Closing Statements

And the conference is tomorrow!  As such, here, in its totality, is my entire case against a so-called Biblical sexuality.

1) In a culture where death by lynching was an accepted reality even 60 years ago, where not only could people opposed to outlawing lynching run for office openly, and where such people who practiced it are called “Grandpa” instead of “inmate”, it is the duty of any Christian in such a culture, indeed any human being with the barest sliver of a conscience, to hold those who declare an entire class of people sinful, evil, unnatural, or condemned by any Divinity, especially in instances where the so-called offenses are consensual in nature and result in no harm to person, property, or the social well-being, to the strictest standards of political, legal, and spiritual accountability.

2) Because of the nature of the current debate over homosexuality and the current culture that the debate is found in, those in a position of leadership or social influence who declare homosexuality to be ungodly and sinful must have the burden of proof.  If they wish to convince the Church that the loving God whom created all of Mankind and its sexuality would condemn an entire people as sinful, tell them their base identity evil, and force them to deny themselves the very happiness and fulfillment that their hetero brothers and sisters have or risk their immortal soul, they must do so under the strictest scrutiny.  As a Church called to enact Justice and Peace, we as followers of Christ have no other moral option but to insist that they must do so by proving beyond all reasonable doubt, yes, all reasonable doubt, that such is and has always been the case within the Christian religion.  The damage and loss being asked of LGBTQ people for no other reason than the personal discomfort of those against their way of life demands no other standard.

3) Those for Biblical Sexuality cannot remotely meet this burden:

                a) The Bible neither understands itself as a rule book nor the Word of God

b) Jesus the Christ, whom the Bible refers to as the True Word of God, is the final authority within the Christian religion, and his recorded ministry does not involve the subject once.

c) Homosexuality is a modern term important only to a modern world.  Ascribing a 19^th century concept to 1^st century and earlier works would be dismissed as an anachronism in literally any other area of human scholarship.

d) Any and all understandings of the Bible condemning homosexuality come from cultural bias not interpretive diligence, extending even to irresponsible if not deliberate mistranslation.

i) The early chapters of Genesis are poetry and counter-myth, not a chronicle of actual historical events.  Any argument relying on the story actually revealing how God made anything is fallacious.

ii) Homosexual Anal penetration was a common method of shaming in the ancient world, almost always done by heterosexually married men.  Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned because they were xenophobic rapists, not immaculately dressed interior designers or restaurant managers.

iii. Leviticus 18 and 20 lists Old Testament sexual offenses generally, the vast focus being on familial couplings not homosexual encounters.  Even then, “thou shalt not lie with a man as a woman” only covers one sexual position with one gender that mimicked, again, war-time rape.  To say that all homosexual encounters would be outlawed from this verse, and thus an abomination, is at best a stretch

iv. As this is the whole of the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures on the subject at hand, noting that the KJV has triple the texts on unicorns than it does on homosexuality, we now turn to the New Testament.  As Christ, again, had no words on the subject, we must bypass the gospels and, yes, even the Book of Acts for our next text.

v. Paul in his epistle to the Romans does call homosexual acts “para physis” or against nature this has two problems.  The first problem is that nature for Paul’s time is not “all of nature” but “individual nature”.  Also, God goes against nature in grafting the gentiles into the people of God later in the same epistle so it is very difficult to say that going against nature is necessarily an evil thing.  Lastly it fails utterly to understand Paul’s entire argument.  The entire point for chapter one of Romans is found in chapter 2, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”  That Paul is quoting a Roman speech or oration and then using it to call out the hypocrisy in the Roman church.  The subject literally does not get brought up again.  Once more, Paul is not saying that homosexual relations are sinful and natural, he is saying that Romans say it is sinful and unnatural and yet are doing them anyway.

vi. While other verses in Paul’s letters are translated to talk about homosexuality, the fact is the words in question are largely unknown and have not been proven.  The words in question are incredibly rare and there is no text, either within the New Testament or even the Greek in which the New Testament was written, that shows any connection between those words and homosexual urge, inclination, or practice.

vii. The actual translation of Jude 1:7 is “Sodom and Gomorah and the surrounding cities indulged in gross sexual immorality and went after the flesh of others (or flesh of strangers) are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of era-long fire.”  None of the words used in this verse have any evidence to back their use to refer to what is understood to be homosexual activity.

