Rabbit transit

It’s hard to find a really good way to celebrate a secular Easter.  The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ are not the stuff of simple and lightweight symbols. Easter transmits a complex message, transported through time through a sacrament of blood-wine and body-bread on an altar derived from a sacrificial cult.

The best the secular city can do is bunnies.  Bunnies and chickens and lilies and pansies and marigolds, chocolate treats and colored eggs.

Bunnies aren’t bad symbols for Springtime.  Every Spring is indeed a miracle, marvelous even though it is repeated annually throughout one’s lifetime and the lifetime of this planet.  Chicks and bunnies are part of that miracle.  Lilies too.

The thing about Easter, however, is that it is more than new birth.  It is new birth from death.  The usual Springtime narrative does not carry with it the dark tone of Good Friday, preceding the stunning unprecedented Easter morning.

Resurrection life has a special quality.  It is life after death.  That is to say, death has no more dominion over it.  The powers of death have done their worst. Resurrection life is unafraid, because it knows only the present and the future. It is more than the average bunny can handle.

Metropolitan Richmond needs resurrection life, nothing less.  There is a negativity in the region which surely rivals the atmosphere in Jerusalem under Roman occupation.  Controlled by Pharisees and an established cult, unable to claim their own destiny, the citizens of metropolitan Jerusalem sought separate and private solutions to the issues of life, awakening occasionally to some supposed scandal or another in the city center.

A tremendous passivity had arisen.  Nothing seemed to change.  Everyone had his or her position of limited security and was holding on to it as tightly as possible.  People felt it was necessary to protect themselves against one another.

There was tremendous hostility and despair under the surface – so much so that when the oppressive government, aided by the various churches, presented someone to be crucified for having blasphemed the current leadership’s claim of God’s blessing, there was great excitement at an execution.

A significant percentage of the population – those that could, those that had enough to be secure, those that were far enough away – stood by passively and watched one more crisis, blaming the participants for it while pretending that their lack of direct involvement was the same thing as moral purity.

But the entire metropolitan city was sinking, squandering its vision and its wealth in thousands of individual sagas of self-preservation while the true body, the commonwealth, sagged and slumped deeper and deeper in the indifferent climate of self-indulgence.  Jerusalem was destroyed thirty years after Jesus’ execution.

Was there some great evil buried underneath Jerusalem?  Had the hypocrisy of the culture finally overcome it?  The Torah had prescribed justice and a healthy society concerned with opportunity for all.  But the practices of the community had become more and more directed toward smaller and smaller centers of self-preservation.  Religion had become just one more franchise business, selling pigeons and making irrelevant demands on those whom it targeted as patrons.

Meanwhile, the unemployed and abandoned, the imprisoned and despairing increased in number, expressing in their outward situation the inward desolation of those who were fleeing the original vision of the patriarchs and prophets.  It was not just the practice of religion they were fleeing, — that had become irrelevant enough.  They were also fleeing the true God, the true values, and the true energy of the civilization.

When Jesus succeeded in getting their attention, they killed him.

Bunnies indeed.

It’s a gripping story, straight out of the websites and the blogs and the social media and the newspapers of today.  For real.

But the rest of the story is what we need to focus on.  Jesus returned in the spirit – maybe even a little while almost in the flesh – and the hope he represented, on the other side of death, was hope of a different sort.  It was the kind of hope that said that despair, negativity, oppression, and imprisonment are not ultimately victorious – that there is a spirit-life which can actually transform the most immobilized of people and communities.

Resurrection life is more than bunnies.  It is courage and change and possibility and hope and something beyond cynicism.  Richmond needs it bad – but not more than Powhatan, or Goochland, or Henrico, or Chesterfield, or Charles City, or New Kent, or Ashland.  Metropolitan Richmond’s people are tragically proud of their failure to work together, seemingly unrepentant in their trajectory to squander the new century, confirmed in their sense of futility over racial integration, unemployment, suburban sprawl, and one another’s irascibility.

We can believe in the power of the Resurrection – the power that claims we can do what is right and that God is leading us to a promised land.  Or we can believe resurrection power is just back then – that now it represents only memory, nonsense, futility, religious language, and the fond hopes of people who don’t know how things really are.  We can believe that the resurrection of Jesus is a church event.  Or we can believe it’s a spirit event for the metropolitan city and its 1.2 million people.  We can believe it means real hope and new life for all of us.  Or we can believe it means only a ticket to heaven for people who believe it when they die.

Some folks in Chesterfield-Henrico-Hanover-Charles City-Goochland-New Kent-Richmond-Powhatan are talking about a new rapid transit system for the metropolitan city to connect us all together in a way that will help us to function as one and make the blood of our common body begin to circulate again.  That’s resurrection thinking.  It’s not for sissies.  It’s not for bunnies.  It’s not rabbit transit.  It’s RVA Rapid Transit.

It takes believing in the resurrection, or something like that, to think that Metropolitan Richmond would ever want to do something that simple, that honorable, that basic, that smart, that inclusive, that economically dramatic, that common, that unracial, that just.

There’s no federal court to force us to do it.  No northern armies. No Roman Empire.  No religious authority.  Just Virginians deciding at last to create a great and healthy city and to give up on the powers of darkness.  The resurrection is like that.

B. P. Campbell, Pastoral Director