And Their Eyes Were Opened…
April 04, 2010
Easter - April 4, 2010
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Luke 24:13-35
It was 1979. I was almost 24, living in Chicago, and my parents had gone to Norway for a vacation. I thought it would be fun to meet their plane when they came home, even though they live outside Philadelphia, so I flew out there, my plane arriving about 30 minutes before theirs. Everything went right on schedule, and soon I was seeing my Mom and Dad walk out of customs. I was so excited at this surprise – and I walked up to my Mom and said, “Hi!” She stared at me… and turned away. I touched my Dad’s elbow to get his attention and said, “Hi!” He looked at me as if I might try to sell him a flower, said “hello…” and walked away. Hmmm, I thought, not at ALL the response I was looking for. Frankly, I felt a little hurt. While I hadn’t seen my Dad for 18 months, I had seen Mom about 6 weeks earlier, and I am their only daughter…. So I followed them out to the curb, waited for them to put down their bags, planted myself right in front of both of them and said, “Mom, Dad…hi!” They looked at me, and then there was a shudder of recognition as they both realized who I was…and we had the joyful reunion I had expected.
Every so often when I am reading the resurrection stories about how the disciples failed to recognize Jesus, I remember this story. Now we often assume that Jesus looked different after the resurrection, and he may well have, and this particular passage tells us that the disciples were kept from recognizing him. But even if they hadn’t been, it has become believable to me that they might not have recognized him. Yes – He is risen! He is risen indeed! But what does that mean to us?
Every year at this time, as I prepare to preach, I reflect on the variety of ways that Christians understand Easter. And a central issue for many folks is what we believe about Easter – do we believe it literally? I’ve said some of this before, but it bears repeating. Sometimes it seems as if we Christians are somewhat embarrassed by the resurrection. Is it because it doesn’t fit into our scientific, rationalistic worldview?? Rather than deal with the power of a real resurrection, we’d prefer to keep it in the distant past and in the unimaginable future so that we won’t have to engage it in the present. We think that as long as we can say, yes, Jesus was raised from the dead (distant past) we can know we will have eternal life (unimaginable future) and we don’t have to deal with what the resurrection should imply for our lives right now.
And this begins to get to what’s important about Easter I think – because actually, for me, although I tend to come down on the side of “it probably happened as reported in the Bible, a physical reality” I’m going to be a little sacrilegious here: I don’t think it matters much what you believed happened back then. Some of us here believe Jesus was physically resurrected, others believe that something spiritual happened, others believe the story of Jesus became a unifying and powerful reality for people. Whatever. I don’t think it matters much what you believed happened back then. What’s important is the significance of that for now. Because if you believe that Jesus was really resurrected, but don’t really trust that God is living and active in your own life now—what’s the point?
Jesus didn’t really talk much about the resurrection. He also hardly spoke at all about life after death. What he did talk about, all the time, was the kingdom of God as a present reality. The habit of our present time – where we think of God as a distant power whose chief importance lies in ensuring that we live beyond our physical death – is completely inconsistent with the Biblical vision of life in God. Life in God, in the Bible, is the way that our present living becomes charged with the reality of God; it’s the way we live in response to the moment-to-moment generosity and imperatives of God.
I spoke a couple of weeks ago on addiction, and in particular about 12-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, etc. These are truly Easter people – people who are finding the ability to experience new life through the reality of God. Think about it! These are people who have experienced physical addictions such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and compulsive overeating – all of which are addictions that have been demonstrated to have a physical basis in addition to the emotional and spiritual dimensions – and people are discovering an ability to rely on God for moment-to-moment recovery. This is not merely about staying sober or clean or abstinent, but about experiencing guidance from God that enables spiritual renewal in all dimensions of life. 12-step recovery is not about substituting meetings for drinking, but about discovering a spiritual approach to life that includes accountability, intimate communities, a sense of freedom, and trusting God for moment-to-moment guidance in the nitty-gritty realities of life. And interestingly enough – these 12-step groups don’t worry about doctrine at all. They will say quite clearly, it doesn’t really matter what you believe about a Higher Power, so long as you trust this power to guide you and empower your recovery. What you believe doesn’t matter – how you trust does. Trusting God day to day, and when necessary minute to minute makes new life possible – God makes a way where there was no way. He is risen, he is risen indeed.
