Good morning.
Christ is Risen,
Christ is Risen indeed.
So began our worship service this morning. We shared this greeting with one another in several languages. This is one way we speak about this day and the series of events that culminated in this celebration of Easter morning.
On the way to this celebration we journeyed through Lent together and with Jesus. Along the way we noted that there are some things we need to hold on to and other things we need to let go of. Over time the church has held on to some things and let go of others.
For example we have let go of the need for women to cover their heads in church, but we have held on to Baptism as a central rite and sacrament of the church. Over time we also hold on to and let go of different ways of speaking about what we believe. This includes the language we use to speak about the Easter event.
There are so many ways to experience the Easter event, that language and the “words we use”, are important, but they will never function and probably should never function alone. I am deeply grateful for the way we were encouraged to experience Good Friday this year. Brad Lepp planned and many others participated in a service that gave a central place to visual arts and the story of the passion.
While we ate and worshiped together by singing the hymns of our faith and by listening to the story of Christ’s passion from the Scripture, several visual artists in our community sat alongside the rest of us and expressed what they were hearing and experiencing in several different artistic mediums including ink, acrylics and water colours. At the end of the evening, each person who participated in this way was invited to share with us in their own language what they were expressing in their art. We heard words like darkness, chaos, blood red, the human condition, our burdens, God’s self-limiting, everything held in God, and the joy of artistic expression.
For those of you who contemplated those pictures Friday evening and again this morning, you will have your own language to describe what you experience in response to what is depicted there.
The language we use and in particular the language the church uses functions to name fundamental human experiences and our fundamental relationship to and understanding of God.
The language of our Easter celebration comes to us in many ways. It comes to us in story or narrative form in the stories recorded in our gospels and it comes to us in doctrine distilled through the ages of the church and it comes to us in the interpretations of preachers.
I’d like to talk about each of these ways that language comes to us but first, let’s begin with the language of the story – in particular today’s story that Doreen told us from the Gospel of John. The beauty of the language of story is that we get to enter it wherever we wish. We may resonate with any one or more of the story’s characters. We may find ourselves in one part of the story or another. In the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb as it was told for you today, I’m not sure what you heard, but I heard a story that spoke of inner longing and grief that led Mary to the tomb in the first place in the early morning in the dark. When she sees that the tomb is empty, I hear a story that invites us to experience her fear and confusion. When Peter and the other disciple run to the tomb I hear in them a deep need to see for themselves. Bold Peter appears not to know what to make of the empty grave – and so I hear more confusion or at least wonder. The other disciple sees and believes maybe even without a need for full understanding. The story continues with Mary’s grief and confusion. And then the story moves to something inexplicable. There is a vision of angels. They talk to her. She talks to them. Even so, she is still blinded by her grief and confusion and then when Jesus says her name, Mary, she sees and knows that it is Jesus. As much as she wants to hold on to this encounter, she is told she must tell the others. And so Mary announces that she has seen the Lord. Christ is Risen indeed.
The language of story – it can encourage or discourage, it can convince us or ignite further doubt, it can convict, it can invite, it can increase our own longing for encounter. We are promised that as the rain soaks the earth and brings forth fruit, the Word of God also will not return to God empty. Ultimately, if we let the language of story do so, it can uncover for us a way to make our most important human experiences meaningful. Speaking of Easter, the doctrines of the church and centuries of attempts to understand and articulate the stories and events of our Bible in systematic ways provide us with another important language. Sometimes we may find this type of language very helpful, but at other times we may experience the language of doctrine as troubling. I’m aware that for many people, the language of substitutionary atonement; the language that says that God sent his son into the world as a sacrificial lamb in our place to atone for our sins, is troubling for many. We are troubled by what this doctrine says about the kind of God who could treat his son this way. Didn’t we learn from the story of Abraham’s almost sacrifice of Isaac that a loving God does not require “human sacrifice”? One way to begin to come to terms with this is to remember that Doctrines are important but not always helpful. They come into existence, as this one did, long after the events they try to articulate and occasionally and after very important consideration by the broad community of God, they might be something that we can let go of or at least lay down for a time when their meaning has transformed into something that hinders instead of frees. After all, the Gospel of John reminds us that the Truth will set us free… and maybe at one time this doctrine was a good way to provide mea
ning for our relationship with God that set people free, but now for some it has become almost an insurmountable wall or prison.
