Easter Is About You
Sermon
ACCESS TO HIGH HOPE
Second Lesson Sermons For Lent/Easter
Probably the most difficult sermon the Christian preacher is assigned to deliver is the sermon for Easter morning. It is common for our Christian congregations to have an overflowing attendance for the festival services. There is high excitement, because the families of the parish also have other activities planned for the day following worship. Children are all agog with the fun attached to bunnies and baskets. The services are replete with extra special music. The pastor may wonder if he will have enough time to get in the usual time for the sermon. All that is distraction enough. However, the real problem for the pastor is to wonder if one is capable of delivering a message that has the convincing power of what Easter really means for us. That should be perfectly understandable. There is absolutely no evidence in any of the Gospels that the first witnesses to the resurrection understood Easter. The reports are that they "disbelieved for joy."
The disciples counted the witness of the women who had been at the tomb as an "idle tale." It went on that way for days, fifty days to be exact, before the disciples caught on. They had to listen to Jesus expound on the Hebrew Scriptures which anticipated Easter. They had to study the Scriptures themselves to see for themselves. Then came the dawning of understanding with the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. That was the awakening. However, no one, including the disciples, would be convinced about anything simply by hearing that someone came forth from the grave. Easter is far more than that. Easter offers far more than that. That is what the Apostle Paul was getting at in the Second Reading for today. Easter is about you. Easter is about your resurrection. Paul writes, "You have been raised with Christ."
You Have Died
As Paul says, "You have been raised with Christ," he also says, "You have died." The death he writes about is the death you died with Christ. Paul was not talking about the kind of death people talk about when they exclaim, "I could have died!" Such an expression simply describes a shock someone has experienced. The expression usually is as frivolous as the person who says, "I died a thousand deaths," in order to express how stressed the person may have been. There are many flippant expressions about death that are as numerous as the jokes about death. However, some people are obsessed with the concern of death.
Michael Cunningham takes death seriously in his novel The Hours. The novel is about Clarissa Vaughan, who is a re--creation of Mrs. Dalloway, the subject of Virginia Woolf's novel of that same name, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia, Clarrisa, and a third woman, Laura Brown, expose the desperation of their lives for love and the unfulfilled desires that make them fit subjects of death. Clarissa meditates on those lives as hours that have passed. They are hours that have been filled with parties, abandoned families, failed loves, and unrealized hopes. Life is so pressured that jumping out of windows, excess of pills, and death by any means is as quiet, easy, and attractive as registering in a hotel. If they do not end their own lives, people die by accident or are slowly devoured by diseases. The best one can make of it is that there is an hour or two, here or there, that offer some ray of hope. Yet everyone knows that the best hours are followed by hours far darker and much more difficult. Clarissa's daughter, Sally, thinks that death and resurrection are intriguing subjects, and it does not seem to matter whether the central character is a hero, a villain, or a clown. Such meditation on death, morbid as it is, touches only the surface and does not match the depths of what the Apostle Paul was thinking when he says that you have died with Christ. For Paul, dying with Christ is not simply recognizing how much death denies life.
You Have Been Raised
What Paul means by our dying with Christ is that we have died to sin. The death to sin is that death which ends the claim sin has on us before God. As sinners we are guilty before God and would be condemned to life without God. Life without God would be eternal death. That death is totally devastating. The women who could think of life only as hours that pass unfulfilled and unrewarding found life so painful that physical death would be a relief from it. Paul would say the opposite. He would say that the life which is so painful because it is unrewarding is only a symptom that those people are dead already. Their physical death would be the complete separation from God. Their death now is their inability to know God as life.
