Sermon of the Week:
What’s it Gonna Take

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 19, 2020.

Second Sunday of Easter #pcusa

Keywords: After the Resurrection, Thomas, Science, Doubt, Owen Meany.

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
1 Peter 1:3-9
and John 20:19-31

What do you do, after Jesus’ resurrection?
Its kind a weird place, right?. Perfect for some awkward silence.
Christ is risen! … Now what?

But here we are, the Sunday after Easter.
And it’s true, the followers of Jesus are in this weird, weird place.

In John’s telling of the Easter Story,
Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early, while it was still dark
to help tend to Jesus’ corpse.

Jesus had died too late on Friday, near the sabbath,
for it to be done properly
so she came when the sabbath was over,
the next business day, as it were.
But Mary found the tomb open.
So she ran back and told the disciples
(there is a lot of running in John,)
and two of the disciples ran back to the tomb to see what was going on,
and they found it just as she had said:
tomb open, no Jesus,
clothes-that-he-had-been-wrapped-and-buried-in
all folded up just so
and they saw it, and they went back home.
But Mary lingers, and sees the gardener,
but it’s not the gardener, it’s Jesus!
And there’s this beautifully touching moment where he calls her name
and she knows. Right there, she knows.
and she calls out to him, Rabbouni, my teacher,
and he tells her not to hold him back,
but to let him be what he now is
risen, alive.
And so she runs to tell the others: I have seen the Lord!

That’s John.

But what happens after that?

Well, that’s our story from today, the story of the disciples
huddled in a secure location, doors locked, unsure what’s next.

There’s been all that running back and forth between these places,
the public places of Jesus’ humiliation and crucifixion and burial,
to wherever-it-is that the disciples have scattered off to,
no more running, they can’t even go outside any more,
closets and inns and safe-houses and homes,
their own isolation, and quarantine.

The Sabbath rest is over. The sun is rising over Jerusalem.
And he is no longer there….no longer there in the tomb.

So there’s euphoria, because Jesus.
Jesus resurrected
Jesus no longer bound.
No longer locked behind stone.
No longer dead.

There’s caution, because Jesus.
Following Jesus now means a possible bounty on your head.
There are people about, everyday people
who once welcomed him on a donkey and a colt, right,
but who later turned their back on him.
And the authorities, both Roman and Religious
would not be pleased to know that the stone was rolled away.

There’s unsettledness, because Jesus.
He wasn’t there! He wasn’t where they laid him!
This Jesus who kept on doing such….strange things
back when he was alive!
Sure, Mary says that she saw him.

But what happened? What really happened to Jesus?

///
One of my favorite novelists is John Irving,
though, truth be told, after a while there are only so many stories
about New England boarding schools and circus Bears that I can handle.

But I love A Prayer for Owen Meany.
That novel is on my top-five-books-of-all-time list.

John, the narrator, (catch that, the narrator’s name is John)
John regularly talks with his friend Owen Meany,
about the meaning of belief and the persistence of doubt.

Owen is a quite unusual boy
unnaturally short and stunted,
he’s bullied and teased,
and even so, a boy who shows extraordinary character and depth.

John struggles to believe, throughout the book.
For Owen, belief comes much more naturally,
and John wants to know why.

There’s this scene, at the schoolyard as children
where John confronts Owen about his faith.

There, in the schoolyard, Owen points to a gray, granite statue of Mary Magdalene
[The schoolyard has a statue of Mary Magdalene?
But that’s not the point….]

When they’ve been there a while,
and it has become so dark that they couldn’t see the statue any longer,
Owen asks John if he knows that the statue is still there.

John says, well, of course, he knows It’s there.

Owen pushes a little bit:
“YOU HAVE NO DOUBT SHE’S THERE?”       Owen nagged at me.

“Of course I have no doubt!” I said.

“BUT YOU CAN’T SEE HER—YOU COULD BE WRONG,” he said.

“No, I’m not wrong—she’s there, I know she’s there!” I yelled at him.

“YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW SHE’S THERE

—EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN’T SEE HER?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I screamed.

“WELL, NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GOD,” said Owen Meany.
“I CAN’T SEE HIM—BUT I ABSOLUTELY KNOW HE IS THERE.”[i]

///

And Jesus said,
Blessed are those who have not seen
and yet have come to believe…

Owen Meany might be an EXEMPLAR of the kind of faith
that the Gospel of John celebrates,
one who believes so fully and completely
that he does not need to see
he doesn’t need to touch
he believes
and he orients his whole life around his belief. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week
Fear and Great Joy

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 12, 2020.

Easter Sunday. #pcusa

Keywords: Yes, Earthquake, Do Not Be Afraid, e. e. cummings, Resurrection.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Acts 10:34-43
and Matthew 28:1-10

Edward Estlin Cummings served
as an ambulance driver in World War One.

He had enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps,
it was a joint operation of the British and American Red Crosses.

It’s a long story, but after a logistical snafu,
some loitering around in Paris until that got all cleared up
and then some anti-war sentiments that he offered,
as an enlisted guy in the middle of the war,
Cummings was suspected of treason,
and was sent to a French prison camp for more than three months.

Shortly after he was released, in early 1918,
toward the end of that war
and right when the Spanish Flu pandemic
was raging across every continent and nation-state on the planet,
this was one of the poems that he wrote:[1]

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Those years in the 1910s, more than a hundred years ago now,
when the world ached at trench warfare
and makeshift hospitals for isolation patients
those years were so dark and fearful.

I don’t really know much about e. e. cummings
as he is better known, the author of that poem,
beyond his avoidance of capital letters
and that he was wildly eccentric, like a lot of the modernist artists of his era
but I have been deeply moved
by these words
which are reflective of a captive’s gratitude
for the simple blessings of green trees and blue skies,
a yes to life itself
a yes that comes with release from the fear of death,
and an anticipated peace.

The poem addresses several themes
that might be on our minds and our spirits today
fear, anxiety, doubt, and, in the end, cummings dismisses them.

That day that he writes of—how could anyone doubt this life,
this love, this “yes”
this You
that is the God who has lifted us from “no”,
raised from death?

Simply amazing.

///
The heart of Easter
isn’t the Easter brunch with friends or loved ones.

It isn’t a Trumpet voluntary in a packed church
festooned with Lilies and speckled with bonnets
and kids fidgeting with their once-a-year ties…
though I love all of these things, and will miss them this year.

The heart of Easter is God’s decisive yes.

The amazing, audacious, in-credible—
in the sense of how-is-it-believable,
God’s monumental YES to life
in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I’ve heard a lot of people tell me this week
how different everything is this Easter
and man is that true,
says the pastor preaching from his home,
to a virtual congregation.

But the heart of Easter is the same that it has always been,
the same since that morning,
on the first day of the week
when Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary,
went to see the tomb.

Today’s reading of the Easter gospel,
the one in Matthew,
has a few details not found anywhere else in the Bible.[2]

For our purposes, not all of those unique details are central to the point for today.
Only here is there any mention of Roman Guards
assigned graveyard duty during the Passover.
They’re unique to Matthew’s story. [Read more…]