Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 4/4/10
With Us Still
Isaiah 65:17-25
Luke 24:1-12
This past week I came across the obituary for a man named Michael Polanick. He was born in Homestead in 1918 and left high school when he was fourteen to go to work – that would have been 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression.
During the Second World War he served as a radio operator for the Army Air Force. He must have been shot down at some point because the article mentioned that he survived a prisoner-of-war camp. He went on to create a plane tracking system which became the foundation for the military’s air traffic control.
He didn’t become a general. He refused any medals for rescuing some people from a burning plane. And he never became a senior executive with some corporation, or amassed a great fortune – none of the marks, in other words, that we usually associate with great success. But what struck me – what has kept me thinking about Michael Polanick all week – was the remarkable richness of his life.
He wrote songs and poetry. He worked on five novels with subjects that ranged from religion to science fiction. He and his wife built their farmhouse by hand. He taught himself to carve the structure’s stone work, and then, at 82, duplicated the effort in building a home for his daughter. At 91, just a few weeks before his death, he was asking his son to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity.
This is clearly a man who embraced this good gift of life with both hands. His 22 year-old grandson offered a wonderful summary, “He taught me life was about making other people happy, living for other people. That’s what he did for us.”
Quite a tribute, quite a life for a man who never graduated from high school. To my mind, Michael Polanick got life right and getting it right experienced a joy and richness that far too many of us miss along the way.
But that’s what an Easter faith can do for us; help us get it right. Not a Good Friday faith focused on the struggles and darkness of this world – so many of us get stuck there and never move beyond. But Easter; this wondrous news that Jesus is risen, that this God-in-flesh has conquered death and darkness; the life-changing news that Jesus is alive and that he is living still.
There is simply no other way to explain the change that came over those clumsy, fearful disciples; transforming them into a force that literally changed the course of human history. It wasn’t Jesus’ teaching that changed them. It wasn’t what he did while he was with them. As powerful as those teachings and works undoubtedly were, the truth is those disciples were still the same dense and bumbling and frightened bunch at the point of his crucifixion as they had been all along. Just look at them hiding out in that upper room behind a locked door, afraid of being discovered, the days that followed. In spite of everything that Jesus had told them, they still didn’t have a clue as to what was actually happening.
No, it was their experience of the risen Jesus that did it. It was seeing Jesus alive and standing there before them that changed everything. The disciples we meet in Acts are completely different: they are bold and fearless and ready to change the world. It was the resurrection that did it.
We can’t prove the resurrection. Attempts to do so may be intellectually intriguing, but they can never amount to irrefutable proof. No, the real evidence comes in what happened to those disciples. The real evidence lies in the experience of the living Christ among those who made the choice to follow; those who made it in Jesus’ own time; those who have made it in the centuries that followed; and in those who still make that choice today.
I’m not talking here about simply professing Jesus. There are all kinds of people who profess Jesus but have no intention of actually following. As James put it in his epistle, “Even the demons believe – and shudder” (James 2:19).
There are far too many who profess Jesus’ name but show nothing of that love which lies at the very heart of Jesus’ nature. People who think it is okay to hate. People who think is all right to amass their fortunes while never lifting a finger to help the poor, the needy and the oppressed. People like the members of that little church in Topeka who picket the funerals of soldiers killed in action and so add to the misery of families already overwhelmed with loss.
That’s not where Jesus lives. You aren’t going to meet the living Jesus in acts of hatred or violence or self-centered greed. There is an enormous difference between professing Jesus on the one hand, and making the choice to actually follow on the other. It is in following that we meet him; in following that we experience his presence, his power and his care.
The same Jesus who met those two dispirited followers on the road to Emmaus so long ago is still meets us today, still makes the choice to travel with us on our varied journeys. And once in a while we catch a glimpse of him – we see him there in that secretary volunteering her evening hours to serve down at a food-bank; see him in the executive who misses an appointment in order to stop and help a stranded traveler; see him in the parents who adopt an infant afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome fully aware of the extraordinary struggles that lie ahead.
Jesus is risen! And our Easter faith proclaims it: proclaims it in the joy that we find, in the hope we know; proclaims it in the shattering of fear’s constraining bonds and in the full, abundant lives that begin to open up before us.
We don’t think our way into faith. No, it is rather in living our faith that our very way of thinking begins to change; that the way we perceive this world and our values and our priorities are gradually transformed. The living Jesus does that.
When we lose a loved one, for example, it’s not that we don’t grieve like everyone else. I grieved just watching each one of my kids board the school bus for the first time, their little lunch boxes clutched in their hand.
Of course we grieve – we feels that same sense of emptiness, that same gap left by a loved one as anyone else. The difference is our grief is tinged with hope. Our Easter faith informs our grief. Jesus is risen! Jesus has broken the shackles of death and so pushed wide the doors of all eternity. And because Jesus lives, we know that we shall live also. We know, we live in the absolute certainty, that the day is going to come when we are going to see our loved ones once more. We know it because Jesus has been raised from the dead. He has conquered the grave.
That knowledge changes the way we grieve. It is a light that offers comfort and hope even in the midst of our great darkness.
But this Easter faith doesn’t just change the way we grieve. It changes the very way in which we live. I just finished Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s wonderful book, The Shadow of the Wind. There is at its center a struggle that all of us know; the struggle in this world and in our lives between light and darkness, the ongoing battle between goodness and evil.
We know how tough this life can be. This Easter faith of ours includes Good Friday. We recognize that evil in this world and even in ourselves that nailed the very Son of God to the cross. We are, as a result, clear-eyed as we look at the world around us. We see that darkness which is still present. We see that evil which twists and distorts our world into forms we can barely recognize. And its touch can be overwhelming.
A car rushes through a stop sign and in that moment everything changes. A manipulative colleague is promoted ahead of us and our spirits plummet. Why not give in and simply live for the moment? Why not surrender and just go ahead and put our own wants and desires ahead of everything else?
We don’t because while this Easter faith includes Good Friday it doesn’t stop there. Death doesn’t claim the final victory. This world can kill God’s love there on the cross, but it can’t keep it in the grave. No, that great stone of indifference and hate which sought to contain it has been pushed back. Jesus is risen! It is love that triumphed on that first Easter so long ago. It is love that rose up from the dead. Love and light and goodness that one day will claim the final victory over all that stands in opposition.
And so we choose love, that same self-giving love embodied in Jesus. Even when life is at its darkest, even when God seems like nothing more than a distant flicker, we choose the way of love. Choose it in the way we give ourselves to serve the members of our family. Choose it in the integrity with which we do business. Choose it in our passion for justice and in the compassion that we show others; choose it even in how we treat our enemies.
We choose love because love is of God. We choose it because no matter how dark our Good Fridays might become, we know that Easter lies just beyond. Jesus is risen, and precisely because he is risen we can be sure that it is love –not darkness, not evil – but love which will have the final word.
That’s the power of this Easter faith of ours. Jesus is alive, and because he lives we shall live also – live as Michael Polanick did; live lives that are full and rich and good; lives lived for others, lives lived in the sure and certain promise of resurrection to eternal life.