“Blessed are the peacemakers” Jesus said. And most of us, I guess, think of conflict resolution on the playground, or the mediator in the boardroom, or the one person at the water cooler who works to make sure everyone gets along, or the cousin who works the phones prior the family reunion. God knows those are gifts; even spiritual gifts not to be taken for granted. But when you hear that beatitude about the peacemakers, “blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God”, when you hear the familiar words on Easter, there just more to hear...

During these days of Holy Week, just this past week, the church’s voice got a bit weaker. Not Nassau Church exactly, but the broader church. The church lost a bit of its conscience this week with the death of William Sloane Coffin. Bill Coffin was the pastor of Riverside Church and before that was the chaplain at Yale University. His was a voice of civil rights and non-violence and full inclusion of gay and lesbian people and economic justice and his was a voice against war. With that voice, he was willing to disagree with fundamentalists or theological conservatives for more than four decades, even when it was considered less than Christian to suggest other theological position. I imagine it has been quite a few years since William Sloane Coffin preached an Easter morning sermon somewhere. It is still our loss when it comes to the church’s collective Easter Day proclamation. In his book Letters to a Young Doubter published just last year, Coffin included an Easter sermon that he had preached at Yale some twenty years ago. “Too often” he preached, “Easter comes across very sentimentally like a dessert wafer– airy and sweet. But there’s nothing sentimental about Easter: Easter represents a demand as well as a promise, a demand not that we sympathize with the crucified Christ, but that we pledge our loyalty to the Risen One....I don’t see how you can proclaim allegiance to the risen Lord and then allow life once again to lull you to sleep, to smother you in convention, to choke you with success.”

That’s William Sloane Coffin on the domesticated gospel. A gospel shaped to make you feel better, to achieve more, to increase your productivity, to assure purpose-driven success. A motivational tool. Gospel as life coach. A domesticated gospel is one where any hard edges are safely sanded down; edges of sacrifice, edges of discipleship that require investments of time and effort, edges that were formed by God’s call for justice and righteousness, edges of discomfort that come when thinking about the plight of the world’s poor. A gospel that never pushes you beyond your comfort zone, never challenges any opinion you hold about life, never questions how you view the other, never threatens the powerful. Easter with the domesticated gospel is indeed all about sentimentality, and familiar hymns, a visit with family, and a nice crowd, and brunch– or a dessert wafer, airy and sweet. The things we cling to on yet another Easter when we find ourselves outside the empty tomb waiting to hear once again of the resurrection.

Mary stood weeping. She had been the first to see the stone rolled away. Convinced that someone had taken the body of Jesus, she ran to tell the others. She remained unconvinced by their empty tomb conversion, unmoved by linen clothes wadded up in a ball. After the two disciples headed home, Mary stayed. She stood weeping outside the tomb. Every now and then she must have bent over to look in to see; to see if the body was still there; to see if this ongoing bad dream would end sometime. Not even the angels could comfort her. “I don’t know where they have laid him!” Even her first sight of Jesus, her encounter with the one now raised from the dead, even that didn’t convince her. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.” Mary’s first brush with the resurrection didn’t seem to shake her from that grief.

That’s when Jesus called her by name. She knew it was him. “Teacher” she said in response. And he said to her, “Do not hold on to me”. Do not grab hold here. Don’t cling to me. “Because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” One preacher points out that it’s not clear that Mary was even reaching for a hug. She wonders if maybe Jesus heard it in her voice, in what she called him, “Rabbouni.” The preacher suggests that Mary called him by his Friday name, “teacher.” But it’s now Sunday. The Day of Resurrection.

“ Don’t cling to me for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” You and I could spend a day in the theological library down the street and still not be sure what on earth or in heaven Jesus meant by that! It would seem Mary, in some fashion, simply wanted to hold on to the way things were; to her relationship with the Teacher who healed the sick and touched the outcasts and modeled for her and the others what a good and faith-filled life should be like. Mary wanted to stop the weeping and hang on to her world. But resurrection power comes from the hand of God. The victory over the forces of death and darkness comes when this Jesus is seated at the right hand of God in all power and honor and glory. When the heavenly chorus gathered around the throne starts sing, “Hallelujah...For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth”

Mary wants to cling, but Mary’s world will never be the same. More than shaking off the grief that broke her heart and getting back to normal following in the Teacher’s footsteps, yearning for a good and moral life; more than that, this resurrection life is about ushering in the kingdom of God; it’s about toppling the powers and the principalities; it’s about life conquering death; forgiveness stomping on hatred; generosity squelching greed; love overtaking success, the first being last; swords being smashed into plowshares; the hungry pushing away from the table now full; the poor being lifted up while the rich stoop down to help with the lifting. Mary’s world will never be the same because as Barbara Brown Taylor says, “Jesus was on his way back to God and taking the whole world with him.”

