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One of the greatest things about having children involved in our worship here is that, as messy and loud and unorganized kids of any age can be, they remind us what worship is about.
They remind us how to ask questions.
They remind us to tell stories over and over and over again.
They know how to say when they don’t feel welcome, when they are hungry, when they are hurt, and they haven’t always learned how to hide their emotions so what they feel is made evident right away and there’s no hiding or pretending.
They know about being in honest relationship, if they are raised with healthy expectations and nurturing surroundings.
If they are raised in a place that gives them room to grow, then they grow and trust and learn.
If they are raised in an environment where they are not safe, then they learn to hide and pretend and make themselves and their own needs most important as a matter of survival.
When we tell kids Bible stories, we don’t get into the complexities of nuance and translation and generations of interpretation, we just break down the stories the best we can into the themes and hope they don’t ask for too many details. What is going to make sense to a kid about the question: “Why did Jesus have to die?” What makes sense to us? What kind of God are we introducing our kids to, our neighbors to, our own hearts to, when we tell these stories of Jesus?
This is why I love children’s Bibles. Kids might ask why things are different in Jesus’ time than they are now, and that’s historical research at its best use, but up at the altar three weeks ago one of the kids asked me how Jesus died being nailed to a cross if nails are small, or how he lived at all after they first nailed him to the cross, and of course the question of ‘why’ comes up again and again. Why did we kill him? It’s easier, it seems, to answer the question of ‘why did Jesus have to die,’ than it is to honestly answer the ‘why did we kill him’ question. It sure gets us off the hook, doesn’t it? But they really are the same question. Some would say God required a pure sacrifice. But God never started the rituals of sacrifice, Cain and Abel started it without God asking, according to our stories. Other gods in neighboring countries required blood sacrifice or ritual copulation with the temple priestess to make the crops grow or provide favorable weather, but our God didn’t demand payment for life, that was our own doing.
So why did Jesus have to die? He preached peace to a violent world, lived peacemaking in a peacekeeping culture.
He healed the sick in a culture where sickness was a visible sign of sinfulness.
He upset the financial business running outside the temple, which helped the temple pay rent and lined the pockets of local moneychangers.
He fed the hungry in a place where folks thought the suffering poor deserved what they got.
He challenged the political authorities but did not want to take their place in the system.
He loved as God loves, being God with skin on, and that vulnerability, that openness, that commitment to honor and love all of life in all its diversities, angered and frightened those who kept their power by feeding on fear. So, to keep their power, to keep their system, to maintain the systems of oppression, the powerful riled up the mobs and made a scapegoat of Jesus, putting all of their frustrations onto his back so they could point and jeer and vent without actually changing the way the world worked.
Or so they thought. Jesus took that anger, that frustration, that humiliation, and didn’t feed back into the system of oppression, but he offered forgiveness, mercy, and love instead. Even while dying, Jesus did not play into our hand, did not participate in our game, did not give in to the fear-mongering which hung him up to dry. Even while dying, Jesus stayed the course of compassion, remained open and vulnerable to love, wept without shame and offered his prayers and his spirit up to the God who made us all.
And here’s another marvelous thing about the love of God in Christ Jesus — while our game is a game of death, a contemporary Hunger Games of its own, Jesus has completely warped our already warped game into a game of life, making the would-be tragedy of his crucifixion into a comedy of resurrection, turning our game so far inside-out by dying our death, that we don’t even have a solid reason to play that game any more.
Jesus has turned “Dead Man Walking" into “Live People Dancing,” turning our individual dying selves into living, breathing, growing community. Instead of fighting and biting and competing for approval and authority, we are embraced and set free for life everlasting, life without fear, life without end, life without having to prove ourselves or attain the ‘right’ and ‘proper’ status symbols to have value and worth as human beings.
And let me say, for the record here, that this doesn’t mean you suddenly have to prove you ‘get it’ and are a ‘good Christian’ by coming for worship every single week. Because that just sets us all up for failure and guilt when we miss a week or two or three. That also ignores that faith is in itself a gift of the Holy Spirit, among many other gifts. And it ignores the resurrection’s power in every other day of the week. It is a good a helpful thing for us to live in community together, to struggle together, to learn how to forgive one another, but that isn’t just one hour a week. The point of Christ’s Resurrection is that it has an impact on the whole of our lives, the everything of our days, the mundane and the surprising and the disappointing and the giddy and the horrific and the EVERYTHING. We grow more deeply in it when rooted in community where we share the Story over and over again, but God isn’t going to stop at the church door when it comes to our death and resurrection.
God didn’t stop at death’s door.
The tomb had no power on resurrection day, and has no power any more, because Jesus has eradicated the reason to fear death by destroying death itself.
Death is no longer the last word, the last thing, the last chance, because death is now the last enemy to be crushed under God’s foot.
That means that tomorrow when you go wherever you go, be it to school or to work or even back to bed, resurrection is still True for you and for me and for the people you love and for the people who annoy you to pieces. Death is no longer a threat over our heads, nor is it a threat we can hold over anyone else. The final word of Life is now the great equalizer. It may not look like we expect it to, but it’s never over. Love wins, life wins, because Christ is Risen! Alleluia!
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