by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Acts 10:34-43 John 20:1-18
Transcribed from the sermon preached on APRIL 9, 2023
I have to admit that since Easter and Christmas tell the same story year after year, sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown’s teacher: “Early in the morning on the first day of the week Mary waw a waw a wa wa.”
You’ve heard the story: God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil. He was crucified. After three days, yadda yadda yadda.
And yet here we are to celebrate. There is a reason that the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus has lasted, that his words and actions for love, forgiveness, and peace, that his Spirit has come back to life even after his execution. The reason is, he is awesome! He inspired awe when he lived and walked in Israel two thousand years ago and we still experience awesome living presence today.
A UC Berkeley professor named Dacher Keltner has a new book entitled “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” He defines the feeling of awe “as being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” The experience of awe makes our ego smaller but our soul expansive and more connected and unified with the Spirit of all life. Awe also gives us a sense of hope. Awe deepens our breathing, slows our heart rate, calms down our nervous system, triggers a release of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that promotes trust and bonding.
Keltner and his group of scientists, after studying awe in 26 different countries, have organized experiences of awe into 8 different categories: Nature, Music, Visual Design, Spirituality, Epiphanies, Mortality (birth and death), Collective Effervescence (or the experience of togetherness, and synchronicity in a group), and finally Moral Beauty. Now in my view, the category of Spirituality is not separate from those other seven but incorporates them all. But I will let them slide a bit on that because they are right on in so many other ways.
Surprisingly, the number one most common avenue through which people experience awe is through moral beauty. I love that term – moral beauty. Moral beauty is the exceptional virtue, character, and ability of others, marked by purity and goodness of intentions. Moral beauty, Keltner says, give us hope and is contagious; witnessing it makes us want to be kind and strong as well. Moral beauty replicates itself. What science is coming to discover is that sacrifice for goodness gives new life.
When we come into the presence of someone with exceptional moral beauty and courage, it inspires awe. We are drawn to them, to follow them, to act like them, to emulate them, to learn from them, to tell others about them, to write down our experiences with them, to philosophize and connect their stories to other archetypal stories of moral beauty, meaning and awe.
They inspire us to do awesome things too. To experience and epiphany: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see. We are inspired to write and sing music, to enjoy collective effervescence singing and worshiping together, to celebrate birth and face death with hope that surpasses understanding. We create art and architecture that inspire awe, bring us together and lift us up. We go out to work to support ourselves and others and do our job with kindness, honesty, integrity, and self-giving.
Even though I believe spirituality and Christianity and the Church can and have inspired awe through all 8 of those categories, it is important to note that not all awe is good. Especially as the Church it is important to recognize that all the art, music, architecture, and collective effervescence isn’t worth a hill of beans if it doesn’t emulate or inspire moral beauty like Jesus. None of us are perfect. We all need grace, but if we are a charismatic speaker or an awesome violinist but are cruel to the waiter, God is not impressed. In the same way, if you are a Jew or an agnostic who is kind, we know God shows no partiality.
When people proclaim Jesus is the Way, create music and awe inspiring churches and then act in a hateful and arrogant way, others do not experience a sense of awe as if the eternal God were walking among us in the flesh, but rather we see Jesus is used as a magical puppet figure, a sad and tragic sideshow to the same old story of competition and dominance, empire and cultural self-service. With such a sad and insignificant Jesus no wonder when people come to church, they hear Wa, waw a waw a waw a.
I am moved to awe by many acts you church members and others do quite often, but I want to tell one big one now. I’m going to use different names.
Recently I have been moved to awe by a story of moral beauty. Back the week before Thanksgiving, a member of our church named Naomi experienced a horrible tragedy. In the middle of the night her house caught fire. She broke a window of her bedroom and screamed for help. Naomi is getting up in age, has bronchitis and has difficulty moving. One of the neighbors, Ruth, who had been shopping for her during the covid pandemic came over with her husband. Her husband and other neighbors found ladders and helped her escape from a window of her burning house.
