April 8, 2007 Easter Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 118; Acts 10:34-43; Luke 24:1-12
Once upon a time Easter was the biggest event in the church year. For over
three hundred years Christmas did not seem to exist, and then for a long, long time
it was just a minor festival. Today churches fill to overflowing at Christmas and
the entire retail economy is built around the six to ten weeks of its celebration.
Easter has diminished to a distant second.
Part of the reason may be that the Easter bunny’s personality is not as well
defined, and it cannot cram as much excitement into its little basket as the well
marketed character of Santa Claus can stuff into his huge, bottomless sack. But
another part of the reason may be that it is easy to feel good when thinking about a
baby’s birth and a beautiful light shining in the darkness of a deep midwinter
night. It is far harder to think about a body that has been dead for three days rising
and climbing out of a sealed rock tomb. Many people have no problem believing
in Jesus as a little baby or a great teacher, but cannot accept anything divine or
miraculous about him, especially his rising again from the dead.
But the power of the Christian religion comes only in small measure from
what Jesus taught, and even smaller measure from his birth. The real, living
power comes from what he did, and especially those things he did that go most
against logic or expectation or our understanding of the way nature works. His
teachings are plenty powerful—the Sermon on the Mount has revolutionized many
a life—but it was the living and dying and triumphing over death that set hearts on
fire with the Spirit—the same Spirit that continues to this day.
The great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth said that the gospel “is
not a natural therefore but a miraculous nevertheless.” Its power seems to go
against nature. Some theologians go so far as to say that “there is nothing about
resurrection that is natural.” (Theodore J. Wardlaw Christian Century 3/20/07)
But what the sages and mystics and poets of every religion have observed for
thousands of years is that there is a nature beyond and within and all around what
we call nature there is a higher spiritual or divine super-nature, what Taoism calls
the Way or Native Americans call the Great Spirit and countless religions call by
the name of countless gods. This other nature operates by laws that seem to
contradict the natural world as we understand it, so we call what happens by the
laws of that greater nature “miracles.”
C.S. Lewis put this beautifully in his first book about Narnia, The Lion, The
Witch and the Wardrobe. The Christ-like lion, Aslan, has been crucified and has
risen again, and when he is asked how it happened, he explains that those who
crucified him knew the Deep Magic, but there was a Deeper Magic that they did
not know. The Deep Magic goes back to the dawn of time, but the Deeper Magic
goes back to the darkness before time dawned.
Jesus tried to teach us the Deeper Magic that seems to contradict the rules
of nature that the human mind observes. Jesus tried to open our hearts to what
surpasses understanding. In the nature we know, those who die lose their life, but
in the Deeper Nature, those who try to save their life lose it, and those who lose
their life for the sake of love gain it. In human nature the strong and violent rule
the world, but Jesus says that the meek shall inherit the earth, Jesus proved
through his living and dying that in the Deeper Nature nonviolence is the most
powerful force in the universe.
We have evidence of this Deeper Nature around us all the time, but we fail
to see it as miraculous. Gravity is part of the nature that our scientific minds have
comprehended. By the laws of gravity, things fall. But it is by the Deeper Nature
that they get up, that they rise again. A child falls off a bicycle and is bloodied
and bruised but the child does not stay down forever. By the miracle of the deeper
magic of the human will, by the miracle of love, the child is able to get back up
and try again.
A woman married a man who had two teenage daughters. The girls did not
want a step-mother, they were unhappy, they were adolescent and they hurt that
woman again and again with their raging rudeness or rejection. Yet she rose again
after every drop-dead look, she tried again after every crucifixion, offering them
her love and support. We should see this as miraculous.
This year I have felt moved by the story of Peter in Luke’s writings. It is
the story of a life progressing not only by human nature as we understand it, but
by the deeper spiritual nature of Christ. Peter’s life is an example of what Easter
and resurrection can mean in practical terms in our own lives.
