[Sermon given on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012 by Sister Nicole Symmonds– Clarkston United Methodist Church, Clarkston, Georgia]
It is humbling to stand here before you on the first day of the week, with the sun rising out of the clouds. It has been a long road to get to this place and now we are here, a small dispensation of the saints, to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. We are not unlike Mary and the two disciples who hastened to the tomb only to discover that their Lord was gone. Like Mary, we have come with grief and one thing on our minds, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Ours is a deeply personal relationship with Jesus because we have lived with the story of his life, death, and resurrection most of our lives. I surmise that Mary too had a deeply personal relationship with Jesus. This is most clearly illustrated by her actions toward the Lord following his resurrection.
She was the first person to rise early in the morning and see about the Lord. At the sight of the stone, which was rolled away, she immediately went to Simon Peter and the other disciple whom Jesus loved and announced to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” She was a messenger spreading the word of the Lord being taken away from the tomb. At her word, the disciples ran to the tomb and discovered the same. The text tells us that the disciple that Jesus loved looked into the tomb and saw his wrapping cloths lying there and he didn’t go in. Then Simon Peter, the man who denied Jesus three times at the crow of the cock, walked into the tomb and saw the wrapping cloths lying there and the cloth that covered Jesus’ head in the corner. The disciple that Jesus loved followed Simon Peter and saw the same, but his vision was different because he saw AND believed. But, unlike these disciples who took to walking in the tomb to investigate, Mary stayed outside of the tomb to commiserate. It is her commiseration that indicated her deeply personal relationship with Jesus.
For Mary, Jesus’ absence from the tomb was more than a reason for investigating an unsolved mystery; it was a moment to show how much he meant to her. It is her commiseration that leads to her investigation and this commiseration lead investigation leads her to an encounter with two angels who would propel her into her being the first person to have an encounter with Jesus. When the angels asked Mary, “Woman, why are you weeping?” Her response of, “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him,” witnesses to a woman grieving a personal loss. Her response to the angels is different from what she said earlier to the disciples in, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb…” In the presence of angels Mary confesses her personal relationship with Jesus but in the presence of men she doesn’t seem to do the same. As if they were granting her an answer to her question, Jesus arrives unbeknownst to Mary. One might assume that she is still so taken with commiserating that she is consumed beyond consolation and not able to see anything but her own grief. But she speaks to this man who she doesn’t know is Jesus and says something, one more thing, that shows us how deeply committed she is to finding her beloved Lord.
“Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” She has told the disciples of Jesus’ absence from the tomb, has responded to angels about why she was weeping, and now, when she is in the presence of someone whom she doesn’t realize is her Lord, she says exactly why she wants to recover his body, so that she could take him away. As if these were the words he wanted to hear, Jesus reveals himself to her by doing something only a friend could do, calling her by her name in a certain way. One senses that there must have been a particular intonation with which Jesus said Mary’s name that made her realize who he was. But at the moment she heard her name, she knew who he was, and she returned the greeting in kind calling him “Rabbouni.” Now we see two close friends meeting again and as close friends are wont to do after time apart, Mary wanted to embrace Jesus. She wanted to savor this moment of seeing him again after what probably seemed like years. She wanted to feel his embrace and maybe, just maybe, this was going to help comfort her. But Jesus would not let her hold him. In a move that seemed to be rather abrasive her told her, “Do not hold onto to me because I have not ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
Here Jesus changes the course of Mary’s life by not only appearing to her and speaking his first words, post-resurrection, to her. But he let her know, subtly, that all of the love she had for him and her knowledge of him, wasn’t to be kept inside. Her deeply personal relationship wasn’t just for her benefit, but it was for the benefit of others, first for the disciples and then for everyone who would hear the message. It was Mary’s deeply personal relationship with Jesus that lead her to become the first person he called to spread the message of the good news about his resurrection and ascension. No longer would Mary have to weep outside of an empty tomb and wonder where her Lord was. Now she knew where he was and where he was going and was called to spread that message. We are not unlike Mary in this respect.
