Easter Sunday - The Light of Christ

Matthew tells us about messengers from God, angels—if you will—twice in his gospel.  First, an angel arrives in Joseph's dreams prior to Jesus' birth and several more times shortly thereafter.  The angel tells him who Mary's child is.  The angel tells him to flee to Egypt with Mary and Jesus to protect Jesus from being killed.  Finally, the angel instructs him to return to Nazareth in Galilee.

Now the third day after Jesus' crucifixion dawns.  Jesus lies in his tomb.  Matthew tells us that Mary Magdalene and another Mary approach to see his tomb.  Although Matthew doesn't tell us, we don't have much trouble imagining how they are feeling.  Perhaps they walk slowly—for grief slows us down.  Could they have been talking, as women often do, to give each other support?  The light of dawn may still be dim and the sounds of the day just beginning.

And suddenly, says Matthew—SUDDENLY everything changes.  Matthew tells us that one of those messengers of God—an angel—arrives, not in a dream this time, but dazzlingly bright, with lightning bolts shooting and the noise and shaking of a great earthquake.  Suddenly, indeed, for the angel rolls back the stone from the entrance to the tomb—already empty—and sits on it.  Make no mistake, Jesus has been raised by the power of God.  And God’s power overwhelms the sealed tomb and the guards placed there by Pontius Pilate.  Now, nothing can be the same—no one can be the same.

In modern athletic lingo we have the expression, “a game changer.”  In fact, one such game changer in football even refers back to the Christian story—you know what I'm talking about?  Yes, a “Hail, Mary” pass.  For those early followers of Jesus and for us, these two angelic appearances in the gospel of Matthew, the only ones in Matthew, signal a “game changer:” first, incarnation and then, resurrection.

But the skeptic may say—well, even a faithful person may say—these parts of Jesus' story—and other parts of the gospel narrative—involving the supernatural provide difficulties for us, living as we do in an age of science and technology.  How can something so momentous as the incarnation, or the resurrection, mostly be ignored by the general cultural record? And why are they recounted with such varying details in the four gospel accounts?  What about resurrection is real?  Why are we celebrating it over 2,000 years later?

Just as Jesus was a different sort of Messiah than most of the Jewish people longed for, both his birth and his resurrection are different sort of game changers than the ones we see and can point out, often before a game is over.  What is real and what causes us to celebrate can only be described this way—after this nothing and no one can be the same again, because God acted to reconcile the whole broken world, including all our sinful humanity, to God's self. 

In Matthew's account we can see the response of the two Marys change from apparently somber to fearful to being filled with joy and awe.  We see them walking first and then running quickly.  We see them initially unaware and then energized as apostles to the apostles—sent by their Lord and our Lord, sent by their Savior and our Savior—to tell how—not only the game—but the whole world, has changed: Jesus has been raised from the dead by God's power and will meet the apostles in Galilee where his ministry and their ministry with him began.  In Galilee the brothers (and I'm sure some sisters, too) will experience the risen Christ and thus be changed as well, energized for mission to tell the gospel message throughout the whole world.

Will they told to work hard, because Christ will depend on them to be effective in their mission?  No, they won't.  How were they to cope with the enormous task of telling the world that Christ's resurrection had changed everything?   Knowing that they might feel both fearful and overwhelmed, the risen Christ reassured them.  When he met them in Galilee and sent them forth, he told them to remember that he always would be with them, for as long as it took.

A large parish in Florida began a mission, establishing a new church in a neighboring community. The rector explained his understanding of mission and evangelism this way:  we can only reach one person at a time, but we must do so in great numbers.  I am convinced that we can reach that one person and do so in great numbers only through the power of God.  God's power acted on that third day to raise Jesus Christ from the dead.  God's power can act in our lives—and the lives of all people—to lead us into new life—resurrected lives where we receive the power to practice the justice, mercy and love we saw in Jesus' ministry and teaching.

Today we have a visual symbol of the power of God that raised Jesus and can make us new people: the light of this tall Paschal candle.  Its lighting at Easter, as well as its presence with us throughout the fifty days of Eastertide and at every baptism and burial rite, recalls for us the light of Jesus Christ, the Messiah of God.

