“For Jesus to stand to His full height, He had to leave the small, dark place of the tomb. For us to rise to our full stature, we must leave the small, dark places of life. We must leave the many and various tombs of this earthly life, and find our way to the broad, open and light-filled places.” – Br. Mark Brown, Society of Saint John the Evangelist
Good Friday, Easter, & Living in the Tension
The following is a sermon I gave at the Easter Vigil, a joint service for St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, St John on the Mountain Episcopal Church in Bernardsville, & St Bernards Episcopal Church in Bernards, NJ. It was held in the barn at The Ross Farm in Basking Ridge. This sermon was almost exactly one liturgical year in the making.
Allelulia! He Is Risen! And we are here to celebrate.
Easter is my favorite day of year. Resurrection. Life. Light. Flowers blooming. Miracles. Hope that wasn’t in vain. The knowledge that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up or deeply you’ve grieved, Jesus is RISEN, and promises us that in our baptism we’ll be risen too. We are a resurrection people. After all of the grief of Good Friday. The weeping. The tears of mourning have been shed and the font is about to be filled with the same waters from which God called forth swarms of living creatures. We are a resurrection people.
And as Episcopalians, we are also a liturgical people. We divide the many lessons our Bible teaches us into a calendar we repeat year after year. To get to Easter – the beautiful 50 days of love and light and hope come to fruition in the miracle of the resurrection – to get here – takes 40 days of Lent, culminating in this journey through Holy Week that our communities have shared together.
Still in seminary, my liturgical formation – a vast amount of which I attribute to my liturgics professor blessed Fr. Pat Malloy, who has become the voice of my inner, liturgical, Jiminy Cricket – My liturgical formation has made me more deeply aware of the richness of our liturgical calendar than I had been before I started this journey. One particularly poignant learning moment occurred just one liturgical year ago.
Last Easter, I experienced the miracle of the resurrection with the church I was interning at in Brooklyn, and since I was not able to make it home across the Hudson to my family afterwards, that evening, I broke bread at Easter supper with friends who had become family near my home at my seminary in Manhattan. Love. Life, Joy, Resurrection. Easter blooming new life.
But my joy at this moment in our liturgical year was harder to carry forward into those 50 days than it had been in the past. Easter Monday should have been a mixture of riding the wave of the momentum of Easter joy and a respite from a whirlwind of liturgical adventures. When I woke up Easter morning, slow to rise on my much-earned day off, I picked up my phone before I could even pick up my head and the first thing I saw was a message about my friend Ty, a young woman I shared a house with during my year in South Africa, a country where two oceans meet, our shared home nurtured a friendship that deeply intertwined a handful of those of us living there into a family. At 23, on Easter Monday, Ty had died. She had joined in the resurrection I had just experienced the day before, but I was not in Easter with Ty, I suddenly found myself back in the midst of the grief of Good Friday. Couldn’t I carry the miracle of the resurrection out into the world for one whole day? We just retold the story of the Lord dividing the Red Sea to guide the Israelites to safety, but suddenly my grief made me feel as if I was drowning with the Egyptians who dared pursue them. Walls of water tumbling down around me, too.
Today’s gospel passage brings us to dawn on the first day of the week after the nightmare of Good Friday. The women who watched the crucifixion of their lord and Savior have learned enough about breathing again to go to the tomb of the savior with the spices they had prepared for the ritual that follows death to prepare to say goodbye to the body of their savior. Their companion of the journey who had taught them so much. Someone who they loved. On this lonely morning after the climax of their grief they found themselves at the tomb, only the stone was rolled away and now instead of facing the cold body they’d been preparing themselves to see all that was there was an empty tomb. Suddenly darker than they’d imagine. And The weight of the unknown had multiplied. They were in the space between Good Friday and the miracle of the resurrection we celebrate this night.
Lent. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. On our liturgical calendar we quantify and measure when these days will come each year. We can control them in our measure of time, in a way we can’t in our day-to-day lives: the soul-filling joys and ecstasies of grief we cannot predict or that fall outside of our liturgical schedule. The Easter of the birth of a new life – or miracle that one was able to preserved against all odds – and the Good Fridays that catch us off guard – the valleys of nothing but dry bones that we somehow stumble through, struggling to find our way. Fighting to see through bleary tear-filled eyes.
