I. Love. Stories.
When I was a kid, I
used to tell stories. I had a really active imagination, so my stories usually
involved Martians or dragons or robotic superheroes. I just loved make-believe.
Loved creating whole worlds that I could play in, could lose myself in.
I never kept my stories
to myself. I would tell them to just about anyone who was around. My mom would
sit at our computer and type up the stories that I told her. Then we’d print
them out and make a book out of them, and my dad would help me illustrate them.
I’m pretty sure I still
have some of those books sitting around, but anyway. That’s a different story.
Stories. What’s your
favorite story?
Think about this
question for a second. What’s your favorite story?
Why is it your
favorite?
Who is the story about?
Last week, we walked
together through a story. It’s a story that has all the elements that make for
a good story. It has foreshadowing. Tension. Conflict. Betrayal. Redemption. And
when we tell it, there’s a lot of singing.
Now, we find out, the
story continues. There’s a “what’s next?” And it sounds like it’s going to be another
good story. The story of a people transformed in order to transform the world.
The story of a church.
Earlier, we heard the first outlines of this
new story. We heard about the disciples, huddled together in the upper room. We
heard about their transformative experience with the Risen Christ, with this
man who still bears the scars of his terrible death but now, somehow,
graciously breathes out the Spirit of peace. We heard about Peter—fearful
Peter, Christ-denying Peter—suddenly filled with courage, leading the apostles
in front of the council, saying “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”
Renewal. Drama. Confrontation. Oh, yeah. This is going to be a good story.
But there is a problem
with this story, or at least a problem with the way that this story has been
told throughout the history of the church. A problem that makes me cringe even
though I want to be thrilling to the themes of redemption and liberation hinted
at in these texts. The story that we are hearing the beginning of tonight is
good news, but it has not always been good news for those that the Christian community
has interacted with. As it turns out stories, even good stories, can be used as
weapons.
I notice,
when I’m reading the gospel of John, that I cringe a lot. I cringe a lot
because John uses a word repeatedly, a word that is used in tonight’s reading. Actually,
in the Common English version that we heard read, the Greek word “Ioudaios” is translated as “Jewish authorities.” But
traditionally, in the old King James Version and in the New Revised Standard
Version that I’m used to reading, the word is translated as “Jews.” And I hear,
“the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the
Jews.” And I think, instead, of all the times in the past 2000 years when it
has been Jews locking doors for fear of the good Christian folks. And I think, instead,
of centuries of pogrom and persecution and Holocaust. Of Christian bishops
urging emperors to prohibit Jewish communities from rebuilding burned out
synagogues. And then I turn to the Acts passage, and I read “the God of our
ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you
had killed by hanging him on a tree,” and I wonder just how long in Christian
history it took for that plural “you” to mean, not authorities or power
structures but instead a whole race or ethnic group. I wonder just how long it
took for this good, good story of resurrection and redemption and empowerment
to turn into a story of violence, of ethnic cleansing of us-versus-them, of
othering.
Of course the story didn’t
start out this way. When the gospel of John uses the word “Ioudaios,” what’s being
referenced is an intra-Jewish conflict. The Jewish community is being pulled
apart over the issue of the messiahship of this Jesus of Nazareth character,
and the fledgling pre-Christian community is not doing so well. It seems, from
other texts in John’s gospels, that Christians—who, remember, are still
predominantly Jewish at this time—have been kicked out of synagogues. So what
we have in John’s gospel isn’t the story of Gentile Christians against
traitorous Jews but rather a struggling Jewish Christian community against, as
the CEB would have it, religious authorities. There are even some scholars who
argue that the meaning of “Ioudaios” is better understood as “Judean,” that is,
from Jerusalem and southern surrounds, in contrast to the predominantly
northern, Galilean followers of Jesus.
This same dynamic of
intra-communal conflict is at play throughout the book of Acts. The author of
the single document that we know as Luke and Acts goes out of his way to
absolve Pilate of the death of Jesus, emphasizing the insistence of the Jewish
community on the crucifixion of Jesus. But as Barbara Reid writes, “When Jewish
Christians spoke of Jews who put Jesus to death, the intra-Jewish nature of the
conflict was clear. But when Christians who are no longer Jews speak of ‘the
Jews’ as being responsible for the death of Jesus, there is a whole other
nuance that fuels anti-Judaism. Luke’s narratives must be understood in both
their historical and theological contexts, at the same time, they must not be
used to foment anti-Semitism.”[i]
But oh, how our
Christian narratives—our Christian stories—have been used to foment
anti-Semitism. The story of the crucifixion, with the Jews as the enemy, the
killers of Christ, fueled Christian violence against Jewish communities, from
riots to pogroms to the ovens of the Holocaust. It was Christian theology—the
Christian story about God—based, ostensibly, on the biblical texts, that made
this violence possible. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners makes this point, that German
anti-Semitism, based on Christian theology and a certain reading of the Bible,
created the atmosphere in which genocide could occur.[ii]
Our Christian story was wrapped up in the need for violent scapegoating. Our
story, our text, was used as a weapon, as a tool for writing other people out
of the story.