Easter Sunday! It’s not about Mary’s world, about your world, it’s about God’s world. Resurrection power is about the mighty act of God. God didn’t just roll away the stone and raise a dead body to life, God raised this Jesus to redeem us and our world and all of creation. God is about the task of shattering every effort at domesticating the gospel message of salvation that comes through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Only Son of God. Stop clinging to an Easter morning that’s airy and sweet–like a dessert wafer. Or as William Sloan Coffin asked at the very end of that Easter sermon, “Are we going to continue the illusion of a Good Friday world, or start living the reality of an Easter one?”

A few months ago a group of students from the Princeton seminary went down to the Gulf Coast to participate in rebuilding efforts. As others have reported, it is still much more cleaning up than rebuilding. The trip was actually part of a class syllabus. At one point the group was working alongside a construction crew that had been all over down there. The foreman on the crew confessed that he was worn out with the tearing down and the hauling of debris. He really wanted to shift to rebuilding something. He described the moment he knew he had enough of hauling people’s lives out to the curb. His crew was operating some heavy equipment and lifting pile after pile onto big trucks to be taken away. One pile at the curb, just down from the house, included an old piano. The homeowner told the construction guys about this warped, soaked, moldy piano. “My grandmother taught my mother to play on that piano. My mother taught me. And I taught my children” she told them with tears running down her cheeks. “Now look at it!” But then she asked them if they could leave it there. And as the crew moved to the next pile, she sat down and started to play it. Right there at the curb, surrounded by destruction, she sat and made some music. Maybe she was clinging to the way things used to be. Maybe, just maybe, she was searching for the strength to play a new song! She sat down in a Good Friday world yearning to play for herself an Easter world. An Easter song.

Standing in a Good Friday world and daring to live into an Easter one. That’s a peacemaker. Yearning deep down to cling to that which you know and yet being willing to point to that which God knows is yet to come. Standing there next to that tomb; the very thresh hold of death, and boldly announcing “I have seen the Lord.” Surrounded, indeed overwhelmed, by the grief and suffering and heart brake that so mercilessly defines what it means to be human, and yet daring to live as Easter people who find the strength even at the grave to proclaim “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” To stand up in a Good Friday world, daring to live into Easter, by begging, pleading, even demanding, the “more excellent way.” A peacemaker. To live the reality of Easter, by singing a new song “Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!” “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God!” Children of God! Those who find the courage to stare a Good Friday world right in the face, and ignoring the sentimentality of Easter-lite, they’re bold enough to say to you and to me, to the world “no, there’s another way.”

Don’t cling to the world as you want it to be; work for the promised kingdom that God describes. Don’t cling to the pressures of achievement and the stress of success, work for the promised kingdom where kindness and humility and gentleness count for more. Don’t cling to the hatred that resides so deep within, work for the promised kingdom where there is neither Jew nor Greek , slave nor free, male nor female. Don’t cling to the mentality that winner takes all or that charity begins at home or what’s in it for me, work for the promised kingdom where you rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep and if one member of the body suffers, we all suffer. Don’t cling to the necessity of violence or the inevitability of a march to war, work for the promised kingdom where strength comes to those who are weak and security and power and trust come from God alone.

Playing piano at the curb! That’s not a bad image for the church at Easter, except they’ve taken away our curb. But there at the piano, teaching one generation after another what it means to be an Easter people, what it means to be the children of God! I know I’m not the only one worried that we are raising a generation of kids in this congregation who think Easter is nothing more than spring break. So let’s stand at the curb of world that would just assume pass us by. Children of God! It’s the Day of Resurrection! And so right here at the curb, surrounded by the debris, with more than enough sentimentality to share, confronted day after day by this Good Friday world, God is calling you to live into the reality of Easter!

 

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