The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The Rev. Dr. James C. Pace
Before we delve into today’s readings a bit, let us pause for a moment to get our bearings. Tomorrow is day 31 in the Great 50 days of Easter. We are more than halfway through this season of light and joy where we celebrate with intensity the resurrection event…new life among us; eternal life given to us; a life that is so beautiful all around us we see hints of its glory in and through Spring flowers and trees and their colors, enormous levels of pollen in the air, tears in our eyes, perhaps. The life abundant all around us…that is what we celebrate. The church will celebrate the feast of the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ into Heaven this coming Thursday. And two weeks from today, we will celebrate Pentecost, Whitsunday……the coming of the Holy Spirit and we then enter into the season after Pentecost which will take us all the way to Advent. So that is where we are…..30 days into the Great 50 days and today we hear from the apostle Paul, that in God, we live and move and have our being. Living. Moving. Being are we. And all in God. I wonder how much that oft said phrase really means to us.
Perhaps I am assuming way to much with what I am about to say to you….I apologize if I do……but if you are anything like me…..when you pray to God, especially in prayers of petition…..God seems somehow “out there”….right? We call out to God….somewhere in heaven….out there. Now maybe we don’t really think about it that much……but I think it somewhat true. When I was the evening hospital chaplain at Vanderbilt (adult and children’s) Hospitals, whenever I was asked to pray for a patient…..our prayers would always somehow seem to be to a God who was beyond the clouds….in heaven……Our Father, in heaven…….hear our prayers…….come, visit, be with this your servant. The idea almost seems to be that we are calling God, a God of hide and seek, perhaps, to come and be with us for awhile. One problem if we push that analogy to its fargone conclusion, if the patient does not get better after such petitionary prayer by whatever standard any one person in the room is measuring by…..it seems that God remains removed…out there. This framework, world-view, cosmology, where God is out there, and sometimes never comes to me or to you or to another personally….can cause a crisis of faith. Where is God? Why doesn’t God listen to me? What have I done to turn God away from me? Does God really have any power to change things? Does God really listen to MY prayers? Crises of faith take many forms…when we feel the absence of God…when God’s mercy and love are far removed from us…..we then know the presence of evil.
I had such a crisis of faith over a year ago. As a chaplain, going from room to room, both Emergency Departments….to Trauma, to the Burn unit, to the Labor and Delivery suites, to the myelosuppression floor, to descalations, extubations, and intubations……I would call upon God from out there, up there, somewhere there? Are you ?? and yet I continued to see suffering in its rawest dimensions. Where was God? I began to not be so sure any more. It is a scary place to be if you haven’t been there.
In God. We live. We move. We have our being, we are reminded by Paul. I didn’t feel very alive. I felt pretty stuck in place; and, felt fairly insignificant, really.
Now. Before we can move on…we must first back up a bit. 42 days ago, we celebrated the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Palm Sunday. We entered into the darkness of Holy Week. Easter was a lifetime away. And yet something very important happened that week that is extremely important to understanding this new cosmology that the Apostle Paul bids us back into today. It certainly helped me in my journey back to faith.
With Jesus stripes, we are healed.
Before the crown of thorns, before the carrying of the cross and falling once, twice…..before the nails, before the sword…..first, the stripes. Here there was brutal exchange between whip and flesh. The stripes across the back of Jesus were permanent. Where each lash hit, there would be a scar. Isaiah 53:5 states: with his stripes, we are healed. Jesus really began his physical suffering with stripes. Moments of pain that happened some 2000 years ago to an actual human being. There, and then, began our healing.
With that entrance in Holy Week…we are offered a powerful glimpse of not only who Jesus is….but who God is. And this can be a completely new way of understanding….if we allow these insights to slice their way into our beings. Jesus, we believe, was a part of the Word that was so vital a part in God’s act of creation. Later, God sent self in human form, enfleshed, into our world so that we might know God personally….…..in the person of Jesus. This was not a person that God allowed scot free from any and all harm. This was a human being, [somehow curiously equally God]….and yet this human’s back was disfigured by a lash. And there was no going back. The political machinery of the day and time didn’t stop with the lash….he went to trial…..lost, hit the pavement, fell down, hung up on a tree and died there. There was God. With us. And the Lord God used that horrible moment to raise this man once and for all…to give him life so that that life might infuse and perfuse each of us with life. Jesus was not ever “out there.” He was here, right amongst us. And so too, we believe, was God.
And we are told today that Jesus, now resurrected, will soon be taken back up into heaven to be with his Father…..but we shall not be left alone….there shall be an advocate given us. God always here with us; we are never alone. And yet the secret lies somewhere within those scars. When Jesus gasped with intense pain…Jesus’ experience is not tied to a particular place nor time. Instead, it is the place that we each know. We are able to identify with a Jesus in a new and real way, because through his pain, he identifies with us. Through his stripes, he is real to us in a way that space and time cannot hide. Here is a messiah who is as universal as he is palpably present to us. Jesus still bears those scars…..they link him to us and us to him. Jesus is here. Our infirmities, disappointments, brokenness, crises of faith, are met and absorbed by a Savior who felt the whip across his back….and who would be raised from the dead so that our scars might give shape to new lives as well.
This is not a God out there. This is not a God who promises to make all things smooth and nice for us………We are living beings in a world that we inhabit with delight…though not always with safety. We are not promised insatiable joys. Neither was God’s only Son. It is a world in which we make decisions and in which some are made for us….some of them go terribly awry. And we seek comfort in God’s grace given to us so freely. But, the activity of God is all around us…..creation never ends. Creation is always the outpouring of God…continuous around us, a continual act. Our redemption is a continual act….never static. They are parts of the same act. A Powerful act, full of power and glory. We know life because of this creative force; we experience forgiveness in and through resurrection….and we come to know how life can continually be made new. Our every breath is a part of God…..breath in, breath out…….holy breath….holy spirit. With every breath, like the birth of every star, is a new and decisive moment….reverberating to the drumbeat of God’s power.
In God, we live, we move, we have our being. God is right here. Beside us…in you. In me. We see God in each person….because God was a person….a person in Jesus. And that image is grafted into each of us. We make God known…….in everything we do and say. God is never removed from us as long as this new cosmology is a part of our belief: In God, we live, and move, and have our being.
In the words of one of the most beautiful psalms of them all……Where then shall I go then….if I climb to heaven…God is there. If I make the grave my bed, God is there……From God, I cannot escape. This God will never forsake us. Day 30 in 50……Alleluia, Christ is Risen! We say every morning in this season of time. And in Christ…we live. We move…..and are given life that never dies. What a great vision in which to actually, be.
