First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
11 April 2004
The Festival of 'But'
UCC pastor David Ruhe tells a story about his eighth grade teacher, Miss Zoe DeLorme. Zoe means "life" in Greek, but says he didn't know that when he was in the eighth grade. But it would not have surprised him, since he and all the other boys in his class thought that the adorable Miss DeLorme was life itself. They'd gaze at her "through a hormonal haze" as she taught them parts of speech, rules of composition and proper usage. He remembers Miss DeLorme all right, but not much of what she taught him—except for one rule, the one that says you're never supposed to start a sentence with the conjunction, "but."
Now, you can be sure of a couple of things about eighth grade boys— they find their parents embarrassing and just about everything else funny, especially body parts and bodily functions. The only reason David Ruhe remembers the "but" rule is because (he writes) one day a boy named Jeff Battle was reading a composition aloud in class and started one of his sentences with The Forbidden Word. Miss DeLorme gently corrected him. But...Jeff Battle never heard the end of it from the other boys— "Hey, Battle! Zoe hates your but! Get your but out of here, Battle! Never start a sentence with your but!"
Now, the story of Battle's "but" is not entirely unrelated to Easter. In parts of medieval Europe, I am told, Christians celebrated Christ's victory by making rude bodily noises and happily mooning an effigy of Satan—a colorful custom that says something (although I'm not sure what, exactly) about the differences between medieval Christians and us.
There's another connection. With all due respect to Miss DeLorme, it turns out that this morning's Easter Gospel, which is a mere ten sentences long, contains no fewer than three that begin with "but". In fact, the very first word of the passage is "But"—it is a doorway into a new chapter, a new verse, and a brand new day. That one small word in God's new grammar changes everything that went before it. "BUT on the first day of the week, at early dawn..."
"But we came expecting a body in a grave," the stunned community of women tells us. "But we saw no body. But we did see two men dressed up like toreadors in suits of light, who scared us. But when they asked us questions, we remembered what Jesus said." "But women are so flighty and hysterical," say the Eleven (who knew better than to listen to girl talk). "But I think I'll take a look anyway," Peter decides, and then runs a four minute mile to the tomb. But he did not know what to make of what he saw and what he did not see. (But then, that's Peter.)
But, but, but... With every sentence that begins with "but," Luke edges us closer to the turning point later in his gospel when all Jesus' disciples finally believe that in the risen One, God has uttered a definitive "but" to the ways of the world. In this resurrection story, not only sentences, but also human lives and death-defying ministries are begun anew by a simple, small, disruptive, holy word.
A holy and disruptive word, indeed. Once (I read somewhere) when Mother Teresa was in this country raising money, she was approached by a fawning Franciscan friar who wanted to talk to her about his soul. She told him she was about to fly back to India and didn't really have the time. He pleaded, telling her that he would even fly back with her, just to have some hours at the side of a living saint. "But", she said, "if you want to fly back with me, that means you have money for a ticket." "Yes!" he said. "But if you have money for a ticket," she replied, "why not give it to the poor instead of to the airline?" But, but, but....
I have a student at Harvard Divinity School who can't be older than twenty-two. He is a very smart young person and he is also a very exasperated young person—exasperated by the way older people compromise their ideals and principles. All semester he's been working hard on an imaginative proposal for a non-profit organization that serves the needs of children, and he is now beside himself because the radical nature of the project is being watered down by the higher-ups who have to worry about things like funding and public opinion. He told me that he's been having dreams lately in which he furiously argues his case to them, like a lawyer at the bar, all to no avail. And in these dreams, every argument that comes out of his mouth begins with "But..."
I find myself starting a lot of sentences with "but" these days too. Watching bodies stack up in Iraq. But, but... Watching the 9/11 Commission hearings. But, but... Watching legislators debate civil marriage. But, but... Watching UN diplomats observe a moment of silence—a moment!—for one million people massacred in one hundred days in Rwanda ten years ago, and apologize weakly for knowing everything and doing nothing. But, but, but...
You don't need to be twenty-two to be furious that the world always finds a way to evade questions, quell protests and frustrate dreams. And it does all this by means of another little word—death. Death was the answer Jesus got. Death was the answer the women knew already as they approached the tomb. It's the answer we get to all the Big Questions. Is it worth it to resist injustice? No, you get in too much trouble. Can people's hearts be changed? No, they kill you first. Will friends stick by you in the worst of times? No, they'll flee in terror. Only the women will remain, and they don't count. The graveyard is a "no" to the best and most bravely-asked questions people ever devise. As Grant Gallup says, it is the only answer Caesar knows how to give. It is Empire's final solution to all human problems. Send in the troops, said Pilate. Send in the Marines, says the President.
