[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 84 (Wednesday, June 24, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1214-E1215]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          EASTER IS OUTRAGEOUS

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. FRANK RIGGS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 24, 1998

  Mr. RIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to my colleagues' 
attention a sermon delivered on Easter Day (April 12, 1998) by the Very 
Reverend Pierce Klemmt, Rector of Christ Church in Alexandria, 
Virginia. I feel the sermon contains many concepts that we, as elected 
leaders, should keep in mind as we carry out the people's business on 
the House Floor.

                          Easter is Outrageous

       I have preached Easter morning for a quarter of a century. 
     Year after year I would unravel the Easter miracle . . . make 
     it sound reasonable . . . plausible . . . accessible . . . 
     especially for the hard to budge agnostics and intellectuals 
     whose families can only get

[[Page E1215]]

     them all dressed up and into church this one Sunday of the 
     year. One way or another, I would argue the reasonableness of 
     the resurrection. Appealing to the laws of natural theology, 
     I can hear myself saying: ``All you have to do, folks, 
     especially evident in this glorious season of spring, for 
     God's sake just look around you . . . See how living things 
     spring forth from the remains of winter's death . . . see how 
     new things constantly, cyclically rise from the dead and 
     buried.'' From the tombs of winter to the resurrection of 
     spring! A green-thumb parishioner actually recommended one 
     year for me to submit my Easter sermon to Home and Garden for 
     possible publication! This suggestion has irritated me ever 
     since. It sent me to reflecting on how unreasonable Easter 
     really is.
       When you get right down and chew on it . . . think hard on 
     the resurrection . . . open yourself to its persistent 
     mystery . . . its pretty outrageous stuff. Say all you want 
     about the new and living rising from the old and dead; Easter 
     defies reason.
       Madeleine L'Engle calls Easter ``the most brilliant of all 
     blessings.'' Easter, she says, ``outrages'' life on our 
     terms. ``It turns upside down our matter of fact, hi-tech, 
     everything explainable world. It offends our sense of 
     intellectual justice. It takes reason to the woodshed.''
       Thought of more as a relationship than something to prove, 
     Easter truth, at its core, is a kind of betrothing. Easter is 
     a betrothing. Easter gospel isn't working from only a 
     coroner's ensemble of facts . . . the kind of cold facts 
     Pilate wanted from Jesus when he interrogated: ``What is 
     truth? Give me the facts and I'll get you off the hook! What 
     is your truth!''
       Easter is the truth Pilate couldn't hear and we can't hear 
     still. Pilate couldn't hear it because he was loyal to a 
     power that was threatened by the truth standing in front of 
     him. After all Jesus was the groom of God's betrothing . . . 
     and unconditional love disturbs people with quid pro quo 
     loyalties.
       Easter truth is God's way of beckoning us to surrender old 
     loyalties and begin anew . . . unconditionally.
       Easter as betrothal begins by becoming supremely loyal . . 
     . devoted to a Sunday community of people. And may I add for 
     those of you who haven't been here since Christmas, a Sunday 
     after Sunday community people. And then in time it is 
     becoming loyal to God's family of people beyond our own scope 
     of interest and need for admiration. It has to do with 
     loyalty, fidelity, and communion with people who work more 
     from love . . . from possibility and hope rather than fact, 
     appraisal . . . caution. A bean encounter Easter does not 
     make it. Easter pushes the stakes into the sand far beyond 
     anyone's expected reach.
       The resurrection outrageously challenges the habits of our 
     hardened hearts, our limited horizons, our shortness of 
     breath. Remember John Updike's series of Rabbit books? Near 
     the end of Rabbit at Rest his hero, in an 11th hour effort, 
     leaps furiously around a basketball court. His heart bursts 
     and Updike writes, ``The heart--it is tired and stiff and 
     full of crud'' . . . Of course, Updike's story was a parody 
     of the typical American heart: Tired and stiff and full of 
     crud. Easter is for opening the coronaries of our gasping and 
     stuck hearts, delivering oxygen, to make us supremely loyal 
     to God's people through Jesus Christ and therefore to each 
     other, the whole human family. It is being open to God's 
