The following is a sermon delivered by Word and World mentor, Laurel Dykstra, at St. Peter’s Church on Sunday, May 1, 2011 during the first gathering of the W&W Mentoring Program.
Shoots and Roots: A Sermon for May Day
Acts 2:14a, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31
May 1, 2011 St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Corktown
Good Morning, Happy Labor Day.
Many countries in the world celebrate Labor Day or International Workers Day on the first of May. It began in the US in the late 1800’s to commemorate the winning of the 8 hour day and within a few years became a memorial of the Haymarket Martyrs. The change of the date to September was a deliberate domesticating, union-busting decision—a theft from working people.
May Day also celebrates an older tradition—celtic and northern European spring rites, with Maypoles, flowers, new life, and honoring of Mary and the feminine divine.
Now you may think, what’s this got to do with Easter, or church or Jesus?
But I think there is a lot in common:
When Christians chose to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus at the time of pre-existing Spring festivals, make no mistake, it was a strategic move. But it was also because in the celebration of new life, of springs return, of fertility, and new live things rising out of seemingly dead ground, they saw something that they already knew in their tradition, in their texts, in their hearts and in their bodies.
And labor? Justice for working people? Decent wages for honest work? Well the gospel is full of stories of day labourers, vineyard workers, planters and harvest, landlords and taxes, fishing industry—Jesus is talking about the systems and structures of economic extraction, the means of production, and the dignity of work
What about Haymarket? a story of martyrs, a show trial for activists condemned for their politics and allegiances, and what they stood for rather than their actions, an execution to show political power, remembered for its capacity to galvanize a movement –doesn’t that sound a little familiar? Like something you might have read before?
So on this second Sunday of Easter, May Day, Labor Day, we celebrate resurrection, resistance, and the rising-up of new life.
I read recently the suggestion we celebrate May Day in a way that honors both our Red Roots—our labor and class history and our Green Roots—a connection to the sacred earth. New shoots from existing roots. And roots and shoots are most of what I’m going to talk about to day. Spring and green things rising up and uprisings, rising bread, rising from the dead, shoots and roots.
It is good for us to remember, when we are told that our actions are too radical, or we are afraid that someone else’s are, that radical comes from the word radix or root. That what it means to be radical is to be connected to that hidden and underground source of nourishment and strength.
To make that connection we need to know our roots, We need to know our race history, our class history, how our people came here to this place—from Asia over the land bridge? In slave ships chained to corpses? As indentured servants? In state rooms? Did your people migrate from the south to work in industry? Did they come to a new land seeking new life? Did they come fleeing violence or did they come perpetrating it—or both.
And speaking of roots, I am really a Hebrew Bible an Old Testament kind of gal.—when I was at school and thought I might follow in the footsteps of some of my mentors and study the stories of the Kingdom Movement—the Beloved community. A teaching assistant said to me, “what do you want to focus on the Greek pamphlet tacked on the end for?” And that was a bit of a turning point for me to begin my study of the Hebrew Bible.
So this time of the liturgical year–the season of Easter when in the common lectionary, we focus on the life of the early church and the first reading is from the book of Acts instead of the Old Testament, it kind of throws me. I feel like we’ve lost some grounding –we’re cut off from our roots.
We Christian’s often imagine, especially at Easter time, that we can understand Jesus apart from the Hebrew Bible. We imagine that the creative, powerful, beautiful, radical things that Jesus did were “Christian,” or that Jesus and the Kingdom Movement the opposite of Judaism. But if the Jewish Jesus was challenged by and shared leadership with women, if the Jewish Jesus challenged the centralized power of the Temple, if the Jewish Jesus said that love and liberation trump the letter of the law every time, then first century Judaism was diverse, and complex, and conflicted. Perhaps as diverse and complex and conflicted as Christianity today.
So worrying a little about how we might be uprooted without a Hebrew Bible reading I looked at today’s texts and discovered a curious thing—While our only Hebrew Bible reading is Psalm 16, we actually get a double or even triple helping of Old Testament—in the first reading, from Acts.
