Nerissa's Easter Sermon

Call to Worship M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because God cannot be contained M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because Jesus lives in you and me now. M: What will you do now? P: Recognize everyone I meet today as Christ in his many distressing disguises. Scripture: Tom Nields-Duffy: Luke 23: 13-49 Gail Tenney Nields: John 20:1-20; John 21: 15-17 Sermon “If You Want to Live, You Gotta Die.” When considering what I wanted to talk about on this Easter Sunday, it occurred to me that people looking for the answer to the question, “Did Jesus really die for our sins, and if so what exactly does that mean?” might not be the same people who would wander into the West Cummington Congregational church today. This is actually my first Easter here, and when I inquired about Easters past, I heard a rumor that Stephen began a sermon with the statement, “It’s a METAPHOR, people!” With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot, for the past six weeks, about resurrection as a metaphor. I’ve been thinking about life, death and rebirth; I’ve been thinking about the phase which Lent symbolizes so beautifully: the period of being planted, when we are still in the darkness of underground, hidden from the world, churning beneath the soil and metamorphosing into some new form: like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a red bud unfurling into a big green leaf. It might occur to you, looking up here at me in all my girthly splendor, that I have another reason for meditating on this topic, but we’ll leave that alone for now. I volunteered to preach the Easter sermon here, in part as a ruse to get my parents to come up for the weekend. As soon as I heard I’d been given the green light, I freaked out. My preparations for writing this sermon consisted of pondering a sentence I heard recently from an Episcopal priest named Cynthia Bourgeault: “If you want to live, you’ve got to die.” Also renting all four disks of the Complete Beatles Anthology. What, you might ask, do the Beatles have to do with Easter? Being that this is West Cummington, I’m not that afraid of you coming after me for implying that the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. I’m pretty sure that none of you burned your Beatles LPs back in 1966 when John Lennon made this infamous declaration. The Beatles, like Jesus, represented leadership to a group who had previously felt unseen and disenfranchised. The Beatles had a new, fresh message, of peace, love and understanding. They lived their lives-or at least their twenties-- for their music, and as George Harrison said towards the end of his life, they gave their nervous systems in service to the cause. One of them died a martyr and another was proclaimed dead, though he apparently rose again, backwards lyrics and mysterious license plates notwithstanding. But the real reason I bring the Beatles up today is because for me, born in the late sixties, they were a powerful example of humans who seemed larger than life and who lived to the fullest, never holding back, and who simply, finally, self-extinguished, like fast burning candles. And yet, they live on, even though their music is no longer in the top ten, even though half of the group is physically dead. Through the vehicle of fame and artistry, they have achieved a kind of immortality. It was easier for me as a young person to understand the Beatle myth than it was for me to understand the Christ story. They were flesh and blood to me, even though they had long stopped making music by the time I got turned on to them. One of my first spiritual experiences came after I learned that George Harrison had introduced the other Beatles to Transcendental Meditation. I took the practice on, though my version of meditating involved sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed and fantasizing about meeting all the Beatles on a desert island. Jesus, on the other hand, was a disembodied and invisible presence on our Presbyterian cross, a pastel drawing in a Sunday School book, a character in a song I didn’t like called “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” We humans, or at least this one, learn best from stories. That’s how I make sense of the world, and given the myriad stories in the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the many Buddhist parables, not to mention Greek Myths and the folk tales of every tradition on earth, I think I am not alone. Jesus himself taught through parable, or as a previous sermonizer in this pulpit suggested, koans. And as we have discussed, those stories sometimes made a lot of sense: like the story of the Good Samaritan and the story of the Prodigal Son. But some of them are real head-scratchers: the one about the master of the vineyard who pays all the workers the same wage even though some of the workers worked from sun down to sun up while others worked for a mere hour. The one about the resourceful brides who wouldn’t share their oil with their sleepier and less on-the-ball sisters. The one from Mark about Jesus killing the fig tree just because it wouldn’t bear fruit out of season. For me, these stories begged the question: who is this Jesus and why should I worship him? And yet, funnily enough, as