What a difference even less than a year can make. Last year, I ended our Easter Vigil sermon with these words:
“That empty tomb also is God’s call to us to action—and that action is ever, insistently, love. Love not just as a fleeting fancy but as a way of life. Love that is a joyful choice and rebuke of the ways of despair, helplessness, and hopelessness that embues so much of our world today. Love that is necessary for eternal life, and indeed, as the resurrection promises us, we can live a life shaped by resurrection right now, and can have eternal life not off in the distant future but now.
It is this kind of fullness and hope that takes hold of us when we encounter that same empty tomb with wonder and amazement—wonder and amazement that we are made new persons in Christ, in all our diversity and difference unified by being children of God, wondrously made in God’s image. We are awakened to a reverence for each other and creation, called to cast off our divisions as decisively as Jesus cast off the burial shroud and walked out into the life.
This is the night when darkness has been put to flight, and sin and death are washed away. Resurrection is new life-- not just the old life given back, but a life transformed. A life based on mercy, a life that empties itself out for love—only to find that love rushes back in, as strong and as resolute as the tide.”
Our lives have certainly been transformed in the last few weeks, but transformed by uncertainty and anxiety—probably much as those disciples felt, scattered to the four winds as is implied in our gospel tonight. If we examine how we got here, though, there are lessons we can learn. Like the fact that scarcity is profitable, but also terrifying to those who end up being shut out. That short-term profits really are no substitute for long-term preparedness and equity in being able to be healthy and safe. That, contrary to the mantra we’ve had pounded into our heads since the 1980s, greed is NOT good.
One of the disciplines that is highlighted during Lent is the discipline of self-examination and confession. For any of you who came to our book group on Tuesday nights, you will remember how much we discussed this each week as we made our way through Rowan Williams’s book Being Disciples.
True confession is not possible without self-examination, as Williams pointed out. Self-knowledge is only possible if we cultivate honesty, as well as stillness. From these two gifts we learn and grow, even when what we learn about ourselves surprises us. And often, when we DO that examination, we are taken aback. Even St. Paul acknowledged this when he once confessed, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
The poet John Donne spoke of much the same thing in his poem entitled “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward:”
Let man’s Soul be a Sphere, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey:
Pleasure or business, so, our Souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the West
This day, when my Soul’s form bends toward the East.
Donne describes our souls as spheres, like planets. Each of us has a course that we intend to run. But something has to set us into motion. For Donne, the primary mover of our lives as Christians should be devotion to Christ. Yet, in truth, we often are set in motion by a host of other forces, what Donne calls “foreign motions,” that attract and pull us, adjusting our course, possibly from the one we had originally envisioned.
If we are living the examined life, we realize how turned around we can get. Rather than being devoted to the gospel as we mean to be with the best intentions, we get wrapped up in our own cares and concerns. And too often, they are not the things that bring us love, or community, or peace. That westward movement is the way of human authority, the sin of Adam and Eve that led humans to test their freedom through disobedience that still stalks us today.
Yet the events of this night remind us that God’s love, the power of life itself, cannot be held behind the sealed stone of any tomb. That power, the power of Love, is what calls us here tonight. Thanks be to God, we are reminded here tonight that no matter how much we have gone astray, nothing is impossible through Christ.
Our gospel from Matthew tonight shows us clearly the two directions that contend to reign in our lives. The guards that are there at the tomb are there because of the arrogance of human authority, an authority that believes it has the final say of life and death to those it considers an enemy. Despite the tomb being sealed by the Roman and Judean authorities, the angel rolls back the stone and sits upon it, another symbolic reinforcement of how God’s power supersedes and conquers that of worldly empire. In my mind’s eye, I have a picture that’s like a combination of Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker and the Greek Winged Victory statue in the Louvre. There that angel sits, victorious, on the stone that we try so hard to seal against our hearts, while those two guards are passed out cold on the ground next to it.
