Easter Sermon

The Kingdom of God

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

March 27, 2005

First Reading: Luke 24:1-12

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel; and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles; but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

Second Reading: Martin Luther King, Jr. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1964.

Let me close by saying that I have the personal faith that mankind will somehow rise up to the occasion and give new directions to an age drifting rapidly to its doom. In spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away, and out of the womb of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened to those at the bottom of society. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are developing a new sense of "some-bodiness" and carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

Sermon

When I graduated from High School I did something that I think was unusual for that time. Not radically unusual, but a little bit. That something a little bit unusual was that I continued attending church when I moved away from home and started college. I don’t think I went every Sunday, but it was a regular habit. I walked across campus and sat in the service at University Methodist Church in Austin, Texas. And I deliberately say I “sat” in the service. I don’t remember any sense of participation, I don’t remember anything significant that was said. I continued my church attendance into my second year of college. Then something happened. A friend in the dorm asked if I wanted to read his copy of The Passover Plot. I said yes, not knowing what the book was about. I soon discovered that it offered an alternative theory to the Easter story. It suggested an elaborate conspiracy about how Jesus faked his death, hence his ability to appear to his disciples after his apparent death. I didn’t think the story believable then and I still don’t. But the story demonstrated a possibility I had never imagined. It was the possibility that what I had been taught in Sunday school wasn’t true. It was the possibility to question what I had taken for granted. That possibility ended my church attendance. After that day I never again attended church except for the occasional funeral or wedding. I believed that for the rest of my life I would never again attend church, much less join one. Well, so much for my ability to predict the future.

My spiritual and religious journey took a lot of turns before I got into this pulpit. I went through simple rejection, to anger, and then to questioning and exploration. My original rejection had been based strictly on the basis of what I thought was a lack of historical accuracy. My movement back to the church eventually led me to look beyond the level of facts and to ask about feelings and motives, to look for answers to deeper questions. Why, for instance, did people come to believe in the resurrection? True or not, what was the human need, the emotional and spiritual need that was fed by such a belief. Those questions led me to have a sense of connection I had not previously experienced with people past and present.

Was the tomb empty? I don’t know. If it was, why was it empty? I don’t know. Does the fact - the fact - that people believed they saw a risen Jesus mean that he actually rose from the dead? I don’t think so. Twenty years of practicing law taught me that there is nothing more unreliable than eye witness testimony. And the lack of evidence - including the lack of a body - proves nothing. All this is, of course, critical for orthodox Christianity which is based on what theologians and logicians alike call a contingent religious outlook. The orthodox understanding of God and of all the Christian doctrines is contingent upon the miracles being true - and in particular contingent upon the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus being true - absolutely, literally true. Any number of Christian theologians and apologists - beginning with the Apostle Paul - have written that if the stories aren’t literally true, then the whole structure of belief collapses like a house of cards. It is why people such as Bishop Spong and the theologian Rudolph Bultmann who questioned the literal historical truth of the resurrection have - from time to time - been personally vilified - not just their ideas have been questioned, but their personal morality and worth as individuals has been attacked for daring to question the unquestionable. It this fixation on the need for death and resurrection that led William Ellery Channing - writing in the early 1800’s - to lament that orthodoxy had “placed a gallows at the center of the universe.” But if we allow ourselves to move beyond the question of a literal death and bodily resurrection is there anything worth discovering? Is there anything that might explain why people would be not just willing, but eager to accept such ideas? Is there something to be discovered if we would withdraw from insisting on affirming or denying the traditional stories?

As I look back on my childhood experience of those stories it seems to me that the constant focus was on death. There was Christmas, of course, but that’s a holiday the church has - historically - found uncomfortable and more often than not something to be rejected. The true center of my childhood faith was Easter with its emphasis on death, an emphasis of which I was reminded every Sunday of the year when I joined in the recitation of the Apostles Creed - a creed that reduces the life of Jesus to a comma and focuses on his death and resurrection. There were, of course, mentions of the life of Jesus and how he was a “nice guy” - but his life was just preparation for death. His life was largely meaningless. But as an adult, as the years passed and I began to move back towards the church, I discovered something. First, in my dogmatic rejection of the dogmas of my youth I was still being controlled by those childhood dogmas. Second, by finally seeking to understand the life of Jesus - instead of just his death - I discovered there was reason for people to want, to desperately want, to believe that this man, of all men, might be resurrected from the dead.

