Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
SERMON “Helmets Required”
Innocent III was a powerful pope. He managed to maintain control over Europe’s kings, and ordered multiple crusades against pagans, Christians he considered heretics, and, of course, Muslims. He didn’t waste much time about it either. He became pope in January of 1198, and in August of that year he issued a papal bull declaring a crusade to retake Jerusalem. It would come to be known as the Fourth.
Things did not go well, even by the disastrous standards of the Crusades. It was agreed that rather than a slow passage by land, this Crusade would travel by boat. The Venetians, masters of the eastern Mediterranean, were hired to build a fleet of transports. But when the Crusaders arrived in Venice in 1202, they didn’t have enough to pay the agreed to sum of 85k marks. In fact, they had less than half of that. Venice’s Doge considered his options. The financial loss was considerable. The loss of prestige if he canceled Innocent’s crusade would be worse. He ultimately decided to give the Crusaders a side gig, intimidating competing ports on their way to the Holy Land. They did so, attacking Zara in Dalmatia, what is today the port of Zadar in Croatia, before they even got out of the Adriatic.
The pope was displeased, and threatened excommunication if the Crusaders attacked any other Christian neighbors. Then came Constantinople.
The city, modern day Istanbul, was established by the Romans, and was the seat of the Byzantine emperor, the heir to the caesars. There were religious tensions, the patriarch of Constantinople the last eastern seat under Christian control of the 80% of early Christian patriarchs who never accepted papal primacy. But the real problem was secular instability, with multiple factions competing for the throne. The son of one deposed emperor promised 200k marks and loyalty to the pope if the Crusaders would intervene. This sum would pay off the Venetians with a tidy amount to spare. More intrigue followed, including the death of a co-emperor and a coup d’etat by the royal chamberlain, who murdered the man who had made the deal with the Crusaders. They, with the blessing of the Venetians, decided to conquer the city outright.
On April 12, 1204, the Crusaders breached the city walls, and began the Sack of Constantinople, a story I have shared before. They slaughtered, stole, and destroyed. If you have been to Venice, you have seen evidence of this event, as the brass horses that adorn the Basilica San Marco were stolen from Constantinople’s Hippodrome.
Few Crusaders ever made it to the Holy Land. Jerusalem was not re-captured. Constantinople, which never recovered from the destruction, would eventually fall to the Ottoman Turks, taking the fourth and final patriarchal seat of the eastern church.
This may seem an odd story to tell at the outset of an Easter sermon. We have the women at the tomb, and Matthew’s version is particularly dramatic, with the women experiencing an earthquake, and witnessing an angel descending from the sky, rolling away the stone, and the guards falling into a catatonic state before the angel ever says a word. Of course, we know that word, the news that Jesus has been raised from the dead and will meet them and the men, who are hiding, in Galilee. And then Jesus himself appears.
But the sermon I’d deliver on that is pretty short, and while that might be appreciated on an Easter Sunday that is also a Communion Sunday, I have to preach more than a) Believe the women, and b) Just because it looks dead doesn’t necessarily mean it is dead. Did none of you people see “The Princess Bride”?
Christianity looked pretty bad in 1204. And yet, it was still going to produce Michelangelo, Johann Sebastian Bach, and a group of renegade Presbyterians in Elmira, New York who cared about enslaved people of African descent hundreds of miles away, and were willing to challenge established religion and the established laws of the state to act.
Christianity looks pretty bad right now in Imperial America. I’d start listing the reasons, but none of us has that much time. I will mention that Hegseth and Huckabee are intent on triggering armageddon, unaware that the Revelation to John of Patmos is fever-dream fiction for desperate times, not an operating manual. And if you are not paying attention to what Mike Huckabee is doing in Jerusalem, you should. Or maybe you shouldn’t, because it is terrifying and evil.
Their Christianity is made up. So is ours. But one of them leans into humility, love, and service, looks like Jesus, and the other looks like the cruel empire that murdered him.
Annie Dillard is right. This is dangerous stuff we are doing, but not because a sleeping God might awaken. God is not asleep. Though Dillard is correct in believing that God seeks to draw us out from the living death of fear and its many corollaries, including greed. Our United Church of Christ Statement of Faith describes God’s desire to save all from aimlessness and sin.
This is dangerous stuff because just like 1,996 years ago, more or less, empire wants to snuff out the spark of revolution, wants to silence the voices that say “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
Empire wants to keep power, whether that empire is a would-be king of a golden toilet or a private equity pirate on a private island, with all those other “p” words that come to mind.
It is dangerous to believe in the “might be” of God’s just a caring realm, where everyone has a chance to live into their full potential, those born into privilege, and those enslaved by multi-generational trauma.
But it is far more dangerous to fall into despair and give up. It might be better for the planet if Homo Sapiens were to go extinct, but there is no guarantee we can do that without snuffing out all other life. Better we use these big brains to stop the destruction, then to begin to slowly unwind the damage. And while this is perfectly rational, the primal drives that destroy are not rational, so we are going to need more than a good argument. We are going to need to lean into the two craziest and most powerful things of all, hope and love.
I do not know or care precisely what happened that morning at the tomb. I don’t believe it was a massive fraud. Massive fraud is hard, hard to pull off, hard to keep secret. I believe they believed, believed that Jesus was still present with them in some way they did not completely understand, a confusion that was recorded in the gospels. Their belief, that even all of the power of religion and empire could not snuff out the message of the kin-dom of God, that justice still mattered, and not the retributive justice of humankind, but the restorative justice of that Divine Mystery we name as God.
We can list centuries of other wrongs done in the name of Christ. Martin Luther endorsed the murderous suppression of the Peasant’s War. The church, Roman and Protestant, aligned with the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, with the Nazis in Germany. The first stories that come out are usually state-sanctioned, and state is imperfect to say the least. It takes time for those other stories to come out. But they do eventually get told. We tell them here, stories of resistance and courage, sometimes of healing and resurrection, sometimes of simply being present, attending to the holy with no answers, just love.
One day, it will be our story being told, a congregation in a Rust Belt town that changed lives, within its own four walls, where all were welcomed, and in the wider community, where members dreamed and fought and served, where love won, and always will.
Grab your life preservers and strap on those helmets. There is work to be done. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
God of All Nations and All People,
we seek divine favor,
weave stories of your favor,
believing blessing is in short supply,
making you as small as we are.
We pray this morning for Salah Sarsour,
President of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee,
detained for the crime of believing
that Palestinians are people,
for daring to disagree with our American despot
and their Israeli war criminal.
We pray for his family and friends and congregation,
for those still committed to our Constitution,
pray that we might remain committed
to our Constitution
as a tool for human thriving.
We pray for all of the victims of state violence,
those who are victims because they are targets,
those who are victims because they are ordered and deceived
to commit acts of violence,
those who are victims of their own hate-filled souls
and their callous disregard for life.
We are thankful for this Easter story,
for the promise that love wins,
though sometimes bearing scars,
and pray as Jesus taught us, saying:
Our Father…