Sunday, April 11, 2004
"Resurrections and Relationships" - April 11, 2004 Easter Sunday
We welcome Easter morning as a festival of the living body.
May its story remind us never to separate ourselves from our life in the body.
May we feel that body and spirit are one; that flesh is good.
May we be in touch with our hands and feet; every living, breathing part of ourselves.
May we love the body: as regenerating myth, as reproducing seed, as immortal release into the great beyond and back; each one of us the word made flesh.
Praise the body!
On March 11, 1965, James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston died from the wounds he received from a beating with a club by a white thug who had only minutes before emerged from a bar in Selma, Alabama.
On a windswept desolate hill sometime around the year 30 C.E., a political rabble rouser named Jesus whom they called the Christ was crucified along with others by Roman soldiers acting under the authority of Pontius Pilate.
Last Monday I attended a talk Wellesley College given by the Rev. Clark Olsen, the son of Andrea¹s grandmother¹s sister, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who in March 1965 was in Selma, Alabama. Both he and James Reeb, and hundreds of ministers responded to Martin Luther King¹s call to come to Selma to march from there to Montgomery. King felt men and women of God would not be beaten as other lay marchers had been only days before on Bloody Sunday attempting to begin this march, which was organized in the wake of the murder of civil rights worker Jimmy Lee Jackson. Initially Olsen was not going to respond to King¹s call. As minister of a congregation in Berkeley, California he felt he had obligations to attend committee meetings, and besides it was expensive. When a parishioner volunteered to pay for his flight., and he realized that a committee could be missed, he made the fateful decision. When Olsen arrived in Selma, he was too late for the training session in non-violent protest. He saw two people he knew, Reeb and another colleague at the chapel gathering place, and suggested they go to dinner. They ate their meal at a black restaurant, and then made another fateful decision, taking a short cut back to the chapel. This route was not through the black section of town which they had come, but it passed by a poor, white enclave where a certain local bar was situated.
The one they called Jesus was known to have consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors, the despised of society. They had celebrated his entry into Jerusalem by throwing down palm leaves. This had alerted the authorities to his presence in the city on the high holy days of Passover. He had protested the hypocrisy he found in the temple, and had told stories of loving your enemies and forgiveness for those who hurt you and persecute you. He said the last shall be first. Both the chief priests and the Roman authorities were disturbed by his teachings which seemed to be causing some disturbance among the throngs who waited in anticipation in the marketplaces and squares. On the night of his capture he waited with his followers in a garden. It was reported that one of his friends betrayed him.
They walked from the cafe down the street, and turned into the white section of town. Three men set upon them from the street. James Reeb was hit with a wooden club, maybe a two by four, on the side of his head, fracturing his skull. Mortally wounded, the bleeding in his brain would kill him two days later. Others may have seen it. But no one was talking. The people felt these northerners were no better than those ³colored² who started all this disturbance. They were outsiders coming in, causing this problem, wanting to change things. This is what they get. One friend fell to his knees to protect his head. He was beaten. Olsen ran down the street but was caught two blocks down. He was hit, and lost his glasses, but was not seriously hurt. Olsen saw it all. The attackers left. Mission accomplished.
Jesus was taken into custody. The stories say he was brutalized by the authorities. He was whipped and tortured. Then he was condemned to death. They made him carry the beam he would be lashed and nailed to, as it was affixed to a stake in the ground where others had died before; Golgotha, the place of the skulls.
Reeb was helped to his feet by his friends. They tenderly placed his arms around their shoulders, and walked back to the chapel. They stayed by his side. The ambulance ride to Montgomery was harrowing and frightening. Olsen scared speechless, Miller bruised and beaten, and Reeb moaning for his life. A pick-up truck rode up behind them filled with men with white bread bodies and piercing eyes. Would they force the ambulance off the road? Would the ministers end up dead in a ditch? Finally, a police car appeared. Would they help them reach the hospital, or would they also try to prevent them from reaching their destination? How did this ever happen? Would anyone help them? What were they doing there? It had been two hours of nightmare, and it was two hours too late for James Reeb.
