Listen for just a moment, if you would, to some of these announcements taken from church bulletins. We call them “church bloopers”:
Now why begin an Easter sermon like that? Why take these fragments of human frailty and repeat them on Easter morning? I’ll tell you why. Because if you got at least a chuckle out of one or two of those of ever so human blunders, we may be onto something about the meaning of Easter: a little foretaste, if you will, of life in a broader, richer, deeper dimension.
Now, I don’t know how you felt when you piled out of bed this morning. Just another April 23rd: a gray, cold, rainy, spring day, exacerbating cabin fever-hardly an Easter dream. No doubt many of us yesterday, for lack of incentive to leave our homes, found ourselves glued to the news emanating from Miami and Washington, witnessing what this morning’s New York Times describes as a story of a Cuban clan, extreme in its way “but not all that different from what most Cuban families, divided by Fidel Castro’s revolution, have experienced: bitter feelings, thwarted love and ever painful efforts at reconciliation.” A city on edge; a boy returned to his father; the whole matter on Easter weekend illustrating the demons splintering us, prying us apart, riveting our attention again on our frail, limited humanity, riddled by sin.
And smothered by the events in Miami and Washington, the anniversaries of the tragedies of Columbine High School and the Federal Building in Oklahoma City this week; Earth Day, yesterday, 30 years old. My soul! We have word of collapsing fisheries right here off our coast; chunks of the Antarctic ice pack free and floating about in the southern seas, inviting another Titanic, the warmest winters on record, threatening significant climate change, triggering monumental agricultural and demographic dislocation. Those engaged in environmental effort do so with a high sense of urgency and remain shocked by the indifference of the rest of us. Saving the earth is an Easter story if ever there was one! But it fizzled this Easter.
And if it is not the broader world of Elian Gonzales or the crisis of the environment, some of us may have wandered in the drizzle to this Easter service disquieted about any number of things:
An illness in your family continues to wear you down; and you don’t know how, where or when it will end.
Your job isn’t paying you enough to keep your head above water in Boston’s housing market. Where can you go? How can you afford it?
You made an error in judgment that set a range of things unraveling, leaving you even yet weak in the knees.
The person you loved walked out on you last week; and your heart just stopped. “Let’s just be friends” just doesn’t cut it.
And some of you most recently, or perhaps over time, sustained the loss of friend, a family member, a spouse, a child, leaving a vacancy in your soul; something time itself may salve but really never fully heal.
Events, incidents, occasions like these for many of us subvert or vitiate confidence in an Easter hope. And no frivolous reference to church newsletter blunders can relieve the discouragement and cynicism some of us brought to this service this morning.
Well, if that is how you felt this morning, you are in good company. That is how the church people feel who first hear the letter we read a few moments ago. They live in what they consider an unholy hell. In 96 AD the Emperor Domitian wants no part of them; he considers them dangerous threats to his authority. He sends his secret police to close their churches, disperse their congregations, burn their books, obliterate the name of Jesus, torture them until they name “Caesar” as Lord. Resistance to this imperial policy fetches imprisonment, exile, execution. Indeed, the man, John, who sends this letter writes from exile, himself shunted to a desert island named Patmos, because he will not surrender to the threats of Caesar.
And that letter? Indomitable hope! Our author offers a collage of images drawn from the Old Testament, devised when the Jews lived in exile, having survived assault, dispersion, the hatred and contempt of ancient empires. John paints a collage of images pointing to the conviction that although human history erupts in perverse and destructive fashion, showers us with evidence pointing to chaos, dissolution and the survival-of-the-fittest that in truth, human history and the cosmos, amid everything denying it- including death-rests (how can I say this?) human history rests in the hands, on the shoulders, under the sovereignty, subject to the rule of One whose Power ultimately transforms the worst life can do to us. That Power controls our destiny, bears us toward a new community undergirded by a Divine heart engendering a human family at home within a community of mutuality and service.
You see, that wonderful epiphany of John we heard this morning envisages the lineaments of the future the God of Jesus Christ seeks to forge in our behalf. Don’t you love it? A city! A city! Not a suburb. Not a mountain top. Not a verdant glen. Not a rural New England town, not the lake country nor a beach summerhouse where we tend to retreat from the harassment of the city and dare call it “God’s country.” No way! Our author describes a city invaded by a city from on high; a city recreated; a city as if descending from heaven itself, taking everything in our urban constellation and reshaping, transfiguring it. As Eugene Peterson writes, “There is not so much as a hint of escapism in St. John’s future. Many people see the Divine promise as they would a trip to Florida-they think the weather will be an improvement and the people decent. But instead we find ourselves provided with an intensification and healing of the responsibilities of urban employment and citizenship. “God’s future for us is formed, reformed, recreated-just to take Boston for example-out of dirty streets, alleys domiciled by the homeless, drug- laden social clubs, usurious bank fees, tipsy legislators, school truancy, horrendous income disparities, neighborhood rivalry and contempt, bleeding health facilities, construction projects run amok, hypocritical churches, traitorous disciples, not to mention Green Line hassles, winter sports debacles, the Red Sox already a game-and-a-half behind the Yankees, and motorists who drive like they play hockey. . . . John envisions a flesh and blood city-thank God!-recreated, holy, infused with a divine spirit of reconciliation and wholeness.”
But more: John sees a city where the likes of those of us meeting here in this building this morning, with our hymns, our brass, our flowers, our choir, become the whole world at worship and service to the One who finally stands behind the cosmos. No more temples, he insists. No more churches. No more synagogues. No more mosques. No more creeds. No more religions: the world’s peoples-ourselves-the source, the locus, the dynamic of the divine radiance and worship.