viii. And all of this ignores the fact Eunuchs were widely understood to have homosexual tendencies, yet they are clearly included to the Body of Christ without question (Acts 8:27-39) and the fact that David is described as having “romantic love” for Jonathan, the same word “ahabah” used to refer to the feelings of the lovers throughout the Song of Solomon.  It also fails to the Church did not have much to say on the subject of same-sex relationships until over a thousand years later and indeed produced same-sex wedding liturgy.

ix.  All these facts show unequivocally that the belief that the Bible supports one and only one sexuality is simply non-sensical.  If an individual community feels strongly that homosexual relationships are bad then we as their loving brothers and sisters in Christ advise them strongly not to have one.  The facts presented here show that the Biblical Sexuality camp cannot meet a burden of clear and convincing proof or even the preponderance of the evidence, let alone the fierce standard of beyond any reasonable doubt as this situation warrants.  As such, the entire church needs to act like it.  No reasonable and ethical person can continue to uphold such draconian, damaging, and unfounded beliefs as this and we as a Church need to reflect this reality.  Anything less is to slander and make base the very Sacrifice that founded us.  Amen

A Matter of Heart...

          What is this?  Is this Church?  Why isn’t everybody in pews?  Where’s the organ, the chancil, and the altar?  What about the sanctuary and all those other hard to remember terms they don’t teach in seminary?  And what about those funny guys in the long dresses?  How can this be worship?  How can this be Church?

                Well, sometimes things are not always what they seem, and just because it isn’t what we are used to, doesn’t mean it isn’t just as true.  But mistaking something for its trappings, getting fooled by the outside and not looking within is something we as humans will always struggle with.  We don’t like change, we don’t like it when differences crop up into our lives.  Between bills, work, family, and all the drama that gets put into that mix we like things to stay the same, we like things the way we are used to, the way we can handle them.  Humanity’s been like that since Adam and the fall, and it was no different for people living in Jesus’ time as it is today.

                Most people don’t really appreciate how different Jesus’ ministry was, how so very radical  compared to what was going on at the time.  I want you to imagine yourselves as Israelites living in Palestine, as 1^st century Jews living within walking distance of the Holy City. The temple and the synagogue are the biggest contact points of your faith, the places where you fully embraced your identity as Jews.  The synagogue was where you learned about your ancestral religion: Your learned what to eat, what to wear, and what to do.  The temple, however, was where you most publicly proclaimed your identity and where you performed the most important rites as an Israelite.  Here the Day of Atonement was performed, here the sacrifices and the various offerings were made to absolve all Israel of her sins.  Here was where you were supposed to meet God.

                But not all of your fellow Jews are happy with things the way they are, indeed the strife with your countrymen is almost equal to the strife you feel with your Roman conquerors.  In the first century there are four major divisions of the Jewish faith that you must contend with, all quite different from one another.  There were the Sadducees, the ruling class of Israel.  Surprisingly secular believers, they do not believe in angels or spirits nor do they really believe in an afterlife.  They pick and choose from their Bible, taking the verses they like and conveniently excluding what they don’t.  Only the first five books of Moses were Scripture to them, you see.  Cutting out ¾ of your book means cutting ¾ of your responsibility and where life would be at odds with the Prophets, the Prophets could simply be discarded.  Still, while deeply flawed by power and compromised by convenience, it must be noted that these are the only Jews among your people who are not racist, that do not believe Gentiles are bad simply because they are gentiles and by extension they do not believe Jews are good only because they are Jewish.

In addition to the Sadducees, however, there are the Pharisees and they are not so far from our evangelical movement.  They are a Scripture driven movement, a missionary movement, and a grass roots association interested in keeping the Scriptures central in the daily lives of their fellow Israelites.  No one person leads it, no organization heads it, rather it is rallied by its charismatic preachers who often decried their government and were quick to advocate war against foreign powers.  Their adherence to the whole of Scripture often makes them legalistic, obeying the bare words on the page but caring little for the spirit in which those words were given, but at the same time you will be hard pressed to find a Jew more openly living their faith or more interested in relieving the suffering of their people than this group.  

