Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

 The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Telephone 510-845-6830    Fax 510-845-6837

 Scripture Readings: John 20: 1-18, Acts 10:34-43, Isaiah 1:11-18

          Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?

          Given that our main worship falls on Sunday, most of us move from the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday, skip the dark night in the garden and the crucifixion, and go right to the joyous resurrection songs and egg hunts of Easter Sunday. As liberal white Protestants, I know we are somewhat embarrassed, and would often rather avoid the darker sides of Christianity. We are known for wanting to do things decently and in order, for being what some refer to as the frozen chosen. But the tragedy of the cross is not decent and in order. So, I suppose, we too, like Christ in the garden, are presented with the option of running from the cross, running from the dark side of human history and the soul, or with faith in God, facing it square on with both our mind and our soul, with the hope we will come out more free and more alive than ever.

          So I appreciate your journey with us last week, as we went from the triumphal entry to the dark night of Gethsemane. My attempt to step into Jesus' mind was a first. "Father, if it be your will, take this cup from me," It left me feeling a little vulnerable, a little crazy If last week happened to be your first, or one of your first Sundays with us, and for some reason you didn't run for dear life, welcome back. You are in for the ride of your life.

          I believe God is leading the liberal church, and maybe even our nation, back into the soul of the Gospel story, into our own soul and back into the soul of the world. And while at times we may get frightened and feel as if we might go down some dark tomb and never come out, God has other plans. It may be helpful to trace where our fear comes from.

          Our movement away from the Passion of Jesus Christ, from the passion of faith, from the expression of fear, prophetic anger, grief, expressive celebration and joy is rooted in Puritan and middle class desire for decency and order and the Enlightenment value of rational thought and efficiency.   

          In America in particular, we see this played out in the abolitionist movement that heated up in the 1830's. As Southerners went on the offensive, they buttressed their pro-slavery argument with numerous proof texts from scripture. The pro-slavery argument would have had a rhetorical advantage, but through such people as Albert Barnes, a professor of Old Testament at the reformed Presbyterian or Union Theological Seminary in New York, abolitionists found they could counter the pro-slavery advocates' use of scriptural texts by using tools of higher criticism to disclose the over-arching theme of salvation history. (Noel)

          In the Civil War, as Lincoln noted, both sides prayed to the same God. "The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully." In an essay in the Passion of our Lord, James Noel notes that "Southerners interpreted their defeat to mean not that their cause had been opposed to God's will but that they were victims of the godless Northerners and "bestial" blacks."

          "The South's racial mind-set had inculcated an anti-intellectualism into its ethos... The Scopes Trial dramatically portrayed the Southern flight from modernity... As the liberals embraced modernism, privileging scientific methods and achievements over traditional, often religiously based views," emotional expression and attachment to the stories of scripture, particularly the cross, became unintelligible to them.

          The emphasis of the liberal Social Gospel enthusiasts on the social ethical implications of the Gospel reinforced the tendency already at work in liberal Protestantism to de-emphasize attachment and emotional connection to the Gospel story and the salvation message. Walter Raushenbusch said, for example, "religious morality" is " the only thing God cares about." Meanwhile the evangelical wing of Protestantism reacted to the Social Gospel by moving further away from social justice concerns.

          "Thus," continues Noel, " the correlation among white Protestants between passion piety and political conservatism and the absence of such a piety and social activism can be traced back to these developments. This correlation cannot be made, however, in the case of African American Christians." (Noel, James. Were you There? The Passion of Our Lord. Fortress. 2005).  We may also note, neither is this correlation made by the Quiche of Guatemala or the Christians in Southern Sudan. For them the passion blends easily into present reality.

          Within the white middle-class psyche, we would like to retain the idea that humanity, and America, is not so lost that we can't fix ourselves, and so we would rather answer no to the question of the old African American Spiritual, Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? We do not want it to cause us to tremble. And within the liberal branch of white Protestantism, we fear that if we release our grasp of rational thought, and risk embracing the passion and mystery of religious experience, we may just turn into ignorant racists, or just lose it altogether.

          And so, more like Peter before the crucifixion than Christ, when the going gets tough, we often would like to head in the other direction. Or like Mary, who upon discovering the stone rolled away from the tomb, we would rather just stop right there, and maybe, after everyone leaves and nobody is looking, just sit down and cry by ourselves. But the Good News of the Gospel is that Christ is no longer in that dark hole.

