“Lech Walesa, Norma Rae
And Jesus Walk Into a Bar”
Easter Sunday
Sunday, April 5, 2015
The Rev. Dr. W. Frederick Wooden
Fountain Street Church
24 Fountain St., NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
www.fountainstreet.org
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To the reader: This sermon was only part of a service of worship with many components
working together, all of which were designed to be experienced in a community context.
In our "free pulpit" tradition, its concepts are intended not as truths to receive, but as spurs
to your own thought and faith.
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“Lech Walesa, Norma Rae and Jesus Walk Into a Bar”
“It was fun, as a child, to bound down the stairs to find seasonal sweet-treats under
each plate, but again, with the passing of time, and the shadow of death over our
broken family circle, I’ve seen Easter as highest necessity. If hope is to flourish, it had
better be true.”
~ Gerhard Frost
SLT 626, expanded
Responsive Reading
Out of the dusk, a shadow, then a spark.
Out of the cloud a silence, then, a lark.
Out of the heart a rapture, then a pain.
Out of the dead, cold ashes, Life again.
This is the day, when fear bends to awe and wonder.
This is the day, we are called forward to make
a new creation.
Readings
From Psalm 118: The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief
cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that
the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
From Acts 10: Then Peter began to speak to them: "I truly understand that God shows
no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is
acceptable to him.”
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Sermon
Word of Robert E. Lee’s surrender arrived on Palm Sunday, April 10, 1865, one
hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow. It took place at a small town, Appomattox Court
House, a rural Virginia hamlet where Wilmer McLean bought a house after having his
first one commandeered in 1861 for the battle of Manassas. He would later say that
the Civil War "began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor." I have been to
both places, but Appomattox is the more solemn. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,
governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College, was present as a young Union
Officer, and recorded the formal surrender on April 12:
“Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes
opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right
to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier's salutation — the
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marching salute. [Confederate Gen.] Gordon at the head of the column, riding with
heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and,
taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted
figure… as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own
command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position —
honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not
a cheer, nor word nor whisper… but an awed stillness.”
I have not often mentioned the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, though its
presence is still profound. Scant yards from here stands the monument to that war, to
the men of Kent County who served in it. I pass it almost every day. This past week
an article in the New York Times noted the similarity between then and now, how race,
states’ rights, deeply divided political parties, were the order of that day as well as
ours. We like to think America is the land of the future, but it turns out we are as tied
to our past as any nation.
A week later, on Easter Sunday 1865, the nation was as deep in mourning as it
was in joy the week before. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday,
which every preacher in the nation noticed and preached. He was our national Christ,
the sacrificial lamb for our sin of slavery. Victory without glory, a peace purchased
with grief. Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and now president of Harvard, in her
remarkable book on the Civil War, titled “The Republic of Suffering,” writes, “The
seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human,
the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among
the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine.” And
what is the Easter story but a tale of “the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman.”
A man of nobility is horribly executed. His animal flesh is sacrificed for his spiritual
claims. Two Good Fridays, two dead men, two dreams dashed at the moment when
victory seemed within reach.
I should be cheerful today. It is Easter after all, and the snow is gone. Spring is
here, my favorite season. And yet when I reflect, some of my saddest times have
come in spring – deaths notably. Just this year, between March 31 and April 18 I am
officiating at three memorials. Every one of them touches me, and each one brings a
bit of that confluence of the animal, the spiritual and the divine.
That’s what makes Easter powerful. It is not merely the extravagant claim of rising
from the dead, but coming after being betrayed, humiliated, tortured, condemned, and
publicly executed. Just beneath the written words of the story is the unwritten story we
all hear in a whisper – “even as you have been betrayed, humiliated, afflicted and
judged, so will you triumph over them all.”
Who has not been betrayed and humiliated? Who has not been afflicted and
judged? Every one of us, and in those horrid moments the worst part is not the pain
but the loneliness. That’s what Jesus felt: in the garden at night, imploring for
company though they fell asleep; on the cross, when they fled. We feel for Jesus
because we know the feeling.