After the Pharisees are the Essenes, Puritans and End Time Believers.  They believe most of the country has fallen into horrible sin, so they do not mix with the common Israelite, seeing them as too tainted, too unclean for Holy Living.  They have removed themselves from society and live in the desert far away from the false government and the false religion that have taken on God’s name.  When God comes to judge their nation, it is their intention to be “Left Behind”, looking forward to the destruction of the temple and the coming of a great teacher.

There are also the Zealots, a group of Jews who feel that the only response to an unclean and gentile ridden government is its violent overthrow.  They were inspired by the Maccabees, the Jewish generals who threw off gentile oppression and foreign entanglements by the sword.  These are your constitution party members, the liberty lovers and the militiamen seeking to return their society to its perceived origins.  They are believers in their weapons and are fervent in their opposition to their government, but they are also the Jews most willing to give their lives in defense of their friends.

But finally, there are the people like you and me.  People who are somewhere in the middle, perhaps seeing one side or another but in all honesty just trying to eek out an existence that both gives credence to your people and shows faithfulness to your God.  You know the Temple isn’t perfect, you know the flaws of your leaders, and you know the dangers of losing your way of life, but it’s also all you’ve got to work with.  And so you work, you live, and you wait.  You endure the times and raise a family, doing your best with what you have…that is until someone comes along and shows you a better way.

And that someone comes…a man, a lowly carpenter’s son, rumored to be of illegitimate birth.  He is a rabbi, but he is not like the other rabbis.  He has no education, no formal training.  He didn’t apprentice himself to another teacher like the others did, he simply took up the mantle one day and, shockingly, people listened.  But people did more than listen, they followed.  They followed by the thousands.  And when this rabbi took disciples, he didn’t take the cream of the religious crop.  He didn’t go to the Scriptoriums, the religious schools for their best students, he took everybody.  He took fishermen, tax collectors, Zealots!  He even taught women!  And what did this man teach?  He taught that the root of all evil was neither Sadducee nor gentile, but the love of money and power and any Jew was quite susceptible.  He taught that gentiles were not an enemy of the religion or the state and they were indeed capable of great faith.  He taught the Temple was about to be judged and replaced with nothing, that the new holy community could be comprised with just two people without any buildings or sacrifices for sins.  He taught that there are no unclean foods and that working on the Sabbath is not necessarily against the law if those works are for good.  He taught that the Scriptures are Holy and Good, but they need filling to be complete.  But more than any of that, in a land of schisms and disagreements, in a land more and more given to violence this rabbi taught that Peace was the answer, that love for neighbor was the solution, that simple faith in God even unto death was the way.

                Now, all of you may be wondering, what in the name of the Holy of Holies does this have to with our gospel text?  Well, I’ll tell you.  As a Jew or even a Gentile in the first century the question arises, indeed begs to be asked how then is this Jesus still a Jew?  How can this sect of Christians still consider themselves part of Judaism when they will eat any food, have no use for temple or sacrifice, are willing to include gentiles into the people of God, and understand their Hebrew Scriptures as now secondary to the message of the gospel?  Yes, this Jesus might be important, indeed he might be the most important man who ever lived, but how can Christianity be thought of as having Jewish roots?

                And the answer is that appearances can be deceiving.  What looks one way can in fact be another and THAT is a theme that Luke deeply addresses in his gospel.  Luke begins his tale as a Gentile would.  Important people, people of divine importance, are often heralded before-hand.  So important is this Jesus, however, that even Jesus’ herald John is heralded beforehand.  Yes, this all occurred as a gentile would think fit, but these heralds are not gentile, they are Jewish.  Jesus and John are born to Jewish parents.  John’s father is a Jewish priest and Jesus’ parents have him circumcised and presented at the Temple according to Jewish law.  The inherent Jewishness of the Jesus story is hammered home time and time again and the relevance of the Jewish scriptures and their filled-full-ment in Jesus is not some outlying afterthought or a tangential footnote, but is central to the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people.  Indeed, where the story seems least Jewish, it in fact shows quite the opposite.  Joseph and Mary are recorded in Luke as obeying the Roman census.  Most jews rebelled at every census, but Joseph and Mary did not.  Their scriptures told them to obey the gentile king, to pray for them and indeed intercede for them while under their rule.  The Prophets proclaimed this, and Mordecai in Ruth lived this, even to the point of seeking royal permission to defend themselves against Haman and their enemies.  Joseph and Mary were not less Jewish for obeying Caesar; they were in fact more Jewish than all the rest of their countrymen.  And so it is for this part of the story, Jesus having just proclaimed the faith of a centurion now goes into Nain and raises a widow’s son, just like Elijah the Jewish Prophet did so many centuries before.  But unlike Elijah, who raised a gentile widow’s son, Jesus goes to the Jews and returns a Jewish widow’s only son back to her.  God has indeed returned to bless his people.  They were not left out.

