Praise the Lord -- Christ is risen! My dad used
to ask, “How’s your second act?” Yeah, and how’s your sermon after Easter
Sunday? I ask three favors this morning -- 1) This is not really a native drum,
and we do not do native drumming or dancing. But drumming and dancing are
universal instruments and languages for connecting directly with Earth. Who
will help make them more part of our life and our worship together? Help find a
way to keep our drum in the sanctuary and equipped with drumming sticks so we
can drum when we want to? Who will help us to dance? At least to learn to move
to the heartbeat of the universe? 2) Who will help us find ways to recycle?
Our day-to-day and Sunday paper, and other recyclables we use? And identify how
else we might show love and favor to Earth as a congregation? 3) Who will help
us find and fund a projector and screen to use in both life and worship? Just
imagine a projection before us this morning of the first pictures of Earth from
space!
The immigration movements sweeping the world
today may be the calls of our lifetimes. Our nation is far from alone in this.
Immigrants, refugees, exiles, and strangers struggle everywhere! My point of
reference is that first picture we all remember of Earth from outer space. No
boundaries, no borders, no barriers – just this fragile and beautiful “pale blue
dot” dangling there for all to embrace and cherish. My questions become, How
big is my world, my Earth? How big is my human family? How complex and
diverse? How expansive and inclusive? Above all, what kind of world do I hope
for my children? For my children’s children? To the next seven generations?
Is this not less about laws and flags, markets and jobs – and more about what
kind of world? What kind of family? Religiously speaking, how big is my God?
How big, how borderless is our God?
Looking to our “Words for Meditation” – Is our God big enough to have
“set the earth upon its foundations”? Big enough to be “maker
of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen”? Big
enough that “remaining immutable and without change, / you are always
completely in movement?” That “completely outside creation and
completely in every creature, / you fill everything completely”? “You
who are completely outside everything, above everything”? “Not
separated from the world, / for you are in everything, but above
everything”? Big enough, as we learn from Chief Seattle, that “the
Earth does not belong to the human; the human belongs to the Earth?
All things are connected like the blood that unites us all”? That
“humans did not weave the web of life, we are merely strands of it”?
That “whatever we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves”? How big is our
God this Earth and Native American Sunday?
Easter Sunday, the Festival of Resurrection, is just the beginning of
opening ourselves to such unending questions. The morning that Jesus
rises from death is the most opening and, if we will, most “optionalizing”
morning in all human history! It creates every new possibility, every
new hope for the world! God opens life itself -- opens the world,
opens us in every possible way and direction, every element, every season,
every moment in every life cycle. There has not been a morning like it
since God rested on the seventh day of Creation! We get in the gospel
stories for Eastertide glimpses of serving a way past the walls, a way that
is life, not death – a way changing everything, not just something about us–
changing the people and species we are, the world and creation we are.
We are born again by Jesus’ resurrection – out of the walls of the tomb –
through the walls of all the locked doors of our lives where we hide out in
fear along with these disciples – and into the walls of the womb – of new
life – for all creation and for us! It is the living without – without
Jesus, without the walls -- in the sense of losing someone so crucial to us,
and in the sense of setting them free from us alone – it is the living
without that brings us real living within. It is the very absence of
one such as Jesus whom we love so much that may enlarge and enrich the
presence, the passion, the power of God – within us! As well as
between and among us. Jesus makes that promise to us several times on the
night before his death. Eastertide begins with the 40 days to
Ascension, when Jesus clears out of our lives, clears the walls of our
lives, once and forever. Ten days later, on Pentecost, the Spirit
descends, and the walls come tumbling down!
Jesus asks us to prepare to receive Holy Spirit
as his way of coming again to us – to receive this very Spirit of forgiveness –
for the world even as for us – as a way of re-membering him. It is forgiving
without forgetting but remembering as much and far back as we can of all that
has been broken and torn apart in our lives and our life together. In the
exhibit called “A Fine Line,” between mental health and illness, at Northwest
Library through this Wednesday, one person says unforgettably, “Sadness
remembers everything.” Remembers everything!
Only then may we begin to piece our lives and
shared life back together again – in ways new and different -- ways healing and
making us whole. “I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me – for I am the Lord of
the Dance, said he!” Jesus promises to open our every heart, our every mind,
our every door, our every arm, our every border! Our every church, mosque and
temple. We are those who re-member the promise of Jesus. We are the doers of
his memory. By remembering our past with him we also remember our future
without him. Even as the disciples are so sure they are living without Jesus,
they find that he lives within them! The future without Jesus becomes the future
within us – the future yet to be born of us. If we made a past with war, for
example, then what is to keep us from making a future without war? Remembering
Jesus, all things become possible.
