Sunday
April 11
Easter Basket
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
Memory
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
Just before Easter some years ago, a dear mentor died, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin who had been our pastor at Riverside Church in New York. He comes to memory at Easter, as did this Easter. His example and service were a beacon and guide for us, as was his preaching, at Yale and then in New York. At Easter his memory arises, partly because he had gift for epigrams. In the joy of Easter there is in the seasonal basket the particular joy of his capacity to put things simply and say things briefly. He was a stellar epigrammatist, as in his own way, was the author of our fourth Gospel, read a moment ago. Here are a few from Coffin:
There is more mercy in God than sin in us.
To age is grow from passion to compassion.
When my son died God’s heart broke first.
The separation of church and state is not the separation of a Christian from her politics.
Lent is the time to get rid of your guilt.
I’m not OK, and you’re not OK. But that’s OK.
Courage is the most important virtue because it makes all the others possible.
Rules are signposts not hitching posts.
The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man.
Hell is truth seen too late.
The trick in life is to die young as late as possible.
The longest, most arduous trip in the world is the journey from the head to the heart.
It is often said that religion is a crutch. What makes you think you don’t limp?
Good preaching is never at people, it’s for people.
To me it is hard to believe a loving God would create loving creatures that aspire to be yet more loving, and then finish them off before their aspirations are complete. There must be something more….
Mind
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
In a class on pastoral leadership this past week, we read Parker Palmer’s classic The Courage to Teach. In it he explores the relationship of the teacher’s inner life to the craft of teaching. Those truest to and closest to their own best selves invariably become the most mindful teachers, of whose insights we are most often reminded. Take Dr. Christopher Morse, who taught us to think about things. Like heaven for instance.
How are we to think about heaven?
One way to think about something is to think about its opposite.
Our Bible uses the word heaven in opposition to the word earth. Heaven is up there. Earth is down here. ‘Heaven and earth are full of thy glory’. ‘As the heavens are high above the earth’. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.’ Heaven represents the ultimate or penultimate reality of the physical world in the Bible, as it does in the ancient philosophers.
But we are today reluctant to think that heaven is up there. For we know that ‘Up There’ is the moon, the Milky Way, and the expanding, even infinite, universe.
Our Bible also speaks of heaven in contrast to hell. Now the comparison is not between up and down, as much as it is between lasting good and lasting bad. Heaven is good. Hell is bad. But we also have some question about these inherited, mythological accounts of hell, as well as similar accounts of this Heaven. Harps, wings, clouds…fire, forks, tails…Good we acknowledge. Evil we acknowledge. Hell as the absence of God, or of good, we acknowledge. But hell as eternal torment, administered in punitive ways by a divinity of somewhat unpleasant temperament, this hell we question.
Here is a third contrast. Not heaven and earth, nor heaven and hell, but heaven and hurt. It is at the heart John and the marrow of the Easter gospel that ‘something happened’. Not up and down, nor good and bad, but now and then. This contrast is built on time, rather than on space or on morals. Heaven is then, earth is now. A belief in heaven, then, is a trust in what is ‘taking place’ over against a knowledge of what is ‘in place’. What is taking place, contrasted with what is in place. What is at hand as contrasted to what is in hand. (I am indebted here to the work of my teacher, Dr. Christopher Morse). Now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face. Now we see in mirror dimly. Then face to face.
Easter reminds, brings to mind. Heaven is both near and different, utterly close at hand, yet completely different from anything in hand. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand.’ ‘The reign of God has come near to you.’ ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God’. ‘The Lord is at hand…’And yet…there is nothing in our hands like what God hands us. The resurrection is Christ’s victory over death, when no other victory avails.
Story
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
The Holy Scripture brings the story of Easter, nestled into our Easter basket this Eastertide.
Last week we heard from 1 Corinthians 15, wherein Paul writes to address an argument in the church about resurrection. (This is utterly fascinating in itself, since it shows that not 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion there was already church disagreement about resurrection! Imagine that.)
It is a pastoral letter, a pastoral word. Paul sits at the bedside, as it were. He takes your hand and remembers your experience in receiving an inherited tradition: dead, buried, and raised on the third day. He mentions to you, hand on shoulder, the centrality of resurrection to the whole of Christian preaching. He pauses to place this account of resurrection into an apocalyptic frame, which he brought with him from Judaism, but notices your flagging interest in the history of religions. So, as he did with circumcision in Galatians, and as we are perhaps inclined to think he often did in polemic, Paul lets the whole Gospel ride on this one point, at this point. He recites names of people you also have heard of—Peter, James, others. With you, perhaps asking in Hemingway fashion for your experience too (what is your actual experience of life, death, love, the numinous?), he recounts experiences of others, who have known an appearance, apostles, individuals, and groups, even himself. (This is our one and only primary source reference to a personal experience of the Risen Christ, by the way). He points to popular religious practices (the experience, apparently known in the Corinthian church, of baptizing in the name of the dead). There is a lengthy pause. Then he dramatically asserts his own experience of suffering, and risks of death, as sure evidence of the power of resurrection. He pointedly equates denial of resurrection with license to do as we please. Paul even takes up, less intelligibly, and more mystically, the further question of how resurrection happens. He then more philosophically, and lengthily, assesses our experiences of the glories of nature, the created order, the firmament, the physical body. The passage is based on experience. While he starts with his own experience, he leans heavily on yours.
Then his conclusion. Listen for what is not said, too. Paul also, for all the experiential assurance of the chapter, clearly announces that he tells of a…mystery. Not a fact. A mystery. Not a miracle. A mystery. Not a wonder. A mystery. Not evidence or verdict. A mystery. Behold, I tell you a mystery…
To announce this mystery, the New Testament in general, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, convey three different accounts of resurrection. Peter (representing the first three gospels) emphasizes a physical resurrection, an empty tomb, more than resuscitation, to be sure, but physical nonetheless. Paul emphasizes a spiritual resurrection, known in revelation. John announces an existential resurrection, one that fills all of life and creation, that was presaged by the raising of Lazarus, one that makes the cross itself a glorification, a completion. Peter shows us an empty tomb. Paul blows the trumpet of heaven. John acclaims a full heart. All three emphases, perhaps providentially provided to reach the varied hearts and minds of various women and men, all the spots on the personality map, affirm that something happened. Something for dreamers, doubters and doers. Something for engineers, philosophers, and politicians. You may ask if they are all on the same page.
We reply, “They are singing out of the same hymnal: Sings Peter, ‘ours the cross, the grave, the skies’; sings Paul, ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free’; sings John, ‘he walks with me and he talks with me’.”
What the church has tried to name, over the centuries, in the weeks of Easter, is that something happened. Something physical, something spiritual, something experiential. There is room for your particular temperament here. To some measure, they must all be true. For the physical resurrection, the resurrection of the body, at the least is attested in the ongoing life of the church. And the spiritual resurrection is at least attested in the preaching of the faith. And the existential resurrection is at least attested in unexpected, undeserved, real love. Something happened. The church is alive. The future is open. Love is real. The Lord is risen indeed!
Song
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
It has been just over a year since our last wedding at Marsh Chapel. So, to converse last week with a couple to be married up the coast this fall, the first since March of 2020, brought an unexpected wave of emotion. Joy! A song of joy of its own. After the conversation, the words and rhythms and gladness of weddings flooded in, in full. Especially the song of St. Paul, not always used in weddings, and when used not always rightly used, but still used often, an Easter song of love:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
For now* we see in a mirror dimly, but then* face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
So, faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Memory and mind, story and song: Made like him, like him we rise
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies…Alleluia!
The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