See,-- and we need this reminder right now more than ever!-- there is no guard that can prevent Love from destroying the chains of death itself. We are called tonight to stand with the two Marys, to see, and what we see changes us forever, urging us once again to turn from the Westward to the East, toward the light of impossible hope and unconquerable Love, Love that calls us to reconciliation with God and one another. Easter is the day that the universe is changed forever.
It’s the dawning of the day we are challenged to do the one thing that truly scares many of us: to embrace the mystery of God’s love for all of us—wonderful and beyond our knowing, as we heard a few moments ago. By faith, we have come this far, tottering like toddlers on the feet of hope—and God has not brought us this far to abandon us now at the grave.
God
Has
Not
Brought
Us
This
Far
To
Abandon
Us
Now
At
The
Grave.
The Resurrected One calls us to resurrection, too, which is scary and thrilling and incredible all at once. Those who have been willing to let go of all that has unbalanced our world and instead have embraced resurrection with Christ will be changed down to the very center of their being. One who has been resurrected has been turned, and turned hard, from death to life, from sorrow to joy, from West to East.
And that’s good news, indeed. Because our lives right now have been upended, that alone is enough to scare us. The pandemic that has ground our lives to a halt then adds to that fear. So how much do we ourselves need to hear the words “Do not be afraid,” spoken by first the angel and then by the Risen Jesus himself in our gospel reading? Do not be afraid, and go tell out the truth of the Risen Jesus, risen even in this year of pandemic, risen and calling us to not return to our lives as they were before the shadow of this illness hung over all of us.
Even in our altered circumstances and in the midst of the unknown, Jesus IS risen, and is calling us to use the sight of suffering of so many before us as an opportunity to jettison all that contributed to the suffering around us. Instead, our resurrection lives CAN be lives where we embrace life over death and need, where we place the well-being of each other, compassion, grace, generosity, and mercy at the center of our rebuilt lives. For such is the sweetness offered to us in the Kingdom of God.
In turning toward reconciliation and resurrection, we called to shake off who we have been, and turn instead to embody who we are called to be. It’s not enough for us to see the glory of resurrection and what promises it holds for ourselves. We are called to witness to that resurrection and how it continues to work in a world that desperately needs to see it and be transformed, too. And that resurrection must be seen through us, as we rise too into new life, now, choosing to set our faces and hearts toward Christ.
This is good news: the resurrection of Jesus is not a singular event in time. Jesus continues to rise again, continually, and we are called to witness to that resurrection with joy and gladness, and most of all, love that binds us and makes us one.
What does Christ’s resurrection mean for us today? It means that we live in Christ, and Christ lives in us, this moment and throughout our lives and beyond. Christ will never desert us. We only have to turn and embrace that love, trust in that love, for that is the way not just of devotion but of life, of self-giving, itself. Christ seeks to rise in our hearts right now, turning us to the East, toward resurrection within us and for the world.
We are called to tell and embody the story of Love that will not die, Love that in binding us sets us free from all fear, sin, and death. Love that makes us holy as Christ is holy, by making us fully human as Christ reveals to us what full humanity can be: not just a mirror reflecting Christ’s Easter light back into the world, but making ourselves windows through which Christ’s love shines through us against the forces of darkness and death. Jesus has and is vanquishing the powers of fear, hatred, death, and destruction that pull us from our intended orbit.
Jesus, in rising from the grave, has given us everything, and in doing so, calls us to share in that holy work by being true disciples witnessing and being the resurrected Christ in and for each other and all creation. Let us seize hold of a resurrection life, for the hope and healing of the entire world.
Alleluia!
Preached at the 8:00 pm Great Vigil of Easter in time of pandemic, April 11, 2020, online at St. Martin's Church Facebook page.
Readings:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation]
Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]
Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all]
Ezekiel 36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit]
Zephaniah 3:14-20 [The gathering of God's people]
Romans 6:3-11
Matthew 28:1-10
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord,
gathered within your embrace
we arise to greet the beauty of this day,
eager to walk in love and faithfulness,
led by the light, grace, and reconciling example of Christ.
Almighty Creator,
You have woven the night sky and morning clouds
into a tapesty of beauty,
reminding us of your promise of faithfulness--
You who call the stars by name
and have inscibed each of us on your hand.
