Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "He Is Risen! What About the Rest of Us?"

Text: John 20:1-18

as I woke this morning to the sound of a steady rain,

I was ever so unhappy.

Not just over the muddy dog factor,

though that is always to be considered …

It’s just that Easter Sunday ought to be

bright, shiny, sunny, with as few clouds as possible …

Sort of like the whole world has been resurrected

after the death of night and sleep.

And it was obvious,

today wasn’t going to look like that.

But in a weird sort of way,

that is what Easter is really about.

Easter is about

things not being what they seem

Easter is about the light of God,

shining even when the day looks gloomy,

even when life itself looks gloomy.

Easter is about hope,

even when all hope seems lost.

Easter is about the power of God to bring about life,

even in the very midst of death.

But let’s back up for a minute …

Because before it is about any of those other things,

Easter is first and foremost about Jesus Christ.

About who he was, what he said, what he did,

and the trouble it got him into.

When we talk about it in theological terms,

we say that Christ suffered and died for our sins,

and all of that is very true.

If human beings weren’t what human beings are,

Jesus would not have died …

in fact, God might not have had to send him in the first place!

So it is true, theologically speaking,

to say that Christ died in order to reconcile us to God.

But if we look at it in its historical context,

the question gets shaped a little differently.

According to the Romans who actually crucified him,

why did Jesus die?

They didn’t care a hoot about our sins, or anyone else’s.

(Least of all their own!)

If it occurred under similar circumstances in our day and time,

we would talk about Jesus’ crucifixion

as a politically-motivated, state-sponsored assassination.

He said things that were so frightening to the powers that be …

the powers that were …

that they were afraid to let him live.

Not only the Romans themselves,

but also the powerful among his own people,

the Jewish religious leaders.

Jesus focused people back on God.

Said that they were obligated to obey God,

not human authorities.

Said that rules were made to benefit people;

people did not have to obey rules just because someone said they were the rules.

Said that "Caesar" – the state –

could not ask of us things that belong only to God.

Viewed from the point of view of those in power,

those are seditious words;

they are treasonous words.

People who talk like that are a danger to the empire,

and they must be silenced.

So that, when God does the unprecedented deed

of raising Jesus from death,

it is not only a theological statement about reconciliation,

although it is that, too.

Jesus’ resurrection is also God’s way of saying,

my Son is right, and Rome is wrong,

and which side are you going to be on?

Rome says, keep your faith to yourself,

practice it quietly and don’t make any waves,

and we’ll let you be.

Jesus says, your faith has to have an impact on everything you do,

including your life as a citizen in the public realm,

and you don’t have the option of staying quiet about it

if things are wrong.

Rome says, we’ll fix you …

You’re dead, you troublemaker.

And God says …

That’s what you think …

It’s Sunday morning, and he doesn’t look dead to me!

We cannot separate our faith

from our political life, or economic life, or social life,

or any other arena of the life God has given us.

Those who tell us that faith should be kept out of politics …

I can only conclude that they have never read the gospel.

Now I’m not talking about "church" and "state";

I am not referring to the two institutions

constantly trying to yank each other’s strings.

I am talking about individual people of faith,

and/or people of faith who come together in groups …

We must, if we are going to be faithful to Jesus’ life and death,

speak up in those times when our collective political and economic life

is doing harm to others, whether near or far away.

In our common life,

we must speak up against decisions that hurt,

and in favor of policies that help.

Ultimately, Easter is about deciding

whether we are on the side of life,

or on the side of death.

Taken in the abstract,

that’s an easy question to answer, isn’t it?

Of course, we’re on the side of life.

Duh.

It’s when we start to look at specifics that it gets complicated,

and we become implicated in ways we’d rather not know about.

Twenty-five years ago this past week,

Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in El Salvador.

Very much like Jesus,

his was a politically-motivated, state-sponsored assassination.

It was a Monday, March 24, 1980 …

Romero had just finished preaching in the little chapel at Divina Providencia,

and was beginning to celebrate the Mass.

We stood in that chapel and saw where he was standing behind the altar

when a Volkswagen pulled up in front of the church,

and a sharpshooter got out, fired,

and got back into the car and sped away.

Romero was probably dead before he hit the floor.

And the whole thing is very gruesomely documented,

because he and everyone else knew it was coming;

they just didn’t know when …

And so the worship service that morning

was filled with journalists, people with cameras,

who recorded the whole bloody thing for posterity.

Including the getaway car,

which eventually led to prosecution of the gunman,

but never to the Army generals or the nation’s President,

who had ordered the killing.

Romero’s crime was simply this:

He took the side of the poor.

He told El Salvador’s government that they were wrong

to make policy that benefited only

the seven wealthy families who control the country,

and continued to keep the vast majority

in hopeless poverty.

