Before I tell you what I see in the Easter Maybe Crowd, I should tell you about my perch. I am minister at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. Judson is a post denominational, post Christian, doubt friendly, arts friendly, queer friendly, congregation of 300 people whose heart is a little bit to the left. It’s a place with a big past, a medium sized present, and a great future, especially if you are somewhat allergic to what most people think is religion.
On Wednesday nights, congregants gather to make bleach kits to help reduce the harm of drug use. We accompany immigrants to their icy check-ins at I.C.E. Yes, that means Immigration Control and Enforcement. We build golden calves in the shape of the Wall Street bull and occupy Wall Street with it, amazed at how many New Yorkers know what it is and what it means.
What’s wrong with Judson is related to what is right with Judson: we can be arrogant. We also sometimes look down on the religions of our births, particularly those of us from Southern or Midwestern fundamentalism. Reactivity joins arrogance from time to time to make Judson a less than Christ like place.
My personal perch is somewhat unusual as well. I am ordained 40 years as a United Church of Christ Minister (think Congregationalists landing on the Mayflower rock.) I am married to a man who is Jewish and have raised three children both ways. One has just married a rabbi; he wears one T-shirt that says “Real Men Marry Rabbis.” His other one is “My mother is a minister, my wife is a Rabbi, get over it.”
Judson people often think I am too conservative. I remind myself frequently ever so much of the two-framed letters I once kept on my wall. One was from Tikkun magazine, rejecting a piece I had sent, saying that my writing was too Christian; the other from Christian Century saying that my writing was too Jewish. I often think of the great Christian writer Madeline L’Engle. Editors told her when she first tried to sell her best selling book, A Wrinkle In Time, that it was too juvenile for adults and too adult for juveniles. I like these kinds of cracks in the literary and theological pavement. I live in one of them.
Thus, when Judson and I come to Easter, you will not find triumphalism. You will hear us sing the big hymns, “The Strife is o’er, the Battle won, Our Victory Over Death is Done” but we sing them the way we sing blood hymns, with more irony than sincerity. We are not so washed in the blood of the Lamb. And we can’t stop singing.
I used to call the sort of Christians who come to services on only the highest of holidays, get the best music, wear their best clothes, see the best flowers, take up the best seats in the crowded sanctuary, only to abandon the rest of us to pick up the heat bills, custodial service and high comic drama of church administration, the “Easter Only Crowd.” These are people who “skim” the spiritual, as do most of the regulars, if the truth were to sneak out from under the organ. Still the regulars are now in charge of putting on the new roof and replacing the broken elevator. And they will do it, the same way they sing the hymns. Trust is the best fund-raiser and hymn-singer.
Now with more respect I call the “Easter Only Crowd” the “Easter Maybe Crowd.”
We belt out the news that death has lost its sting and we support our song with flowers and the like to help ourselves believe what is clearly either not true or only mysteriously so. We imagine that we are going to be brought safe through Jordan, and in imagination possibility rises.
Am I really a stranger to the Easter Maybe Crowd? No, with apologies to the foul Falwellians who are now assured I am damned to hell. Damnation confirms me in my doubt and hateful certainty disgusts me. And what about my co-regulars? Are we really strangers to the Easter Maybe crowd? I think just the opposite. We are all toe dippers in a mystery as large as the sting of death, and as grand. I have learned that the true outsider on Easter morn is me. I stand at the stoned-close grave and knock. I stand there with all the others who hope it is true. And in our hoping, we make it true.
