Easter Sermon 2008
Reynolds Price is a novelist, he writes from a wheelchair because of a rare spinal cancer that almost killed him 20 years ago. He wrote a book called “A Whole New Life” in which he writes about the healing vision of Jesus that he believes saved his life. In an interview with the Oxford Review he said, “When you undergo huge traumas everybody is in league with us to deny that the old life is ended. Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?”
Who are you going to be tomorrow? Most of us will walk into work tomorrow morning after having spent time with family, time that for some of us might be excruciatingly painful, and for others, sweet joy and happiness. But most of us will walk into work on Monday morning and enter into our old lives, follow our old patterns and in the end be unchanged by this earth shattering event that has happened. What if, instead of walking from this place feeling the same, expecting the same from others, we declared to ourselves, I am dead, now, who am I going to be tomorrow?
Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, “Leaving Church”, writes of an encounter with a former parishioner who had stopped attending church altogether. She writes, “After a lot of listening, “he said, “I think I finally heard the gospel. The Good new s of God in Christ is ‘You have everything you need to be human.’ There is nothing outside of you that you still need – no approval from the authorities, no attendance at temple, no key truth hidden in the tenth chapter of some sacred book. In your life right now, God has given you everything that you need to be human.” In hearing the words today, tomorrow when I wake up, I am going to look at Sara, and I am going to look at Eliot and Naomi, and recognize fully that God has given us everything we need to be the humans God wants us to be. I am going to look at all of you when I greet you in Church, when I see you on the streets or skyways and know deep in my heart that the light of Christ is in you, not because of something you did, not because of something you want to be, but because you are a beloved child of God, created with great care and intention to walk this earth.
When God has given us all that we need to be human, we understand the great and simple challenge that we have to be human, to be who we are without striving to be someone or something greater and different than what we are. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more, nothing at all. And the kicker of course, is that there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. God has a great and beautiful and powerful love for us and it is a love that is so far beyond what we know and understand. It is not at all like the love we have for our children, yet we can see God’s love in their dancing eyes. It is not at all like the love we have for our spouses and partners, yet we can feel God’s power in their intimate touch. It is not at all like the love we have for one another, yet we can experience God’s beautiful desire for us to belong when we are gathered in community. God’s love is a love that vastly transcends our understanding of emotion, spirituality and life. John O’Donohue has captured the smallest tip of the great iceberg that God’s love truly is in his poem, Beannacht, he writes:
On the day when/the weight deadens/on your shoulders/and you stumble,/may the clay dance/to balance you.
And when your eyes/freeze behind/the grey window/and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,/may a flock of colors,/indigo, red, green, and azure blue/come to awaken in you/a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays/in the currach of thought/and a stain of ocean/blackens beneath you,/may there come across the waters/a path of yellow moonlight/to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,/may the clarity of light be yours,/may the fluency of the ocean be yours,/may the protection of the ancestors be yours./And so may a slow/wind work these words of love around you,/an invisible cloak to mind your life.
Always God’s love emerges from the depths of our hearts and souls, always, God’s love emerges in our lives unexpectedly and sometimes in an earth shattering way. Beneath the darkness, beneath the fog, there is a great light, beneath the hardened shell we have created for our lives as protection from the elements of our world and culture, from the words of our friends and lovers, a deep longing is singing out desiring to be made free, broken from its prison of callousness, hardness and darkness. Our true authentic selves, the eyes of our hearts desire and long to be free from the cross we have hung them on. It is not that we must strive to discover these authentic selves, it is not that we have to find out who we are or start a great search for the human being God wants us to be. No, it is simply allowing God to overtake us, allowing the love, the light, the pain, the agony we have to break through the hardened casing we place around our heart so that we may see with the eyes of our hearts, with eyes of generosity, love and humility. That is what the cross is about, it is about love, it is about seeing with deep generosity, abundant love and great humility how others seek to belong and be loved themselves.
Taylor, in the same book writes, “While there are clearly many different ways to be human, it remains possible to see Jesus not as the founder of a new religion but as the exemplar of a new way of being human – a new Adam, in the language of the apostle Paul – who lived and died with such authentic faith in God that he gave his followers the courage to try to do the same thing.” In our being human, we often can stomach only so much freedom, limitations and boundaries immediately spring up to protect what we know, and what we understand as familiar and like ourselves. Taylor continues, in the same paragraph, writing, “We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain equilibrium. If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful and we are not.”