Sustain us with your word, Blessed Jesus,
that our hearts be transformed in love and compassion,
that we tenderly care for each other
in witness to all You have done for us.
Renew us, O Holy Spirit,
in generosity and lovingkindness,
that we may see and know our mutual dependence
as one body, one spirit, one creation.
Merciful One, pour out your grace and healing
upon all for whom we pray.
Amen.
Why is it, we all must wonder, that the start of the liturgical year—Year A, even, in the three -year cycle—begins with talking about the end? And I don’t mean like reading the last page of a book first kind of end, but THE END. We begin with a vision of the final judgment at Jesus’s second coming, the one we proclaim about in the Nicene Creed that will be when Jesus “will come again in great glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.” His kingdom—you know, the thing we celebrated last Sunday.
Eschatology is that branch of theology which deals with “the study of the end of things” (“eschatos” means “last”). The gospel reading for this week is eschatological, as it is traditional for Advent to begin with a gospel reading that deals with this subject.
It is the end of Year C and the beginning of Year A. It is the end of the Season after Pentecost, also known as “Ordinary Time.” And indeed, Advent reminds us that we do not live in ordinary time during this month of preparation that is at once both joyful and solemn. Thus, in this Advent reading, we have a discussion of the end times, right as we balance upon the edge of the beginning.
This passage we read from Matthew’s gospel today itself was one that was quoted to me often in my childhood churches. Many of them talked often about the “end-times,” and this was one of their favorite images: two people will be working side by side, and one will be taken and the other “left behind” when Jesus makes his “second coming.”
I didn’t like hearing that back then any more than I imagine you do. It didn’t help when my mother tried to scare the living hell out of me-- yes, I mean it-- by taking me to see some low-budget alleged “documentary”—notice the air quotes I used with my fingers when I said that word— called A Thief in the Night, about what the earth would be like for those who were “left behind.”
Nuclear war, disease, disruption and yes, even mutants—these were all the fates awaiting those who were left after Jesus took the faithful bodily up to heaven and left everyone else down here on earth to suffer—which didn’t square with what I knew about Jesus, either. This one imagined that the United Nations became a tool of Satan during his reign on earth and forced everyone to wear “the Mark” or face execution by guillotine, because why not a guillotine? I remember sitting with my big-haired mama in a darkened movie theatre with a bunch of other families with their big-haired mamas as they, I guess, tried to scare their kids into being “born again.”
It didn’t help that the preacher behind this series of films—yes, he managed to get FOUR of these pieces of cheesy garbage made and actually watched by millions of people—always cast himself in the movies and he looked like Grampa from the Waltons but talked like Oral Roberts when he REALLY got wound up.
So I sat there in the dark with my arms crossed against my chest, slouched down in my seat eating the margarine-drenched popcorn my mom had brought into the theatre in a grocery sack and waited for it to be all over. I was waiting for, you know, it to end. And then I struggled not to laugh at the absurdity of waiting for a movie about the End Times to end for the last hour, because I was sitting next to a bunch of people who believed that this movie was the best chance to save our souls.
The problem I had with the strategy behind this movie was that it put all the emphasis on the end. It really didn’t matter HOW you lived your life—so long as you personally accepted Jesus as your savior. You could still be mean to people, and make fun of the poor and hate foreigners and refugees—and I knew people who smugly assured me that they were “saved” who did all those things while also assuring me that the Buddhist family in the newspaper were all doomed to hell even though they cooked Thanksgiving meals for the homeless in their restaurant every year. You could look down your nose at those different from you all day long, only just as long as you believed in Jesus, you would go to heaven, these movies subtly and not so subtly told us.
But when we look at the message of the gospels in their entirety, we see a Jesus who called us to be disciples during our lives right now—to heal the sick and feed the multitudes and welcome the outcast.
For all of this talk about Jesus coming again like a thief in the night in Matthew 24, there’s the outline of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus in Matthew 25, where the king judges the nations based on whether they cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, and the stranger.
