Sermon-of-the-Month for May, 2006
OPENED MINDS
This story of the risen Jesus' appearance to the eleven disciples underscores the truth that the Bible always speaks to us in two voices: mystery and meaning. Mystery and meaning.
Our faith is never so laid out and figured out that it solves the mystery of God's love coming to dwell on earth and overcoming human transgression through a brutal state execution and an empty tomb. Easter doesn't magically cast out doubt and instill absolute faith and full understanding; and any faith that believes it has graduated from mystery to comprehension must surely be a weak faith, one that lacks the power to touch the human soul. When do we reach the point in the faith journey when we can stop praying the prayer of the father of the epileptic son: "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief"? Never...in this life...or we are on a journey of delusion rather than a faith journey.
And yet the mystery does not leave us helpless and without direction: within the mystery of faith is the meaning which faith imparts. In fact, mystery is the gateway to meaning... and to deeper though never complete understanding.
There was the September my college roommate, Roy (actually one of two roommates) came back to Richmond for our senior year. I had roomed with him the year before and had come to know him well as we had talked and studied together, threw frisbees, listened to a new group called the Beatles, commiserated over the dining hall food, watched the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination together, and shared our questions and ponderings about our faith. I knew him well...but this September something was different. Roy didn't seem quite "there" somehow; wasn't always as eager as before to join Bob and me for a bull session or an evening off campus in town. He spend more time at his desk writing, somewhat secretively, and we noticed him more often walking alone through the campus. He had become a bit of a mystery. What had come over Roy? Was everything O.K.? we asked and he would say "Oh sure," and walk off kind of glassy-eyed. He had become a mystery to us; we couldn't figure him out for those first weeks. Until the Saturday he introduced us to a young woman named June who was in town for the weekend -- and then it dawned on us: "Roy's in love!" Of course! No wonder he was a mystery to us. Now love itself is a mystery that can't be explained or "figured out" -- but in this case it proved to be a mystery that led us to a deeper understanding. There was some meaning to Roy's odd, "unlike-himself" behavior. Aha! - so that's it, we now understood.
The resurrection remains the deepest of mysteries -- but it opens up a world of meaning for all who are grasped by its power. It took some time for the disciples to apprehend -- not completely comprehend -- the meaning of what had happened on Friday and what was happening on this Sunday evening after mysterious reports of an empty tomb. It was the doing of God's invincible love.
The women on Sunday morning had had a vision of angels; two disciples had met the risen Jesus in a stranger on the way to Emmaus; Simon Peter had seen the risen Lord. But you don't process such mysteries easily; and you don't move immediately from despair to hope. After all, most of them were hearing these things second hand; don't pin too much hope on somebody else's story. The British poet and priest of the 19th century, Gerard Manley Hopkins, speaks to this reluctance in one of his poems:
"...tell summer No,
Bid joy back, have at the harvest,
keep hope pale."
In other words, don't be seduced...don't over invest in hope: We tend to keep hope pale because we've been fooled before; false hopes are the cruelest of letdowns. So here are the disciples, somewhere between wanting to believe and daring not to believe too much - keeping their hope pale - when Reality breaks in upon then and Jesus announces the password that brings immediate recognition: "Peace be with you." The disciples are human enough to react with the appropriate response to being confronted with life's deepest of mysteries: terror, fear, trembling. Because every good Hebrew knew, "when you're dead, you're dead." Of course doubts arose in their hearts and they wondered if they were seeing a ghost, a spirit before their eyes. "Peace"? -- Not for a time. A ghost perhaps?
No...no ghost: "Look and my hands and feet...touch me and see." We are at the heart of the mystery of the resurrection. The resurrection is not about some soul or disembodied spirit living on after the body dies -- that's Greek thought, not Hebrew. "When you're dead, you're dead." But neither is resurrection merely about a human body being restored to life, as Lazarus was after he had been dead four days. He eventually got sick and died again. Resurrection is much more than resuscitation, a temporary reprieve from death. And yet... the marks of the crucifixion are still present in the one standing before them. Resurrection transformation doesn't remove the wounds of our past -- it transforms them and gives them new meaning. Just as the wounds of Jesus do not disappear but are given new meaning: the cross, once the pointless death of love incarnate, is now the means of restoration between God and the people God loves so much as to give us God's only Son. The mystery is the gateway to meaning. I think it is true in life that when we experience transformation -- healing out of our dis-ease, hope out of our despair, a future out of a dead end, peace out of our inner turmoil, forgiveness out of our wrongdoing -- we are changed but we still bear the wounds as reminders that the way of life is through death and that Easter can't be Easter without Good Friday.
Henri Nouwen says that those wounds we continue to carry with us are in fact a source of blessing to others, for we become agents of transformation, what he calls "wounded healers," able to walk with others through dark valleys with a word of hope to sustain, a word of promise to enable them --and us-- to walk the difficult stretches of the journey. To get through Good Friday because of the promise: Easter is coming!
No ghost...no spirit. But the one who has walked those roads of suffering, and even the road that seems to end at a cross. Transformed in resurrection glory...but without doubt the one they had loved and in whom they had hoped. The mystery of Jesus' death and resurrection opens the way to meaning and deeper understanding: it was all - centuries of Jewish glory and struggle... Moses, the prophets, the Psalms - all leading up to this. "He opened their minds to understand the scriptures". And he still opens disciples minds to those "Aha!" moments when, on this side of the resurrection we see the meaning of the cross anew: a God who suffers with us in our misery and then transforms that suffering into new possibility. And even transforms our death into life eternal.
I have been especially struck in pondering this scripture this year by the words "he opened their minds." When I look out at our country today, and when I look out at the church and unfortunately, all-too-often the Presbyterian Church, I believe I'm seeing much close-mindedness. I see minds made up and unyielding to new discoveries of the Spirit; I see an obsessive need to limit, to control, to categorize people, to impose restrictive visions of what or who is acceptable, to keep some people out and shore up the privileged; I see a fear of the expansive and generous invitation to life that we see in Jesus, who crossed society's barriers and broke down those barriers that kept people separated and classified in some form of "us" and "them." I'm speaking about close-mindedness in issues such as religious tolerance, reproductive choices, sexual preferences and commitments, economic opportunity, and in the church, ordination standards. In short I see too much the fear of change and too little the love of Jesus.
But I shall not end on a negative note, because I know that the risen Christ continues and will continue to open minds, as his Spirit has opened the mind of the church as well as minds of individual Christians over the years, in a trajectory of gracious inclusion of those the world would exclude. I know I have been so grateful to the Lord over my years for the times when I thought I had the truth in tow, only to have my mind opened to deeper truth and brighter light. So here's the good news: Jesus Christ is risen, not imprisoned in the tomb! The Lord is alive and still at work and has much to show us about life. As much as we've come to know about the love of God...we've only scratched the surface!
Amen.
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