"Raising Them Up" | Nathan LeRud | Easter Sunday | March 31, 2024

This past January, Oregon's Museum of Science and Industry, our beloved OMSI, exhibited several panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt in a in a room off the main lobby. Some of you may have seen that exhibit while it was here. The entire AIDS quilt, which maybe a few of you have seen. It comprises more than 50,000 individual panels, it weighs something like 54 tons when you cart this thing around. The last time it was shown in its entirety I think was 1996 on the National Mall in Washington DC, spread out over the Mall, and it covered everything. And these days, it's mostly individual panels or groups of panels that go around the country to help tell the story of the AIDS epidemic and the community's response to it.

So my buddy Glenford was one of the curators of OMSI's exhibit, and as they were unpacking it and installing it, Glenford texted me a photo of one of the panels that was going to go on display.

It's this beautiful quilted image, maybe 15, 16 feet high. On the top is a beautiful red sunrise with this tiny little blade of green grass kind of poking up through the ground, rising through the Earth out of the hard rocks and the soil. And then on the top right corner is the Seal of St. George. It's the seal that you maybe have seen around the country: it's on a hundred thousand Episcopal church signs. Usually it says, "The Episcopal Church welcomes you," with this little Cross of St George, but around this cross, on the panel was written "The Episcopal Diocese of Oregon." And Glenford texted me, he said, "isn't this your church?" And I was like yeah, yeah that is in fact my church. And I was like, I've never seen this panel before, I don't know anything about it.

So I did a little bit of research, Glenford kind of helped me. The panel had a date on it, 1993. That would have been the height of the AIDS epidemic, the years in which according to one study, one out of every nine gay men tested positive for HIV. One in 15 had died by 1993. The vast majority of the victims were between the ages of 25 and 40, so young.

And I knew a few stories from that period. I knew about Trinity's own Deacon Val Ivey and her work with AIDS patients. Some of you knew Val or know Val. I knew about the funerals for people with AIDS that were conducted during these years, often picketed and protested. Some of them happened at Good Samaritan Hospital just down the street from us in our Episcopal Chapel there. Some of it happened here in the cathedral, I think. Some of you lived through this period. You served as volunteers, you were nurses, you were chaplains in AIDS hospices, you held the hands of people whose families had disowned them, right, refusing to acknowledge the truth of what was happening.

So I had all these questions, right, about the the panel and what it meant, and I posted Glenford's photo to a couple of Facebook groups that I'm on, you know: "Does anybody know the story of this thing? Does anybody remember who who made it, who commissioned it? What's the story behind it?" It was like I was I was compelled with this this need to know more. I wanted to to hear this story. I wanted to make sure that somebody remembered it, documented it before it got lost to history.

Stories are funny that way. They're kind of fragile, in a way. The AIDS epidemic was at its height 30 years ago. That's about the same amount of time, about 30, 35, 40 years that had elapsed between Jesus's death and the time when the writer of Mark's Gospel, the Gospel that we just heard, right, well we don't really know what his name was– the tradition calls him Mark. But this guy, this anonymous person, sat down to write what most scholars agree is probably the earliest account we have of the Jesus story. About 40 years that after Jesus's death, that's when we think this was written. The writer of this gospel almost certainly didn't actually know Jesus in the flesh. There's a scholar Candida Moss who's just written a new book "God's Ghostwriters," I think. It was reviewed in the New York Times this weekend. And Candida suggests that Mark was probably an enslaved person. He was probably a scribe. Most scribes were enslaved in the Roman Empire. Somebody whose job was to write stuff down so that it wouldn't be forgotten. So Mark is working kind of frantically against the clock, if you like. He's trying to collect all of the stories, even if it's just the bare outlines of the narrative, writing against time, to make sure that the events that shaped him and his community won't be forgotten, once the original generation of Jesus's followers have all died. It's like he's– it's like he's engaged in this, like, first century oral history project, conducting interviews with disciples and with Jesus's original followers, trying to establish what actually happened before all of the myth-making, of legend and tradition takes over. And Mark's ending to this story, which we just heard– exactly, actually– probably exactly the way he wrote it: Mark's ending is kind of odd, and has had scholars puzzling for many years. There's three women who go to anoint Jesus's body early on Easter morning, Mark says. It's Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and then somebody named Salome, we don't know who that was. Other writers are going to put different names in here. Somebody's going to say no, it was actually Mary the wife of Clopus, or it was Mary Jesus's mother, and at some points there's so many Marys all over the story that it's no wonder things get confused, right? Like, just pick a name. So they encounter this stone rolled away from the entrance, they encounter an empty tomb. And there's this young man dressed in white who tells them Jesus isn't there, that he's gone ahead of them into Galilee.

And then Mark does something really strange, it's even stranger in Greek, the original language of this text.

Mark commits a kind of grammatical atrocity. It would make your fifth grade English teacher horrified to know what he did.

Mark ends a sentence, ends the story with a conjunction, right, he says, "The women said nothing to nobody, so frightened they were, because–"

Now it's not wrong exactly it's just sloppy, right? Most scholars under their breath will say, well you know, he was– he was writing really fast, and he was probably barely educated, so he probably didn't know how to write elegant Greek, you know, he just didn't know the rules, he was too stupid.

And in fact, the ending was so embarrassing to early Christian communities that they would tack on these, like, "better endings" to try to solve the problem. One of them has Jesus, like, coming into a locked room with the disciples and saying "hey it's cool, you can handle snakes now and nobody will get hurt."

I'm not talking about snake handling this morning but that's where that comes from, that's a sermon for another time.

Mark's original ending, which you just heard is abrupt, and it's awkward, and it's unfinished, it's ungrammatical, and it's kind of unsettling.