How does any of us learn again to live without loved ones? I know
there are many among us who do. Do we not start with receiving
forgiveness? First for ourselves, for the sense in which we might or
should somehow have been able to keep our loved one from dying? “If
only you had been there,” as Lazarus’ sister complains to Jesus. If
only we had prayed better. If only our faith had been stronger.
Then somehow we could have prevented this death to us, this loss and this
grief to us. Jesus is coming right through that wall around us!
That wall of regret and of blaming ourselves. Of holding ourselves
responsible for what we could do nothing about in the end – what has to be
let go of now nevertheless.
Jesus is coming, always, to offer forgiveness –
in the Spirit of the one who has the most to forgive! All who might have done
something to keep him from dying! All who might have done something to let him
be killed! Part of our Good Friday liturgy is a “Roll Call of Confession” –
“Judas, slave of jealousy where are you? I am here. Peter, slave of fear,
where are you? I am here. Thomas, slave of doubt, where are you? I am here.
Pilate, slave of expedience, where are you? I am here.” Anyone of us could
name ourselves for failure to be somewhere we have been called to be, standing
by someone in need. Every one of us knows something of jealousy, fear, doubt,
expediency – of betraying, denying, abandoning, condemning – can I get a
witness? Even now, in this moment, Jesus comes to bring “peace” upon us,
forgiveness upon us, that we might get on with our lives -- that we might get on
with remembering Jesus, remembering all the peacemakers, remembering our own
loved ones – the work of our lives!
Only as we know and accept ourselves as forgiven are we able to forgive
others – all the others who need our forgiveness – whoever, wherever they
are. That same Spirit who comes again for us comes again for all
people! Again, we may start with our own loved ones – with forgiveness
of those who have died on us – who have left us without their actual,
physical, flesh-and-blood presence to us – so that we must do the hard work
of finding they now live within us! Between us! Among us!
They live in the communion of saints. They live in communion we share
with each other – beginning with the most intimate circles of our lives in
faith – those with whom we are “of one heart and soul” – every part of us
now belonging to the whole. It is the resurrection, the forgiveness,
the Spirit of Jesus that give us great power and grace. We remember
Jesus not only in spirit but also in substance – until there is no one needy
among us – and we live together in that unity the psalmist says is like
“precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard!” Blessing us
with the promise of life forever and fully within us!
Walter Wink remarks that the early church could
have left Judas out of the whole. A much less embarrassing way of betraying
Jesus could have been found – if the church had wanted to keep an illusion of
sinlessness and non-hypocrisy. But the church chose to be honest about
Judas – however unclear his part is. Just as the church chose to be
honest about Peter and Thomas – and about you and me! All of us parts
of the church are needed to make up the whole. Jesus forgives us all
-- for we know not what we have done! We rarely set out to do harm to
others. Even the nations may set out to do what they think will be
good. But all that we do without knowing brings harm, to others and to
us – for the harm we do others, and do the earth, Chief Seattle warns us, we
also to do ourselves.
It might help if we were a little more doubting,
like Thomas – if we practiced a little more of what theologians call
“hermeneutical suspicion” toward some of the scriptures and the traditions to
which we are heir! And toward some of the voices of those who lead us – whether
in church or in state. Because Thomas knows the one irreplaceable thing: It is
not the true Jesus we follow -- except that we can touch where he has been
crucified -- wounded for love and for solidarity with the needy and with the
Earth. Jesus comes as the one Henri Nouwen calls “God’s wounded healer. . . .
As followers of Jesus, we can also allow our wounds to bring healing to others.”
We will not settle for anything other, anything less in our leaders. How do we
keep asking the question, will winning the “war on terror” make it right?
Remembering Jesus leads us to see that serving the way of death, even by killing
ourselves in the process of killing others – suicide bombers or just plain
bombers -- cannot be the way to live fully and forever. The way to life is life
itself. The way to peace is peace -- to forgiveness, forgiveness.
As Paul Tillich preaches of the words we hear
when Jesus, our amazing grace, works past our walls – under, over, around, and
through all that separates us in our deathly fear from him in his undying love –
words that our former pastor Bob Olmstead loves to share in their scandalous
stark simplicity – “Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our
darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are
accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you
do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do
not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for
anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the
fact that you are accepted!’ If that happens to us, we experience grace. After
such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more
than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers
sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is
demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual
presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”
Amen.
