My first Easter sermon at First Church Berkeley! It included compulsory group dancing. And I still didn’t get tomatoes thrown at me! ~ Rev. Molly Baskette ~ First Church Berkeley UCC“ResistDance” ~ John 20:1-18Sunday, April 16, 2017 ~ Easter Sunday I know a lot of people named Jesus. There is, obviously, the person who brings us together today: the radical, brown, refugee, outsider, preacher, prophet, child of God who could not stay dead no matter what they did to him. But I know others. There is Jesus, our cheerful and capable janitor here at Beth El. And I just met another Jesus, the undocumented man I met at the sherriff’s office on Thursday, when Rev. Rachel and I went to advocate for the rights and dignity of our immigrant neighbors. Jesus is everywhere, if you have eyes to see. When I graduated from seminary, my husband Peter and I moved to Mexico for a year, to work at an orphanage, the Casa San Jose. As problematic as we now know orphanages to be for child development, the Casa was a pretty happy place, all in all. I’m Facebook friends with many of the kids we tended back then. They are young adults now with families of their own, some of them in LA, with or without documents, making a life. And they unfailingly talk about the joy of that time in their childhood--how much fun they had, how they took care of one another, how in spite of the trauma and burdens they bore, they felt safe and loved. When we lived there, there were 141 kids on site. And three of them were named Jesus. Clearly, we had a problem. How to differentiate between all the Jesuses? The eldest, a handsome teenager, got to be, simply, Jesus. The next youngest became Chuy, an affectionate nickname for Jesus in Mexican culture. And the youngest of all was 4-year-old Chuyito, little tiny Jesus. Chuyito was a dead ringer, I imagine, for the original model, childhood edition: curly brown hair, winsome brown eyes. He barely ever said a word, and always hung his head to the side, in curiosity or skepticism, as if anticipating the day when he would be debating the Pharisees. Chuyito loved to crawl into my lap and stay there for hours, and I loved him there, because we were both pretty homesick and lonely, and when life is hard you need a soft place. My favorite memory of Chuyito is not from that year, but a couple years later. When Peter and I left the Casa to go home to the US, we discovered we were homesick for Mexico, and so we’d travel back with a group from whatever church we were inhabiting, and give them a chance to fall in love with the kids the way we had. On our first trip back, our group brought a backpack for each of the hundred-plus kids, stuffed to the brim with clothes, art supplies and toys, and handed them out on our last night together. The boys, including Chuyito, put their backpackson immediately and refused to take them off. Then we strung Christmas lights, rented a DJ and a speaker, and had a giant dance party on the patio. Bankers and little boys do si doed and swung one another wildly to salsa music and Madonna alike. Chuyito, now a full-on boisterous 7-year-old, danced like a maniac for hours with his backpack on, until his movements finally slowed, until he fell asleep, face down on the tile. With his backpack on. Even Jesus needs to rest. I have a friend, a UCC minister, who suffers from pretty debilitating depression. You’d never know it. She seems happy enough, and is one of the funniest people I know. But her depression has almost ended her marriage; it has hobbled her parenting; it caused her more than once to reconsider her career as a person who has to be hopeful as a profession. My friend told me something once I’ll never forget. There are times when medication doesn’t do its job, when prayers fail her, when nothing is working to shift the great gray elephant of depression that sits on her soul. And this is what she does in those moments: she changes one thing. Just one thing. “If I’m lying down, I get up. If I’m standing up, I sit down. If I’m inside, I go outside. If I’m outside, I go inside. If I’m alone, I get with people, if I’m with people, I get alone. If I can change one thing, then I can change more things. If I can change more things, then perhaps I can change everything--or, God working in me can, anyhow.” All she has to do is make one little movement. I myself have never suffered from a lasting or truly devastating depression. To be perfectly annoying about it, being happy has always come pretty easily to me. But this year has tested me severely. Some mornings, including this week, the news has flattened me to the bed, immobilized me as surely as a deep depression. Pick your poison: Syrian children sarin gassed, America making mushroom clouds in Afghanistan, North Korea testing ICBMs, flying coach while Asian on United. Health care under threat, public schools under threat, the rights and lives of immigrants and refugees, black folks, Muslims, queer and trans under threat. We don’t know who will live and who will die before this bitter cup has passed from us. All this against a backdrop of winter rain, such needed rain but a rain that now feels like it will never end, a perma-rain that chills the soul as well as the body, a new and possibly forever climate-chaos abnormal. I’m trying to remember that this is an Easter sermon. If I