This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, drawing from Zechariah 14:1, 6-9, 16 and Mark 16:1-8
This is a story about a man and his God.
Today is Easter Sunday, and I'm sure many of you have turned up looking for today's edition of the greatest hits of the Christian high holidays. When we come on Christmas eve, we expect to hear the narrative of the birth; of Bethlehem in Judea, and the miracle in the manger. When we show up on Pentecost, we expect to hear about great tongues of fire descending upon disciples in a locked room, of the first great baptism of the masses, and the Holy Spirit inventing Google Translate two thousand years early.
So today, naturally you would expect to hear that great and timeless story of the stone that was rolled away, of women being the first to hear, and the first to tell the story of Christ resurrected, firstborn of the dead. You would expect to hear about the misogynistic denials of the disciples, their frantic insistence that God's truth is only real when it is seen with the eyes of men, only true when it comes out from the mouths of men, only believable if it is couched in terms that men can understand, packaged for the male gaze and distributed by male hands.
On this rock shall the church be built, indeed.
I hope you don't think me dismissive of our shared, Christian narrative. While it may be coated in that oily patois of our shared, grimy humanity, this particular story, perhaps more than any other, is the one that makes us Christian. It is important not just because it tells us who we are, but because it is that beautiful, perfect moment where the divinity of Christ breaks through dirt, and the slime, and the grime, where that spring of living water explodes forth in defiance of every law and rule of reality as we know it. It's a powerful word; an important word.
But it's a word we have all heard before.
Look, I know that the story of the resurrection is treated like the one great moment in our collective history that transcends everything else, binding us together as a shared community despite all the hurt and pain we may have experienced in our lives, but for those of us whose trauma comes from the fullness of ourselves being cast aside by people claiming the name of the risen Christ, that great resurrection day narrative can leave us just wondering…
What does it matter?
What does it matter to the outcast few, when that church down main street in America is preaching to pews full of white cops the miracle of a white Jesus resurrected into a white world which affords no such miracle to the black and brown bodies lying dead at their feet? What does it matter to the outcast few, when the boyish excitement of Peter reverberates right overtop the quiet awe and faithful obedience of women so honored by Christ as to be the first to see, and so honored by men as to be denied even their own names in Luke’s accounting of the gospel. What does it matter to the outcast few when those who hate us, those who have abused us, those who have rejected us ride that rolling stone away from the tomb and right over our wearied, broken bodies?
What does it matter?
Over the last year or so, I have been quietly looking for some way to answer this question for all of us and, as will come as no surprise to those of you who know me well, I found at least the beginnings of an answer not in the Bible, but in a quiet exchange between two characters in a recent episode of Star Trek.
On the one hand we have the famed Captain-turned Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, a deeply flawed man despite his many successes, someone who has lived most of his life trying to save as many lives as possible in order to mitigate the guilt that haunts him from the many traumas of his past. And on the other hand, we have his perennial agitator, the being known simply as Q. And this Q character…well…he's a god; little-g god to be sure, but he is an impish, mischievous, creature of nigh-infinite knowledge and power who, for some reason, pops in once or twice a season just to mess with Picard specifically, throwing his life off track, playing games with him, and otherwise just being as annoying and confusing as possible.
You don’t actually need to know the fullness of their story together to understand this moment (and I’m not so crazy as to waste our precious time today explaining decades of Star Trek backstory to you all in lieu of the scriptures) but it is at least important to know that it is their last moment together. Over more than 50 years, this god-like being has been present at (and arguably responsible for) many of the worst moments of Picard's life, along with some of the moments where he experienced the greatest personal and emotional growth. And now, in their final moments together, the two men find themselves sat in the broken atrium of Picard's long-abandoned childhood home, with all the trauma of his life laid bare before him.
And in that moment, Picard comes to the humbling realization that this entire relationship, far from being the whimsical brutality of a little-g god who just wanted to mess with him, was a slow and meticulous process of loving guidance, bringing him at last to this place where he can see his trauma clearly, release the guilt that has so long driven him, find forgiveness, and embrace himself for who he is, rather than constantly measuring himself against the person his trauma told him he needed to be.
