Sermon:
The first Easter was a wrecked scene of dispirited disciples in the shadows of an insurrection. This year Easter falls on April 4, the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. That early spring evening in 1968 was ten days before the Feast of the Resurrection. In 2021, the second Easter of the coronavirus pandemic, we celebrate Resurrection in the shadow of insurrection. Easter also called Resurrection Sunday or Pascha is one of the most important days in the Christian faith commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
The Easter Triduum or Paschal Triduum starts on the evening of Maundy Thursday with the last supper continuing through Good Friday and the crucifixion and burial of Jesus Christ into Holy Saturday and ending with prayers on the evening of Easter Sunday.
Acts 10 narrates a significant change in Peter’s own life but also a massive shift in the trajectory of the church’s mission in its earliest days.
For Luke, this moment is significant well beyond Peter’s life. This story of Life After Death is a powerful symbol of a promise enunciated from the beginning of Luke’s gospel and throughout Acts, a promise represented most powerfully in the resurrection of Jesus.
Without question, God’s spirit is moving. The only question is whether Peter, as well as the church, will sense the winds of change and follow God’s lead.
Peter’s speech is a monumental speech. His thesis is a brief but powerful theological insight: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality” (cf. Romans 2:11). God picks no favorites. Everybody has a right to live!
No matter our place of origin, the same God reaches out to us; the same gospel calls us home. Social boundaries and ethnic differences are no obstacle to the gospel. Such differences are not an issue or a problem for God’s church.
Life After Death! Jesus’ resurrection violates the natural order of life and death, contradicts expectations that the Messiah would bring a swift end to the political powers, and continually challenges us to examine our faith anew. For Peter, the implications of the resurrection include the shattering of social boundaries, for “he is Lord of all!”
Easter is that time of the year where the defining symbol of the Christian faith the cross is worn with special pride. It is found on clothing, hats, bumper stickers, jewelry, koozies and just about anything else. We’ve marketed the cross so well that we’ve completely disconnected it from its original context and meaning.
But for someone living in the first century the cross was a form of social control meant to utterly terrorize the population;
• To bend them to the power and will of Rome.
• To demand allegiance.
• To remind the Jews they had no power.
• To announce that In Rome’s eyes the oppressed. the poor. the different. were less than human.
Referring to the cross, the late James Cone wrote, “Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings.” Indeed, the cross has lost much of its original meaning. It’s become a hollow and feel good trinket suitable for all occasions. It can be made in precious gold, adorned with diamonds or left tastefully rustic. It’s the perfect reminder that we’ll never need to suffer because Jesus suffered for us.
Sadly, in America there is another symbol that’s closer to the original feeling the cross would have produced, and one we especially we Black Southern Christians – should reflect on this Holy Week: the noose. The noose was used to terrorize blacks in the South primarily after the Civil War.
• It told blacks they were less than human.
• It reminded them to stay in their societal place and not to challenge the white system.
• It utterly terrorized blacks and galvanized a racist system all across the United States.
The Noose that was constructed this year of the National Mall.
It’s the same noose that Billie Holiday sang about in Strange Fruit:
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
It’s the noose that brought together whites from near and far to celebrate the protection and proliferation of a white way of life. It’s the noose, the tree, the lynching tree or cross that provided amusement for those wanting to celebrate someone dying an excruciating death.
This Noose also left blacks to retreat to their spaces on the white margins for fear the lynching fever might spread to their homes and sprout new Crosses.
The cross and the Noose or the lynching tree were and are symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved for slaves, criminals and insurrectionists the lowest of the low in society.
Yes, Jesus was lynched.
• Jesus was a scapegoat and given a sham trial, just like the 12 convicted in the Elaine Massacre in 1919.
• Jesus was paraded through the streets to his death for all to jeer and mock just like John Carter, who was dragged behind an automobile by a white mob through Little Rock in 1927.
• Jesus’ garments were bartered as mementos, as a remembrance of the crucifixion, just like postcards that were sold as souvenirs to whites who wanted to remember where they were when they protected the South.
In American history like New Testament History this scene was played out again and again, all over the United States. Sadly, it’s also played out today in, among other things, a criminal justice system that mass incarcerates African Americans at a sinful rate.
So, this Holy Week maybe we Christians should hold the image of a cross in one hand and the image of a noose in the other.
• Both should be uncomfortable to think about.
• Both should call us to repentance.
• Both should unmask the systems and powers that too often rule this world and turn brother against brother and sister against sister.
• Both should call us to work on behalf of the oppressed, marginalized and Poor who find themselves hanging from these “trees,” the cruel instruments of control and terror.
Easter has an edge that has been smoothed over by a less dangerous perhaps but no less problematic alliance between Christianity and the trifecta of individualism, capitalism, and American Nationalism.
When Jesus is summarily executed by the Roman authorities, his followers know that their lives, too, are subject to a brutal state apparatus that thrives on crushing agitators and vilifying the weak.
Exactly a year before King died, he denounced the Vietnam War and the triple evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. This was a solemn judgment on the body politic and was, to many, intolerable. In those last month’s his rage grew more visible. He was practiced in the rhetoric of grief.
For his troubles he was profiled, picked up, beaten up, and, like the one from whom he learned nonviolent direct action, brutally killed.
However, there is the life after death. Christians believe that Death is not the end of our existence. That belief has shaped the Christian faith since Jesus Christ rose from the dead after his execution 2,000 years ago.
This does not mean that Christians are somehow immune from or unaffected by the pain of grief and loss when a close friend or relative dies. But it means that they have a hope in something eternal that goes beyond life and death as we know it. And that hope sustains them in such difficult times. A Hope in Life After Death!
Lastly, On the day when we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, it may therefore be particularly appropriate for the church to consider how the Spirit may be moving amongst us in unexpected and challenging ways and to ask how the reverberations of the resurrection continue to be manifest around us. Yes Covid-19 During the Year of 2020 and 2021 we have talked about Reset, Renew, and Restart.
In My Mind the title Life After Death comes from an Album, double CD that I listened to in Hight school, On March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G., was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. It remains unsolved. Not long afterward, The Notorious B.I.G. rose again: The double album Life After Death was released March 25. It sold 700,000 hard copies almost immediately, jumping from to No. 1 on the Billboard. The album’s cover art featured the man formerly known as Biggie Smalls in a long black coat and black bowler. He stared us in the face while leaning against a hearse that bore the license plate “B.I.G.” There were no sunglasses to hide his lazy eye. He wore it full and proud, looking over his shoulder as if he already knew. One of his best friends said, in many ways, the title “Life After Death” isn’t just about Biggie — it’s about us. We are the ones living life after his death. That’s it church The Death of ML King The Death of Jesus was not about them and their sins it’s about US.