Early on in the Passion story Jesus predicts that Peter will deny him, and
Peter, quite naturally, protests. But Jesus speaks for the Deeper Nature when he
tells Peter, “I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when
once you have turned back, strengthen the others.” (Luke 22:32) Peter’s
response is to deny that he will deny Jesus. According to Peter’s magical thinking,
he must be perfect.
But here is the deeper magic. God knows that we are going to fall. God
knows that we are going to stray. God knows that we are going to fail. God
knows that we are going to be confused and act it, but God forgives us even before
it happens. We think of faith as being perfect, as not falling, but according to
Christ’s understanding of Deeper Nature, faith also means getting up after we fall,
turning back after we stray, starting over after we fail. Faith is all about rising
again.
Naturally enough, Peter does deny Jesus and then runs away. But
miraculously, he has the faith to rise up out of his shame and return to the
community of disciples, so he is there when the women come back on Easter
morning with their magical story. Luke wants us to know that he knows how hard
it is to believe this story, how much it goes against our sophisticated knowledge of
nature. To convey that, in only twelve verses Luke uses the conjunction “but” six
times. Luke is saying, you might expect it to be otherwise, but nevertheless, this is
what happened. We would expect Peter to stay down, having fallen so
disgracefully low, “but Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in,
he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had
happened.”
Nothing the deeper magic does is more amazing than when it transforms
physical death. I am sure you have heard stories of people dying for several
minutes and meeting a being of light and then come back to life free of fear and
full of love. Or we have heard stories of people seeing and talking with the dead,
including Jesus himself. Is it mass hallucination, or is it the deeper magic at
work? The answer really does not matter. What matters is that people find their
lives transformed.
The empty tomb was just the beginning of Peter’s amazement at the hands
of the Deeper Nature. Not only was he forgiven even before he fell; not only did
he find that Jesus lived even after he died; but then Peter found that the other part
of what Jesus said came true. Jesus said, “When once you have turned back,
strengthen the others.” On the Day of Pentecost, Peter suddenly found himself
able to preach. And in today’s passage from Acts, Peter was again amazed to find
that the Deeper Magic was in people he thought impure and excluded from God’s
realm. Peter said, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” Peter spent
the rest of his life strengthening others with what he had learned by falling and
getting up and by turning back and witnessing the power of Christ’s way.
The deeper magic begins by a child getting up and back on the bike after
falling, but it continues as the child becomes stronger, wiser and bolder for having
fallen. The magic continues even farther as days or months or years later the child
comforts and encourages a younger child who has fallen. Miracle upon miracle of
rising again.
The step-mother who suffers through her step-daughters’ teen years finds
that when they reach their twenties, they begin to show their acceptance and
gratitude and love. She finds also that when a friend who is a new step-parent
calls in despair, she has much wisdom to offer that can encourage and strengthen
others. What seemed at the time to be a slow, painful death turns out to be full of
new life. Miracle upon miracle.
I love the Easter hymn, “Now the Green Blade Rises,” with its refrain,
“Love is come again like wheat that rises green.” I love all the tulips and daffodils
that symbolize the rising again of nature. It is a powerful thing that we will
witness in a week or a month when nature finally shrugs off winter and explodes
with new life. But as lovable and powerful as these images from nature are, the
love and power of the Deeper Nature from before the dawn of time are far greater.
Things rise that the laws of gravity or death say should never rise again. We are
forgiven even before we fall. By the laws of the Deeper Nature we are faithful
even after we fall, if we get up and turn back. If we empty ourselves, we will be
filled. If we lose our life for love, we will gain life. If we get up and look into the
Deeper Truth of death, we will be amazed at what we see.
Let us pray together in silence, bringing before God something in our life
that feels like a failure right now, or that feels fallen. Let us turn to God in the
faith that some deeper spiritual nature is at work in this thing, and that we will rise
again from it with some gift of greater wisdom and love to help strengthen others.
Let us pray in the faith that we will find it to be so, giving thanks at the same time.
Let us pray in silence….
Sermon 04/08/2007