And it’s not just addicts of one sort or another who experience life-in-God as a daily reality – all sorts of experiences can bring people to a new way of looking at the world, a way that sees life as being charged with the reality and love of God. While often negative circumstances bring us to this point – an illness that challenges our ability to carry on by ourselves, a loss that utterly upends life as it was –positives can also lead us: the desire to explore prayer more as a constant in life, the observation of the changes in a friend or loved one who is newly living a life-in-God, or a deep love of the natural world that has come to understand that God is in all things. Some folks mistakenly think that one who is living this kind of life must have become religious in the legalistic, conservative, judgmental way – the kind of person with a Bible verse for every situation who is, as the old saying goes, “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.” It’s a shame that the religious right has convinced so many people that theirs is the only way to live the with-God life because living with God means engagement with the world as it is, not escape; it means loving the world, not judging it; and above all, it means understanding that life-in-God means everything belongs: our flaws, our gifts, our failures, our celebrations – God is in it all.
There is a whole family of people – from every faith – whose primary experience of faith is not doctrine, but seeing the world differently. These people we often call mystics, or contemplatives, don’t necessarily shun theology, but they look to the immediacy of the world to find the reality of God. Think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words: Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries…. Or Richard Rohr, who writes: “You do not resolve the God question in your head – or even in the perfection of moral response. It is resolved in you, when you agree to bear the mystery of God: God’s suffering for the world, and God’s ecstasy in the world. That’s much harder, I’m afraid, than trying to be “good”…how do we do it? By praying and meditating? By more silence, solitude and sacraments? Yes, all of the above, but mostly by living and accepting our own reality…Living and accepting our own reality will not feel very spiritual…it seems we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The first feels very religious; the second just feels human and not glorious at all.” By embracing our own real lives as the place where God lives, we learn to embrace life, and the real, fragile world, with the passion and love of God. And so we can say: he is risen! He is risen indeed!
In his chapter on "Attention" psychologist William James says this: "Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit." His point seems to be that by paying attention to some things, and not paying attention to others, we create the universe around us. What we notice has a lot to do with what we expect to see, and just as my parents didn’t expect to see their daughter (and so didn’t see a daughter), the disciples had no expectation of seeing Jesus and so they didn’t. If we believe that God is here, and that Christ is with us always, and that we can rely on the presence of the Holy Spirit, then we begin to see signs of divine presence in our midst. If our mindset is such that we do not expect to see signs of God's presence in the world, we likely will not.
Father Pedro Arrupe was a Jesuit who wrote: “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evening, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
What does resurrection mean in our lives today? What does it mean that God loves the world too much to walk away? What does it mean that even when the world’s answer to Jesus was NO, God’s answer was YES? What does it mean to realize that God is free to reject our rejection, and to understand that in God, new life is always possible, sometimes especially through the brokenness of a life that is falling apart? What does it mean to know that in Jesus, God has lived in solidarity with this world up to, and beyond the end? If it doesn’t mean anything in our lives right now, it doesn’t mean anything at all, because Jesus always lived in the now.
It means we are never alone. It means we dance…instead of marching or crawling grimly through life. It means that love is the ultimate reality – not our love, which fails all too easily, which gives up, or which understands love as possession and control – but God’s love which grounds us in freedom, always meets us wherever we are, and persists even beyond the end. It means that God’s love is more real than our failures and breathes a joy that transcends happiness. It means that when we are fully alive, we love the world, not to possess it, but to cherish it. It means that we have a zest for life that is forever uncool, that we don’t have to be on guard but can be passionately transparent. It means we are loved, and that our response is to love the people and the planet, embracing both beauty and pain as part of the cost and blessing of being alive.
And it means we who are ordinary folks, like the ordinary bread and fruit of the vine, experience God in extraordinary ways when we allow ourselves to be taken, blessed, broken and given – the body of Christ for the love of the world. It means that we will reveal God to one another in the breaking of bread and the living of life just as it is. It means we laugh, we forgive, we take God very seriously and ourselves not so much, and it means we hold everything gently, because in the end, nothing is really ours, and the only reality is that we are God’s, and that in God everything belongs, and so we can trust life, because it is good. Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, and nothing will ever be the same. Amen.