We die in Christ when we acknowledge that we are sinners and that our Lord Jesus Christ died so that in our stead and for our sake he atoned for our sin. Christ's death on the cross was God's statement to the world that God is willing to be reconciled to us if we acknowledge our need for forgiveness by God's grace. At the same time we die with Christ in baptism and by faith we are also raised with him. We are raised to life that is made new in Christ. The life we have in him is life that knows no end. It is the life which is filled with the Spirit of God. It is life that relieves us of the need to justify ourselves or our behavior before God. We know that this life has been made totally acceptable to him. We are regarded as righteous before God. We do not have to prove ourselves. That means we are totally free to do what has to be done.
Think Heavenly
Our death and resurrection in our Lord Jesus Christ have definite implications for us. Because we do not have to be so self--concerned, so worried about our status before God, we can think heavenly. Paul says, "Set your minds on things that are above." Jewel Hilburn, a character in Bret Lott's novel Jewel, gives us an illustration of such heavenly thinking. Jewel lives happily in the backwoods of Mississippi with her husband Leston and five children. At age forty Jewel gives birth with great difficulty to a daughter, Brenda Kay. Jewel's life changes radically when she is advised that Brenda Kay is Mongoloid with little hope of living beyond the age of two. Jewel is advised to place the child in institutional care and get on with life with the rest of her family. As she struggles with that possibility and twirls it around in her heart and mind she holds Brenda Kay tightly in her arms. She whispers to herself over and over again portions of Psalm 139, "Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there." Jewel knows there is more to the psalm but she concentrates on the phrase, "Thou art there." She is not sure how God is dealing with her, but she concentrates on the presence of God, regardless of how she chooses. God is present, and she knows she can make her decision in the light of that Presence. She is thinking heavenly.
No doubt many of us here have reflected on that psalm under the same kind of pressures as Jewel experienced. We may also have thought of the line from the hymn "Abide With Me:" "I need your presence every passing hour." To set our "minds on things that are above" is not to think about harps, angels, and comfortable clouds. Rather it is to think things through as the people of God who are blessed with the presence of God in all our doings. We know God's presence not only in the troubled times, but as we go about our daily business and routines. One translation of Paul has it, "Be heavenly minded." That is a memorable way of thinking about it. As we roll up our sleeves and get to work in the grubby everyday stuff we are called to do, we can be "heavenly minded."
Don't Be Grounded
As Paul encourages us to be heavenly minded, he also adds, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth." That is hard to do. How in all the world are we going to get along on this earth if we do not think about the things of the earth? What Paul would answer is that he was not encouraging us to ignore everything that is around us, particularly those things for which we are responsible. What he is suggesting is that we not permit the things in this world to control our lives. We are not to become slaves to the creation nor the things within the creation. In E. L. Doctorow's novel The City Of God, there are incidents and persons that seem unrelated. However, the intention of the novel is to show how they are related. The situations portrayed appear to be related by the absence of God or the unwillingness of God to reveal God's presence in life.
One meditation in Doctorow's book contemplates how vast the universe has become for us. The more that we learn about the creation, the more advanced we are in the management of the universe, the more remote God appears to be. That seems to be the case in theology itself. Father Tom Pemberton, an Episcopal priest, gives up on trying to make sense out of his theological study and resigns from the priesthood. He marries Sarah Blumenthal, a Hebrew rabbi with whom he uncovers names of persons responsible for the Holocaust in Poland. At his wedding, the former priest, known as Pem, speaks a prayer in which he challenges God to make up for the lapses in God's attention to all the catastrophes taking place in the world. He suggests that God remake us and that we remake God. The novel closes with a meditation on the future of the city of God. In reality it is a meditation on the city of Man, which will undergo utter physical, emotional, economic, and political confusions that can only create more military totalitarian abuse. That is a good description of how things are when people set their minds on the things on the earth. The human situation without the presence of God creates chaos.
