Sermon April 12, 2009

The Day of Resurrection

Cultures through out time all have their stories of the dead coming back to life. We're no different in our day and age - you can see it in our popular culture. Take, for example one of the most famous movies of the 1960s, one that, in 1999, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress described as "historically, culturally or aesthetically important". Any guesses? "The Night of the Living Dead." The recently dead rise as zombies and attack seven still-living people trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse. And all the still living are killed.

If these zombies are examples of resurrection, then who would want anything to do with it?!

You might think that the idea behind "The Night of the Living Dead" is a very modern, 20th century idea. But, as Ecclesiastes said, "there's nothing new under the sun" (Eccles. 1:9). If you were one of Jesus' disciples, and were to tell a Greek or a Roman that Jesus had risen from the dead their first question would almost certainly have been: "how on earth did you get him back into his grave again?"! For the Ancients, resurrection was much like the Night of the Living Dead - grotesque and frightening, and potentially quite dangerous to the still living - it was unconnected with that event of joy that we celebrate today. Even the ancient Israelites would have been troubled. While they believed in a resurrection at the end of time - where the just would be rewarded and the wicked punished - they would have been just as disturbed by any suggestion that someone was actually raised from the dead here and now.

Now this certainly helps make sense of part of what we just heard: why the women "went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." They feared a sort of "Zombie Jesus."

But there's a more significant reason why, for the representatives of Empire, the advent of resurrection - the return of the dead - was a major problem. If you read much in ancient literature of the appearances of the dead then you'd find that it was mostly dreams or visions, and almost always the dead appeared to denounce their killers.

Now think of this characteristic of all ancient empires: they specialized in mass slaughter; their growth - their very survival - was predicated on the assumption that there were "enormous quantities of human lives [that] were expendable and unimportant; [that] those who fell victim to the system simply disappeared" [Abp. Rowan Williams]. So if you happened to be part of this sort of impressive killing machine then you didn't need to ask for whom the bell tolled, so to speak, you'd know it was tolling for you. If the dead came back, it was to indict you.

And here's a group of friends of an executed seditionist going around saying "He's back", and, further, proclaiming to his killers that their life and health are on the line; that they have to trust that he has made peace for them with God.

And then, for these members of this Empire, it got worse. His resurrection, his friends said, wasn't an isolated event. Rather Jesus' resurrection was only the first. None of the dead would be left behind. They were all coming back.

This must have been very sobering news for any Empire with blood on its hands - and can anyone name an empire that doesn't have blood on its hands?

The sad truth is that empires have only become more efficient at spilling innocent blood - from the Nazis 20 million to the Japanese 20 Million to Stalin's 35 Million, to Cambodia, to Ruanda, to the Balkans - and the list goes on.

On the whole, humanity, from the dawn of time, has never assumed that every life has value, is precious. Some human beings have always assumed the right to kill others, even their own children. For empires life is, largely speaking, expendable.

Jesus changed that. For all it's failings Christianity has brought about an irreversible shift in human culture - our faith says that human value cannot be extinguished by violence or death; that no one is forgotten. "God holds on to the lives of all the departed - including the lives that have been wasted, violently cut short, damaged by oppression." (Ibid). Everyone has worth in God's sight.

And if God can raise a man who was the victim of the most shocking and disgusting form of execution - one designed to utterly obliterate a person from the face of the earth, the epitome of State-sanctioned murder - and make him the very messenger of this word of grace, as the very giver of God's life to us; if God can do this - can raise Jesus - then every empire across time must surely begin to worry.

Every empire believes that the dead can be forgotten. And we, too, can find ourselves so overwhelmed by the numbers who die at the hands of the oppressors elsewhere that it is easy to accept by default that some lives are simply forgettable in death. And we do the same thing with those more close to home who die alone, or unloved, down the street from us - the aged with no family to care for them; the addict abandoned by all as hopelessly lost, the mentally ill whose own personal hell scares us away.

To this, the story of Jesus' resurrection cries out "never"! The words of the gospel are words of hope, not of defeat. They cry out when no one else will, that these human beings are not forgotten by God, that - before God - their dignity is held gently and affirmed, that, as the psalmist says, they - as we - are held in the palm of his hand.

So it is that the resurrection reminds us of our fundamental call as Christians, reminds us of the responsibilities we took on with the waters of baptism: to look for those most likely to be forgotten by the world and to ask ourselves exactly what our own duty is to them.

But as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said "the goodness of the resurrection news is most evident for those who have lost people they love to any sort of incomprehensible evil - the tragedies of dementia, the apparent meaninglessness of accident, the horrors of violence or injustice"

And he tells this story, of that time when the death squads went about their cruel, murderous work in places like Chile, El Salvador and Argentina. Christians, he said, found a unique way to celebrate their faith, their hope and their resistance. At Eucharist each Sunday someone would read out the names of those who had been murdered, or who had simply been "disappeared." And after each name, someone in the congregation would simply call out "presente". Present. Here.

And I can't help but think of that wonderful passage from the Letter to the Hebrews: "...since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12: 1a-2)

They are here. When, every week, we pray (as we shortly will) "with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven" we say "presente" - "here" - of all those the world would forget but whom God remembers.

With angels and archangels; with the gassed Jews, the macheted Rwandans, with the dead heroin addict found in pioneer park, or the lonely old man no longer able to remember his name, with the two crucified beside Jesus, and all the tens of thousands of others that the efficient Roman imperial administration dispatched without a thought; ......with all the company of heaven.

"And with Christ our Lord, the firstborn from the dead [Paul tells us,] by whose death our sinful forgetfulness and lukewarm love can be forgiven and kindled to life, who leaves no human soul in anonymity and oblivion, but gives to all the dignity of a name and a presence....."(ibid) "Hail thee, festival day, blessed day that art hallowed forever; day whereon Christ was raised, breaking the kingdom of death" (Hymnal 1982, #175). "He is risen...[and now] he is present everywhere and to all." (Ibid, Rowan Williams) "He has been raised", St. Paul says, "and we have been raised with him" all of us, we are all gathered now. No matter what name is called out, no matter how long dead, the answer is always the same: "presente." Present. Here.