He told them they were wrong

to keep stealing elections that they had, in fact, lost.

He told the military to put down their weapons

and stop firing on their brothers and sisters.

Well, you can hardly let someone like that live, can you?

On the outside wall of the chapel at the University of Central America,

there is a quote from Romero that is eerily prophetic:

It says – in Spanish, of course –

"If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people."

Literally?

No … as far as anyone knows,

Romero’s body remains in its tomb

in the basement of the cathedral in San Salvador.

But effectively? One would have to say yes.

Romero was honored on the 25^th anniversary of his death

all over El Salvador,

with Masses, concerts, formal and informal gatherings …

People from all over the world have been traveling to El Salvador

the past couple of weeks

to remember his life, his ministry, his witness.

More people know about him now

than ever knew about him when he was alive.

In a very real sense, he has been resurrected,

and it is an awesome thing to see.

In fact, he has been resurrected right here in Oak Cliff …

The Calvario funeral home over on Davis St.

has a freshly-painted mural on one of the back corners of the building,

up high, it wraps around the corner …

It has painted arches with brightly-colored scenes in them,

and in the area above the pillars between the arches,

there are portraits.

Second from the left is Romero.

Check it out.

So, one can perhaps be willing to conclude,

Romero was on the side of life;

the Salvadoran government was on the side of death,

and we feel okay about siding with Romero.

We heard from several people that his legacy has been powerful:

that in El Salvador now, it is taken for granted that

the church should be an advocate for the poor.

No one before Romero had ever dared to say it;

now, people take it for granted.

So, this seems an easy one.

Through the events that have happened in the last twenty-five years,

God has, in a sense, resurrected Archbishop Oscar Romero.

God has said,

Oscar is right, and the government and military were wrong,

and who are you going to side with?

With life, or with death?

Where it gets more complicated

is when it involves us.

And I’m not even going to talk about

such political hot potatoes as

cutting health care for indigent children …

talk about siding with death! …

or about battles over where homeless shelters get located,

or about finding billions of dollars to fight wars

but cutting the budget for affordable housing,

which there already isn’t enough of …

Those are close to home;

it should be obvious to us that we have to say something.

I want us to go back to El Salvador.

This time, not to the city, but to the mountains;

to the province of Morazán,

the little village of El Mozote.

On December 11, 1981, the entire population of the village

was rounded up, men, women, and children separated from one another,

and then, over the course of the day, systematically massacred.

There was one survivor,

only because she managed to slip out of a line at dusk

and hide behind a tree until dark.

She had to listen as her own children were shot.

But the Salvadoran government denied that any such thing had ever happened,

and ignored her testimony.

Two journalists from the U.S. who came through a couple of weeks later,

saw the carnage for themselves, and wrote about it, were silenced;

one of them, Raymond Bonner,

even lost his job at the New York Times

under pressure from the Reagan administration.

The U.S. government?!!

What did they care?

Ah, that’s where it gets interesting.

When forensic anthropologists were finally allowed

to being to do exhumations at the site,

they found some interesting things …

much of it, people on the ground had known but no one believed them.

Of the more than 800 people massacred on that day,

more than half were children under the age of 12.

The bullet casings and bullets that were found

were all traceable to an ammunition plant in Lake City, Missouri.

We provided those bullets.

I don’t just mean that we made them;

we provided them to the Salvadoran military.

The guns that fire those bullets

are American-made rifles, which we also provided.

And the military group responsible for the massacre –

the elite Atlacatl Battalion –

was trained in the United States,

at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia,

at our expense.

My tax dollars, your tax dollars,

funded the murder of hundreds of children and adults,

and that’s only talking about one location in a decade-long civil war.

We visited El Mozote,

and saw the different locations where the men were tortured and killed –

in the church –

the house where most of the women were killed,

the farmacía where the children were gunned down.

We sat quietly at the memorial where the exhumed remains

have all been reburied together.

And I wondered:

Are we on the side of life, or of death?

If we are on the side of life,

what do we do about it when our leaders,

whatever their intentions,

try to pull us over onto the side of death?

What do we do, what do we say,

when Caesar claims for itself

things which belong only to God?

How do we witness that we are people of the resurrection

in a world where human lives appear expendable

in the mad drive to get or keep power?

It’s not enough simply to say that

we believe Jesus Christ was raised from the dead,

as though believing something fairly implausible

were enough to demonstrate our faithfulness.

If we believe it, what are we going to do about it?

How are we going to live,

so that others will know that we are on the side of life

and not of death?

How will we witness to God’s sovereignty,

that is above everything else that would claim our loyalty?

God’s sovereignty, that has power even over death?

Christ is risen …

what about the rest of us?

Amen.

© 2005 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)