Easter and the Lorraine Motel

Sermon by Rev. Victor Carpenter, March 23, 2008

First Religious Society, Carlisle, Massachusetts

The Gospel of Mark (which is the oldest and most authentic version of the story) stops at the point where the women who had gone to the tomb to retrieve Jesus body, meet a man (maybe an angel) who tells them that Jesus has gone to Galilee.  The women run away and are too scared to tell anyone what they saw and heard.

And who can blame them!   

The women who had gone to the tomb to anoint the body for a proper burial.  Heart breaking work, but still routine.  Then they meet someone they don’t know who tells them this crazy story about Jesus (whom they know is dead) deciding to get up and go to Galilee.

Sounds like a Stephen King novel or a script for one of those “Terminator” films where the hero staggers back to life even after he has been shot and incinerated and blown to bits

Or Dracula   when the pale hand of the undead count slowly pushes up the coffin lid and climbs out.

Those movies are silly but they pack us in…

They play on the fact that we are both fascinated and horrified by death.  And when Easter rolls around each year we give a pretty good imitation of those women at the empty tomb.    We run   away!

The liberal religious escape route of choice is usually a celebration of the earth returning to life in the spring.
    The traditional Unitarian Universalist Easter sermon is entitled, “ Upsy Daisy”

 If you are a visitor to this church this morning and took note of the quilt hanging behind me with its splendid array of spring blossoms, you could be forgiven for thinking that we are going to worship flowers once again.

   But hold that judgment.  My Easter doesn’t start with flowers. I start with Jews.

Specifically with the Jews who gathered to celebrate   Passover with Jesus in that “upper room” on the night before he died.

Passover is the central festival of Judaism as Easter is central to Christianity and many UU churches celebrate Passover as well as Easter.  When these two festivals fall in the same week of the year as they often do, the UU church will often have the Passover feast served in one room while the Christian Maundy Service celebrating what is called “the last supper” is served in an adjoining room.  Passover celebrates  Jewish  freedom;  the “last supper” recognizes Jesus’ immanent death.  The people celebrating Passover next door seemed  to have a better time.

Sometimes people who don’t understand the connection think that this is just an example of liberal religion’s confused attempt to blend the two Judaism and Christianity, or that its just people’s being nice and hospitable to other people’s faith by giving them “house room” for their celebration.      Neither explanation is true.

There is deep historic and religious precedent for linking the rituals of Passover and the Last Supper together.

Jesus was    an “observant” Jew.    That  means he participated in the practices and festivals  that go with being a  Jew .   So   Jesus ,  the   Jew who  preached a gospel of  freedom  ,   would certainly  celebrate  Passover  that observes  the  struggle  to break free from Pharaoh and bondage in Egypt.;  the Exodus out of slavery.

‘Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.”

With that historic association in mind, consider the  “last supper”.     The Jews (including    Jesus and his disciples who gathered in Jerusalem) were   “enslaved” by Rome.  The disciples  knew  that Jesus  has been identified as a troublemaker by the Romans.

 So they  eat this special meal, the Passover that  celebrates  the escape of Jews from enslavement  drawing courage against the bad things that  they can be pretty sure are about to happen.

And Jesus   goes to great lengths to identify himself with the Passover narrative.

During the Passover meal, cups of wine are served several times in remembrance of slavery and the coming of freedom.

  Jesus instructs his followers to eat the bread and drink the wine, “ in remembrance of me”.    The instruction goes beyond  the simple request to remember him as their friend.  Jesus asks to be remembered in the context of Jewish liberation  from captivity and oppression. 

Go down, Jesus, way down to Jerusalem land, tell old Caesar let my people go

And then Jesus dies.

But putting that way misses an important point.  Jesus doesn’t just “die”; he doesn’t have a heart attack or a stroke;   Jesus is crucified – by the Roman oppressors .

To which you might respond by saying, “So what?”  Dead is dead.   Crucifixion  is certainly a terrible way to die  , and we’re sorry about that  , but dead is dead. End of story.

No, the story ends here ONLY if you ignore the whole Jewish back-story of the struggle for freedom that lies behind it.

If you ignore the back -story of Jewish struggle against oppression, that IS where you DO end up.   Well, perhaps you can inject some life into it.  After all modern medical science reports resuscitation of dead persons with some regularity. 

But here’s the difference:

To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow against mortality

To restore a CRUCIFIED person to life is to strike a blow against both the system that caused a wrongful death and at all death systems that cause suffering in the world.

That distinction  is  at the very foundation of my faith.  

Last Month I was in Memphis Tennessee for a conference and visited the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated while visiting Memphis in support of that city’s Garbage collectors who were on strike.

When King and King’s Aids checked in The Lorraine   it was a cheap, crummy two-story motel in the black part of Memphis.   Not now.   Not any more. 

The Lorraine has been turned into a Civil Rights museum, incorporating all the latest display techniques to trace and to involve visitors to the museum in the   centuries of struggle for freedom and justice from colonial Jamestown to Memphis. 

Only the hotel room in which King stayed remains untouched, it is as it was when he stayed there: the bed    unmade, cigarette butts are still in the ashtray; the balcony onto which he stepped before the killing shot was fired is marked by a simple wreath.  

But the Lorraine is no death memorial.  The Lorraine is brims with life, and not merely life remembered.  There is neither gloom nor sadness; instead there is inspiration and dedication; there is life waiting to be lived, justice waiting to be established, hope waiting to be realized

Martin Luther King was assassinated/ crucified because he struck a blow against the system that caused wrongful death.     The Lorraine is testimony that King lives as his spirit breaths life into those of us who would speak out and live out his message of courage and love.

Go down Martin, way down in Memphis land, tell us, tell us, and tell us to let your people go.

And still the people wait to be free.   Now others have take up Martin’s message.

One such speaker of truth is   the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago.  Rev. Wright’s blowtorch rhetoric disturbed people.   As you know, Rev. Wright is Barak Obama’s minister and, last week; Barak Obama came under attack for his relationship to the fiery preacher.

  For a moment the connection between Jeremiah Wright and the presidential candidate it seemed potent enough to halt the Obama campaign but then, last Tuesday, the candidate did a brave thing.  In addition to affirming his relationship with Rev. Wright, Obama confronted this country’s racial stalemate and the spirit- deadening  “gotcha!” games of division and distraction that are generated by our racial stale-mate.

 Obama said, “We have a choice.”

   We can continue to accept politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism.  We can continue to tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the O.J. trial

OR we can say  “Not This Time!”

Go down Barak, way down in America’s conscience, tell the people, let you fixed and distorted racial attitudes GO

Obama is telling us that we can change; we can embrace what Lincoln called “the angels of our better nature” and be saved.

You’re sitting there thinking, “ Can we?”  I’m standing here thinking “can we?”

Today is Easter: the message at the heart of this Christian festival has nothing to do with reviving corpses and everything to do with “change”;  “turn then mourning into praise” chorus an Easter hymn reviving the strength and spirit of systematically oppressed people, crucified   people, people that both Rev. Wright and Barak Obama know something about.

People like our own folks that went to New Orleans on reconstruction detail know something about.

Remember.” to restore a dead body is to strike a blow against mortality” and that’s nice; that’s astonishing!

BUT    “ To restore a crucified people is to strike a blow at the crucifying system that caused wrongful death and at the death systems that cause such suffering in the world.”  And that holy 

Here is an Easter sermon, condenses into three words that say it all:     

 We Shall Overcome” !