And in that moment of shock, he asks the great question; the same question that every one of us will ask when we meet our creator face-to-face and experience that same revelation
Why me?
We ask this question every day, when we behold our trauma; when we see the great and terrible gap between God's perfection and our own imperfection. when we see the empty tomb and hear that all these things - the cross, the grave, and the sky - are not denied to us by the myriad exclusions of the many, but given to us personally and lovingly by the love of the one who made us.
Why me?
Surely something so magnificent, something so reality-breaking, must be intended for higher and better people. Surely this great gift of salvation, the defeat of death itself must be meant for those who fit in, those who are welcomed, those who belong.
Why me?
Do I have some higher calling? Must I save the world? Is there something for which I will be well and truly required?
Why me?
It is in Q's uncharacteristically simple and honest reply to this question, where I hear the voice of the risen Christ most clearly, where I hear that perfect whisper of God's love:
"Must it always have galactic import? Universal stakes, celestial upheaval? Isn't one life enough? You ask me why it matters. It matters to me. You matter to me."
The resurrection story is important, yes. It tells us what happened, but it does very little to answer that far greater question, the question that every one of us who has borne witness to the “mercies” of the Christian church from beneath the heel of its boot, never mind the hem of its garment, have had resting on our lips in agony when we contemplate a resurrected world that includes us too.
Why me?
To answer that, we need to listen to the voice of the prophets, for while the Gospels love to tell the story of what Christ has said and done, it is the prophets who often tell us why God is doing it at all. Each prophet came to this message in their own way of course, but it was the word of the prophet Zechariah on which I found myself resting this week.
You see, Zechariah was a prophet in a time where God’s people were scattered, laid low by the Babylonian Empire. The great empire of world had told God’s people that they were irrelevant, that they didn’t matter, and so it had brutalized and abused them, separated them from their lives and their families, shattered their country and scattered them as a people. And the great summation to his entire text, the fullness of his prophetic work is to turn to these beaten and abused people and say,
“See, a day is coming when all that has been taken from you will be returned, and the cold into which you have cast will cease to be. All those who have turned on you will turn to you, and will understand the Lord through you. The light will never again fail to shine on you, and that spring of living water shall burst forth so powerfully that it will flow through your land forever.”
And you will never be thirsty again.
Of course it would be easy to write off this kind of thing as the blindly optimistic false-hope of the oppressed, pining for mercies that never quite come. And now that we have sat and wrestled with our thirst, in the dry and scorching darkness of Good Friday, we might be forgiven for thinking that this hope would never come.
But then…that moment comes, when all the powerful and the privileged have stepped away to their comfortable upper rooms, when the only people present are the oppressed, the unheard, and the silenced. The stone rolls away, and God reveals to them that oh yes, it can. Not even death itself can stop our God from fulfilling these promises; not even death itself in the hands of the most oppressive, most powerful, most highly weaponized, militarized, and politicized empires to ever walk this earth can stop our God from fulfilling these promises. There is absolutely nothing, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation that is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Not because we prayed the right prayer, or said the right words. Not because we followed all the rules just right, or hid the fullness of ourselves to avoid conflict. Not because we hid our scars, denied our sexuality, concealed our poverty, or kowtowed to the white-dominant culture with a stranglehold on the institutions of our faith.
No.
Our hope is in the name of the Lord, the maker of the heavens in the earth.
Our hope is in the name of the Lord, who succumbed to the thirsting unto death, to the indignity of the cross, to the brutality of empire, and to the cold prison of the grave.
Our hope is in the name of the Lord, who emerged victorious over death in blinding revelation to those the world had said could not see.
Our hope is in the name of the Lord, who reaches down through all of the dirt, and the grime, and the muck of our broken world, takes our weary head into divine hands and says,
You matter to me.
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