April 15, 2001
Easter Sunday
| CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: | Why Look for the Living Among the Dead? | Luke 24:1-12 |
Easter Sunday is a wondrous and a frightening day, at least that’s how I experience it as a minister. On the one hand it is the high point of the church year. It is the day toward which everything else points. At the same time it demands from us the deepest of faith, the kind of thinking we usually don’t participate in throughout the rest of the year. As a minister, trying to decide what I’m going to say when I stand up before a congregation is particularly challenging. It would be enough if it was just all of the regular congregation. At least those of you who are here every Sunday have a chance to hear what I have to say, not just about this resurrection story, but also about many other scripture passages throughout the year. So when I say a particular thing about a particular passage, you are able to put it in the context of the whole rest of the year. Some of you are here visiting for the very first time. I have no idea what your expectations are. I have no idea where you have come from, where you are in your faith journey. So, while I don’t want to disappoint your expectations, at the same time I want to be true to what I believe God is calling me to say to this congregation. Each year as we move through Lent and toward Easter, there is an anxiety that grows in me. Some of that anxiety is due to the battles that I fight within myself. That is, I find myself approaching Easter as a Fundamentalist. A Fundamentalist for the Day. When I read the story, I see two options before me. One option is to accept that Jesus died on the cross, and was buried in the tomb, then brought back to a fullness of life, through some action of love on the part of our Creator. I either have to accept that literal resurrection, or turn my back on the whole deal and say it’s really all a lie and I can’t accept any of it. There’s not any other Sunday where you will hear me say that I am stuck between those two choices. But that is exactly where I find self standing every time I come to an Easter Sunday.
I was talking with another minister about this lack of enthusiasm for preaching on Easter Sunday, and he said, “You’re a storyteller like I am. It’s a story. It’s a metaphor. It’s something that points beyond to a truth that is far greater than we can explain.” I said, “I know that, that’s usually where I stand, but it’s hard for me to find myself there on Easter Morning.” There are others who will say it shouldn’t make any difference if you want to believe that the resurrection is literally true, or if you want to say that it’s a true story that should not be bound by scientific proof. A true story points to something that we know to be true in our lives. When I am talking about this choice between a literal understanding of the resurrection and turning my back, I really not talking about a crisis of faith. I don’t feel that I have a crisis of faith at all. I believe very deeply that we are all united in this experience of life. I believe very deeply that there is something beyond our individual personhood, a force of love, and creativity and power that is greater than anything one of us can achieve individually. When we come together and learn from each other we work for the greater good and we are empowered by this divine energy beyond us. I don’t struggle with whether or not there is a God, or whether there is really any true way that we should live our lives. I try to live faithfully, because I believe that it’s the very most important thing that we do as people of faith, to try to live the best we can use our abilities our gifts to help other people in the world.
There are those who say that you don’t need to worry about whether it’s fact or metaphor. Just live out your life and act in a loving way. Whenever I think about the idea of believing in a literal resurrection there is a whole load of baggage that comes along. It’s part of a description of a world in which humans have sinned and been separated from God A price was demanded. Jesus gave his life. God brought him back again. If you speak the name of Jesus, then you will be guaranteed an eternal life. If you don’t, you will forever be separated from God. You have heard me talk about this issue before, and sometimes I think that it’s my own personal struggle and my problem, not yours. But this past Wednesday, I went down on my monthly visit to Operation Nightwatch, a shelter clearing house in downtown Seattle. About 100 to 120 people every night are fed a meal. Then the staff helps to find them placement in shelters around Seattle. I was talking to a big black guy wearing a sweat suit. He was obviously a body builder, well muscled. He told me about the exercises that he did. He practices with a staff, doing a form of oriental martial arts. I told him that I had recently visited a Muslim worship service on the day that observed Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac. I knelt in prayer with the congregation and after about 10 minutes my legs began to ache. They ached even more when I realized that we were still in the prelude, working up to worship. We hadn’t started worship yet. The leader of the congregation set a chair over to the side for me. He said, “If you need this chair, you can go over and sit for a while.” I went and sat in the chair for the rest of the prelude time. When they got back to the prayers where they were praying kneeling and leaning forward and standing up again, there was enough movement that I was able to be with them in prayer throughout their worship service. I told the bodybuilder that it was very clear to me that Muslim prayers were much better for their bodies than my prayers were for mine. A Hispanic man next to him asked, “Are you Muslim?” I was wearing a collar, which I always do when I go to Nightwatch, I said, “No, I’m not Muslim. I attended this service in support and out of respect, participated in the prayers.” He said, “Well, how can you do that? They don’t worship the same God.” I said, “Well, of course they worship the same God. They are people of the Book. They recognize the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures and then the Koran.” He said, “Well, but, you worship Jesus.” I said, “I worship God that I know through Jesus. God is revealed to me in Jesus. But I don’t really feel, as a Christian, that I worship Jesus, I worship the Creator. I know the Creator best through the life of Jesus, and the things that I have learned from him in the scriptures. The Muslims also respect the Jewish Scriptures.” Then he said, “Well, the Jews!? But they killed Jesus!” I said, “Wait, Jesus was a Jew. It wasn’t as if the Jews were the enemy and Jesus was a Christian and the Jews came and killed Jesus. Jesus was a Jew and there were disagreements among the people of the community. Some of them supported Jesus and some of them disagreed with him. The Jews are children of God. The Christians are children of God. The Muslims are children of God. There should be respect. We all worship the same God together.” He didn’t have much more to say after that, but I’m sure that he was not fully convinced.
