Easter 2009

Here's my Easter sermon. I've been preaching through Revelation and thinking about martyrdom. I am mostly awed at the way in which martyrs invoked a new reality--the new creative work of God begun in the Resurrection--and opened the door to the possibility of life lived free from the constraints of death, even in the face of death. The death that the martyrs anticipated took the peculiar shape of Christ's death which, we learn at Easter, is transformed by resurrection.





We are known as a peace church. As Mennonites we are identified to a great extent by our opposition to war and violence, often calling ourselves pacifists and for evidence pointing to generations of conscientious objectors and activists working in the arenas of conflict resolution and peacemaking. We frequently quote verses such as “blessed are the peacemakers,” “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek” and so on. In all of this there is a certain honesty: the world is a violent place, full of conflict, wars, and struggles over power. We would simply rather have a peaceable world than a violent one—who wouldn’t? And yet our lives are understood according to narratives of struggle.

To the extent that we are Americans, we are a people who, for the rule of law and a peculiar notion of freedom, fought a great empire and won. Our identity has been forged according to the myths of redemptive violence that the revolution and subsequent wars have been used to suggest. By myths of redemptive violence I mean stories that have been told of wars and conflicts, stories in which we learn the necessity of violence in the good task and calling that has been the formation of the American nation. What would America be without Valley Forge, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, and D-Day? Bearing the name Sam Adams, as I grew up I came to identify with these stories as somehow definitive of who I was. I was named after the great American patriot after all, the founder of the Sons of Liberty and the instigator of the Boston Tea Party. Even the beer was named after the patriot! What would a great American beer be without a nod to our revolutionary origins?

But aside from the nationalistic stories, our lives on a more personal and less political level are understood according to stories of conflict and struggle as well. If you have overcome some hardship in your life, whether poverty, abuse, neglect, addiction, dependency, or the like, you have learned that such conflicts ought to in some way define you. They are part of your story. It may be that you are going through such struggles and conflicts right now that demand so much energy and attention that you will forever be changed by the demands that are placed upon you as your character is forged in the fires of adversity.

This is simply the way the world is. A Darwinist might call this the survival of the fittest. Organisms compete with one another for scarce resources and the ones best adapted to the task survive, beating out the competition and assuring their place in the genetic future. At the core of our world, at the core of the universe it seems, is conflict, strife, competition, and violence.

So who are we to protest? Who are we to want peace? If we are realistic about conflict, we ought to be realistic about the solution: prepare and be strong, defeat your enemy, adjust, adapt, play the game and come out ahead. Enter the race, train, and win. Survive, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Etc.

It doesn’t, of course, have to be so selfish. If we want peace we have to fight for it, right? If we want to be free from terror we have to kill all the terrorists. If we want to be free to live as we do, to work as we like, to worship who we want, we must assert these things with strength or we will find them slipping from our grasp. There are plenty of bad people who would like to see us fail.

Conflict, war, struggle, adversity—these are the ways of the real world.

So, we write of Jesus rather easily. A spiritualist we think he is, or an idealist—wait until heaven, then there will be peace. Or perhaps all he is doing is simply showing us how to find inner peace. The peace that passes all understanding. Let’s psychologize Jesus, make him the stuff of motivational infomercials, so we can understand the right technique to arrive at and get this un-understandable peace.

But the world is all about struggle, conflict, and war.

Or is it?

On trial before the governor Pilate, Jesus is asked the question, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answers, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

“Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”

“My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

“So you are a king?”

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

Jesus’ trial is remarkable. He never enters the game. He offers no defense. He is innocent and yet takes the abuse. He explains when it seems right but at other times remains silent. He is not competing with Pilate. He is not competing with the High Priest. He is not competing with the Emperor.

After being flogged, mocked with a purple robe, and given a crown of thorns, Jesus is presented to the crowd who wants him to be crucified. Pilate is baffled and distressed. He questions Jesus again.

“Where are you from?”

Jesus gives no answer.

“Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”

Jesus answers this time, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”

From then on, we are told, Pilate tries to release him.

Jesus refuses to enter the game. Interestingly, he acknowledges the power of Pilate, the Roman governor, but he refuses to acknowledge the myth that made sense of Roman power. Paul does the same sort of thing in the 13th chapter of his letter to the Romans. Power is not, ultimately, won through struggle and conflict. Power is God’s. Pilate would have no power if it had not been given from above.

