This beautiful and difficult building was constructed when you still needed a place to keep the horses that pulled the buggies that brought the people to church. There is flood mud in the basement from 1972, more than a dozen electrical boxes throughout the building, and the “former parsonage” on the fourth floor at the Gray Street end is like something right out of a Stephen King novel.
Much of the building is inaccessible to those with mobility challenges, including our office space, and even if we manage to fund an elevator, figuring out where to put it is a challenge since the floors in the three sections of the building do not line up.
Even this worship space has gone through a radical transformation, the organ and choir moved from the front to the back, the single central pulpit replaced with the pulpit and lectern model common in more liturgical churches. And can we talk about the mid-20th century craze for light wood and Scandinavian design? I cannot tell you how many Mid-Atlantic and New England churches I have been in that have a mismatch of chancel and sanctuary.
Historic preservationists, sometimes more hysteric preservationists as someone recently noted, want old buildings to exist in a mythical never-time, but this simply isn’t reality. Any building that is in active use changes because humans change the world and are changed by the world. If you want a building that does not change as fast, look to a mausoleum, where residents are less inclined to demand updates, though time still takes a toll.
Christianity, being so much older than the Park Church, is also filled with creepy corners, weird wiring, and things that just don’t line up. Much like this building, we’ve learned to live with this suboptimal situation, but it is easy to get lost.
For example, the unknown authors of Matthew want you to see Jesus as the new Moses, yet they share Luke the Physician’s view that Jesus is a king descended from the House of David, and all of the gospels dabble in the idea that Jesus is a blood sacrifice in accordance with the transactional nature of worship in the Second Temple.
Don’t even get me started on the figure of the Human One, a point of self-identification for Jesus picked up from the Book of Daniel, sometimes translated as the Son of Man, which definitely is not the Son of God.
You’d be forgiven if you found it all a little confusing, forgiveness being the point of much of our theology.
So many Christians embrace sacrificial and transactional interpretations of Easter because that is how the human brain is wired, but I want to suggest that the Holy Mystery we name as God is not a giant human in the sky with human wetware, so the victory of Easter is to be found not in burning the sin mortgage on our souls, but rather in the liberation from our own violence.
Jesus is in Jerusalem for Passover, and it is Passover, not the Kingdom of David, that should inform us here.
The Passover story is a story of liberation. When the eleven brothers of Joseph joined the former slave in Egypt, they were welcomed and celebrated. But over the years, as generations thrived in the new country, native Egyptians became envious, slowly clamping down on the immigrant population until they were once again enslaved as Joseph had once been.
Their liberator turned out to be a stuttering fugitive, ethnically Israelite, culturally Egyptian. The mythic struggle included a series of disasters, the plagues the Israelites believed were sent by God, culminating in the Passover, in which the first born male of every household not marked with blood on the doorposts was killed. Notably, the lamb or goat butchered to mark the door of the Israelite homes on that night was not a sacrifice, but was nourishment for the journey. Let me say that again: the Passover or Paschal Lamb is not a sacrifice.
We might discount the more extravagant and miraculous claims of the Exodus story, but there is a strong case to be made for a core historicity. And asking ourselves what we can learn from the story yields a rich harvest.
The Israelites in their “Promised Land” do not replace one monarch, Egypt’s pharaoh, with a new monarch, Moses or otherwise. In fact, Moses isn’t even there as they live into their new covenant, just as Jesus would not be present 1200 years later as his followers live into their new covenant. The twelve escaped tribes have only one true ruler, a God they experience in the world, but who cannot be depicted, no idols with human or animal faces, no deified human on a throne.
Later Christology would try to shove Jesus back into the role of priest or king, but he is only truly a prophet in the Israelite tradition of troublemakers, good troublemakers, who challenge and unwind human systems of oppression.
Jesus leads us on a new Exodus, out of the sin of human violence, out of the sin of our fear and scapegoating. We humans create rules and systems of violence, convince ourselves that the victims of our violence deserve our violence, even as we declare that the violence of others directed toward us and those we love is without merit.
And there is Jesus, tried and convicted and executed at the request of the religious through the legal authority of the state, and the murder is not justified. The scapegoat is and always has been completely innocent. That Jesus did nothing to warrant execution is obvious. That he would return from the dead was not. The Exodus escapees pass through a desert on their journey to a new life, and Jesus, having passed through a desert and temptation at the start of his ministry, now passes through death itself, through human violence at the very worst, for they have seen him destroyed at the hands of church and state, and yet they experience him as still present, as having returned from the grave.
Easter morning is liberation from Rome, liberation from the Sanhedrin, liberation from the transactional God, for God no longer requires slaughtered bulls, indeed… She never did. God is no more nor less than mysterious and loving Creator, calling us into being and surrounding us with grace.
The Promised Land is not some ethnically-cleansed re-creation of a three thousand year old kingdom under the warlord usurper David. It is not a kingdom at all. It is many tribes sharing the same land, tribes that practice jubilee, that cares for vulnerable elders, orphans, and the poor, that does justice, just not the transactional and retributive justice of humans, for the stone has been rolled away, and we are called to practice resurrection justice, the righting of wrong, restorative justice. Let evil and death feed the gaping maw of evil and death, for it always does. We, this body gathered, we are an Easter people, and though we are surrounded by the worst, we are loved by the best.
The floors might not line up, and some pews are cracked, and some parts of the structure may need to be reconstructed in order for this to be a house for all people. And while we are working on retrofitting our theology, we might take a crack at the building as well.
May you experience Easter freedom, this day and always. Amen.