April 12, 2009 Easter Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 118; Isaiah 25:6-9; John 20:1-18
The title of this sermon is “Yes! The Way of Joyous Love.” The “yes” and a
good measure of the joy come from the opening stanza of ee cumming’s sonnet that I
read every Easter:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
“The Way of Joyous Love” part of the title is a sequel to the sermon I preached
last week on Palm and Passion Sunday, which was entitled “The Way of Suffering
Love.” That sermon talked about how the way of suffering love is the strongest power
in the universe, a power that Gandhi and King harnessed in their nonviolent movements.
Suffering love has changed the course of empires. It is also a power we can see at work
in our neighbors whose portraits are hanging in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth
right now. They are part of an exhibit on conflict and reconciliation by the artist Félix
de la Concha, and each has a story to tell about suffering love.
The Passion story is also all about the way of suffering love—about people who
love and suffer and keep on loving through their suffering. It is about redemptive
suffering, a love that redeems. Jesus on the cross is the greatest symbol, and we see it in
other characters, too. Peter denied Jesus, but within hours of doing so he came back to
the community of disciples, he returned to his love. He endured the suffering of what
he had done and the suffering of losing Jesus, and so he was there on Easter dawn to be
the first to enter the empty tomb.
Mary Magdelene never abandoned Jesus, never denied him, but kept loving him
as she felt her suffering heart break, and so she was even greater than Peter. She was the
one to discover the empty tomb. She was the one to see the angels. She was the one to
greet the risen Christ.
The poet Robert Frost wrote about “knowing how way leads on to way.” The
good news today is that the Passion’s way leads on to Easter’s way, that the way of
crucifixion and loss leads on to the way of resurrection and new life, that the way of
suffering love leads on to the way of joyous love. Mary’s plaintive weeping, asking the
man she supposed to be the gardener, “Where have you put him?” leads to the joyous
outburst, “Teacher!” running to throw her arms around him.
Mary felt rise up in her an agonized “No!” in response to her heartbreak at seeing
her beloved Jesus tortured on the cross, but that no was followed by a stronger,
determined “No!” to her impulse to go into denial or to shut down her heart so that her
love would stop suffering. That suffering “No!” leads to the joyous “Yes!” to being
alive that ee cummings expressed in his poem. cummings thanks God “for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes,” but remember that in the very next line
he says, “i who have died am alive again today.” There is a direct link between his “no
of all nothing” death and the “Yes!” of his rebirth. The suffering of the one leads to the
joy of the other.
Our former neighbor and worshipper here, Dr. George Vaillant, is a
psychoanalyst and researcher at Harvard University, as well as the author of landmark
books on human development and behavior. His latest book is called Spiritual
Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. In it he writes about the evolutionary
importance of joy as an incentive for human connections of love and community. He
talks about how joy is particularly intense in a reunion, which is so crucial to inspiring
us to hold community together. It is what moves us to search for the one lost sheep.
The joy of reunion is what inspires the father of the prodigal son to forgive so
generously and, to use Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase, to restore broken community.
Vaillant goes on to observe that “without the pain of farewell there can be no joy
in reunion. Without the pain of disapproval, there can be no joy in forgiveness.
Without the pain of captivity, there is no joy in exodus. Thus, just as hope, love,
forgiveness and compassion are all connected with suffering, so too is joy.” (p 131)
Another neighbor and occasional worshipper here, the Rev. William Sloane
Coffin, died at his home in Strafford two years ago today. Bill was a great example of
how the way of suffering love leads on to the way of joyous love. The word compassion
means to suffer with another, and Bill suffered with many struggles for justice and
peace. His compassion led him to be a Freedom Rider and leader in the Civil Rights
movement. It led him to get arrested leading protests against the Vietnam War. In long
nights in prison, compassion led him to comfort his fellow inmates, singing “Comfort,
comfort ye my people,” from Handel’s Messiah. It led him to work for nuclear
disarmament, and to oppose the Iraq war.
Bill said, “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are
the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel
with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with the world.” (Credo p84)
Bill suffered over his beloved America’s flaws, but as Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the
Director of the Shalom Center, said, Bill “was brave, bright, committed, and joyful.”
Bill exuded joy even in the midst of struggle, and he identified the source of that joy as
his passion, a word he knew meant both to feel strongly and to suffer.
