Sermon for Easter 2011

Scriptures for today are here (we used the gospel from Matthew)

If you believe in Easter according to Walgreen’s, Easter is a festival celebrated in pastel colors. The shelves are filled with marshmallow Peeps in hues of pink and yellow, chocolate bunnies in rainbow foil, fluffy pink ducklings, peanut butter eggs beautifully wrapped in lavender, stuffed bunnies with big yellow bows, and so on. And – not that there’s anything wrong with that – but I think the reason for this explosion of cuteness is that we live in a world that has no idea what to do with Easter. We live in a world that believes in Good Friday, and believes that every story ends with Good Friday, with death. A Good Friday world has no idea what to think of the message of Easter, which proclaims life that comes out of death. So it trivializes it into a springtime festival, a feast of pastel colors.

But if you read the Bible, Easter is not a feast of pastel colors at all. Easter begins in darkness. Easter begins in disappointment that must have filled Jerusalem that day. Historians tell us that Jerusalem was a city of 40,000 people at the time of Jesus, but that at the Passover, the population swelled to 200,000 with Jews who came to Jerusalem to celebrate the great feast of freedom, the Passover feast remembering their deliverance from long-ago slavery in Egypt. But they arrived in Jerusalem each year to find it thronged with Roman soldiers, and realized that they were still slaves.

This Sunday morning, the first day after the Sabbath, would be the first day they could travel back home after the Passover – one more disappointing Passover. Imagine this teeming crowd of hopeful people, longing for freedom, hearing the stories of how God had led their ancestors to freedom so long ago, yet questioning whether God was still present for Israel. Picture them packing up that Sunday morning to head back to their disappointing, ordinary lives in Galilee and Bethany and Magdala and Cyrene and all the countries where Jewish people lived; thinking about the farms and the fishing boats and the shops waiting for them there; and sighing not only with the letdown of the end of a holiday, but also with disappointment that once more, the Romans had made short work of a would-be Messiah, the young Jesus of Nazareth who so many hoped would be a new Moses.

So all over Jerusalem, as that black sky lightened into gray, people began to wake up and sigh and pack up their few possessions to head back home to Galilee and other country places and pick up their normal, poverty-stricken lives.

For the disciples, rubbing their eyes from lack of sleep and beginning to stir in the darkness, surely this Sunday morning must have been the day when they started to wonder what they would do, when they went back to Galilee. Matthew, the tax collector, thought about his old job, remembering how Jesus had called him into a new way of life, knowing he could never return to cheating people. Simon the Zealot, formerly a revolutionary rebelling against Rome, yet called into discipleship with the Prince of Peace, wondered whether he could ever go back to his old rebel friends after his newfound friendship with tax collectors and sinners, yet he knew he could never forget his detour into preaching love instead of revolution. Peter and Andrew, James and John, thought about old Zebedee whom they had left behind in the fishing boat, wondered if Zebedee would welcome them home, tried to imagine what it would be like to fish for fish instead of fishing for people. Thomas, the practical one, knew that Friday’s traumatic death was nothing unusual or surprising: it was only what he expected, it ended a beloved story the way so many real-life stories end: in irrevocable, irreversible death, a Good Friday ending. All of them tried to understand what it would be like to be back home in Galilee, all wondered whether any of the dream of the last three years would stay with them, or whether it was all for nothing.

For Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, waking with red and puffy eyes from weeping until they could weep no more, where every time they closed their eyes the picture of their Lord’s death would fill their minds, the long dream was completely, irrevocably ended. Perhaps they were wondering too whether they would be welcomed at home after their time of living scandalously, traveling around with a band of men. As they woke and dressed and went out to slip through dark city streets just coming to life, they knew the bright, shining life they had built with their Master was gone. The hopes, the dreams, the vision of a new way to live, a new way to love – all over. And the world was back to normal: heartbreaking, infuriating, devastating normal; the kind of normal that knows that life is ruled by death, the end of every story. And all they could do, as the first gray light began to glow in the eastern Jerusalem sky, was to go to the tomb to weep some more before heading back home to Galilee.