The march to Golgotha was horrible. He could barely stumble along the path, as his injuries were quite severe. His followers had all run away. One had betrayed him. Did they expect he would miraculously save them all? But others stood by. They say one offered to help carry the cross. And the disciple named Mary, and his mother, also Mary stayed at his side, never left him in his hour of pain. There was another, a stranger who was also being crucified, one of the forsaken ones who recognized his compassion. Then he died. Another rebellion put down. Mission accomplished. Finally, there was one named Joseph who offered to care for his body, and offered his tomb, where he could be laid to rest. There were those who loved him, who made the choice to affirm their relationship for him in his greatest hour of need.
Why did he die? He was not leading some march singing we shall overcome racism. He was not leading an army into battle. He was really a nobody. Trained as a Presbyterian, he was an associate minister in Washington for a brief time, and now here he was working in Boston for the Quakers on some housing project. He chose to live in Dorchester among the people, the despised ones. We call him a martyr because he died so that others might live in freedom, but he didn¹t want to die. He had four little kids and a wife. The Unitarian Universalist Association didn¹t think much of him. He was no hero to them (did they even want him in their ministry?) until he took a club to the side of his head. Small decisions. To go at all. To eat out. To turn right to the part of town where no white civil rights worker should be seen. Insignificant acts. Carried along by a stream of happenstance. A hero in death, but nobody in life. Except to those who loved him, and stood by him in his hour of need. Except that his belief in doing the right thing, to stand up for racial justice carried him to martyrdom.
Why did he die? That¹s what Christians are contemplating today; for 2,000 years in fact. A recent film has concentrated on the violence of his death, and in its graphic depiction of human cruelty has tried to affirm a theological belief in his suffering for our sins. It is a faith that seems to suggest that God had a plan for the world, and needed appeasing, needed to send someone to redeem us. In one review of the film, the writer said this is not your grandmother¹s tea-cosy Unitarian faith. The implication might be that the violence human beings inflict upon one another is too blood curdling for us. We turn our face from Good Friday, in order to affirm life without confronting human cruelty and sinfulness. But I think what we turn from is not the human proclivity to hurt one another, but the religion that puts its faith in a mighty power that controls everything. We find the risen Christ of Easter a reflection of a mighty Lord who will make everything alright, who will say your sins are forgiven, who will sit in the sky as magisterial power offering instant miraculous cures. This is the Christ proclaimed by those male disciples who ran away, by those men who said we have the one truth about this story of a Jew from Nazareth who was a nobody. We will make him Lord of all.
Clark Olsen never went back to Selma. He told how Reeb¹s death help bring about great social change. It was a catalyst for President Johnson to push the voting tights act through Congress. His death meant one step closer to equality, one more step toward justice. Today, a black man is the mayor of Selma, Alabama. Reeb¹s martyrdom changed a nation, and we Unitarian Universalists have held him up ever since as a hero. Yet he never intended to be a hero. All he envisioned was a fairer world, and he took a small step toward achieving it. And something happened. Loved by his family, by his friends, but few others. He laid down his life for integrity. Olsen returned to Alabama for the trial of three men. They were acquitted of this murder by an all white, all male jury. The then white mayor of Selma said it was enough that they had to do through a trial, imagine how tough that was. The one time that Olsen was moved to tears in his talk the other day was not when he described the assault on Reeb, or even in the great civil rights change his death fomented. No , Olsen broke down when he described going into the court room, when he had to point a finger at the man who assaulted his friend. He is the one, Olsen said. He did it. He killed my friend, and I witnessed it, and lost the relationship forever.
Who killed Jesus? The popular film we have spoken of helps the 2,000 year old anti Semitic charge against the Jews resurface. One of my students last fall told me that the ancient hymn Jesus Christ, Our Lord by Clement of Alexandria originally started with the words gentle shepherd. When the hymn was translated from the Greek to the Latin, gentle shepherd became mighty Lord, which it remains today. Those disciples that Easter morn wanted a risen Christ to make up for the shepherd Jesus they ran out on, the nobody who they deserted. They needed forgiveness of sins in their theology because they committed the greatest of human sins. They ran out on one they said they loved. The women in the famous story, the ones who value the relationship with Jesus, stayed by his side, even unto death. They choose eternal love unto death, and the disciples eternal power after death.
