I guess I spoke too soon when I put the title of this sermon out there on the internet and on the front of the church. A Letter to the Apostle Paul, Constantine, Fred Phelps and the Rest was the original title that came to me. It's provocative and eye catching. It might have even brought some of you in here this morning. For those who were really waiting for this title, I will give you a short glimpse into what I was going to say. I was prepared to tell Paul how his zeal for God might have lead to several extremist and exclusive traditions. I would have asked Constantine if he knew that Jesus' specific goal was to deconstruct the power structures of the Roman (or any other) Empire and that the cross was a Roman tool of suppressing people who resisted the empire; therefore, it was highly unlikely that it was Jesus who sent him the dream of the cross as a means to conquer the world in the name of the Roman Empire. And as far as Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson, and all the folks like that, I was just going to question which God they actually worshiped and which Bible they read. Because it's slightly different from the one I'm familiar with.
Although I think this might have been a good sermon, I feel the panels and testimonies from the conference this weekend calling me to a different sermon. I feel the need to focus my sermon less on those individuals and more on where the legacy of those movements have left us collectively and individually.
"They have taken away my Lord and I don't know where they have laid him." I first heard this quote used in reference to Spiritual Violence and what the Conservative Right has done to Jesus at a lecture with Obery Hendricks (an author and professor at New York Theological Seminary) and Michael Eric Dyson (an author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania). Dyson in his quick, listen-hard-or-you'll-miss-it way of speaking said, "What the Christian Right has done with Jesus is like it says in the Bible, 'They have taken away my Lord and I don't know where they have laid him.'" The connection he made hit me like a ton of bricks. It was such a powerful image and analogy, especially as I approached this event dedicated to fighting against Spiritual Violence.
I needed to explore further where this quote was situated and when and how they had taken away the Lord and who exactly "they" were and where they had taken him. I found that this exact quote could be found in the midst of the story of the resurrection of Jesus.
After Jesus died, Mary Magdalene, like the other followers of Jesus, was in mourning. Like anyone who's lost an important spiritual and personal figure, she needed to mourn. She needed to visit his tomb and see where his body lay and reflect on ways to heal and move forward. But when she got there, the stone to the grave was pushed aside and Jesus' body was missing from the gravesite.
She had found such incomparable love in Jesus, yet there she stood over an empty tomb. It must have been unbearable to know that he was not only dead but that someone had taken his body away. This was the Lord who had given her the respect that she would never find in her fellow disciples or in history. Whether or not she was a prostitute or if she was Jesus' wife or if she was the only female disciple or a conflation of all woman named Mary (which was everybody in that day), the radical thing was that Jesus respected her and valued her in a way that women were not valued or respected. This man who made her feel like a complete person was now completely gone - no spirit and now no body. They've taken away my Lord and I don't know where they have laid him.
She wept and then went to tell the other disciples that Jesus was gone. She told Simon Peter and "the other disciple," whom Jesus loved, and they immediately went running to the tomb. The other disciple got there first but didn't go in to the tomb. Peter followed and went directly in to investigate and the other eventually followed. They saw that it was empty, that Jesus wasn't there, and they left and went home. The disciples did not understanding that this "they" had not taken Jesus' dead body away, but that Jesus had walked away.
The text says that Peter and the other disciple went home. It seems to me like they felt a little defeated. I think I understand why they did go home; truth be told, I probably would have gone home, too. After all of that sacrifice - they had left their homes and relatively secure lives to follow this man who promised them a place in the Kingdom of God, their vision of which was probably filled with luxury and things that held earthly value - they could have never guessed that their pursuit of the Kingdom would have lead them to an empty tomb. This man who they eventually came to believe was God was now dead and they couldn't even find his body to mourn over it. I would have gone home, too.
