NOTE: Here are my thoughts and reflections from this morning's worship on Easter Sunday 2015. It was a sweet culmination to a full and beautiful Holy Week. Now it is chill time for a few days - and then onward towards our sabbatical reflections cuz according to our countdown clock it is only 25 days, 610 hours and 36,649 minutes! (And check out these great pix by Gillian Jones in the Berkshire Eagle @ http://photos.berkshireeagle.com/2015/04/05/photos-easter-sunday-services-at-first-church-of-christ/#1)
Христос воскрес - Khristos voskres
I am so glad
you have chosen to be a part of today’s Feast of the Resurrection. It is the
heart and high point of our life together.
It is the essence of the Christian way in the world – an authentic
celebration of spirit and flesh – that tells the whole world God’s YES is
greater than all our NOs! Easter Sunday proclaims that the world can do
whatever it wants – it can kill Jesus, it can ignore the truth, it can wound
the innocent and pay homage to hatred instead of hope - and God is still going
to raise Christ from the dead.
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And more
than that, God is not going to run away from our brokenness and pain but plants
Christ smack dab in the middle of our reality again and again and again. That’s why Jesus isn’t in the tomb when the
women arrive to take care of what they thought was in order. St. Mark’s gospel
makes clear that Jesus has moved on beyond death because he’s got more love to
share with the world. One of my mentors
in faith, the late Clarence Jordan, who was the founder of Koinonia Farms and
the inspiration for Habitat for Humanity, used to talk about Easter like this:
The
resurrection of Jesus was simply God’s unwillingness to take our NO for the
final answer. God raised Jesus, you see, not as an invitation to us to
come to heaven when we die, but as a declaration that now everything real is
holy because God has established permanent, eternal residence on earth. The
resurrection, you see, places Jesus firmly on THIS side of the grave – here and
now – in the midst of life. He is not standing on the shore of eternity
beckoning us to join him there. He is
standing right beside us now – in our pain and fear, in our joys and in our
sorrows – strengthening us for this life… That is why we must say that on
the morning of the resurrection, God put life in the present tense, not in the
future. God gave us not a promise, but a presence: not so much the assurance
that we shall live someday but that Christ is risen today!
So if Easter
means anything it is that what God showed the world in Jesus is what God
intends for you and me, too! As they
used to say, the proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is NOT the empty
tomb, but the full hearts of transformed disciples – not the rolled away stone,
but a carried away church – committed to sharing with the world all the love that
Jesus made flesh on earth before the Cross.
But here’s the rub:
· No matter how hard you try, you
can’t THINK your way into the blessings of Easter. We’re talking about the presence
of God’s grace in our lives – a living encounter with the Risen Lord – so let’s
be clear: Resurrection living is not
the result of what you think.
· Easter is neither an intellectual
construct nor a philosophical principle you can grasp with your rational mind. It is an intimate encounter with
the living Lord – the mystical presence of Christ within and among us. And
truth be told, this creeps some people out – especially folk like you and me –
middle class citizens with a measure of higher education.
Our whole
world and economy is built upon the premise that knowledge is power. “Cogito
ergo sum” – I think therefore I am – as Rene Descartes said in 1637 giving
shape and form to the Enlightenment.
Actually he said, “Je pense, donc
je suis” because he was a Frenchman – which literally means “I am thinking,
therefore I exist” – but you get my point. Our world, our lives and our
families are built upon the foundation of higher education.
How many
times have you heard it said: Education
is the ticket out of poverty? In the
brave, new world of the 21st century those with advanced degrees
fare far better than those with less formal education. One study in 2013 documented that adults with
a traditional bachelor’s degree earn $22,000 more each year than those with
just a high school diploma. On average college grads earn 63% more in hourly
wages than their high school peers and are twice as likely not to face
unemployment. And let’s not even talk
about those with advanced degrees.
+ The prophet
Isaiah tells us in chapter 55: my
thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the
heavens are higher than the earth, so are
my ways higher than your ways and my
thoughts than your thoughts.
