"Wouldn't Take Nothing for my Journey Now"
Sermon Presented April 16, 2006
EASTER Sunday
Mark 16:1-8
I love Maya Angelou and am excited about seeing her when she comes to Milwaukee in June. James Baldwin said of her: "Her portrait is a biblical study of life in the midst of death." What does he mean? She's a best selling author. She's been an actress, dancer, producer, director, composer, university professor, and civil rights leader. She wrote and read a poem for Bill Clinton's second inauguration. Where does he get the death piece! Why does he relate her life to the biblical story?
Today, Maya exemplifies life, but that's NOT how her journey began. Her journey began with abandonment, abuse and racial prejudice, and she can write as she does because of both the darkness and the light of her life experiences. The significance of her entire journey is evident in the title of her book: Wouldn't Take Nothing for my Journey Now.
After their parents' stormy marriage ended, three-year-old Maya and her four-year-old brother Bailey were put on a train and sent from California to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandparents. The porter in charge of their welfare left the train the day after they boarded - pinning their tickets to Bailey's inside coat pocket. When they left the train, they were deep inside the racial divide of the South.
In Stamps, church, education, hard work, and stability defined their lives. However, when Maya was seven, her dad appeared and took the children to St. Louis, leaving them with their mother. Here their lives changed radically! While their mother worked nights, the children stayed with her live-in male companion, who raped Maya when she was eight. A short time later, the children went back to Stamps where they remained for several more years until racial tensions erupted and they again went to live with their mother, this time in California. During Maya's tumultuous high school years, she became pregnant and had a son. This gifted young woman was cloaked with visible and invisible scars, but life sprang from the depths of her wounded ness.
Today is Easter Sunday when Christians celebrate Christ's victory over death. But as we celebrate the resurrection, I want you to remember that the risen Jesus also bore his pre-resurrection scars. His victory encompassed his entire journey, including his suffering. I'm reading Mark 16:1-8.
We usually read from the Gospel of John and not Mark's gospel on Easter Sunday. Mark's account, the first gospel written, is short, and in all likelihood, ended at the conclusion of our reading. The oldest manuscripts end here. Scholars believe that scribes who copied the scrolls believed the story was incomplete and added their own endings. Verse 9 is one ending and the rest of the verses represent another ending. Most of your Bibles have a notation to that effect.
Mark's account of the resurrection has no post-resurrection appearances. (You have to go to the other gospels to find them.) Mark concludes with a young man announcing to the women who come to the tomb that Jesus is alive and that he will meet them and the disciples in Galilee. The text then says that the women leave in fear and silence. They can't trust the message of hope they receive.
My thesis this morning is that we can't look at hope without looking at struggle. We can't look at resurrection without looking at the pain and struggle that preceded it. The author of Hebrews (5:8) said that Jesus "was a Son who learned obedience through what he suffered." His suffering was integral to his personhood. Maya Angelou's suffering was integral to who she is. My suffering is part of who I am, as is yours. God works through our suffering to shape us and give us hope.
Joan Chittister, an author, educator and Benedictine Sister, has written a powerful book titled Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope. Her contention is that it isn't possible to write a book about hope without looking at the nature of struggle. The question the book addresses is: Where in pain does hope lie?
My generation was raised to believe in certainty. If you work hard, you will succeed. If you pray hard, God will give you what you ask for. If you live a good life, you will be rewarded. If you have enough faith, you will accept God's will for you. However, today we live in a time of uncertainty and struggle and we need a spirituality of struggle to deal with war, terrorism, poverty, hubris, and child abuse. We need to know how to survive struggle without succumbing to it; how to bear struggle without being defeated by it; and how to emerge from struggle better than when we found ourselves in the throes of it.
Christians deal with their struggles differently. Some believe that everything that happens is God's will or plan. People are abused, the poor are poor, women are routinely beaten and routinely ignored, nations are bombed, and babies are born with handicaps because that's the way God planned it. When we believe that God wills these tragedies, we question our own lack of faith when we can't embrace the pain and turn it into good. Then the process of struggle is turned into a kind of spiritual masochism. If it hurts it must be good for us.