Despite all the movies that glorify suffering and all the popular books about raptures and the apocalypse the heart and soul of Jesus the man was quite different. His ministry was a broken record. He had one sermon. He kept repeating it over and over again. It didn’t matter where he was or who his audience might be, it was always the same message. He had a few variations, but they weren’t significant. His story was one that resonated with his audience - an audience of rural peasants, the poorest of the poor. People who knew what it was to suffer - not as an abstract idea, but as a daily reality. They didn’t need reality shows like Fear Factor to put them into horrible situations. Fear was a daily fact of life: fear of starvation; fear of injustice; fear of death from the hands of the Roman Empire. The message he offered was one that spoke of a world where no one went hungry. The message he offered was one where justice would roll down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing spring just as the prophets had predicted. It was a world where - by sly insinuation - even the mighty Roman empire would be vanquished. It was - to use the phrase he loved so much - a world not ruled by Rome, not a world of the Empire of Rome, but a world of the Kingdom of God. It was, and is, a thoroughly Jewish understanding of the world, an understanding premised on the great gift of the Jews to the world, the gift of the idea that God loves justice and God acts in the world towards that end. I believe any peasant, slave or ordinary citizen of the Roman world would have wanted that vision of the world to be true - and they would want the man who preached that message to be alive. And it is a message that persists in slipping past the creeds and dogmas of orthodoxy, no matter how often the creeds and dogmas are repeated.

The heart of the message Jesus taught was a radical romanticism. It was an idealistic belief that a perfect world was possible. It is an idea that has captivated people in all times and in all cultures - whether or not they have ever heard of Christianity, whether or not they believe in God. It is an idea that dies with every act of injustice. It died with the death of Jesus. It died with every pogrom of the middle ages. It died in the Inquisition. It died in the crusades, it died in the holocaust. But every time it dies it is miraculously resurrected - although sometimes under different names. One of those resurrections took place with Josiah Royce, the American philosopher who championed romantic idealism. He looked at the story of Jesus and saw not a reason to create creeds and dogmas, but a reason to create community - but not just any old community. He saw in the message of Jesus a way for individuals to be connected with one another. He saw, in his words,

[a] community where love and justice rule in a community of unique distinct individuals who are loved for who they are in a plurality of their circumstances. Yet, they share a common memory and future. It is a community of interpretation where our stories, context and future hope have meaning and inspires hope and each individual is assured that they are loved. (The Problem With Christianity, Josiah Royce)

And he had a name for this kind of community. He called it the beloved community. But his beloved community was neither more nor less than the Kingdom of God that Jesus imagined.

The Kingdom of God also perished when Africans were enslaved and brought to this country. It was resurrected with abolition and then died again when Jim Crow became the law of the land. And then it was resurrected in the Civil Rights movement, resurrected in the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. who had read Royce and recognized in Royce’s beloved community the presence of the Kingdom of God. King picked up the language of Royce and used it over and over again as part of the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement. And then, with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., it died again only to be resurrected in our memory of what Dr. King had done and said - in this instance through these words from his acceptance speech for the Noble Prize:

Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

Dr. King’s words, written in 1964, sound like they are addressing about the events of today. They sound like our current national political situation, the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq and the heart rending story out of Florida. But “In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.” That’s because the resurrection event of Easter was not the resurrection of the body. The body of every man and woman is perishable. All of us are dying, all of us will die. But there is something that doesn’t die, and that something is a matter of the heart. It is the longing of men and women in every age for justice. It is the longing of men and women in every age for “...a community where love and justice rule. . .,” a community where every person is “loved for who they are. . .,” a community in which “each individual is assured that they are loved.”

Jesus never created such a community. He only preached its possibility. The contribution of the early church was the attempt to create a community based on his wildly romantic notions. And in many ways they did so. What eventually became the symbolic meal called the Eucharist began as the Love Feast, a kind of potluck supper, not unlike our potluck breakfast this morning. It was a way of saying that today no one goes hungry, no one starves - an extraordinary message in a world where starvation was common. And those early communities did something else. They cared for one another. They raised money and cared for the sick and those in need. There were many aspects of the early house churches that shocked their contemporaries, but none more so than this. The rest of the world couldn’t understand why the followers of Jesus would care for others.

Eventually, of course, the creeds and dogmas came to dominate. But the radical ideas of Jesus continue to be resurrected. You can see them in the Iron Gate Ministry of Trinity Episcopal Church that feeds hundreds of homeless people every day. You can see them in the wonderful work done by Catholic charities, one of the finest religious based charities in the world. And you can see it our own Feed the Homeless Program - which directly benefits from our plate offering this morning - and our Christmas family program.

The Kingdom of God dies with every act of injustice and every act of hatred. But it is resurrected with every act of kindness. It is resurrected every time people gather together and say we will form a beloved community, “...a community where love and justice rule. . .,” a community where every person is “loved for who they are. . .,” a community in which “each individual is assured that they are loved.” That’s what our church is supposed to be. Our search for truth - our commitment to sharing love - is nothing less than a wild and romantic idealism that says the Kingdom of God, the Beloved Community lives again. Do we fail from time to time? Yes. And when we fail it dies. But it is always resurrected again. That’s why I have come to believe in Easter. Not an Easter of creeds and dogmas, but the Easter of a ridiculous and impossible idea, an idea that is eternal, the idea that “In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men [and women].” Amen.