     truth; truth that human loyalties often ridicule.
       If Easter is outrageous, then believing in Easter should 
     make us outrageous people. Right? People whose hearts are 
     tired and stiff and full of crud are poeple like the Apostle 
     Peter in the Bible before Good Friday. Like Peter, we follow 
     the Lord halfway to Calvary's cross, but forget about the 
     other half. As for most of us, are we not like the crowd 
     gathered on Good Friday, not there to cheer the crucifixion, 
     but also not there to protest it? And so failing to realize 
     that compassion without confrontation is hopelessly 
     sentimental, the people went home beating their breasts, just 
     as we do today, preferring guilt to be responsibility.
       I believe Easter faith makes religiously outrageous people 
     . . . often, unreasonable people. Not obstinate, just firm. 
     We frequently talk about saints as the strong, quiet types. 
     But Easter people I know are saints in another key. God 
     brings them out when faced with ``R'' rated situations. Those 
     saints are not the strong and silent, they are the foolish 
     and brash . . . loud and long . . . loud and long alike . 
     . . like . . . like well . . . Bella. (Remember Bella? 
     Congresswoman from New York?) Say what you want about her 
     politics and hats . . . it was truth that she was most 
     open-minded about . . . truth about politicians, labor 
     laws, racism, war . . . the truth about . . . church going 
     people. I think if Bella had been around town during the 
     Holy Week in Jerusalem with Jesus and his half-hearted 
     disciples, she would have been kicking and screaming at 
     the authorities all the way from Gethsemane to the foot of 
     the cross. She would have been carrying posters of protest 
     all the way up and down the Via Delosa!
       There was a cartoon in the paper eulogizing Bella last 
     week. Did you see it? A disagreeable looking Saint Peter is 
     pictured holding the Big Book at the entrance to heaven. A 
     rotund women dragging two suitcases and sporting a floppy hat 
     has just kicked down the pearly gates and is shown marching 
     well on her way into heaven. St. Peter murmurs, ``Come in, 
     Ms. Abzug!''
       Bella was an Easter person. Or take the Bishop Daniel Deng 
     Bul, our partner in genocidal-ridden Sudan. Out of a God-
     given love for his drowning people, he stares down the 
     governmental oppressors and says: ``You have bulldozed down 
     our churches and schools and clinics in Khartoum, but here, 
     in my diocese, in this refugee camp, with my people, (he 
     draws a line in the sand) your destruction stops here.''
       For Christmas, Easter betroths compassion with 
     confrontation . . . marries compassion to confrontation. They 
     become one flesh. Without confrontation, compassion is 
     pathetically sentimental.
       Easter is a betrothing. As such it is two sided. It 
     represents a demand as well as a promise . . . a demand that 
     we not simply sympathize with our tears the crucified Christ, 
     but that we pledge our loyalty to the one risen beyond our 
     deadlines. And, as Pam stated a few weeks ago, that means an 
     end to all loyalties for people and institutions that 
     crucify. For example, while we are enjoying our current 
     economic bonanza and therefore asking less and less questions 
     of justice and tolerating more and more bad behavior, and 
     more and more spurious journalism about facts and rumors that 
     don't count, how can we think the Risen Lord would applaud 
     our economic system? A system that clearly reverses the 
     priorities of his mother's Magnificat-filing the rich with 
     good things while sending the poor empty away.
       Loyalty to the Risen Lord stirs . . . mettles . . . 
     compassion with confrontation. It is being outrageously loyal 
     to God's people, not just to those whom we like and find 
     agreeable.
       Easter is being outspoken when people are separated from 
     what God promises to all.
       Easter is preferring responsibility to guilt . . . And 
     this, my friends, is what makes Easter unreasonable, 
     irrelevant to our lives, certainly not easy. Easter is not 
     for just life after death. Easter, at its heart, is a bold 
     conversion . . . every day you roll out of bed, you got to 
     decide for it, saying, ``I will not separate my compassion 
     from the hard work of confrontation.'' At Christmas, God did 
     the unthinkable. God came down and became human . . . dwelt 
     among us full of grace and truth. But this is only going 
     halfway . . . At Easter God did the outrageous . . . we are 
     risen with Christ . . . we become like him in our deaths.

     

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