line in our institutional church history, we leaned not into the voices of the women at the tomb, but of those who failed to believe them. We determined that some voices were not welcome in the church, that some people were not worthy to proclaim the Gospel. It is clear, simply from this evening’s readings, that we got this very wrong. The first proclaimers of the good news—Jesus is not dead, but alive—were women. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who had come with Jesus from Galilee are the Gospel’s first preachers. In order to be Biblically accurate, it could be argued that only women should preach on Easter. I digress.
These women had been with Jesus on the way. They had traveled around the Judean countryside, providing invaluable service to the community. We know that they were exceptional women, given that they traveled with this band of radicals rather than staying put and keeping a home in the village of their husbands. They famously sat at the feet of Jesus, learning from him and sharing the good news that he proclaimed. But we also know that their roles as disciples were likely related to the care and keeping of the men; feeding, clothing, mending, cleaning, tending. We know that they had not abandoned this responsibility, as they approached the tomb of Jesus in the early dawn hours. They came to tend to the body of their friend, the last act of service they would ever do for him.
When we don’t listen to the whole story, because we do not hear from everyone involved, we are very likely to miss out on something important. In some instances, it might be interesting details or context. In some instances, it might be the whole point.
We know from the historical record that it is almost always the winners who write the story of the war. It is always those with power whose voices are loudest, whose expertise is acknowledged, whose contributions are applauded. But if we stuck to that version of the story, in the case of Jesus’ death, all we’d know is that some rabble-rouser was executed and nobody ever thought twice about it again. Thanks be to God, we have the testimony of these women.
Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the Mother of James, and “the other women who were with them” spent their sabbath day afraid and unsure about what the future would hold. They relied on their tradition to point them toward action, to move through the rituals of grieving together. These women probably fed their families, and gathered to pray in the candlelight. Then, before anyone else was awake, I imagine them meeting, quietly, at one of their homes, and gathering the spices they’d prepared. I imagine them looking one another in their scared faces, taking a few steadying breaths, nodding resolutely, and walking out into the dawn.
These women are some of the most courageous people in our whole scripture. While they were doing their sacred duty to their friend, they were making their way to the grave of a convicted political criminal. They took a significant risk to themselves and to their terrified community, showing their faces at this place, where Roman guards likely still stood. But in the chaos and turmoil, they had courage.
When they arrived to do their work—the practical, mundane, sacred work of tending to the dead—they were met, instead, with an empty tomb and two dazzling strangers. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” One of the strangers asks. “He is not here, but has risen.”
Not only did these women have the courage to show up at the tomb of their friend when all hell had broken loose, but they had the courage to believe it was true that he was alive again. And then, the courage to run home and tell their friends this unbelievable truth. It is, at face value, an absurd proclamation. He is risen? Could it be?
But as the people of God, who have heard the stories of God’s work in the world over millennia, we are perhaps familiar with such odd things.
“Let there be light,” God says, and it is so.
“Go into the ark,” God says, and Noah goes.
“The Lord will provide,” Abraham says, and Isaac nods.
“Do not be afraid,” Moses says, and the Israelites cross the Red Sea.
“Prophesy to these bones,” God says, and Ezekiel breathes.
“He is not here, but is risen,” the stranger says, and the women believe.
They believe, but their friends and coworkers in ministry fail to believe them! They are dismissed, their proclamation of the gospel truth disregarded as an idle tale. How many women—and how many marginalized and minoritized people, across time and space—have told the truth and not been believed? How many times have people insisted on their lived experiences, only to be ignored or invalidated or even punished? This cannot be the example we follow in a post-Easter world.
We, hearers of these stories in the Year of our Lord 2022 know the truth, and the truth has set us free, because, for centuries, people have had the courage to tell that truth. And the person they told it to trusted them, believed them, and continued to tell the story. Our ancestors in faith have told the stories of the people of God, and told them again, and again. Year after year, night after night, telling the stories. The simple stories, and the weird stories, and the confusing stories, and the complicated stories, and the gruesome stories, and the uplifting stories, and the liberating stories.
And in the same way, each of your stories is part of God’s story. Your lived experiences, many and varied, are reflected in the pages of our sacred texts. Your victories and your defeats, your hopes and your fears, your joys and your sorrows, all of you belongs here, in the story of God.
The truth, as hard as it is to believe, is that Jesus, who was once dead is alive again. You, who were once dead, are alive again in Christ. Hallelujah! Amen.
Holy Foolishness
If you have been a practicing Christian for more than a few years, you have noticed that the church calendar moves around with regard to the Gregorian calendar, such that holidays like Easter are not on the same date every year. This year, we will—spoiler alert—celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord on April 17th. Last year, it was April 4th, in 2020 it was April 12th, in 2019 it was April 21st, and in 2018, it was the somewhat dreaded April 1st.