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Luke 24:13-35
It was 1979. I was almost 24, living in Chicago, and my parents had gone to Norway for a vacation. I thought it would be fun to meet their plane when they came home, even though they live outside Philadelphia, so I flew out there, my plane arriving about 30 minutes before theirs. Everything went right on schedule, and soon I was seeing my Mom and Dad walk out of customs. I was so excited at this surprise – and I walked up to my Mom and said, “Hi!” She stared at me… and turned away. I touched my Dad’s elbow to get his attention and said, “Hi!” He looked at me as if I might try to sell him a flower, said “hello…” and walked away. Hmmm, I thought, not at ALL the response I was looking for. Frankly, I felt a little hurt. While I hadn’t seen my Dad for 18 months, I had seen Mom about 6 weeks earlier, and I am their only daughter…. So I followed them out to the curb, waited for them to put down their bags, planted myself right in front of both of them and said, “Mom, Dad…hi!” They looked at me, and then there was a shudder of recognition as they both realized who I was…and we had the joyful reunion I had expected.
Every so often when I am reading the resurrection stories about how the disciples failed to recognize Jesus, I remember this story. Now we often assume that Jesus looked different after the resurrection, and he may well have, and this particular passage tells us that the disciples were kept from recognizing him. But even if they hadn’t been, it has become believable to me that they might not have recognized him. Yes – He is risen! He is risen indeed! But what does that mean to us?
Every year at this time, as I prepare to preach, I reflect on the variety of ways that Christians understand Easter. And a central issue for many folks is what we believe about Easter – do we believe it literally? I’ve said some of this before, but it bears repeating. Sometimes it seems as if we Christians are somewhat embarrassed by the resurrection. Is it because it doesn’t fit into our scientific, rationalistic worldview?? Rather than deal with the power of a real resurrection, we’d prefer to keep it in the distant past and in the unimaginable future so that we won’t have to engage it in the present. We think that as long as we can say, yes, Jesus was raised from the dead (distant past) we can know we will have eternal life (unimaginable future) and we don’t have to deal with what the resurrection should imply for our lives right now.
And this begins to get to what’s important about Easter I think – because actually, for me, although I tend to come down on the side of “it probably happened as reported in the Bible, a physical reality” I’m going to be a little sacrilegious here: I don’t think it matters much what you believed happened back then. Some of us here believe Jesus was physically resurrected, others believe that something spiritual happened, others believe the story of Jesus became a unifying and powerful reality for people. Whatever. I don’t think it matters much what you believed happened back then. What’s important is the significance of that for now. Because if you believe that Jesus was really resurrected, but don’t really trust that God is living and active in your own life now—what’s the point?
Jesus didn’t really talk much about the resurrection. He also hardly spoke at all about life after death. What he did talk about, all the time, was the kingdom of God as a present reality. The habit of our present time – where we think of God as a distant power whose chief importance lies in ensuring that we live beyond our physical death – is completely inconsistent with the Biblical vision of life in God. Life in God, in the Bible, is the way that our present living becomes charged with the reality of God; it’s the way we live in response to the moment-to-moment generosity and imperatives of God.
I spoke a couple of weeks ago on addiction, and in particular about 12-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, etc. These are truly Easter people – people who are finding the ability to experience new life through the reality of God. Think about it! These are people who have experienced physical addictions such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and compulsive overeating – all of which are addictions that have been demonstrated to have a physical basis in addition to the emotional and spiritual dimensions – and people are discovering an ability to rely on God for moment-to-moment recovery. This is not merely about staying sober or clean or abstinent, but about experiencing guidance from God that enables spiritual renewal in all dimensions of life. 12-step recovery is not about substituting meetings for drinking, but about discovering a spiritual approach to life that includes accountability, intimate communities, a sense of freedom, and trusting God for moment-to-moment guidance in the nitty-gritty realities of life. And interestingly enough – these 12-step groups don’t worry about doctrine at all. They will say quite clearly, it doesn’t really matter what you believe about a Higher Power, so long as you trust this power to guide you and empower your recovery. What you believe doesn’t matter – how you trust does. Trusting God day to day, and when necessary minute to minute makes new life possible – God makes a way where there was no way. He is risen, he is risen indeed.