Your Life Is Hidden
The irony is that God has done what Tom Pemberton prays for in his wedding prayer. God has reinvented himself in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, who became one of us to die and rise again for us, so that we can understand God's love for a fallen world. In Christ, God also reinvents us, as we die and rise again in Christ. The fact that we have died and risen with the Lord Jesus Christ by faith in holy baptism means that our lives are "hidden with Christ in God." That may sound like strange language to us. However, when you meditate on that powerful notion you realize how meaningful this is in our lives. Paul is impressing upon us the fact that God is present in the world in and through us. It is in us that the power of God moves. Paul says that is a "hidden" life in Christ, because that is not how the world sees it. For the world the power is concentrated in city hall, the governor's office, and the White House. Power is located on Wall Street and in our giant corporations which effect bigger and larger mergers to concentrate the power even more. For all of that, what has all this great power achieved in ridding the world of violence, hatred, prejudice, racism, anti--Semitism, and war? What has all the power in the world done to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give shelter to the homeless?
Yet the powers for reconciliation, forgiveness, grace, mercy, and genuine charity are concentrated in the people of God, the faithful of our Lord Jesus Christ. They go about their work quietly, faithfully, and effectively in their own homes, in their vocations, and in the society. They are the real glue in the society. They give of themselves and of their possessions to relieve pain, hurt, and want in the world. The world does not recognize and salute these followers of Christ as the great heroes in the society. They appear to be powerless, meek, and mild in the face of Fortune magazine's picks for the most powerful among the wealthy influential people of the world. The people whose lives are hidden in Christ, however, move in and among the world as the people who guarantee the presence of God within the creation and the society.
When Christ Is Revealed
The reason the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the congregation at Colossae was because there was evidence that some teachings alien to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ had been circulating in the congregation. Paul sensed that these teachings were an attempt to make some kind of hybrid of the Christian faith and the Greek philosophy about the universe. People had been attracted to the teachings about a hierarchy of "elemental spirits of the universe," angelic beings who were to be worshiped. These beings were ranked in authority and were to offer some form of reconciliation between humanity and the gods. These teachings represented a blending of astrology and philosophy emerging in ethical regulations of the people's behavior. Paul labeled these teachings simply as human commands offered in the "appearance of wisdom promoting self--imposed piety" (2:23). Paul urged his people to ignore the efforts to make them captive to this "empty deceit" and "human tradition" (2:8). Paul recognized that these instructions were ineffective in dealing with the core problem of self--indulgence. Worse than that, they were antithetical to the work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul did not need to waste time arguing about the existence or non--existence of forces in the universe. What Paul did know was that the fullness of the universe is revealed in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ who is Lord of all and in whom we have died to whatever forces are out there that try to control us. What was obvious in the popular notions of the relationship of the human to the cosmos, or the universe, was that somehow the gods had to be favorable to the creatures. Paul discards the human efforts to suggest how this could happen. What Paul proclaims is that it has already happened in the manner in which our Lord died and rose again to be revealed in us. Now, our lives are already hidden in Christ, there will come that day when Christ will be fully revealed.
It Will Be In Glory
To be sure at the present it is not obvious to the world that our lives are hidden in Christ, but we know it is so, because Paul says, "Christ ... is your life." We know that Christ is present because we understand ourselves, the creation, history, and the daily news in the light of what Christ is to us. We know that our lives are God's gift to us, and the new life God has given us in Christ Jesus is all of life redeemed. That is basic stuff. For us it is a tragedy that the world cannot understand itself this way. This is why we read history with all of its great tales of human knowledge, ingenuity, creativity, technology, and artistry as failure in its inability to solve the great problems of human relations. However, in faith we live in high hope of that day when the Lord of the Creation will be revealed in glory. It is then that we, too, will be revealed in glory with him.
