“So, Now It’s Our Turn.”

So, here we are some two thousand years-plus past that first Easter and the resurrection of Jesus’ followers into those who would come to be called “Christians.” What difference has that event made – in their lives and ours? This divine revelation in whom “we live and move and have our being,” as Luke recounts in The Book of Acts, has made us its “offspring” – legitimate sons and daughters of creation itself. So what?

Well, because now it’s our turn. It’s up to us to reveal the life given us through Jesus, and to live it out in and for the world. Maybe the Jesus revealed to John had it right, when we hear him say,

“…the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do [even] greater works than these….”

Do you realize just how truly astonishing that sounds? It isn’t just that this carpenter’s son from Nazareth is savior of the world, but all that he revealed about life, love, and blessing – is his saving gift to us. It’s up to us now, as the newly revived Body of Christ, to make it happen.

So, how are we doing after all these years?

We should be celebrating Easter on every Sunday of the week, but by now all of that spontaneous enthusiasm has worn off and we find ourselves just plodding through our days and looking forward only to a summer vacation. It’s no accident that our readings for today are about endurance and hanging-in there for the long haul that’s always out there ahead of us.

I think Jesus knew what was happening long before his followers did. When those first days of hope and enthusiasm run into the harsh realities of life later, we’ve all got to have something more solid on which to stand. What Jesus has left us is a dual legacy: the gift of his spirit still at work in our lives, and his example of what it means to love another human being. If we’re really following in his footsteps, what first seemed impossible is now clearly possible because his spirit has taken possession of ours in this mystery that the church calls the resurrection. In this incredible resurgence of new life we may be able to discover that we haven’t been left orphaned, but are richly, unbelievably, provided for.

Let me try to put it in another way. Saying goodbye is never easy. When members of our circle of close friends, families, or community move away we realize that the quality of our lives will be lessened in some ways because of their leaving. Jennifer and Mike’s gifts and talents will no longer be available to us in less than sixty days from now. But some transitions are harder than others. The most painful separation that we all will experience, sooner or later, happens at the death of someone we’ve loved. Grief counselors, soul friends and support groups can help fill the emptiness and the pain of our loss. Eventually we find that we’re able to work through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining and finally acceptance into a place of healing. Henri Nouwen, in his book In Memoriam, tells us that we’ve got to come to realize that the spirit of the one we’ve loved remains with us, but in a profoundly different way than before. It’s like the Spirit of all that is Holy now has been sent to us through the spirit of the one we’ve lost. In writing about the death of his own mother and cherishing her memory, he writes:

To forget mother would be like forbidding her to send the Spirit to me, refusing to let her lift me up to a new level of insight and understanding of my life. I started to feel the power of Jesus’ words, “It is for your own good that I am going because, unless I go, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you…. When the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth” (John 16: 7, 13).

Today’s reading from the Gospel According to John is a poem for lovers – but a particular kind of loving. Unlike the often fleeting, although deeply delightful, infatuation of our first love (or second or third), the love that John speaks about is a deep intimacy rooted in a profound experience of trust, compassion and care. It’s a love that survives death, and it’s a love that models for us the kind of love that we’re invited to have for each other.

“If you love me, you will keep my word.” That’s the ultimate test or demonstration of our ethical commitment to being Christian. Christians are people who keep Jesus’ word – who face the challenges and demands of life but remain people who love Jesus, who love Jesus’ way of being in the world, who turn again and again to his life, his ministry, his teaching, and the stories of his suffering, death and resurrection as somehow offering us a way of deciding how we, too, will live out our lives. “If you love me…” is both a foundation as well as the condition for our faith and commitment.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.

So begins Dante’s Divine Comedy – a confession of being so lost that for some it has become an allegory expressing the stark terror of a midlife crisis, a crying need for redirection. The straight road is Dante’s biblical image for the way of salvation which is both straight and narrow. Lost as he is the poet has to traverse the entire cosmos, though, in order to find his way home. He can’t simply get himself back on track; and the most direct and familiar route doesn’t seem to work anymore.