                So yes, things changed.  The trappings of the past, the trap-things, the outside appearances that ensnared, yes they were discarded but the heart was no less true to its heritage.  God is not an exclusive God.  Claiming the Gentiles did not mean dismissing the Jews, and the blessings of the future in fact did not include the cursing of the past.  Both were upheld and one did not happen at the expense of the other.  So it is with us.  So often we look at the future and we see great cataclysmic change.  We look at our society and our children. We say “look how different it’s all going to be”…except it’s not.  2000 years from now we will still be silly, ridiculous humans in need of Jesus, but I will not lie to you, my friends, things will look different.  We will have a different president, we will live in a different world.  Our children will grow, they will not be exactly like us and our church will look very different in the years to come.  It’s only looks.  God is the God of the old and the new, and he gives the same heart to them both if we ask Him.  So yes, things will change, just not really.  And we can take heart in that.               

The Last Barrier

What is the point of Pentecost?  What is the use of this day we call the birthday of the church?  Are we celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit into our midst, the dawning of a new age of humankind, or are we merely re-enacting a story, a play that is no longer relevant, whose only characters have become long devoid of any meaning?  Are the secularists right?  Are we merely the perpetuators of myths, peddlers of superstition and an age-old decrepit sort of order?  Are we what they say we are? Are we the pitiful inhibitors of progress they claim; con-artists so pathetic that we have actually bought into our own con, sellers of the invisible to a people too scared and too uneducated not to buy?  Is today a myth?  Is the only difference between Pentecost and Pandora, of the Holy Spirit and Heracles, that people have evolved out of the one and not the other?       

A tale of whispy fire and the miraculous speaking of other languages, of blessings bestowed by breath, and Advocate that only exists for those who believe he does?  If someone asks us as Christians, when we speak of Pentecost, which one do we speak of?  Is it the one in John or is it the one in Acts?  Two separate accounts of the coming of the Holy Spirit, two very different stories of the coming of the third person of the Trinity, how can both be true? Who in their right mind would ever believe such tales? 

If we are honest we would admit these are all very good questions, and as strange as it sounds I wish more Christians would ask them.  I won’t lie to you, ladies and gentlemen, I have studied the history of the Church, and I see something of a disconnect between the followers of Jesus now and the followers then.  The followers then spoke boldly and with power.  They spoke against the social injustices of their time, sought reform, and went to their deaths gladly.  They took babies off of garbage heaps and found them homes, we trick scared mothers into fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers.  They fought for the treatment of criminals, removing cruel punishments; we take away their right to vote and have governors go on record to say they do not mourn for a second that they have executed an innocent man.  They brought a message into the wilderness of the world, taking a vibrant gospel to a people who did not speak their tongue or even remotely knew their ways.  We won’t even go across the street to get to know our neighbors.

And so I looked at these things, I looked at the church then and the church now and I asked myself, “What happened?”  How did things get to be this way?  What happened that turned a group of people so empowered into a people so lifeless?  Ladies and gentlemen, most people forget I did not go to  seminary first and then to law school.  I was not some naïve schoolboy loyal to the Christian story because my family would disdain me if I didn’t. I didn’t go to seminary first and then law school, I went to seminary as a fully trained attorney.  I knew garbage when I heard it, and if you think you’ve got it tough try being a theology professor under cross-examination by one of your students.  Ladies and gentlemen, I know evidence, I know reason, I know how to reconstruct an event that happened in the past, and I know how arguments are made.  These stories are NOT garbage.  They are NOT myth.  Just because someone gives an account of the fantastic does not mean it is fantasy.

