Persuasion vs Force: Jesus vs Caesar (Easter Reflection)

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Easter's celebration of Resurrection isn't about elevating Jesus above all, like an authoritarian emperor. It's a vision of hope and justice to lift up ALL people, that begins with Jesus, and moves forward by the power of persuasion, not force.

SPEAKER NOTES

Easter Message

Intro

• Happy Easter!
  • And a public thank you to everyone who has been so supportive to my family after my injury this week!
  • Everyone in a community goes through seasons in need of care, including pastors, and we’ve entered one of those seasons.
• This year, the Easter reflection I’ve prepared for us has got me thinking about my decade of life working in a Retirement Community and Assisted Living Campus before this church started.
  • Maybe it’s because much of my time there I was caring for people post surgery
  • And I’ll be having surgery Tuesday
  • Anyway, I was grateful to be brought to memories working in that place
• Specifically, I found myself remembering caring for memory care patients…
  • People in various stages of dementia…
    • Can be incredibly rewarding and beautiful, seeing people remember love, even if they don’t remember specific memories… or remember a song, because of the way music gets lodged in our brains
    • Can also be incredibly taxing though, as losing one’s memories and functioning is of course disorienting and scary, and sometimes caregivers receive the brunt of someone with dementia’s anger over that
  • Here’s something we all learned as caregivers, which is both obvious and difficult at the same time:
    • When caring for someone with dementia, it’s all about patient persuasion…
      • taking your time
      • gentle coaxing
      • smiles and using people’s names
      • kind rubs of the shoulder or pats on the back
      • reassuring words
    • the threat, that every one of us struggled with, is getting impatient, getting in a rush, and resorting to force…
      • just move them yourself and put them in the wheelchair…
      • just make the decision for them instead of waiting for consent…
  • I remember one time…
    • One resident, Ms. Newcombe
      • Physically she was quite well, and she had very clearly been a person of grace and elegance (you could tell just by her wardrobe)
      • But mentally she was in an advanced stage of dementia, so she could get agitated and confused and angry
    • And the time I’m remembering, I was in a good, settled place myself that morning, as I was helping her with her weekly appointment at the fitness center
    • She was agitated as I came to pick her up
    • But I was patient and gentle and kind
    • And it was such a clear example of persuasion being better than force
      • As the morning went on, her interactions became so pleasant…
      • She’s working with her trainer at the fitness center, a friend of mine, John, also persuasive, not forceful
      • And she looks at him, calmly and sweetly, while they’re doing stretches and says, “Those are new glasses.”
      • And John stops and says, “Wow, yes, yes, they are. Thanks for noticing Ms. Newcombe.”
      • We were like, stopped in our tracks — has some unexpected cognitive clarity been unlocked by a morning of kindness?
      • And then, still smiling, her gaze shifts focus to behind John out the window, and she calmly points and says, “and there’s a man on fire out there”
    • And we just had to laugh,
      • And she laughed with us!
      • Because despite the cruelty of dementia stealing her cognitive abilities
      • She still knows what connection and joy is!
    • Memory care settings are one of THE places that can teach you:
      • It is persuasion, not force, that helps us experience those things that matter most.
• I want to zoom in on this distinction
  • force vs persuasion
• Our celebration on Easter Sunday of Resurrection coming after Death (death is not the end of any story!), in some ways, comes down to that distinction: force vs persuasion
• And as an inspiration for us this morning, this week, this spring, I want to tell you why I think so.
• We can see it when we move past some of the more popular but less helpful assumptions around Easter and the story of Jesus

Context

• If you joined us at all during Lent the 40 day season in the church calendar leading up to today, Easter, you’ll know that this is our tradition this time of year here
  • to ask big, reflective, hard questions of our Christian Tradition
  • Because that is what it takes to honor a tradition… rethinking, re-interpreting, re-applying its lessons to new times that call for new questions
  • Fundamentalism says it is dishonoring to do such things with our traditions, but that’s not true.
  • What is dishonoring is to leave our traditions to gather dust and never rethink them
• And so, with a play on the “give up something for Lent” tradition, we’ve been giving up unhelpful and incomplete beliefs for Lent
  • And constructing new, more helpful beliefs in their place
• Our BLC kids have been doing this too...
  • They’ve been encouraged that God loves questions, so ask a big question about God or life each week of Lent
  • You can see those questions from the last six weeks decorating our space this morning - great questions!
• We’re in that same vein this morning for Easter
  • Pushing beyond popular assumptions
  • Asking good questions
  • To arrive at something more beautiful, hopeful, relevant