Another way to deal with struggle is to assume that God is a magician whose role is to save us from the realities of life. Thus God changes traffic lights from red to green and meets all our needs. If we put enough suffering in - we get a blessing out. But when life doesn't fall into place like we want, we have to deal with our feelings. Sometimes we try to fool ourselves into thinking that we never even wanted what we lost. With that approach, we shove down our feelings and ignore our questions.
Both of these approaches bring failure. Either we believe too little or feel too much. But God isn't a puppeteer and God isn't a magic act. God is God, and we need conversion!
Joan Chittister says that "conversion is the opening of the heart to the grace of new possibilities." It doesn't blame God for plotting evil plans to test and try and torment us. It recognizes in the glory of new life that God simply companions us, simply stands by ready to receive our tattered, restless selves, as we are tested, tried, and tormented by life itself. God guides us to new life by allowing us to open our eyes to new possibility and find it for ourselves. (Chittister, p. 25)
We need to understand that conversion isn't always immediate. It may take years. But the longer we put it off and the longer we resist change, the longer it takes for us to become more than we were when the struggle began. (Ibid)
Change is an invitation to see life differently now than we did before. It stretches our vision and opens our hearts to what we couldn't see before. When we spend time working in Inner City Milwaukee, we see poverty differently. When we spend time in a war zone, we see the war differently. When we work with the homeless, the terrorized, the mentally ill, gays and lesbians or people of other faiths or ethnic backgrounds, we see them differently. Change converts us from the narrowness of perspective that trapped us in the small confines of our former selves to a more expansive, more flexible citizen of the world. It calls us away from a narrow religious outlook. It calls us to imagination. It calls us to see that there is more than one way to be in the world. It calls us to open our arms and hearts to the rest of the world and be embraced by it.
Change will happen whether we want it or not. But conversion isn't automatic! We can allow ourselves to become dogmatic, and refuse to move forward in the light we have been given, or we can seek conversion.
The spiritual person is open to the possibility of something different than was imagined. We may wonder how it would have been if things had gone the way we wanted in the first place. We will never know what kind of a husband the "man who got away" would have been, but a sorority sister of mine saw the medical student who broke their engagement end up as a drug addict who committed suicide. Joan Chittister, whose dream was to write fiction, now writes essays and books on spirituality.
The artist Samuel Bak, a Holocaust survivor, paints the tragedy of the ovens, but in every piece of Holocaust art, he adds a ladder to the top of the crematorium walls, a green leaf sprout, the sun shining, or a bridge of rabbis. There is always a sign of hope in the darkness of his paintings.
My grandson Christopher won a poetry contest last week. He sent me the poem and I commented that I saw loneliness and pain in it. He replied: "There is loneliness and pain in the poem, but there is also love and hope." He titled the poem "The Dianthus" - a name for the carnation - a flower representing love.
Joan Chittister says that "Hope and despair aren't opposites. They are cut from the very same cloth, made from the very same material, shaped from the very same circumstances. Every life finds itself forced to choose one from the other, one day at a time, one circumstance after another. The sunflower that turns its head relentlessly toward the sun is the patron saint of those in despair. When darkness envelops us, it is time, like the sunflower, to seek the light." (Ibid p. 106)
"Life isn't one road. It's many roads - roads that provide the things of hope in the midst of despair. In the process of struggle, we find sources of new understandings - where hope dwells. That wisdom carries us beyond the dark night of struggle to the light of new wisdom and new strength. (Ibid. pp. 106, 7)
When we discover hope in our struggles, we have moved toward conversion, and an opening to the mystery of God's presence. The bad still happens, but somehow we begin to see a whole new perspective and that new perspective is our gift from God.
Just as the resurrected Jesus was recognized by his wounds, and Maya Angelou is recognized by her wounds, so are we. We need conversion. When we invite God into the conversion process, our wounds will shape us but not defeat us. On this resurrection morning, God wants to be a part of our conversion process. What happens is up to us!
Sources: Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope by Joan Chittister and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