Now much work has been
done, after the Holocaust, to disassociate biblical interpretation from this
pernicious anti-Semitism. But Jewish people are not the only victims of our
Christian tendency—can we call it our human tendency—to write people out of
stories. Other religions have been the target of our stories-as-weapons as
well. I’m thinking particularly of the stereotypes and the fear directed toward
Islam, from the blood-drenched saga of the Crusades until today. The story
relies on the exclusion of others, of people of other religions, in order to
secure the particularity of Christian salvation. And we look to some of our
favorite Bible verses and we see the shadow of this looming exclusivity. We see
John 3:16, that favorite verse for signs at football games, and we read “For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him may not perish but have eternal life.” And somehow instead of the love
of God, and instead of the statement against condemnation that appears in the
very next verse, somehow this verse comes to mean “You must accept Jesus or you
must perish.” And we hear John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the
life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” See? Look! It’s in the
Bible! If you don’t believe in Jesus, then you are excluded. You are written
out of the story.
(This is bad exegesis,
by the way. But I think it’s representative of the way these texts have been
interpreted over the centuries and throughout modern times.)
Now maybe it’s natural
for religious stories to exclude other religions. But the way that the
Christian story has been told over the centuries and right up until our current
time has been perfectly willing to write people out of the story within the
Christian fold. It will come as no surprise to you to hear me say that our
texts have been used as weapons against women. I mean, there’s the obvious
proof text passages. 1 Timothy 2:12: “I permit no woman to teach or to have
authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Or 1 Corinthians 11:3, “I want
you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the
head of the wife.” But those passages are the easy ones to critique, to say,
“Well, those are just the product of a certain sociohistoric context.” But
there are parts of our story that are much closer to home, I think, that have
been used to commit violence against women. How many women experiencing
domestic violence have been told that the abuse their husbands are pouring out
on them is simply “the cross that they have to bear”? How much Christian
theology has centered around God as an abusive Father, pouring His—and I say
His here on purpose—wrath out on a victim Son? And if an abusive Father, why
not an abusive husband? And I could go on and on about texts from the prophets
Hosea and Jeremiah that picture Israel as an unfaithful wife and proceed to use
language of violence and shame against the feminine depiction of the people of
God. So often, too often, the texts that we draw on for our Christian faith
have been used to silence women, to hurt women, to write women out of the
story.
Of course, the latest
fad in violence done in the name of the Christian story is that which is
committed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer folk, whether
Christian or not. And again, we can go to the Bible for our prooftexts, for
those seven clobber passages that are used to tell gay people that they are
inherently wrong, unclean, less-than. During the recent rallies at the Supreme
Court in response to the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 court cases,
one journalist went and talked to young people who were rallying against marriage equality. He had them
write the reason for their opposition to gay marriage on a pad of paper and
then snapped a picture of them. Almost every single one of the young people he
talked to used some sort of pseudo-Christian argument to make their case that
marriage should be between one (cisgender) man and one (cisgender) woman. As
Peter Gomes, the late Harvard chaplain and himself a gay man, writes: “Although
most contemporary Christians who have moral reservations about homosexuality,
and who find affirmation for those reservations in the Bible, do not resort to
physical violence and intimidation, they nevertheless contribute to the
maintenance of a cultural environment in which less scrupulous opponents of
homosexuality are given the sanction of the Bible to feed their prejudice and,
in certain cases, cultural “permission” to act with violence upon those
prejudices.”[iii]
To Gomes I would add that even when overt violence is not acted out against gay
people, the violence of closets and of silencing—with all the depression,
self-loathing, and all too often suicide that results—is not to be
underestimated. For so long LGBTQ people have been the scapegoats, pushed to
the margins and written out of the Christian story.
I could go on, of
course. I could talk about all the biblical arguments for chattel slavery in
the United States. The violence done in the name of the Bible against
indigenous people, including ongoing violence against Palestinians sanctioned
by the land promises of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The
violence of colonialism. I imagine you get the point.