an adolescent I was happy to forgive the Beatles for experimenting with drugs, cheating on their wives, fighting pettily with each other about songwriting credits. That just proved they were human. Jesus was supposed to be the Son of God; some said he actually was God Himself, or at least one third of God. I wasn’t yet focused on the fact that Jesus, too, was fully human. As I grew older, my faith began to change, though my love for the Beatles did not. I began to read wonderful exegeses of the scriptures, heard sermons from different traditions about who Jesus was and what Jesus meant to do. After a very brief dalliance with Campus Crusade for Christ, I rejected the literal in favor of the literary view of Jesus. I read Elaine Pagels and dove into the Gnostic Gospels. I read Wordsworth and Emerson and wrote papers about William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, founders of the Unitarian Church. I had many arguments with fellow Christians in school about the meaning of the resurrection and whether or not we were supposed to take the Gospel as actual history (their view) or as myth and poetry (mine.) “Jesus is a radical socialist Jew!” I shouted. “Jesus came to right the wrongs of a petty, materialistic society! Jesus would weep if he saw the condition of the church today!” I pointed to the scriptures about the Pharisees, those petty pedants who missed the forest for the trees, who worried about plucking grain on the Sabbath and tried to understand God through their intellect. “God can only be known through the heart, and through direct experience!” said I, paraphrasing Emerson. The truth was, I was as guilty as they were in this respect: I was only experiencing God with my intellect. I could point out that the Bible mentioned the need to care for the poor 2000 times and homosexuality only twice. I could point out, to fans of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that Jesus abhorred it when people prayed in the streets. I could point out that the Gospels contradicted each other many times over, so how, therefore, could we take the Bible to be the literal word of God? And so on. But what I was failing to do was what I said I needed to do: see with the heart and not the mind. And more importantly, that I had to die to something if I wanted to live. I experienced the Beatles with my heart. I could also analyze their music and write scholarly papers on why they were the greatest pop band of all time. I could learn their songs note for note and memorize each of their individual discograpies. But in the end, the reason I loved them was wordless: it had to do with the way the music made me feel, especially when I lay in bed alone in my dorm room with the lights out and just listened to “Across the Universe” and “Hey Jude.” Music, like God, is ultimately an emotional experience. It wasn’t until I had a personal crisis myself that I began to experience God in this way, in the way music could reach my heart and align me, wordlessly and lovingly. I was thirty, immersed in a very ambitious music career, striving to be the next Beatles, and very sick with an eating disorder. I had tried everything to get well. I had a wonderful, gentle therapist, a supportive family, an acupuncturist, a meditation practice, about fifty books on the topic, several good friends who had been through what I was going through and a fierce determination to beat what was clearly a kind of addiction. But nothing worked, and as hard as I tried to get well, I kept getting sicker and sicker, more and more desperate and confused. What finally changed me was a kind of death, also known as surrender. I surrendered to my inability to conquer my problem alone; I surrendered to my limits as a human being, and I asked for help from Whomever was out there. I got on my knees and said a prayer, and with that prayer, a presence came; a wordless, loving, clear presence. A calm came over me, and a relationship began. I felt like Helen Keller in the last scene of the Miracle Worker: what had previously been an academic idea suddenly became direct experience. From that moment on, I could see. And what I could see was a God who loved me no matter what, a God I both recognized from the Bible as the loving father of Jesus, and-to my great surprise—as Jesus himself. And the stories in the Bible fell away at that point, seeming more like the scaffolding intending to hold the building in place as it was being built than the building itself, within which I was now dwelling. Actually, not all of the stories fell away. Some in particular remained and took on a vibrancy I had been missing previously. The many stories of Jesus healing hopelessly deformed and mutilated people began to resonate with me. As I felt myself healed, and around me saw others getting well, too, I saw first-hand the power of faith, the way God could enter a life and transform it from hopeless to joyful. And I learned a new definition of sin. In its original definition, sin meant, simply, that which separates us from God. No judgment, no shame-just separation. The absence of presence. From my meditation practice I was learning how elusive presence could be; that even as I sat diligently hour after hour, day after day, it still was like pulling teeth for me to just stay