Dying, We Live

Easter Sermon, March 31 2013

Preached by Rev. James Murray at Dominion-Chalmers United Church

When I was growing up, one of my favourite Easter hymns was “All things bright and beautiful”

“Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings,

he made their glowing colors, he made their tiny wings.

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,

all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.”

I was always comforted by the beauty and the goodness of nature which was contained in the lyrics. I was quite surprised recently to discover that in the original version of the hymn, the author, Cecil Alexander had included a fifth verse. This final verse states:

“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.”

The final verse suggests that God has fixed the order of this world and that things cannot change.  Alexander wrote the hymn in 1848 when he was a guest at a castle in Ireland. At the time it did seem that the social order had been ordained by God and that it could not change. By the 1920’s that final verse had been dropped in most hymn books. One thing we have learned over the years is that things can change. Social orders do change. Life changes. And God is not a puppet we control. God does not exist to bless our current social order or our personal belief system. God is so much more. And the Resurrection show s us how dramatically different life can be when God is a part of it.

For the Christian faith is not a way to seek power in the world. We have the power. Christianity teaches us how to let it go. The journey to this new life is a journey which must include a journey through death. In order to share the new life of Easter, we have to experience the dying despair of Good Friday. Good Friday and Easter are much more than just dates on a calendar for us to observe. They are a profound life changing spiritual process we are to experience for ourselves.

You and I live in a world full of desires. We live for our desires. All the things we want in life are an expression of that desire. We desire all these things, as a way of getting the attention of the people we desire. It is a vicious circle which never lets us go. We crave power, popularity, all for affection of others. We want to be loved. It frustrates us that even when we get everything we want, there are still others out there who are competing for those same things. So we can never be secure with the things we do have.  Having all these things, and even getting the attention of the people we desire does not satisfy us. All that we crave is only temporary. None of it lasts forever. This is why we can’t actually get all the love, money, popularity, prestige or power we want. No amount of it will ever be enough. This is why it cannot ultimately satisfy us. If we keep chasing these good things, it will ultimately destroy us.

If we are lucky we realize we need to be healed of our addictions, our desires, our longings. For many people God then becomes the genie in the lamp. If I say the right prayer, God will fix my problem.  God becomes a cosmic fixer rather than lived reality in the world. When we reduce God to being a fixer, God just exists to justify our beliefs, because we won’t let God challenge us. This limited view of healing imagines that when I am healed, all of my pain will stop, and all wrongs shall be righted. Once we’ve been healed then everything will be all sunshine for us. We think if we’ve been healed then nothing bad can ever happen again to you. The reality is, of course, much more complex.  Most of the forces which wounded us will still be there the day after we are healed. What we need is a new way of living and coping if we are to face those forces as a healed person.

Many people do feel that things in their life are fixed and cannot change. When they tried the magic wand of healing it didn’t work. So instead they try cope with their woundedness by numbing the pain. They find comfort in alcohol, drugs, food, sex, shopping. Sometimes they find comfort by just stewing in their anger. And nothing will ever change for them.

Have you ever lost your car keys? It has to be one of life’s more difficult moments. You get a true sense of a person’s character when things fall apart. Because there really isn’t a gap between your beliefs and your actions. It’s just that most of the time we keep our deepest beliefs well hidden. It is at a rare moment when things are off guard that we let our true feelings out. It is upsetting to not have control over something important like your car. When we lose something important we get panicky. We get mad. It is difficult to be around people when we are looking for those lost keys. This is when the darker side of who we are is revealed.  All of our emotional drama shows we are afraid of letting something go. The keys are inanimate objects. They don’t care where they are. But we care. Because the world says if we don’t take things like our possessions seriously, we will be punished and lose it.

Sometimes, though, you have to lose something in order to really understand what you do have. Only by losing it can you discover if it is really worth having at all. The true scandal of Good Friday is that God loses everything on the cross. At the crucifixion, Jesus experiences the loss of God. He cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus experiences the trauma of experiencing the absence of God. On the Cross, Jesus experiences rejection from his friends. He is betrayed by the religious authorities. He is murdered by the political authorities. Our friends, our religion, our government are all things we count on to give us comfort, order, and stability. All three have turned against him. And more than this, Jesus experiences the absence of God. On the cross, we see Jesus, completely naked, alone, dying.