Resurrection

• The popular belief to push beyond on Easter is our assumed picture of resurrection
  • In the West our assumed picture when we read or think about “resurrection” in the Bible is something like:
  • Jesus was dead, but then, because Jesus is so special, Jesus is raised.
• This assumed picture, though, is not actually an accurate picture of the ancient Hebrew idea “resurrection” in the Bible,
• Our picture aligns more with a different ancient concept called “ascension”,
  • and over many hundreds of years we’ve collapsed the word resurrection into ascension
  • Ascension is the idea that some individuals are so heroic, so important, that instead of dying, they ascend into heaven.
  • Moses and Elijah in the Hebrew Bible are so important they don’t die, they are carried up to heaven.
  • This was a far more well known concept in the ancient world —
  • Not just among a small minority group like the Hebrews, it was a well known thing among the powerful Romans.
  • Romulus, the founder of Rome, didn’t die but was taken up to be with the Gods.
• If the goal was veneration of an individual hero, Jesus, the New Testament Biblical writers would’ve been better served focusing on the “ascension” of Jesus
• But that’s not what they focused on. They focused on the resurrection of Jesus… Why?
  • Because resurrection was a bigger thing —
  • In the Bible, “the resurrection of the dead” represented the promise of
    • justice for all, especially those unjustly treated,
    • accountability for the abuses of the world’s corrupt and dominators,
    • hope that we might see the loved ones we’ve lost someday again, that death is not the end of any of our stories!
    • peace that there is a God who sees every pain, every tragedy, every trauma, and wants to wipe every tear from every eye!
    • some within Jesus’ Hebrew tradition cynically called this wishful thinking, but Jesus and his followers held to this
    • Because Jesus’ mission was never about one special hero, who should be elevated over all others, like the Roman Caesar or Emperor —
    • It was about a different program entirely — meant to lift up all, the whole human race
    • There is no individual resurrection of one elite person, there is only the general resurrection of all; Jesus is just the start of it
  • The Eastern Orthodox Church has understood this better than us in the West,
    • which is why I’ve chosen ::for our image today:: an Eastern Icon of the resurrection —
    • Eastern icons don’t depict Jesus alone when representing the resurrection… there’s always Adam and Eve too (representing the whole human race) held by the hand being brought with Jesus ::image off::
  • This is how we can more accurately translate the Biblical idea of “resurrection” to today
    • Not collapsing it into the more popular idea of “ascension”
      • Easter isn’t meant to be a pep rally for Jesus, the superstar
    • Resurrection, what we celebrate on Easter, is the Biblical way of talking about a longing for hope for all humanity,
    • For the moral arc of the whole universe to bend toward justice, as Dr King phrased it

Back to force vs persuasion

• And how do we access that hope? How does that justice come about?
• Putting our hope in the Ascension of Elite individuals suggests that it is special, celebrity, authoritarian power that will bring about justice,
  • by force — because only they can fix it, what they say goes, they’re dominant…
  • We don’t believe people are taken up to heaven or the gods anymore
  • But are we tempted to put our hope in such authoritarian power to bring about justice?
  • You better believe we are. And it’s often broken pictures of Justice that we’re wanting in those cases — retributive justice, like we talked about giving up last week.
• But putting our hope in the “Resurrection of all” instead of “Ascension of the elite” suggests that it is all of our participation in what Jesus began that will bring about a true Justice
  • not by force, but by persuasion
  • through patient action, loving example, prayer, and resilience
  • this is Jesus’ Rule of God (or Kingdom of God to use the traditional gendered language)
• The Rule of God was ::Jesus’ program for peace::, subverting the Imperial program for peace of the Roman Caesars
  • We can swap out Caesar and Rome for any of the Imperial powers throughout history
  • Historian and Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan describes the two programs this way:
    • Imperial program: peace through war and victory
    • Jesus’ program: peace through distributive justice (everyone having enough)
    • Force vs persuasion ::image off::
• Which inspires you more?
  • Which calls to you to participate?