Lent is NOT a season where we endure giving up chocolate chip cookies for 40 days out of our calendar year. Lent is the wilderness we get lost in when we least expect it. The storm that unexpectedly rolls our way in the midst of relatively smooth sailing. The darkness that encroaches on what we thought was a well lite path. The telephone call at an unexpected hour to let us know that the rules we’ve been playing by this whole time no longer apply and that leaves us wondering if we’ll ever be back in the game again. During moments like these, the Good Fridays of our own lives can take much longer than one calendar day – much like we often speculate the creation narrative to in the face of modern science.
And even when our eyes clear of the tears that cloud our vision and our legs learn to stand, there’s still a space between standing and being able to move forward into Easter morning.
The women in today’s Gospel reading are in that space between. Waiting in that tomb, fighting the fear and the grief they’ve been fighting since the crucifixion that they’ve had to fight every step – every breath – of the way to even this far. Wanting so deeply to move forward in their grief but not knowing what to do yet. No light to guide their way.
The space between.
In the beginning, the earth was dark and formless too, but then a wind from God swept over the face of the water and from the dark, empty space and deep, surging seas, God said, “Let there be light” and so began the seven days of creation that filled the space with life that God called good.
While the lamentations of the prophets and the power of the passion we heard last night and last Sunday retell the story of my grief in the Biblical stories of our salvation, there is one more non-canonical text that has been a supplementary map to the many unscheduled Lents that I’ve encountered in the past seven-and-a-half years: it’s the Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love. In the midst of many beautiful moments about navigating Lent in our lives outside of worship, there’s one moment that I carry around more than most of the others that resonates with today’s gospel passage. At this particular moment, Gilbert is grieving her divorce and her great lost love at an ashram in India. She is longing for God but her worship is impaired by the immensity of the grief that weighs upon her over the end of her marriage. At this particular moment she is conversing with a dear friend who she refers to as “Richard from Texas” and as Gilbert conveys her struggle to move forward after all of this time, Richard says to her:
“[You say you miss him?] So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him and then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of him because then you’ll really be alone, and you’re scared to death of what will happen if you’re really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, if you clear out all this space in your mind that you’re using right now … you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And what the universe will do with that doorway: It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop [blocking] that door.”
When the women arrived at the tomb on Easter morning, the stone was gone, rolled away, no longer blocking the entrance to the tomb, and when they walked in, the tomb was empty, and for all the grief and fear and confusion they could fill it with in the space between when they saw where the body was no longer laid and when the angels spoke, the angels did appear, dazzling, next to them to tell them “He is not here! He is RISEN!”
This is the miracle we celebrate now at Easter., Easter is the season in our liturgical year that we celebrate the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and eternal life and a great, beautiful moment of joy but it’s joy is greater than its annual place in our liturgical calendar. For me, the joy in this day is that it is bigger than this day. This moment represents the timeless the triumph of eternal life of Christ’s resurrection, the promises made for us in our baptism. And there’s more. Easter is a reaffirmation of surviving all the Lents and Good Fridays that happen in our lives outside the liturgical calendar –that are measured in late night phone calls and moments when the water rose too fast and too quickly. Easter isn’t just about the glory of the past 40 days of adorning our altar in purple and not saying Allelulia – Easter is the resurrection we’ve shared with Christ every time we overcame the heaviness of our broken hearts and kept moving forward. Easter is being able to get up Sunday morning after very nearly wishing we’d died too on those Good Fridays that dragged on and on beyond the safe confines of the few hours allocated on our liturgical calendar. The joy of Easter is what happens what the waters of grief recede and the spirit of God rushes across the receding waters to fill the weeping shores with the love and light and the miracles of the resurrection. The rebirth we experience in the waters of baptism – enduring heartbreak we thought might drown us to be cleansed and called forth from the waters into new life as we read about in Genesis. This is why we have water to be thankful for in Easter.
Allelulia. He is risen. And we are here to celebrate.
***The Easter Vigil at Ross Farm***Penal Substitution, the Convict Christ, & Rising Again
Our discussions of atonement this semester have centered around the four major atonement theories: ransom, satisfaction, moral influence, and penal substitution.