I have felt this for sometime in my ministry: that God is faithful and we are not. We come to Church every Sunday, we come and listen to the music provided, pray the prayers we have and we know deep in our hearts that this model of Church is broken, that there is a dissonance, something is wrong. We choose not to pay too much attention to it, but we know; we know that something is dead, and rather than proclaim it dead and seek to discover what it could be tomorrow, we proclaim, maintain and hope for the same. It is time for us to let down the Church from the cross, it is time to take the body to the tomb and mourn its passing. We must roll the stone in front of the hewn out grave and kneel, stand and sit in vigil, mourning over our loss, remembering that God is greater than anything we can imagine and that by placing the Church in its final resting place, there is one more act, one more event that will take place. The Church, the Church as the people of God, will be resurrected in some way, I can guarantee it, because that is what God does, but until we can give ourselves fully to God, and allow God to act and work the miracle of the resurrection, we will never discover what we can be as the Church.
As much as it might pain me to say so, you do not need anything from me in order to know how to live fully. The Church cannot offer anything to you that will make you a better person. Our liturgy, while wonderful and beautiful, will not make you a more complete person. Why is that, you might ask, because God has already given you everything you need to be human and as St. Irenaeus, the great second-century theologian, said “the glory of God is a human being fully alive!” God lives in the world, working in the lives of those who do not know God, those who are oppressed and alone, those in prison and those who are broken, dying and sick. Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her hope for the Church, resurrected, “What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at Church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job was to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?” The empty cross and the risen Christ speak volumes in our effort to understand that the Church is the only institution that does not exist primarily for itself, but rather for those who do not belong to it.
“Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?” These are the words I challenge you to hold in your hearts as you leave this place, as you spend time with your family and as, on Monday, you return to work or to school, to the life you once knew. God has ripped to shreds the expectations the world has for all of us. Christ has reached out his hands to us, embracing us erasing our solitude and aloneness. The tomb is empty, something has happened and we can never be the same.
Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
You are dead! Who are you going to be tomorrow?
Who are you going to be tomorrow? Most of us will walk into work tomorrow morning after having spent time with family, time that for some of us might be excruciatingly painful, and for others, sweet joy and happiness. But most of us will walk into work on Monday morning and enter into our old lives, follow our old patterns and in the end be unchanged by this earth shattering event that has happened. What if, instead of walking from this place feeling the same, expecting the same from others, we declared to ourselves, I am dead, now, who am I going to be tomorrow?
Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, “Leaving Church”, writes of an encounter with a former parishioner who had stopped attending church altogether. She writes, “After a lot of listening, “he said, “I think I finally heard the gospel. The Good new s of God in Christ is ‘You have everything you need to be human.’ There is nothing outside of you that you still need – no approval from the authorities, no attendance at temple, no key truth hidden in the tenth chapter of some sacred book. In your life right now, God has given you everything that you need to be human.” In hearing the words today, tomorrow when I wake up, I am going to look at Sara, and I am going to look at Eliot and Naomi, and recognize fully that God has given us everything we need to be the humans God wants us to be. I am going to look at all of you when I greet you in Church, when I see you on the streets or skyways and know deep in my heart that the light of Christ is in you, not because of something you did, not because of something you want to be, but because you are a beloved child of God, created with great care and intention to walk this earth.
When God has given us all that we need to be human, we understand the great and simple challenge that we have to be human, to be who we are without striving to be someone or something greater and different than what we are. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more, nothing at all. And the kicker of course, is that there is nothing we can do to make God love us less. God has a great and beautiful and powerful love for us and it is a love that is so far beyond what we know and understand. It is not at all like the love we have for our children, yet we can see God’s love in their dancing eyes. It is not at all like the love we have for our spouses and partners, yet we can feel God’s power in their intimate touch. It is not at all like the love we have for one another, yet we can experience God’s beautiful desire for us to belong when we are gathered in community. God’s love is a love that vastly transcends our understanding of emotion, spirituality and life. John O’Donohue has captured the smallest tip of the great iceberg that God’s love truly is in his poem, Beannacht, he writes:
On the day when/the weight deadens/on your shoulders/and you stumble,/may the clay dance/to balance you.