Glory in Christ is what we celebrate anew this Eastertide. It is a fortunate innovation in the liturgical calendar that we no longer refer to the Sundays which follow Easter as the "Sundays after Easter," as though Easter is over. We now call them the "Sundays of Easter." This innovation encourages us to allow the insights of the Sundays of Easter to wash over us until we understand the full implications of what Christ has done and is still doing for us. There was no celebration of glory that first Easter. The disciples fell all over themselves trying to get the import of the day. For us, too, we need much time to contemplate the power and effect of the fact that the Christ, who Paul says is "seated at the right hand of God," lives also within us to serve with us until that day he is revealed in glory and we along with him. Until that day, we can take seriously the advice of the Apostle to "seek the things that are above" serving in humility and being "heavenly minded."
The disciples counted the witness of the women who had been at the tomb as an "idle tale." It went on that way for days, fifty days to be exact, before the disciples caught on. They had to listen to Jesus expound on the Hebrew Scriptures which anticipated Easter. They had to study the Scriptures themselves to see for themselves. Then came the dawning of understanding with the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. That was the awakening. However, no one, including the disciples, would be convinced about anything simply by hearing that someone came forth from the grave. Easter is far more than that. Easter offers far more than that. That is what the Apostle Paul was getting at in the Second Reading for today. Easter is about you. Easter is about your resurrection. Paul writes, "You have been raised with Christ."
You Have Died
As Paul says, "You have been raised with Christ," he also says, "You have died." The death he writes about is the death you died with Christ. Paul was not talking about the kind of death people talk about when they exclaim, "I could have died!" Such an expression simply describes a shock someone has experienced. The expression usually is as frivolous as the person who says, "I died a thousand deaths," in order to express how stressed the person may have been. There are many flippant expressions about death that are as numerous as the jokes about death. However, some people are obsessed with the concern of death.
Michael Cunningham takes death seriously in his novel The Hours. The novel is about Clarissa Vaughan, who is a re--creation of Mrs. Dalloway, the subject of Virginia Woolf's novel of that same name, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia, Clarrisa, and a third woman, Laura Brown, expose the desperation of their lives for love and the unfulfilled desires that make them fit subjects of death. Clarissa meditates on those lives as hours that have passed. They are hours that have been filled with parties, abandoned families, failed loves, and unrealized hopes. Life is so pressured that jumping out of windows, excess of pills, and death by any means is as quiet, easy, and attractive as registering in a hotel. If they do not end their own lives, people die by accident or are slowly devoured by diseases. The best one can make of it is that there is an hour or two, here or there, that offer some ray of hope. Yet everyone knows that the best hours are followed by hours far darker and much more difficult. Clarissa's daughter, Sally, thinks that death and resurrection are intriguing subjects, and it does not seem to matter whether the central character is a hero, a villain, or a clown. Such meditation on death, morbid as it is, touches only the surface and does not match the depths of what the Apostle Paul was thinking when he says that you have died with Christ. For Paul, dying with Christ is not simply recognizing how much death denies life.
You Have Been Raised
What Paul means by our dying with Christ is that we have died to sin. The death to sin is that death which ends the claim sin has on us before God. As sinners we are guilty before God and would be condemned to life without God. Life without God would be eternal death. That death is totally devastating. The women who could think of life only as hours that pass unfulfilled and unrewarding found life so painful that physical death would be a relief from it. Paul would say the opposite. He would say that the life which is so painful because it is unrewarding is only a symptom that those people are dead already. Their physical death would be the complete separation from God. Their death now is their inability to know God as life.
We die in Christ when we acknowledge that we are sinners and that our Lord Jesus Christ died so that in our stead and for our sake he atoned for our sin. Christ's death on the cross was God's statement to the world that God is willing to be reconciled to us if we acknowledge our need for forgiveness by God's grace. At the same time we die with Christ in baptism and by faith we are also raised with him. We are raised to life that is made new in Christ. The life we have in him is life that knows no end. It is the life which is filled with the Spirit of God. It is life that relieves us of the need to justify ourselves or our behavior before God. We know that this life has been made totally acceptable to him. We are regarded as righteous before God. We do not have to prove ourselves. That means we are totally free to do what has to be done.