But then, the earth shook. For the two Marys, arriving at the tomb looking for death, an angel appeared with news so astounding that they quivered with fear. Death cannot hold the Son of God down; death has given way to life. Not bunnies and flowers, not life that springs naturally out of the earth; not the kind of life you wear pastel colors for as you celebrate springtime. Not any kind of life we understand, but life that contradicts the most fundamental thing we know: that life always ends in death. Life that says that the Good Fridays of the world are never the end of the story.

And as the sun rose in the Easter sky, the angel told the women the earth-shaking news that we have all come to hear: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!]

And when you hear this, when you realize that Good Friday is not the end of the story, when you understand that Easter Sunday follows Good Friday, life will never be normal again.

As the women rush back to tell the news to the other disciples, Jesus himself appeared. All the powers of evil that had descended on Jesus had done the worst they could possibly do, had overcome him, defeated him, killed him in wretched misery. Yet there he is: still bearing the marks of suffering in death, but transformed, alive, telling them to go home and meet him in Galilee.

Evil did not have last word, death did not have last word, the last word was God’s. And because God had the last word, and that Word was the flesh of Jesus, alive then as he will be for eternity, we know that all Jesus’ promises to us are true: the glorious promise that God will be with us always, to the end of the ages; the joyful promise of abundant life for us and for God’s whole creation; the radiant promise that you and I are forgiven and restored as children of God.

The Lord is Risen, and Jesus Christ is loose in our midst, and the whole world today is new. So we say, Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!] And 2,000 years later on Easter Sunday, we celebrate that triumph with flowers and bells and bright lights and beautiful clothes and beautiful soul-piercing music, and yes, pastel colors.

But here’s the question I always have: what happens when we go back to Galilee? You and I have ordinary lives, just like the disciples that Jesus told to go meet him in Galilee, we have our own fishing boats waiting for us, our computers and kitchens and schools and families and televisions, we have our normal joys and griefs, we have normal life waiting for us to take it up again as soon as Easter is over. And the question is, where in our own Galilees do we meet the risen Christ?

Because if Easter was just something that happened 2,000 years ago, a really happy event that we’re glad to remember, we can enjoy our bunnies and eggs, sing some beautiful hymns, and then go back to Galilee and forget about it till next year. But if Christ is on the loose, not just here in church on Easter, but in all the normal, everyday, Galilees of our lives, if Jesus Christ has really overcome the forces of evil and delivered us through our baptism into God’s new creation that starts today; if it’s really true that Good Friday is no longer end of the story; then that’s something that changes us inside out, irrevocably, not as a long and beautiful dream that we wake up from, but as a solid, tangible, observable presence in our lives.

And that, for me, is the whole point. It’s not just that Easter is the happy ending to a sad story that happened long ago. It’s not just that our grief at the death of a person we admire was followed by his appearance to those who loved him and the assurance that his love would not die. It’s not just that God’s love has power over death itself. It is all these things, but it is so much more.

Easter is the stunning, joyous, incomprehensible good news that Christ was not just someone who lived in the first century AD. Christ is someone who is alive here and now, in church, and yes, in Galilee. In a world that still believes Good Friday is the end of all our stories, Easter is here.

The Risen Christ is with us still, healing the sick, releasing the prisoners, opening the eyes of the blind, proclaiming good news to the poor. Shining the light of God into the darkest places of human life. Commanding us to love one another as he has loved us.

Christ is with us still, telling us to go to Galilee and we will see him there. Go back to our normal everyday lives, go back to our workplaces and our schools and our families, go back to the joy and sorrows of human life. Go back to every place that believes in Good Friday and announce Easter. Live as Easter people in a Good Friday world, live as those who know that love always triumphs over death, live as those who have learned that the kingdom of death does not have the final say in our world after all, that the final word is God’s, and God’s love wins.

And know that he is there, the Risen One who encounters us in ordinary Galilees. Because friends, Jesus Christ has breathed his life and spirit into us, and we are his.