But the religious leaders try to pull Jesus into the game. They try to get him engaged according to the rules of religion and politics: “If you release this man,” they say, “you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.”

And so Jesus is crucified.

It is not that Jesus was somehow a spiritual king, unrelated to the emperor. John, in his apocalyptic vision, prefaces his letter by affirming that Jesus Christ is “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev 1.5). Jesus is not set against the Emperor, rather he is set above the emperor. And it is this that gets him into trouble, leads to his death, and the death of many of his followers. Jesus’ death is certainly a political death in a political contest—but by his death Jesus denies the very rules that would govern the contest. His is not a Kingdom from this world. In John’s Gospel this is the last we hear of the Romans. Their part is over. The end of the conflict that defines our world; the end of the sort of power that rules nations and empires; the telos of the conflict that defines our lives is this: the death of the Son of God.

That’s as far as the story goes. Or so it seemed.
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”

The scene has changed. The players are different. Now we have women, fishermen, friends.

The hot and bloody stone of Pilate’s politics has been replaced by the dark morning chill of a woman grieving in a graveyard. Then an empty tomb! Then there is running, and news, and more running. One disciple outruns the other and gets to the tomb first. They see the tomb empty—empty except for the grave-clothes—and there was a mixture of belief and confusion. Then the men leave and Mary is left, alone, with her grief. But she is not alone. Jesus is there. He is alive.

Religious and political power killed him. The conflicts that seem to determine this world killed him. The politically fit survived and killed the King of the Jews. Rome is stronger. The tension between the Jewish leaders and Pilate is eased for a moment. Diplomacy found a victim—but at least it was only one. It’s an old story, a very old story. But something new was happening, away from Pilate, away from the Temple elite, away from the crowds, away from the powerful and the proud. The politics of death continued, but life….life had won. And life did not play according to the rules. As it turns out, conflict is not the nature of the world, war and conflict are not the essence of the cosmos. Peace and life are. And their reign has begun. Jesus is alive, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth. The only way that Jesus could have stood there before Pilate, carried his cross to Golgotha, been crucified and died, is if the power behind the cosmos is more determinative than the power in the cosmos. Were his kingdom from this world he would have fought, he would have engaged the empire, but instead he simply bore witness in the face of the conflict of this world that life was stronger than death, that God was not in the same league as the emperor, that though all the power and shame of the empire could be hurled at the Son of God, the victory would remain God’s.

She mistakes him for the gardener. Mary mistakes the King of Kings for a gardener. The only way such a mistake could be made is if the nature of kingship and power had somehow been fundamentally shown to be different than the way we have learned to see it.

This is what we witness to when we call ourselves a peace church. Being a peace church is being an Easter church. On Easter, everything changes. Life is shown to be more powerful than death—not by degrees, but by its very nature: death is shown to be ultimately powerless in the face of the goodness of God. By bearing witness to this through the practices of non-violence, reconciliation, and peace-making, even to the point of death, we participate in the life that is at the heart of the cosmos.

Easter tells us that our lives are not to be determined by conflict, violence, and war. Instead our lives are to be determined by the life and the peace that comes to us on and through Easter. In our church, even here, we are invited to enter into the shalom that comes to us from God the giver of life. In our worship we join together with the power of life over death. In the face of death our ancestors in the faith were able to sing because they lived in a world where death was not final, not ultimate—but rather life was. This they learned from Easter. As we go from here this evening, may we begin to see that Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed as we learn to see the lies inherent in the conflicts that surround us. May we begin to live as if life was infinitely greater than death so that our lives too may be a witness to the kingdom that is not from this world, but is instead the kingdom of the King of Kings.

Who are the Mennonites?