This idea of Christianity and Jesus dying and brought back to life so that all of us can have individual salvation, is dangerous because it can lead to the exclusivity that causes us to judge other people. Sometimes we don’t even know what we are saying or how we are promoting this idea about the Jews being responsible for the death of Jesus. But I recognized the possibility Friday as we were doing the Stations of the Cross with the other churches of Greater Kirkland Ecumenical Parish. In the Gospel of John, in the nineteenth chapter the reading says, “Pilate said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” But they cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” Pilate calls out to what John describes as the “Jews” and the “Jews” say “Crucify him.” Now if John would have said, “And Pilate called out to Jesus’ people, and Jesus’ people said, “Crucify him” at least you would understand the relationship. Beyond that you have to understand the times that John was writing. John was writing when Christianity was struggling. Struggling for survival. The Jewish faith that had tolerated Christianity up to that point changed, saying, “We will tolerate you no more. Make a choice. Are you a Jew or are you a Christian.” John was encouraging Christians to stay true to their new found understanding of God revealed in Jesus. It was the right message for those times, but I’m not sure it’s the right message for us now in these times.
It can be frustrating, more than that, it can be lonely to be a minister and to try to figure out the expectations of people who come on a Sunday morning. I try to share what I believe very deeply about the goodness of humanity and about our need to care about each other and work for a better world. I try to figure out how to take my beliefs and share them with you so that they will touch your hearts. Often I don’t know the impact of my words. I don’t know if they will encourage you, at some point in your life, to make a necessary change. I don’t know if my words help you to understand God’s love so that you are able to survive a trial in your life.
But one of the wonderful things that technology has brought is the ability to get on the internet and find the rest of the United Church of Christ Congregations that have websites. On many of them, as on our website, there are sermons, the whole sermon text. If you go to our church web page, at www.kccucc.org, you will find my sermons from the last four years. Anyone from around the world can go to the internet and find what Walter John Boris said about the resurrection last Easter. That’s a scary deal! I was able to go to some web pages and read the words that ministers spoke. I’m certainly not the only UCC minister that struggles with this idea of a literal resurrection or a metaphorical resurrection, and what it means for us in our lives. I was greatly encouraged to read those words. In fact I was introduced to something that I was not aware of before. A church in Tucson, AZ, listed a link on their page. They have declared their congregation to be affiliated with “The Center for Progressive Christianity.” Some of you may be familiar with this, but I was not. Sometime in the last four or five years, while I have been struggling alone here in the Northwest, other people have gotten together and said we need to start figuring out how to talk about our faith in a way that we can address contemporary people. People who know technology and science, who are not as likely to accept something if they are asked to look at it from a literal standpoint. They have described Progressive Christianity in eight different points, and it is very much in keeping with things that I have shared with you through the Sundays.
The Eight Points by which we define Progressive Christianity By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who:
You find no regular creedal words here from the history of the faith. I believe that you do find the truth of the resurrection here in these points. God calls us, through Jesus Christ, to care about our world, to care about each other, and to live our life in love. May God’s Spirit be with us this Resurrection Day. Amen.