Some Basics of Penal Substitution
Penal substitution centers around the idea that Christ died on the cross as a substitute for our sins. God transferred the guilt of our sins to Christ, and Christ bore the punishment that we deserved, in the crucifixion. Penal substitution sees the entire human race as criminals, relying on Christ to be innocent and cleansed from sin.
Under penal substitution, Christ’s purpose was to bring order. This theory is a product of the Reformation. Penal substitution is a response to a culture that focused and the law and a need for order in a time of political and social upheaval. Anselm’s Satisfaction theory seemed like too much of a commercial transaction.
Some key theologians in discussions of penal substitution include Martin Luther, John Calvin, Faustus Socinus[1], and Hugo Grotius. Luther wrote:
“He sent his Son in to the world, heaped up all the sins of all upon him and said to him …You be the person of all people, the one who has committed the sins of all people…Now the law comes along and says I find that sinner taking on himself the sin of all people; I see no other sins but those in him. So let him die on the cross! And so it attacks him and kills him. This done, the whole world is purged of all sin.” [2]
It’s very “an eye for an eye.”[3] A crime was committed. The law looks for someone to carry the punishment, and since all of that sin was transferred to Christ, Christ dies for our sins. In case that legalism isn’t depressing enough, John Calvin’s penal substitution musings recall that Christ had to die for our sins so that we might escape “God’s dreadful judgement.”[4] Ouch. I experience God as merciful, gracious, and patient; and I preach, teach, and live accordingly. “Dreadful judgement” sounds like something that happens in a bad religious horror movie or how people justify loving their neighbors in a way that has rules and conditions… Anyway…
Arguments Against Penal Substitution
Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) wrote a book questioning many theories atonement but focused most pointedly on penal substitution. He didn’t understand why God couldn’t simply forgive sins and why God would insist on punishing the guilty party: “There is no creditor who, according to the strict letter of the law, is not able to forgive his debtors part of the debt or the whole debt, having received no satisfaction.”[5] Socinus saw substitution as unjust. He further supported this argument by citing scripture passages: “Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent – the Lord detests them both.”[6]
Jens Soering’s The Convict Christ
Jen Soering’s book talks about Jesus’ dying as convicted felon, driving the point home with phrases such as “capital punishment” and “common criminal.” Soering doesn’t let the reader comfortably separate Christ dying on the cross for our sins and sin that is the brokenness of our criminal justice system. When God decided to make Godself vulnerable in human flesh, he did so as a death row inmate. The author is Christ-like himself in his counter-cultural challenge to acknowledge our sins and where we might be disowning Christ by not loving him in “the least” of our own as we’re called to in Matthew 25:36-40.[7]
“To see Christ’s self-sacrificial death as the ultimate expression of love is comfortable and familiar – though not especially challenging, since none of us really expect to have to give our own lives for our brothers [and sisters]. But to see Jesus’ execution as the sum and substance of evil is strange and unsettling, since it calls into question our own criminal justice system. For how can we justify using police and court procedures today that are virtually identical to those used to prosecute Christ two thousand years ago?”[8]
Here are some depressing facts[9] to drive Soering’s point home:
- The U.S. imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.
- The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners.
- The total incarcerated population in the U.S. is a staggering 2.4 million — a 500% increase over the past 30 years.
- At the end of 2007, 1 in 31 adults was behind bars, on probation or on parole.
- Parole violators accounted for more than 35% of all prison admissions in 2000. Of those, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; the rest were returned for a technical violation, such as missing a meeting with the parole officer.
- A first-time drug offense carries a sentence of 5-10 years. In other developed countries, that sentence would be six months of jail time, if any at all.
- African-Americans comprised 12% of regular drug users, but almost 40% of those arrested for drug offenses.
- Conservative estimates put innocent people who plead guilty between 2% and 5%, which translates to tens of thousands of innocent people behind bars today.
‘Cause let’s be real here. The Church has this terrible history of blaming Jews for the crucifixion. That’s the real “dreadful judgement:” our own hypocrisy.
One of my most embarrassing moments in South Africa involved coming home from work on May 2, 2011 and having to assure my housemates that not every American was standing in the streets cheering over the death of another human being, even one who had committed such unfathomable atrocities.
It’s quite a counter-cultural charge we’ve got here: preaching the gospel against the law, only to be convicted and punished to save the community you’re fighting for.
