Recent Sermon from Myers Park Baptist Church

H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
April 11, 2004

GOD PROMISES; WE SING
Texts: I Corinthians 15:51-58; Luke 24:1-10

I write my Easter sermon with the window open next to my desk – so I can see the colors of spring and hear the birds sing. Spring is the season when God and nature conspire to help us believe!

What the birds sing is the "Yes" of God. The Apostle Paul writes:

Our Bibles, our churches, our culture, our theologies give us such mixed messages about God. Will God punish us, strike us dead, leave us, give up on us, send us to hell? Paul is telling us that Jesus is the answer to God’s bad reputation. There is a faithfulness at the heart of things.

A child of an alcoholic parent may never know what’s coming next: Lavish affection or soul-damaging rages. God is not like that.

Easter is God’s yes. Not Yes and No. Yes! Not Yes, If, Not Yes, But. Not Yes, Maybe. Yes!

There is little in springtime that does not shout Yes – which is reason enough for Easter to be placed here – at least for us Northern Hemisphere dwellers. Poet e.e.cummings sings an Easter song:

Easter is the message of God’s encircling undiluted, unequivocating Yes.

I

Take a look at Luke’s Easter account. The women closest to Jesus come to his grave to anoint his body. The artist of our cover, Buoninsegna, paints the scene in brilliant golds and reds, yellows and oranges, and glowing whites.

Seeking his corpse, the women find an open tomb and a couple of angels. The angels say, with a wink: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" The suggestion they plant is that the Crucified One is now the Living One.

With this news – and all its challenges to our normal sense of things – Easter begins to happen. Jesus begins to appear in a series of resurrection appearances in forms which we can only wave at linguistically – we use paradoxical phrases like "spiritual body." Well, which is it? we ask irritably, impatiently. Is it body or spirit?

The most beautiful blue I know is the color of the blue bird I catch out of the side of my eye as it flies by. When it is sitting still, the blue is still blue, it is still beautiful, but it is not the same.

So it is with the elusive presence of God, of the Risen One. We see the Risen Christ out of the side of our eye. Any Christ you can hold in a room or capture in a syllogism is not the risen Lord.

II

And what begins to happen as Easter happens? Courage begins to happen.

Paul Tillich called it the most essential form of courage, "The courage to be."

There are three great threats, he wrote, to our being, to our personhood. They are inside our heads, but they are as real and as lethal as bullets or bombs or disease.

They are the anxiety of guilt, the anxiety of meaningless, and the anxiety of death. The Risen Christ came to his disciples and comes to us to set us free from these disabling killers.

Take the anxiety of guilt. You’ve done something wrong; you’ve harmed another. You betrayed someone close; you’ve betrayed your own best, truest self. And guilt clings likes clothing on fire.

You’ve heard of God’s forgiveness, but it has not made its way from your head to your heart. And you are a long way from forgiving yourself.

Molly Peacock in a poem called "Forgiveness" writes:

I think I believe in some kind of bodily resurrection because I need bodily forgiveness.

Sometimes the guilt you suffer is false guilt. It is the trip the world outside you has laid on you. You’ve been told that something’s wrong with you. There is a defect in your manufacture. There’s something wrong with you. You’re told your deepest desires are unclean in the sight of God.

Listen: God loves you exactly as God made you. Nothing will ever change that.

The Risen Christ appeared to his guilt-ridden disciples, not to judge them, but to forgive them and to give their laboring conscience peace.

III

There is the anxiety of meaninglessness. You feel like giving up on any notions of truth and beauty, justice, love or peace.

Life can rip your heart out. The death of a child. The death of a dream. The persistence of evil. The persistence of your own "loyal flaws." Think of how Jesus’ disciples must have felt to see Jesus killed.

But Jesus returned to them and to us to say: What we’ve begun is not over. It’s only begun. God’s dream of a just society, of a whole person, of a beloved community, of a reconciled humanity: It has only begun. You can be part of it.