You may not have recognized it, but that first reading, that Charletta read, comes from Pentecost—what’s missing in the assigned verses is that great bit where the disciples are speaking in many languages and Peter addresses the crowd, who are not getting the message—saying, “they can’t be drunk, it’s too early in the morning”
Then, to tell the story of Easter Peter draws on his own roots and quotes the prophet Joel’s incredible, inclusive passage of kingdom come:
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
Now when I say Kingdom Come I do not mean pie in the sky by and by when you die.
Kingdom come is an imperative, a plea and a demand
Kingdom Come right here, right now.
that invasive, uprising, mustard seed, bursting fish net, donkey Kingdom that is within you and within me and most of all within us all together.
Then Peter draws on his roots again and quotes Psalm 16, the Psalm that Tevan spoke and danced and embodied for us this morning. He says “listen to what our ancestor David said about Jesus: God was with him and he could not die.”
What we have witnessed in Jesus has changed the Power of Death for us. Has so changed us, that we must search our roots to explain it.
But this is where it gets touchy, because Joel has three movements, desolation, restoration and retribution. That beautiful passage of women and elders, slaves and dreamers is followed by an explicit call for vengeance, and war—the precise words are, “to beat plowshares into swords.”
And David and Psalm 16? Well that’s not all good news either.
David is a king and as such his portrait in scripture is profoundly ambiguous.
David is the humble, beautiful shepherd, the youngest son, David who loved Johnathan, David the musician, the underdog giant slayer—God’s anointed.
But David is also flawed, volatile, arrogant, murderous, decadent, A man who controls neither his passions nor his children—his family life is chaotic and violent. David of 19 wives and countless concubines. David who is celebrated for killing tens of thousands.
And the book of Psalms, containing the hymnody of centuries, includes coronation hymns, the lament of exiles, accounts of salvation history, and Psalm 16 which is a “psalm of confidence”
The psalm expresses confidence in the presence and faithfulness of God and acknowledgement of the good things in life. But this confidence comes dangerously close to complacency and a theology of prosperity.
Verse 6 “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage.”
Makes me think of different boundary lines and the people on either side of them, those who finds them pleasant and goodly and those who do not. Maybe you are thinking of some of those boundary lines too– the wall at the US mexico border, of Palestine, of some of the color lines that divide neighbourhoods in this city.
Those of us who have and experience good things, must be very careful not to mistake them for evidence of our own goodness. It comes very close to blasphemy, to taking the name of God in vain, to call the spoils of war, the gifts of God.
But these hard parts of the story are our roots as well, the painful parts, the parts we disagree with. But we have to read and know and preach and teach and grapple with these roots as well because, know this, if we refuse to know it and claim it there are those who will use these stories, our sacred heritage for harm.
So then what can we affirm from our readings today, the Gospel, Acts, and it’s Hebrew Bible roots?
Number 1. That the theology of complacency is pervasive, insidious and real:
So today when we remember May Day, and the labour struggles and those who have died, including doctor King with the Memphis sanitation workers, we must ask whether the wild and dangerous memory of the martyrs strengthens us for resistance, or whether it has been domesticated and sold back to us.
On May Day when we celebrate the earth it can’t be Gore Tex theology protected from the elements by expensive rain gear. We need to engage with environmental racism, and the fact that in this country, race is the single greatest determinant of whether you live near toxic waste, whether it is your children and elders who sicken and die. That the destruction of species and ecosystems and relentless extraction is intimately and necessarily connected to the exploitation, displacement, and destruction of peoples and cultures.
Number 2. The psalm talks repeatedly of hands and hearts, tongues and flesh, the gospel of hands, fingers, and sides, wounds and the connection between touching and seeing and believing—reminding us that bodies are important. I’m going to say that again because I don’t think it gets said often enough in church. Bodies, and all that happens to them, are profoundly important.
And the last and most important thing, what the writer of acts was searching his roots for, was a way to say and show that it was impossible for death to hold Jesus in its power.
That Rome, that empire, that corporations, that rightsizing and Emergency Managers, that the Power of Death in all its forms, does not have the last word.
Amen.
Questions for discussion offered by Mentoring Program Participants Liz Nichols and Chris Grataski
Word and World convened its second