And so to each one of us this Easter, Jesus says, celebrate the joyous life of the resurrection. Celebrate the life that cannot stay dead, celebrate the life so abundant that it comes bursting out of the tomb, celebrate the life of joy that is promised to each person here. And then go back to Galilee and find Jesus Christ waiting for you there. Let him fill your life with joy and peace, let him promise you healing and fullness and eternal life, let him bless every corner of your everyday, normal, Galilee life. Because with Jesus Christ alive and on the loose, our normal lives are transformed into resurrection life, and every promise God has ever made us is true.

And so once more, let us say together: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!]

New Blog

To those who read this blog: please note that I have started a new blog. From now on, I will use this blog ("Susan Snook's Blog") to post sermons only. For other thoughts, I will be writing on my new blog, "A Good and Joyful Thing." I have started by posting my thoughts from last week on ministry with young people. See you there!

Sermon for 4.10.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent5_RCL.html

An article in 2000 in the satirical newspaper The Onion – which writes articles lampooning current events as if they were real news articles – had this headline: “Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn the Second Law of Thermodynamics!” Which is funny enough if you’re like me and know very little about physics, and all you picture is clueless officials trying to repeal laws of the natural world. But it’s even better if you know what the second law of thermodynamics is.

My friend Lucas Mix, who is both an Episcopal priest (college chaplain at University of Arizona) and a PhD astrophysicist, explained it on his blog last week. Basically, this is the law that explains why your closet turns into a disorganized mess if you don’t stay on top of it with constant vigilance. Or, as Lucas puts it: “the disorder of a system can only increase or stay the same unless you put work into it. Properly, the law talks about heat transfer, but the practical effect is that order comes from organizing things – putting energy in – and if you don’t put energy in, they run down. Clocks run down. Closets become messy.” Or, if you drop a deck of cards, it sprawls in a heap on the floor, rather than spontaneously organizing itself into suits.

You may have guessed that physicists didn’t discover this rule by looking at their closets, but at the natural world, and Lucas says, “And, yes, even the physical universe will run down with time. We say that entropy (the measure of disorder) increases.”

At which point we come to a very interesting dovetail with Christian tradition, because the Creation story in Genesis 1 tells us that God created the universe by organizing it, by bringing order into chaos, by separating things from each other: darkness from light, earth from sky; water from dry land, etc.

Physics tells us that the universe that is now so carefully organized, with scientific laws that can be observed, is running down, very slowly, according to the law of entropy, and will eventually end in heat death, descent into chaos. Lucas says this idea should be even more of a problem for the Christian Right than evolution, if they knew about it. As a fictitious senator in The Onion article put it, “I wouldn’t want my child growing up in a world headed for total heat death and dissolution into a vacuum. No decent parent would want that.” (Not to worry – it won’t happen for billions of years.)

The fact is, however, that on a micro level, we all will die, the ultimate descent into chaos: Christian tradition is no denier of the obvious. Every human learns that death is as inevitable as taxes. And we humans develop a variety of strategies to deal with this fact. Some of them are good – taking care of our health, working on strong relationships with other people, developing a relationship with God. But many aren't so good – from the fabled midlife crisis, to killing each other, to grasping a number of false idols to save ourselves from death. An idol is something that can’t deliver on its promises, and our idols of money, alcohol, sex, appearance, success, and so on won’t help keep death away.

But – and Christianity gives us an enormous “but” to the Second Law of Thermodynamics – but God is still sovereign over the laws of nature. And our scriptures today say that the God who Created the universe by bringing order out of chaos has every intention of defeating the entropy that brings death and disintegration to humans and human societies.

One thing to understand about Jesus was that he was a Jew, immersed in 1^st century Judaism – and in the first century, Jews were divided over whether there was such a thing as resurrection. One faction was the Sadducees, who were wealthy, powerful collaborators with Rome who controlled the Temple. They didn’t believe in resurrection, and if you don’t believe God will eventually judge you, it gives you all kinds of license to sin.

