We’re pushing 5 weeks of Easter now, almost to the end.
We’ve gotten through the empty tomb, “side wound Sunday” with Thomas, and
eating fish on the beach. This past
Sunday, the raising of Tabitha in Acts for this Sunday and Jesus talking about
his sheep hearing his voice. All kinds
of encounter with Jesus trampling down death. All kinds of truths, all kinds of people
trying to figure it out for themselves.
In my vacation week after Easter, I visited the Boston
Institute of Contemporary Art, where an exhibition of the artist Walid Raad
who, the ICA tells us, “informed by his upbringing in Beirut during the Lebanese
civil war (1975–1990), has spent the past 25 years exploring the ways we
represent, remember, and make sense of history.” The exhibit is full of things that are “true”
in different ways—in a conventionally factual sense maybe or maybe not, but
still true. It also holds a not un-pointed critique of American naiveté, which
the Boston Globe’s art critic Sebastian Smee grapples with brilliantly in this
review.
In all of my preaching this Holy Week I felt confronted by
the wideness of the view of our new
stations of the cross, as I wrote here in March. The Raad exhibit asks a
similar question. How much are we willing to see? What lives, in the words of
writer Judith Butler, in her book Precarious Life, are actually
“grievable?” The crucifixion of Jesus only, or also that of the criminals on
either side? We can have all kinds of lovely ideas about Jesus and compassion
and justice, but if we don’t see those put to death next to him, that’s a
pretty thin participation in God’s love. Any
metric of our faith depends more on those criminals and on those in our world
now than on Jesus himself. Too often, we don’t see them, and the American
tendency toward tidy narratives and easy answers is literally fatal to those
who fall in the cross hairs of our foreign policy. One of the series of photographs is of shell
casings Raad found as a child growing up during the civil war in Lebanon. My
kids find Easter eggs; the world that he grew up in is plainly un-imaginable to
them.
In the middle of the Raad exhibit there’s a wall of images
where visitors can leave their own categorizations of facts as tending toward
one of three categories—emotional, aesthetic, or historical. Easter, it occurred
to me, is a different kind of fact altogether.
Factually, the tomb was empty. We can offer explanations about what
happened, conjecture about resuscitation or body theft or, even, true
resurrection. But the empty tomb is only understood
in confrontation with that space of death, at the same time confronting how it
becomes a space of life. That transformation, though, doesn’t happen in our
heads: the tomb can be empty or not empty, the body stolen by grave robbers or
raised by the almighty power of the living God.
The transformation happens in our lives, in our own lives and that of
our communities.
I’m not persuaded intellectually that “Christ is raised from
the dead and that death no longer has dominion” (Rom 6:9). I have come to
believe, day by day and week by week, in what I have experienced and seen of
the risen Christ. I don’t believe because I’m afraid of the alternative, of
heaven vs hell or joy vs some cartoon of eternal punishment, I believe because
I have tasted it and heard it and walked with the truth of the resurrection and
I know that that dead don’t always stay dead. (My sermon about Tabitha is here). It’s not a
historical fact or an aesthetic fact or an emotional one. It melts the
categories and then knits a scarf out of them.
Just as, or even more powerful than any belief in
resurrection, though, is the invitation toward resurrection. I am doing the
Mother’s Day Walk for Peace through Dorchester to stand with victims of
violence and to go, bodily, in my part of the risen body of Christ to be one
with the risen body of Christ of the city.
I am writing Governor Charlie Baker to advocate for full inclusion of
transgendered people because the risen body of Christ is a female body and a
male body, and a neither, both, between body. All of these encounters with the
world are encounters, also of the peculiar kind of truth that Easter is.
So there it is, again—more questions than answers, more labyrinthine steps than journeys completed. Thanks
for reading.
