by The Reverend Dr. Craig Lemming
Click here to watch the recording on YouTube.
In the name of the Triune God who is reborn endlessly in love. Amen.
Happy Easter! Last year’s Easter Vigil sermon ended with a Diana Ross dance break at the Peace. There was also a temporary copyright infringement on our YouTube livestream that was eventually lifted. Thank you, Diana Ross. This year’s sharing of The Peace will involve a different disco dance break. So stay tuned and prepare yourselves, in mind, body, and spirit, to shimmy out of the tomb together as the risen Body of Christ! Before we shimmy, however, it is very meet, right, and our bounded duty to reflect upon the Holy Scriptures. Tonight we are in that sacred, liminal, threshold, in-between the horror of God’s Love crucified and the bliss of God’s Love resurrected. Ancient, sacred stories rekindle the vigil fire of God’s love. So, we begin by drawing near to that love in God’s Holy Word.
The Lesson from Genesis teaches us that God calls Creation out of chaos into a beloved community that includes all creatures and all peoples. We are Created to be God’s family. The Lesson from Exodus teaches us that God calls all creatures and all peoples out of exploitation, enslavement, and extermination into freedom so that we can free others. We are liberated to be God’s liberating family. The Lesson from the Prophet Ezekiel teaches us that God removes our hearts of stone and puts God’s very Spirit in our hearts of flesh. We are rehumanized by God’s Love to be God’s beloved family together. We are freely created, liberated, and rehumanized to be God’s family in the midst of violent, colonial projects of destruction, enslavement, and dehumanization. Choosing to create, liberate, and rehumanize our world together involves adopting one another as siblings. Suffering alone is agony. Suffering with chosen family is Holy Wisdom.
Moments ago, we concluded The Rite of Holy Baptism by saying: “We receive you into the household of God.” God’s household transcends and transforms the meaning of family. God’s household is not biological. God’s household is a gift, choice, commitment, and practice. Restoring the interdependent relationships between God, humankind, and Creation that colonial empires seek to destroy, requires us to see one another and to treat one another as loving siblings, aunties, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and niblings. Receiving and offering God’s gift of Chosen Family is what it means to be fully alive as the Body of Christ. Aliveness in Christ means welcoming and being welcomed into the household of God. Aliveness in Christ means receiving and being received as members of God’s beloved family. To love and to be loved with all of our quirks, gifts, and difficult-to-love imperfections. How do we receive and offer this aliveness in Christ to one another and to all people in the face of today’s fascist, colonial divisiveness, evil, death, and destruction?
We can do what the Holy Women in tonight’s Gospel did. The Gospel women and the women who have accompanied us throughout the season of Lent did not fight, flee, freeze, or fawn in the face of demonic, colonial evil. Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, the Prophet Miriam, Saint Brigid of Kildare, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Day, and Ruby Bridges teach us three practices for how to live fully as God’s family: 1. Practice Sabbath rest and recreation; 2. Speak joyful truth to the emotionally unintelligent; and 3. Go and find Jesus in the Galilees of society.
First, the Holy Women teach us that Sabbath rest and recreation are resistance. Colonizers are dedicated to keeping us over-worked, exhausted, confused, distracted, and hateful. We cannot be fabulously alive and loving if we are not defiantly disciplined keepers of Sabbath rest and recreation. As we heard in the Gospel, “After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.” We cannot tend to the hard work of loving and caring for lives that have been devastated if we ourselves are not practicing restorative Sabbath rest and renewal.
Next, the Holy Women teach us how to speak the joyful truth in love even when we feel afraid. We must ensure that women on the margins of dominant culture, who have survived the horrors of coloniality, can speak joyful truth in love, especially in the face of man-babies who are terrified of love and truth. Marginalized women have been proclaiming the joyful and life-giving Gospel truth for centuries. It’s time for us to listen to Black and Brown women who have resisted coloniality by creating kinship across lines of gender, race, class, and culture. As Mary Magdalene and the other Mary approach the tomb, we read that “an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone… For fear of the angel the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ … So the women left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” Like the Gospel women, we too can speak the joyful truth in love even when we are afraid.
Lastly, the Holy Women teach us that we need to go and find Jesus in the Galilees of society. As we heard in the Gospel, “Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And the women came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” Why Galilee? God’s Love incarnate, crucified and risen, is always scandalous. For the scandal of God’s Incarnation to mean anything at all, Mexican theologian Virgilio Elizondo teaches that it is essential that Jesus comes from and returns to a particular place: Nazareth in Galilee. Elizondo writes,
To be a Galilean Jew classified one as an outsider in many respects — geographically, socially, culturally, linguistically, and religiously. Galilee was a region where people of mixed origins lived; an economically marginalized region separated from the center of power in Jerusalem; a region known not only for its distinctive dialect but also associated with ignorance of the religious law and laxity in observing Jewish religious customs and ceremonies[…] The Galilean identity of Jesus concretizes the scandalous meaning of the Incarnation[…] In Jesus, “God becomes not just a human being, but the marginated, shamed, and rejected of the world.”1
We can choose to be God’s creative, loving, and liberating family, by practicing what the Holy Women in the Gospel teach us to do. Practice Sabbath rest and recreation as resistance. Speak the joyful truth in love, especially to those who are afraid of love and afraid of the truth. And lastly, follow Jesus in the Galilees of society with those who have been excluded, shamed, and rejected because of their gender, race, class, or culture. We can start practicing being God’s family tonight. Disco can help us to practice rest and recreation, to speak or sing the joyful truth in love, and to live in solidarity with people of all genders, races, classes, and cultures. By choosing God’s love, we are a family. So, let’s dance, sing, and be God’s family together. Rising in body or in Spirit: The Peace of the Risen Christ be always with you! Let us offer one another a sign of God’s peace. Amen.
- Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, third ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 221. ↩︎