We have commiserated and investigated the whereabouts of our Lord Jesus. We no longer have to weep and wonder where he is. We have the pleasure of knowing not only where he was and where he is, but also where he will be. But with this pleasure of knowing Jesus and having a deeply personal relationship with Jesus, comes the responsibility to let others know about Jesus. Just as Jesus told Mary not to hold onto him, we must not hold onto to Jesus for ourselves. We must let him go so that he can continue to do his work. And we must go forth to do the work that he first called one woman to do, to spread the good news of his resurrection.
Yesterday afternoon I reached out to one of our contributing writers, Alisha Gordon, to see if she was planning to see Tyler Perry’s latest film, “The Single Moms Club.” “Not with my own money,” she replied. I expected this response. Gordon is a single mother and a graduate student who is increasingly weary of how Tyler Perry tells women’s stories. Her and I continued to talk about why she wouldn’t be paying to see the movie and I came to the realization that Perry might have missed out on a big marketing opportunity in not explicitly targeting single mothers. Not marketing that increases their consumption by way of paying for his movie, but marketing that shows his concern for the plight of many single moms by sponsoring a “Single Moms Night Out.” After all, Perry stands to make plenty of money from the story of single mothers, so why shouldn’t some of the proceeds go toward actual single mothers by way of giving them a space to release and celebrate just as the characters in his movie will inevitably do?
Given this I scoured Perry’s Twitter feed and the Internet to see if he was already on top of it. Alas no theatres were rented out and no contest was launched to celebrate single moms in a tangible way. Perry speaks of honoring the lives of single moms but what about honoring the daily lived experience of single moms? The single moms who want to see his movie but can’t afford it? Or the ones who have been struggling in isolation with raising a child because her community has cast her to the margins? How could a man benefit from the story of single mothers–including the single mother who raised him–without tangibly giving back to that very community? With that I said to the writer, “I wonder if Perry would consider paying for single mothers to see it.” She challenged me to tweet Tyler Perry and we hope that the rest will be social media history.
I want every single mom on Twitter to tweet @tylerperry and ask him to sponsor a single moms night out to see this movie.
This yielded Gordon, others who are single moms, and even a couple of men who aren’t even single parents sending tweets to Tyler Perry asking him to sponsor a “Single Moms Night Out.” Gordon also sent a widely shared open status message to Tyler Perry on Facebook that read as follows,
Hi, Tyler Perry!
I was wondering: what if you sponsored single moms to see your film #SingleMomsClub this weekend? It would be quite the gesture. I mean, you ARE telling OUR story, right?
Most single moms I know are on a fixed income and spending $15 at the movie theater (plus $ for a baby sitter) is far-fetched and hard to come by.
Yet, you stand to earn millions of dollars off of the stories of women who are often marginalized and ostracized in society.
Single moms live and find rest in the margins — margins that limit and oppress and restrict and constantly remind you of your decision to carry and birth a life you may or may not have been prepared to care for.
In those same margins, the community comes to offer support and guidance as we collectively raise sons and daughters.
You are telling some version of this story (and getting paid well to do so.) Of course, a comp movie ticket to your local theater isn’t justification nor does it placate the need for more in-depth conversation about single parenthood.
[But what it does is not call for the marginalized women whose story you are attempting to tell PAY INTO seeing their story told.]
So, what say you, Tyler? Got a little room to offer your biggest supporters the opportunity to see their story told sans reaching into their pocketbooks?
This post is public, so I’m looking forward to getting the “like” notification from you soon!
Sincerely,
Alisha Gordon
In doing this, our hope is that many single moms and supporters of single moms will flood Tyler Perry’s Twitter feed and Facebook feed with requests to sponsor a “Single Moms Night Out.” We hope that it will create a groundswell that he can’t deny and it will force him to truly honor the women whose stories he dares to tell and to profit from. We know that there are certainly other and better ways Perry can help through programming and advocacy that supports single mothers, but that is another post for another day.
So what do you think, should Tyler Perry sponsor a #singlemomsnightout so that real single moms can see his new film “Single Moms Club?” If so, join the campaign and tweet @tylerperry to encourage him to do so. If not, tell us why. Either way, we hope you’ll join the discussion.
