Glory!

Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; John 20:1-18

A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie

Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the Disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’;

and she told them that he had said these things to her.” John 20:18

Glory! As a much younger person, I had an idea that glory was a place that was good, as good as it gets. For example, when Judy and I were married we bought an MG Midget and drove it from London to Sidon, Lebanon, a city about an hour south of Beirut. I loved that car. The trip was glorious. The experience of living there together was glorious. Later, reading a book by Graham Greene I came across the phrase Absolute Glory. I realized that my enthusiasm for the car was the sense that it would take us to Absolute Glory. It was a conveyance.

In the beginning of the gospel of John, Glory is identified with grace and truth. Grace is an umbrella term for love and the consequences of love: cooperation, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation and justice. Truth is truth. Glory in being defined as such, is a place of extreme healing fueled by the hope that God will heal all of creation. Thinking about this I realized that today Glory, if I could describe it in human and tangible terms would be that same trip but this time driving through Sidon and on south across the border into Israel all the way to the center of Jerusalem. This cannot be done today because the border is closed and has been since 1948. An open border would mean peace in the Middle East. The trip is simply a metaphor for healing and while it brings to light one troubled place in this world, we can use it to think of other places as well.

I bring you this personal example of the hope for healing as an invitation to you to think about what healing might mean for you. The assumption on this particular day, of course, is that each of us brings to worship on Easter Sunday an intense longing, a yearning for healing and new life in the midst of a deeply troubled world. A shooting on an Indian reservation brings up, once again, the despair of a displaced people and a palpable hopelessness fueled by anger. The national attention on the medical case of Mrs. Schiavo seems to me to reflect a dramatic national imbalance. We go crazy over the nutrition of one human being who while deserving of our compassion seems to obscure the hunger of the 35 million hungry people in America. Wars and rumors of wars fuel our fears. The reality that there is no Sabbath in our lives means we cling desperately to every available moment of peace for whatever centering we can find. Families eat fewer and fewer meals together, meaning there is less and less time to share the stories and personal concerns and hopes. In the last year we have lost several (and it seems more than the usual number) members of our congregation to death bringing into focus all the more our mortality. Where is the good news?

The resurrection of Jesus is God’s affirmation of his work, of his life and teachings, of his healings. The resurrection brings hope that one day the world will be as God would have it be. This is the promise of the risen Christ. If there is any way to identify the feelings that we bring to worship on this particular Sunday, it is that. There is such drama in the distance between the world as God would have it and our troubles.

Our troubles stem from our fierce determination to remain autonomous, separate from God. But the resurrection of Jesus tells us that God will never give up on us and as bad as things get, it is still God’s world, and God intends healing for this world. In that day, we will shed our autonomy and bring ourselves into the sovereignty of God’s community of love. That is glory!

One of the ways we experience glory now is to glorify God, that is, to worship and praise God. Glorifying God pulls us out of our autonomous selves and brings us into relationship with God and into relationship with each other. We need this. We are a needy people. As human beings we are by definition needy. What we need is God. This is one of the strong messages of the psalms, and today’s reading is no exception. It is a song of glorification, and it underlines our need for God.

What is less widely spoken of and yet, in my mind, is equally true is that God needs us. Antonio Vivaldi’s musical version of the Gloria conveys so beautifully that sense of glory. And in the Gloria one of the things we find is that the text addresses all three persons of the Trinity. In our western traditions, the trinity can become a difficult abstraction. But, in Eastern Christianity, there is a strong emphasis on the relational nature of God. God is not God without being in relation to us suggested by the relationships in the Trinity. Yes, God is autonomous, but the vitality of God depends completely on God’s need of us, on God’s need for a relationship with us. In that relationship God intends to help us create the world as God would have it.

That relationship is not always easy. Let us not forget that the execution of Jesus on a cross was the consequence of dangerous political activity. Jesus was killed because he challenged the powers that be. The resurrection as God’s affirmation of the life and work of Jesus includes that challenge of the status quo, that challenge of everything that stands between us and glory, the challenge of everything that holds us back.

In the film Sideways we meet Miles, a lonely and unhappy middle-aged man searching for happiness and companionship. Miles is immediately likable and we can even connect some of our own loneliness and unhappiness with his. In an important scene Miles is sitting having a glass of wine with a woman he has met and they are speaking softly and we on the audience are sighing in unison hoping that they will be able to connect, to exchange loneliness for companionship and unhappiness for joy. We are on the edge of our seats and when she puts her hand on his knee we think, there it is! But Miles cannot respond. His being is too far down in himself and he can’t get out to respond to her reaching out to him.

Today as I think about that moment in the film, I think of our world and of us and of our imprisonments, our entrapments, the ways in which we are stuck; I think of all those things including most of all that need for autonomy that seems always to eclipse our ability to respond to our need for God and to accept God’s need of us.

And so in the context of a world in such a state, let us remember each one of us that the resurrection message is that we will connect with God and with each other, we will be healed. This is still God’s world, but we must listen carefully for the voice of God so we can be sure to play our part according to God’s dreams for us. This is good news. Happy Easter everyone! Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! Amen.