Through this felt experience of the absence of God we find the primary way we are to enter into the presence of God. God is no longer the puppet on a string. God isn’t the therapeutic healer. God isn’t blessing the existing social order. God isn’t here to prop up our beliefs about the world. God isn’t going to magically intervene to save us.

Easter morning is a difficult place to be. This is a moment of letting go. It is the sunrise on a completely different world. It is not a morning most people are quick to embrace. For we are used to living with our fears of meaninglessness, our fear of death, our sense of guilt. We’ve gotten good at hiding them. We’ve learned how to carry these burdens with us. 

We’ve convinced ourselves we are good people. We tell ourselves that bad things aren’t supposed to happen to us. We are priviledged. Special. Rich. Powerful. Doctors are supposed to treat everything so I don’t feel any pain. And if I do suffer, I’ve been a good boy so God owes me a miracle. We feel we are owed a happy life.  And so we cling to the world we had. We hang on to the world we wanted. But the world is changing rapidly. The old world is gone. Your old life has passed away. Yet we still cling to old ideas that no longer work. Ideals that no longer help. We live in buildings that used to serve a purpose which no longer exists. Hell happens when we can’t face where we are. All around us is perpetual perishing. Every day we confront the forces of death.

You don’t live in the same world you lived in as a child. Companies aren’t loyal to their employees any more. Your children live in a different part of the world. Friends drift away. The banks collapse and interest rates tumble. The things you counted on to take care of you aren’t there any more. They won’t be coming back for you. When you face such days, you know you have arrived at your own Good Friday.

The choice is to transcend. We do so by let the old die. Let go of the old excuses. You can’t excuse yourself by saying “I’ve had a bad day. I had a rough childhood.”  It’s not healthy to pass your pain onto others. You can’t thrive by robbing others of their power.

Resurrection involves a new life. In order to get there you have to experience death of what was. A resurrection life involves letting go. We have to be willing to face reality of death, and not be attached to it. Don’t fear the loss of all the things you desire, be it love or money, prestige or power, or sex.

A resurrection life is eternal life lived by you here and now. Just as the resurrected Jesus still bore all the scars of the crucifixion, so will our resurrection life continue to bear all the scars we endured in this life. This is not a magic wand which will take away the forces of death, meaninglessness or guilt. Resurrection gives us the courage to face the principalities and powers of this world without fear. We are no longer constrained by vain desires. 

Because of the Resurrection, we do not experience God as being some thing that we are to desire. God is not a person or an object that we desire or love.  By the light of Easter morning, we learn how God is present in the very act of love. We will not find our happiness by renouncing the world and by pointing our desire towards the divine spirit world. When we experience Easter first hand, we realize the divine is present in our very act of loving this world.

Christianity is a religion of love. Some say it is because we love better than anyone else. The real reason is that we have left behind the idea that the goal of life is to be desired. You don’t get ahead in life just because you are loved. The greatest truth in life is love itself. 

 Such a love you have to experience for yourself. You can read about love in books, you can watch it in countless movies. But until you experience love for another, all those books and films are meaningless. Until you learn  to care for someone,  to lift them up by your embrace, all those stories will never melt your heart.

In the incarnation of Jesus, in his crucifixion, and finally in his resurrection, we discover that God is not an object we are to desire. Rather, God is that experience which transforms how we experience everything. God is the name we give to the experience of loving this world. Once we have experienced God’s love, we can understand that we live in a world which is worth living for, worth fighting for, even worth dying for. By loving the world in this way, we experience God’s love. God is present where we love.   This is life before death. This is life eternal. This is the life which Jesus offers to us. By his life, death and resurrection, Jesus shows us such a life is possible for us all. It is a love you are invited to experience for yourself. It is a love you are invited to share.  And such a love has the power to change everything.  Amen.

Source: This sermon draws from Peter Rollins book “Insurrection- To believe is human, to doubt, divine” published by Howard Books in 2011.