James Reeb was a nobody who came to Selma because he was called to be there. He chose to live a life of integrity. After he arrived he went to dinner with his friends. A small thing. One little act of integrity leading to another seemingly insignificant thing. What about you or I? If we observe wrong doing or discrimination, what might one word do, or one act lead to? If we refused to participate one time, or asked one question, what would come next?. More questions? More actions? And might it turn the world? Who is to say? Jesus was a nobody who said your relationships are more important than your power. The humble ones are the people who enter the kingdom of heaven, not the great and mighty. The church may march in pomp and power; the world may tell us that pomp and power are what¹s important, but the person in whose name they proclaim such power would have none of it. Unitarian Universalists know that it is a violent world, and people commit terrible acts of inhumanity - the world is full of war and sorrow and pain. We also know that little people disappear under the heel of power.
Easter is a message not that the mighty shall prevail, not that the violent and the power hungry shall win. Easter is a message that nobodies win. People who value relationships and love and equality win. The buried treasure story tells us they found true treasure by working together, caring for the earth, and by using their skills. Our Easter message is not that one waits for miracles, but that we create them every day of our lives. We saw today that because of fear, a man may die. A man may die so that one day whites and blacks can live in harmony, but one day a black man will be mayor of Selma, Alabama, where in 1965, they beat and killed a white Unitarian Universalist minister who believed black people must be free. All he did was show up. Just being on the line, he overcame our human fear and prejudice. The resurrected one lives in that black mayor today. Whether it is in Jesus or in James Reeb, the Easter message is if you love others, and live with integrity, speaking and living the words of truth and justice, some day, even as you die, the grass will grow green, hearts of stone will turn warm, and love will come alive in this world. Even the smallest of acts of integrity point the world towards justice and love.
Sometimes things don¹t go, after all, from bad to worse.
Some years, muscatel faces down frost; green thrives;
the crops don¹t fail, sometimes one aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest one;
decide they care enough, that they can¹t leave some stranger poor.
Some become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss;
sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen:
may it happen for you.
"Resurrections and Relationships" - April 11, 2004 Easter Sunday
Mark W. Harris
Opening Words - from Mark Harris
We welcome Easter morning as a festival of the living body.
May its story remind us never to separate ourselves from our life in the body.
May we feel that body and spirit are one; that flesh is good.
May we be in touch with our hands and feet; every living, breathing part of ourselves.
May we love the body: as regenerating myth, as reproducing seed, as immortal release into the great beyond and back; each one of us the word made flesh.
Praise the body!
Sermon
On March 11, 1965, James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston died from the wounds he received from a beating with a club by a white thug who had only minutes before emerged from a bar in Selma, Alabama.
On a windswept desolate hill sometime around the year 30 C.E., a political rabble rouser named Jesus whom they called the Christ was crucified along with others by Roman soldiers acting under the authority of Pontius Pilate.
Last Monday I attended a talk Wellesley College given by the Rev. Clark Olsen, the son of Andrea¹s grandmother¹s sister, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who in March 1965 was in Selma, Alabama. Both he and James Reeb, and hundreds of ministers responded to Martin Luther King¹s call to come to Selma to march from there to Montgomery. King felt men and women of God would not be beaten as other lay marchers had been only days before on Bloody Sunday attempting to begin this march, which was organized in the wake of the murder of civil rights worker Jimmy Lee Jackson. Initially Olsen was not going to respond to King¹s call. As minister of a congregation in Berkeley, California he felt he had obligations to attend committee meetings, and besides it was expensive. When a parishioner volunteered to pay for his flight., and he realized that a committee could be missed, he made the fateful decision. When Olsen arrived in Selma, he was too late for the training session in non-violent protest. He saw two people he knew, Reeb and another colleague at the chapel gathering place, and suggested they go to dinner. They ate their meal at a black restaurant, and then made another fateful decision, taking a short cut back to the chapel. This route was not through the black section of town which they had come, but it passed by a poor, white enclave where a certain local bar was situated.