But there is some language related to this doctrine and related to the Easter event that we seem to have let go of that I propose this morning we may wish to reclaim. I propose this morning that we reclaim the language of Sin and Salvation.
There, I’ve said them. For some these are the “S” words, loaded down with so much baggage that we’d have to get a trolley or two to help us carry them.
We had good reasons to set them down for a while. The language of sin and salvation in some contexts have been used and abused. We have left behind and gratefully so the tent crusade language and emotional manipulation of fear and guilt that seeks to scare people into heaven. In that language, sins were defined as lists of things not to do or else. (Some of the things on the list that I remember were smoking drinking, dancing, playing cards etc.) And in my experience of those tent meetings, salvation was accomplished by saying a few magical words through tears of sorrow and terror. In that world I had no idea what the joy of salvation really meant or could mean because at first I was too afraid that if I made a wrong move I would be condemned to hell and as I got older and I began to realize what had really happened during those crusades (the emotional manipulation part) I was too angry to want to have anything to do with that language. It has been a long road back.
I’m sure that many of you have your own personal sin and salvation history – some of it helpful to you, some of it not helpful. I will presume it has not been entirely bad.
This snippet of my own personal history and your own story fit into some broader trends that makes understanding what happened with the language of sin and salvation a little easier. According to Barbara Brown Taylor, one of my favourite preachers and pastoral theologians, our loss of the language of Sin and Salvation has something to do with the following trends.
Trends such as pluralism, postmodernism and secularism have forced us to be careful about that of which we speak and the meanings we ascribe to these words. These words cannot be used as cliché’s.
In brief, Pluralism is about our neighbours – who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and so on. Pluralism is about how we live beside them, talk to them and seek to understand them, just as we seek to make ourselves understood to them. If we are going to do this, then Sin and Salvation can’t be cliché’s as I’m afraid they had become for many. Our neighbours also have ideas about the human experiences and God awareness that the words Sin and Salvation seek to describe. We really have to know what we mean to say with those words in order to understand and to be understood.
Postmodernism, though very difficult to define is, in brief and as a working definition, a way to say that the modern age is over. Postmodernism is disillusionment with an age that believed that the authority of science and the power of the state or nationalism and the power or authority of the church could make us better or bring out the best in us. Although these institutions are capable of good, they have also been capable of producing things like the atom bomb, allowing the rise of Hitler and perpetuating things like apartheid, the civil war in Northern Ireland and the clergy sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. Postmodernism teaches us to be justifiably skeptical of authority. The preacher can no longer stand in the pulpit and tell you the list of sins you are committing and expect to have anyone stay to listen.
And Secularism, let’s just say that secularism has made it possible to make greed which was once considered one of the seven deadly sins, into a virtue when it comes to the economy and the stock market. In a secular society we have learned to call lying “spin” and greed “motivation”.
And so, since we couldn’t comfortably talk about sin and salvation anymore we replaced those words with other words like rule-breaking, and/or moral and ethical dilemmas, and/or I didn’t really sin because “it’s wasn’t my fault.” I did what I did or I do what I do because of such and so context or such and so childhood experiences.
But let’s get back to speaking of Easter.
Deep inside us we know that Easter commemorates events that have something to do with experiences that can’t be described by rule-breaking or moral and ethical dilemmas or avoidance of blame. Deep inside us we know that Christ crucified had something to do with powers of darkness, chaos, and alienation (to use some of the words that our visual artists used and tried to express in their art the other night) And these are powers that we know have touched us and everyone we know at some time or other in our lives.
