Sermon for Year C, Easter Sunday
By The Rev. Torey Lightcap
March 31, 2013
St. Thomas Episcopal Church
“Patterned”
How many Easter Sunday sermons
have you heard in your life?
I’m going to guess:
An average of about, mmm, one a year for
every year you attended services, right?
Okay.
Let me tell you something
you’ve probably already figured out.
Each one of those Easter Sunday
sermons was a way of trying to get the folks
Who wouldn’t normally come on a Sunday
To become more regular members of the
congregation. No secret there.
It was an ad, in other words. A
hook.
A hook about Jesus, yes, but a
hook.
Doesn’t matter where you were.
You were getting sold on something.
It’s nothing like “Mad Men”
Where folks sit around and try to concoct the
perfect way
To get you to buy! buy! buy! our product;
Nothing so overt, so malicious, not in my
experience –
But Easter Sunday has always seemed to have
this subtle message
(The “B” side of the record)
That you should be convinced that the
church you’ve selected to come to
Is somehow better than all the other
churches you might have chosen today.
Even though it’s perfectly
obvious they all have their pluses and minuses.
When you fly, what do they say?
“We know that when it comes to air
travel, you have a choice of carriers
(Except at Sioux Gateway Airport);
Thank you for flying with XYZ today.”
Consumerism, right? Customer
loyalty! Build the brand!
In the sermon, the preacher is
bright and articulate (!); the flowers smell fabulous;
The building is lovely; the choir is
perfectly pitched;
In the music, you feel okay about yourself ’cause
as it turns out you can carry a tune;
In your suit and tie or in your new dress –
well, it feels nice, doesn’t it,
And feeling nice is, ah, well, it’s nice, isn’t it?
And you know that spring is in sight
And that there’s chocolate back on the
counter at home.
C'mon: Easter Sunday rocks!
It seems scandalously lazy on
our part,
But this is the church’s whole advertising
ploy!
So, the thinking is pretty
simple:
You see or hear something you like, you come
back again.
Mister or Miss Repeat Customer,
right?
Which makes sense enough. But. But.
Well, … I guess I’ve kind of
come to think that this is, um, sort of dumb.
I mean, dumb on the part of the
church. A real failing.
Yes, Father Torey is saying on Easter Sunday morning at St. Thomas
That the church has failed me!
That the church has been dumb!
And why? Why would he say that? I’m gonna talk to him about that.
No, I mean failed outright. As
in the fact
That you have come for something real and
transcendent and enriching
And maybe even just a little bit of a
challenge;
And we
have instead handed you a list of reasons to Join Our Club.
Here’s our literature.
Like this is Sam’s, and the
samples have been set out.
I mean that kind of disservice.
And. Well. Talk about the cart
in front of the horse.
See, instead of engaging in converting
potential customers into loyal customers,
And instead of carping about customer retention
The other 364 days and 51 Sundays out of
the year,
Let’s just talk about what really brings us
here, okay?
The real stuff.
Because each one of us has a
bottomless, gnawing hunger and longing
That comes from way down inside
To have our spirits challenged and fed at
the most basic level of our being.
I’d like to call it something
like this:
It is, to me, the desire to transcend the
humdrum everyday ordinary beat of my life.
To achieve some kind of … escape velocity
From the endless grind of living in a fearful
world where resources seem scarce
And people are naturally suspicious of each
other, cynical with one another,
And willing to talk each other down when
they’re not in the room.
I have, and I suspect you might
too, have this hunger to get away from a world
Built on fakery and sleight of hand, and
cleverness and irony, and false promises.
… I have a deep longing
To not be so tired or frazzled or pulled in
so many directions at once,
And I wonder if you might, too.
I have a desire, instead, for stopping,
and for truth and the telling of
truth as we see it:
Not a truth that dismisses or excludes other sources
of truth automatically,
But instead, it’s just a hunger to see the
world in a bigger way than I did yesterday.
It’s a hunger to be, well, sort
of reckless and poetic
And to burn every falsehood to the ground.
I mean, at least, that’s what I’d call it.
A longing to rise above the
usual and the ordinary.
Even though I know good and
well
That everything we do and sing and act out in
this space
Is very much about the details of my ordinary
everyday humdrum life.
