Easter for a New Century: A Sermon

Easter for a New Century: A Sermon

Here's the text of my Easter 2017 sermon on Matthew 28.1-10.  I'm trying to honestly make some kind of sense of the Resurrection for real life, here and now.  And I don't want to fall into banal cliches, hackneyed phrases, and worn out dogmas that assume we can just repeat "Christ is Risen" and feel in any real way that we've engaged honestly with the ancient religious truth proclaimed at Easter, the modern world as we've come to know it, and a spirituality that helps us flourish in these challenging times. 

Matthew’s account of the Resurrection is not history as we understand it.  It doesn’t pretend to report the facts; but it does intend to proclaim the truth.  There can be a world of difference between the two.  Too often we focus on the facts and ignore the truth.

Here’s what I mean—

An Easter Acclamation: Cosmic and Evolutionary

After searching for an opening Easter Acclamation that is progressive and cosmic in nature, and finding nothing that went where I'd like to take the congregation this Easter, I decided I'd just have to write one.  

So, here's an acclamation/invocation that draws on themes found in the high Christology of Saint Paul (Colossians) and well as the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas; it's also drawn from the medieval mystics Meister Eckhart and Hildegard von Bingen, and the modern evolutionary theologians, Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry.  I also hope it has some of the poetic flare of that great earth mystic, Saint John (Muir) of the Mountains.  

O Radiant Light, 
O Flame Divine, 
as shines the light of Easter’s dawn—
Come, bless the embers of the earth,
sparks flung from our eternal birth.

O Word of God, 
the Source of Life, 
you rouse us from the night of fears
to open souls and minds and ears
and hear the music of the spheres.

You are the Fire that birth’d all things,
the Force that spins the galaxies;
you are the Flame within all flames,
the Hidden Power that knows no name.
From you all things that are were sent,
and into you does all extend.
Peel back the bark of any tree,
lift up a stone—they blaze with Thee!

O Risen Christ,
you shine in us,
the radiance of your holiness;
despite the sting of death and strife,
we rise to dance this Dance of Life.

 

The spiritual life, the downward path, and the values wisdom brings

Down is the way into the soul

Thomas Merton once wrote: “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

It's also true that most of us spend our time climbing the wrong direction; one friend recently told me, "I climbed to the top of the pinnacle only to sit down and realized how much it hurt."

Every spiritual tradition, at its heart, offers a downward pathway into the temple of the soul.  If we cooperate with the life-journey, we may well learn the values of true wisdom: 

depth rather than acquiring

awareness rather than ambition

wisdom rather than being right

humility not arrogance

gentleness not force

love not security

growth not comfort

relinquishment instead of clinging

A different, but wholly transforming way of being in the world.

And frankly, these are values not often learned until we travel the second half of life--a downward journey into limitation, physical decline, suffering, and eventually the final letting go, death.

"There is a crack in everything": Hope for activists entering a new political era

Despair is an energy, a negative energy that is born of the stuff that can rattle around in our heads, unchecked.  Despair’s the sour fruit of the cranky stories we often tell ourselves, the bad-tempered tales we can inflict on others.

We live and die by the stories we tell—inside our heads and outside our bodies.

“The destiny of the world,” Shakespeare scholar, Harold Goddard tells us, “is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories [we] love and believe in.”

Today, we’ve gathered in this circles, not to wring our hands or shake our heads or pound our fists and inflict our despair on others.

No, we’ve gathered together to stir ourselves, to wake up, to find some traction.  Whether we realize it or not, we’ve gathered together to tell ourselves stories, ordinary stories that come from ordinary people—stories that can become the source of our hope . . . our creative, courageous action on behalf of the wellbeing of our world.

“Hope,” says Rebecca Solnit (who is for me a contemporary writer and dissident whose voice is on par with the voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that feisty Russian dissent who challenged the Soviet behemoth in the second half of the last century)—

Feeling passionate but alone? Here's a way to contribute to the common good

Circles of Strength are small, intentional gatherings of people drawn together by a desire to co-create the kind of world we wish to live in.  We gather around two essential goals: 1. we identify our desires to improve our world, and 2. together, we grow our sense of strength so we can make a difference.

Around us, millions of Americans are rising up to meet the environmental, social, and political challenges of the 21st century.  

Rather than feeling disempowered or disillusioned, people like us want to do something useful to transcend barriers, overcome hostilities, and create programs, products, movements and opportunities that contribute to the common good in our neighborhoods, cities, nation, and around the planet.  

Circles of Strength are small gatherings of 3 or more people (no more than 5).  They are intentional in that they meet at least every other week for at least an hour to check in with each other around a series of questions like:

  • What am I feeling passionate about? And why?
  • What is a problem or injustice I cannot allow to remain unchallenged?
  • What would I like to do about it?
  • What gifts do I have to address it?
  • What gets in the way or holds me back?
  • What progress have I made since we last met?
  • What do I need to take the next step?

Circles don’t need a trained leader, but they do need a common commitment from each other to listen more than give advice, and to help others find their passion.  Through meeting together and talking about our desires for a better world, we help foster accountability, hope, and follow-through. (And when we fail or repeatedly bang into walls, we help each other find new direction.)   

Find a few other people, create a circle, and begin to change your world.