I don’t say these things because I believe blindly in the stories handed down to me, I was a questioning believer.  I took nothing at face value.  I read, I studied, I learned.  When I read these pages I put them to the fire because as a believer in God I knew that was what He wanted me to do.  He wanted me to see if these words were true, He wanted me to taste and see that He was good.  He did that because He wanted me to have a relationship with Him not a human religion.  I was not supposed to believe human institutions but doubt Him.  So I tested the Scriptures, I attacked them as vehemently as any lawyer would, because as a man of conscience THAT’S MY JOB.  I cannot take this message into the world if in fact I am not convinced of its truth.  I am not going to spread lies that get people hurt, and I am not going to risk a single ounce of my time and resources over something I am not 100% positive that it actually happened, and neither should you.  And what was the end result of all that testing, you may ask?  Well, I’m here aren’t I?

Ladies and gentlemen, our so-called scholars do a-lot to detract against our Bible.  They’ll go to all sorts of lengths to say our Bible is not what it says it is.  They say Moses did not write its first five books, but they won’t tell you how many ancient Egyptian Words are in those Hebrew books.  They won’t tell you that the author of those books not only clearly spoke Hebrew and Egyptian, was clearly very literate, knew the landscape of ancient Egypt very well, so well in fact that modern archeology has had to catch up to him, was extremely familiar with Pharaoh’s court and was well versed in ancient military tactics.  Clearly not the markings of a prince of Egypt.  What is more, they fail to answer the question what would be the point of even writing such books.  They say the Exodus is a myth, that the Israelites were merely an uneducated band of loosely aligned raiders roaming through Palestine.  What they fail to explain is why then these books even be written.  If I came down to you today and said America wasn’t actually a series of colonies that fought for its independence but that we were all slaves of the Canadians thousands of years ago forced to build their monuments but freed by a God you’d never heard of before, you might think it was interesting but you wouldn’t believe it.  If you wouldn’t believe it, why would they?  I’ve been around lawyers, my friends, and the first rule is if you are going to lie you have to make it believable.  What is the point of telling your audience a story of how you were rescued from slavery miraculously unless your audience already knew it was true?  Who else would ever receive such an idea?

And that’s just our Old Testament!  Imagine what they do to the New?  Jesus never existed and his divinity was manufactured in the 4^th century at the council of Nicaea.  Well first of all, which is it?  Conspirators generally don’t manufacture divine status to people who never existed.  Second of all, these are all extremely interesting conclusions to make of works that by all accounts were penned in the first century.  Ladies and gentlemen, Nero caught Christians and used them to light his palace grounds. After Nero comes Domitian.  Since just taking us up and killing us wouldn’t suffice anymore he denounces us as atheists and kills us then.  After Domitian came Trajan, and despite all this persecution in less than a century a governor in northern Turkey complains about how these Christians are turning up everywhere: the city, the countryside, everywhere.  He captures our women, tortures them, and discovers we don’t do anything terrible but that we worship Jesus as Divine and the see the emperor as human.  After Trajan came Marcus Aurelius, who after learning that killing us outright wasn’t working decided to just torture us to the point of death or imprison us and let us die of exposure.  And they weren’t just attacking the laity anymore, the targets became ever more nuanced.  They went after our bishops, our scholars, our learned men and women.  Their great minds like Celsus, unable to argue effectively against Christianity, unable to denounce Jesus’ miracles as false, unable to decry the empty tomb, their greatest mind could only say Jesus was a fatherless criminal who healed the sick, drove out spirits, and raised people from the dead by witchcraft.  I guess if you can’t win a debate through argument, the only thing left is to kill the debaters.  And so all this and worse continued until Constantine and the Edict of Toleration occurred over half a century before any Church Council.  Ladies and gentlemen, does this happen for people that don’t exist?  In a world where you literally had a different religion for every foot of ground you could walk on, do you pick the one that gets you tortured and killed if you weren’t radically convinced of its truth?  It’s pointed out that people die for their religion all the time, except no they don’t.  The terrorists that attacked the world trade center on 9/11 didn’t die for Mohammed, I’d argue greatly they didn’t even know Mohammed.  They didn’t die for their religion, they died for their politics.  They died to effect political change, these Christians didn’t die for politics they endured politics until it killed them.  Christianity is the only social movement in history that defeated a superpower by losing.  Do people do that for a lie?

