The Most Fragile Season
1 Corinthians 15:3-11, Galatians 2:19-20
A
Sermon Preached by
University
Congregational United
The student said to the
teacher, “God for me is a jewel, locked in a treasure chest at the bottom of
the ocean. Where is God for you?”
The teacher lowered her arm,
lifted a cupped hand. She opened an
invisible treasure chest and pulled out an invisible jewel. “Here is God.
You cannot grasp God. You cannot
lose God either. God is here. God is everywhere. You cannot gain hold of God, yet God has hold
of you.”
Where is God for you today?
This season is one of the most fragile seasons in which to preach; this Easter Sunday, one of the most fragile Sundays.
For there is something about this Sunday that is beyond us. Beyond our grasp and reach.
And the gift this season offers is but a cupped and open hand. Something we can’t grab hold of, stuff in our pocket like a set of keys. Nothing but a cupped and open hand. And what good can that be?
This Easter Sunday, I and some of you have been reaching out to the past. For this is a day of memory. Reaching out to our pasts and what this day has held for us. I reach out and find a face of a five year old boy, a face that was once my own, and now, no longer. I see him in his cousin’s hand-me-down bright red blazer with a gold medallion, standing on a hillside early one Easter morning. Surrounding him are his parents, sister, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends. A family and church community that made real to him the promise of this day. And when the sun sparks over the distant hills, and the local milkman picks up his trumpet to play, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”, the little boy that I once was knows that it is true. That the story is true, that the promise, the hope of this day is real.
We reach out towards a past that we cannot grab hold of. We reach out towards a time when the promise of this day was made real to us. We reach out towards those who made promise of this day real. We reach out towards family and community that over the years has done what families and communities do – change. As I reach out towards the family and community who stood with me that Easter morn so many years ago, I reach out to so many around that circle who have died, others who have been lost to us. Marriages that have ended. Jobs that have disappeared. A sense of purpose and meaning that has changed or died. For some of us a faith, a hope that we once knew and now no longer. We reach out towards a past, of all that we have lost and no longer can hold.
And we reach out amidst the
losses of this very time and day. This
week all of us have lived through the worst week of violence and death in
And some of us reach out, as well, to a meaning, an understanding of this day that has been lost to us. This day that we sing of a tomb that is empty, angels in white, Jesus risen from the dead, walking and talking with his friends – the images this year seem to fall flat. We don’t understand them anymore – if we ever did. They just don’t make sense. But without them what sense does this day make? Some of us reach out towards a faith that has lost meaning for us.
This year I have been so conscious of reaching out to a past we cannot hold, a future we cannot contain, a faith that has changed. And I have been drawn back again and again to the apostle Paul this season. For Paul stands with us. There was something about this day that was beyond Paul’s reach and grasp. Something about it that he could not hold or contain.
For Paul was not there on that first Easter morn to experience what happened or did not happen on that day.
He didn’t peer with the women into the empty tomb.
He didn’t see and hear the angels.
He didn’t see Jesus walking and talking about.
He didn’t, like Thomas, get to put his hand in Jesus’ hands and side.
He didn’t, like Peter, get to have breakfast with Jesus on the lakeshore.
No, on that first Easter, Paul was not there with those first witnesses to experience what they saw and experienced. Instead, he was persecuting, jailing, killing those who followed this Jesus. Knowing that they threatened the foundations of his way of life and faith.
No, Paul was not there on that first Easter.
But he “got” the resurrection, or better, the resurrection “got him” a year, maybe two after that first Easter.
And what was handed to him, he hands to us: “For I hand on to you as of first importance what I received, that Christ died, was buried, raised, and appeared. Appeared, as to one untimely born, to me.” (1 Corinthians 15:1-5, 8)
What he experienced, how Christ appeared to him, Paul never speaks of. He has no particular interest in it. But what does interest him is this: He writes, “I was crucified with Christ and now it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:19-20)
Something happened. Something changed his life.
He lost something:
He lost his community. His friends. His faith.
And he gained something. And this, that he gained, he holds out to us. A life. A life. A life no longer “his own” but Christ’s life in him.” A new life.
This new life that he gained has captured the imagination of others who have followed this Risen Christ. It has captured the imagination of the very possibility of what this day holds.
And what an amazing life his was.
Paul wrote his letters to the churches in Corinth and Galatia maybe 20 years or so into his ministry. A ministry that would take him over 10,000 miles spreading the good news of this Christ who is alive and with us and who calls us all to a new life, a life that is no longer our own.
A life that proclaims it has staying power even amidst all the losses of life – a past that we cannot grasp and a future that we cannot control.
At the end of his ministry of about 30 years, Paul and those who ministered with him, Priscilla, Aquilla, Lydia, Peter – could look back on those 30 years of work and see but slight results of their work. Christ had not come back as they had been led to believed he would. They had attracted maybe 3000 new followers. 3000. Not much to show after they had given so much, worked so hard. Although the letters of Paul and the early leaders and the book of Acts paint a very rosy picture of this time, it must have been a time of great discouragement and despair. It would have been so easy to give up, but they did not. They kept on keeping on. They did not give in or give up. What kept them going?
Paul spent the last years of his life in prison before he was shipped off to Rome to stand trial before the Roman Emperor. Anytime along the way, he could have said, “I am sorry. I won’t do it again”, and he would have been set free. But he did not. Why didn’t he?
What he knew, what was in him and those that ministered like him, was something that they could not keep to themselves but got into others.
In the 60’s three of the leaders of the early church movement, James, Peter and Paul were all killed. The Emperor Nero began persecuting and killing other followers of this Jesus. There would have been so many reasons for this tiny movement to die – but it did not. It did not. Instead the faith of these early leaders got into the women and men who would be the leaders of the next generation. They received the gift of Easter, the gift of life lived in the cupped hand. They knew that they could not hold or contain God. They knew they couldn’t lose God. They knew that they were held in a very love of God that could not, would not, let them go. A love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. A love that never ends. (1 Corinthians 13: 7-8)
A love from which we cannot be separated. A love that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)
This is the gift of Easter, the gift of life lived with a cupped and open hand.
A gift that has allowed followers of Jesus Christ to face discouragement and despair, persecution, pain, and even death itself awake, aware, and open eyed because they know they are held by a love of God that cannot be taken from them. A life that holds their own. A life in them that allowed them to give their own lives away.
I have been talking these past weeks with a friend who has been going through a very hard time. He said to me, “I am full of despair. What I know is the words of Isaac Watt’s hymn are my own cry, ‘Time like an ever rolling stream, soon bears us all away; We fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.’ (Verse five of the the hymn, “Our God our Help in Ages Past”) That is my song of grief these days. I have lost my family, my marriage, my job, my community. I have lost all that gave me hope and meaning. Where is God?”
The student said to the
teacher, “God for me is a jewel, locked in a treasure chest at the bottom of
the ocean. Where is God for you?”
The teacher lowered her arm,
lifted a cupped hand. She opened an
invisible treasure chest and pulled out an invisible jewel. “Here is God.
You cannot grasp God. You cannot
lose God either. God is here. God is everywhere. You cannot gain hold of God, God has hold of
you.”
We reach out this Sunday to a past we cannot hold.
We reach out into a future we cannot control.
On this Easter Sunday, I feel so blessed and thankful to have my parents here with me. And I have been looking down the road, twenty years or so into the future. And I am so mindful of all that will change for all of us here. Some of us will have died. So much lost. And new life given as well. So much we cannot control or hold.
But only this. This cupped and open hand. The gift of this day. That there is life on the other side of this life called “our own”. Even for us, today. A new life for us today.
So on this Easter, let us draw back our stretched out hands;
Unclench our fists;
Cup and open our hands,
Receive the gift of this day.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * *
The story,
“Where is God?” is based on a Zen koan.
For more on Paul and the early church, see:
Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus, Donald Harman Akenson
The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, Rodney Stark