April 1st is one of my personal least favorite days on the calendar, as I am a curmudgeon and I disdain the practice of April Fool’s Day. I do not care for pranks of any kind, because I do not find it funny that we punish each other for practicing trust.
You may be inclined to disagree—obviously this is a minority opinion, as we all experienced who knows how many dumb jokes just a few days ago—and that’s fine. But as someone whose literal job it is to listen for the truth and tell the truth, I struggle with a day dedicated to being mocked for doing just that.
Today is not April 1st nor is it Easter, but it is a day for fools. Let me explain.
One of our most well-known and beloved saints, Francis of Assisi, was a holy fool. He is featured in one of my favorite books, Illuminating the Way, by Christine Valters Paintner. In it, his foolishness is described as “subvert[ing] the dominant paradigm of acceptable ways of thinking and living.” [1]
We know him as a lover of the earth and all its creatures, as he famously noted that “the world [was his] monastery.” At the time of his life and ministry, the church was a place of riches and grandeur, and St. Francis chose to relinquish all of that in favor of a simple life of presence.
St. Francis was an anticapitalist before there was a capitalist to be anti, rejecting the mainstream social values of hurriedness and productivity and consumption. He chose to slow down, live a contemplative life on the margins of society. He was by no means the first of our church ancestors to behave in this way, but his 12th-century peers thought him quite foolish. But Francis knew that this was the best way for him to see where God was at work.
The prophet Isaiah relays the words of God, who says, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” We are being invited to look at the world in new ways, perceiving from a different perspective. This is what holy foolishness, like that practiced by St. Francis, calls us to. As “fools for Christ”, which he called his community, we step outside what is considered “normal” in our culture, and break loose from the bonds of others’ expectations and rules for our lives. We follow Jesus’ radical example, not the conformist example of conventional wisdom.
In some ways, Jesus himself is a holy fool, “the one who subverts the way things are done and confounds our expectations. Jesus sat at the table with tax collectors and [sinners]. He healed on the Sabbath. He broke boundaries, turned things upside down, and invites us to do the same.” [2]
In our Gospel story this morning, Mary does something foolish. She upends a valuable bottle of perfume—an entire pound of pure nard, it says, for emphasis—onto the feet of Jesus, mopping up the significant excess with her own hair. This is not normal behavior. This is not typical or expected or even responsible. But Mary did not do it because she thought that it was. She knew it was foolish, and that is precisely why she did it.
Mary, you may remember, is the sister of Martha—with whom she disagreed about how to show hospitality to Jesus and his friends—and the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected from the dead. Quite a family! Mary is someone who spent a lot of time with Jesus and his disciples, and had listened to him preach and teach before. She knew who he was and what his presence meant in her home.
Other than Jesus, of course, the other major player in our story this morning is Judas. I am personally uninterested in any Judas slander, as I imagine his role in the life and death of Jesus to be more nuanced than our Gospel authors give him credit for, and these narratives were penned decades after the events they describe, when there had been plenty of time to cement him in the villain role. So his objection to her foolishness, and particularly the author’s parenthetical assignments of motivation are not what’s interesting about this story.
But what Jesus says to him has been interpreted in some problematic ways over the centuries, and so we do have to address his presence, briefly. Judas says that the perfume should not have been “wasted” in this way, and instead should have been sold, and the money given to the poor.
Jesus replies, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
Jesus’ words here, “you always have the poor with you,” have been spun to excuse us from alleviating poverty for centuries. Many preachers will tell you that this story is a repudiation of social justice, and that our focus should be exclusively on the worship of God, not the liberation of our siblings.
If we are scholars of scripture, though, we know that here Jesus is quoting the Torah, Deuteronomy 15:11, to be precise. There, it is written, “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” This verse comes in the section of the law regarding debt cancellation.
Deuteronomy 15:1 says, “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts” and then lays out how, precisely, to go about structuring that. This debt-canceling year is known as the “year of jubilee”.
Our present debt crisis could use some jubilee. Yesterday, the student loan debt in the United States reached one trillion, eight-hundred-ninety-four billion, four-hundred-seventy-eight million, three-hundred-fifty-six-thousand, nine-hundred-twelve dollars ($1,894,478,356,912).[3] 35 million Americans have student loan debt, and 90% of them are not ready to make payments toward that debt when the pandemic payment freeze ends on May 1.
It is arguable that it is foolish to cancel student debt.
People have been paying off student loan debt for decades, and the US government is counting on those payments being made, eventually, so they can pay back their own debt, presumably. People take out loans all the time; it’s a significant part of how the US economy functions. It’s how we own homes and cars; it’s how we start businesses. There are many people who have already paid off their student loans who feel that cancellation now is unfair to the hard work they put into their payments. There are economic arguments all over the place for all the reasons why it is foolish to do it.