Think Heavenly
Our death and resurrection in our Lord Jesus Christ have definite implications for us. Because we do not have to be so self--concerned, so worried about our status before God, we can think heavenly. Paul says, "Set your minds on things that are above." Jewel Hilburn, a character in Bret Lott's novel Jewel, gives us an illustration of such heavenly thinking. Jewel lives happily in the backwoods of Mississippi with her husband Leston and five children. At age forty Jewel gives birth with great difficulty to a daughter, Brenda Kay. Jewel's life changes radically when she is advised that Brenda Kay is Mongoloid with little hope of living beyond the age of two. Jewel is advised to place the child in institutional care and get on with life with the rest of her family. As she struggles with that possibility and twirls it around in her heart and mind she holds Brenda Kay tightly in her arms. She whispers to herself over and over again portions of Psalm 139, "Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there." Jewel knows there is more to the psalm but she concentrates on the phrase, "Thou art there." She is not sure how God is dealing with her, but she concentrates on the presence of God, regardless of how she chooses. God is present, and she knows she can make her decision in the light of that Presence. She is thinking heavenly.
No doubt many of us here have reflected on that psalm under the same kind of pressures as Jewel experienced. We may also have thought of the line from the hymn "Abide With Me:" "I need your presence every passing hour." To set our "minds on things that are above" is not to think about harps, angels, and comfortable clouds. Rather it is to think things through as the people of God who are blessed with the presence of God in all our doings. We know God's presence not only in the troubled times, but as we go about our daily business and routines. One translation of Paul has it, "Be heavenly minded." That is a memorable way of thinking about it. As we roll up our sleeves and get to work in the grubby everyday stuff we are called to do, we can be "heavenly minded."
Don't Be Grounded
As Paul encourages us to be heavenly minded, he also adds, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth." That is hard to do. How in all the world are we going to get along on this earth if we do not think about the things of the earth? What Paul would answer is that he was not encouraging us to ignore everything that is around us, particularly those things for which we are responsible. What he is suggesting is that we not permit the things in this world to control our lives. We are not to become slaves to the creation nor the things within the creation. In E. L. Doctorow's novel The City Of God, there are incidents and persons that seem unrelated. However, the intention of the novel is to show how they are related. The situations portrayed appear to be related by the absence of God or the unwillingness of God to reveal God's presence in life.
One meditation in Doctorow's book contemplates how vast the universe has become for us. The more that we learn about the creation, the more advanced we are in the management of the universe, the more remote God appears to be. That seems to be the case in theology itself. Father Tom Pemberton, an Episcopal priest, gives up on trying to make sense out of his theological study and resigns from the priesthood. He marries Sarah Blumenthal, a Hebrew rabbi with whom he uncovers names of persons responsible for the Holocaust in Poland. At his wedding, the former priest, known as Pem, speaks a prayer in which he challenges God to make up for the lapses in God's attention to all the catastrophes taking place in the world. He suggests that God remake us and that we remake God. The novel closes with a meditation on the future of the city of God. In reality it is a meditation on the city of Man, which will undergo utter physical, emotional, economic, and political confusions that can only create more military totalitarian abuse. That is a good description of how things are when people set their minds on the things on the earth. The human situation without the presence of God creates chaos.
Your Life Is Hidden
The irony is that God has done what Tom Pemberton prays for in his wedding prayer. God has reinvented himself in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, who became one of us to die and rise again for us, so that we can understand God's love for a fallen world. In Christ, God also reinvents us, as we die and rise again in Christ. The fact that we have died and risen with the Lord Jesus Christ by faith in holy baptism means that our lives are "hidden with Christ in God." That may sound like strange language to us. However, when you meditate on that powerful notion you realize how meaningful this is in our lives. Paul is impressing upon us the fact that God is present in the world in and through us. It is in us that the power of God moves. Paul says that is a "hidden" life in Christ, because that is not how the world sees it. For the world the power is concentrated in city hall, the governor's office, and the White House. Power is located on Wall Street and in our giant corporations which effect bigger and larger mergers to concentrate the power even more. For all of that, what has all this great power achieved in ridding the world of violence, hatred, prejudice, racism, anti--Semitism, and war? What has all the power in the world done to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give shelter to the homeless?