Who would dare spend their whole life preaching the gospel against the law, only to be convicted and punished to save others?
Wait a second… Didn’t I just hear about that somewhere? Maybe some traveling I did recently?
“Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.” – Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
In my adventures on the other side of the world (specifically: South Africa), I received stories of the fight for justice. The men and women of the anti-apartheid movement risked their lives in the dangerous fight for equality, humanity, and dignity for their brothers and sisters and children. Fr. Michael Lapsley brilliantly summed up the necessity of the anti-apartheid movement, when we met him, saying “Apartheid was a way of death carried out in contrary to the Gospel of Life.”[10]
Nelson Mandela is a particularly powerful example of someone who lived his whole life preaching the gospel against the law, only to be convicted like a criminal. Just like Jesus!
Each in their own way, they both rose again.
[1] Seriously? How cool of a name is “Faustus Socinus”!?! Maybe I just like it because it sounds like the kind of name a character on The Ghost of Faffner Hall would’ve had…
[2] Table Talk
[3] Exodus 21:24
[4] John Calvin’s Institutes 2:16:5
[5] Atonement YouTube Dictionary of Theology 1
[6] Proverbs 17:1
[7] “I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’”
[8] Jens Söring, The Convict Christ: What the Gospel Says About Criminal Justice (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, ©2006), 3.
[9] The hard truth: “19 Actual Statistics About America’s Prison System”
[10] January 11, 2016
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Wilson
(This quote is often attributed to Nelson Mandela, who used it in his inauguration speech)
Introduction: Storytelling, Atonement, South Africa, and Re-learning to Love the Blog
Why am I doing this?
When I was a little girl, I used to write stories for fun. I had this video game with a cartoon bookworm named Wiggins, who lived in a tree, and I would write stories to fill the branches. As my stories and I grew, the tree grew. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the jingle that played at the beginning of the game. It’s so obscure that I cannot find it on YouTube!
Back then, I knew far more about the worlds I was imagining than about the one I was living in. All the Star Trek: The Next Generation I watched (for as long as I can remember) instilled in me a sense of endless possibility, continual crossing of horizon lines, and humanity being capable of bettering itself. I think believing the best in a people is a good quality to have for a soon-to-be Episcopal priest.
Now that I’ve been existing on this planet for a while (on my good days, “existing” can even be considered “adulting”), I have more stories in my heart than just the ones I imagine, both ones I’ve lived and ones that have been entrusted to me along the way. When my professor, the Rev. Dr. Michael Battle, asked me to articulate my greatest passion, I told him that it is storytelling. The priest I grew up with, The Rev. Dr. Ken Gorman, preached a powerful last sermon in which he talked about how we all have a piece of the Divine within us. Furthermore, when we make ourselves vulnerable, we not only reveal that bit of Christ in ourselves, but we invite others to do the same. Telling out stories – our deep truths and our journeys – and receiving the stories of others is how we encounter Christ in each other. It’s how we build bridges across the gaps between us. It’s where we laid our own chief cornerstone in the stories of Abraham, Moses, Esther, Paul, and Jesus.
Currently, I’m in my last semester at General Seminary, and as I get ready to graduate, I’m taking two classes that include a social media project, storytelling and reflecting on both the theology of atonement, which I’m taking a course in, and a pilgrimage course to South Africa.
In January, I went to South Africa with a group of students, alumni, and a board member led by the Rev. Dr. Michael Battle and his South African colleague, the Rev. Edwin Arrison. Our week-long journey, entitled “A Walk with Desmond Tutu,” involved lots of traveling and lots of listening. We broke bread with powerful voices in the Anglican Church today and the anti-apartheid movement from years ago, including Fr. Michael Lapsley; the Rev. Rene August; John Allen, Desmond Tutu’s biographer; Professor John de Gruchy; the Very Rev. Michael Weeder, Dean of St. George’s Cathedral; Nomfundo Walaza; students in the #feesmustfall movement and more. We visited Robben Island; the District Six Museum; Volmoed, a retreat center near Hermanus; Zwelihle, a township in Hermanus; a farm in Stellenbosch; the University of the Western Cape; Stellenbosch University; and St. George’s Cathedral. Our journey culminated in having breakfast with Archbishop Tutu himself. It was an amazing adventure! Exiting the “bubble” of the United States offers the chance to gain perspective, both on how our culture looks from afar and how my own life looks, when I step back from it. If you’ve ever seen Monet’s water lilies, then you know that if you stand too close, it can look like nothing more than big blobs of paint. It’s when you step away and take some space that you see that that “blob” is a flower, and it’s surrounded by other flowers, with a whole lot more going on than you can see up close.
