Love and Let Go: A Sermon for May 9, 2010

Lydia, the seller of purple cloth, is one of my favorite Bible characters. Perhaps that’s because purple is my favorite color. Or, perhaps it’s because I was once a seamstress, and couldn’t manage to pass through a dry goods store without lingering long over the many colors and textures. All too often, I went home with yardage that was already fashioned into something wonderful in my mind, but that ended up in a drawer, one of many unrealized projects.

I imagine Lydia, her colorful goods spread around her, leaning forward to listen eagerly to Paul preaching the Good News (Acts 16:9-15, NRSV). The workings of the Holy Spirit often seem hidden from human eyes. But the power of the risen Lord was quick to show itself through Lydia. Her heart was opened; she and her household were baptized. Then, having brought her household into the faith, she brought Paul and his mission team into her household.
                                                                                                                                                                  

I don’t know if the designers of the lectionary predicted the possibility of the 6^th Sunday of Easter falling on Mother’s Day, but they couldn’t have made a better choice. Lydia was a mother of the church in more ways than one.

She Worketh Willingly With Her Hands by Elspeth Young

Some sources say she was Paul’s first convert in Europe. As a merchant, she was no doubt a woman of some influence in the community. She not only brought her own family into the faith, but also turned her home into the beginnings of the church in Philippi.

Today’s lessons are full of “good things,” of which the work of the Holy Spirit in leading Paul to Philippi and in opening Lydia’s heart and mind are but two. “Good things” is even the theme of today’s collect. It begins, “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding...” (BCP, p. 225)

For the writer of today’s Psalm (67, BCP p. 675), the good things include God as equitable judge of all peoples and guide of the nations. They include a good harvest. These verses are all about interactions between a loving Creator who sheds light and generous blessings on those who love and praise God.

Light is also a big part of “the good life” in the new Jerusalem of John’s vision in Revelation (21:10,22-22:5). This holy city, which descends from heaven, needs no sun or moon because “the glory of God IS its light and its lamp is the Lamb.”

The gates of this wonderful place are never closed. The river of the tree of life runs through it, and the tree of life feeds the peoples and heals the nations. And all the people will bask in the light and worship the Lamb.

“O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things!”

In today’s Gospel lesson (John 14:23-29), Jesus is also in the business of handing out good things. The first is a promise: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them,” he says, “and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

The second good thing Jesus hands out in this passage is an outright gift: “Peace I leave with you,” he says, “my peace I give to you.”

Wow! The peace of the risen Christ freely given! And in return for our love, God the Father and God the Son in the person of the Holy Spirit take up residence in our lives.

What more could we ask? Yet so often, our lives do not seem the least bit peaceful. They are too full of unreasonable demands and unfair situations, death and destruction, and conflicts of all sizes and shapes, from road rage to the news of yet another oil spill and yet another suicide bombing in the Middle East.

Who could ask for a better deal than God-With-Us, in exchange for nothing more than our love? Yet so often, we can’t love God for all the unlovable people in the way! From the guy who curses our hesitation in traffic to the suicide bomber, from the slow cashier determined to test our patience to the teenager whose appearance and mannerisms are designed solely to shock our sensibilities—the children of God come to us disguised as the unlovely.

 “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things… as surpass our understanding.”

Hmmm. We are accustomed to not understanding evil things. But good things? What’s to not understand?

I love chocolate and ice cream. I love cool mornings to work in my yard. I love my son. These are good things. What’s to not understand?

Perhaps what is difficult about good things from God is that we can only have them by giving them away.

This is in rather stark contrast to many of the good things the world has to offer. We work hard to earn the money to have a good life: the chocolate and ice cream, a yard to work in, Mother’s Day dinner at a nice restaurant with our children.

Especially in a society such as ours, in which economic growth depends on our purchasing of goods and services, we learn to understand “good things” as things we can possess.

We get so confused at times that we think we possess the lovable people God has put in our lives: our children, our spouses, our friends. And then something happens that drives home our utter lack of possession of the people in our lives. Children grow up and leave, and we must let them go. We discover that love and relationship cannot be put in a jar and stored, like pints of mayhaw jelly lined up on the pantry shelf, to be pulled out and enjoyed during the off season.

 “To love” is a verb! It is a way of being in the world that is a lot like breathing: half taking in and half letting go, taking in, letting go. We breathe in God’s love for us, and breathe it out in our love for one another. We breathe in our love for one another, and breathe it back to God.

During this Eastertide, we have heard Jesus over and over attempt to prepare his disciples for the fact that he must soon leave them… again. Last Sunday he reminded them that he was going where they could not go, at least not yet. This Sunday he says, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” How mystified they must have been!

How mystified we still are at this good thing from God that can only be had by giving it away.  Love in relationship with God and the people of our lives—the lovable and the unlovely—has its being in moment by moment and day by day interactions. We must live it rather than try to possess it.

AMEN.

Practice Resurrection: A sermon for Easter, 2010

Just three months ago, we gazed in awe at God come to earth some 2000 years ago in the form of a babe in a manger. The Incarnation isn’t a stretch for Christians. We’ve believed that for a very long time. Not quite 2000 years, but getting there.

