Imagine a Life Beyond Imagining

a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Flora Keshgegian, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, given in Christ Chapel on April 22, 2004

A little known bit of trivia about me: the first time I ever preached in a Sunday morning worship service was in a Methodist church. It was my second year of seminary and one of the folks with whom I had done CPE the summer before invited me to preach in the Methodist church where he was a student pastor. I remember little else about that event. I don't remember my fellow seminarian's name nor that of the church.

What I do remember is that since this church did not use a lectionary, I was asked to choose the Scripture passage on which I would preach. I could not tell you now what I preached on. Nor can I even be sure of the passage or passages I chose, but I do remember this. I spent many, many hours searching for and choosing the scripture, too many hours reading through what seemed like the whole bible, before I spent any time on the sermon itself. It was then that I learned the value of the lectionary. It was then that I gave thanks for its discipline. Thank God for lectionaries, I confessed. We may not always embrace the readings assigned for any given preaching occasion; we may chafe against the restrictions. But lectionaries are a time saver. And a worry saver. At least, we don't have to spend endless time and energy hunting for the perfect text; we don't have to carry a concordance around for constant reference. Lectionaries definitely help with time management.

They also provide a rhythm and a structure to the church year. Our Sunday lectionary takes us through, in each of its 3 years, the annual cycles. The lectionary gives shape and expression to the church year, as we move through each season with its particular tones and emphases. So here we are in Easter season and the lectionary selections move us through resurrection appearances and other passages that witness to the new life and power and even freedom known in and through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is a season of joy and of celebration, as we proclaim and hear about resurrection and redemption. We have much cause to celebrate, cause for great joy. Triumphal tones may be found as well, in the readings and the hymns. God has triumphed over death. God has won the victory over the forces of evil. God's power to prevail is manifest again and again in the words we hear. Not only is Christ resurrected, but Jesus' followers escape miraculously from prison and those bumbling, inarticulate disciples now seem to have found voices to proclaim Christ's resurrection with conviction and eloquence. The miracles seem endless and our church calendar, our lectionary cycle, reminds us of them, week after week, year after year. Those readings bid us to celebrate, rejoice and give thanks and praise to God for all that God has done for our and the world's redemption.

And yet there is for me, always, other calendars to consider, calendars that suggest a certain poignancy, if not an irony, in this season. So often in the midst of the Easter celebration of life, I -- and we -- are also bid to remember death: senseless, unjust deaths of terror. In this second week of Easter, when we have not yet exhausted the repertoire of Easter hymns, when the shouts of alleluia and the scent of lilies still fill the air, another calendar asks for attention. Holocaust commemoration day, that day on which we are asked to remember all who suffered and died in that most horrific of assaults on humanity, always falls in April. This year it was this past Sunday, April 18. And there is more.

The remembrance day for the Armenian genocide is always April 24. Every year then, in the midst of Easter season, I am bid to remember all that my people suffered. I find it striking, if not ironic, that these two major genocides of the 20th century have both ended up on the April calendar, with dates always near, even coinciding. And here I am preaching in the week between. What's a preacher to do?
And if that was not complicating enough, today is Earth day, another annual April event, a day to remember the earth as our habitation, to recognize its fragility as well as its glory, to give due attention to our responsibility for its well being, as well as to give thanks for its abundance. What is a preacher to do?

This clash of calendars, each with its agenda, its bidding if not demand for a particular regard or response, could well feel overwhelming. Perhaps, this is why T. S. Eliot referred to April as the cruelest month. Perhaps his comment was meant for this strongest of juxtapositions of life and death, of the triumph of goodness faced with irredeemable evil. What is a preacher to do?

So, eager for direction, I turn to the lectionary lessons. The surprise is the reading from Job. After all, we are well acquainted with the Gospel selection. It is a regular in the Easter season line up, but Job? I don't think I am alone in this surprise. Often this reading is passed over. The church I attended this past Sunday took refuge in the selection from Acts in this season when the lectionary offers choices. Acts in the safer choice. But Job? Job in Easter season? Job the biblical text perhaps most studied, most written about, by those who look to answer the question: why do bad things happen to good people? Job? Whose meaning remains a matter of great debate even today. The verses we heard from Job are among its most debated. Who is this God of Job that would put this good man through such trials, all seemingly for a wager? Who is this God of Job who when all is said and done seems to demand a type of submission that seems uncalled for? Only then, only when Job who has already lost everything and admits it, seemingly admits to his helplessness and his repentance, does God act to restore Job's fortunes. The closing chapters of Job could easily be read as a majestic song of obeisance, an extolling of the might of God who is everything, who is all powerful and before whose power we are nothing. Such a God commands if not demands submission.