He said,
Strangely enough, it is because we are so passionless that we are so
joyless, for passion leads to the springs of gladness….And if God is a
suffering God, if this whole universe is borne on a heart infinite in
compassion, then the more we suffer in his name, the closer we come
to him. And the closer we come the more convinced we are that we
are loved with a love far more dependable than our own…so that like
Jesus we can be full of joy, strongly invulnerable in the midst of our
vulnerability. (Credo p15)
For months now I have been thinking of the joy that Bill Coffin would be feeling
if he were still alive. After all his suffering on behalf of the Civil Rights movement and
racial equality, think of the joy he would have felt seeing an African-American elected
president. Think of his joy to hear a president lead not only on education and health
care, energy and the environment, but on nuclear disarmament as well, positions
informed by a Christian faith and Christ-like love. Bill would think he had died and
gone to heaven, if he hadn’t already died and gone to heaven.
Also, and perhaps most of all, think of the joy Coffin would have felt this week to
see his home state legalize marriage equality for all. During the Civil Unions debate Bill
advocated strongly for marriage equality. He had begun preaching it long before that,
and early on he became the most prominent endorser of the Freedom to Marry Task
Force. The victory this week was in part due to his steadfast dedication to the cause.
The same could be said about this congregation. Many of us have walked the
way of suffering love on this issue. Some of us suffered being discriminated against for
being gay or lesbian ourselves, and many of us ached with compassion watching our
friends or relatives suffer discrimination. One beloved member of this congregation
saw her son die of AIDS, yet felt she had to hide the truth about him for years before,
during and long after that heart-breaking ordeal. She suffered alone until she shared his
story for the first time here in our discussions about becoming an Open and Affirming
congregation.
To some extent, our suffering love became joyous love when we voted
overwhelmingly to become Open and Affirming eleven years ago, but still we suffered
as a small island in a vast ocean of Christian homophobia. Then our suffering love
again became joyous love when we were able to work for the passing of what became
the Civil Unions bill. But still we suffered because separate is not equal, and faithful,
loving couples and families we knew were still treated as second-class citizens. Our
suffering love became joyous love again as we voted unanimously at a congregational
meeting last summer to endorse the Freedom to Marry legislation. We showed our
suffering love as we attended vigils and placed newspaper ads to promote marriage
equality in the last two weeks, and then on one miraculous day it was transformed into
joyous love as the legislature had the courage and faith to overturn the governor’s veto.
If the way of suffering love contains the greatest power for change in the
universe, the way of joyous love is the most beautiful expression of that power. The
joyous love in the voice of Beth Robinson and other leaders and supporters of the
Freedom to Marry movement that we heard on the radio this week moved many of us to
tears.
Many of the world’s most uplifting works of art are expressions of this kind of
hard-earned, joyous love. Today’s Psalm is one example, and the passage from Isaiah
another. The prophet Isaiah wrote from under “a shroud that was cast over all peoples
and a sheet that was spread over all nations,” the shadow of death; but, his suffering
love opened into the joyous prophetic vision that God would “swallow up death
forever.” “Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” “On this
mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food.” “Let us be
glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.”
We read that beautiful passage on Easter because of the belief that Christ
fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy and triumphed over death. When we are struggling, it is
enough of a stretch to believe that the way of suffering love will lead on to the way of
joyous love; yet this day asks us to believe far more. It challenges us every year with
the question of the resurrection.
In a few minutes we will sing, “Now the green blade rises from the buried grain.”
The last verse says,
When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain,
Christ’s warm touch can call us back to life again.
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that rises green.
Can we believe that Christ’s way of suffering love leads him to rise from the dead
and live again in joyous love, and that this same way will lead us through death to life?
And if so, is it our faith in Christ’s resurrection that inspires that joy, or does joy at
feeling the victory of love in our own experience teach us to have faith that Christ lives
beyond the tomb?
I will let the Rev. William Sloane Coffin have the final word on those questions
from an Easter sermon he once delivered. He said,
All the apostles after Jesus’ death were ten times the people they
were before; that’s irrefutable. It was in response to their enthusiasm
(the word means “in God”) that the opposition organized; and it was
in response to the opposition—so many scholars believe—that the
doctrine of the empty tomb arose, not as a cause but as a
consequence of the Easter faith. The [resurrection story] may be
literally true—I don’t want to dispute it—but I also don’t want any
of you to stumble forever over it. Like many a miracle story in the
Bible, it may be an expression of faith rather than a basis of faith….
I myself believe passionately in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
because in my own life I have experienced Christ not as a memory,
but as a presence. So today on Easter we gather not, as it were, to
close the show with the tune “Thanks for the Memory,” but rather to
reopen the show with the hymn “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”
(Credo p28)
Let us pray…O living God, O Way of suffering love and of joyous love, O creator
and sustainer and redeemer of the entire cosmos whom we can experience as a real
presence in the micro-cosmos of our hearts,
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
Please hear the great “Yes!” resounding in our deepest souls as we pray to you in
wonder and in silence now…
Sermon 04/12/2009