Easter: The Second Naiveté
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Florrie Arnold, who is four, told her mother that Jesus had 12 best friends but one of them was mean to him. Then the bad guys came and killed Jesus. They felt bad but Jesus said it was OK. The Easter Bunny found Jesus. Jesus came alive again. God loves Jesus. Why was his friend mean to him?
Connie put Florrie on the phone a couple days ago to me and I heard her tell me a lot of this, but it was Chris Arnold yesterday who told me that Florrie has asked that question about Judas a number of times. She's having trouble understanding why a friend would hurt a friend. For us, unfortunately, the Judas and Jesus story, like the Cain and Abel story is the part that is easier to believe.
Can we ever go back to believing like Florrie does-believing that a good God brought his dear son back from the dead to show us that evil does not win in the end? Can we believe that God not only overcomes evil and death, but that Jesus can forgive his betrayer and crucifiers, that it can somehow be made OK?
We know all the counter arguments. We know all the reasons not to believe. We know why faith does not work, why love gives out, why the state of the world is hopeless. There aren't enough healings, there aren't enough prophets, why, there aren't even enough good marriages. We are all living the land of Nod, East of Eden. God seems not in charge, but rather in retreat.
We know why we can't go back to Florrie's view of God who will make it all better. And, if we felt touched by the way Florrie tells the story, doesn't that also prove the point-that the Gospel is a fairy tale that we want to believe but know we can't: it is too good to be true. How can we believe that the image of God goes deeper than the mark of Cain?
Well, because I believe with all my heart and head and gut that the story about Jesus is true, I see a way to regain a second naivete, a second level encounter with the story-after we have gone through the acid bath of doubt and suffering and negation. Friends, there is a deep logic to the resurrection, the logic of the deepest grain, it is a logic combined of child's desire and something greater than adult despair. It is the logic of becoming wise as serpents, and yet chosing the empathy to be gentle as doves. The Easter story is the story of the great second chance, but we can not get there too easily. We must go through the Good Friday of Tenebrae, and this sermon does some of that.
For some people, a sermon should be like a Celine Dion love song, low on specifics, high on cliches and emotion. You know yourselves that hope for a sunny day of faith, especially in an Easter sermon. I remember that hope from my family growing up, when my parents would tell the five of us: today, at least try to look presentable and behave yourselves. Today, can we act like a family together. Today, can you please get along with your cousins... Make it look right. Well, I'm afraid this sermon is not going to be all sweetness and light, but it has resurrection.
You know that it is the power of real belief to contain if not fully to explain the hard things as well as the happy faces. Real belief does not paper over things. The doubts, criticism, anger-we can imagine Judas was pretty angry at Jesus for choosing the wrong path. We know Jesus was furious when he entered the Temple and found it clogged with petty-fogging money changers and priests busy with sacrifices rather than people.
We deal with the opposite context, that many people around us, even if they claim to be spiritual and believe in God, have no idea what goes on in this room, have no idea what is distinctive about Jesus' way (whether it works or not), no idea that our idea of love is based in Jesus' self-giving love-in which we see God's self-giving love. How can we hold onto that vision when to the world around us, military power as the essence of foreign policy, and profit as the soul of the American dream. If the core of the Gospel is NO BULLYING, and the world says, its all bullying, what do we do? We are misfits. But if we follow the story of the prophet Jesus in Jerusalem, we will find that we are not the Romantics, idealists, perpetual Florries.
We come again to a "Florrie-dation" of our faith, but we go first through the hermeneutic of suspicion, the understanding that takes things apart, and tries to explain them away. This is the language of Paul Ricoeur, a French Protestant philosopher, first expressed in a great book on Freud. (I went to a conference on Ricoeur at the University of Chicago two years ago as part of my continuing education, provided by this church. I had the great privilege to meet Ricoeur the day after the conference in the art museum and speak with him in French about Picasso's blue period, which we were both viewing. But I had learned from two Catholic scholars that Ricoeur wrote the book on Freud and philosophy partly to understand why one of his children, a son who was gay, had committed suicide, despite all his family's love and faith and acceptance.) What Ricoeur does in that book, however, after going through all the ways that Freud tried to take apart religion and ritual, trying to reduce it to family patterns and illness, was that he then takes apart Freud. Where Freud tries to prove that religion is finally childish, Ricoeur shows the rebellious child's view of religion in Freud, and through a method of retrieval, he makes way for a parent's view of religion that is also a second innocence, or naivete. This is philosophy to go beyond philosophy.