But what an amazing and powerful image for those of us who are survivors of Spiritual Violence. We believed in God. We had personal relationships with God. We heard God say to us that regardless of who we are we are loved. So we believed in the sanctity or infallibility of the scripture and the divine position of the priest or minister or the church lady. We counted the church as our second home and the congregation as our family. We sacrificed so much for the church because that is what we believed was the right and righteous. But then the tables turned: we experienced abuse, racism, sexism, and homophobia at the hands of those claiming to represent God. We heard a message from the pulpit that reflected a God we didn't believe in. And like Jesus thousands of year earlier, the spirit of goodness that this institution held for us all of a sudden dies.
We spend time searching for what we lost. We don't remember that promise that God originally gave us; it's hard to remember in the midst of the noise of violence. Some of us are like Simon Peter and the other disciple: when we experience Spiritual Violence, when we first get a glimpse of the emptiness, we react. We run. We run hoping that it is not true. Sometimes, like the other disciple, we go to the door, we go to the website, we go one Sunday. But we cannot go in because in our hearts we know of the emptiness that lurks on the inside. Some of us are like Peter: we are not afraid to go inside and investigate for ourselves. Yet in both cases we end up going home because the emptiness of Spiritual Violence is so unbearable. We just need distance.
Mary didn't go home. She stayed at the empty tomb and cried. She mourned the loss of what was so important to her wholeness. She cried for the loss of her way, her truth and her light. She stayed and cried because she didn't have any other option. She, like the words of the Iyanla Vanzant poem, "cried with an agenda." She cried. She stayed and she cried.
The text says that in the midst of her agenda-filled crying, two angels appeared. They were sitting inside the tomb where the dead body used to be. They said to Mary, "Woman, why are you crying?" Again, her response was the same words that she spoke to Simon Peter and the other: "They've taken away my Lord and I don't know where they've laid him." Then she turns around, and Jesus is standing there. But the problem is she has no idea that it's Jesus. Perhaps because she had gotten used to the idea of searching for a dead body, she had convinced herself not to expect a living entity.
I believe that this is analogous to the way that far too many of us - and not just the survivors of Spiritual Violence - approach the church: with the conviction that Christianity is this stagnant, dead place where God is only a photographic image of a guy who used to be. But Mary turned around and there was Jesus. He wasn't dead. He wasn't an empty vessel. She turns around and there was a very much alive and well Jesus standing there waiting for her to realize who he really was.
Jesus asked Mary why she was crying and who she was looking for. Assuming he was the person who took the body away, she tried to ask for him to bring the body back to her so that she could take it and give Jesus the sort of burial she felt he deserved. But Jesus called Mary by her name. When she heard her name it brought her back to life. It brought Jesus back to life for her. She realized that he was not a person in the garden who had taken her Lord's body away: he was Jesus. He was the one who loved her with a radical love. He is the one who never considered the traditional role of woman and accepted her into his following. If they were married, it was a marriage full of mutuality that was unprecedented in that (or this) era.
This is so powerful for us today as we embark on a journey together to find a way back from Spiritual Violence. As we move forward towards spiritual non-violence, it is important to remember the lessons learned from the Mary's experience.
First of all, even in the midst of apparent desolation, cry! Don't be afraid to express your frustrations with the lack of love or acceptance in church. Don't allow yourself to be silenced, because God is likely behind you.
Secondly, turn around! I think we must turn away from complacencies. We should turn away from accepting the remnants of a human-created God of violence and oppression. We should turn away from letting people take away our Lord. We should turn away from allowing people to die physically and spiritually because they've allowed this false image of God to dominate their lives.
And finally, God knows your name. In spite of what the collective "they" will say, the creator of the universe and your soul does not consider any of His/Her creating to be scraps or leftovers, to be thrown away and/or ignored.
God is concerned about God's creation. God is concerned about the future because God is the future. God is concerned about all of us because God lives within us. With all of the things that the Pauline tradition did to create oppression, there are some truly liberating texts within that tradition. One of my favorites is the end of Romans 8, where it says, "...for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God…"
Ancient Testimony: John 20:13-14