The one they called Jesus was known to have consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors, the despised of society. They had celebrated his entry into Jerusalem by throwing down palm leaves. This had alerted the authorities to his presence in the city on the high holy days of Passover. He had protested the hypocrisy he found in the temple, and had told stories of loving your enemies and forgiveness for those who hurt you and persecute you. He said the last shall be first. Both the chief priests and the Roman authorities were disturbed by his teachings which seemed to be causing some disturbance among the throngs who waited in anticipation in the marketplaces and squares. On the night of his capture he waited with his followers in a garden. It was reported that one of his friends betrayed him.
They walked from the cafe down the street, and turned into the white section of town. Three men set upon them from the street. James Reeb was hit with a wooden club, maybe a two by four, on the side of his head, fracturing his skull. Mortally wounded, the bleeding in his brain would kill him two days later. Others may have seen it. But no one was talking. The people felt these northerners were no better than those ³colored² who started all this disturbance. They were outsiders coming in, causing this problem, wanting to change things. This is what they get. One friend fell to his knees to protect his head. He was beaten. Olsen ran down the street but was caught two blocks down. He was hit, and lost his glasses, but was not seriously hurt. Olsen saw it all. The attackers left. Mission accomplished.
Jesus was taken into custody. The stories say he was brutalized by the authorities. He was whipped and tortured. Then he was condemned to death. They made him carry the beam he would be lashed and nailed to, as it was affixed to a stake in the ground where others had died before; Golgotha, the place of the skulls.
Reeb was helped to his feet by his friends. They tenderly placed his arms around their shoulders, and walked back to the chapel. They stayed by his side. The ambulance ride to Montgomery was harrowing and frightening. Olsen scared speechless, Miller bruised and beaten, and Reeb moaning for his life. A pick-up truck rode up behind them filled with men with white bread bodies and piercing eyes. Would they force the ambulance off the road? Would the ministers end up dead in a ditch? Finally, a police car appeared. Would they help them reach the hospital, or would they also try to prevent them from reaching their destination? How did this ever happen? Would anyone help them? What were they doing there? It had been two hours of nightmare, and it was two hours too late for James Reeb.
The march to Golgotha was horrible. He could barely stumble along the path, as his injuries were quite severe. His followers had all run away. One had betrayed him. Did they expect he would miraculously save them all? But others stood by. They say one offered to help carry the cross. And the disciple named Mary, and his mother, also Mary stayed at his side, never left him in his hour of pain. There was another, a stranger who was also being crucified, one of the forsaken ones who recognized his compassion. Then he died. Another rebellion put down. Mission accomplished. Finally, there was one named Joseph who offered to care for his body, and offered his tomb, where he could be laid to rest. There were those who loved him, who made the choice to affirm their relationship for him in his greatest hour of need.
Why did he die? He was not leading some march singing we shall overcome racism. He was not leading an army into battle. He was really a nobody. Trained as a Presbyterian, he was an associate minister in Washington for a brief time, and now here he was working in Boston for the Quakers on some housing project. He chose to live in Dorchester among the people, the despised ones. We call him a martyr because he died so that others might live in freedom, but he didn¹t want to die. He had four little kids and a wife. The Unitarian Universalist Association didn¹t think much of him. He was no hero to them (did they even want him in their ministry?) until he took a club to the side of his head. Small decisions. To go at all. To eat out. To turn right to the part of town where no white civil rights worker should be seen. Insignificant acts. Carried along by a stream of happenstance. A hero in death, but nobody in life. Except to those who loved him, and stood by him in his hour of need. Except that his belief in doing the right thing, to stand up for racial justice carried him to martyrdom.
Why did he die? That¹s what Christians are contemplating today; for 2,000 years in fact. A recent film has concentrated on the violence of his death, and in its graphic depiction of human cruelty has tried to affirm a theological belief in his suffering for our sins. It is a faith that seems to suggest that God had a plan for the world, and needed appeasing, needed to send someone to redeem us. In one review of the film, the writer said this is not your grandmother¹s tea-cosy Unitarian faith. The implication might be that the violence human beings inflict upon one another is too blood curdling for us. We turn our face from Good Friday, in order to affirm life without confronting human cruelty and sinfulness. But I think what we turn from is not the human proclivity to hurt one another, but the religion that puts its faith in a mighty power that controls everything. We find the risen Christ of Easter a reflection of a mighty Lord who will make everything alright, who will say your sins are forgiven, who will sit in the sky as magisterial power offering instant miraculous cures. This is the Christ proclaimed by those male disciples who ran away, by those men who said we have the one truth about this story of a Jew from Nazareth who was a nobody. We will make him Lord of all.
