Why are you here: April 21, 2019

Luke 24:1-12                                                                                                                        

Easter, Year C                                                                                                                          

            I have a question for you all.  Why are you here?  I am sure there are many reasons. Many of you might not be sure what that reason is.  Some of you are here because you come every Sunday and church and faith are important to you.  Some of you are here because it’s Easter and your family has always come on Easter. It’s a tradition. Some of you are here because the world is changing far too fast and you yearn for something that doesn’t change, something you can rely on.  Some of you are here because you want to hear the music and see the church full of lilies and azaleas.  And while some reasons may be better than others, I don’t believe there is a bad reason to be at church.  Because the ultimate reason for your presence here today is that God wants you here and will use whatever excuse necessary to get you here.

            While I do not know why you are here, I bet that none of you are here for a surprise.  I suspect very few people (if any) came to church thinking, I wonder what’s going to happen today.  Is Jesus going to rise again?  Are we going to sing Jesus Christ is Risen Today?  We come to Easter Sunday with a certain set of expectations.  And I get that. I know what it is like to go to church with expectations.  I was raised Catholic and one of the things I loved about the Catholic Church was the music. I go to Catholic Church once a year when I am on vacation and visiting my parents in New York and let me tell you, I get very annoyed if I don’t hear any of my favorite hymns.  Often I end up there around July 4^th and get a bunch of patriotic hymns, which really annoys me.  I think, I show up once a year, you would think that they could play my hymns.  I realize that is not a good attitude.  I should be there to worship God, but sometimes, I get too wrapped up in nostalgia and end up irritated.

            When the women went to the tomb, we know what they were expecting.  They were carrying spices so that they could anoint Jesus’ dead body.  It was an important religious custom that they were performing.  Of course, that is not what they ended up doing.  As we all know (because we have heard the story) the stone was rolled away and the tomb was empty.  No dead body to anoint.  The text says that they were perplexed.

            The windows in my office overlook our beautiful cemetery and I often see people visiting graves of loved ones who have died, either carrying flowers or just going to visit.  Imagine one of those people arriving at a grave and seeing the gravestone pushed over and a gaping hole with fresh dirt around it.  It is almost unimaginable.  Consider the fear, the confusion, the anxiety.  Would there be hope?  Probably not…because dead people don’t come back to life.  It’s one of things in life we depend on, death and taxes.  Once a body is buried or put in a tomb, that body stays  there. 

            In the Gospel story, when these women discovered the empty tomb, they were approached by two men in dazzling clothes (most likely angels).  The presence of these men did not bring comfort. They brought more fear.  The women could only bow their heads.  Instead of greeting the women or telling them not to be afraid (which is what angels typically did), these two men asked them a question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”  Then the angels reminded the women of the things that Jesus said to them when he was alive.  Meanwhile, we the readers are drumming our fingers impatiently asking ourselves why these women are so obtuse.  Jesus told them this was going to happen.  Why are they so surprised?  Why?  Because he died! These women saw him die and saw him buried.  Where else would they go to look for him besides a tomb?

            To their credit, they were able to take it all in.  When the angels reminded them of what Jesus said, they remembered Jesus’ words, heard them with an entirely different perspective. They remembered how they felt about him when he was alive, the way he stirred not only their hearts, but the hearts of the masses, the way he healed people, the way he loved without condition.  They remembered him and his words.  In remembering, they believed.  They were able to overcome their limited expectations and find hope in that empty tomb. 

            Why do you look for the living among the dead?  We do that all of the time.  After the horrible fire was extinguished at Notre Dame Cathedral, we saw pictures of the charred remains. We saw the video of the wooden steeple falling to the ground. We saw the hole in the vaulted ceiling.  But the most amazing picture was that of the gold cross surrounded by smoke and embers, seemingly untouched.  It stands in defiance of the wreckage that surrounds it.   Life in the midst of death.

            It might seem that the question those two angels asked is meant to point out the error on the part of the women, the foolishness of looking for Jesus Christ in a tomb.  But they weren’t foolish at all.  They were loyal to the end.  What they realized deep in their hearts, was that sometimes we do find the living God in the most desolate of places. Despite the fact that they were expecting to find a dead body, they were open to the possibility of life.  If they weren’t, they would not have listened to those angels.  They would have come up with a rational explanation for it all.  They laid down their meager expectations as soon as they were reminded of Jesus’ words. 

            In the resurrection stories, Jesus often had to remind the disciples, before they could recognize him. In the Episcopal Church, we do that every Sunday when we celebrate communion. We don’t just do it on special days.  We do it every Sunday because we need that reminder.  Our lives are so full of distractions---we need someone to remind us every Sunday of who Jesus was, what Jesus said, how we died, and how he rose again.  Read the Eucharistic Prayer.  It’s all there.  We say those words every Sunday. Then because Jesus realized that words are not always enough, we receive the body and blood of Christ at the altar rail. 

            God calls us to let go of our meager expectations. Our Lord is so much bigger than we can imagine.  He comes to us not only in the emptiness of a tomb, but in the charred remains of a burned cathedral, or the steel beams forming a cross in the wreckage after 9-11, or the darkest moment of our lives.  Death, nor fire, nor war, nor sin can conquer our God or confine our God.  Allow yourselves to be surprised by God.  Allow yourself to be reminded of God’s deep and enduring love.  Come to God’s altar. Come again and again. 

