Scripture communicates like the most sublime poetry: at a slant. Through its images and stories and symbols, the Biblical literature resonates in many dimensions at once to transmit something to each hearer of the experience of ultimate meaning, ultimate value. What resonates in the gospel of the resurrection is God’s ultimate word to us: YES. YES to love, YES to life. Therefore, reason for hope is woven inexorably into the fabric of the universe.
If you’ve been around Emmanuel Church for any time at all, as I have been now for a year and a half, you know that when it comes to faith, Emmanuelites don’t all think alike, nor speak with one idiom, nor come from the same place. This community gathers on the principle that everyone is welcome here, wherever we are on our spiritual journey. Naturally, people are in different places when it comes to the resurrection.
Some of you have told me that you are humanist, full stop. Look, you say, I stopped buying Christianity since I came of age, but still I come to church just in case there might be something I haven’t heard before that would stand the test of reason. Anyway, there’s the music — with the spirituality of the German lyrics comfortably at one remove — and then there are the good and interesting and variously gifted people of Emmanuel.
Some others have told me that you were wounded in your original family’s religious world, and those hurts are still easily reopened. You come here because here you find acceptance as the person you are. Still, perhaps there is a part of you that harbors a nagging suspicion that ‘they’ were right, that God may well be as vindictive and harsh and rejecting as ‘they’ said. Perhaps part of you deep down hungers and thirsts for blessing, but remains wary of the hidden violence that can lie just below the surface of unreflective religion.
Some others are brand new to Christian faith and practice, having heard about it but never having experienced it firsthand. You said that you come in wondering what’s it about, and why you should involve yourself at all.
Still others long ago embraced Christ, with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, and have pondered in your hearts for many years what the Scriptures and your prayers reveal, sifting them with your own life’s experience, and you say that everything to you is a sacrament — an outward sign of inward radiance — and here you are fed with spiritual food and leave strengthened to love and serve the world.
Such rich diversity is part of Emmanuel’s character, and why it is continually compelling and sometimes amazing. Still, whenever I prepare for my turn in the pulpit, I long for the gift of tongues, to find a language that would make sense to you ‘wherever you are in your spiritual journey.’
God’s answer to my wish seems to be, thanks all the same, but your enlightenment is God’s own deep work in you. I do believe that the Spirit ‘has you covered,’ and is working within you through the events of your own lives and the challenges that are distinctly yours to wrestle with. Thus, my preaching prayer becomes: that the words of my mouth will be mediated to your heart by the spirit working in you, so that by the end of our liturgy you will have gathered enough fragments of meaning from the whole of our common prayer, my meager words included, to make a rich and satisfying meal.
Especially on this great Feast of the Resurrection. You will not fail to have noticed that on this great feast, Emmanuel pulls out all the stops — gay flowers, the biggest hymns, the richest colors, airborne and pedestrian puppets, the renewal of Baptismal Vows, the most ancient and ecumenical Eucharistic prayers, the most splendid music our splendid musicians can produce, dancing in the street, alleluias upon alleluias.
This feast is the culmination of the high holy days of Christianity that began last Sunday when this congregation pondered Christ’s suffering and death. Through the week, following the way of the cross, we felt our way in the darkness to a fresh realization that Holy God is not far off from the suffering world. On the contrary, astonishingly, that is where in human experience the Ancient of Days draws very near. The cross releases us from the misconception that the way to blessing is first to achieve perfection. It is not that we are perfect, but that God so loved the world that we all have been included in Christ’s profound blessing that frees us to love without fear.
Christ is risen, we exclaim. Christ is risen indeed. Therefore, let us keep the feast!
Given Emmanuel’s diversity, surely there must be under this wooden roof a wide range of responses to the resurrection. I can think of these: As if Nevertheless Therefore.
As if could be dismissive shorthand: as if the resurrection ever happened! As if the cross means anything but ‘maggoty minus and dumb death.’ (e. e. cummings) So, that is one take. Interestingly, a person who held that position would be immediately represented in today’s gospel. When the women disciples — who had followed Jesus from Galilee, who stood by him as he was crucified, who prepared oil and spices to anoint his body for burial, one final kindness — when the women disciples came back to tell the others that the tomb was empty as Jesus had told them it would be, the men disciples dismissed it as an idle tale: As if, the men said, the terrible death we ran and hid from wasn’t ultimate!