Story — MSI’s Pompeii exhibit

• Some months ago we visited with our kids the Museum of Science and Industry’s ::“Pompeii” exhibit::
  • About the Roman town suddenly wiped out by a volcanic eruption on Mt Vesuvius one day in 79 CE (just 50 years after Jesus)
  • Pompeii is the source of a lot of historians’ knowledge of the 1st century Roman world,
  • Because of the way volcanic ash preserved so much of the ruins
• It was a good exhibit! We learned a lot ::image off::
  • about the dangerous science of volcanic eruptions
  • and about the town of Pompeii
• BUT what Keziah and I couldn’t help but notice was that EVERYTHING — all the artifacts, all the videos, and all the displays except for a few throwaway sentences — was about the rich and elite Romans
  • everything was from the perspective of the imperial program, the 1% or less of the population that owned lavish stuff preserved by all that volcanic ash…
  • even though the vast majority of the people who died that day were poor or enslaved
  • They were the ones who built and crafted most of that lavish stuff
• It got me thinking back to history classes as a kid growing up in America —
  • same thing there —
  • The conquering Alexander is “Great”,
  • the violence of Greco-Roman culture’s obsession with dominance is passed over, in favor of lessons like: “they taught us democracy”
• When we learn about history, when we imagine how the past ties to our world today,
  • We unthinkingly tie ourselves to the elite of the past
  • Because we like to think of ourselves as more significant than “just the masses”…
  • Remember the TikTok thing about how apparently men think about the Roman Empire all the time?
  • We have this attachment to the Romans, the elite of history
• Even though, if we think about it,
  • who has more in common with my and Keziah’s family and all of the working families at MSI chasing their kids around that Pompeii exhibit, hoping for some quality time, maybe a Stan’s doughnut, and a moment to experience awe and fun together beyond the exhaustion of modern life?
  • Is it the Roman elite who most of the text we read focuses on?
  • No! It’s the masses, the poor, the enslaved! Of history and of today!That’s who my family has more in common with!
• But the temptation is to compare ourselves to the Romes, the elite
  • rather than the rest of the 99% of people who have to work for a living
• When we do this, we unthinkingly allow a toxic belief to get smuggled in
  • That “force” is the best power
  • That ascension of elites is more important or more useful than the resurrection of all

Strength in weakness

• But it is not true.

• The force that authoritarians wield is NOT more powerful than the resilient persuasion of Jesus’ Rule of God — his alternative program for peace that invites us to participate

• In St. Paul’s letter 1 Corinthians in the Bible, that culminates with Paul’s vision of Jesus ushering in the “resurrection of all”, he begins the letter talking about true strength being found in what the imperial program calls weakness — but it’s not! ::scripture::

  20 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, [it is] Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. ::scripture off::

• We can see this truth in the small ways that people show love to Memory Care residents

• And, as we talked about last week, we can see this truth in the way the Crucified Jesus exposes our human cycles of violence and retribution, and refuses to use his victimness as a weapon.

• It is the Imperial program of force that glorifies violence, that justifies the revenge game, like the atrocities being committed against Palestinian citizens.

• It is the Crucified Jesus’ program

  • that isn’t scandalized by pain, thinking it can be eradicated,
  • but courageously comes close to all those hurting, cast off, exhausted, beaten down,
  • and comforts us:
  • death is not the end of any story; resurrection comes after death.

• That persuasive “weakness” of God is incomparably stronger than the supposed strength of imperial force.

Bringing it home

• I asked earlier, which program inspires you more?
  • The imperial program — strength in domination and force
  • Or Jesus’ program — strength in weakness and persuasion
• Here’s the next question that question begs: What’s a more magnetic picture of God?
  • The imperial program’s God or Jesus’ God?
  • An authoritarian
    • who, given the evil and injustice of the world, is either evil himself, or asleep on the job?
  • OR the persuasive God Jesus shows us,
    • a God who doesn’t lie to us about the reality of evil and injustice,
    • who doesn’t respond to suffering with trite phrases like “everything happens for a reason”
    • but who is present to every creature in every moment, as our fellow experiencer,
    • and as our guide — persuading, luring, calling each of us to participate in bringing about the most beautiful, most just, most loving outcomes
    • even when we refuse to cooperate, God doesn’t leave us to our own devices, but faithfully comes to us in the next moment, still luring, still persuading, still bringing hope, moving us toward justice
• To me, the Persuasive God, always inviting us to help bring about justice and hope (resurrection!) for all, is so much more magnetic than a God of Force, up in the sky, demanding to be venerated
  • And, honestly, for us today in the Modern World, an Authoritarian Sky God of Force doesn’t hold up in the face of modern science
  • But a fellow experiencer God, recognized by the persuasive call inside us all toward goodness and justice and beauty —
  • That is a vision of God
    • that can cohere well with modern science
    • that can respond to the largest, pressing needs of our world,
    • AND that can move us personally, deeply, wiping every tear from every eye.
• Let me pray for us…