The light of Christ came from God into our world through Jesus.  The light of Christ in Jesus was raised from the dead through God's power.  The light of Christ can transform all of us to be the people God has created us to be.  Gaze on this light and be reminded of the two Marys at dawn on that first Easter morning.  As they did, we can encounter the risen Christ and be transformed.  The light of Christ within us will offer us the resurrection power we need to live faithfully, joyfully reaching out to others in Christ's name.  Don't be afraid; don't be overwhelmed, for the light of Christ always will be with us, for as long as it takes!

Palm Sunday - Living into the Mystery of God

Here we are.  We have participated in the telling of our Lord's final meal, his betrayal and arrest, and his trial, his torture, his death on the cross. We are beginning the most holy week of the year for those who have chosen to follow Jesus Christ as our Savior. We know that a week from today we will celebrate Jesus' bursting from the tomb.  We know the resurrected Jesus will transform his dispirited disciples. We know through the power of God he will triumph over evil and death.

Yes, the joy of the resurrected Christ will come, but not today.  Today we are asked to live into the mystery that surrounds an important question:  What does Jesus' suffering and death, his passion, mean?  Or another way of asking this question is: Why did Jesus need to suffer and die?

 At first today we heard and sang “Hosanna!”  Then we heard ourselves calling out, “Let him be crucified!”  We heard Jesus' anguished cry, feeling abandoned by God, and the centurion's recognizing Jesus as God's Son.  And finally we heard  about the new tomb holding Jesus' broken, dead body being sealed shut.

What purpose lay in all these distressful events?  What is the mystery into which we have to live to understand them?

That mystery is the mystery of God. On this day and through this week, we have the possibility to go deep.  To come to know the Holy One who sustains us, who loves us, who came to live as a human being, who obeyed and offered himself in love to defeat the power of death-dealing evil.

The mystery of God cannot be found in theology or in Bible study or even in preaching.  All these inform our journey into the mystery, but they are not the mystery.  Experiencing the mystery of God—our Creator who redeems us and sustains us—comes from encountering the living God in a moment out of chronos, out of human time.  It comes in kairos, a moment in the time of God.

Jesus sent his disciples to secure a place where they could share the Passover meal by telling them to say, “Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, 'The Teacher says, my time [kairos] is near.'”

Was participating in the dramatic reading of Matthew's passion gospel a kairos moment for us, an experience of the mystery of God?  It may have been. Will receiving the body and blood of Christ at the Eucharist be such a time?  Will it come some day this week in prayer or in worship?  It may.

May God grant us such moments this week.  For in these moments our lives become caught up in the mystery of God.  Words may fail us, but we will know . . . we will know.

The 5th Sunday of Lent - Given New Life

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice!  Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.  So begins Psalm 130, identified as De profundis in Latin, meaning “out of the depths.”  Our English word “profound” comes from the Latin word.  How profound is our desire for God to listen to us, when we express our needs?  Some folks label this sort of prayer as a “foxhole” prayer.  When things are desperate enough, we pray out of our profound need at the moment.  Then afterwards . . . depending on how things worked out . . . we are temporarily elated or angry or doubting, but then we revert to our usual patterns of life.

Behavioral psychologists have determined that intermittent reward works best for establishing behavior patterns that resist decay.  So if we believe that God answers prayers more readily the harder we pray, our praying behavior will be strengthened when we receive a positive result only occasionally and randomly.  If we think God behaves this way, then God seems capricious and manipulative—not a God I'd particularly want to believe in.

But, instead, if we view God as wanting to know what is on our hearts and in our thoughts—if we view God as loving us and accepting whatever we bring in prayer—then as the psalmist did, we can “wait” for the Lord and “hope” in God's Word.