In time, as the story unfolds, those disciples will discover much more, about Jesus and about themselves. I believe that if a person perseveres in personal and common prayer and study, and in practicing the implications of the resurrection, vast dimensions of unexpected meaning and value open up.
Nevertheless might take up the doubt about the resurrection, but move to a very different place: although intellectually I cannot believe in the resurrection of Jesus, nevertheless I incline my heart to live as if it were so.
The writer Frederick Buechner writes thoughtfully about this faithful equivocation (in Telling Secrets) with rich understanding. Is the Lord risen indeed? you ask.
“Many of us have believed in him for a long time, have also hungered to believe in him when with part of ourselves we sometimes couldn’t believe in much of anything. In the midst of a suffering world and of our own small suffering, we have tried to believe in a God of love and power, the highest power beyond all others. Have we been right? Is it finally true what we have believed and hungered to believe? This side of Paradise, who can say with absolute certainty? Who can say anything that really matters about anything with absolute certainty? Even Jesus on his cross asked that hardest of questions.
“There are a few lines from a novel called Curate written in 1876 (Curate, by George MacDonald, NY Routledge, 1876, pp. 490 – 91) that seem . . . as honest an answer to that question as any I happen to have come across. . . . The speaker is a minister named Thomas Wingfold, and he is [reflecting on] the years he has spent in the service of Christ and his Kingdom:
‘Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. No facts can take the place of truths; and if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go farther, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore believing as those that deny him.’ ”
This is a kind of faith that is winnowed down by radical doubt, but persists nevertheless, for the heart has its reasons that reason itself does not know.
But what if, while respecting the honesty of doubt, and the difficulty of knowing, one takes a different step: wholeheartedly embracing the gospel as the truth of one’s own life and then living from then on as a student of faith’s meaning, that is, as a disciple, practicing a faith that is forever in search of understanding adequate to experience, trusting that one day we will know, even as we have been known. Christ is risen indeed!
From that point of commitment, the world changes. One is no longer outside looking in, no longer lingering at the threshold, but enters into the household of faith, and its literature and wild and wonderful traditions and varied practices of faith, and begins to explore their infinite implications. Because Christ is risen, therefore . . .
Christ is risen, therefore, ultimately even death will have no dominion.
Christ is risen, therefore, love of God and of neighbor trumps violence.
Christ is risen, therefore, we can love without reserve, and without fear.
— therefore, our fidelity is a reflection of God’s faithfulness to us.
— therefore, mercy and compassion unseats harsh judgment.
— therefore, there is no one left out of the kingdom of grace. No one.
— therefore, reason for hope is woven inexorably into the fabric of the universe.
Perhaps at the end of the day — or anyway, at the end of this sermon — all of these perspectives co-exist within the mind and heart of each of us. Perhaps, in each of us, there is a voice of doubt, a restless mind seeking understanding, and a spirit poised to plunge — or to plunge again — with Christ all the way into the mystery of death and resurrection.
The resurrection stands as the towering symbol of Christian belief, from which infinite implications for freedom and love and faith and action flow. Coming from all our different places, we will not agree on our conceptual interpretation of this history, nor on the finer points of theological reflection.
But that is not as important as that we gather together to listen, to pray, to interpret and to remember this great story through word and sacrament and symbol and music. I am convinced that, if we continue in the apostles’ teaching and in the breaking of the bread, what it means will be clear to us in God’s good time.
Now we move in the liturgy to the prayers, which on Easter take the form of renewal of baptismal vows. If you have been baptized, this is an opportunity to reaffirm your commitment. If you have not been baptized, you might choose to say the prayers to experience what this ethical and spiritual commitment would feel like. Or you may refrain from these prayers, because at this time they are not yours.
Wherever we are on our spiritual journey, let us resolve to trust that the Spirit, working in us, will do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. It is Easter Day, and Christ is risen; therefore — THEREFORE! — let us keep the feast! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!