To be sure it has a long way to go. We can catch sight of it only out of the side of our eyes, like we catch sight of Jesus. But it is on the way.

Those who believe will always be in a minority. But God and a minority are enough.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "a transformed and transforming non-conformity."

The Apostle Paul used these words: Don’t let the world squeeze you into its old but let God remold your minds from within!

It is Easter faith which led Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead the Civil Rights Movement, which led Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus, which led Toyohiko Kagawa to the slums of Tokyo, which led Solzenitzen to oppose Soviet terror with his pen. It is what led Dorothy Day to the poor of New York City, led Bonhoeffer to help Jews escape Hitler and to die opposing Hitler.

It is what leads teachers of children to teach, public servants to serve, parents to parent, rabble rousers for Christ for the good to rabble. It is what leads you to fight for human dignity and freedom. Don’t worry that you may be in a minority. When has it been different?

Jesus came to his beaten disciples to call them again, to say: "Don’t give up. Life is winning; death is losing. Pass the word! The kingdom of good will prevail over the kingdom of evil. Get to work. Spread the word."

IV

This anxiety: It is our fear of dying, our fear of a particular way of dying, our fear of being a burden on others, our fear of dying alone. It is our fear that death may really be the end of it all. It is the fear that when I die there will be too much left undone, unsaid. It is the fear that I may have more in my debit column than in my credit column, as if love keeps count.

Jesus came back to tell us that death is a door, the door to the Final Healing and to the Final Mercy. What is on the other side of the veil is unimaginably good. As scripture says:

People have many different images of the life to come. But the Risen One says it will be a Final Healing and a Final Mercy.

What do I have to believe about resurrection, about eternal life? As I said eight weeks ago: The question is not what do I have to believe but what do I need to believe. And when you need to believe more than you do now, or differently, God will give that to you then.

What Easter brings is wonderment, and wonderment is the door to the deepest kind of faith. Not certainty, wonderment.

If you look closely at the Easter accounts in Luke’s gospel you will see that Easter begins not in certainty but in wonderment.

Look at the language: Disciples are perplexed, puzzled, amazed, startled, frightened, dumbfounded. When the women tell the disciples what happened at the tomb, they diagnose it as an idle tale, as nonsense.

When Jesus appeared they still couldn’t make sense of it, but they tingled with excitement. Luke uses the phrase: They "disbelieved for joy." It was all there mixed together: Joy, doubt, faith, perplexity. In a word: Wonderment.

Conclusion

Perhaps there is something very right about why many Christians around the world begin their Easter not on Sunday morning but on the night before at the Easter vigil.

Why? Because before Easter is a ray of light it is a "ray of darkness" to use the wondrous phrase of Dionysius the Syrian, There is a divine ray of darkness. It is close to what the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan wrote:

Before Easter is a ray of light it is a ray of darkness, because a ray of darkness can reach where a ray of light cannot. It goes to that place within that John Keats called "Negative Capability" – a dwelling in, a "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts."

The divine ray of darkness reaches into the place where uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, anxieties and terrors live. The ray of darkness reaches as deep as a cross, as deep as the hells we inhabit and the hells we make. This is where Easter begins because this is how deep Christ has gone. John Donne, the poet/preacher of St. Paul’s Cathedral, wrote, preached:

It is as a ray of darkness the first words of Easter come to us:

It is I. Be not afraid. It is I, alleluia. Peace be to you. Alleluia.

Be of good courage, Jesus says this Easter day. "In this world you will find tribulation. (Tribulation, you may say, is my middle name. Hello, Trib!) But be of good courage. I have overcome the world."

Then the church begins to sing – even those who can’t sing, those whom educators euphemistically call "uncertain singers." Then the church begins to sing:

To God’s great Yes the church utters its Amen, which means, Let it be, which means our Yes, which means "count me in," which means thank you and thank you and thank you and thank you.

Which is what I mean by Radical Doxology: That in face of it all, we say, Christ "eastering" in us, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

And Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen.

Now it’s your turn.

1. Cornucopia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002) p. 227.

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