The fact is, the 9/11 terrorists didn’t know Mohammed, but our gospel writers knew Jesus, and in the end they didn’t call him Prophet or Rabbi, they called him God.  And while so-called scholars, what they really are media pundits with enough money to buy their Doctorate, they dismiss the gospels out of hand and they do so too readily.  Each gospel is argument, a challenge to the most basic precepts their audience has.  Mark addresses persecuted Christians afraid to talk about Jesus and he ends his gospel with a conundrum, with Jesus’ tomb empty and women too afraid to speak about what they’ve seen.  Matthew’s gospel is a message to fellow Palestinian Jews about how Pagans acted more righteously than they, Luke’s gospel is written literally to a hostile witness, he is writing his gospel and acts so that Theophilus will believe what he has been told.  Theophilus is not a believer yet, and the fact is you don’t spend years upon years researching and writing books in the ancient world to convince someone of an easily disprovable lie.  And then there is John.  John’s gospel is literally an insult to his audience’s intelligence.  It is back handed slap that says that an itinerate uneducated homeless rabbi from hillbilly Judea knows better than all of Greek education and philosophy combined.  It enrages, it taunts, no it demands you investigate what they have to say and see for yourself whether or not it’s true.  Ladies and gentlemen, as a man with his law degree you don’t make these plays unless you know you can win.  These arguments grab the audience by the ear and MAKE them look at the Jesus story, they insist you do not take them at face value and order you to spend every ounce of your energy trying to refute them so that when you fail you’ll finally get it.  After every argument is spent, after every dart you’ve thrown at them bounces off, only then does doubt evaporate.  Only then does the fantastic reality of a God who loves you, who loves you enough to become human and die for you, only then does it sink in that it’s real.  All of it. 

The problem with the Church today, my friends, is not that our stories are false, the problem is we let people make us too afraid to question whether they are false.  We let fear overcome us, fear of how people will treat us if we question, fear of what the answers to those questions might be.  That fear crippled us, made us unwilling and unsure.  It made us falter in our dedication to the point where we had to be guilted into even doing a half measure.  It made us think one hour a week was enough, but that one hour a week for many turned into one every two, then one a month, then just Christmas and Easter.  We traded a transformed people and a transformed worth for a few magic words and a belief in fire insurance.  As your pastor I will remind you it doesn’t work that way.  The man who buried his talent in fact does not get rewarded for doing so. 

Ladies and gentlemen, last year I pointed out that you were innocent.  You remain so.  After everything that happened, after everything that this congregation went through it chose to remain faithful to its character as it always has done, but a year ago I said Innocence would not be enough.  Our foe is too wily and too cunning for innocence alone, and I challenged you to be wise as well as innocent, and you have been.  You’ve been unorthodox, you’ve broken boundaries, taken calculated risks, and today we’ve beaten the odds.  We are still here are we are more fruitful for Christ than we ever have been.  This year, however, this Pentecost it is time to be something more.  You have been innocent, you have been wise, but now I challenge you to be Empowered.  Accept the Holy Spirit into your lives and follow His direction.  Strap on his sword and put on the full armor of God.  What is Pentecost ladies and gentlemen?  Pentecost is God’s sucker punch.  After Yeshua’s victory in the resurrection the forces of evil, hate, and human misery were left in disarray; too distracted, too dizzy, too focused on keeping away from Christ in the boxing ring to notice that God gave us the gloves.  The time to strike is now, the time bring comfort for the grieving, relief to the wounded of body and spirit, the time call out the unjust for all the hurt they cause IS NOW.  The Greedy, the power-mad, the hate-mongers, and the pilferers of human suffering are out there and they have no idea the Holy Hell they’ve called down on themselves.  Let’s get out there and do it.   

