Sermons

Easter for Baghdad

Two thousand years ago, when Jesus assembled his disciples around their banquet table in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover Festival, the original story of resurrection from oppression (we call it the Exodus) was already ancient. It had been written down hundreds of years earlier from an oral tradition thousands of years old, in one of the few books anyone had ever seen. Only a few people could actually read, and neither Jesus nor any of his disciples are likely to have been able to do so, but they certainly knew all about its magical detail since childhood, from a lifetime of observance of it. The story was timeless.

Yet in one important respect, the ancient story of resurrection from oppression that framed Jesus' Last Supper, was as fresh as the food on his banquet table. Roman oppression in Palestine at the start of the Christian Era was as brutal and ruthless as Egyptian oppression had been over 1000 years earlier. Also Jesus had to deal with the same patterns of accommodation to oppression that his Jewish brethren had adopted to preserve their sanity and survival under Roman oppression, as were reminiscent of those adopted by the ancient Israeli slaves under the Egyptian Pharaoh. And so today, I sense another fresh and somewhat uncomfortable reminiscence with the familiarity in which this eternal human yearning for resurrection from oppression reasserts itself on our banquet table.

A self-righteous reminiscence would have me liken myself, and my American soldier brethren in the deserts of Iraq, as agents of Moses come to lead the oppressed people of Iraq out from under the oppressive boot of the Pharonic, Caesarian, Saddam.

A more humble reminiscence has me wondering how Egypt must have seemed an awesome and unchallengeable Super-Power of its day, as Rome must have seemed in its own day, and as America seems today. Each Super-Power must have offered many advantages and virtues to the lives of those of its ordinary citizens who conformed to socially acceptable behavior. And each must have drawn the line of inappropriate behavior at: subversion, terrorism, blasphemy, and sedition, beyond which tolerance and acceptance simply did not extend. Egypt did not countenance a slave class that rebelled ungraciously for rights that its super-power status was not prepared to confer. Rome would certainly not have undermined its own enduring stability in allowing a renegade, colonial, lower class, rabbi to challenge the God-given authority of Caesar, and the established order of the realm. America now, has classified Saddam as blasphemous and seditious of the American world order. We consider Saddam's regime to be subversive of the conformity to rules that our empire has set down and to which all must accede for the benefit of all. Tolerance and acceptance simply do not extend as far as the Iraqi regime.

Saddam may or may not have given good cause for our oppression of his regime. He has been a brutal murderer in his own right, and may possess weapons of mass destruction, but cause, I believe, is not the issue. That Moses was a known murderer in his own right, might have been cause enough for disqualifying him to lead the Jewish slave revolt, but it did not. That Jesus claimed, with no tangible evidence, to be the son of God who did not need to follow established religious laws, when everyone then knew that the only son of God was Caesar, that religious laws of the day were not negotiable, and that the punishment for their disregard was capital, may have been cause for his justifiable crucifixion, but it was not. Cause was not the issue. The issue was resurrection from oppression.

Moses taught that the path to resurrection from oppression led to another place on earth, out from under the yoke of the oppressor's geographic control, where a community of like-minded souls could rebuild their lives and connections together and be accountable to, and for, only themselves. He taught that love in itself is no guarantor of safety, dignity, freedom or happiness, especially when it is not reciprocated. The impartiality and equity of law was Moses' only guarantor.

Jesus taught that the path to resurrection from oppression led to another place in the heart and soul of every person, whose safety, dignity, freedom and happiness could not be assured by geography, but by grace. He taught that we can open ourselves to grace by refusing to reciprocate the absence of love, and by being insistently and senselessly loving even in love's absence. We can open and let grace flow into our hearts and souls, and we can share our openness and vulnerability with others who may variously be both our oppressors and our oppressed. However, we cannot force grace on anyone who is not ready to receive it; not on a Jew, not on a Muslim, not even on a Christian. These are not easy lessons.

Resurrection from oppression is a resurrection from forced grace: it is a yearning that places as much, though different, expectations on the oppressor as on the oppressed. Once free, ancient Jewish slaves of Pharaoh's time spend 40 years - two generations - wandering in their desert wilderness, before they settled on where and how they wished to be in community with one another. Once crucified and risen, Christ led his followers through several hundred years of pogroms and brutal persecution in the wilderness of Roman Diaspora before Constantine's reprieve. In each case, by the time the oppressed were ready to settle, they had already developed intolerances and oppressions of their own with which to oppress others. The very act of choosing resurrection seemed to carry with it such an enormous burden of responsibility that many refused to continue to accept their own responsibility for it, and reinterpreted the deed in the passive tense, as if "being chosen", or being among "the saved" absolved one of resurrection's shadow, that is oppression, itself.

In a polarized world, in which both Jesus and our current President say, "You are either with us or against us", both love and justice devolve into tests of fealty and power. In such a bipolar dysfunctional world, everyone feels either like the keeper or the kept, the attacker or the attacked, the oppressor or the oppressed. There seems to be no other way.

Yet there is another way. It is the third way, and it draws us around this otherwise insoluble dilemma into the place where men and women of conscience are neither "with us or against us", but both with us and against us. Conscience recognizes the existence of a middle ground, where the "us" is less central to the resurrection experience than the path into the middle ground, the common ground of our shared humanity. Conscience recognizes that a G.I. who cradles an Iraqi baby in his arms is not a traitor, neither is an Iraqi farmer who walks six miles to find an American soldier and leads him to a captured American female soldier who has been mistreated. Conscience recognizes that a loyal American citizen can disagree with the presence of American troops on Iraqi soil and exercise his democratic rights to say so. Conscience also recognizes that a loyal American citizen can agree with our presence on Iraqi soil, and do the same.

Once we can all become comfortable again on this middle ground of conscience, the terms of a new resurrection from the oppressions of our time may emerge, for us, for the Iraqis, for everyone. This middle ground is where we are all vulnerable and where none of us exercise control. And just being in this sacred ground can be acutely uncomfortable, especially for those who suspect everyone else's motives, and insist on controlling them. Yet, I believe control, in this context, is the enemy of safety, trust, and our resurrection from the oppressions of our time. America may need now to wander the desert of its own making for another two generations before regaining a healthy respect for our middle ground of conscience. We may prefer to wallow for hundreds of years in the prison of our super-power self-worship before the world gives us the reprieve we so yearn for, but cannot give to ourselves.

Or we may come to our senses more quickly, by remembering and sharing the ancient story of Passover, the awesome oppression that we are capable of bringing upon ourselves, and the resurrection into grace that is open to each us if we only chose to observe it.

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