"Welcome Happy Morning, age to age shall say." So begins a very old Easter hymn, dating back to the 6th century. When that song was first written, Christianity had endured for 500 years, and Venantius Honorius Fortunatus, its writer, predicted the continuing of the faith down through the ages. 1500 years later, we can say the same--welcome, happy morning. Easter has arrived!
John's gospel calls Jesus "the true light, which enlightens everyone." On this night, we began our vigil in darkness, remembering the hours when the true light seemed to be snuffed out, when Jesus lay silently in a dark tomb. He, who was God incarnate, endured the pain of a human death, in suffering that can best be described as torture. He surrendered his life, in obedience to the Father, and by dying for our sins, gave us the promise of eternal life. His resurrection on Easter morning demonstrated the way to new life for all his followers.
Imagine what this night of vigil must have been like for those early Christians who came to be baptized on Holy Saturday. After three years of intense preparation, they walked naked through the water, like children entering Paradise: innocent and believing. They were not simply claiming a religion; they were entering a close-knit community. Being a Christian in those days was no easy proposition; those were very dark times indeed, when Christians were persecuted and many were martyred. Early Christians trusted that God would make a way for them in this world and would welcome them to a better life in the next. They entered the waters of baptism with complete assurance of Salvation.
Why did those early Christians pursue the faith in spite of the dangers they could face? Why are there still people of faith today, 2000 years since the death of Christ? For that matter, why are we gathered here in this chapel near Kinsey Run on a Saturday evening? The answer to all these questions is the same. We love Christ because he first loved us and gave his life for us. As Thomas Merton wrote, "We could not seek God unless he were seeking us." Some of us feel a gentle nudge and others, like St. Paul, find themselves knocked to the ground by the power of the call, but all of us are called into the body of Christ. We are called by the power of love and the hope of new life in the world to come. Our faith has survived all these years because many of us have had a personal encounter with Christ, and we bear witness to others. Resurrection is very real to us because Christ lives on in every faithful heart.
Just as each morning the light returns with the rising sun, the darkness of the tomb could not erase the Christ-light. In every act of love, in all our thoughts that turn toward him, Christ is alive in the world. As he told his disciples before the crucifixion, he had to leave them, but he would send the Holy Spirit to dwell in their hearts. The light of his love is eternal and infinite because of his death and the resurrection we celebrate this evening.
All of us have our own experiences with death and resurrection. As much as we'd like to recapture happy days we remember from years gone by--family gatherings at the holidays, graduations and weddings, the birth of a child--those events have died to us. Yet they live in memory and continue to bring us joy.
Both of my parents are long dead, but in my thoughts of them, I feel them to be very much alive. As much as we might want to, we cannot bring back the past, but the blessings of the past--the love, the joy, the hope--can never die.
Even nature has a way of reminding us of the reality of resurrection. We suffered through an exceptionally cold winter this year, but the flowering of dogwood and redbud and the mantle of green bring evidence that seeming death is annually conquered by the force of resurging life. The flood of June, 1995, nearly destroyed this valley and left many of us wondering if anything would ever grow here again, but by the following spring, the meadows were green once more.
Welcome happy morning, age to age shall sing. The light that came into the world and was heralded by the star of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve has now expanded to encompass the whole world with its radiance. The light of Easter Eve is the abiding light of love.
Amen.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Homily for Good Friday April 22, 2011
"And we call this Friday Good." These are the last words of Part IV of T. S. Eliot's poem "East Coker." A provocative statement, isn't it? As a child I wondered why on earth anyone would call this anniversary of Christ's excruciating death good. What can be good about an unjust arrest and unfair conviction? What is good about the taunting of the crowd, the flogging by the Roman soldiers, the agony of the cross, the betrayal by the disciples, even the seeming abandonment by the Father? Why do we call this day good?
The first and obvious answer is that this is the day on which Christ died to atone for our sins, the self-sacrifice that gives us hope of eternal life. But there is something more. In what we call Christ's passion, we see the man Jesus at his most divine and the Lord Christ at his most human. In his willingness to suffer and die for us, in his obedience to God and his forgiveness of the very men who kill him, we see the man's divinity. In his tormented prayer from the garden--"My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me"--we see the mortal man. When he tells his disciples they will betray him, we recognize his human loneliness. Don't we all feel the pain of this young man when he cries from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
From the earliest days of Christianity, the question of whether Christ was truly both human and divine has been debated. In the 3rd century, a group of Christian followers of the Egyptian presbyter Arius contended that since Jesus was created by God, he was therefore subordinate to and less than the Father. He was, in their eyes, an ordinary mortal. At about the same time, the Gnostics were contending that Christ was completely divine and in no way human, that he was purely of the spiritual realm. Imagine how our understanding of the Lord would have changed if either of these interpretations prevailed. Our current belief that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine underpins our understanding of his love for us.
The church's early controversy ultimately led to the 1st Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the source of the Nicene Creed we say to this day and reaffirm whenever baptismal vows are made. We recite the Nicene Creed so often that what it says probably eludes us. Why it was written, why we say it is simple: the Nicene Creed declares the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus. It defines the three figures of the Trinity as being equal and inseparable. Listen to some of the familiar passages from it; see how they uphold both the divinity and the humanity of Jesus:
"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten by the Father, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. For us, and for our salvation, he came down from Heaven, by the power of the Holy Spirit...he was made man." Both truly human and truly divine, "he suffered death and was buried," but "on the third day he rose again."
On this day, this Good Friday, we are asked to rise with Jesus on the cross and descend with him into the tomb. We are asked to enter into his suffering, his darkness. Despite his anguished prayers the night before in the Garden, Jesus calmly responds to Pilate, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world." He accepts and fully understands the cup that has been given him. As Isaiah had prophesied, "He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed."
In the first line of the Good Friday section of his poem, T.S. Eliot calls Christ "the wounded surgeon," who heals us, as the prophet said, "by his bruises."
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart....
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good
As the poem suggests, we spend many of our days in lightness, going about our business, believing we are "sound," without considering the real cost of the peace we have been given by our assurance of salvation. On this day, this Good Friday, we are asked to ponder the pain and the darkness of the cross and the suffering of the one who gave his life for us. "Like a lamb he was led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth."
This willing descent into darkness, this complete surrender, the spiritual choice modeled by Christ, has been called the via negativa, the descending way, and it can be terrifying. In spite of his pain, Jesus trusted God and God's plan. In spite of the pain for his Son, God knew that ultimately His plan would be successful. Jesus surrendered his mortal fears and followed the preordained path to the cross. Do we ever truly surrender our fears, worries, preoccupations to God? When we manage to let go in that way, it can feel like "sinking into the arms of God," as Meister Eckhart, 13th century mystic, described it. Maybe, like me, you only surrender when you have exhausted every recourse in a terrible situation until all you can do is surrender it to God. Maybe, like me, when you find that you are finally compelled to surrender, you feel immediate release and you know, on some very deep level, that "all shall be well." Don't you wish you could remember this feeling the next time you find yourself in turmoil? Why do we always take back the illusion we have of controlling our lives? Why is surrender so hard for us? I guess it's because we are fully human--and not very divine!
As many times as I've heard and read the Gospel stories of Holy Week, I still find my heart pounding as the events move relentlessly on to their bitter end. Jesus clearly knows all along what will happen--who will betray him, how he will die--but he continues along the path without veering from it. Yes, he has a few weak seconds of mortal fear and anxiety in the garden and on the cross, and in those moments we recognize our human brother. But his weakness is completely subsumed by his staunch courage and unwavering obedience. Those brief glimpses of human frailty, however, are essential to our understanding of the Lord. The Nicene Creed reminds us that it is important for us to believe that Christ was both man and God. As Edmond Browning, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church so beautifully states it,
"Jesus was really divine and really human. The way in which he lived that out has always been a mystery. People have often solved it by claiming Jesus didn't really feel the things we feel: no doubts, no temptations, no yearning for love and intimacy. This cannot be! His sacrifice was nothing if his life and its joys were a matter of indifference to him. Part of the glory of the Cross is its sorrow: a young man with everything to live for lays down his life out of a love purer than any the world has known."
Amen. Amen.
The first and obvious answer is that this is the day on which Christ died to atone for our sins, the self-sacrifice that gives us hope of eternal life. But there is something more. In what we call Christ's passion, we see the man Jesus at his most divine and the Lord Christ at his most human. In his willingness to suffer and die for us, in his obedience to God and his forgiveness of the very men who kill him, we see the man's divinity. In his tormented prayer from the garden--"My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me"--we see the mortal man. When he tells his disciples they will betray him, we recognize his human loneliness. Don't we all feel the pain of this young man when he cries from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
From the earliest days of Christianity, the question of whether Christ was truly both human and divine has been debated. In the 3rd century, a group of Christian followers of the Egyptian presbyter Arius contended that since Jesus was created by God, he was therefore subordinate to and less than the Father. He was, in their eyes, an ordinary mortal. At about the same time, the Gnostics were contending that Christ was completely divine and in no way human, that he was purely of the spiritual realm. Imagine how our understanding of the Lord would have changed if either of these interpretations prevailed. Our current belief that Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine underpins our understanding of his love for us.
The church's early controversy ultimately led to the 1st Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the source of the Nicene Creed we say to this day and reaffirm whenever baptismal vows are made. We recite the Nicene Creed so often that what it says probably eludes us. Why it was written, why we say it is simple: the Nicene Creed declares the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus. It defines the three figures of the Trinity as being equal and inseparable. Listen to some of the familiar passages from it; see how they uphold both the divinity and the humanity of Jesus:
"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten by the Father, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. For us, and for our salvation, he came down from Heaven, by the power of the Holy Spirit...he was made man." Both truly human and truly divine, "he suffered death and was buried," but "on the third day he rose again."
On this day, this Good Friday, we are asked to rise with Jesus on the cross and descend with him into the tomb. We are asked to enter into his suffering, his darkness. Despite his anguished prayers the night before in the Garden, Jesus calmly responds to Pilate, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world." He accepts and fully understands the cup that has been given him. As Isaiah had prophesied, "He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed."
In the first line of the Good Friday section of his poem, T.S. Eliot calls Christ "the wounded surgeon," who heals us, as the prophet said, "by his bruises."
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart....
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good
As the poem suggests, we spend many of our days in lightness, going about our business, believing we are "sound," without considering the real cost of the peace we have been given by our assurance of salvation. On this day, this Good Friday, we are asked to ponder the pain and the darkness of the cross and the suffering of the one who gave his life for us. "Like a lamb he was led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth."
This willing descent into darkness, this complete surrender, the spiritual choice modeled by Christ, has been called the via negativa, the descending way, and it can be terrifying. In spite of his pain, Jesus trusted God and God's plan. In spite of the pain for his Son, God knew that ultimately His plan would be successful. Jesus surrendered his mortal fears and followed the preordained path to the cross. Do we ever truly surrender our fears, worries, preoccupations to God? When we manage to let go in that way, it can feel like "sinking into the arms of God," as Meister Eckhart, 13th century mystic, described it. Maybe, like me, you only surrender when you have exhausted every recourse in a terrible situation until all you can do is surrender it to God. Maybe, like me, when you find that you are finally compelled to surrender, you feel immediate release and you know, on some very deep level, that "all shall be well." Don't you wish you could remember this feeling the next time you find yourself in turmoil? Why do we always take back the illusion we have of controlling our lives? Why is surrender so hard for us? I guess it's because we are fully human--and not very divine!
As many times as I've heard and read the Gospel stories of Holy Week, I still find my heart pounding as the events move relentlessly on to their bitter end. Jesus clearly knows all along what will happen--who will betray him, how he will die--but he continues along the path without veering from it. Yes, he has a few weak seconds of mortal fear and anxiety in the garden and on the cross, and in those moments we recognize our human brother. But his weakness is completely subsumed by his staunch courage and unwavering obedience. Those brief glimpses of human frailty, however, are essential to our understanding of the Lord. The Nicene Creed reminds us that it is important for us to believe that Christ was both man and God. As Edmond Browning, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church so beautifully states it,
"Jesus was really divine and really human. The way in which he lived that out has always been a mystery. People have often solved it by claiming Jesus didn't really feel the things we feel: no doubts, no temptations, no yearning for love and intimacy. This cannot be! His sacrifice was nothing if his life and its joys were a matter of indifference to him. Part of the glory of the Cross is its sorrow: a young man with everything to live for lays down his life out of a love purer than any the world has known."
Amen. Amen.
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