The fire took everything. She lost her driver’s license, social security card, birth certificate, no house insurance, no health insurance, financial records, wills, or trusts, all her medicine, food and clothes burned. Everything gone. The fire department took her to Herrick Hospital and the doctors found her lungs and heart in dangerously bad shape.
She had no family that could help her, so the hospital released her to a house for people who have nowhere to go. A house for prodigal sons and daughters. With no identification, no transportation, unable to walk, and technology of computers in recent years passing her by, it would be very hard for her to help herself. She was in serious danger of being homeless.
Now let me back up a bit to tell you that Naomi is not perfect but has been someone who has been quick to comfort others in need. She has raised her beautiful and seriously mentally and physically challenged granddaughter her whole life. She volunteered working in the garden here at the church for over twenty years. She planted all the plants that encircle the parking lot, the apple trees and wisteria that bloom every Easter as they bloom today. The awe of nature. She planted and took care of the plants on the front patio and the back patio. She planted and nurtured the memorial garden that was started in honor of Mary Benson. But like all of us, if we are lucky enough to live long enough, we all sooner or later lose our faculties which once served us and others so well.
So anyway, physically and mentally weakened, and grieving, the situation for Naomi looked dire.
I think the low point for me was the first time Naomi and a couple of us went back to see the house. She was shaking with grief, the house smelled of smoke and mold from the fire and water used to put the fire out. There were holes in the roof and water flooded the basement as we experienced a never-ending storm of biblical proportions. Squatters had broken in, stolen things, and when police arrived the thief accused the good Samaritan neighbor of assault when they touched their elbow. Now the neighbors were losing patience, people were trying to squat and steal, she was running out of money for rent at the less than great group home she was in, and with no id she couldn’t access money or health insurance. Then just when her identification came, and she could go to the bank and take care of some of the important paperwork, she came down with covid.
Peter, rock and the point guard who has an incredible ability to cast a net for details and hold an end goal in mind, Ruth, Naomi’s great Christian neighbor and Martha who are both smart, powerful women who take a task like a fullback takes a football and drive downhill to the end zone, Martha, James, Matthew Mark Luke and John and Pricilla the real estate agent, and others, all pitched to help.
The task looked overwhelming, with literally hundreds of things, big and small that needed to be done.
Now I need to go back again to tell another related story. Back in 2014, during the crisis of children at the border, Pablo of Primera Iglesia, the Hispanic Presbyterian Church in Fruitvale sent out an email saying that they had refugees coming to the church door and they didn’t have the resources to deal with them. A group from the Mission and Justice Commission from St. John’s went down and met with the Baptist family to listen to their story. They had gone through a horrible violent tragedy; too horrible for me to give detail now.
St. John’s worked with them helping with housing, furniture, clothes, school, tutoring, and legal help. We have had successful resolution of four asylum cases, with one still pending. Now after their low point of brutal violation, fleeing for their lives and being arrested and thrown in jail, they are now legal, working and thriving. And Peter came with them over to Naomi’s house and they did an amazing job of helping find things in the burnt-out rubble, helping to clear and clean the house, and do gardening so the house could sell. They were able to salvage a few things to take home make good money, and the garden looked great.
The work is not done yet, but much has been accomplished.
So, this week, as I was standing out in the sun on the balcony of Naomi’s new apartment at Lake Park, with Naomi who has improved health, with Naomi having accepted an offer on her house, with the offer going for more than expected… Having heard and witnessed the Church being the Church, Christians being Christ like, sacrificing their time, talent, and heart to help others, of those who have been buried in a tomb of tragedy and loss in turn rising to help others, I thought to myself, this is a resurrection story. This is moral beauty. This is Christ risen, Christ showing up again, even disguised as a gardener. Wow, I thought to myself. I am in awe.
Christ is Risen! Christ is risen indeed!