     

An Easter to Remember

Happy Easter.  I have to admit those words are hard to say this morning.  Easter is supposed to be time of great joy: a welcoming of new life, new possibilities into the world at spring time.  It is reveling in the triumph of life over death – and I don’t feel it this year.  With everything going on, with the attacks in Belgium that happened earlier this week, with the bombings in turkey and elsewhere that the media failed to report, I just feel … numb.  And that’s just with everything going on over there; over here it isn’t any better.  As Americans we live in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and yet despite this we lead the industrialized world in child poverty, and we use that wealth to have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Whereas similar countries like Germany incarcerate 76 out of 100,000, Italy 85, and Saudi Arabia 161, the U.S. manages to find ways to imprison a whopping 716  people out of 100,000.  Child sex trafficking continues to rise, making up 40% of all human trafficking cases and the FBI has identified the twin cities as one of 13 US cities with high incidents of child prostitution.  Agencies say you cannot be homeless for 24 hours in the twin cities before you are approached to enter a prostitution ring, and the fact is reports also say they only ask so many times.  Urban food deserts are on the rise, our inner city poor have to travel miles to even get to store that has fresh produce and healthy things to eat, slavery is a real thing on our shores AGAIN, and not only does our elected leadership continuously do nothing about any of it, but as a pastor who also is a law school graduate, it infuriates me that I am continually asked to support one of two parties whose frontrunners are either scandal ridden lawbreakers or people who actively advocate war crimes.  So, no, I must confess I’m not feeling it this Easter season.  Everything we’ve done today feels rote, a ritual done because it is expected, not because it is relevant.

                And so I ask myself, how did we get to this place, how did we end up this way as a nation?  Easter has always been the highest point of the Christian year.  Indeed, from what I can tell about the Earliest Church from the writings and structures they left behind, every Sunday used to be an Easter, every Sunday was a celebration of the continuous renewal of God’s blessings of life and when Easter itself actually came around – THAT was a blowout party.  How can it be that Easter, a day that had so much joyous meaning for our ancestors that they would sooner be put to death than abandon it, how can it be that this day has dwindled down to a mere tale, an hour long service where we sing sunny hymns and act joyously for a little bit, only to go home afterward unchanged?  For the Christian, Easter is not just a holiday, it is not just a day where we dress up nicely and allow our children to ingest copious amounts of sugar to move on to a nice ham dinner afterward, Easter is the celebrated Supreme Reality.  Through the eyes of Easter, Death is an aberration, a disease well on its way to being cured.  Through the Eyes of Easter, this body, this world, this existence, are not a dime-store knock offs.  We in fact would not be better off if we were never born; that this physical life of ours contains blessings that not one other creature in this universe gets to experience.  Through the eyes of Easter, I see that Good wins.  That evil cannot have the day.  That all suffering is fleeting, and that one day cruelty, injustice, hatred, and pain will all be things of the past.

                And so I cried out to my God and my Savior, “What happened?”  Easter is supposed to be the Christian identity, how can we live out the joys of Easter, how can we embody its meaning, how can we make it relevant to people, when we ourselves have never once experienced it?  Where … did Easter … go?

                I remember many an Easter from my own childhood.  We’d wake up that Sunday, my brother and I, and we’d go hunting for our Easter baskets.  The sun was usually up, the air crisp; we’d find our Easter baskets and devour the chocolate rabbit plus a few jelly beans before breakfast.  Mom would make pancakes and sausage, but the end result was always the same on Easter Sunday – The church would swell up as exhausted parents would force their children to sit still on a sugar high for an hour.  The pastor would muddle through a sermon, having already done a Good Friday (and sometimes a Maundy Thursday service), learning to crack a joke when a child’s energy levels exceeded the fear of their parents.

                My parents brought me to church every Sunday, not just Easter, but they didn’t really believe.  Like many today they were agnostics and practical atheists.  They didn’t really believe in Jesus or any of this resurrection stuff.  Like the Greeks and their festivals to Zeus, so was Easter to the Christians – a people thoughtlessly playing out their stories and that was about it.  They didn’t come to church, they didn’t bring me and my brother to church, because they believed they were imparting essential life truths to us; they brought us to church to appease their own parents and the society around them.  In truth, as a pastor I don’t really blame them.

                As the first generation after the 2^nd world war and as the first generation to really go to college, they had questions honestly raised by their education, questions that quite frankly their rural blue-collar parents had no idea how to answer.  A factory or an office worker knows little of history or the historical process and the only archeology a farmer engages in is when the plow happens to dig something up.  Of course, as a man with a law degree who graduated seminary, I now know those questions could have been answered.  The scholarship to answer those basic questions of faith had been around since at least the forties; my parents simply chose not to look for them.  At the end of the day, feeling forced into doing something they didn’t want to do, it was easier to surround themselves with shallow worldly questions than to be honest and seek after deep spiritual answers.