On the other hand, Pharisees were close observers of the law, and did believe in resurrection, based on some scriptures like Ezekiel’s vision of Dry Bones in the Old Testament lesson today. They didn’t believe that it had actually happened in the past, or even in the present, but they believed that it would happen on “last day”, the day the forces of entropy finally brought an end to the world, and God reversed them and brought about a new creation, reorganizing death and chaos into order and life. This is what Martha refers to in the gospel when she says, “I believe my brother will rise on the last day.” Jesus agreed with the Pharisees on this – he is close to their beliefs despite the fact that he often disagreed with how they put their beliefs into practice.

Where Jesus does something revolutionary is in saying that the resurrection has already begun, that God’s new creation is not just somewhere in the future, but has been brought into the present with the life and ministry of Jesus, and it applies in some way to ordinary people like us, here and now. There’s so much happening in this gospel story: it’s such a human story – full of the deepest truths of human life – delay, irony, bravery, love, grief, neighbors who care for the grief-stricken, blame as Martha and Mary both come out to Jesus to say if he had been there, Lazarus would not have died. These are words we’ve probably all said to God at some time – and this gospel tells us that God is big enough to take it.

It’s a real, genuine story, full of the stories of real, genuine people. Yet, at the same time, this is another story in John that is a “sign” – it points to something else. We are familiar by now with John’s technique of narrating a physical story as a symbol of an eternal spiritual truth. Now he tells a story of death, and of life brought out of death, to introduce us to the truth that in Jesus, life triumphs over death, and God’s order trumps death’s chaos.

In this story, we learn many important things, but I want to draw your attention to three of them. First, we learn that Jesus loved this family – and this is the key to what happens. It’s not that Lazarus was a descendant of Abraham, it’s not that Lazarus was particularly good, it’s not even that Lazarus loved Jesus. John doesn’t tell us anything about these things. It’s just that Jesus loved Lazarus and his family.

Second: Jesus’ love leads to a new creation for Lazarus, a reversal of the entropy of death, as we hear Jesus’ stunning statement that he is Resurrection and Life. Jesus himself is Resurrection – not just that he will be the resurrected one – but he himself IS resurrection and life, God’s new creation come alive in the world. Right here and now, Jesus says, resurrection has begun.

In John’s characteristic way, we have a reversal of children’s Show and Tell. John tells us that Jesus is Resurrection, and then he shows us. Jesus gives a great shout: Lazarus, come out! And from the darkness of the tomb, Lazarus emerges into resurrection light and life.

And the third thing happens: Jesus calls the community into action: Unbind him, and let him go. Jesus saves Lazarus from the entropy of death – but it is up to the church community to surround him and help set him free.

Like all of John’s “sign” stories, this one operates on several levels – it is a story that happened at a particular time and place, to particular people Jesus loved. On a particular day, long ago, Jesus stood outside a tomb and shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” Yet because it is a “sign” story, John isn’t trying to tell us that if we pray hard enough, the people we love will be restored from death now. Instead, this is a sign to what God intends for the future – a complete reversal of entropy, and a new creation that restores the world to its intended state.

Yet, it is also a story about each of us –WE are Lazarus, the ones Jesus loves. Because John always operates on several levels, this story applies not just long ago, and not just sometime in the future; it applies now. It still happens every day.

Jesus still stands outside the tombs that imprison us and gives a huge shout. Lazarus, come out! And we stand blinking in the sunlight, called into freedom, away from the fear of death that imprisons us with chains that make us cling to money, possessions, alcohol, sex, or other false idols as our savior.

Lazarus, come out! calls Jesus, and we emerge from the dark, called away from our fixation on our own self-love, and called into relationship with God and our neighbor.

Lazarus, come out! calls Jesus, and we stand in sunlight, called out of death itself, into the eternal, abundant life that is ours by virtue of our baptism, which was the moment when we died with Jesus and were raised to new life, made part of God’s new Creation that has already begun, right here and now.

The law of entropy and death has been reversed into a new law of order and life. The seeds of the kingdom of God have been planted by Jesus, the and those seeds are us. Like Lazarus, we are imperfect, we don’t deserve it, but we are loved by Jesus, and that’s what counts.