+ In the fifteenth chapter of John’s gospel Jesus says: If the world hates you, be aware that it
hated me before it hated you. If
you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its
own. But you do not belong to the world, I have chosen you out of the world… so
be in the world but not of the world.
+ And St. Paul cuts to the chase in
Romans 12: by the mercies of God, I appeal to
you sisters and brothers to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but
be transformed so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and
acceptable and perfect.
God’s ways,
beloved, are not our ways – so Easter asks us to put aside all our
education, striving and thinking and just let Jesus come to us with love. And
that makes some of us – most of us – crazy.
I know – been there, done that – it breaks your mind. I once had a
spiritual advisor tell me during an exasperating season of despair, “Lumsden,
you are too damn smart for your own good. You actually believe that you can
think your way into God’s grace.”
And he was
right – I did believe that – it didn’t work, of course – I couldn’t
think my way into a living encounter with God’s grace in the resurrection. But
for the longest time I kept on trying.
That is the working definition of insanity, you know? Doing the same
thing over and over but expecting different results. Fr. Richard Rohr put it
like this:
If anything
is universally true it is that most of us are so self-absorbed and addicted to
our habitual patterns of thinking and understanding the world that unless we
interrupt these thoughts with a healthy dose of alternative consciousness, we
will always see the world in black and white terms. We will always think we
have to earn God’s grace. Or think the right way before we can know God’s love.
What’s more, we will always act like we’ve got it together because when you
look at our lives – and our homes and our cars and our advanced degrees –
things look good. We got there by thinking and hard work. So at some
fundamental level we actually believe that we are morally superior to the rest
of the slobs all around us.
· Do you know
what the theologians and spiritual masters call this? Original sin. We truly think that our ways are better than God’s
ways – that our ways will work even when they keep failing – that our insanity
is better than God’s grace.
· Our world
teaches that “the one with the most willpower wins” – and it works – out there
– but it doesn’t work in here. In here,
intimacy with the Lord is not found by addition, but by a process of
subtraction. In our hearts, we have to
let go of stinkin’ thinkin’ so that there is space for grace.
And the best
thing we can do to get ready for God’s love in our hearts is to find time every
day – certainly at the least every week – to stop thinking. When we interrupt
our addiction to insanity, we make space for grace. And do you know what they call that time when we
stop thinking in contemplative quiet? P..pp…pppp...prayer!?! You know that word?
You can say it
– prayer – or you can call it meditation, walking in the woods, art, dance,
playing music or quiet time have all realized that without such an interruption
we continue to believe that we can think our way out of our anger, fear and
shame, when we can’t. Because we’re too damn smart for our own good, we have to
interrupt our thinking to create space for grace. Otherwise, if you always do what you’ve
always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. If you always think what
you’ve always thought, nothing changes.
And the longer we stay locked in our heads, the less capable we are of
sharing healing, hope, forgiveness and peace with others because we haven’t
experienced it first from the inside out.
That’s what
the women who went to the tomb on Easter morning discovered: Jesus had departed
the old ways so that he could share more love.
He didn’t care what the women thought or believed about the
resurrection: he had more important things to do. So when Mary and Magdalene
and Salome showed up thinking they were going to do what they had always done –
anoint a dead body with spices – God confronted them with the enormity of grace
and they fled in awe and amazement.
But let’s be
clear: it was their experience that unlocked their hearts for a new way
of living. They weren’t able to think in the old ways any more – they had just
encountered a love greater than all their thoughts combined – and that love
changes everything. The more they trusted
that love, the more space their hearts had for grace.
Awe and
amazement seized the women at the tomb the Bible says – in time it transformed
them, too – by love. They fled their old ways – gave up their old habits – let
God’s grace transform them so that they no longer conformed to the ways of the
world. God wants to come to you with
this love – God aches to come to you with this grace – so ask yourself: can I
make a little space – a little quiet – a small interruption in my thinking to
receive this gift? If so, then what was
true on the first Easter can be yours forever.
And that, dear people of God, is the good news for those who have ears
to hear.
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