And don’t confuse the fact that
I am here the other Sundays of the
year
Or that I wear a white collar and a black
shirt
Or
that I stand in this pulpit with the church’s authority behind me
As my way of absolving myself from that
hunger I’m talking about. I’m hungry, too.
We all are;
To be a human being is to hunger and to long
for something more
Than what we already have, or who we
already are.
To be human is to get so hungry
that finally we break out and go on a quest for answers.
I don’t mean easy answers; there are no easy answers in this life; no good ones.
If there were, we wouldn’t need
Easter
Because life wouldn’t be about walking a hard
road.
It would be about eating candy,
and we can do that any time.
We wouldn’t require the idea of
resurrection in our lives
And we sure wouldn’t need to fuss around about
the resurrection of Jesus.
Dare I say it? If life was all
easy answers, would we really even need God?
Would we really be hungry for anything
at all outside ourselves?
So you don’t need a commercial
for St. Thomas today. I get that.
Just this, then: to be
marinated for a while in the fact of resurrection.
Just to soak in the idea
That the basic pattern of all of life, as far
as I’ve come to see, is this:
Life/death/resurrection …
life/death/resurrection.
The bits of green we see
popping off on our lawns this morning
Are only the most literal version of this
truth.
Living and dying and rising, and
living and dying and rising:
Once you’ve ingested that basic pattern and
it hits your blood,
You start to see it everywhere; you can’t unsee it.
It seems almost ridiculous in a
way to even point it out,
But the fact is, because it’s everywhere,
we’ve become so accustomed
That we’re almost immune to seeing it, or
learning from it anymore.
So we need to marinate in it.
We need to talk about it. We need to see it.
It’s the basic philosophy of
all training in the armed forces
That a person can’t be a useful soldier
Until he or she has been broken down, taken
apart, and put back together.
Old identities, old ideas, have
to die off in order for that process to work.
Life/death/resurrection.
Recovery and support
communities like AA see it all the time:
People coming in almost totally damaged by
life, slave to a disease,
And walking these impossibly long and
heroic and quiet and often disappointing paths
Of death and resurrection just to be able
to keep living their lives.
Life/death/resurrection.
We start each day with some
energy and hope
And by the time we reach the night, we have
to recharge,
So we go down to our beds.
We must, if we want to be able
to rise and live again the next day.
Life/death/resurrection.
Even at our own deaths, at the
end of our frail physical existence,
Something holy and indescribable occurs.
I have attended at enough
bedsides
To have seen it and felt it for myself a
number of times.
The death of another human
being
Feels to me much more like a passing-on than
a ceasing-to-be.
Life/death/resurrection beyond
our sight.
Living and dying and rising.
It’s everywhere. THE pattern.
And it makes me say that I
believe in God.
I believe in God, in part,
because to me the alternative just seems too selfish.
I believe in Jesus.
I believe in Jesus, in part,
because I’m kind of a numbskull about these things
And I need evidence that I am loved and that
I need to give love,
But I also need a way to take that massive
concept beyond all knowing
That we call God
And to have it placed in a frame that will
enable me to understand, if I can, at all.
I need a way to physically,
tangibly translate the fact
That all things proceed from the love of God
And give of themselves.
They give and give and give,
like Jesus, til at the last they give the last of what they have.
And their end is their
beginning.
“We shall not cease from
exploration,” TS Eliot wrote in The Four
Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning
So I stand before you today as
a fellow traveler, as one amazed and shocked
That the thing that amazes and shocks me each
year at this time
Still has the power to amaze and shock me.
That God’s holy grace and power
have been extended to us
In the bounding-forth from the tomb of the
Son of God, Son of Man.
I stand before you as someone just
in awe of the fact
That the pattern has repeated itself yet
again.
In his life, Jesus the Christ
teaches us to listen to one another, walk with one another,
Feed and heal and care for one another, and
to pray with and for each other.
In his death, he teaches us to
acknowledge him for who he is:
Surely this man is the Son of
God.
And in his resurrection, he
teaches us that nothing in heaven or earth and no force in hell
Can separate us from the love of God.
It’s foolish, I know, for me to
ask you to take this pattern into yourself,
Because it already lives there.
The love of God is steadfast
and everywhere,
And God’s holy Word lives and dies and rises
Always and everywhere.
So it was. So it is. So it
shall be.
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