4/12/20 “Still Rising” by Nancy E. Petty

“Still Rising”
Scripture: Matthew 28:1-10

Easter. Easter is giving God your most exuberant praise. It is celebrating a God who could make the impossible, possible. It is walking into the realm of the miraculous. Easter is knowing that when we come across obstacles, God is still able to roll stones away. Easter is a season of new life. It is the leaves reappearing, flowers blooming, and the springing up of green grass. It is a reminder that the work of Jesus to bring good news to the poor and the oppressed is not dead but lives on in us. Easter: the idea that love always resurrects itself. Easter life is found in my family, friends, in the earth, in all things. Easter is about resurrection. It invites us to transform despair into hope, chaos into creativity, apathy into compassion.

Yes. Yes. To all of these things my colleagues have named. AND, I have a confession. From an early age, I have found Easter to be one of the most stressful days of the year. I’ve told you before that as a child, Easter meant Easter clothes – itchy dresses, hated hats, and white leather patent shoes that were always too tight. A total nightmare for a girl like me. As I got older, the teenage years, Easter became the morning we got up before dawn (insert teenage eyerolling and huffing) to worship outside as the sun rose, followed by a pancake breakfast at the church, and then another worship service (more eyerolling and huffing). In more recent history, some 18 years ago, Easter became my first real panic attack. After months of conversation, some painful and some affirming, and 10 years of ministry already shared with you, you had just called me as your co-pastor. Easter was just days away. It was my first Easter to preach as one of your co-pastors. As Sunday drew near, I realized I was exhausted and raw from the process and I had nothing left to give, especially not on the most celebratory day of the Christian year; and with no question, the largest attendance Sunday of the year. Easter was just too much.

But really, Easter has been a challenge for me for another, more significant reason. That reason being, Western orthodox Easter theology. I have always struggled with the meaning of Easter, specifically this transformation of the human Jesus to the risen Christ.

For most of my life of faith I have wondered about the relationship between the human Jesus who went into the tomb on Good Friday and the Christ figure who rose from the dead on Easter morning. Growing up, I imagine like many of you, I thought that Christ was Jesus’ last name. It was said that way—Jesus Christ. Just like someone might say, Nancy Petty. But as I began forming my own faith and theology, not just that which was handed down to me, I struggled to articulate what I believed about the Jesus of history and the Christ figure of Christian theology. A number of years ago I decided that I would take some time to figure out what I believe about Jesus—who he was and what his life meant. Here are the headlines of that journey.

Jesus was the son of Mary. His father was Joseph. There was something special about his birth and his presence coming into the world. As he grew in body and spirit it was clear that he possessed an uncommon wisdom and “knowing” of God’s love and God’s hope for humanity. He was a devoted Jew and was committed to the teachings of his faith. From his own faith, he became a radical disciple of justice-love. He was a revolutionary leader who challenged the status quo and the powers and principalities of systems of extraction and oppression. He led a non-violent movement that preached inclusion of all and justice for all. He brought healing to people who were suffering. He had eyes and a heart to see a world where love was stronger than hate, forgiveness more healing than revenge, humility of spirit more life giving than self-importance and pride. His movement became such a threat to the system that the system had him executed—put to death on a cross. His death was not an atonement for some kind of original sin or our personal shortcoming in life. His death was an injustice perpetrated by an unjust system. It was an atonement for systems of dominance that keep poor people poor and oppressed. His life, the human Jesus, was and remains today one of the clearest manifestations of God’s love and justice for all of creation. And I believe that I am more the person God created me to be when I follow his way, his life and his truth.

A few years ago, now that I could articulate what I believed about Jesus the person, I decided that I needed to make another journey of faith—that of trying to understand the Christ figure. I needed to understand Christ as more than Jesus’ last name. I needed to be able to say at Christmas “the Christ-child” and on Easter “the risen Christ” and at least know what that meant to me. Here’s how I can best describe that journey to you.

Forty-five years ago when I made the commitment, at age 11, to follow Jesus, Jesus Christ was one person. There was no Christ without Jesus. Jesus was the Christ. He was the Christ-child in the manger and he was the Christ who rose from the dead. This theology that was taught to me by the church, connects Christ to a period of time just over some two thousand years ago. I never questioned that teaching.

Now fast forward to about 30 years ago. It was during this time in my faith journey I had to separate the human Jesus from the divine figure of the Christ. The institutional church and Western Christian theology had weighed me down with so much baggage when it came to the Christ figure that I had to just unload it all. What it taught and said I had to believe about Jesus Christ—that God gave Jesus as an atonement for our sins, that God didn’t love you unless you accepted Christ as your personal savior—these teachings were like heavy weights tied to my ankles that kept me grounded in an unmovable fear. And so, I focused on the human Jesus that I might best follow him and tried not to think much about the idea of Christ.