The prophet Ezekiel's vision of the valley with dry bones came when his people, God's chosen people, languished in slavery in Babylon.  For most of the people, this was not forced labor in the sense of the Israelites' slavery in Egypt at the time of Moses.  The top members of society had been carried off from Jerusalem to pacify the captured province.  If the best and the brightest went to Babylon, they would not cause trouble for the Babylonian authorities and their puppet rulers.  In Babylon they could help create prosperity for their captors—and many of the exiles did prosper there as well.  But their captivity meant they could no longer worship God in the land they believed God had provided for them.  Despair and hopelessness characterized their plight.  Psalm 137 expresses this so clearly:  By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

Through his vision of the dry bones and the breath of God that gives them life, Ezekiel understood God's way of acting in a seemingly hopeless situation.  Through Ezekiel's prophecy, God told those with little hope, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

Many of us who have faced the reality of a loved one's death wished that this reviving of the dry bones could be a physical reality, as well a spiritual reality.  But God was not reversing time as if the Babylonian captivity had never happened; instead God was offering the power of the Spirit to give new life in the face of hopelessness.

Certainly Martha and Mary felt hopeless when their brother, Lazarus, died.  They had such a strong faith in the healing power of Jesus that they blamed Jesus for not arriving soon enough.  Each one said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  So profound was their sadness and their hopelessness that Jesus was moved to tears of empathy.  As the prophet Ezekiel experienced a sign of God's life giving Spirit in his vision, so Martha and Mary would learn what God's promise of new life meant.  Out of the depths of their grief they cried out to one in whom they believed—the one who listened to them, who wept with them, and who gave new life.

Jesus prayed to the God who listens, Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me . . . He said this prayer to demonstrate to the mourners who had gathered in Bethany that his power to give new life came from his relationship with God. But his words also revealed an aspect of God's nature:  God listens to those he loves—which just happens to be all of us—all humanity.

So then if we believe that God listens to not only the prayers we speak and think, but also the prayers we make without words, the prayers we make by our deeds, the prayers of our fears and anxieties, even the prayers of our hopelessness, we can expect that new life will come.  God's spirit will not only offer us the strength to “carry on,” but also the gift of joyful, new life.

How then can we describe our godly hope that rises from the depths of our lives?  Psalm 130 ends with these words (which I am changing a bit), People of St. Nicholas', hope in the Lord.  For with the Lord there is steadfast love and with him there is great power to redeem.

And Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, they will live.

Yes, we can trust—we truly do know, as did Ezekiel and Martha and Mary, that our hope rests in God, who loves us, who listens to us and who gives us new life!

The 4th Sunday of Lent - Blindness and Sight

The sermon this Sunday was done in dialog with one of the St. Nicholas’ parishioners.  The following reflects some of the points we talked about.

As we listen to the story of Jesus healing the man born with blindness from the Gospel of John, there are several contexts we need to think about in order to understand the story.

First, John said Jesus had been teaching in the temple and so infuriated the religious authorities that they were planning to stone him.  He hid himself and left the temple in order to avoid these authorities.  Now he is just walking along with his disciples; he is not seeking conflict or looking to impress others.  However, when his disciples express concern about whose sinfulness caused the man’s blindness, Jesus decides to act.  He wants the disciples to see that God’s love does not look at sin, but about what is needed to make people whole and well.

Next, we can see the issues that concern the gospel writer and the community for whom he wrote.  At the time this gospel was written, there was much conflict between the religious authorities and those who were following Jesus’ teaching.  It was possible to be kicked out of the synagogue for claiming to follow Jesus’ way.  The issues of who was being faithful to God’s Law, who was going to be included, and who was going to be excluded clearly came to the surface in John’s telling of this story.  These questions still concern us today in our churches—often making us look to others as rigid and uncaring as the religious authorities appear here.  Institutional power looks ugly when it is practicing exclusion.

Then, we are hearing this story in the season of Lent.  During this season we are called to examine our shortcoming as a community, as well as individuals.  What are our shortcomings as Episcopalians?  What are our shortcomings in this community of St. Nicholas’?  We should be praying to discern how we have fallen short of God’s call to us as a community?

And then we should take action to remedy this. 

Finally, we are hearing this story one day before the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   How have we been blind to the harm that injustice based on categories of race and ethnicity has done?   How can our eyes become open?   Perhaps through the power of the Holy Spirit we can become willing to see in new ways.  Our willingness and the power of the Spirit may lead us with John Newton, a former captain of a slave ship who became an Anglican priest, to proclaim:  “Amazing grace . . . ‘Twas blind, but now I see.”