The following are three key convictions making up what I think it means to be Anabaptist or Mennonite. These are not in any way limited to Mennonites, but I think they represent the witness of that tradition to the broader church. And I do not think they can be written off as some quaint characteristics of an obscure denomination! These are why I am committed to keeping this tradition alive...

a) The Lordship of Jesus Christ. His lordship encompasses all of life and demands that every aspect be submitted to Him. There are no “spheres” or “domains” in which and over which He is not Lord. This has more ramifications than we would at first think, for if Jesus is Lord then the quality of that Lordship does not change even if we want to distinguish between public/private or spiritual/temporal. All of those dualisms are done away with if Jesus is Lord.

b) Non-violence/peace as faithfulness to Jesus. Non-violence names the practice of rejecting the means of power that the world relies upon to determine the outcome of history. Anabaptist faithfulness is eschatological in that it relies on God to determine the future, thus enabling the rejection of violence and other coercive means of control. Peace names the practices of reconciliation that enable the community of disciples to embody the substance of God’s righteousness and to work for that righteousness in the world.

c) The community displays the nature of the reign of God. The Anabaptist community is a community that displays to the world what sort of God it is that rules the world. And it is in our worship of the slain Lamb that we participate in His rule (Rev 5.7-10; Cf. John Howard Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World” in The Royal Priesthood.)

waiting as a mark of discipleship

The following is part of the rough draft for this afternoon's sermon. I never got to finish it as a written sermon, but am offering what I have here in case it can be helpful.

What does it mean to a people who wait? I am going back two weeks to the epistle reading from 1 Thess 1.9-10 that we missed, but that I alluded to last week: Paul writes, “For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.” Waiting is a theme of the Bible, repeated especially throughout the book of Psalms as an appropriate disposition one ought to have toward the Lord. Psalm 27.13- 14:

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD
In the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
Be strong, and let your heart take courage;
Wait for the LORD.

Or Psalm 43 from today’s reading:

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Hope in God. Wait upon the Lord. Wait for his Son from heaven. This attitude of waiting has been criticized in the people of God as a motivation for inaction. Christians, it is said, are a people who wait for their “pie in the sky, by and by…” We sit on our hands while people suffer around us. We wait for heaven, rather than trying to bring a little bit of heaven to earth. I especially hear a version of this when people criticize our stance of non-violence, as if our unwillingness to bear arms against our enemies were somehow a failure to take seriously a responsibility to do everything we can to make sure that good triumphs over evil.

On the other hand, there are countless Christians who have decided that waiting really has nothing to do with how we live in this world, and are impatiently trying to gain as much power in Washington as possible in order to create a Judeo-Christian nation. For these Christians waiting is entirely spiritualized. So, on the one hand we have those for whom waiting means doing nothing, and on the other hand there are those for whom waiting in no way limits an aggressive attempt to gain power to change the course of the world (even though, presumably, their theology teaches that things will get worse and worse until Jesus returns). At several points in our nation’s history the Christian assumption was that the things would actually get better and better and the Millennium would be ushered in through the hard work of either evangelists or those working for a progressive notion of social justice. A Civil War, two world wars, and Vietnam put a decisive end to most of these Christian movements.

So, does waiting mean sitting around on our hands, or does it mean actively pursuing power to change the world? Or something else entirely? I will suggest that it means something else entirely.

Let me give an example from history that might help clarify what I am saying. In the early history of the church the Roman emperor Constantine I decisively ended the brutal oppression of Christians and led the way for Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire. For many Christians this represented what they had been waiting for. The emperor becomes Christian and the Empire soon follows. And yet, this is very different from the Thessalonian church being praised for their willingness to wait for God’s Son from heaven. Constantine was not God’s Son. And the subsequent history of the church after Constantine ought to make us question what sort of victory was really won when the Empire became Christian. The emperor is not the Messiah, nor is the President. Yet this hope is alive and well today. I heard a young woman interviewed this week who was eagerly waiting for Sarah Palin to run for president in eight years. Christians, especially in light of history since Constantine, should not be looking to national politics or to any state for a savior. This is what I take waiting for the Son of God to mean. It may mean other things, but it at least means this.

But how do we describe our waiting? I would differentiate between living faithfully while waiting, and an impatience that seeks power so that waiting is unnecessary. As Christians we do not take the power to determine the outcome of history into our own hands, rather we live faithfully in the meantime—seeking justice, peace, mercy, and hope—while rejecting the tools of power that would coerce those ends. And so the rejection of violence is justified by this just to the extent that violence represents an unwillingness to wait upon the Lord. I can picture the Thessalonian church in their faithfulness, caring for the sick and the poor, bringing equality between differing groups to realization in their fellowships, advocating on behalf of the abused, but trusting on the Lord for the outcome of their actions and hopes....

By being a community that is willing to wait, that is willing to reject the coercive means of control offered to us, we bear witness to the Lord who will come, and we might even convince a few that He is the living and true God who has already come....