And when your eyes/freeze behind/the grey window/and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,/may a flock of colors,/indigo, red, green, and azure blue/come to awaken in you/a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays/in the currach of thought/and a stain of ocean/blackens beneath you,/may there come across the waters/a path of yellow moonlight/to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,/may the clarity of light be yours,/may the fluency of the ocean be yours,/may the protection of the ancestors be yours./And so may a slow/wind work these words of love around you,/an invisible cloak to mind your life.
Always God’s love emerges from the depths of our hearts and souls, always, God’s love emerges in our lives unexpectedly and sometimes in an earth shattering way. Beneath the darkness, beneath the fog, there is a great light, beneath the hardened shell we have created for our lives as protection from the elements of our world and culture, from the words of our friends and lovers, a deep longing is singing out desiring to be made free, broken from its prison of callousness, hardness and darkness. Our true authentic selves, the eyes of our hearts desire and long to be free from the cross we have hung them on. It is not that we must strive to discover these authentic selves, it is not that we have to find out who we are or start a great search for the human being God wants us to be. No, it is simply allowing God to overtake us, allowing the love, the light, the pain, the agony we have to break through the hardened casing we place around our heart so that we may see with the eyes of our hearts, with eyes of generosity, love and humility. That is what the cross is about, it is about love, it is about seeing with deep generosity, abundant love and great humility how others seek to belong and be loved themselves.
Taylor, in the same book writes, “While there are clearly many different ways to be human, it remains possible to see Jesus not as the founder of a new religion but as the exemplar of a new way of being human – a new Adam, in the language of the apostle Paul – who lived and died with such authentic faith in God that he gave his followers the courage to try to do the same thing.” In our being human, we often can stomach only so much freedom, limitations and boundaries immediately spring up to protect what we know, and what we understand as familiar and like ourselves. Taylor continues, in the same paragraph, writing, “We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain equilibrium. If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful and we are not.”
I have felt this for sometime in my ministry: that God is faithful and we are not. We come to Church every Sunday, we come and listen to the music provided, pray the prayers we have and we know deep in our hearts that this model of Church is broken, that there is a dissonance, something is wrong. We choose not to pay too much attention to it, but we know; we know that something is dead, and rather than proclaim it dead and seek to discover what it could be tomorrow, we proclaim, maintain and hope for the same. It is time for us to let down the Church from the cross, it is time to take the body to the tomb and mourn its passing. We must roll the stone in front of the hewn out grave and kneel, stand and sit in vigil, mourning over our loss, remembering that God is greater than anything we can imagine and that by placing the Church in its final resting place, there is one more act, one more event that will take place. The Church, the Church as the people of God, will be resurrected in some way, I can guarantee it, because that is what God does, but until we can give ourselves fully to God, and allow God to act and work the miracle of the resurrection, we will never discover what we can be as the Church.
As much as it might pain me to say so, you do not need anything from me in order to know how to live fully. The Church cannot offer anything to you that will make you a better person. Our liturgy, while wonderful and beautiful, will not make you a more complete person. Why is that, you might ask, because God has already given you everything you need to be human and as St. Irenaeus, the great second-century theologian, said “the glory of God is a human being fully alive!” God lives in the world, working in the lives of those who do not know God, those who are oppressed and alone, those in prison and those who are broken, dying and sick. Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her hope for the Church, resurrected, “What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at Church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job was to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?” The empty cross and the risen Christ speak volumes in our effort to understand that the Church is the only institution that does not exist primarily for itself, but rather for those who do not belong to it.
“Everybody is trying to patch us up and get us back to who we were, when in fact what we need to be told is, You’re dead. Who are you going to be tomorrow?” These are the words I challenge you to hold in your hearts as you leave this place, as you spend time with your family and as, on Monday, you return to work or to school, to the life you once knew. God has ripped to shreds the expectations the world has for all of us. Christ has reached out his hands to us, embracing us erasing our solitude and aloneness. The tomb is empty, something has happened and we can never be the same.
Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
You are dead! Who are you going to be tomorrow?
Comments
Thanks, Aron. Greatly expressed!
Michele
But, I have only read it twice after having been there to hear it. Pretty soon I will get the whole message.utxaxwe