present with my breath, with myself, with that one-pointed concentration. Presence in and of itself began to feel like God, or at least the bridge between God and me. And I was playing with another definition of God. What if God was Reality? What if God was the river that flowed north to south? What if all God wanted from me was to show up and let the river carry me where it would? How would my life be transformed if I took that as my savior? That surrender to what is, and the simultaneous knowledge that no matter how bad things looked in the moment, what would never change was God’s absolute and perfect love for me? Here’s where things can get a bit soupy—I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable when speakers veer off the road of Biblical text and go cross-country with their “woo woo” experiences of God and Jesus, but I have no other way of telling this story. Like Paul, a writer with whom I have many issues, I found Jesus on my own road to Damascus and experienced him close up. Because of this I am forever changed. I was experiencing Jesus the way I experience music-wordless, timeless and the truest communication I’ve ever had. In this new view of my role and God’s role in the way life went, I grew a new perspective on the crucifixion story. For here was Jesus, someone whom I had come to know, not from the pages of the Bible, but in my own life, as a presence, a brother, a loving example of how to stay present with whatever was. As a healer, as a teacher, as a friend. I had a new perspective about the cross. I saw Jesus’s willingness to surrender to humiliation and torture as the ultimate expression of surrendering to What Is, even when What Is is grisly and inhuman and seems to be, at least to the disciples who fled the scene, the absolute worst ending to the story. But what I also know from my own experience is that if you really stay with What Is, no matter how miserable it may be, it will change, and more importantly, you will be changed. Everything dissolves eventually-everything and everyone dies- and everything-including you-is born anew. You wake up, look around you and blink and say, “how did this happen? I seem to have become transformed.” Elaine Pagel’s discussion of the Gospel Of Thomas had a huge impact on me when I was first coming into this new relationship. One of the ideas she posits is that Jesus can be interpreted as a kind of divine Twin (Thomas means Twin). As so, goes the theory, he really is both the Son of God and the Son of Man—and part of his message is to show us that we, too are sons and daughters of both God and human. To use a term coined by our modern day priests, our friends the psychotherapists, we could say that Jesus was the purest example of the Authentic Self we have yet experienced in a person who walked this earth: Jesus had such a clear understanding of reality and human nature, was always able to be himself, with no apology whatsoever, was always able to look straight ahead and walk where he needed to walk, even if that road took him across a lake near Gennesaret or up the hill to Calvary. Cynthia Bourgeault, in her wonderful analysis of the Passion story, shows how all the characters within it represent aspects of our false selves: Judas and his fear and greed and deceitfulness; Peter and his cowardice; Pilate and his ability to see the truth but unwillingness to go with it; the soldiers with their violence; the mob with its cruel taunts, and finally the thieves on either side of Jesus in the Luke version of the story. One thief says, “If you are the Son of God, get off the cross and save us too!” He joins the voices of the mob. The other thief says, “Shut up! This man is innocent, and we are guilty! Yet he dies with us!” He turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember us in the kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus turns to this thief and says, “In truth I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Today. Right now. You are with What Is and that, when we really accept it, is Paradise. And I believe one of the most crucial lessons Jesus taught us, both before his death and through his post resurrection example, is that he is within each of us and always has been. In Matthew 25:45, he says, “As you do to one of the least of these, you do to me.” After his death, he asks his disciple, “Peter do you love me? Then feed my lambs.” Pardon the Beatles pun, but the Jesus I have come to know really is within and without each of us, and I can no longer look at any individual and not see Jesus somewhere lurking within, in his distressing disguise. I still love the Beatles, although they no longer enter my life on a daily basis and teach me how to live. I tried to follow in their footsteps for years and it didn’t work. When I tried to find heaven through a number one hit and the love of a huge audience, this route made me sick, and then sicker. I guess I was a sinner, meaning I was separated from everyone else, trying to be above everyone. When I walk in the footsteps of Jesus, by which I mean when I walk my own path, understanding God through my own heart and raw experience, letting the light of God shine the way, I am well. More importantly, I have company. This is the kind of life everlasting that I believe in today.