                Of course, I don’t really blame my grandparents for this either.  Times were changing and changing fast.  Their children moved far away into the city, got an education.  They entered into a profession, instead of just finding a job.  As a nation we went from horse drawn buggies to muscle cars and propeller planes to jets that broke the sound barrier.  Computers, smart watches, and phones that most people don’t talk on but just use to take pictures and text.  Gay Marriage, Transgendered people, multiple religions, it was a dizzying array of changes to throw at a people who grew up having their milk delivered by wagon.  To ensure their children didn’t lose their roots, they did what their own parents did to them and what their parents did to them: they used the power of the family to drive their children into their place.  They called, they nagged, they threatened to cut people from their will and at times even exiled their own children to make an example to the rest of the family.  They didn’t foster faith so much as they drove home the words and practices that made themselves feel comfortable.  They didn’t love their children no matter what, if they wanted to do that they would have journeyed with them in their questions instead of insisting they repeat the supposed answers.  When their children asked them if Jesus was real or if the resurrection was myth they could have responded “I believe so, but that’s what I was taught.  Let’s ask our pastor, or let’s see if we can go to a seminary professor and see what they have to say.  In fact, let’s make a project of it this year.  Let’s talk to many pastors and lots of different professors and see if we can’t help.”  To be honest, however, I don’t know that my grandparents ever made their children feel safe enough to ask those questions.  Tradition has been called the “Tyranny of the Dead”, and with every act that my grandparents did to isolate their children, to manipulate family, it was done with exactly one haunted look in their eyes – the look that asked “What would my parents think if they were alive today.”

                Ladies and Gentlemen, I propose to you that we are not achieving the Easter Experience because none of us want to go through Good Friday to get it.  We all want the incredible joy, the freedom, and the triumph that Easter represents, but we refuse to put to death the things that are keeping us from it.  Like a dog with a large stick, we want to hold on to the things we feel entitled to and yet we remain baffled when we can’t seem to get through the door.  Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and to experience the phenomenal life-changing joy of the Resurrection they had to put down everything that they were raised to value.  The Jewish people of the first century commonly believed in a Messiah of War, that violent righteousness and vindication would ever somehow inaugurate God’s kingdom of Peace.  That had to die.  Many Jews dreamed of a Jewish theological state, that tenets of true Jewish religion would become enforceable by law.  That had to be killed.  The Jews of that era also believed that the Jewish way made them better than everybody else and they believed that the gentiles could never be the people of God, too.  That racism had to be put down.  Everything they hoped for, everything they felt entitled to, everything they ever believed in, all of it had to be shattered and the broken pieces of their desires piled up in a heap at the foot of the cross before they could experience the fulfillment of God’s promises to them and before the enduring pieces of their faith would be revealed.  It is no different for us.   Easter, ladies and gentlemen, was the good news no one was looking for or even would have wanted, but once lived it was the joy that could not be stamped out.  We can have that Joy too.  Even in today’s world that seems to create one new nightmare after another, we too can experience victory.  It is not gone, it is not irrelevant.  We too can embody the resurrection reality and when confronted with those nightmares we can know it’s just a dream.  The terrible evils that we encounter are passing, we will one day wake up from them.  But even so, through Easter we are given power and we are reminded that even though we are asleep we can still control the dream.  What makes a nightmare a nightmare is the feeling of our own powerlessness.  Easter tells us that powerlessness IS A LIE.  The world as we experience is not the world as it has to be, it can change!  But it takes us putting down that which makes us a nightmare to others.  It takes us going through our own Good Friday and trusting God to pick up what’s left.  

                So, ladies and gentlemen, what will it be?  Will this Easter be just another themed Sunday, one out of 52 others but with a duck or a bunny motif, one where we sing sunny songs and then return to the world at large; to our businesses, to our homes, to our lives that force us to be fake people eternally hiding behind a shallow mask, serving a world that literally just wants you to pay bills, mop floors and die?  Do we want that or do you want something more?  Because a better life is waiting for you if you do.

Amen and Amen.