often feel despair these days, I who have every advantage, how must it be for those who don’t share my privileges? Those who face actual and immediate threats to their lives? The undocumented, the brown-skinned, the broke? I have my whiteness to shield me from ICE and the cops, my paycheck to shield me from poverty. I even have a faith to shield me from sorrow if I choose it, to hide in a La La Land of Easter joy where everything turns out all right in the end. And yet I have met so many people, who no matter how systems and circ*mstances might conspire to kill them, have mastered the art of defiant joy. I guess that’s what you do when people want you dead--staying alive is your only countermove. And Jesus, himself broke and brown and unhoused, is the best example of living big and beautifully in the face of violence and death. I’m always amazed by his capacity for resurrection. Jesus made a decision. He could have stayed dead. He’d discharged his duty to the human family. He taught us everything he knew, offered us an entirely new way of being human, he loved us hard in spite of our frailties, and in return we rejected, abandoned and crucified him. Who would sign up for more life in the face of that? I confess that sometimes it just seems like a whole lot less WORK being dead. If you’ve had a near death experience, or even surgery under general anesthesia, you know what I’m talking about. There is something truly compelling and even seductive about the idea of slipping away, into a place beyond pain, beyond suffering. A place of eternal rest that no fear or sarin gas can touch. Jesus lived through the worst we could do to him; he reached that moment of peaceful surrender, and he made a decision to come back. And he didn’t do it by half-measures, either. He didn’t shamble out of the grave, explaining himself. He didn’t try to stay under the radar to avoid the authorities. He came back in a BIG way. We cut him down but he leapt up high. He made resurrection into a Broadway show tune, complete with the choreography of hapless disciples running all over the stage. The early church fathers came up with a word to describe the Trinity: perichoresis, literally, circle dance. They understood God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit as movement, constant flow from the beginning of Creation. And being dead did not exempt Jesus from his place in the dance. Did you know that some researchers at Oxford did a study? They taught a group of volunteers, each in private, the same dance moves. Then they taught another group, individually, all different dance moves. They noted everyone’s pain tolerance levels by putting extra-squeezy blood pressure cuffs on them. [who comes up with these studies? I have no idea] Then they set them all free in the same room, on a dance floor, with headphones on. The ones who had learned the same dance began to sync their movements. The ones who knew different moves, or heard different music, each did their own thing. And when the experiment was over, they measured each one’s pain tolerance again. The ones who had moved in sync were able to stand significantly more pain than before. But the ones who heard different songs, or were taught different dance moves to the same music, experienced either no change in pain perception, or actually felt more pain than they had at the start. Perichoresis, dancing in sync, had legitimately made the synched dancers able to bear more pain. Of course, they didn’t control for people who find any kind of dancing in public painful. :) Dance is the body’s jazz hands for the soul. Dance is God on the move. We dance our babies around the kitchen. Practice the moves to Thriller in our bedroom for hours. Dance is the mosh pit, the all night rave, Asian grandmas at Zumba class--all of them just as much church as where we are right now. Dance is the 7-year-old Mexican orphan tearing it up on a tile patio; a 3 year old in the aisles at church who will not be stopped but just HAS to dance to every hymn. Dance is Ghost Ship, the young ones gathering before the fire that night, ready to worship at the altar of joy, and now dancing at home with God; and dance is this community, today on Easter, rising from our own ashes. Dance is resurrection: the mom in chemo doing a three minute dance party around the living room in defiance of her white blood cell count. Dance is a flash mob practicing for the Climate March, to show how the Earth will rise up against us if we don’t rise up for Her. Dance is what we do when we have too many feelings and not enough words. Dance don’t cost a thing--it belongs to everybody without regard for ability to pay. To dance is to let God move through us, reanimate us no matter what grim reapers are haunting us, the perichoresis that began before everything, the music still playing, healing us, body and soul. Dance is THIS GUY. To dance is to laugh in the face of death, and all its minions. They have not won--whoever “they” are--if we can still dance. Every day, someone, somewhere, faces the powers of death. But then they change one thing. They make one little move. They put down the bottle. They call the therapist, the DV hotline, the immigration lawyer. They pack a bag. They write their name on the application. If they are lying down, they get up. They join the dance.
