The place has testified

Jeremiah 31:1–6 · Acts 10:34–43 · Matthew 28:1–10

"We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God"

— Mark Heard

So begins Patty Krawec, an Anishinabe Ukrainian writer, in her book Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. These words are not Krawec's, but rather the singer Mark Heard's.

"For years," Krawec writes, "I belonged to a mailing list that named itself for [this] song [...]. We thought it was a lovely, poetic image for those of us who felt outside of the traditional church, but then we dug down into the lyrics and discovered Heard wasn't talking about us as a small group of disaffected Christians. He was talking broadly about us as the Church [in the American Continent]—how the church is a pale shadow of what it could have been, should have been. The dominant church is running wild and unshod over this beautiful earth, with no regard for anyone else. A people who, despite grasping for power, have become ruins and hollow bones. Western Christians have, as they say, lost the plot."

We don't need to dwell too long on our churches' histories to see the truth of these words.

While we have come here this morning to tell the story of the empty tomb, the truth is, our churches in this land have many tombs that are not empty.

Kamloops.
La Tuque.
The Mohawk Institute, and the sites of many other residential schools, are just one set of examples.

Our churches have been an instrumental part of the colonial projects of Quebec and Canada—of stealing Indigenous land, converting it into resources to be extracted and sold, to increase the wealth of the rulers of this world.

There is a reason that our Diocese's coat of arms has a lion giving what looks like the keys of the Kingdom to the Bishop's hat.

As a document in our own Diocesan archives explains, it is the Lion of England, and in supporting a key, it indicates the sacred confidence reposed by the Sovereign as supreme head of the Church in the Bishop of Quebec; the undulating line is a symbol of the transatlantic situation of the Diocese of Quebec; the Cross of St. George in the canton marks the delegation from the sovereignty of England.

In other words, the symbol we still use to represent our church is a diagram of our place in the colonial project of the state. It literally sets the authority of the bishop and the diocese within that project.

"All this I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me." (Matthew 4:9)

In an article reflecting on the Anglican Church of Canada in light of the #ACCtoo movement, the former editor of the Anglican Journal and the Quebec Diocesan Gazette, Matthew Townsend, argues that while the church preaches resurrection—as an institution, it is much more like a zombie:

"Where the church should be vital, driven, integral, and just, it is silent, evasive, and moribund. The institution, propped up by growing investment returns and shrinking gifts from its declining membership, can offer little of meaning or merit to its members or, most importantly, its victims."

That is a cutting critique.

Zombies are not living resurrected life. Zombies are corpses that refuse to die, and, animated by that refusal, they consume the lives of others to sustain themselves.

In contrast, resurrected life is both a gift and a responsibility bestowed upon Jesus, for his faithful pursuit of the Creator's reign and realm at the cost of his life:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
(Luke 4:18–19; cf. Isaiah 61:1–2)

Jesus died for this proclamation.

And it's important, when we think about Jesus's death, that we remember that.

Jesus didn't die any kind of death.

He did not die of old age, cancer, or a terrible accident.

Jesus died a specific kind of death: he was tortured and murdered by a state, by an imperial and oppressive system of power—a power whose power over the people was its power to kill.

Jesus died because that system of power found itself threatened by Jesus' proclamation and practice of the Creator's reign and realm.

Zombies are corpses that refuse to die, and they consume the lives of others to sustain themselves.

Jesus gave life to others, and in so doing, he willingly died.

Now, admittedly, this seems like a super strange place to begin an Easter Sunday sermon, doesn't it?

Where is the goodness, the hope, and the joy that the feast of the resurrection is supposed to engender?

Where is the enthusiasm, the grace, the sense of mission it's supposed to inspire us towards?

Before we dare to call this past Friday Good, before we presume to join Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the empty tomb, I think we need to hold in our minds and in our hearts the many tombs that our Christian traditions have built and have hidden—the many tombs that are not empty.

After all, one of our strangest beliefs as Christians is that the church is the body of Christ.

But is that body, in the form of our institutional churches, a resurrected body? Or is it a zombie?

Is it a body that brings new life, even at the cost of its own—or is it a body that consumes life in order to sustain itself?

If we as Western Christians have become ruins and hollow bones, if we have lost the plot, where can we find it again?

I believe it is here.

It is here. It is only here—at the center of loss, of defeat, of knowing that our leaders and institutions have failed, of knowing that our hopes and our dreams have died—that we can join the women on their walk to Jesus' tomb.

It is here, it is only here, in the fear that that tomb holds nothing but hollow bones, that we might begin to see the stone rolled away as the earth-shaking sign that it is.

It is here, it is only here, that we can begin to hear the words of the angel piercing through the depths of our despair:

"Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay."
(Matthew 28:5–6)

The revelation of Jesus' resurrection does not lie in an idea—it lies in a place.

In a tomb that we will know is empty only if we enter it.

The angel doesn't ask the women to take her word for it. She asks them to go into the empty tomb: to come, to see, and to be transformed by the testimony of the place. To have their fears and their despair, their hopes and their dreams reoriented by that place.

When the women leave the empty tomb, I don't think they are the same as when they entered it.

I think the testimony of that place changed them.

It's only after entering the empty tomb that the angel then gives them their task: to go and tell the other disciples what they have learned in that place.

"He is not here; he has risen, just as he said." (Matthew 28:6)

And, to borrow a phrase from the Chronicles of Narnia: Jesus is on the move.

And it is the disciples who are called to catch up.

The women, transformed by the witness of the empty tomb, don't hesitate.

Yes. They are filled with fear.

Fear that if Jesus has been resurrected, if death—the power of the powers—has been overturned by the Creator, then there are no certainties in our lives, in our identities, and in our institutions that cannot be overturned in order to bring about the Creator's reign and realm.

Yes. They are filled with great joy.

Because if Jesus has been resurrected, if the power of death has been defeated, then not even our worst failures, not even our ancestors' most horrific mistakes, can stand in the Creator's way.

And so—
filled with fear,
filled with joy—
the two Marys break into a run.

Jesus is on the move. He has gone ahead of them to a new place. And if they are going to join him, they will need to get to that new place too.

But here's the beautiful catch.

They don't actually have to finish their run to find him.

Because Jesus meets them on the way.

He appears to them in the midst of their run. But he doesn't stay—he joins them just long enough to tell them not to be afraid, and to continue their journey.

Where that journey might end for us, as Anglican Christians worshiping in Quebec today, is far from clear.

To speak honestly: while the resurrection fills me with great joy, in knowing that the Creator is not limited by my mistakes and by the horrific failures of my ancestors, I am also filled with fear by the uncertainties of what it means for us to be the church today.

In the words of Fred Kaan's hymn:

"The church of Christ in every age,
Beset by change and Spirit-led,
Must claim and test its heritage
And keep on rising from the dead."

When we claim, and when we test our heritage as Anglican Christians living in this place, what will that test reveal about us?

What will we need to change?

What certainties will we need to overturn, if we as a church are to live a resurrected life?

What will the Creator be calling us to become in this place?

I don't know. I suspect it's a call we will only hear rightly as we join with others on the way.

But I do know this: the place has testified. The tomb lies empty.

And Jesus is on the move.

Now it's our turn to start running, and to catch up.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!