"The women said nothing to nobody so frightened they were, because–"

Now you tell me what that means.

I think that's deliberate.

I think Mark deliberately left a resurrection story without an ending. It's as if he knows that this story can't be ended yet, because it's not done, it's not dead, it's not history. Certainly it's not from Mark, right, he knows the people who were there that morning. For Mark, this story is alive still, and he's writing to make sure it will stay alive. Jesus stands back up– that's all "resurrection" means, right– he stood back up. And the terrifying implication of all of that is that now all of these other bodies, all of these other dead bodies, are going to start getting back up, too.

I mean the Easter story is kind of a zombie apocalypse more than it is a theological treatise about life after death. It's a horror story in one way, it's not a child's picture book with pretty tombs and colorful eggs. It's like an episode of The Walking Dead.

Nobody knows how this thing is supposed to end. It's like we've lost the ending.

So I keep thinking about this AIDS panel, right, this one green blade of grass rising up out of the stones of the earth on sunrise on a beautiful spring morning: the dead that don't stay dead. The stories that powerful people try to kill or silence.

But those stories keep lurking in corners, whispered in cemeteries– the dead that are not dead at all when you start paying attention.

So I went to see the panel in person, it was a couple days before the exhibit closed. My friend Glenford got me in, it was early in the morning, right, nobody else was there. The room was like an empty tomb.

And what I hadn't realized from the picture he sent me that was that stitched into the the gaps in between the stones were all of these names. Like, dozens of names. I counted them, actually: 42 names.

Some of them just first names: Will, Sawyer, Christopher– boys, I assume, whose families were so ashamed of their sons and the ways in which their sons had died that they would not let their full name appear in a public space.

Every single one of them was an Oregon boy.

I've learned since then now having preached the sermon a couple times and having had some people say, "I recognize that name," some of them were Trinity boys."

We actually think this congregation may have been the place where this quilt panel originated.

Some of these were boys who grew up in these pews. They were acolytes here, they were choir members. They were boys who loved this church and continued to show up week after week, God loved them, and serve an institution that mostly, in those days, told them that they were sinners, malformed, a theological and social embarrassment, a canonical problem, a scandal to the church, and a scandal to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

And then somebody remembered them.

Somebody cared enough to record their names and stitch those names lovingly into the fabric and ensure they wouldn't be forgotten.

And 30 years later, here they were in front of me. Boys I never knew, not a single name I recognized. The queer elders that my generation would never meet in the flesh.

I stood there reading these names, and the grief hit me like a semi truck.

I was totally unprepared for it.

I started sobbing, actually, standing there in front of this quilt, like I was getting something out of my body. I don't know everything that was happening to me in that moment, grief is sometimes like that. I didn't know any of those names, but you know how sometimes you like fall apart at a funeral for somebody you didn't even know? It's like all of the grief that we carry in our bodies, the ones we've lost– I thought about the dozens of funerals we've had at the Cathedral this year, I mean, sometimes like three a weekend.

All the ones that we've buried out there in that Memorial Garden under the magnolia tree.

And then all the other ones that I've lost: the boy I married and divorced, the boys I dated and lost track of,

the boys, the girls, the ones who were neither boys nor girls, all the queer ones lost to history.

I mean, so many names.

So I wrote them down.

And I'm starting to say them now because every time I say these names, somebody recognizes one, and then they tell me his story. It's Burke Dorsland, it's David Meyers, it's Patrick Loomis, it's David Murray and Bill Smith and William Miller and David Peterson and Craig Shane Newbie and Lenny Seagal and Frank Connelly and Dale Tonken and Bill Tabor and Michael Austin and Hudson Ladd and Brad Torson, who was a member of Trinity, and Michael Chiklish and Robin Moburg and Roger Monkton and Gary West and Frank Reed and Brad Spurb and Wayne Kennedy and Christopher Sweater and James Allen Jan III and Robin Monay and Alan Nelson and Michael Vlack and Daniel Draper and Philip Anderson and Richard Brown and Michael McVey and Hugh Connine and Damien Hahn and Bill Crannick and John Ellis and Luke Falby and Alec Robertson and Brad Roy and Sawyer and Drew and Will and Christopher.

We have this tradition here at Trinity.

We print these names in the back of the Easter bulletin.

They're your names. They're the names of your beloved ones whose memories are brought to life in this explosion of floral greenery you see all over this altar– I mean this thing is incredible. This is a physical testament to the names you carry, the names maybe only you remember.

It's a visible testament to the Gospel we preach today: that our dead are not dead. Not to God.

And then we gather in this space and we raise them up.

We do this every single Easter.

We sing this schlocky Catholic praise chorus– some of you love this thing, some of you endure this thing– but it's the weirdest thing we do all year in this very decorous and proper Episcopal Church. Come Easter Sunday, we throw our hands up into the air during this song like a room full of holy rollers at a tent revival meeting. I mean, I keep expecting people to be, like, slain in the spirit on our floor somewhere.

We raise them up. It is a moment of Resurrection.

I feel it in my body every year.

We refuse to let their names and their stories, their loves, and their losses– we refuse to let them be forgotten.

Their names are stitched into the very stones of this building, and on the last day, God be praised, on the last day, they will come up out of these stones like that blade of grass in the panel. They'll rise from the dust of the grave, hesitantly maybe, like that sprig of grass, right, you've seen this at the spring, right? It starts kind of hesitant at first, and then it explodes scandalously, gloriously, out of the dead muck and detritus of a dying church.

Those boys will rise in all of their fabulous glory.

And they are not alone. Their Lord goes before them to show them the way.

That is what Resurrection means.

Our dead are not dead, not really–

They're just waiting.

They're waiting in the earth. Seeds that were planted generations ago, lying in wait.

Waiting for their moment to rise.