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Easter Day 2020

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A Video of this sermon is available on the Trinity Geneva FaceBook page.

On June 21, 1981, I was ordained a priest.
The man I asked to preach that day
was The Rev. Jonathan Sams,
a priest I had known for about ten years
and with whom I had bonded
in the strange and profound ways
that men sometimes do.
He taught me how to up my fishing game,
and he introduced me to people and places
I might never have known otherwise.
When I first met him
he was living with a junkie in Chicago
and part of an organization
that would come to get me
in the right kind of trouble
with the Military Intelligence Agency.
In other words, he was a colorful person
especially for an Episcopal preacher.
He was also a colorful preacher.
In his sermon that day,
he said he had a dystopian vision of the future
with me hiding in the hills of southern Indiana
after a nuclear holocaust or something,
and I was trying keeping church going.
He said he knew I wouldn’t be able
to figure out the complicated formula
for finding the date of Easter
that appears in the back of the Book of Common Prayer,
and requires the use of the Golden Number.
But not being precise about when Easter fell,
he speculated,
would not be of particular concern to me.

Well, here we are in pandemic.
Not quite the same,
a much better situation by comparison,
even though it is painful and hazardous
and it is not nearly done inflicting its harm yet.
But I have thought frequently of that sermon
and the humous image he provoked
way back when, as I have type away in quiet
trying to keep worship and community alive
in this time of social isolation
and internal exile.

When is it Easter?

That is not a question about
when the full moon rises
or the Golden Number is in play.

When is it Easter?
Easter is when we can dream again.

I know, I know,
pandemic is not the stuff dreams are made of.
Who dreamed on September 12, 2001?
Who dreamed when their pink slip arrived?
Who dreamed when their child died?
Who dreamed when the stock market sank like a stone?
Who dreamed when their spouse or partner left?
Who dreamed when that fearful diagnosis came?
Who dreamed when the soldiers marched into their village?
Who dreamed when the bombs fell?
Who dreamed when the cops stopped them
because of their skin color?
Who dreamed when the orders came
to stay at home?

You see dreaming, if it is vision and not denial,
is not natural in the shadow of death
or standing on the parched earth of drought.

It may be my contrary nature,
but I push against the popular belief
that resurrection is about life after death.
For one thing, the hope
of a life after death
did not begin with Jesus
standing outside the empty tomb.
It was around long before him
and is held one way or another
by all sorts of people
who never heard of him.
Life beyond the grave
has been envisioned by religions
ancient and modern
from the beginning of time.
And that is just one of the reasons
I want to make the case for resurrection and eternal life
as two different things.

Whether it is Elijah taken up in a tornado;
Lazarus stumbling out of a cave wrapped like a mummy
and rubbing his eyes in the piercing sun;
or Jesus bubbling in giddy delight
with the two Mary’s
as they touch each other in disbelief;
resurrection is a shaft of light
and a passage of air
in what we thought was a sealed tomb.

Resurrection is an awakened dream
when others are asleep in grief and fear.
When is it Easter?
When we can dream again.

And when we do dream again,
when we have awakened from our grief
and can breathe again,
when we are a little crocus pointing our head
through the semi-frozen soil above,
when we see the light of resurrection
we are induced to dream again – to envision.

We are compelled to dream,
not lazily daydreaming
as in a late afternoon geometry class –
but compelled
to dream.

It is no easy feat, I realize.
Especially now.
But it is always hard, always a struggle,
always the challenge we meet or not.

We are locked between the challenge
of two griefs we know all too well.
On the one hand, we are confronted
by all the wrongs of the world lined up
like Napoleon’s army
armed with the powerful forces of self-centeredness
that push and squeeze and coerce
us to enrich ourselves.
With generals named power,
bottom-line,
success,
victory,
achievement
and conquer,
they seek to prevail at all costs.

On the other side, pushing us so close
to that other grief we can hardly move,
are the fatalities of the bottom-line,
the victims of the victorious,
and the vanquished of the conquerors.

There we stand,
resurrection blowing our mind
and an awakened dream enflaming our heart,
and staring down a winner’s gauntlet
that dares us to bring our dream into their world.
We turn and look the other way,
and all we see are the martyrs and the defeated
staring back at us wide-eyed
and wondering about our trepidation,
urging us to follow their example.

Pontius Pilate on one side
laughs at our silly dream,
Jesus on the other, standing in front of the cave,
wonders what our hesitation is all about.

So, stumbling in the dark,
wandering on the parched earth of drought,
maybe even shrouded by a pall of grief,
when we begin to dream again
is when we will know it is Easter.

By dream, I mean an envisioning
that has concrete direction,
not denial that protects us from truth.
When we can envision
and begin walking toward what has been dreamt,
then we will know it is Easter.

Crisis and tragedy, awful things like pandemic,
keep us from dreaming.
But then, over time, we often get used to dreamlessness.
We succumb to a prolonged drought.
When that happens, death sets in.
Death is a state of dreamlessness
while resurrection draws us out
into the presence of dreams.

If you are 85 years old
and more of your friends are dead than alive,
it is time to make new friends,
it is time to dream again.
It is time to gird your loins
and start something new
and not just hang on.
If you are sixty and the horizon
looks a lot smaller than you’ve been used to,
and you wonder how you will make the years ahead
golden instead of gray,
it is time to dream again.
It is time to envision a new dream
instead of trying to squeeze a little more life
out of the old one.
It is time to open your arms wide
in an embrace of possibility
instead of a fretful tapping against objects in your way.