          Mary finally gets the courage to look in; she sees the burial clothes of Jesus and two angels. Why are you crying, they ask? Like so may in Guatemala, she logically thought he had been disappeared. "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." She turns around and sees Jesus, but doesn't know it is him. She thinks she must be talking to the gardener.

          By the way, Jesus has a new set of clothes. Barbara Brown Taylor notes, "There is a naked gardener in this story someplace. Either that or Jesus found the extra set of work clothes down by the fertilizer and the rakes. Peter and the beloved disciple saw none of this. They saw nothing but a vacant tomb with two piles of clothes in it. They saw nothing but emptiness and absence, in other words, and on that basis at least one of them believed." Though we are not told exactly what he believes, and neither of them understood.

          "Anyway you look at it, that is a mighty fragile beginning for a religion that has lasted 2000 years now." (Brown Taylor, Barbara. Escape from the Tomb. Christian Century, April 1, 1998 page 339).  The risen Christ's first appearance is mistaken as the cemetery groundskeeper, a job for a peasant laborer, or a slave or an immigrant refugee, if there ever was one. You might think he would look like a king. This is one of those little mini moments in a story that carries the weight of a thousand words. The very fact that Jesus, the Son of God, is mistaken for the groundskeeper hallows the vocation and reveals a great deal about Christianity.

          "Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for," he asks. "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will get him." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned toward him and cried out, "Rabonni." Here we expect a long embrace, but he says, "Mary, do not hold onto me."

          Here is another twist to our resurrection story. Jesus has died and the risen Christ comes back. Yet we cannot hold onto him. We cannot keep him a certain way, in a certain place, with a certain look, even with a certain gender. On the one hand we can have this very specific and particular experience of the God incarnate. But we cannot hold only that image, the experience as if it were God for all time. Some people seem to hold onto Jesus, and his image and teaching become mummified or petrified. Instead of living love, Jesus too often becomes petrified doctrine.

          Or, we may hold him so long and so tight, we don't let him do those things, which caused us to love him in the first place. One of the reasons I wanted to come to serve this church was that St. Johns was one of the founding members of the Sanctuary movement. Back in the 1980's tens of thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans were being murdered at the hands of US trained and supported death squads. As people fled for their lives to the United States, our government called them law-breakers and illegal aliens, and sent them back to face torture and death. St. John's said, "Not if we have anything to do with it. God doesn't call them illegal. In God's eyes, our nation's support for state terrorism and genocide is illegal. As Christians, as American citizens, we are going to stand for something better." Other churches heard the call of the risen Lord and jumped on board. In 1985 Christian Century called the Sanctuary movement the most significant religious news story of the year.

          But by the time I got here, Sanctuary had developed more into a legal support system, the civil wars in Central America ended, St John's had grown a little older and intellectually tight. And holding onto the memories alone, even though wonderful, just didn't seem to be giving the church life.

          The Tum family were among those who were helped through the Sanctuary movement. Their village was burned, their elders raped and murdered, and they fled to the mountains, or to Chiapas, and eventually to the Bay Area. Years passed without knowing who among them was dead or alive. No doubt their family searched; they just wanted to know one way or the other who had taken them, where they had been laid. But they made it here, and met up with one another, got jobs as gardeners or custodians, serving with love the country that would have kept the stone over their path to a new life.

          Surely there is no going back to the way it was before... before the crucifixion, before colonialism or slavery, before the burning, the pain and suffering and death, before our complicity in sin and evil. They are facts, and they should make us tremble. The evil and pain of the cross is not erased or denied by the resurrection; it is surpassed and overcome by forgiveness and hope, and by work for justice, equality and dignity for all people. Pain and suffering, anger and hate do not have the last word. Somehow grace carries us through to a new day, toward a new life of joy and peace.

          Eventually the Tums who found refuge here heard that their fellow remaining villagers went back to start a new life. It is tempting to want to hold onto this story, to hold onto them and say, "They are alive and we helped them. They are not in the tomb. Join us to tell this story of old."

          But they said, don't hold onto me; we have to unite with our God in heaven; we've got to go ahead to Galilee, to Xicaquic. We're going to help the people we left behind. They also need to know about new life."

          And so it is that we too, on this Easter morning here at St. John's, meet the risen Christ in a gardener, and we ourselves, giving thanks for, though not holding onto the past, move out boldly toward the future with new hope and life as a congregation. We can use our minds, our rational thought, our ethical systems, but God wants our life, our tears and our souls - God wants us to become a living part of the story, this miraculous story, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.