And like everyone who is invited into relationship with Jesus, we are released from the grave clothes that bind us by the beloved community of Jesus, the community that is called to love and care for each one of us, and we are set free to be once more the people whom Jesus loves.

John tells us that Jesus’ raising of Lazarus was the final straw for Jesus’ enemies. From then on, they plotted to put Jesus to death. In a very real way, Jesus gave his life for Lazarus. And in the same way, Jesus gives his life for us. We are on the road to the cross now, walking with Jesus toward Jerusalem. With Thomas in today’s gospel, we can say, let’s go with him now, so we can die with him. But the good news is: in our baptism, we have already died with him, and in the waters of baptism, we have already been raised. With Jesus, we can have confidence, even as we walk to the cross, that we live already in Resurrection life. Thanks be to God.

Sermon for 4.3.11

Scriptures for Today are Here: ww.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent4_RCL.html

If you’ve ever been to the home of a person who is blind, you might notice the absolute order of his house, not one thing out of place. The extreme tidiness is not due to strict housekeeping standards; it is because of the simple fact that a blind person needs to know by memory where everything in his house is; how many steps it takes to get from the sofa to the kitchen; precisely where in the cabinet to find the salt shaker. A blind person never rearranges the furniture in his house; he needs things to stay the same so he knows where he is.

You and I rely on our eyesight to tell us these things most of the time; but we’ve all experienced blindness in some way: for instance, getting up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen and get a glass of water, not turning on any lights so as not to disturb anyone, and knowing our way around the house; walking with hand held out, feeling our way so as not to bump into the door jamb.

Most of the time this works pretty well, and we manage to get our drink of water and get back to bed without incident. But what if someone left the dresser drawer standing open? We would have a big bruise on our shin the next day. What if someone left a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor? We might find ourselves sprawled out on the kitchen floor among shards of broken glass and puddles of cold water.

Worse still, what if someone snuck into the bedroom in the middle of the night and moved all the furniture around? We would be moving confidently toward the bedroom door when bam! There we’d be, come to a dead stop with a six-foot dresser barring our way and no idea how to get around it.

Think of the Pharisees in today’s gospel as blind people who believe they know where all the furniture is. This is no judgment on the Pharisees: the human condition is that we’re all blind, living in darkness; we can’t see all the time what God is doing and what God intends for us. God realized this a long time ago, and gave the Jewish people an excellent map in the form of the Torah, the law, which is pretty helpful to people who need to know how to feel their way through their daily lives.

But the problem is, what happens if someone (a) comes into the bedroom and rearranges all the furniture, and (b) turns on the light and says, you can open your eyes to find your way now!

John’s gospel from the beginning has set up this idea: in the first chapter, he tells us that Jesus is the true light that has come into the world. In the story of Nicodemus that we heard a couple of weeks ago, he tells us that Nicodemus came to Jesus under cover of darkness, and heard the great truth that Jesus has come into the world to save the world, to bring light to the world. However, Jesus tells Nicodemus that not everyone will welcome the light, and some who are evil will simply prefer to stay in darkness, and judgment will come to them not by God’s choice, but by their own.

Effectively, what John tells us in the gospel today is that when Jesus rearranged the furniture and turned on the light, the Pharisees in this story covered their eyes, refused to see by the light Jesus provided, and insisted that the furniture hadn’t moved. And their actions in this story reveal that they are the ones who are truly blind, because they prefer to remain stumbling in darkness.

This is a story laced with irony and comedy from first to last. The Pharisees come into the story assuming they can see and the man is blind. And they see lots of things: their religious furniture is carefully arranged. In one corner, there’s the nightstand: those who suffer must have deserved it, so they must have sinned – even to the absurd idea that a baby can sin in its mother’s womb. In another corner, the solid immovable dresser of the law meant that anyone who broke a rule like working on the Sabbath must not be from God. Therefore, no healings should take place on Sabbath, leading to the irony that they accuse God Incarnate of being a sinner for doing God’s work on the Sabbath.