So here’s the question:
why not just throw it all out? Why, if the Christian story has been accompanied
by, and has fueled, so much violence throughout the centuries, if our texts
have been used to write so many people out of the story, then why should we
keep the damn thing at all? Why should we read the texts, why should we listen
to the stories?
Here’s why I think our
Christian stories matter. Because they point the way to the risen Christ. And
this Christ, this risen Christ, is the Jesus who knows what it is to be written
out of a story. To be pushed to the margins. To be violated, abused, killed. And
it is this Christ—this risen Christ who still carries the signs of trauma in
hands and side, wounds that Thomas can touch—who, against all reason, breathes
the Spirit of peace out onto the disciples who betrayed and abandoned him. This
wounded, this traumatized Christ comes to us from the margins of the page, from
the places of crushing pain, and gives us the ability to tell a new story. Gives
us new lenses to read this old, old story.
This risen Christ, this
resurrected Jesus, calls us to question any place in our story that excludes
and scapegoats, because if we read with the eyes of Christ we read with the
eyes of the excluded and the scapegoated. This risen Christ, this resurrected
Jesus, transforms Peter and the rest of the disciples from marginalized voices
huddled in a room to empowered voices that must obey the call of a God of
justice and of peace rather than any human authority of violence and
dehumanization. When we read our texts,
when we tell our stories, in the Spirit of this resurrected Jesus, we find that
our texts can no longer be used as weapons. That we can no longer engage in the
project of writing people out of the story.
Because, you see, we
are an Easter people. We are an Easter people, and something fundamental has
changed. Something that leads us to challenge, like Peter standing before the
council, the violent side of our shared story.
What’s your favorite
story?
Who is it about?
Who is included, and
who is not?
Let me tell you my
favorite story. It is one that I have probably told before. You might have
heard it in this very chapel, but I think it is worth retelling. The story is
about South Africa, in the depths of the struggle against apartheid. The white
South African government had outlawed a march against apartheid, so the
organizers of the march decided instead to hold a church service at St.
George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. Then-bishop Desmond Tutu was preparing to
speak to the gathered marchers when the doors to the cathedral burst open. In
poured members of the dreaded apartheid secret police, making no effort to
conceal their identity. They carried tape recorders and pads of paper. The
message was clear: speak up, and your name will be taken down. You will be
recorded. And we will find you. And we will find your family. And you will
regret that you did not hold your tongue.
Desmond Tutu surveyed
the situation. The menacing agents. The terrified congregation, eyes moving
fearfully from him to the intruders. What would he say? How would he respond?
He began thoughtfully. “You are powerful,” he said. “You are very powerful.”
“But we serve a God who
will not be mocked!”
And then, spreading his
arms wide in a gesture of welcoming and smiling widely, he proclaimed: “Since,
in Christ, we have already won…we invite you today to join the winning side.”
The response was
tremendous. The congregation began singing and dancing, and the pressure of
their movement slowly moved the secret police out of the cathedral and onto the
street. From fear to celebration. From huddled in a room to saying, with Peter,
“We must obey God rather than any human authority.”
Now the thing about
this story is that when it happened, there was no way, just no way, that
Desmond Tutu was right. The anti-apartheid movement was not the winning side.
It was, very decidedly, the losing side. But a decade later those same
protesters would be dancing in the streets of South Africa celebrating the fall
of apartheid, and who knows but they might have been joined by some of those
same secret police agents who had been tasked to intimidate and brutalize them.
The anti-apartheid movement was carried forward by a hope in the resurrection,
a hope that challenged not only state-sanctioned but also church-sanctioned
dehumanization and violence. The scapegoated, traumatized Jesus, emerging from
the margins of the story to breathe peace.
Friends, we are being
invited, today, to meet this resurrected Jesus. This might mean positioning
ourselves in some scary places. In the margins of our collective stories. In
fearfully locked rooms. In the places within our narratives where prejudice and
scapegoating rule the day. In places of trauma and pain. Because it is from
exactly these places that the risen Christ emerges, breathing peace. This risen
Christ is calling to us, today, from demolished homes in East Jerusalem, from
bomb-shattered streets in Syria, from poverty-ravaged and abandoned urban and
rural landscapes in the U.S., from psychiatric wards and homeless shelters,
calling to us. Calling to us to, today, to tell a different story.
Calling to us, today,
to join the winning side.
[i]
Barbara Reid, “Notes on Acts,” in the New
Interpreter’s Study Bible (Abingdon, 2003), 1959.
[ii] Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen’s, Hitler’s Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997).
[iii]
Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading
the Bible with Mind and Heart (Harper One, 1996), 146.
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