These powers of darkness, chaos and alienation are the only powers on earth that make torture and war and murder possible. These are the powers that sneak into all realms of our lives and are capable of corrupting governments, our use of technologies, and even occasionally the church. When we find that we are in collusion with these powers we need to find the right word for what that is and what that means. The Bible and our church tradition names collusion with darkness – Sin. The definition of sin that I find most helpful is “our collusion with anything that leads to the disruption of our relationships with God, others, all of creation and our selves”. We can participate in sin individually and corporately. When we wake up in the middle of the night because something in us aches or hungers for what we know not, it may be that the grace of God is convicting us of sin either within ourselves or in the systems of the world that surround our daily activities.
I cannot and will not be able to name that sin for you. As a pastor and preacher all I can do is invite you to notice it and when you notice it I can encourage you to listen to it’s nudging and prodding.
Also by the grace of God it might be that conviction of sin within you will lead to a desire to change or to let that part of yourself die.
I can’t describe it any better than this without telling you a story about my own experience of sin and salvation.
Many long years after those tent crusade meetings after which I shut out anything that smacked of guilt or ran away from anyone who tried to tell me what my sins were, I went on a Silent Retreat at Loyola House in Guelph. It was the week after Easter.
I knew when I went on this retreat that I longed to experience the Joy of the Resurrection because I had not experienced that joy during our traditional Easter celebrations. I hoped some rest and relaxation and some silence on retreat would automatically restore my joyfulness. And so each day of the retreat I planned to read again and pray with parts of the story of Christ’s passion and resurrection. The first day of the retreat was wonderful as I experienced the grace and comfort of God in prayer, but by day three I found myself becoming really angry – angry at the signs all around me of a warming planet, angry at the burdens of others that I carried that I couldn’t seem to put down. Even reading through the Easter story was making me angry. Why couldn’t I experience the joy of the resurrection? At this point my director on retreat had an inspired idea. On that third day he asked me if I had buried Christ’s body. I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Symbolically,” he said, “have you buried the body?” I was puzzled. “Try it,” he said and that was all – he sent me back into the silence of my day. And so, alone among the crumbled remains of an abandoned building on the Loyola house property, I symbolically buried Christ’s body and with it all my anger and all the burdens I had been carrying were buried as well. That’s where they belonged. I sobbed for a long time. My sin as I was able to name it to myself at the time was a sin of self-reliance. No preacher had ever told me that self-reliance was a sin. In fact, I had been raised to believe that self-reliance was a good thing, a source of strength and pride. Somehow I thought I was supposed to carry these things, but in that moment I realized in a way that I will never forget
it is a living Christ who carries the burdens of the world, not me. (maybe a sin of arrogance as well) Christ carried my burdens and everyone else’s and all the aching and groaning of all of creation into death with him when he was crucified on that cross. And only when we recognize the power of the darkness that crucified him will we truly know the power of the resurrection – will we really know the Joy of Salvation.
Salvation means healing, wholeness, deliverance and the fullness of life. When we recognize and name the power of sin within us and around us, all that mars our relationships, and discover that we want to change, or let these things go or let them die, when we recognize their power and let a living Christ take them from us, then we also put the power back in the words grace and forgiveness that are part of salvation. That’s when grace and forgiveness can also be ours.
Then and only then does God’s grace and forgiveness and the power of the resurrection have power. And this is not something we accomplish on our own by reading the right self-help book, or hiring the right life coach. Those things may assist our desire to set out on a new path and those things are good. Ultimately, however, our Salvation, our deliverance, our healing, our “being made whole” requires a power beyond anything we can muster up on our own. Our Salvation requires the power of God to bring Life out of Dead things.
That is the power of the Resurrection and that is the source of our Joy.
Hallelujah, Christ is Risen.
Christ is Risen indeed.