Here we are, not even a week into Lent, and we are already being faced with the mysterious reality of resurrection, faith and doubt. This is what ABC led many to with the Sunday premiere of “Resurrection.” Based on the debut novel “The Returned” by Jason Mott, Resurrection is about the dead returning to life. This is no, “And on the third day he rose again,” story though. The people on Resurrection, such as 8-year-old Jacob—the first to be resurrected, have been gone for a long time. Jacob was dead for 32 years before coming back to life in a rice paddy in China and finding his way to his aging parents doorstep with the help of immigration office J. Martin Bellamy—played by Omar Epps. The locus of these resurrection stories is Arcadia, Missouri, a town that at once seems small and sleepy but is really full of secrets and sadness. We don’t know why Jacob and others are coming back to life—rest assured this is also not a zombie apocalypse story—nor do we know who is responsible for these resurrections—there is no hint that it’s a God thing, but what we discover is resurrection changes everything and creates questions.
A moment of contemplating the possibility of resurrection is shattered when loved ones are faced with the full-bodied presence of their loved ones. Existential questions may remain but empirical evidence requires their full attention. When the un-aged Jacob lands on his parent’s doorstep and asks his father Henry Langston, “What’s red and green and goes a million miles an hour?” “A frog in a blender,” his father answers without a second thought and in an instant he is hit by the realization that this could really be his son standing before him. Yet and still the question of whether this is truly possibly is thick in the air. One of the most emotional moments of the show was when Jacob’s mother reached out to touch her son for the first time. With slightly trembling hands hovering over Jacob’s head, Lucille Langston stood as one in disbelief until she touched him. She was an embodiment of Thomas the disciple who didn’t want to believe Jesus had risen unless, “I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side” (John 20:25). My comparing Jacob’s mother to doubting Thomas is probably just the occupational hazard of a former seminarian and forever theology nerd but the show offers up other moments of explicit theological and philosophical reflections.
Jacob’s story connects to several people in Arcadia including Pastor Tom Hale who was his childhood friend. As you can imagine, Jacob’s appearance sends Pastor Hale into a sort of crisis of faith and he begins to wonder how he can go from preaching the miracles of God to believing in the miracle as manifested through Jacob. Pastor Hale’s wife gives him wise counsel by telling him that his job is not to have all of the answers but to be there to comfort people who have questions. As a resurrected Jacob walks into the church, Pastor Hale invokes his wife’s words of wisdom and the spirit of Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” by telling his congregation that faith is in asking questions not knowing answers. This is how resurrection changes everything.
During my last semester of theology school in a class on Howard Thurman, my professor polled the class and on what we believe is essential to the Christian faith. Some of the essentials we listed as a class: belief in Christ, incarnation of Christ, acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, faith, and, of course, the bodily resurrection. After this non-comprehensive list was formed my professor went back through and polled the class on each essential asking by a show of hands to respond to whether or not these were indeed essentials. Once he got to the question of the bodily resurrection, I was one of six students—in a class of 20 or so—to affirm that belief in the bodily resurrection is essential to the Christian faith. For this my professor put me in the hot seat. “Why do you think belief in the bodily resurrection is essential to the Christian faith?” My professor asked me in front of my fellow students. I was nervous and I spouted a bunch of answers of why it makes sense to me, until he asked me if it is a requirement for everyone to believe. I was asked this question about this time last year, we were also in the midst of Lent already talking about resurrection and I ended my response with a question, “Why wouldn’t you believe in the bodily resurrection if you are acknowledging this liturgical season?” I couldn’t see how most of my classmates would give up in believing in the bodily resurrection that fulfills Jesus’ own words of, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). But the basis of our entire “essentials of Christian faith” discussion was about people coming together to question what it is they believe and even to formulate answers that produce more questions. There was power in the questions and even in some of the answers.
Most of us, if we are willing to admit it, live in a space somewhere between faith and doubt but we shrug doubt off. We’ve been taught that to doubt is to border on unbelief. But to doubt, from time to time, is a part of faith. Theologian Paul Tillich said, “If doubt appears, it should not be considered as the negation of faith, but as an element which was always and will always be present in the act of faith. Existential doubt and faith are poles of the same reality, the state of ultimate concern.” To put it plainly, and in the context of the show Resurrection, to doubt while holding on to your belief in the God of miracles or in the miracle itself is not to withdraw from faith but to exercise faith all the more. It takes a measure of faith to move through doubt. Resurrection, while not a show explicitly about faith, has something to show people of faith about living in the tension of faith and doubt. The characters who are witnessing their loved ones come back to life own the doubt they are experiencing, but they also have enough faith to make the miracle of a resurrection seem more probable than possible.
