Easter Sunday Move Along, Folks. Nothing to see Here

You’ve certainly experienced a traffic jam caused by lookie-loos gawking at an accident in the opposing lane.  Of course, you have.  You live in Southern California, or in some other place similarly overcrowded.  Drives you nuts – unless you’re the one doing the looking.  As you approach the scene of the accident, there’s the patrol officer waving a flashlight saying to drivers as they all slow down to stare, “Move along, folks.  Just move along.  Nothing to see here.”  And as you pass, she gives you the evil eye of consternation.

That is the word from the empty tomb this morning.  “Nothing to see.”  Why do you look for the living amongst the dead?  How often do we Christians find ourselves lost and wandering about amongst that which does not give life?

I came across an intriguing book a couple weeks ago, The Grave of God.  What a title.  I wondered if this was a reprise of the Death of God theology of the 60s or what.  It was a much more damning indictment than anything out of that period.  It concerned the tendency of the church for self-preservation over mission.  For safety over risk.  For condemnation over liberation.  For death over Resurrection.[1]  The church has used God to justify oppression, wars and patriarchy.  God has been used to justify narrow partisan and parochial interests.

When I was a small boy, I wondered why it was that part of the family wouldn’t talk about Aunt Donna.  It was as if she were dead.  It was only after I had become a teenager that I discovered the real story.  Aunt Donna, after losing her husband Frank, went into a deep depression.  Her life literally fell apart.  It was only when a Catholic friend reached out to her and took her to church that Aunt Donna got her footing.  She found such a nurturing community that she converted from the Christian Science faith of my grandmother.  She ultimately became a nun, working as a nurse with the Sisters of St. Joseph in Tacoma, Washington.  I’m sure her work was a blessing to those hospital patients, but to us she was as if dead.  We dared not speak her name or we were hushed.  In retrospect, it was very hurtful, especially to us children.  So much hate.  And this is what the church taught?  Such vindictiveness is indeed the grave of God and the tomb of all that is holy.  The Resurrection Spirit is like the wind.  It blows where it will and it liberated our Aunt Donna from that dark cloud  of depression over her head. Yes, it did! 

Today, we rejoice that these narrow denominational tombs are empty.  Alleluia.  We Christians are a Resurrection people.  We live not in the House of Fear but in the House of Love as my friend Ed Bacon would put it.  I saw that one of his internet friends had responded with the reminder, “The House of Love has room for all, and we need to remember to leave the door unlocked and porch light on for all who want to move in.”

Easter is about Resurrection.  It does us no earthly, or heavenly good for that matter, to have ideas and opinions about that empty tomb unless we are moved by Resurrection Power to leave the tomb and beginning to live as a renewed people. 

Resurrection breaks into our lives sometimes when the Spirit grabs our funny bone. Humor allows the dreary stuff of life to fall into perspective.  Humor is some of the best Resurrection medicine.  Resurrection humor blasts through self-absorption and anger, through custom and the walls of clan and tribe.  It liberates us from the tomb of self-importance.  Nothing to see in there, folks.  Nothing to see.

Ed, in his book, 8 Habits of Love,[2] tells the story of one of his mentors, Rabbi Friedman.  The rabbi recounts a time when his son had to go to court for rear-ending a woman’s car on his way to work.  By the time the father and son had arrived at court the other driver was already there in the courtroom, furiously pacing back and forth.  When she noticed the two, her look became a hateful scowl.  She wanted the judge to throw the book at this young boy.  The rabbi begun to sense that the judge and spectators were becoming caught up in the tension filling the courtroom.  In fact, he himself was getting caught up in it.  As Ed reports the scene, “…he began to sweat; he was getting angrier and angrier.  His son looked at him with pleading eyes.  Everything seemed to be getting out of control.  The rising panic was infectious and debilitating.”

The rabbi moved away from the others to get some perspective and to calm himself, and when he returned, he heard the judge asking him what he as a father thought would be a reasonable punishment.  In an instant that blessed liberating spirit, might we even say that Resurrection Spirit spoke through the humor of the words that escaped his lips: “Life imprisonment,” was the judgement of the father. “This is surely the worst crime a young man can commit – to have a fender bender against this woman.”

The judge and the lawyers burst out into laughter.  The woman’s demeanor began to change as she, too, began laughing.  Holy laughter brought them forth from the tomb in which the proceedings had become mired.  Holy laughter, Resurrection laughter was the medicine which restored reason.  And Ed reports that all went home without any dire consequences.  A Jewish rabbi and Resurrection?  Why not?  Was it not also a Jewish rabbi who burst forth from that tomb on the first Easter morning?  Resurrection cannot be contained in any one religious tribe.  It bursts through whatever tomb in which we contrive to stuff it. 

The power of Christ has been let loose throughout the humane values of not only the West, but it has infected all who have absorbed those values, even though they are adherents of other faiths.  Or of no faith.  The power of Christ is now so diffuse throughout the world that most, even professing Christians, fail to recognize its origin.  Take the power of liberated women.  Yes, it took us Episcopalians a long time to get there.  To our shame, women could not be deputies at General Convention until 1970, when twenty-eight women delegates were finally welcomed to General Convention by President of the House of Deputies, John Coburn.  Yes, Resurrection!  Even in our beloved Episcopal Church.  Male chauvinism is a dark, empty tomb.  Nothing there for anybody.   Absolutely, nothing!