In saying goodbye to his disciples, Jesus tells them that he will not leave them in such a desperate place – without hope or direction, comfortless and orphaned. But for us to believe this, though, to believe the words from 1 Peter 2: 9, “…you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” is all too often determined by our earliest memories of family. Did we really belong? What did belonging mean when we were very young? Were there others in our family that we felt were favored over us? Or did we feel special, irreplaceable? Were promises kept?

I’m reminded of an essay from her book, A Leak in the Heart, where Faye Moskowitz remembers that her father married a refugee from the Shoah (or Holocaust) soon after her own mother’s death – she and her younger brother were very small. She writes,

It was a good deed to marry such a woman, one who had ‘lost’ two sons in the death camps (‘Lost,’ as though she had carelessly misplaced the boys somewhere and might one day remember where she had left them.)

One of her aunts speculates to the young Faye: “She’ll be grateful for anything; she’ll be good to your brothers. She has lost sons, after all.”

Then one day a shocking thing happens. Faye hears the woman screaming at her six-year-old brother: “Why do you live, and my sons are in the ground?” The child runs and tells everyone what she’s heard, adding the words, “Wicked woman.” And the adults agree with her. Now, however, the author looks back with deep sadness and regret on how she acted on that day. She writes:

The refugee woman is dead and my father, too, but I still ask her forgiveness whenever I think of that summer day. Out of the unspeakable depths of her loss, the words were wrenched. My brother was there and was splattered by them, but he was not the target. How could we all have so misread her anguish? As if children were interchangeable and one could take the place of another….

At some point in our lives all of us will struggle to find the meaning, worth and place of our lives within God’s larger world. Often in those hard and lonely times we may not be able to find any meaning or sense of worth and place. Such an emptiness is truly terrifying and painful. I know. I’ve been there. Surprisingly enough 40 years ago I found myself helped by the weekly repetition of a responsive benediction in a Marine Corps base chapel. Every Sunday, at the close of worship, our chaplain led us in proclaiming these words: “We are God’s children: loved, forgiven, responsible.” These words rang over and over in my head at the time surrounding the My Lai Massacre in Viet Nam. It was just two days before Easter, I remember, and I nearly lost my 2^nd Lieutenant’s commission, myself, over my outraged protests that the killing of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians – old men, women and children – ever could be justified, and then covered up by our own government.

“We are God’s children: loved, forgiven, responsible.” Week after week of repeating those words was powerful. I, who felt lost and looking for meaning, was asked to claim myself as a child of God – loved, forgiven, responsible. I even came to believe that if God could imagine me that way, maybe I could imagine it in others too, until I came to experience its truth. If we can’t even imagine such an thing, then it will never come true.

Years later, after I’d taken up kayaking as a contemplative experience and learned how to re-orient my life and be healed of old wounds, I came across these words from the poet, Mary Oliver:

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin [paddling]. But, listen to me…. Lift [that paddle] from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny…or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks…when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then [paddle, paddle] for your life toward it.

But how did you come burning down like a
wild needle, knowing
just where my heart was?

At every age, in many different contexts, and for all kinds of reasons, people struggle with questions of despair and hope, loss and identity, insignificance and worth. And no matter who we are, we’re invited to imagine a far, far better world than the one we’ve come to know. We’re offered the presence and power of something holy, something sacred, something so deeply spiritual that many of us have finally come to call it God – once unknown, but in whom, now, we find that “we live and move have our [very] being.”

I began this sermon with a question: what difference has the event of Jesus’ life made in our lives? My response has come from our scripture lessons for today: now it’s our turn to live as he lived. When I think about suffering and healing shared, about empathy and openness to the kind of shalom that leads to justice, the words of yet another poet comes to me:

When it is necessary to drink so
much pain,
….
when we have wept many tears
and the they flow like rivers
from our sad eyes,
only then does the deep hidden sigh of our
neighbor
become our own.

Listen well to Jesus’ words to his friends today. They’re not patronizing; neither do they “let him off the hook” in terms of his responsibility toward them. Help is being offered to them, because they need help. The Spirit lives in you. “You know him, because he abides with you, and is in you.” Jesus has tremendous confidence in his followers and in their power to bring his witness and words to life in the future. He needs them, just as much as he needs us. So, now it’s our turn.

Make it so.

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