Yet the powers for reconciliation, forgiveness, grace, mercy, and genuine charity are concentrated in the people of God, the faithful of our Lord Jesus Christ. They go about their work quietly, faithfully, and effectively in their own homes, in their vocations, and in the society. They are the real glue in the society. They give of themselves and of their possessions to relieve pain, hurt, and want in the world. The world does not recognize and salute these followers of Christ as the great heroes in the society. They appear to be powerless, meek, and mild in the face of Fortune magazine's picks for the most powerful among the wealthy influential people of the world. The people whose lives are hidden in Christ, however, move in and among the world as the people who guarantee the presence of God within the creation and the society.
When Christ Is Revealed
The reason the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the congregation at Colossae was because there was evidence that some teachings alien to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ had been circulating in the congregation. Paul sensed that these teachings were an attempt to make some kind of hybrid of the Christian faith and the Greek philosophy about the universe. People had been attracted to the teachings about a hierarchy of "elemental spirits of the universe," angelic beings who were to be worshiped. These beings were ranked in authority and were to offer some form of reconciliation between humanity and the gods. These teachings represented a blending of astrology and philosophy emerging in ethical regulations of the people's behavior. Paul labeled these teachings simply as human commands offered in the "appearance of wisdom promoting self--imposed piety" (2:23). Paul urged his people to ignore the efforts to make them captive to this "empty deceit" and "human tradition" (2:8). Paul recognized that these instructions were ineffective in dealing with the core problem of self--indulgence. Worse than that, they were antithetical to the work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul did not need to waste time arguing about the existence or non--existence of forces in the universe. What Paul did know was that the fullness of the universe is revealed in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ who is Lord of all and in whom we have died to whatever forces are out there that try to control us. What was obvious in the popular notions of the relationship of the human to the cosmos, or the universe, was that somehow the gods had to be favorable to the creatures. Paul discards the human efforts to suggest how this could happen. What Paul proclaims is that it has already happened in the manner in which our Lord died and rose again to be revealed in us. Now, our lives are already hidden in Christ, there will come that day when Christ will be fully revealed.
It Will Be In Glory
To be sure at the present it is not obvious to the world that our lives are hidden in Christ, but we know it is so, because Paul says, "Christ ... is your life." We know that Christ is present because we understand ourselves, the creation, history, and the daily news in the light of what Christ is to us. We know that our lives are God's gift to us, and the new life God has given us in Christ Jesus is all of life redeemed. That is basic stuff. For us it is a tragedy that the world cannot understand itself this way. This is why we read history with all of its great tales of human knowledge, ingenuity, creativity, technology, and artistry as failure in its inability to solve the great problems of human relations. However, in faith we live in high hope of that day when the Lord of the Creation will be revealed in glory. It is then that we, too, will be revealed in glory with him.
Glory in Christ is what we celebrate anew this Eastertide. It is a fortunate innovation in the liturgical calendar that we no longer refer to the Sundays which follow Easter as the "Sundays after Easter," as though Easter is over. We now call them the "Sundays of Easter." This innovation encourages us to allow the insights of the Sundays of Easter to wash over us until we understand the full implications of what Christ has done and is still doing for us. There was no celebration of glory that first Easter. The disciples fell all over themselves trying to get the import of the day. For us, too, we need much time to contemplate the power and effect of the fact that the Christ, who Paul says is "seated at the right hand of God," lives also within us to serve with us until that day he is revealed in glory and we along with him. Until that day, we can take seriously the advice of the Apostle to "seek the things that are above" serving in humility and being "heavenly minded."
