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Reconciled! Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 4, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Corinthians 5:14-21 Matthew 27:57-28:20
Easter 2010! “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” The shout goes up this year in a world stalked evermore by terror and violence against the innocents, in a nation divided by ideology, threatened by hatred and ripe for a lynching, in a church shamed by its own arrogance and lies and self-deception. But the shout also goes up in countless hearts and minds gathered by a story that both defies rational belief and yet tells the truth, a story that has gathered us around a Word too good to be true, and will send us out once again with the daunting message of reconciliation. “As a wavering Christian and occasional rationalist,” writes author Walter Kirn in today’s New York Times Magazine, “I’ve always found Easter (which I sometimes think of as the New Testament’s Passover 2.0) a singularly problematic holiday, both in its cheery, secularized aspects and its grisly, credulity-straining religious form. My considerable respect for Easter in theory,” he goes on, “and my shallow responses to it in practice, left me feeling inadequate and frustrated. Year after year I tried and failed to feel the profound sense of renewal and gratitude—of hitting bottom and coming back—that the liturgically crucial feast is said to inspire in countless souls that I kept wishing and praying included mine. This spring my hunger for an uplifting Easter is especially acute. I doubt that I am alone.” Given the reasoned doubts many in this sanctuary may share with Kirn as to the plausibility of Easter morning, Matthew’s account of the resurrection would, at first glance, be tailor-made for a people in love with facts, in search of evidence, in sympathy with those suspicious of the church’s proclamation. Pains are taken by Matthew to assure any who are listening for evidence that the same witnesses of Jesus’ death on a cross [he really died], were also present at his burial [he was actually buried] and were the first to be told after the stone was rolled away, “He has been raised from the dead [He is risen indeed!].” Though they were merely women, these witnesses could attest to the truth of the early church’s kerygma: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day.” Then there is the command from Pilate that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest the body be stolen by the disciples. This is soon followed by the report of a counter plot concocted when the body is nowhere to be found: pay the soldiers a large sum of money to say “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.” Brilliant! say the skeptics. Balderdash, says Matthew. To the charge that the body was stolen [a charge which has sold thousands of books in my lifetime and was obviously a bestselling idea in the century following the resurrection], Matthew adds a story meant to squelch the rumor first spread in order to silence the disciples’ confident shout that he is risen indeed. All of which leads us to conclude that the community receiving Matthew’s gospel for the first time was a community and a time like our own, wherein some worshipped Him--but some doubted. Still the reports of reliable witnesses and an account of lies concocted to refute the truth are merely a gloss on the greater doubts which hold us back from worshipping Him today. For while these are interesting details given us by Matthew, they cannot do business with the darker questions which keep us from faith. And lest you think I am speaking of the problem Christ’s bodily resurrection poses to our enlightened, twenty-first century reason, think again. The problem here is not with the way we know what we know, meaning how our sophisticated scientific method fares against the credulity-straining claims of Christian belief. The problem on this Easter Sunday is not finally with our heads. The problem is the problem posed by the credulity-straining claims of the resurrection on our hearts as we survey the world in which we live, the planet ordered by our enlightened minds, the darker pages of history stretching behind us with holocausts too numerous to name and turning us now to face terrors that are beyond human comprehension. As Walter Kirn mildly put the same point, “The past year has been a test of faith for Americans of all sorts, even atheists, and on many fronts. Take our long and agonizing vigil at the grave site of what once was termed ‘the new economy.’…The rock in front of this tomb remains in place…and the day of rejoicing still appears far off. This seems true in the realm of politics as well…and the winding down of the battle for Iraq. Unity and peace, where are ye? Hidden.” We hear the claim that God has raised Jesus from the dead, that all power in heaven and earth is given to him, that God has reconciled the world to himself and we want to shout not “He is risen!” but “Show me! Show me that power in our city streets and on the operating tables next door. Show me that reconciliation within our nation’s capitol and among the church’s wretched faithful. Show me that truth at the edge of my true love’s grave.” Precisely here, within sight of our loves and losses, is human doubt most honestly voiced. I think of a young man’s letter to author Reynolds Price, written as cancer ravaged his body: “I want to believe in a God who cares…because I may meet him sooner than I had expected. I think I am at the point where I can accept the existence of a God, but I can’t yet believe he cares about us.” For evidence of that care, I turn to the incarnation, to the Christmas claim that God was in Christ. There I see God’s love. But the resurrection makes a more radical claim: that the God who raised Jesus from the dead has overcome darkness and evil and death itself. Here the evidence, we think, is slim! “Many times in Christian churches,” writes Annie Dillard, “I have heard the pastor say to God, ‘All your actions show your wisdom and love.’ Each time I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, ‘That's a lie!’--just to put things on a solid footing.” Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who do hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. “When was that?” asks Dillard. “I missed it.” We have all missed it: missed this power hidden in weakness, this glory buried in human flesh, this mercy concealed in the rejected of the earth, this love abandoned on a cross, this truth revealed in Him who was raised from the dead. “Easter?” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 from his prison cell as if in response to these doubts. “We’re paying more attention to dying than to death. We’re more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death. Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as ‘the last enemy.’ There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection.” We doubt as those who live within the scope of human possibilities, you and I. We are, of course, paying more attention to dying: to the massacred victims of a family south of Bagdad yesterday and the innocents blown to bits every day in the Middle East, to friends dropped dead at age forty-one and children molested at age four and five and ten, to the most vulnerable in every society bearing the death-dealing blows of human hatred and sons or daughters bullied until suicide is the only option, to young people with barely a chance on the streets of our city and aging parents leaving us inch by inch. We must pay attention to the dying, for Christ’s sake. But if that is all we are willing to allow our hearts and minds to consider, then we have abandoned our days--and the days of those we love--to the despots of the world and bombs falling from the sky in response, to rampant hatred and diseases that ravage, to the hopelessness and helplessness of the human condition unredeemed. We have left ourselves to live within the scope of human possibilities; human potential as they say; human devising, believing ourselves to be dying, day by day, with no God on whom to call. To put it in words long abandoned, we are still living in the sin from which we have been saved. Translated, that means we are still keeping our distance, holding onto our doubts, reserving our judgment about this credulity-straining claim that death has been overcome and evil defeated by the God who in Christ has come after us in life and in death because we are his. But what if the real truth is the news of death’s defeat while the lie is the life we choose to live in death’s thrall? “I believe,” writes Reynolds Price, who battled death and came out of the fray paralyzed, “that the resurrection of Jesus is, in however unfathomable a way, a visible palpable reality which holds extreme hope for us all. The Jesus who was unquestionably dead on Friday evening was alive on Sunday morning….Through long decades I have examined, I think, all the alternate ways to explain the astonishing Gospel narratives of his return from death. I’ve examined, from many angles, the still staggering fact that a literal belief in that return strengthened a small handful of Jesus’ previously mediocre and terrified colleagues…to transform the life and the future of the huge Roman empire in under three centuries. And with no shade of doubt, I can join Paul in his strongest conviction. God has ‘cared’ on a singular occasion of extraordinary promise for our earthly lives and thereafter. “But that conviction,” Price continues, “serves as no featherbed beneath me, no opiate, for I am also aware, with less natural consent, of Paul’s almost violent insistence that God’s love literally hunts down the souls he has chosen for grace.” Whether we believe this or not, the risen Christ is God’s earnest that you and I--who have come through these doors this morning in all faith and doubt, our hunger for an uplifting Easter especially acute--we are those whom God has hunted down and chosen for grace. The only real doubt is whether this will be the Easter when, by grace, we do not miss it! “Because I suspect that no man will ever succeed in satisfying me further on this matter [of resurrection],” writes Kirn in words that makes this preacher’s heart sink, “I’ve stopped asking questions; I take Easter as a fact now. I’ve decided that faith is what some facts are made of and that the true meaning of Easter isn’t just the escape from sin and death but, in part, the escape from thought itself, one of humanity’s greatest oppressors and, perhaps, the hardest to shake off.” “Do you find,” asked Bonhoeffer who never stopped thinking up until the moment he was hanged at the hand of the Nazis, “do you find that most people don’t know what they really live by? This perturbatio animorum, this disturbance of the soul, spreads amazingly. It is an unconscious waiting for the word of deliverance, though the time is probably not yet ripe for it to be heard. But the time will come….” I pray that the time will come for you even on this Easter morning. Incredulous as I am before the credulity-straining testimony of those first woman at the tomb and before a cloud of witnesses who not only have lived in the light of Christ's resurrection but have died fighting the dragons of darkness with a courage and confidence I can barely imagine, I tell you He is alive and has gone before you to Galilee, has gone before you to whatever place you live dying without Him and die living without him because “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” |