But student loan debt cancellation could lift up to 5.2 million American households out of poverty. Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates. 58% of student loan debt belongs to women. Student borrowers who identify as LGBTQ have an average of $16,000 more in student loan debt than those who are not LGBTQ. [4]
Advocating for student debt cancellation may cause others to look at us askance. But we sit at the feet of Jesus.
And Jesus is not saying that there is no need to give money to the poor, but rather the opposite. Debts should be canceled so that all are able to live freely and to give freely. We should all be at liberty to lavish one another with our riches—financial, emotional, and spiritual. Mary has chosen to show her adoration of Jesus by anointing him with this richly perfumed oil.
Jesus suggests, perhaps, that Mary’s unusual behavior foreshadows his death. Mary knows that Jesus is in danger, and is wanted by various authorities for various crimes against the empire—for advocating for things like debt cancellation.
She knows that times like these, gathered around the table with friends, may be limited. Tensions are rising. She wants to be sure that her friend Jesus knows what he means to her, to them, to their community. And so she does what is perhaps not the most fiscally responsible choice, according to conventional wisdom and “the way it has always been done”.
Reconfiguring our financial system to more closely resemble the Torah would perhaps be an unpopular option among those who are wealthiest in our present system. But for the poor—who were there in the time of Jesus, who have been there since, and who are here now—it would be gracious, and merciful, and holy, and foolish. How will we, who sit at the feet of Jesus, lavish our riches on those we love?
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[1] Christine Valters Paintner, Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics, 4.
[2] John Valters Paintner, “Jesus and the Fool Archetype: The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” in Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics, 7.
Question Authority
Most of you know that I am married, in part because I use two last names and in part because I wear a traditional wedding ring on my left hand, and also in part because I have spoken to you about Jonathan, my spouse, at some point.
Jonathan is an English teacher, teaching 7th and 8th graders over at Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Junior High on the Eastern side of Davis. He has been teaching English for as long as I have known him, and even a few years before that. As a self-proclaimed word nerd, it surprised no one in my life when I chose him as a partner.
One of the things that is most excellent about Jonathan is his curiosity about the work that I do, and his willingness to take part in some of it, including, but not limited to, talking out my sermons with me when I’m in the brainstorming spitballing wondering stage.
I can’t cut corners when talking with Jonathan about the assigned texts for the week. He does not have a graduate theological education nor a pastor’s library from which to draw; in addition to his degrees in English, History, and even a minor in Religious Studies, his Jewish upbringing in the Christian hegemony of the United States has made him a thoughtful, and good, and moral person, and so his collaboration is a treasure.
As he is my beloved, I could spend a long time telling you about him, but you are perhaps wondering what he has to do with you, on this second Sunday in Lent. Well, I’ll tell you. But first, I’ll tell you about the Bible.
As progressive protestants, our relationship with scripture is so rich, because we are not limited by an allegedly literal reading of the Bible nor by a top-down hard-line “this is what the Bible says” approach from our preachers and teachers. We are free to read the Bible for the complex collection of literature that it is, from generations of God’s people throughout their known world.
Our scripture has histories, and poetry, and apocalyptic literature, and interpersonal correspondence, and narratives, and wisdom, and prophecy. The people of God have been theologizing their experience for millenia, and that’s reflected in the dozens of centuries of events chronicled in the Bible.
The people who compiled our lectionary had a lot to work with, and I do not envy them their task. This week, they gave us such an interesting collection of texts, full of different ways to imagine God. What a treat! This week, Jonathan’s English teacher chops got to shine, because on top of talking theology and history, we’re talking about imagery and metaphor.
Think back to your last English class, and remember those units in figurative language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable” and imagery is defined as “visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.”
If you’d be so kind as to pick up your bulletin—or, if you’re with us online, please click over to that window—and review the pages with the scripture printed on them. I want you to skim and then please shout out—or type in the chat—any figurative language that you encounter. This is the kind of audience participation feared by congregations and middle school classrooms alike!
[The congregation begins to shout out answers]
Excellent work, everyone. So many participation points were scored for today.
Why did I have you do this? Oh, several reasons. For one, I like causing a ruckus. Two, I like tricking people into exegesis.
What’s exegesis, you may ask! It comes from Greek words that mean “to lead out of” and it is our fancy word for the critical interpretation of scripture. It’s the act of reading scripture and extracting meaning. There are books and books of exegesis done by other people that you can read, and you can also sit down with your Bible and scribble in the margins and wonder about what it says, whenever you like.
If our scripture did not contain figurative language like these phrases we have just identified, and was simply a list of literal and declarative sentences about God, it would be a lot shorter and a lot less interesting. So, the main thing our exegesis has taught us is that there is more to the stories in our scripture than meets the eye.