A bit more of a stretch was considering the possibility that incarnation happens on a daily basis. That God has been in the business of coming to earth for a very long time, and comes again, every time people of God rise up and go out to do God’s work in the world.

Today, we consider a similar thing: Resurrection did indeed happen some 2000 years ago, in a burial garden near a place of death in the ancient Middle East. Again, believing that is not much of a stretch for Christians. We are pretty comfortable with understanding our faith in historical terms.

The challenge is to know our faith as a living thing. It is to get over the notion that Christianity is about a promise of future glory… based on events that happened centuries ago. It is to see that the Kingdom of God permeates “now” and that we along with Christ our brother are it. The challenge is to live our faith, rather than to merely believe in it.

Like incarnation, resurrection happens on a daily basis. God has also been in the business of breathing new life into mere mortals throughout human history. Indeed, it would be fair to say that human history is a history of God breathing life into mortal flesh, from Adam forward.

Look at the disciples in the Gospel accounts of the hours after Jesus died on the cross! They aren’t physically dead, but they just about as well be. The eleven and others huddle together behind locked doors. Some have scattered, heading home to Emmaus and, no doubt, other communities surrounding Jerusalem to try to disappear into the woodwork.

They are a classic example of troops in full retreat after the death of their leader. Clearly, they had understood little of what Jesus had told them. It was over.

The women go to the tomb to do the last thing they can do for their Master: Prepare his body for eternal death. When they come back with the story of the empty tomb, the reaction of the disciples is disbelief. They thought it “an idle tale.”

Then comes this comical Keystone Cops routine of men running to the tomb. First they run together. Then one surges ahead, but loses heart at the last moment and stops at the entrance. He who lags behind rushes in with last-minute bravado.

But, John says, the empty tomb is not enough. At least one of the disciples “saw and believed,” John says, but “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” I imagine them shaking their heads as they walk away.

What an odd contradiction. They saw but did not understand. They believed but headed back to the safety and security and comfort of home.

It is only later on, when Jesus appears in their midst and breathes on them, that they are resurrected.

And, as we are fond of saying, the rest is history! That little band of folks—eleven and a handful of others, we know not exactly how many—goes out and changes the world. Forever.

Resurrected people do amazing things.

Nora Gallagher is a journalist who has also written several books about her own spiritual journey. One of them is called Practicing Resurrection. It is an account of how the loss of a beloved brother throws her life into a tailspin, and of her return from walking straight down a wrong vocational path, dragging a failing marriage.

Gallagher’s struggle back requires her to re-examine everything: her call, her work, her marriage. It leads her finally to an exploration of nothing less than life after death. She concludes that “experiences of resurrection" really aren't about "believing six impossible things before breakfast.” Rather, she proposes, “Maybe resurrection, like everything else, needs to be practiced.”

We have all been there, in some way or another. Human existence is a process of marching resolutely into dead ends and struggling to find a way back out again.

We don’t have to be “control freaks” to long for some control, some ability to maintain our balance as we face big challenges and small ones of daily life. But we have so very little. Fr. Richard Rohr defines human suffering precisely in these terms. “When are humans suffering?” he asks. “When they have no control.”

It often seems to me that it is precisely when we think we finally have it together, that we are finally on top of our game, that life hands us the most deadly, life-destroying blows. And we suffer.

Someone we love dies or becomes seriously ill. A spouse or lover leaves us. A best friend betrays us. We are downsized by our employer. Our company fails. An economic downturn takes most of our nest egg. Our politics turns nasty. Our children and grandchildren are sent half way around the world to fight a war that we are just not sure is worthy of the sacrifice of young, beautiful lives.

Evil abounds. We aren’t in control, and much of the time it looks like God isn’t either.

But God chose to become human, to suffer and die on a cross in order to rise again in power over death. How do we understand that? As a one-time event? An economic transaction in which Jesus paid a “price” to God.. or was it to the devil? ..so that we can live happily ever after.. some day in some glorious future?

That kind of thinking certainly creeps into our religion through the words of hymns, sermons, meditation guides, and so forth. But it is wrong-headed. It makes this glorious gift of life in the midst of this glorious creation something to merely “get through” for whatever period of time.

We cannot control all of our circumstances or other people. We can choose how we respond. And we can choose, not merely to believe and huddle together in the safety and security of church, but to live our faith in the world.

Fr. Richard says to follow Christ, we must practice dying. The thing that must die is our own beloved ego, because it is human ego that leads us to destroy others in myriad ways, in order to preserve our own illusions, pretenses and sense of control.

And if we practice dying, if we let go of our prideful clinging to being right, being in control, being safe and secure… If we can empty ourselves of all the false selves the world presses upon us, then we can hear God speak our name, as Mary did in the garden.

Like Mary in the garden, and like Mary the mother of the babe in the manger, we will be filled with new life. We will rise up from the ashes of our hurts and losses and failures. We will run to tell the world, “I have seen the Lord!” We will practice resurrection.

AMEN.