            Sometimes the challenges of our lives forces us to build walls around our hearts and we find that it is easier not to be reminded of God’s love, because then we open ourselves to being disappointed.  I understand that fear.  But this is Easter Sunday and those walls cannot protect you from a living God.  If we believe in a living God and a loving God, then those walls will shatter.  They will come down and God will come in to our hearts and our lives.    

What is your sacrifice?: April 19, 2019

Good Friday

            On April 12th, 1963, while Martin Luther King was in the Birmingham jail because of the demonstrations against segregation, eight prominent Alabama clergymen (including the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama) published a letter in the local newspaper.  The letter urged people to cease their support of Martin Luther King as he was inciting violence, despite the peaceful intent of the protests.  Four days later, on Good Friday, Martin Luther King wrote a lengthy response to these clergy men.  The letter is referred to as “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It would be impossible for me to summarize it as the letter as it is approximately 7,000 words, and they are all important words. 

            The letter was critical of what King referred to as the “White Moderate”—those who supported desegration but wanted to wait until a more appropriate time.  King was also critical of the white churches.  He wrote: “But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

            It is not a coincidence that he wrote these words on Good Friday, a day when the church talks the most about Jesus’ sacrifice, a day when we are reminded of the betrayal of not only Judas, but Peter and the other disciples who abandoned Jesus when he needed them the most.  At my last church we always did a drama for Palm Sunday. As the assistant, it was my task to cast the drama.  There were of course a few people who I called on several times.  At one point one man said to me, “How come I always have to be the bad guy?”  I responded, “The only good guy in this story is Jesus and no one wants to play him either.”  It’s true.  If you look at all the people in the story that we hear every Palm Sunday and every God Friday (which includes Peter, the chief priests, Pilate, the soldiers, the crowd), no one ever comes out looking good.  Only Jesus, and he gets crucified. 

            Of course the biggest betrayal comes from those closest to Jesus--his disciples.  We all know about Judas and his outright betrayal.  We know about Peter’s denial.  Yet there were 10 other apostles.  Where did they go? Where were they during the trial?  Where were they at the crucifixion?  The Gospel of John mentions that one of the 12 apostles was at the foot of the cross.  The Gospel does not name the disciple.  It only refers to the “beloved disciple.”  I sometimes wonder if that was done so that we could all see ourselves in that spot.  There were some women (including Jesus’ mother) who were at the foot of the cross, but the other 11 disciples were missing.  

            We can’t be sure why they are missing, but since the Gospel tells us later that they went into hiding because they were afraid, I assume they were trying to save themselves.  They were afraid that if people associated them with Jesus, they would either be arrested or crucified.  I do not blame them. They were terrified and I would have been as well.  They were not ready for this kind of sacrifice.

            I often wonder if I would have been brave enough to support Martin Luther King as a white pastor at that time.  I just heard a pastor talk about the experience of having to flee in the night because his father had the audacity to work with African American pastors in the 1960s.  His life was threatened.  The life of his family was threatened.  His father risked a great deal to stand with African American pastors and he paid a price.  I am not sure I would have been that brave. I would have almost surely been part of the white moderate. 

            In the quote I read at the beginning of this sermon, King said that we need to recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church.  Yet we can see that before the early church was born, the leaders of that early church made a lot of mistakes. They weren’t ready to sacrifice, not until after the resurrection.  They needed to witness not only Jesus’s sacrifice, but his triumphal re-entry. 

            It’s hard to reclaim that sacrificial spirit because we have been comfortable for far too long.  Most people don’t come to Holy Week service.  Sometimes it is because work or family makes that difficult.  But sometimes I think it is because we would really rather just skip over the sacrifice and rejoice in the triumph of the resurrection.  We feel that the sacrifice already happened and now we can just enjoy the benefits of that sacrifice.  Unfortunately, without the sacrifice, as Martin Luther King said, we forfeit our authenticity.  If we cannot stand up for unpopular truths and marginalized groups, then we are no longer the church that the early apostles created and ultimately died for. 

            I am not going to tell you what sacrifice looks like for you.  Only you can know that. But for me, it means that I can no longer let fear determine my actions or reactions.  I cannot constantly worry about what other people will think.  Good Friday asks us all to consider what sacrifice looks like for us.  If you are already the kind of person who likes to “tell it like it is,” then doing that more, isn’t really a sacrifice.  For some of us sacrifice will look like more listening and less talking.  For some of us, it will be about speaking out more.  Only you and God can know what sacrifice looks like for you.  But I can tell you one thing, if the sacrifice feels good and is easy, it’s not sacrifice.  If it makes you a little sick and anxious, it just might be. 

            While sacrifice is not easy, it is not the end.  At the end, we have resurrection.  Martin Luther King never gave up on the church and Jesus never gave up on his disciples.  He forgave them after his resurrection and they were transformed into a new p eople---a people bold enough to proclaim the Gospel in a hostile environment.  The last line of Martin Luther King’s Letter was: “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”  That is what Christian hope looks like.

****I encourage you to read the full letter: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html