But this question of the Christ figure kept nudging at me, especially around this time of year. I wanted to understand what it meant when, with you, we proclaim on Easter morning, Christ is Risen! I wanted that proclamation to be more than words handed down to me. I wanted to be able to celebrate, with the kind of exuberance that Chalice talked about, this Christ that death could not keep in the tomb. And so, about two years ago I started the journey to discover the Christ of my faith. I found a glimpse of that Christ reading an article in The New Yorker about Richard Rohr and his theology of what he calls the “universal Christ.” Here’s what I read:

More conservative Christians tend to orient their theology around Jesus—his death and resurrection, which made salvation possible for those who believe. Rohr thinks that this focus is misplaced. The universe has existed for thirteen billion years; it couldn’t be, he [Rohr] argues, that God’s loving, salvific relationship with creation began only two thousand years ago, when the historical baby Jesus was placed in the musty hay of a manger, and that it only became widely knowable to humanity around six hundred years ago, when the printing press was invented and Bibles began being mass-produced…Rohr argues that the spirit of Christ is not the same as the person of Jesus. Christ—essentially, God’s love for the world—has existed since the beginning of time, suffuses everything in creation, and has been present in all cultures and civilizations. Jesus is an incarnation of that spirit…But this spirit can also be found through the practices of other religions, like Buddhist meditation, or through communing with nature…This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed.

Finally, someone spoke what I felt but had never been able to articulate. Christ—God’s love for the world—has existed since the beginning of time and Jesus is an incarnation of that spirit. As Rohr writes in his book, The Universal Christ, “The Christ Mystery is the New Testament’s attempt to name [the light]…that occurred on the first day [of creation]…and light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else. Wow! All of a sudden the gospel of John made sense to me:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The light, the love—the Christ—was in the beginning and Jesus became a manifestation of that light and love.

What does Easter mean to me now? It means that since the very beginning of creation the darkness has not and cannot overcome the light and love of God. That’s Easter. That’s the Christ. And the reason this day is so important is that that light and love is still rising in this world today—in doctors and nurses and healthcare workers, in grocery store clerks and food service workers, in sanitation workers and the farmers who put food on our tables, in you and me and us whenever we choose love and forgiveness and humility of spirit. Just as Christ is a universal Christ, so is resurrection universal. The very reason we can trust Jesus’ resurrection “is that we can already see resurrection happening everywhere else.” Rohr writes, “Resurrection is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often looks like death.” If we look, Bryan Lee is right. Love always resurrects itself. It is happening all the time, even now.

What does Easter—this risen Christ—mean in the midst of a death-dealing virus such as COVID-19? Could it mean that we are in a moment of universal resurrection? Could it mean that the universal cosmic Christ that has been with us from the very beginning of creation is still dying SO THAT the Christ light might be reborn and reborn and reborn? Could it mean that in the death of so many loved ones, and in the death of so much of our daily lives and routines, that the resurrection is not just a possibility but a PROMISE to give us new life, rolling away the stones that have kept us closed up in our dark tombs of shallow consumerism and self-interest and political strife? 

The idea of a universal cosmic Christ who was and has been with us since the very beginning of creation—that is God’s love and care for us—has the power to transform our fear into trust, our need for certainty into unexplainable compassion, and stones along the path into possibilities. This Christ—incarnate in the person of Jesus—can transform despair into hope and death into new life. 

What does Easter mean to me? It means that the Christ who has been present since the beginning of creation is still rising. The Christ who rose up in Moses and Esther is the same Christ who rose up in Martin and Rosa. The Christ who rose up in King David and Judge Deborah is the same Christ who rose up Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. The Christ that rose up in those marchers who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 for voting rights is the same Christ who is still rising up in people all over this nation who are fighting for their right to vote and for healthcare for all and environmental justice and and the end of poverty and war. The Christ that spoke through the prophets Micah, Amos and Hosea is the same Christ that is speaking through Imam Abdullah Antepli and Rabbi Lucy Dinner and Rev. William Barber. And the suffering Christ that was present when Jesus was on the cross and the risen Christ who walked out of that tomb is the same Christ that is present with us—in the suffering of the poor and the dispossessed, and in the suffering of this pandemic we face; AND in our rejoicing of this Easter Sunday when we proclaim that life is victorious over death. The visitor at the empty tomb proclaimed: Do not be afraid. Do not fear. The universal, cosmic, risen Christ is with you—from the very beginning of creation to the end of this life and for all eternity. Nothing can ever separate you from God’s love in Christ. Christ is still rising, and light is still shining on a weary world. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.