Readings: Genesis: 1:1-2:2; Genesis 22:1-18; Exodus 14:10-15:1; and Ezekiel 37:1-14
In a month’s time I have a rather special birthday coming along. It is one that seems to have the attention of a number of well-wishers who are sending me numerous invitations to let them help me. Of course it is my 65th and the well-wishers have all kinds of Medicare packages they want to sell me. Whether the significance of becoming an official “senior” is impacting my Easter reflections, I cannot say, but I want to begin by saying the obvious—life is a one-way street. It sounds more like the title of a country-and-western ballad than a sermon, and no doubt by the end of the service someone might have googled and discovered the same!
In a month’s time I have a rather special birthday coming along. It is one that seems to have the attention of a number of well-wishers who are sending me numerous invitations to let them help me. Of course it is my 65th and the well-wishers have all kinds of Medicare packages they want to sell me. Whether the significance of becoming an official “senior” is impacting my Easter reflections, I cannot say, but I want to begin by saying the obvious—life is a one-way street. It sounds more like the title of a country-and-western ballad than a sermon, and no doubt by the end of the service someone might have googled and discovered the same!
Clearly, life is a one-way street, and one which none of us
actually chose to find ourselves traveling down. In the best circumstance, love
brought us here at the human level, and no matter what our circumstances of
origin, we believe Love at the divine level has everything to with this
unexpected and unrequested gift of life. Into that very same Love we commend
our own loved ones at our end for we grow to realize that nothing can ever
separate us from such Love.
It is also clear to us as we reach midlife, perhaps that we
cannot go back, and in most cases we do not want to go back. I am not
interested in returning to my youth, strange and counter-cultural as that may
seem. We may have mid-life crises, which
look like we are seeking to relive the past, but normally it is just that we
are doing NOW what we would have done THEN. And it is the strangeness of this
that catches our eye, only reinforcing the fact that nothing rolls back the
clock. As I say, few of us would ever
seek to go back to younger years—younger dreams, yes, and younger vigor,
certainly. But the one way pull of living wins out.
What the Christian life offers, however, is this—at every
place along the one-way street, there’s new life; at every place where
reflection meets reality, reality meets hope, repentance meets forgiveness and
failure meets mercy.
God simply starts again with us, breathing again into our
being God’s own breath that creates life. For some it is a new life literally
through healing; for others it is about emotional deliverance or spiritual
awakening. And it happens at our most vulnerable and exposed moments. God
brings this new life to where we are along this one-way street. There is never
any need to go back in time or wish things were different. God says, “Behold, I
make all things new,” and asks us to “receive the Spirit” as we hear in the
first words of the Risen Christ to His disciples in the Upper Room.
I share this sermon with one of our beloveds who most recently
reached the end of her one-way street. Barbara James was my phone interviewer
as part of the Iowa Episcopal election process for which today I celebrate my
12th anniversary of consecration.
Barbara left some books behind on a shelf in the Guild Hall and invited
any of us to take whatever we were drawn to. I took Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing, a book I believe you
studied in one of the book study groups Barbara was part of. The title gripped
my attention, especially its subtitle—The
Search for a Christian Spirituality. Through that book God has met me on my
road with the offering of new life in “search for a Christian spirituality.”
You see, we all have to keep up with ourselves as we grow.
That is why we celebrate dying and rising year after year on the big stage of
Holy Week and Easter Day; and also daily in our personal prayers for this world
of confused and desperate nations, and of our own personal strivings. It does
not matter your role in the Church—bishop or not, this process of growth must
and does, at our best, go on.
Rolheiser writes of appropriating the essence of the Paschal
mystery deep into the many areas of our lives and he stretches out the Paschal
message all the way through to the Day of Pentecost, and invites us to live in
harmony not only with the death and resurrection of Jesus but also with His
forty days of Eastertide—His ascension and the gift of the Indwelling Spirit.
Good Friday for him is an occasion to “name our deaths,” in
the face of the real deal of the loss of life.
Easter Sunday is the time to receive new life or to claim
our births.
The forty days send us along a period of readjustment to
this gift of the new, and is appropriate as a time for grieving what we have
lost as we adjust to the new reality.
Ascension invites us to let go of the old and let it bless
you, refusing to cling on to it. “Don’t cling to the old, let it ascend and
give you its blessing,” he writes.
Finally, the Day of Pentecost is the reception for new
Spirit for the new life you are already living. “Accept the spirit of life you
are, in fact, living.”
Among the things he writes for us to name as our deaths, he
includes youth, wholeness, dreams, honeymoons or our ideal of God and Church.
The claiming of new birth as we grieve and let go in a way
that blesses us and the subsequent receiving of the Spirit’s gifts for this
moment is the reality portrayed in Ezekiel. It is how dry bones get up and live
as a marching army. And it is how each of us are never in such despair that we
cannot be met with the Living God for a new and deeper gift of new birth
suitable for our age and place along life’s one-way street.
In a few moments we will declare Christ as Risen. The organ
will spring into life; flowers will appear from nowhere and transform the
sanctuary, and the dry bones of liturgy will live with new life. Even more
glorious will be the living and breathing icon or image of the Risen Christ
declared in the new life received in baptism of our baptismal candidates, and
in our renewing of baptismal vows. This
is Christ Risen, through each and every one of us who believes and so declares
that Christ is Risen. Let the words of your declared faith sink into you as a
people of conviction—both about how God reveals God’s self to us and the world;
and about how such faith provides more that food for thought, but also power
for living.
I can base my relationships, my sense of purpose and
vocation, my vision for recrafting the world about me and my greater hope for human
potential on such faith—that we are created, restored, and spiritually
empowered. Made new at every point, we find ourselves this evening on the one-way
street of Glory and to Glory.
Every Scripture we read tonight tells us about reaching dead
ends on that road. We began with the nothingness out of which everything was
made. The Universe was at a dead end and then God said: “Let there be.” We then
heard how God brought Abraham and Moses, the great Patriarch and Prophet of the
Jewish Faith, to the end of themselves: one at the extraordinary and unfair
request to sacrifice Isaac, the very one on whom Abraham’s promised descendants
would depend; and the other at the incomprehensible mockery of reaching the Red
Sea shore where God directed Moses to bring his people into freedom only to be
hemmed in by Egyptians on the one hand and the Sea on the other.
Where God leads us sometimes feels like a cruel joke at our
expense. It often seems unfair and confusing—a dead end up a one-way street,
with life barreling down upon us. Suddenly, God offers an alternative way—unimaginable
and, because of that, unseen from our perspective: life out of death, truth out
of error, and righteousness out of sin. We are invited to claim a new birth out
of a named loss.
How ready are you for God’s unexpected new and renewed life?
Name your death.
Claim your new births.
Grieve the losses but only as you adjust to the new.
Don’t cling to what you must let go of, but be blessed as
you let old things pass.
And accept the Spirit of life that in fact is gifting you
for the life you are living NOW.
For in reality, we don’t go back. Rather, we are always
invited to cycle and recycle forward from generation to generation in and with
the Risen Christ who makes all things new, and meets us at multiple points
along our one-way gift of life.
Amen
