Foolish Stories

Foolish Stories

Mark 16:1-8

April 1, 2018

Fifty years ago this Wednesday, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and in the immediate aftermath riots erupted across the river from Arlington and in dozens of cities across the United States. Over the following four days in the District, 13 people would lose their lives, more than 900 businesses would be destroyed, more than 700 residences lost to the fires, and neighborhoods left in ruins that, in many cases, remained desolate for 30 years.

It would be a massive understatement to say that people were afraid.

In the mid-1950s, this congregation had more than 600 members. By 1968, the membership had declined to around 300. The people here then, by all rights, should have been terrified. They should have been quivering in the face of an uncertain future that looked certainly bleak. The church collapsing, the city in flames.

So what did they do in the face of their fear? They wrote a letter to Dr. King’s friend and colleague, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, expressing support for that summer’s Poor Peoples Campaign, and welcomed the Poor Peoples Campaign to use Dill House, the brick three-bedroom house next door to us that the church still owns. The people at CPC understood something incredibly foolish: the best way through their own fear came in offering comfort to others living in fearful conditions.

In 1970, this congregation had about 290 members. By 1988, membership had declined to 97. By most measures, this was a dying congregation. By all rights it should have been considering last rites. Its dwindling base of members should have been shuffling off quietly, intimidated by impending dissolution, and preparing for a decent and orderly death.

It would have been decent and orderly, for, of course, they were good Presbyterians.

Ah, but because they were also good Christians, they were foolish. They were a resurrection people, and there is nothing more foolish in the whole of creation than people who, in the face of death, not only seek signs of life but boldly live into resurrection.

So, in 1988, dying on the vine in an aging building with a greying membership, Clarendon Presbyterian Church helped found the Arlington Food Assistance Center and hosted its initial food distribution. Today AFAC serves more than 2,200 families every week and distributes food to our neighbors from 18 sites around the county. The edible greens decorating our sanctuary this morning will go into our Plot Against Hunger and, when harvest, will continue the decades-long ministry of feeding our neighbors.

I can hardly think of a more foolish story than a people hungry for new life deciding that the best way through their own hunger was to be found in feeding others.

By January, 1997, the membership at CPC had declined to 57. In the summer of that year, our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), added the infamous “fidelity and chastity” amendment to the Book of Order, effectively barring gay and lesbian members from ordination to any church office.

That might have struck some folks as the final death knell for this small community, which, by that point, already had ordained several gay ruling elders. It would have made sense to close up shop, sell the property, and give up the ghost.

Instead, CPC became the first Presbyterian congregation in the commonwealth of Virginia to join the More Light Presbyterians network of congregations working for the full participation of GLBTQ persons in the life and ministry of the Presbyterian Church across the United States. What a foolish thing to do: feeling the harsh wind blowing against them, this church chose to change the wind.

Eight years later, when Virginia passed its version of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, CPC announced its own marriage policy championing equality at the very moment when the weight of the law and of larger church policy were clearly on the other side.

We have a long history of foolish stories in this place.

We are not just April fools, we are fools the whole year round!

In November, 2016, this community joined progressive communities of faith across the country in shock at the election of a man whose policy proposals and personal traits have brought justifiable fear to the poor, to queer folks, to immigrants, to the sick, to people of color, and the marginalized. In other words, to the very folks we have tried to stand in solidarity with for decades. It would have been perfectly reasonable to gather together, shut the doors against a rising malevolent wind, and lapse into a long season of mourning. Our lives had been turned upside down by unexpectedly shifting political tides.

Instead, a group of us from a proudly progressive congregation in a decidedly progressive part of the country travelled that same week to West Virginia, to a decidedly conservative part of the country, to help folks whose lives had been turned upside down by rising flood waters earlier that year.

What a remarkably foolish thing to do: to find a way through our own grieving by way of comforting others in their grief.

You know, I don’t know what happened 2,000 ago in Jerusalem. I do understand what Jesus’ disciples must have felt when he died. I have known defeat. I have experienced failure and am acquainted with grief. I have felt deep despair. This is not unusual. Each of us has walked our own versions of these rocky roads.

That’s why I love the original ending of Mark’s gospel. The women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” This is the word of the Lord.

That simple end of the oldest gospel seems the most human to me – too human, I think, for the surviving community that became the church so they added some post-resurrection appearance narratives to Mark to make it seem, well, less human and more divine.

Nobody knows what really happened, but one thing is pretty clear. In the midst of their fear and their anguish the early church, well before the redactors got their hands on Mark’s gospel, did something profoundly foolish: in the face of their own fear they told their story; they proclaimed a love beyond any understanding and more powerful than death; they became known, in fact, for how they loved one another. We know this. We know that they told their story because we have heard it.

How remarkably foolish: to believe that love can conquer fear; to believe that hope can triumph over despair; to believe that life can rise up in the midst of death.

Who could believe such a thing? What fools … what fools we must be. For we gather here to worship a crucified God, who invites us to rise again. Rise again to love even when we are afraid. Rise again to hope even when we despair. Rise again to new life even in the midst of a culture of death. Rise again from the silence of the tomb, to tell the world a story of life. Rise up, we fools! Rise up! Amen.