Set next to the Gospel reading these verses from Job seem to reinforce a similar message in John. God's power is able to accomplish its purposes, even that of raising Jesus from the dead. Our recognition of that power is manifest through awareness of human limitation and sinfulness. In the confession of who God is, is a confession of what we are not. The demand is one of repentance and belief in the face of the mighty acts of God. God has offered many signs to guide our faith, but more blessed are those who have faith without seeing. Job may declare, "now my eye sees you" but John has Jesus declare: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

So Job, perhaps the most famous victim in the western world, is seemingly to be victimized further. This time by playing the foil in this lectionary display of God's power and what it means to recognize and believe in such a God. Is that it? Is that the message we are to hear and take away from these readings?

If so, then we have ignored the commemorative calendar that puts us in this week of genocide remembrance. And I cannot. It is the word, ashes, curiously that brings me up short. Job declares in the NRSV translation: "I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." As we know, ashes were a ritual sign of repentance. "Dust and ashes" signaled penitence and mourning or mortality. Yet, especially in this week, I cannot hear those words and not think of the crematoria that haunted the landscapes of Germany and Poland. I cannot hear those words and not think about all those who entered those crematoria and never emerged. Nor can I hear those words and not recall the many stories I have heard and read of Armenians who had taken refuge in churches and other buildings being burned to death when the buildings were set on fire. Or the horrific scene on the docks of the seaside town of Smyrna when, long after that genocide had officially ended, the Greek and Armenian sections of the city were set on fire and thousands fled towards the water only to be burned, trammeled or drowned while ships of the western powers stood by in the harbor and did nothing. Ashes may be a sign of repentance, but they are most definitely the residue of evil, of crimes against humanity that go unanswered.

Is the answer to be found in a god who asserts power and control, might and majesty? Who declares that God's power is supreme? Is it to be found in a triumphant resurrection, understood as a display of God's power that evokes confession of faithful recognition?

What then of the ashes? What then of the wounds? What then of the losses?

The author of John tells us that he has recorded "signs" so that "you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in [Jesus'] name." Perhaps then a way into answering the unanswered questions is to consider this promise of life. It is, after all, what John tells us is the purpose of his Gospel. And it is the effect of resurrection. Resurrection means that life is not defeated by death dealing forces. It means that the desire for life, however beaten and burned and left for dead, does not disappear. Life crawls out from dung hills and tombs and crematoria to claim itself and to go on, with commitment and grace and even goodness.

There is some dispute about those verses in Job and how to translate them. In the verse, "I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes, the reflexive "myself" is not present in the Hebrew and rather than "repent in dust and ashes" at least one translator suggests they be read as "repent of dust and ashes." What a difference a preposition makes. What a difference one fewer word makes. So the verse would read: "I despise and repent of dust and ashes." "I despise and repent of dust and ashes."

The claiming of life in the midst of death is not a triumphal resurrection, nor should it be. It does not require submission to God in recognition of God's greatness and our nothingness, nor should it. And it does not resolve or make up for the losses. It does not take away the wounds. Rather, resurrection only makes sense, is only to be recognized, when we remember the losses, when we recognize the wounds.

What is remarkable about Job is not his confession, however translated, but his ability to continue to live. That is what God makes possible. That is resurrection. What is remarkable about Jews and Armenians and all those who have been, as one Armenian author put it, "hated to death," is that they continue to live and to claim life as good and worth living. That is what God makes possible. That is resurrection.

May we never take such resurrection for granted. May we never think that the power of God is on the side of anything other than life, life renewed, life ongoing, life lived despite the threat of those death dealing forces that will not yield their choke holds. Resurrection is the stubborn, resilient, relentless desire that the God of life makes possible. It is made real again and again in the midst of the ashen residue of the world's hatreds and assaults. Resurrection happens in every moment when someone who has only known refusal and suffering and death, is able to say yes to life. The power of God makes that possible -- not the power of a triumphalist God who demands confession and repentance, who is revealed and known through acts of dominance, but the power of the life giving God who is working in us "infinitely more than we can ask" or even imagine. To proclaim resurrection is to know that God, to be able to imagine such life beyond imagining. To celebrate resurrection is to rejoice in such promises of life in a great amen and alleluia.