Clark Olsen never went back to Selma. He told how Reeb¹s death help bring about great social change. It was a catalyst for President Johnson to push the voting tights act through Congress. His death meant one step closer to equality, one more step toward justice. Today, a black man is the mayor of Selma, Alabama. Reeb¹s martyrdom changed a nation, and we Unitarian Universalists have held him up ever since as a hero. Yet he never intended to be a hero. All he envisioned was a fairer world, and he took a small step toward achieving it. And something happened. Loved by his family, by his friends, but few others. He laid down his life for integrity. Olsen returned to Alabama for the trial of three men. They were acquitted of this murder by an all white, all male jury. The then white mayor of Selma said it was enough that they had to do through a trial, imagine how tough that was. The one time that Olsen was moved to tears in his talk the other day was not when he described the assault on Reeb, or even in the great civil rights change his death fomented. No , Olsen broke down when he described going into the court room, when he had to point a finger at the man who assaulted his friend. He is the one, Olsen said. He did it. He killed my friend, and I witnessed it, and lost the relationship forever.
Who killed Jesus? The popular film we have spoken of helps the 2,000 year old anti Semitic charge against the Jews resurface. One of my students last fall told me that the ancient hymn Jesus Christ, Our Lord by Clement of Alexandria originally started with the words gentle shepherd. When the hymn was translated from the Greek to the Latin, gentle shepherd became mighty Lord, which it remains today. Those disciples that Easter morn wanted a risen Christ to make up for the shepherd Jesus they ran out on, the nobody who they deserted. They needed forgiveness of sins in their theology because they committed the greatest of human sins. They ran out on one they said they loved. The women in the famous story, the ones who value the relationship with Jesus, stayed by his side, even unto death. They choose eternal love unto death, and the disciples eternal power after death.
James Reeb was a nobody who came to Selma because he was called to be there. He chose to live a life of integrity. After he arrived he went to dinner with his friends. A small thing. One little act of integrity leading to another seemingly insignificant thing. What about you or I? If we observe wrong doing or discrimination, what might one word do, or one act lead to? If we refused to participate one time, or asked one question, what would come next?. More questions? More actions? And might it turn the world? Who is to say? Jesus was a nobody who said your relationships are more important than your power. The humble ones are the people who enter the kingdom of heaven, not the great and mighty. The church may march in pomp and power; the world may tell us that pomp and power are what¹s important, but the person in whose name they proclaim such power would have none of it. Unitarian Universalists know that it is a violent world, and people commit terrible acts of inhumanity - the world is full of war and sorrow and pain. We also know that little people disappear under the heel of power.
Easter is a message not that the mighty shall prevail, not that the violent and the power hungry shall win. Easter is a message that nobodies win. People who value relationships and love and equality win. The buried treasure story tells us they found true treasure by working together, caring for the earth, and by using their skills. Our Easter message is not that one waits for miracles, but that we create them every day of our lives. We saw today that because of fear, a man may die. A man may die so that one day whites and blacks can live in harmony, but one day a black man will be mayor of Selma, Alabama, where in 1965, they beat and killed a white Unitarian Universalist minister who believed black people must be free. All he did was show up. Just being on the line, he overcame our human fear and prejudice. The resurrected one lives in that black mayor today. Whether it is in Jesus or in James Reeb, the Easter message is if you love others, and live with integrity, speaking and living the words of truth and justice, some day, even as you die, the grass will grow green, hearts of stone will turn warm, and love will come alive in this world. Even the smallest of acts of integrity point the world towards justice and love.
Closing words by Sheenagh Pugh
Sometimes things don¹t go, after all, from bad to worse.
Some years, muscatel faces down frost; green thrives;
the crops don¹t fail, sometimes one aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest one;
decide they care enough, that they can¹t leave some stranger poor.
Some become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss;
sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen:
may it happen for you.