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What If It Were True?
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 16, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Corinthians 15:12-20 Luke 24:1-27
The shout goes up throughout the world: “He is risen!” and for ages the resounding cry has come back, “He is risen indeed!” But perhaps this morning we should shout a little louder given the multitude of counter claims to the received faith recently in the news: that Jesus walked on ice rather than water; that Judas was not his betrayer but his one and only confidant; that Jesus’ body was never buried but consumed by birds of prey; that prayer not simply is ineffective but injurious to our hearts? Amid these well-timed headlines soon to be followed by well-placed best-sellers we, nevertheless, offer our joyous assent to the only news worth our lives saying, “He is risen indeed!” But is he? Is he who was dead really alive? We wake this morning, whether modern or increasingly postmodern people, whether skeptics or believers who have never ceased to be astonished by the gospel, we wake asking anew in light of all that we think we know, “What if it were true?” Three things must be said in the beginning about the context of our asking. First of all we wake in a time when truth, even according to the scientific community, is up for grabs. Curiously the evidence that Jesus walked on ice or that his body was never buried returns us to the Enlightenment, to old-fashioned scientific proof and a Newtonian universe wherein the table exists because I scrub it! But in an increasingly postmodern age, paradigms shift, the universe expands…or contracts, time itself is strung out into unimagined dimensions, certitude fails. Truth is what I experience, they say, knowledge subjective, perspectives personal and prone to distortion. But, we say, what if it were true that Christ is risen, “true in the dumb sense,” says theologian Robert Jenson, “the sense with which we all use the word when behaving normally….” What if, in the context of a time with no truth to tell, what if it were true that he is risen? In the second place we wake in a time when what it means to be human apparently is up for grabs. It is confusing enough that the lines of demarcation blur around our beginnings and endings given what we may dare biologically; but even more critical to our self-understanding is the question of what it means to live as human beings who have been given a destiny. A destiny! The word itself sounds odd in our ears. Consider our children plugged into ipods and IM-ing day and night, awash in communication but ill-equipped (by us) to discern what of the cacophony is life-giving and what is death-dealing, what is worth their lives and what is a sham. We are “deconstructed selves” say the philosophers, “temporary and accidental meeting places of conflicting forces and impulses.” Perhaps, we say, but what if it were true that in Christ’s rising our destiny is eternal life, eternal life being another word for God? Though more to the point of the text before us and in the third place, we wake this morning as those for whom the story that once promised to make sense of the disparate facts of our days has been forgotten or never learnt or appears now merely to be one option on the cultural, economic, moral and religious smorgasbord of the day. “The narratives with which we rightly are so impressed,” says Jenson, “the grand narratives of cosmological physics and evolutionary biology, and modernity’s social and political narrative of…liberty” have become the over-arching narratives into which we try and fit the story of God. But what if it were true that he is risen? Then it would be cosmology and evolution and every fly-by-night socio-political narrative that ultimately wound be be fit into the story of God’s purposes...if it were true! What if it were true? For reasons neither modern nor postmodern but as ancient as the human condition, this was the question on the lips of the apostles, according to Luke, a question that lingered late into the afternoon of that first day of the week when two of his followers were walking to Emmaus. In a sense, they also were people with a story that no longer could make sense of the disparate facts before them, were human beings suddenly without a destiny, were believers whose certitude had been shaken by the headlines. Before these last three days, they had understood their history over the centuries as “a story in search of an ending…[and]…had thought that the ending was going to happen with Jesus….Clearly, it had not,” says New Testament scholar N.T. Wright. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” the two disciples said to the stranger who had joined them along the way. They had hoped Jesus would bring the story to a glorious conclusion. But the crucifixion was the end of this hope because the crucifixion meant that the story was stalled in exile, meant that though they physically had returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, God’s promise had not been fulfilled. Israel’s God had not become king of the world, but rather the world, when they woke, was still ruled by pagans. “This explains, of course, why the two disciples were arguing so vigorously,” says Wright. “They had been traveling up a road that they thought was leading to freedom, and it turned out to be a cul-de-sac.” Moreover all this talk from the women about an empty tomb and angels simply added to the confusion. Therefore they were rehearsing what they knew for sure as they walked. And what they knew led them to conclude that the things Jesus had told them—especially concerning his rising on the third day--could not be true. He was dead and not alive; they were lost and not found; and though Emmaus was only seven miles down the road, they were exiles far from home. But notice next what the stranger does. He does not add to the facts as they know them nor does he dispute the facts they have recounted before him. Rather he is distressed because they have been telling the right story the wrong way. So he begins from the beginning “to tell the story—differently.” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. What if it were true? I think, in a very real sense, he has come as a stranger along side us this morning through the scriptures, asking what we are discussing as we traveled from our separate ways. Oh, we say, we were discussing the latest news. Had he not read the headlines? Of course we had expected by now, we say, a unified field theory to make sense of the universe, a theory into which we might still be able to fit a Creator, metaphorically speaking. Oh, how foolish you are, he says to us as he said to the disciples long ago, and how slow of heart to believe. Slow of heart we are because we live as though we have all the time in the world to believe but I tell you, by the end of the hour each one of us will walk through those doors either living as though it were true or not. For if it is true that Jesus is alive and death defeated and the future pried open for the God who has loved us in this way, then everything is changed! But in what way? In the first place, as soon as we even ask the question of truth concerning the God who raised Jesus from the dead, says Robert Jenson, “consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims—say, that ‘Jesus loves me’—contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds”; that will, in the dumb sense, take the sting out of the grave and the victory away from death. The instance Jenson gives of his own mind being blown involves Dorothy Pappadokos who is the organist at the cathedral of St. John the Divine. “While her French-style improvisations are shaking the stones of the building, and my stony heart, when climax upon climax each improbably eclipses its predecessor, I am able to sustain the notion that all God’s various holy ones are gathered there with us, that in fact we are praising God…‘with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven,’ that if only we could see what is actually there, we would see the mighty thrones and dominions and Mary and Paul and Olaf and my father-in-law and so forth around us in the cavernous spaces…” if it were true! If we lived as though Jesus is risen from the dead! In the second place, if it were true, then we must begin again at the beginning with the God who creates and calls us into being. Here most certainly we have told the right story the wrong way! For to “create, in Scripture, is not to make a thing, not even a big and beautiful and wonderful thing like the cosmos,” says Jenson. “It is rather to initiate, sustain and fulfill a history…[Therefore]…the kind of act creating is…is an act of love.” Or to put it another way, if it were true that, at the center of history, we should meet him whom God has raised from the dead, then we surely are having to do not with an abstract being that causes or makes the universal cosmos, but with the love who chooses, communicates, addresses us in time and tells us (by raising Jesus from the dead!) where this all is going and why. Because of this history and its plot, by the way, prayer makes sense. “Prayer” says Jenson again, “is another of those fantastic ventures faith takes….If the world were a cosmos, prayer would be stupid or arrogant. God, as outside artisan… would have to ‘intervene’ to respond to prayer….But the world is not such a mechanism; [prayer] occurs rather in the freedom of history…a history in which we are participants.” So in the second place if we lived as though it were true, then we will know ourselves not as “temporary and accidental meeting places of conflicting forces and impulses” but as the praying animals, included in the plot by the God whose love has called us into being from the beginning. Then finally if it were true that he who was dead is alive, we may be those who live out our days as though he will continue to surprise us! The difference between a dead Jesus and a living Christ is this: the living surprise us and the dead cannot. Or to put it another way, if someone is alive we await the future, we await surprising events which, when they happen, we will recognize as right new twists in plot of God’s history. If he is alive then we must ask not “what would Jesus do” but live with eyes wide open to the surprising thing he is doing and will do next; with hearts and minds available for who we will become because he lives! So it was with the two on the road to Emmaus, though they did not yet realize it. As they drew near to the village, it was evening and they urged the stranger to stay with them. So he went in, says Luke, and when he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to them. Suddenly their eyes were wide open and they saw what actually was there, saw that the idle tale was true, saw that this stranger was their surprising Lord alive! In an instant they turned around and headed back to Jerusalem, shouting down the long corridor of history the news that has never ceased to astonish the world. “He is risen!” they cried. Let the people say, “He is risen indeed!” |