“You value justice higher than mercy.” This sentence, at once both question and accusation, glared at me as I took the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, a test that measures psychological tendencies in how a person perceives the world around them and makes decisions. I sat for a while, staring at the words and considering my response and its implications. I answered no, propelled by nagging thoughts not only of Jordan Davis, a black teen recently slain, unarmed, in the passenger seat of a friend’s SUV, but also of Michael Dunn, a 45-year old software developer and Davis’s killer. In that moment I decided that, as a Christian, I should be more concerned with mercy and love–not so as to forfeit justice, but in order to balance the scales. My thoughts rested on how we pursue justice AND mercy, particularly when the former pursuit appears hopeless.
Weeks ago I saw Jordan Davis’s face flash across my computer screen. I read the headline indicating he was shot and killed by a white man while sitting in a vehicle with his friends playing loud music. After that, I read no further. It’s a story I’ve seen before and I knew how it would end. I never expected that justice would be served. So I went on about my weekend, unfettered by the anticipation of a verdict that would inevitably disappoint me. But this case wouldn’t let me go. When I met a friend at the movies on Saturday evening she told me that she just got off the phone with her mother who was waiting by the television for the verdict. And when I left the movie theatre and checked Facebook, my timeline was flooded with cries of “No Justice, No Peace” and expletive-laced statements about how Florida did it again. None of this came as a surprise and I didn’t join in the chorus because I had nothing new to add. But by Sunday I wondered if our cries for justice are made hollow–and if we are made numb–because we lack a concern for mercy and love.
W.E.B DuBois asked, “How does it feel to be a problem?” We seek justice on behalf of young black boys whose lives are marked by that question. They walk out of their homes and are considered a threat even when they are just walking down the street with a bottle of Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles, asking for help after their car breaks down, or in a convenient store parking lot in their car with their friends and their music turned up. These young men weren’t armed with anything more dangerous than the color of their skin. That color is enough. As the verdicts are rendered it feels like the moral arc of the universe that Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of is too long, like it will never really bend all the way toward justice. And so our cries for justice continue and crescendo, though muffled by a system that is not interested in the rights of all individuals to equal protection, but that protects some individuals while flatly denying the worth of others. Every time the blood of one of our own is shed, we know shout “No justice, no peace” in the streets. Yet at the same time, we should question whether our one-sided pursuit for justice aligns with divine justice. We are always concerned about our own—the ones whom look like us, but should our concern be so limited? What of the mercy and love of which our sacred text speaks? In light of that what are we to do with our justice? Do we cry out for justice alone or should we always be crying out for mercy in the pursuit of justice?
Every Sunday I stand at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church and sing “Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison” Lord Have Mercy, Christ Have Mercy. I know how to do this well for myself among my brothers and sisters in Christ. But I don’t know how to cry out for mercy in the public square. I have learned to cry “No Justice! No Peace!” but I struggle with what it looks like to be concerned about mercy in the midst of what appears to be injustice. Alongside our cries for justice we must cry out for mercy for our young black men because of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Ferrell, and Jordan Davis–that much is a given. But I believe that mercy requires us to care for both the victim and the offender, which, in turn, requires us to let go of our thirst for retribution. We fail to cry out for mercy in cases like these precisely because to do so forces us either to care about our enemies, or to admit the fact that Christ commands it and we simply won’t obey.
Valuing mercy in the case of Michael Dunn is to remove him from our system of justice–one dependent upon the keeping of contracts and rewarding of merits—and to consider him a person still in the midst of becoming. It doesn’t excuse him from his actions, which denied Jordan Davis any mercy. But it reminds us–and perhaps Dunn himself–that he is human. From the moment that offense is committed, we seek to dehumanize persons such as Michael Dunn. We strip them of any trace back to God and blame their actions on their individual depravity without concern for how they may be in need of mercy. But we forget that we are inextricably linked together by our humanity and our shared lot in falling short of the glory of God. The white supremacism of this society is an ugly thing, but we should not fail to recognize that its greatest perpetrators are also some of its greatest victims, for they lose not simply their lives, but their humanity as well.