“A Walk with Desmond Tutu” – January 2016
This adventure to South Africa was not my first one, but my first trip is the one that taught me I needed to go back. My second trip taught me going back once is not enough. For my first trip, I was a Young Adult Service Corps missionary, sent by the Episcopal Church. My stories surrounded three pillars. First, I lived at the Anglican Society House (“AnHouse”) at the University of Cape Town and journeyed with my thirteen housemates in daily life and adventures. Second, I commuted (by train and public taxi) to Cape Town proper a couple of times a week to work in the main office for the Anglican Student Federation (ASF), the student network for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Here, I got to know the amazing student leaders who make God’s work extend across the province with very little resources. Finally, while I didn’t explicitly work at Hope Africa (Amanda Akes did), the staff there were my people, too. ❤
***Highlights of the Good Life***
August 2010- August 2011
With this foundation, I hope to talk about what I’m starting to learn about atonement as well as unpack some of my reflections from my adventures in South Africa.
atonement:
the reconciliation of God and humankind through Jesus Chris
On the usefulness of nonviolent resistance…
When someone asks me about nonviolent resistant, so many powerful events and people twentieth century history come to mind from Gandhi’s hunger strikes to Martin Luther King Jr, the Civil Rights movement, and sit in’s. These events paved the way for so many of the peaceful marches in Fall 2014 following the shooting of Michael Brown. When I think this way, I’m reflecting on nonviolence in a cultural and literal way, but what does nonviolence mean in a Christian context?
Throughout scripture, we are reminded that our thoughts can lead us to sin even if they are not all realized into action. For instance, in the Epistle of James, James writes: “But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.”[1] The violent action of sin is preceded by the thought that tempts us, angers us, or preys upon our fears. If sin precedes action in the form of a thought, then when does violence begin? Does it start before one draws back one’s arm to strike? According to James, yes it does! It all starts with desire, an emotional response that is poorly handled. It’s a timeless story well-told both in scripture and a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
For how highly our culture values the canon of Star Wars and the heroics of the Jedi, it is really quiet amazing how little we mind our thoughts relative to our actions. After all, the best existing paraphrase of James 1:14-15 is one of the most quoted lines from the wisdom of Master Yoda; “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to the Dark Side.”[2] The Dark Side: while it may be nothing more than a different point on the same spectrum from which the Jedi gain their power, the Dark Side is where that power is used without restraint or fear of consequence for how it affects others. Among the Jedi, collaborative leadership governs a hierarchical system in which the community of Jedi mentor each other in mastery of power but also mindfulness of thoughts. The thoughts they mind are not just violent ones from flaring tempers, but the seeds that grow those thoughts. Yoda cites anger as starting in fear. Throughout the episodes 1-3 of Star Wars, we hear the Jedi caution each other, and especially the protagonist-turned-antagonist-turned-protagonist Anakin, to be mindful of their thoughts. At the end of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, it is Anakin’s fear of losing his wife, Padme, that causes him to give into the Dark Side, the temptation to use his knowledge of the force without restraint. He forsakes all he once held sacred because of a fear and countless Jedi and others die as a result, many, including Padme, die because of Anakin’s reckless thoughts run rampant and Anakin’s disregard of his fellow disciple Yoda’s advice, cautioning him of the danger within his fear of loss.
The Jedi mindfulness of thought is at the heart of their order, in which they focus on peace, seeking a diplomatic solution before drawing their swords. [I probably could have also writing about them in my paper on whether there is such a thing as a just war]. Living by their code as demonstrated in the Star Wars movies can help one live into James’s caution to be mindful of our desires and to give us the strength of resolve protestors had decades ago, when they dared to sit at the Other End of a counter and not strike back at the hateful acts of those around them.
[1] James 1:14-15 NRSV
[2] Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, directed by George Lucas (Lucasfilm, 1999), DVD (20th Century Fox, 1999).
Ann Kathryne Urinoski 