3rd week of Easter
For our Easter reflections, Call To Action has asked a variety of people of the LBGTQ continuum to write about how they experience the Risen Christ in their lives. How do you experience the Risen Christ in yours?
In our Easter Sunday Gospel Mary Magdalene is essential to the story of Resurrection.; she is the first to see that the stone was moved away and runs to tell Peter and Thomas. Like in the gospel, women today continue to be at the forefront of proclaiming the good news that the stone of oppression can be moved and the path of radical liberation and dignity must become a reality if we are to embrace the risen Christ in our world.
In my own community I have experienced the role of women making the resurrection message of radical liberation a reality through my interaction with hotel housekeepers and those organizing to support them. Women working in two of the major chain hotels in our community have been living in a world of oppression and fear as they are expected to smile and project the friendly corporate spirit while enduring working conditions that include cleaning fifteen or more rooms a day, lifting 100 pound mattresses and enduring frequent sexual harassment. All to make poverty wages that don’t come close to covering the very basic living expenses.
These hotel workers, along with local faith leaders have taken the call to resurrection into the streets and have begun to demand that the stone of oppression be rolled back and the path of radical liberation and dignity be realized in our community. Every time I stand with the hotel workers and the union organizers outside the hotel, I experience the reality of the risen Christ in our world. When I walk with them and other clergy to deliver a letter demanding workman’s compensation for a woman who collapsed after a fourteen-hour shift, I experience the reality of the risen Christ in our world. When I share the load of a paper bed with a hotel worker while walking from the hotel to city hall, I experience the reality of the risen Christ in our world. The courage of these women who risk further alienation by standing outside their workplace to make their oppression known and demand that the pathway of radical liberation and dignity be realized in their workplace gives me hope that the resurrection will be fully realized in our world.
Celebrating the risen Christ on Easter is a sign of our willingness to embrace the call to be saturated with the risen Christ in every part of our being. A saturation that gives us no choice but to roll away the stones of oppression in our communities and create a pathway of radical liberation and dignity. Who are the oppressed in your communities? How are you being called to be the risen Christ with them?
