“Blue lights flash. A door is broken down. The story we tell today is not unusual, because life can change or end in an instant. When you fit the description.”
Meditation by Mike Kinman at the Great Three Hours on Good Friday, April 19, 2019. Reading: John 18:1-11.
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“So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.”
Blue lights flash.
A door is broken down.
Life can change … life can end in an instant.
Anytime. Anywhere.
Blue lights flash.
A door is broken down.
Life can change or end in an instant
…when you fit the description.
As we begin these three hours, let’s be clear about one thing: The story we tell this afternoon is not unusual.
Unusual is what the women will find at the tomb on Sunday morning.
Unusual is what happens that night on the road to Emmaus.
The story we tell today:
…the stop.
…the arrest.
…the beating.
…the church and the state collaborating to smear the reputation of the victim.
…the crowd calling for more law and order
…the summary execution
…the police officer crying tears too little and too late
…the mother screaming until she has no voice left, cradling her child’s lifeless body in her arms.
The story we tell today has happened every day of every year for the past 2,000 years and more.
The story we tell today is happening right now in this country … right now in this city.
It is happening. Right. Now.
The story we tell today is not unusual.
…when you fit the description.
The power of the incarnation is that each of us, every single one of us, gets to know that whatever we are feeling in our experience of being human … that God through Jesus knows that feeling
…shares that feeling.
…is with us in that feeling.
I know you are hurting.
I know you are tired.
I know you are afraid.
We all are hurting.
We all are afraid.
We all rage and grieve and are absolutely exhausted.
We all have our hearts broken and we all have our hopes dashed.
We all … every single one of us … have parts of our lives that are crying out for healing
…that need healing
…that deserve healing
And the intensity of the presence of every one of these feelings in the story we tell today can console us, I hope does console us whoever we are.
The intensity of the presence of every one of those feelings in the story we tell today can and I hope does remind us, does remind you that God is with you, God’s love is in you and God’s healing is for you.
And …
If the intensity of these feelings is not normative for us.
If the intensity of these feelings is the occasional or even semi-regular occurrence and has not been a part of our everyday lives for the whole of our lives.
If every day we do not live with
…the fear of death
…the pain of incarceration
…the threat of arrest and deportation
…the hopelessness of underprivilege
If we do not get pulled out of line at airports
…or followed in department stores
…or mistaken for the janitor or the gardener
…or asked “no, I mean where are you really from?”
If we do not have to discover our history for ourselves because it’s never taught in schools.
…or have to lobby for special classes in seminary to learn about our theologians
…or have to bring our own hair care products with us when we stay in hotels
…or have to build casinos on the little land of ours we have left just to eke out a living.
If every day, we do not bear the exhaustion of living in a world that demands we assimilate and code switch just to get by.
If our very life expectancy isn’t 10, 20, 30 years shorter because of the chronic danger and daily toxic burden of just being who we are.
If we do not know the burden of what it feels like from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep and even in our dreams to “fit the description,”
…if when I say “fit the description,” we don’t immediately understand what I am talking about,
… then for the next three hours I would invite us to consider that the story we will share invites us into something that will be unusual for us..
…and that is recognizing that this story is not just about us.
The White Church has taken the story of the crucifixion and allegorized it, theologized it, and sentimentalized it.
Black Liberation Theologian James Cone writes: “The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the ‘cost of discipleship,’ it has become a form of ‘cheap grace,’ an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission…. (that) God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience.”
“Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons”
This was nothing unusual for Jesus.
Everywhere Jesus went, he knew the police could beat him, arrest him, take him away, even kill him … not because he was the Chosen One of God but simply because he was a dark-skinned person¬ walking around in a police state. A state that was “more devoted to order than to justice, which preferred a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”
Everywhere Jesus went, he knew that in the eyes of the state, the church and the world, his life did not matter. Because in Jesus, God chose to identify with the oppressed to the point that their experience became God’s experience.
Everywhere Jesus went, he knew his life was expendable
… because Jesus fit the description.
Jesus didn’t have to stir things up to become a target. As Traci Blackmon says, “It is impossible to be unarmed when my blackness is the weapon you fear.”
It is impossible to be unarmed
… when you fit the description.
When Jesus began to be a danger to that negative peace by becoming a force for that presence of justice, yes, that upped the ante. But that just made it more likely for him to suffer a fate that very well might have happened to him anyway
…because he fit the description.
The fear his mother had that she would be standing at the foot of the cross was a fear she had since before Jesus was born. When Simeon told Mary holding the child Jesus “…and a sword will pierce through your heart also,” a part of her probably thought with terror: “yeah … tell me something I don’t already know.”
I’m sure there was a moment where Mary and Joseph sat down with Jesus and told him exactly what to do and what not to do when stopped by a Roman soldier, knowing even that was not a guarantee he would survive the encounter.
Knowing that someday that encounter would happen … because he fit the description.
I’m sure there was a moment where Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus hid from Egyptian authorities because their immigration status put them in danger.
Hiding behind some locked door in a country they had fled to for their lives … because they fit the description.
And so when “Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons”
let us be clear that this was nothing unusual.
This was nothing unusual for Jesus
…because Jesus fit the description.
“God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience.”
Until we can see Jesus as the refugee child dying in a cage while his parents are deported.
Until we can see Jesus as the transgender teen beaten and left for dead in an alley.
“Until we can see,” as James Cone writes. “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”
The story we tell today.
…the stop.
…the arrest.
…the beating.
…the church and the state collaborating to smear the reputation of the victim.
…the crowd calling for more law and order
…the summary execution
…the police officer crying tears too little and too late
…the mother wailing until she has no voice left, cradling her child’s lifeless body in her arms.
The story we tell today has happened every day of every year for the past 2,000 years and more.
The story we tell today is happening right now in this country … right now in this city.
It is happening. Right. Now.
The story we tell today is not unusual. So let us not allegorize, theologize or sentimentalize it.
Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons
Blue lights flash.
A door is broken down.
Life can change … life can end in an instant.
Anytime. Anywhere.
Blue lights flash.
A door is broken down.
The story we tell today is not unusual.
Life can change or end in an instant
…when you fit the description.