Even our children intimate that death is the answer; they do so from an early age, and without our having to tell them. Donna Schaper, whom some of you know, was changing the sheets on her eight-year-old's upper bunk when, she writes, her hand felt something rubbery. It was a tangle of several hundred rubber bands stuck to the far wall with tape. The kids had had the ordinary rubber-band battles in the house from time to time, but she had no idea that her son's room was "a veritable armory, the wall by his bed an arsenal".
When she asked him about it, he told her that he needed the rubber bands "to feel powerful". Weapons, he said, make you powerful. "I disagreed," Schaper goes on to say, "in that futile way that parents disagree with children about such matters... I said, no, weapons do not make you powerful.... [Then] I suggested that we list a dozen things that do make you powerful...."
"Well, he said, one is rubber bands. Two is guns. Three is swords. Four is slingshots. Five is uzis. Six is...." I made him stop there.
"Okay. Okay. How about some other kinds of things? Like maybe words."
"No, Mommy, words do not make you powerful."
"Okay. How about friendship?"
"Okay, friendship. Especially if your friends have weapons."
Death is the answer we know at least a little bit about by the time we are eight. When we have learned it more completely, we declare that we have grown up. Coming to terms with its many forms— disappointment, betrayal, failure, the downward readjustment of our ideals, the necessity of violence, the triumph of power, the finality of loss—is called "maturity". Over time, we resign ourselves to it, condition ourselves to the irreversible.
And so, because they were grown-ups and had already accepted the irreversible answer to the Big Ones, the women who followed Jesus from Galilee put Kleenex in their pockets and sensible shoes on their feet and went to the grave where their deepest hope and boldest question lay dead and defeated.
"But, but, but," says God... and raised Jesus from the dead.
Which means, among many other things, that God has "butted" into our acquiescence to death. The God we heard from in our first reading this morning says, "Maybe you are grown-ups and have resigned yourselves to death, but I am original and young and conditioned by nothing.. I am doing something new." Easter is God's declaration that death does not in the end prevail. It is "God's class action suit against death and sin," as James Forbes of New York's Riverside Church says—God's assertion that justice will not be mocked forever, that love will not ultimately be thwarted, that death will not have the last word.
Now, before the last word is spoken, we know that many other words are uttered that fill our lives with loss and grief and pain. Martin Copenhaver likes to say that the next-to-last words are excruciating— ex-crucis, like suffering on a cross. Faith does not try to silence these penultimate words. Faith does not provide an escape hatch or a bag of cosmetics. Faith teaches, on the contrary, that it is precisely in suffering and perplexity, abandonment and grief where God creates a victory. And faith promises that the last word in the composition of our lives is and always will be God's. That is hope. And that is Easter.
A final story, courtesy of a colleague. Some years ago, a sociologist dropped in at an African-American church in Philadelphia. When he related his experience later, the astonishment he'd felt that day was still palpable. "For an hour and a half," he wrote, "the minister preached one line over and over. For an hour and a half, one line— "It's Friday. But Sunday's comin'!"
He started softly by saying, "It's Friday; and Jesus was dead on the tree. But that was Friday, and Sunday's comin'!" Somebody yelled, "Preach it, brother!' It was all the encouragement he needed.
"It was Friday and Mary was cryin' her eyes out and the disciples were runnin' around like sheep without a shepherd. But that was Friday, and Sunday's comin'!"
"It was Friday. The cynics were looking at the world and sayin', 'As things have been so shall they ever be. You can't change anything...' But they didn't know that it was only Friday... and that Sunday's comin'."
"It was Friday, and on Friday Pilate thought he had washed his hands of a lot of trouble. The Pharisees were struttin' around and pokin' each other in the ribs. They thought they were back in charge. But it was Friday! And Sunday's comin'!"
"By the time he finished," the sociologist reports, "I was exhausted. At the end he just yelled at the top of his lungs, 'It's Friday!' and all five hundred of us yelled back, 'But Sunday's comin'!"
Zoe DeLorme, back off! Jeff Battle, take heart wherever you are! There's someone with a "but" much bigger and more transgressive than any conjunction you ever started a sentence with. (I mean, 'with which you ever started a sentence'.) Easter is God's great "but" to death. And from Easter onward it is proper and even required that every sentence of our lives should begin with it.
Death, "but" out! New life, begin!
© 2004, J Mary Luti