In another corner, they have the certainty that since healings don’t take place on the Sabbath, that the man must not have been healed after all and in fact, has to be a different man. So they send for his parents to say maybe he wasn’t blind, or maybe this wasn’t him, but his identical twin or something. When assured that it was the same man and he had been healed, they reverted to their first certainty that he was a sinner and therefore had nothing important to say to them. And when confronted with a challenge to everything they knew about how the furniture was arranged, they simply decided they couldn’t deal with the challenge and drove the man out of the synagogue.

You can see what they’re doing: they’re carefully maintaining their blindness throughout, refusing to open their eyes and recognize that Jesus is a new light that allows them to see in new ways. And by refusing to see by Jesus’ light, they prove that they are willfully and intentionally blind, and they are stuck in darkness – so judgment comes to them. Ironically, at the end of the story it is the formerly blind man who can see - not only physically, but also spiritually, for he sees the truth that Jesus is the Messiah, with spiritual sight that unfolds gradually throughout the story. And it is the Pharisees who are blind, who have proved themselves to be sinners by choosing to remain in darkness.

Those silly Pharisees, right? Always making mistakes, bumbling their way through the New Testament like Keystone Kops, constantly critiqued by Jesus and everyone else as too certain, too rigid, too judgmental, too condemning of everyone else. It’s easy for us to criticize them because they’re so different from us.

And yet – and yet – aren’t we all Pharisees in some way? Think of who they were in Jesus’ time – sincerely religious, devoted people. Don’t we know lots of people like that? In fact, isn’t that why we’re here? We love God, we want to be what God asks us to be. Yet ultimately, we are all vulnerable to spiritual blindness – doing what the Pharisees did – taking something good, like the Bible, mixing it with our own preconceived ideas about how things should be, and coming up with the absolute certainty that we know who’s right and who’s wrong. There are certainly many religious fundamentalists who operate this way, but it’s not just fundamentalists. The controversies that erupt in the church on a regular basis don’t happen because some Christians want to throw away the Bible and write something new. They happen because people disagree on how to read the Bible, and which passages shed light which other ones.

Right now, the controversy du jour in the American Christian world is over a new book by an evangelical mega-church pastor, Rob Bell, who had the temerity to tell the Pharisees of our world that he doesn’t believe that all non-Christians are going to hell (in his new book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived). For his trouble, he got a lot of his evangelical brethren telling him that he was going straight to hell.

Rob Bell asks an important question, which I will talk more about in another sermon. But today’s gospel isn’t so much about the content of what we see, as how we see it. How do we determine what to believe when things aren’t as clear as they used to be, when we live in a time of huge transition, with furniture being moved all over the place?

Phyllis Tickle has written a book called The Great Emergence, in which she says that every 500 years, the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale – getting rid of outdated beliefs and practices to make way for new ones that will help us face a new world. Talk about moving the furniture! She says that the transition we’re in now will be every bit as earth-shattering as the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. And think about where our world is now. We are in a communications and technology revolution. Physicists tell us that time and space themselves are relative, so that we can’t even be sure of where we’re standing any more. And in the church, we can’t assume that we live in a Christendom world, where most everyone around us is Christian and our basic institutions are based on Christian principles. Around us, everything is changing and we have to find our way through the dark of a whole new world.

So here’s what I do when I think about the hard questions in a dark and murky world: I look at Jesus. When I look at Jesus, here is what I see: I see the Son of God who heals, who preaches good news to the poor, who loves others as he loves himself. Jesus’ story is not about a God who chooses to operate by use of power. This is the God who voluntarily chose to empty himself of power in order to give himself completely for love.

And this is the God whose last earthly command was for his disciples – you and I – to love one another as he has loved us. That means we give ourselves for each other, even if it means dying. That means we live according to the law of love, caring for one another, bringing healing to each other, shining light in the darkness of each others’ lives. That means we believe above all else that Jesus loves us and Jesus loves everyone who stumbles in darkness, looking for the light. Because God has given Jesus to us as the light of the world.