And this new city? See! A river of life running through it, nature healed, Earth Day consummated! Starvation in Ethiopia no more. Worldwide AIDS vanished! And trees with leaves for the healing of the nations. What a vision: Serb and Albanian, at one another’s throats in Kosovo, now brothers and sisters in the love of God; Catholics and Protestants in Ulster teetering on fratricide, now siblings in Christ. Blacks and whites in Africa, in America-in Boston-uneasy, apprehensive, now in the Holy City bonded children of the Divine. Elian, hostage to a strife-riven world, now in the Holy City just another little boy among a couple of billion of little boys living in peace among the human race made, by God’s grace, the human family.
The future of God, you see, resides in a city where human dislocation and injustice dissolve and a new creation-a new urban creation-molded and created by loving hands and hearts settles among us, the tears wiped from our eyes, mourning and crying and pain no more, Death gone. God with us. Indomitable hope embracing us: “Behold I create all things new.”
Can we see intimations of this new creation among us now? Maybe. Can we live anticipating this new social fabric? Perhaps. It takes eyes of the soul that see, it takes a heart that is open, a faith that will not be bulldozed by betrayal or falsehood, a hope refusing to wilt under cruelty, boredom, or cynicism. And hope, endowing the capacity to discern the divine presence alive and at work among us when everything else appears bleak, drab, gray and simple survival seems the order of the day.
My young colleague Hamilton Throckmorton reports the following story. It helps us with an Easter point of view. It joins the gift of the city descending from heaven with the reality of our earth seen through the eyes of love and hope. Intimations of the new creation. “Once upon a time,” he writes,
I had a young friend named Philip. Philip lived in a nearby city, and Philip was born with Down Syndrome. He was surely a delightful child-happy, it appeared, but increasingly aware of differences between himself and other children.
Philip regularly attended Church school. His teacher was also a friend of mine. My Sunday school friend taught third grade in the church school at a nearby Methodist church and Philip attended his class along with nine other eight year old boys and girls.
My Sunday-school-teacher-friend teaches very creatively. Many of you know eight years olds. And Philip, with his differences, was not readily accepted as a member of his third-grade Sunday school class. But my friend was a good teacher and he helped to facilitate an enthusiastic and good group of eight year olds. They learned, laughed, and played together. They really did care about each other, even though, as we all know, eight year olds don’t express their affection for one another very often or very well. But my teacher-friend could see they enjoyed each other and he reveled in it. He also could see and knew that Philip was not really a part of that group. Philip, of course, could not choose to be different, nor did he intend or want to be. He just was. And that is the way things were.
My Sunday school teacher-friend came up with a marvelous design for his church school class on the Sunday following Easter last year. You know those things that panty-hose come in, the containers that look like great big eggs? My friend collected ten of these to use on that Sunday. The children loved it when he brought them into the room. He planned to give each child a great big egg. It turned out to be a beautiful spring day and he asked each child to go outside on the church grounds and find a symbol of new life, put it in the egg and bring it back to the classroom. They would mix them all up and then open them and show-and-tell their new life symbols and surprises together one by one.
Well, they did this and it proved spectacular. It was confusing. It was wild. The kids ran around, gathered their symbols and returned to the classroom. They put all the big eggs on a table and then my teacher-friend began to open them. The children eagerly gathered around the table. He opened one and there lay a dandelion. And they “ooed” and “aahed.” He opened another and they found a little butterfly. “Beautiful,” they screeched.
My teacher-friend opened another, and there they saw a rock. And as third graders will, some laughed, and some said, “That’s crazy! How’s a rock supposed to show new life?” But the little guy whose rock they discussed spoke up. He said, “That’s mine. I knew all of you would get flowers, and buds, and leaves and butterflies and stuff like that. So I found a rock because I wanted to be different. And for me, that’s new life,” They all laughed again. My teacher-friend said something to himself about the unique profundity found in eight year olds and went on opening the egg surprises.
He opened the next one and he found nothing there. The other children, as eight year olds will, said, “That’s not fair. That’s dumb! Somebody didn’t do it right.”
Well, at about that time my teacher friend felt a tug on his shirt and looked down and Philip stood beside him. “That’s mine, Philip said. “It’s mine” And the children, being children, said, “Oh Philip, you don’t ever do things right. There’s nothing there.”
“Oh, I did too do it,” said Philip. “I did it. It’s empty. The tomb is empty.”
The class went silent, a very full silence. And for all of you here this morning who have a hard time believing in a miracle of hope and seeing it from time to time, I want to tell you that a miracle happened that day last spring. From that time on, things were different. Philip suddenly became a part of that group of eight-year-old children. They took him in. They included him. He freed himself from the tomb of his differentness.
Well, Philip died last summer. His family knew from the time of his birth that he wouldn’t live out his full human life span. His little body contained too many hurtful and wrong things. And so, late last July with an infection that most other children would fend off easily, Philip died. The mystery of life enveloped him completely.
His family held Philip’s memorial service in that church. And on the day of the service nine eight-year-old children marched right up to that altar, not with flowers to cover up the stark reality of his death. Nine eight-year-olds, with their church school teacher, marched right up to that altar and lay on it an empty egg, an empty, old, discarded holder of panty hose.
A drab, gray Easter Day? Not on your life! The creation of all things new. Indomitable hope! Watch for it. Expect it. See it. Celebrate it.
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