And it’s not just addicts of one sort or another who experience life-in-God as a daily reality – all sorts of experiences can bring people to a new way of looking at the world, a way that sees life as being charged with the reality and love of God. While often negative circumstances bring us to this point – an illness that challenges our ability to carry on by ourselves, a loss that utterly upends life as it was –positives can also lead us: the desire to explore prayer more as a constant in life, the observation of the changes in a friend or loved one who is newly living a life-in-God, or a deep love of the natural world that has come to understand that God is in all things. Some folks mistakenly think that one who is living this kind of life must have become religious in the legalistic, conservative, judgmental way – the kind of person with a Bible verse for every situation who is, as the old saying goes, “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.” It’s a shame that the religious right has convinced so many people that theirs is the only way to live the with-God life because living with God means engagement with the world as it is, not escape; it means loving the world, not judging it; and above all, it means understanding that life-in-God means everything belongs: our flaws, our gifts, our failures, our celebrations – God is in it all.
There is a whole family of people – from every faith – whose primary experience of faith is not doctrine, but seeing the world differently. These people we often call mystics, or contemplatives, don’t necessarily shun theology, but they look to the immediacy of the world to find the reality of God. Think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words: Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries…. Or Richard Rohr, who writes: “You do not resolve the God question in your head – or even in the perfection of moral response. It is resolved in you, when you agree to bear the mystery of God: God’s suffering for the world, and God’s ecstasy in the world. That’s much harder, I’m afraid, than trying to be “good”…how do we do it? By praying and meditating? By more silence, solitude and sacraments? Yes, all of the above, but mostly by living and accepting our own reality…Living and accepting our own reality will not feel very spiritual…it seems we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The first feels very religious; the second just feels human and not glorious at all.” By embracing our own real lives as the place where God lives, we learn to embrace life, and the real, fragile world, with the passion and love of God. And so we can say: he is risen! He is risen indeed!
In his chapter on "Attention" psychologist William James says this: "Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit." His point seems to be that by paying attention to some things, and not paying attention to others, we create the universe around us. What we notice has a lot to do with what we expect to see, and just as my parents didn’t expect to see their daughter (and so didn’t see a daughter), the disciples had no expectation of seeing Jesus and so they didn’t. If we believe that God is here, and that Christ is with us always, and that we can rely on the presence of the Holy Spirit, then we begin to see signs of divine presence in our midst. If our mindset is such that we do not expect to see signs of God's presence in the world, we likely will not.
Father Pedro Arrupe was a Jesuit who wrote: “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evening, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
What does resurrection mean in our lives today? What does it mean that God loves the world too much to walk away? What does it mean that even when the world’s answer to Jesus was NO, God’s answer was YES? What does it mean to realize that God is free to reject our rejection, and to understand that in God, new life is always possible, sometimes especially through the brokenness of a life that is falling apart? What does it mean to know that in Jesus, God has lived in solidarity with this world up to, and beyond the end? If it doesn’t mean anything in our lives right now, it doesn’t mean anything at all, because Jesus always lived in the now.
It means we are never alone. It means we dance…instead of marching or crawling grimly through life. It means that love is the ultimate reality – not our love, which fails all too easily, which gives up, or which understands love as possession and control – but God’s love which grounds us in freedom, always meets us wherever we are, and persists even beyond the end. It means that God’s love is more real than our failures and breathes a joy that transcends happiness. It means that when we are fully alive, we love the world, not to possess it, but to cherish it. It means that we have a zest for life that is forever uncool, that we don’t have to be on guard but can be passionately transparent. It means we are loved, and that our response is to love the people and the planet, embracing both beauty and pain as part of the cost and blessing of being alive.
And it means we who are ordinary folks, like the ordinary bread and fruit of the vine, experience God in extraordinary ways when we allow ourselves to be taken, blessed, broken and given – the body of Christ for the love of the world. It means that we will reveal God to one another in the breaking of bread and the living of life just as it is. It means we laugh, we forgive, we take God very seriously and ourselves not so much, and it means we hold everything gently, because in the end, nothing is really ours, and the only reality is that we are God’s, and that in God everything belongs, and so we can trust life, because it is good. Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, and nothing will ever be the same. Amen.