The Church, in John’s account of that first Easter morning, reports trouble with some Pesky Women who beat the men to the Easter miracle.  And then there’s that foot race over which man gets to be there first, as if the women’s testimony accounted for nothing.  This whole episode is a reflection of the argument over who really counts in the church.  It’s all about church politics.  The Resurrection message could easily have been lost in this church skirmish.  And so often it is.  And those Pesky Women?  We men eventually wised up to God’s Resurrection Power residing in their persistence and in their glorious gifts.  In the end, we men had both the good sense and the grace to get out of their way.  And what an Easter blessing these women have been for our church, both as lay and ordained! 

The infection of empowerment has now spread to the women of Afghanistan.[3]  After the most horrific abuse under the rule of the Taliban and ISIS, these women are now rising to their full potential.  They will not be suppressed. Not any longer. Resurrection, I say.

In The Daily Good there was a story about a girl, Hassanzada, who at the age of sixteen becomes a news presenter, the first woman to do this in Afghanistan.  In her hometown of Mazar-i-Sharif such a notion would have been dismissed as a childish dream.  Yet, here she was, broadcasting the news. 

Today Hassanzada is now twenty-five and runs her own magazine, Gellaria.  Sort of like Vogue.  And to think that just a few years ago, women were not allowed to leave their homes alone or permitted to attend school.  Girls who had the temerity to go to classes were sometimes the victim of acid attacks by the Taliban.  Under ISIS, girls had been sold into sexual slavery, considered as mere animals with no agency of their own.  And now, even with the Taliban gone, the oppressive cultural norms internalized by many women remain as a stale tomb imprisoning any aspirations of personal fulfilment.

It has not been easy for Hassanzada.  Shortly after she appeared on television, she began receiving threats from the Taliban and their warlords.  The elders of her own village were furious that a woman dare have her face publicly shown on television.  There were angry letters, threatening phone calls and bullying.  Yet she kept going to work, day in and day out.  She persisted.  Yeah, one of those sorts of women.   Hassanzada is that beloved angelic messenger shouting to the women of Afghanistan, “Move along, ladies.  Nothing here for you in this Taliban tomb.  Only the death of your dreams.  Absolutely, nothing to see here.  Nothing for you.” 

Hassanzada knew that if she gave into this intimidation, every girl in Afghanistan would suffer a diminished future.  The Taliban mentality would have won. “If we quit every time we are threatened or attacked, then women would never get anywhere. We have to be fearless,” she insists.[4]

Even tragedy did not deter her.  One day her younger brother was attacked and brutally beaten, almost to death.  Yes, the family decided to move to Kabul for their safety, but her parents continued to support her work and aspirations. 

What has enraged Hassanzada more than the violence directed at her and her family has been the complacency of so many Afghan women and their servile acquiesce to the Taliban attitude that they are nothing.  Today she continues in her media work to encourage young girls to dream dreams like she had.

The Resurrection Spirt has surely burst forth from the Taliban and the ISIS tomb of dead ideology and dead male privilege.  There is no stuffing it back in.  Don’t even try.  There’s a whole new generation of Pesky Women out there bringing new life to Afghanistan.  God bless ‘em.  Men, let’s face it.  You cannot stifle these women.  So, join them.  Join them and become a part of the Resurrection of Afghan women.  Become a part of a resurrected Afghanistan.

This Resurrection Morning, we celebrate the bursting forth of new life at St. Francis and in our beloved Episcopal Church.  We are so fortunate to have a bishop like John Taylor who has refused to sell off any more church properties, but insists that we, the church, discover our new ministry when the neighborhood changes, when the world thinks it no longer has any use for the Gospel Message in this so-called modern age.

A number of us will be attending the Episcopal Enterprise Institute, training to learn how to reconfigure our ministry in such a way that it will serve the present needs of our neighborhood on Sterling Ave.  We are an irrepressible Resurrection People. 

The watchword of House of Hope is this:  Instead of judging people by their past, stand by them and help them repair their future.  That is Resurrection theology in action.  No dank, smelly tombs for us!  And addiction is the worst sort of tomb.

This Good Friday I so missed our sister Joyce Marx at our Stations of the Cross service.  I still remember following her last year as we processed from station to station.  For those who didn’t know Joyce, she was one of the founders of St. Francis.  And let me tell you this.  She and her husband Gene did not sweat and toil all those years for us to give up.  At St. Francis we’re just getting started.  Hold my beer and watch this!  Or diet soda, if you prefer.

Move along.  Move along, nothing to see here in any old dark and smelly tomb.  Friends, the action’s out there — Resurrection action bursting forth uncontained.  Matthew tells us that following his initial appearances, Jesus went on before them back to Galilee, went on before them, even back to Sterling and Citrus, San Bernardino – back to the world of hustle and bustle, the world both of tears and unrestrained joy.  Back to the sometimes pedestrian world where we’re daily empowered to live Resurrection. To paraphrase David Letterman, Easter has no “off” switch. 

Christ has risen.  (He is risen indeed).   Happy Easter.  Amen.

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[1] Robert Adolfs, The Grave of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 26ff.

[2] Ed Bacon, 8 Habits of Love: Open Your Heart, Open Your Mind (Boston: Grand Central Life & Style, 2012),

[3] Kiran Nazish, “Afghan Women Making their Voices Heard by Launching their Own Companies,’ The Daily Good, April 27, 2018) http://www.good.is/features/media-women-in-afghanistan-gellara-magazine-zan-tv

[4] Kiran Nazish, op. cit.

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43;
John 20:1-18

Preached at St. Francis Outreach Center, San Bernardino;

 The Rev. John C. Forney
April 21, 2019