For most of us do not disbelieve or believe on rational reasons alone. It is rather a matter of how we get through the burned over ground of lost hopes, broken relationships, careers blocked, foetuses miscarried, and worse-robberies, rapes, car accidents... We are the people for whom it is not enough to say, you can get over it, like any grief. Time heals... But it is not a matter of getting over things. It is a matter of getting through them.
The message of Good Friday is that we can never get over the fact that a brave, brilliant, charismatic, story-telling prophet of 33 was tortured to death outside Jerusalem 2000 years ago and it is still happening. If we are going to disbelieve, we have to be clear about the power of evil. Guys in Latin America, guys in China, guys in Israel, guys in Palestine, guys in Iraq, guys in Egypt... they don't nail you to a cross anymore, but they hood your head and strip your body and they stick on the electrodes and they cut you and they burn you and they inject you and if you're a woman... and if you are allowed to live, maybe they throw you into a brutal prison and starve you there, or maybe they throw you back into a despair-filled refugee camp, and maybe your children can work in sweatshops or be a prostitute or a day laborer...
And who cares? There are millions of people like that. We pay other guys like Henry Kissinger or Oliver North or John Negroponte to make deals with the Pilates of the world to keep the lids on. Let's be honest, all of this is controversial. It is in our interest, for our own self-respect as Americans, for our own mental health, to doubt or deny the truth of such suffering. Do we really want to know what causes terrorism? Don't we want the good old us vs. them? Can we dare doubt that military solutions solve things? How can we believe that Jesus rose again from the dead when they are still killing people on the Mount of Olives? So after the places of pain and grief, we are tempted by the empty tomb of cynicism.
Our text in Matthew gives us the reasons to suspect the story-the body was stolen, the resurrection is a bunch of spin (BS), etc. Both the believers and the disbelievers start with the fact of the empty tomb, and before the women get there, we are already told that religious authorities suspected that the body of Jesus would be stolen. We already know how unlikely it was that a condemned criminal would have a wealthy supporter like Joseph of Arimathea to provide him with a tomb at all. And we know the grief and paralysis of the first non-heroic disciples.
Believing again with the second innocence can start where we feel the despair and grief, like on 9/11, but we only move toward faith when we have empathy, to know that 9/11 occurs every day in some parts of the world. If you're a Chechen Muslim, a Pakistani or Coptic Christian, a Sudanese Animist, a little girl in a poor Thai village-you can be a victim and there is no escape. Believing starts when you take the step of solidarity in your heart. That's when the Holy Spirit is moving in your conscience. This is not a guilt trip, but a realization of the immensity of God's suffering in Jesus, and of the joy in God that continues to be greater than all suffering. That is the joy in God that brings Jesus back to life.
Again friends, this is not about the good rational arguments that skeptics can dissect at leisure or pretended detachment. This is making a choice, not to live in a world of self-protective suspicion of other people. What do we do when we realize that our whole life has been risk-adverse? Can we believe in a God who takes risks to reach us? What do we do when we admit, yes, my spouse really is an alcoholic? How hard the work of recovery can be, but God says its worth it. What if your marriage is a bargain that seems exhausted, (when the only passion left is rage or bitterness? Can we imagine a second innocence in our relationships, after the grievances, the hurt, the fears of vulnerability...) Because the stuff about becoming as a child is not just about seeing that God sends us surprises and dreams, and it is not about credulity. It is about vulnerability of acknowledging defenselessness.
Our resurrection stories themselves are unconsciously-or deliberately?-vulnerable. The surprise is there: Behold is used four times in our Matthew passage. The choice of witnesses is an embarrassment always: women, who were kept uneducated and considered little better than children in the ancient world. Those witnesses to the resurrection who took off from seeing the angels and Jesus-those women running full of "fear and great joy," those witnesses could precisely not be witnesses in ancient courts of law. (Yet this is the ring, the sting, the thrill of truth)
In some congregations this morning, the Celine Dion love song is drawing to a close and you know that God loves you and wants you to have marvelous experiences that heal all your wounds. I believe that, too, but it is forgiveness, ultimately God's forgiveness, that heals wounds. I believe that we are more likely to see the resurrection if we go out in the morning to the tomb, if we have taken the steps of empathy and solidarity, even in our own places of weakness. The resurrection is not a neutral thing. We see it when we have first heard the blood of Abel calling from the ground, and now Jesus' blood calling from the ground. And then we see Jesus again, who says to us, I am not my brother's keeper: I am my brother's brother and my sister's brother. And then we know we are Jesus' sister or brother and that Jesus is with us. Amen.
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