On Agapic Love and Justice
W.H. Auden wrote, “Evil is always unspectacular, and always human, it shares our bed and eats at our table.” Auden finds the face of evil in the face of everyday people. And if we dare to consider how our own faces can be evil, we will not hesitate to cry out for mercy. This challenges us to ask if we are any different from Michael Dunn, Randall Kerrick, George Zimmerman and others, particularly when our pursuit of justice finds us exalting ourselves above them just as their pursuit of power found them exalting their humanity above another. Jesus touched on this in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14 when he said:
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all of my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Through this parable Jesus shows how justice and mercy works. It is like the old church mothers who remind us that “favor ain’t fair.” It isn’t always in the favor of the people who consider themselves most worthy of it. The text shows the sinner asking for mercy and being justified but, at its core, it is a cautionary tale for those who trust too much in their own righteousness. This may be hard to swallow because we live in a time when we watch our brothers and sisters of all stripes commit all manner of offense. We don’t want to align ourselves with them but we needto because we are all connected and made in the image of the same God. As much as we claim being made in God’s image for ourselves, we must also claim it for those who have forgotten. We remember difference, but without being connected to a larger community that difference would be perpetual alienation: an option that is neither practically possible nor theologically acceptable. And this is what impresses upon us the universal need for mercy: it is how we must live together. Such a consideration of mercy depends on love–specifically, agapic love.
As Christians we have a particular command to love not just our neighbors but also our enemies. Jesus declares this in Matthew 5: 43-48 when he says:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
If you blink you will miss the fact that Jesus is deconstructing Israelite law and radicalizing it every time he says, “You have heard that it was said…But I say to you…” Here he is changing things, upending assumptions and moving people to let go of personal agendas and preferential love. Therefore, Jesus’ living presence in our lives should challenge the way we love. In his book “The Priority of Love,” ethicist Timothy Jackson argues that, “A strict legalistic justice based on contract or merit falls short of God’s spontaneous agape. This is not to say that God, and therefore ethics, are arbitrary. It does suggest, however, that God’s own holiness is the key to integrating questions of character, action, and consequence into a coherent picture of biblical justice.” Jackson goes on to suggest that if justice is concerned with keeping contracts and giving no less than what is deserved, agape is incompatible with it because agape pushes us to bestow value beyond what is required and in this we see God.
We who follow this God must unbind our theories of right in order to let a fuller vision of justice and mercy come forth. This refusal to seek a justice bereft of mercy may require us to live in tension between what we prefer and what God may inevitably desire, but we are not without examples. Perhaps the party least expected to show mercy, Jordan Davis’s parents have, despite their disappointment in the verdict, shown the path to grace and mercy in their recent interviews. “God is the ultimate justice and so justice on Earth is one justice,” his mother explains, “but always look to God to be the ultimate justice.”
One year ago Eunique Jones Gibson had a dream, in the metaphorical sense. It was six months after the birth of her second son and she began reflecting on the future of her children and the “opportunities they could pursue as a result of the progress and achievements made by individuals past and present.” Her reflections were also in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case and her concerns as the mother of two black boys. With those concerns she started the “I Am Trayvon Martin” photo campaign in which she photographed everyday people wearing hoodies. From there she started “Because of Them We Can” a campaign which started as a Black History Month feature and then rolled into a year-long project because of Jones-Gibson’s realization that “28 days wasn’t enough.” The “Because of Them We Can” campaign features children posing as notable figures in black history and their resemblance is often uncanny. But, more significant than that is how Jones helps these children embody historical figures. An embodiment that we must hope will enable them to always recall what is possible because they’ve spent some time walking in their shoes in the most literal sense. An embodiment that takes them beyond the 28 days in February allotted for mass recognition of our history into the other 337 days where we must remember the work that was done and is still being done toward our liberation.
But, in celebration of this month that we still are grateful for, Gibson recently released the latest video in the BOTWC series which finds a young woman reenacting Rosa Parks’s bus experience. Watch the video below and check out more of Eunique Jones Gibson’s work on “Because of Them We Can.”