We are in the second week of the season of Lent, the 40 days leading to Easter. Last week, Ernie led us through Jesus’ 40 days of temptation in the desert, which recall the Israelites 40 years of wandering, which recall the Great Flood’s 40 days of deluge. Scripture is full of self-referential instances like this, reminding us of the connection between all these characters in God’s story, including us.
In our scripture during this season, we follow Jesus on his journey in public ministry, ultimately leading to his arrest and execution. This week, we read a terse exchange with some religious leaders. They tell Jesus to leave town, because Herod is trying to kill him.
This is interesting, because more typically in our lectionary, we read stories that set the Pharisees against Jesus, arguing with him about any number of things. This instance, though, seems like perhaps they are more aligned than that, giving him a heads up that he is in danger. It’s also possible that they are simply trying to get Jesus out of the way.
Jesus replies by insulting Herod and them. He starts his reply by saying, “Go and tell that fox for me,” insinuating that they are in close contact with Herod, enough that they could pass along a message. As religious leaders, they should not be cozying up to the Roman occupying forces, friendly with the empire.
By calling Herod a fox, Jesus makes his understanding of Herod’s penchant for deception quite clear. Foxes, metaphorically, tend to represent suspicion and craftiness. Someone who is sinister and cunning and practiced in dishonesty might be called “sly as a fox”. Jesus holds Herod in fairly low esteem.
His message is not simply to name-call, but to remind Herod that his authority is not ultimate. Jesus answers to one more powerful than Herod, or Caesar, or any earthly leader. And because he is loyal to no God but God, he has work to do in the world, and Herod will not get in the way of that work.
There are wounds to heal and demons to cast out and that ministry cannot be waylaid by the likes of Herod. Jesus does not cower in the face of Herod’s threat [1]. His primary concern is continuing to bring forth the kindom of God, even though that puts him in grave danger. We who know the whole story know just how much danger Jesus will be in.
Jesus continues his figurative language journey by exclaiming, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Inasmuch as this is a reprimand, I don’t want us to lose sight of the idea that God desires to hold us close, keeping us together and free from harm. The image of a hen gathering her chicks is quaint, but the imagery is especially rich when we recall the idiom “a fox in the henhouse” points toward the danger of trusting someone with questionable intentions.
With Herod the fox prowling God’s proverbial henhouse, we are left to wonder:
Who has our interests at heart? To whose authority should we submit?
Is it Herod? Caesar? Empire?
Or is it Jesus? The God who loves us? One another?
One of the reasons that we are gathered here this morning is because we need help answering this question. If it were clear to us, we could go about our lives with much less to-do around confessing and repenting and praying and learning and growing. But as it stands, as we repeat in our liturgy week after week, we have failed to love our neighbor as ourselves, and so we gather to worship the God who created us and who loves us dearly—just as a hen gathers her brood, so our God holds us close.
Meanwhile, wars rage as empires grasp for power. We are lured in so many directions, by so many foxes who would have us believe that they know what is best for us. Wouldn’t we like to make some money, gain some influence, live a life of leisure! But by submitting to the powers and principalities of this world—the imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy—we deny the authority of God.
At the start of this service, we said aloud the decalogue, the ten commandments. We began, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me. You shall not make for yourself any idol. You shall not invoke with malice the Name of the Lord your God.”
Martin Luther is famous for his theological claim that we are all simultaneously saints and sinners, and so just as we receive these commandments, ask God for mercy, and confess the sin that so easily entangles, we are beloved.
Every day, we choose the idolatry of individualism and power over the collective liberation freely given to us by the God of grace. But it is God who brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, and it is God who liberates us from the power of sin and death. It is not by our own power that we are free, not by our own power that we are healed. And it is not by any earthly power, either.
With these truths, we cannot devote ourselves to powers other than God. We cannot cause harm to one another in the name of God. We cannot fight wars in the name of God. We cannot legislate away human rights in the name of God.
In this season of Lent, we are invited to ritually reimagine our relationship with God. We pick up spiritual practices that reconnect us with God’s presence, and we throw off everything that hinders.
You may have, at some time, done some type of fasting as part of your Lenten discipline, abstaining from a food or drink that you considered a vice. If your relationship to those substances is hindering right relationship with God and with your siblings in Christ, then by all means, leave it behind.
But the invitation to a holy Lent runs deeper than our diets. Could we fast from consumerism? Could we fast from perfectionism? Could we fast from overwork? Could we fast from self-loathing? Could we fast from prejudice? Could we fast from idolatry?
Jesus flouts the authority that Herod so desperately wants to exert, and returns to the fundamentals of his ministry. He has healing to do. In this season of Lent, I invite your pursuit of Christ-like-ness to include this same disregard for the fox in the henhouse. We have healing to do. Amen.