For every place in the scriptures that it talks about Jesus’s second coming, there’s many times as much of an emphasis that Jesus’s birth and life already initiated the coming near of the Kingdom of God.
The judgment spoken of in our gospel passage today reminds us that judgment and justice, both tempered by grace and mercy, are two sides of the reign of Jesus. When Jesus comes to judge us, he will judge us on how well we embodied justice and mercy for those who are forced to the margins in this world we have made and of which we are a part. These people who assured me that they were saved when the rapture came also loved to quote scraps of scripture about terrifying prophecies and about a vengeful God, one without mercy. But in John 5:39-42, Jesus accuses those who profess their own faithfulness but hollow out their responsibility to others with this observation: ‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. I do not accept glory from human beings. But I know that you do not have the love of God in you.'
That movie may not have taught me anything about God. But today I went with my husband and our daughters to see the new movie about Mr. Rogers called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I had heard about how this movie made grown adults cry, including my oldest. But Mr. Rogers was one of the spiritual gurus of my childhood, and so we went.
I was fine until we got to a scene where Mr. Rogers and the cynical writer who is interviewing him are riding the subway in New York. The full range of humanity was in that subway car around them. But all of a sudden a teenager called out, “Hey—Mr. Rogers!” in kind of a tough voice. But when they got his attention, these oh-so-cool teens started singing Mr. Rogers’ theme song, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
By the time they get through the middle of the first verse, the entire car, including cops and tough guys, was singing along, “Won’t you please? Won’t you please? Please won’t you be my neighbor?” And boom—cue the waterworks.
I thought about how Mr. Rogers embodied Jesus for me, long before I knew he was a Presbyterian minister. I thought about how he was a dependable, calming influence in a time of great chaos in my own life. How he talked about how he liked each of us just the way we are. How he embodied a life of faithful witness without ever saying the name of Jesus even once.
Just like Mr. Rogers, Jesus calls us to be faithful, and Christianity as a whole is judged in our world based on how faithfully we embody the love of God within us, how prayerfully we embody the command to love God and love each other, to have love in our hearts or else faith is nothing. The call of Jesus to us is to embody Jesus’s teachings so faithfully that, as one of my favorite hymns of childhood goes, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”
“Belief” in Jesus isn’t just about heaven and the end times. It’s not just about grabbing a magic ticket to save yourself. Belief in Jesus is about having LIFE, and having it more abundantly, right now. It’s about transforming our lives through joy, and then using those lives transformed by love to do nothing less than transform the world.
Jesus calls us to go beyond belief to discipleship. Belief in Jesus is most importantly a call to work for the repair of the world. Belief in Jesus is about nothing if it is not directed outwardly toward those around us—that’s why there are so many commands to love one another in scripture.
Belief in Jesus is nothing if it is not transformative, leading to making us not just fans out to save our own necks, but disciples. Discipleship is about transformation of our lives and our relationships with each other, especially the marginalized, the oppressed, and the helpless, right now. It’s about working to bring the kingdom of God into being the kin-dom of God, to recognize each other as beloved children of the One Who Made Us and Loves Us.
Jesus calls us to be ready. To be ready and watchful, for Christ appears in ten thousand places. But he also calls us to transform our hearts so that we can see him here with us now. He appears—right now-- among those we easily overlook. He appears among those the rest of the world seeks to turn away, among those whose outstretched hand is sneered at not as a plea for help but as a con.
He appears among those who are carrying burdens we can never see and may not understand. He appears in the vesture of those whom we tell ourselves are not truly needy or deserving of our time or attention.
Jesus leaves no one behind, but calls the world unto himself and to his life of joyful care for each other.
The days grow short—quite literally—as we hear these words. Yet the sure and certain promise that carries us through this darkness is that even in the darkest of nights, the light of a single candle can be seen for miles. Even when we talk about Jesus’s second coming, we are reminded that he is risen and with us even right now, calling us into deeper bonds of kinship and companionship with each other.
Amen.
Preached at the 505 on November 30, and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on December 1, 2019, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.
Readings:
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44
