The late William Strauss is best known as the co-founder and director of the Capitol Steps, a satirical theatre troupe originally made up of congressional staffers with over 40 albums and a long list of appearances on PBS and NPR. I suspect they are finding it hard to come up with material that tops real life these days. In fact, their last album, “Orange in the New Barack,” came out three years ago.
Few realize that Strauss was also an author and theorist, In fact, he had three degrees from Harvard, a Bachelor’s from the College, a J.D. From the Law School, and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, where he was part of the first graduating class. Along with Neil Howe, he developed what is sometimes called Strauss-Howe generational theory, sometimes called Fourth Turning theory. The details may be for another day, another sermon.
I mention the theory primarily because, at least for me, it is more accurate than others. Any division of generations is arbitrary, but those that place me in the Baby Boom clearly get it wrong. I am way more “Breakfast Club” than “Rebel Without a Cause,” Gen X in my mind and according to Strauss-Howe. And while I already loved great literature and poetry, many younger members of Gen X were introduced to the power of the written word through the character of John Keating in Peter Weir’s 1989 film “Dead Poets Society.” Ironically, the movie is set in 1959, squarely in the Baby Boom. Keating, brilliantly played by the late Robin Williams, challenges his students, fans the flames of youthful rebellion and individuality. At one point, he pushes a shy new student, played by a young Ethan Hawke, to issue a barbaric yawp, a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
Whitman is certainly on any short-list of greatest American poets, a list that I believe also includes Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, among others. You may well have other candidates. Great poets use language to try to catch something that can’t quite be caught, a moment, a feeling, the thing-ness of a thing, in the same way that painters try to capture things on canvas or paper, a gesture that points to some other, the thingness of the thing, a Mona Lisa or a bombing in Spain. Whitman was bold enough to try to capture an entire nation, a war, a grief, indeed, the great gay poet sought to capture a universality, a vibrancy, but also a rawness, of emotion, the chaos of the Brooklyn waterfront.
His “O Me! O Life!,” the reading Penny shared with us this morning, is like the Twenty-Second Psalm in someways. You may best know that psalm as the one Jesus begins on the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” But Jesus knew the whole psalm, the first line simply shorthand for the whole psalm which ends in triumphant praise. Or maybe he simply ran out of oxygen, for crucifixion killed you by suffocation, a tragic end so many are suffering these days. Like the psalm, Whitman’s poem launches heavy, despair and questioning, but ends in affirmation. And while Whitman was Christian-ish, while his affirmation of life is not in explicitly Christian language, it fits both Easter and this moment in which we live.
This moment when we celebrate the greatest of Christian mysteries, not Virgin Birth, for Christmas, as lovely as it is, is not what saves. And while some may see the brutal death as saving, many of us see in it only human depravity and wickedness. For so many of us, our hope, our salvation, is in a holy power, a holy love, that transcends even death itself. I can try to parse the conflicting accounts of resurrection encounters for the rest of my life and never answer questions about things like the physicality of the Risen Christ. If he had a body Thomas could touch, how did he get through the locked door? I don’t need to answer those questions. All I need to know is that many people experienced him as still present And it starts at the tomb.
If you are very familiar with the gospels, read ahead, or were listening carefully, you might realize how shocking Matthew’s account really is, not the shock of angels and the living dead, though those are certainly shocking. Matthew’s is the action movie version of Easter morning. Only in Matthew do you get the earthquake, the descent of the angel who rolls away the stone, the guards passing out, all in the sight of the two Marys. In the original ending of Mark the women run away, afraid, never telling anyone. In the other gospels, including Matthew, they do tell someone, engage other disciples, for they too are disciples despite patriarchy’s attempt to demote them. And here in Matthew, having seen an earthquake, and angels, and unconscious guards, they set off with fear and great joy. “Suddenly, Jesus met them and said ‘Greetings!’”
Easter morning is God’s “barbaric yawp,” though maybe more divine and mysterious than barbaric. But it has the same wild exuberant energy that Whitman captures in his poetry, a vibrancy that cannot be contained, not by polite society, not on a printed page, not even by a tomb cut into a cliff with a giant boulder and Roman guards.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
So says the poet. So says our God. You are here!
Okay, well actually, you are there, wherever you are this morning, the den, the breakfast table, your study. But you are here, this earth, this time, and you did not call yourself into being. Like our God, you are becoming and the play is going on. Life is a little magic fireball of possibility, and we walk around carrying that powerful potentiality inside of us until we breathe our last breath, and even then, we dare to imagine, God is not done with us yet.
He is not here. He has escaped this prison of death. He is loose in the world. Go and find him.
We’ve got a challenge ahead of us. We are going to need to build an economy, not rebuild what was working for us, but build something that will work for everyone, that will give everyone a chance to thrive, and that is going to take holy imagination, holy activism, and holy patience as we try to move our sisters and brothers out of fear, out of the sinful worship of self, and teach them the power of agape love, selfless love, the power that we find in community. We are going to have to walk with sisters and brothers who carry a grief as backbreaking as that cross on the journey to Golgotha, sisters and brothers who are traumatized, who fell off the wagon when they could no longer attend twelve step meetings, who were seized by mental illness.
Few of us have ever faced such a challenge in our lives. But Whitman knew what Americans could do, and Jesus knew what that little band of disciples could do. Imagine, a community organizer in a backwater colony at the edge of the empire changing the world. It would be enough to make that Skywalker from Tatooine proud, but this was a real Skywalker, and he would change the world.
And we are called to change the world, each in our own way. We say “thy will be done.” But her will, his will, their will, its will, however it is you imagine that Divine Mystery, God’s will is love, is creation and creativity, is life, life, life! Life so barbaric, so vibrant, so uncontrolled, that it could not be contained, cannot be contained.
Easter is here, and Easter is still coming. “The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
Contribute your verse. Sing until you can sing no more. The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia.