Baptized into Death, Raised to New Life

Transcribed from the sermon preached March 31, 2013

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Romans 6:3-11, Luke 24:1-12

 
Why do we come to Church on Easter?  There are many reasons. It is our job; it is what we are expected to do. We like the music. It is a thing the family does. We always go to church on Sunday, and this is another.  We hardly ever go to church, so we better drop in just in case.  We have faith and hope, or we have lost faith and hope, and we need to find it. Maybe we like the opportunity to wear a pretty dress – or look at pretty dresses. Maybe we come for the Easter egg hunt.
We may wonder about theology, about the logic of it all.  I’m here but don’t expect me to believe these myths, don’t expect me to believe this doctrine or that.  We come for many reasons, but one doesn’t necessarily cancel out another, one thought or reason does not burry another in a tomb for it never to rise again.  Just because we come because our mom wanted us to doesn’t mean we don’t also hope for a boost of resurrection faith today.  Suspicion of institution doesn’t cancel our desire for community or our comfort of tradition passed down.  Doubt doesn’t cancel out faith. Jesus Christ is risen.
I suspect there is a time for most of us as we mature, when we learn a certain definition of “myth” and weigh it against the fantastical stories of Sunday school, and the rules of science, and our faith experiences a certain kind of death, a day or two or three of death.  
And as we inevitably discover the humanity, fallibility and finitude of those we love and those in the church, and our eyes are widened to the intractability of evil and suffering in the world, an honest faith will die with a rigidly defined God. However, if and when we discover our own fallibility and finitude in humility, we find ourselves looking out and up once again...
As we move along through our life, we discover there are all sorts of things that would like to take God’s place as the answer, to offer us meaning, to assure us of happiness, to define and provide us with truth and knowledge, to call upon our allegiance, to demand our service.  As Bob Dylan sang, “We all have to serve somebody.”
Some will say we serve our self, but then the whole aim of capitalist culture works to convince our narcissistic self that they have the stuff that our self needs.  And as our self is atomized and separated from community and Creation, we notice something is missing and we may find ourselves blowing with the wind and tide of fad and fashion.  We discover that stuff has no life.  And we hear the echo of scripture ask, why do you look for the living among the dead.  We have not come today to proclaim, Stuff has risen.  
Wealthy business and corporations manipulate markets and pay politicians to get their way.  We have placed faith in corporations, so much so that the government has ruled that they are persons. Yet, there is no life in them.  And we do not gather here today to say, Corporations have risen.   
Technology is very impressive and calls for our allegiance; we have the technology to be in California and talk face to face with someone in Peru.  We can build great damns and genetically modify corn to resist bugs.  We can fly to the moon and analyze icebergs.  We can build a bridge and transplant a human heart, and yet relationships grow weaker, more people are lost or left out, Earth’s ecosystems are in peril, drones spy and drop bombs, and our hearts still long for spiritual wholeness and peace. To quote Martin Luther King Jr., through technological advance, “we have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”  So we have not come here today to say, technology has risen.
So maybe we throw ourselves into work, to winning approval, money or power; but we don’t get enough, or we discover that moths and rust consume, and thieves break in and steal. Economies crash, jobs and homes are lost and we see that the priests of the economy don’t know much and can’t do much.  We don’t gather today to say, Economic theory has risen.
 We may look to government and nation to protect and serve, and we may look for meaning and purpose through patriotic duty and serving and driving civil government.   But we also learn, if we remain honest, that war fought by our government is just as expensive and brutal as any other, and that innocent death at the hands of our military makes people of other nations just as angry and ready to fight against us as the death of our innocent invokes our anger and violent wrath.  If we insist that we are all-righteous and they are all-evil, we not only lose perspective on the truth that may make for peace between nations, but we lose the ability to confess sin, which precedes the grace that brings internal peace.  Grateful and supportive we ought to be; still we do our soldiers no favor by pretending the wars we send them to fight are not fraught with moral ambiguity.  We can pretend our killing is innocent in our politics, but not in our soul.  
We also discover that there are certain truths and responsibilities over which the government cannot, and should not have control. Government while offering some support is not a living, loving parent, and therefore an inadequate substitute for a living, responsible human being.
Internally, Government cannot solve or answer all our conflicts, and by making all our issues political, by asking government to give a definitive answer to a conflict through legislation, our dialogue for clarity shifts to positions for victory.  Propaganda rather dialogue, simplicity rather than clarity wins.  One side is good, the other side is bad, one side right, the other wrong.  And since we are not on the wrong side, and out of fear of losing we cannot admit our faults, then neither can we admit our need for grace.  With no grace we must deny the truth that there are many shades and mixtures of right and wrong, we do not live in a world of choices between shadowless light and utter darkness.  So government law makes a definitive claim, but it is a poor and dangerous god.
Wendell Berry, in an article in the April 3 Christian Century entitled, Caught in the Middle, writes that the idea of “right to marriage” is brand new and only exists by reason of it being selectively withheld.  Apart from its momentary political expediency there is no reason for it.  Whatever one may think of all that is presently implied and entailed by the legalization of marriage, surely nobody can claim that marriage is either the government’s invention or that the government has an inherent right to determine who may marry.”  The government can certainly withhold legal approval and forbid its officers to license weddings for people in some designated group.  But a wedding is not a marriage.  “A marriage, proclaims Berry, “is the making of a marriage, by daily effort to live out the vows until death.  The vows may be taken seriously or not, but there is no way of withholding them from homosexuals.  You cannot copyright the vows which a homosexual couple is perfectly free to make.  The government cannot forbid them to do so…”
“Conjugal love, Kierkegaard wrote, is faithful, constant, humble, patient, long-suffering, indulgent, sincere, contended, vigilant, willing, joyful.  All these virtues have the characteristic that they are inward qualifications of the individual.  The individual is not fighting with external foes but fights with himself…
So the government is not the answer, the government cannot be our god.  We do not gather here today to say, the government has risen, or even, my party in the government has risen.  
But neither do we come to proclaim the Church as our god, or even the Bible as God, as if a pope or denominational theology, or petrified moral law or interpretation can somehow capture and box up truth by which we forever condemn our enemies, and designate ourselves to sit at the right hand of God.    
“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred,” continues Berry, “for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking the heat and even the courage of a personal hatred.  Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave.  And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as there was at the crucifixion and has been before and since. This mob violence can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal of kindness to heretics, foreigners, enemies, or any other group different from ourselves.  So we do not come in today say that the Church deserves our unquestioned allegiance.  We do not come to say, Church doctrine or law has risen.
Berry again, “No church can make a homosexual marriage, because it cannot make any marriage, nor can it withhold any degree of blessedness or sanctity from any pledged couple striving day by day to be at one.”  We can and will offer support and pray for God to bless and give strength to a marriage regardless of those who take the vows, but Berry’s point is important, that it is the two people and their relationship that is alive and the values they seek to live by cannot be given life or death by government or church.  He goes on: “If I were one of a homosexual couple, the same as I am one of a heterosexual couple, I would place my faith and hope in the (eternal) mercy of Christ, not in the judgment of Christians.”
I suspect that even after the doubt of maturity, resistance to dogma, the temptation of technology and narcissistic entertainment, even beyond any sense of duty,  or favor to mom or Easter egg hunt, we come here today because Jesus expressed an integrity of love, an incredible kindness and bravery for inclusive justice and peace that we hunger and thirst for.   As crazy and mythical as the empty grave story, aren’t we glad it is a story of a real live human being and not expressed in some abstract philosophical concepts that do not and cannot live!  I suspect that we come, no matter what category or group we or some other may place us, because we are of the human group, in human relationships, and therefore while a Spirit within tells us we are created in love, we also know that we have fallen short and will fall short, we have said and done what we should not have said and done,  and have failed to say and do what we should have said and done, and so, we are in need of grace, of the cleansing, nourishing and sustaining waters of baptism.  And Jesus came and lived and loved on earth with such profound depth and compassion that despite ourselves, we want our apathy, and cynicism, and narcissism and doubt and sin to die, so that we may be reborn to new life and new hope.      
I come here today to proclaim the life of a God whom my doubt and cynicism cannot kill, no government or corporation can rule, dominate or end.  We come not to proclaim a full book, or a full bank, or a full bust, or a full army or a full government, but an empty grave.  We don’t understand it; it is a mystery, but we know we need it to be true.  And what we know of Christ is that he is not just for some, but for all.  Not just for Democrats and gays, feminists, immigrants, and Christians.  We can’t keep the love of Christ down, for that stone has been rolled away and he is alive and on the move, offering grace, speaking challenging truth, and calling all to join him in a life of integrity, justice, love and grace.  You can hate and categorize us out of your narrow circle, but by the Spirit of the living Christ draws a circle wider than the universe.   
We come today and join the Church because we want to be a community of hope.  Not just in theory or doctrine but in practice, in relationship.  And so we will work with grace and strength so that our government, business, technology, marriages and faith communities serve life affirming values.  We come today to celebrate, because the love of Christ comes to us first. Before we are conscious of being held or needing God’s grace, Christ is there.   We come today to celebrate, because after all is said and done, when governments and their laws have come and gone, when technology rusts and fails, when gold melts and steel mills freeze, when our knowledge ceases, our memories retreat our senses grow dim, the love and mercy of our God lives forever.  
We come to celebrate today, for even as we all sooner or later face death, we will not let the fear of death keep us from affirming life and love.  There is something more powerful, more important than avoiding death, and even as death and grief will have its day or two or three, the great love of God through Christ will rise again, and again and again.  Jesus Christ is risen, Jesus Christ is risen, Jesus Christ is risen.