Easter moves us from Friday to Sunday, from death to new life.
Friday, in Christian reckoning, is a null-point wherein the power of God is defeated by the empire of force. But the church has found in that Friday shut-down the transformative work of God.
It is a Friday truth that suffering love has transformative power that the “executioners” never suspect. What I mean to say that it is the act of crucifixion of power that really show who Jesus is. It was not until the Church Lied on Jesus that The State was able to crucify him, it was not until the Good Jews on the time of Jesus who went to church and kept the Passover and prayed the prayers decided to conspire with the cradle to prison pipeline that morality and legality got mixed up.
Sunday follows Friday.
Sunday—Easter Sunday and all of the Easter Sundays to follow—exhibits the transformative power of God’s new life in the world. Yes I know we have come this morning to get our Easter Shout on, But the Challenge is that Easter is not all fun and Games that there is Pain in the middle of the Celebration. I tell you we need to think of Easter as more of a funeral celebration of Life then a Christmas Pageant.
We cannot escape the particularity of that surprise in that ancient moment when the Nails are pressed in to the hands and feet of the Savior, We can not escape the pain of seeing the salvation of the world lynched on a cross.
Let me see if I can explain, In the 1630s English Puritans represented their journey across the Atlantic to America as the exodus of a New Israel out of Old World slavery into a promised land of milk and honey. And through the centuries, the story Thanksgiving Story of the American Israel would serve as our nation’s most powerful and long-lasting myth.
But to black Americans the nation was not a New Israel but the old Egypt, condemned to sure destruction unless she let God’s people go.
The existence of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and racism contradicted the mythic identity of Americans as a chosen people. I
African-American Christianity has continuously confronted the nation with troubling questions about American exceptionalism.
Perhaps the most troubling was this: “If Christ came as the Suffering Servant, who resembled Him more, the master or the slave?”
Suffering-slave Christianity stood as a prophetic condemnation of America’s obsession with power, status, and possessions. African-American Christians perceived in American exceptionalism a dangerous tendency to turn the nation into an idol and Christianity into a clan religion.
In other words, it was clear that the Pain of Slavery and its legacy was to much to allow any real celebration. Any time someone tried to celebrate the Easter time of the American Society, there would be someone to remind him or her of the Good Friday of our Journey now. I challenged you that you can’t have Easter in any form without the recall of Good Friday.
Divine election brings not preeminence, elevation, and glory, but—as black Christians know all too well—humiliation, suffering, and rejection.
Chosenness, as reflected in the life of Jesus, led to a cross. Led to Good Friday and death, and the Pain of the Cross. Yes no matter how you look at it, to follow Christ hurts at the deepest levels and to be a community that follows Christ is to be in a state of Pain.
The lives of his disciples have been signed with that cross.
To be chosen, in this perspective, means joining company not with the powerful and the rich but with those who suffer: the outcast, the poor, and the despised.
In the world, but not of the world. These words capture the relationship of the Church to human society and culture. On the one hand, the incarnational character (Christ ness) of the Church establishes her in history, in this particular time and place and culture. On the other, the sacramental character ( the Cross) of the Church transcends time and space, making present another world, the kingdom of God, which is both here and now and yet still to come.
Because we are “not of the world,” Christians stand against culture when the values and behaviors of the culture contradict the living tradition of the Church. The Church has to take on the responsibility of the cross.
One key example can be seen in the life and ministry of Martin Luther King Jr.
King's firm insistence that the Christian church should participate in civil rights activities set him apart from politically conservative scriptural fundamentalists.
In 1940, he revealed his commitment to social gospel Christianity in an address on "the true mission of the Church" delivered to the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association:
Quite often we say the church has no place in politics, forgetting the words of the Lord, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath [anointed] me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised."
... God hasten the time when every minister will become a registered voter and a part of every movement for the betterment of our people. Again and again has it been said we cannot lead where we do not go, and we cannot teach what we do not know.
As ministers a great responsibility rests upon us as leaders. We can not expect our people to register and become citizens until we as leaders set the standard.
With the Celebration of Easter God’s power for life is always again being given in a world tempted to settle for deathliness.
Death on Easter is the power of death that leads to hostility toward neighbor, that evokes greed and rage and violence toward others.
But Easter tell an alternative account of the world, where gifts of healing and forgiveness defy death.
Joseph Washington believed that understanding the nature and causes of Black suffering, begins by associating the Black community with that of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53
('He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.' (v.5)).
In other words, God's plan for humanity is fulfilled through Black suffering! However, what exactly is this 'plan'?
Well, according to Washington God's plan is for humanity to be set free from racism.
This means as those who suffer, the Black community, the Good Friday Christians have a mission - to free (liberate) non-Blacks from their sin (i.e. racism).
This also means that as a result of their divine calling (mission), Blacks are suffering (and have suffered) for the sake others, just as Isaiah's 'suffering servant' did.
The church keeps Easter so that we now, in our culture of despair, may be recruited for a more excellent way.
The Easter Lord, via Easter texts, invites an Easter people to be about that defiant civil disobedience of new life in a weary, spent world.
Some might Ask So what does this have to do with Easter, well here is the egg.
Jesus was executed by Roman authorities because his teaching was a threat to the established order of the socio-political system of the empire. The Politics of Jesus were against the empire. While its was the Jewish leaders that set him up it was the empire that killed him as a terrorist. In other words it was the lutenetes of Caser that water boarded and tutored and wiped Jesus and finally crucified him.
From that the church claims that in his death Jesus has done something decisive for us.
The news of Easter is that, in the resurrection of Jesus, God has broken all the vicious cycles of deathliness in which the world finds itself.
The Easter narrative of John 20 provides an early attestation about the “seeing” and “believing” of the first
Easter, first reported by the uncredentialed women and then verified by the credentialed male apostles.
The news of this new aliveness is breathtaking;
Mary’s declaration, “I have seen the Lord,” is one of bewilderment and astonishment (John 20:18).
Neither she nor her companions could explain what had happened, because they had no categories for this exhibit of God’s power for life. The narrative portrays a deep, singular event that defies all of our modern categories of explanation.
Peter witnesses to the gift of forgiveness given in Easter (Acts 10:43).
Easter invites us to imagine, embrace, and live in a world that is without fear of death or guilt. It is no wonder that the authorities recognized the Easter proclamation to be dangerously subversive of the world organized around death and guilt.
Let me end with this story, A little Boy about Omri’s age went on a class field trip to the Hat at South Of the Boarder and the teacher gave eat of the students a quarter and told them when they got to the top of the hat if they put their quarters in the telescope they had they might be able to see all the way back home to Darlington one young man said well I want four quarters if yall can see back home with one quarter, well four quarters make a complete dollor and with a dollor I might be able to see my furture. In other words the little Boy belived that if he paid a greater price he could get a greater reward or if not atlest see where he was going.
Church Good Friday is about Paying the Easter Price, and Easter is not Just about the celebration of the resurrection but also about Celebrating the GOOD FRIDAYS you have overcome.