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Without the week before, Easter is just a magic trick. Lots of gods came back to life
– Osiris and Serapis to name but two. But their religions are gone because it is the
human Jesus, who lived as we do and died as we do, that makes us care and makes
his story more than a myth.
It is the hope of restoration not resurrection that touches us most deeply. We want
to know that we matter, which is the question with which I started my series back in
February. Is not death the ultimate defeat and separation that erases us from reality?
My Universalist heritage proclaims that all will be saved, all will be restored. In a
culture where a wholly other God dominates, rewarding the good and punishing the
bad, this notion is unintelligible. Where is the justice in letting everyone into heaven,
people ask? But a parable told by the early Universalist leader, Hosea Ballou
wonderfully explains why even the biblical God would save all people despite their
sins:
Imagine a child playing in the yard. He falls into the mud, getting quite filthy. His
mother comes out, picks him up, bathes him and changes his clothes. Now, did she
love him because she washed him or wash him because she loved him?
A century later, James Weldon Johnson’s “Seven Negro Sermons in Verse,” called
God’s Trombones, begins the first poem about the Creation like this,
“And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely -I'll make me a world.
Even after creating the world he says,
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I'm lonely still.
So God made humans to keep God company.
Those who followed my Lenten series on the Nature of God, know it ended with a
rather abstract idea of God as a cosmic mind in which we ‘live and move and have our
being,’ to quote Paul in the book of Acts. But we are concrete beings, not abstract.
We want to feel a part of this larger truth and love, not just think it might be so. The
Easter story does that.
At the memorial for a young woman this past week I shared a favorite portion from
the Christian scriptures, from Paul’s letter to the Romans, which reads, “For I am sure
that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come,
nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God.” That for me is the real promise of the Christian faith
- that we are never lost and will never be alone.
There is no joke that begins with “Lech Walesa, Norma Rae and Jesus walk into a
bar.” But you recognize that Lech Walesa is the founder of Solidarity, the Polish Union
that destroyed the Communist regime. You recognize Norma Rae as the fictional
textile worker in North Carolina who succeeds in organizing a union there. You
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recognize Jesus as the one who promises by word and deed to usher in the kingdom
of God. You recognize a bar as a place ‘where everybody knows your name.’
The Easter story is not about magical resurrection but about spiritual restoration.
Though Jesus was despised and rejected by people, God did not. You and I have
each been despised and rejected, but God does not. We belong to the universe,
because God alone is not God. Those who come to FSC to hear heresy, there it is.
God needs us, needs creation, as a body needs a mind. One is not whole without the
other.
It is we, imperfect and fragmentary beings that we are, who despise and reject,
who separate and condemn, who afflict and judge. Anything that separates and
subordinates and diminishes and despises, anything that rejects and rends the single
garment of destiny in which all of us are woven, is sin. And its wages are not the
death of the body but the death of ‘dignity, meaning, worth and joy.’
We know in our deepest hearts that all we want or need is to belong. What is the
desire for success but to be recognized, seen by the world? “Look at me, look at me!”
we said riding our bikes. What is the longing for love but the sense of deep
connection? Is not every embrace a tiny echo of when we nursed or were inside our
mothers? All our worldly desires are but a variations on Lincoln’s mystic chords that
bind us to one another across generations.
I left out some words of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain earlier. “Before us in proud
humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings,
nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve;
standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking
level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond.”
Easter was the founding of the universal republic of suffering, the union of those
who endured as Jesus endured, who hoped even when hopeless, and lived even
when life itself seemed vain. Two thousand years ago it gave birth to Christianity.
One hundred and fifty years ago it gave new birth to America. We are all citizens of
that republic, called to “bind ourselves in union,” as my favorite hymn says, one to
another and across the centuries, born from our suffering, our hope and our hands.
Truly, the Kingdom of God is within you.
Amen…
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