If you are 40
and you have that gnawing sense
that you have lived under the tyranny
of the wrong dream
but are so far into it now
that you can’t possibly change,
it is time to dream again.
It is time to understand yourself
and your dream
and know that God’s best hope for you
has nothing to do with how you make money.
It is time to be brave
and recover the dream you lost somewhere long ago
because someone told you it wasn’t possible.
It is time to recover your energy
and be honest about your dream.

If you are twenty-something,
and nosing your way along a path
that has been rutted by millions of people before you,
stop following the herd.
Dream again.
Break out and dream again
like you used to when you were a kid.
Being an adult has nothing to do with being boring.

Being an adult has to do with the exploration,
wisdom, encounter,
and vigorous dreaming.
It is not time to settle for less
it is time to dream and insist on more.
Again, I am not talking about how you make money
but about who you are
and what you do
and how well you love
and allow others to love you.

If you are a teen
your probably not listening,
but I’ll say it anyway.
If you’re a teen I know you’ve got dreams.
I know that you keep them secret
because you don’t want anyone to laugh at you.
That’s okay, but don’t give them up.

Listen for God’s dream for you,
not just those glossy dreams of cool
and wealth
and fame
that the clever hawkers of dreams
tell you to dream.
Those marketers of clothing,
stardom,
and love
are a burning flame they hope
you will fly into like a mindless moth.
Don’t swallow the dreams they want you to dream.
Instead, deep inside
there is a quieter flame
that burns inside you
even though it does not consume you.
It is God’s best hope for you.
Seek that dream, listen for it.

There is not an adult
or friend in the whole world
that has another dream like yours
or who can tell you what yours is.
It is your dream, dream it.

When is it Easter?
When we can dream again.
Are you cynical?
Then it’s not Easter yet.
Are you bound up in what has been lost?
Then the stone has not been rolled way.
Are you living for yesterday?
Then he’s still on the cross.
Are you full of regret
for what might have been
or what was
and shouldn’t have been?
Then Palm Sunday is yet to come.

If you are ready to dream again –
and by that I do not mean deny your pain
or pretend you haven’t been hurt
or dismiss the your grief
or repress the suffering –
but are you ready to turn around
and take another, unknown step?
Can you willfully decide
it is time to turn around
and dream again
in spite of all that you’ve experienced?
If so, welcome to Easter.

 

Easter 2019: Your Easter Wonton Soup

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So, let’s think about this.

Jesus’ women-friends
go to the tomb to take care of business
and come back and tell Jesus’ men-friends
the body is missing.
And the men friends think the women-friends
are telling an idle tale.
Now there is a story with the ring of truth to it.

Being a man,
I thought that perhaps Kim Rosen
was spinning a fanciful poem
when she writes that
the caterpillar liquifies
inside the cocoon.

But I have to tell you,
and maybe you already knew it,
that is exactly what happens.
With the release of enzymes,
the caterpillar digests itself.
Really, it does in fact liquify,
becoming caterpillar soup –
not puree but more like wonton soup
with groups of cells forming the wontons.

You might think my calling them wontons
is not very scientific,
but neither is what biologists call
those various groups of cells that eventually form
the eyes and wings and feet.
They call them, “imaginal discs.”
Really, imaginal discs.
That’s pretty poetic for science.
So, the caterpillar dissolves all of its tissues
except for the imaginal discs –
the wontons –
and uses the soupy mush to feed those multiplying cells.

If that’s not amazing enough, hold on.

It’s not just magnificent butterflies either.
A fruit fly even –
you know, those annoying little nothings
that hover around the bananas
and are so easy to smoosh –
begins with an imaginal disc of fifty cells
for each single wing.
Each of those imaginal wing-discs
will eventually be composed of fifty-thousand cells.
So, from little wontons
floating around in a disgusting soup,
black nits composed of fifty-thousand cells each
emerge into “the inevitability of wings.”
Don’t you find that amazing?
No?
Okay, try this.

One study of a particular moth,
suggests that it remembers,
IT REMEMBERS,
what it learned in the later stages
of being a caterpillar in that time before soup.

In other words, even though it melts
into the thick darkness of dissolved rot,
its memory swims through
and arrives on the other side
with those wings.

If you are not amazed by that
nothing I can say is going jump inside your skin.

Speaking of skin, did you know that our skin is an organ?
I didn’t, not really.
I may have heard that before,
but I was a humanities major
with a very poor science background.

Our skin is our largest organ.
It weighs about eight pounds altogether –

mine probably weighs more than Peg Kennedy’s.
We know the skin has several layers
but did you know our skin ages quickly?
Oh, I’m not talking about wrinkles here.
The cells on the outer layer of skin,
the dermis, is replaced every month or so –
which means we lose about thirty-thousand cells
every minute of our lives.
Hold that more a minute:
about thirty-thousand cells die
every minute of our lives…
and that is just the skin.

The entire surface layer of our skin
is replaced every year.

Now on some level I knew that
but when I look at a snake shedding its skin,
I never think of myself doing the same thing.

It turns out that we are more like a caterpillar
than we might imagine.
We just don’t see it
because, like the caterpillar melting
into wonton soup, we are living it.

Hardly anything in our body lasts more
than a few years.
We think we are this solid physical form
we have had since infancy
only a bigger, older incarnation of it.
Not true.
We have died one piece at a time
and been reborn
over and over and over and over again.

I am not lying.
Every tissue and organ in our body
dies and recreates itself.
The cells in the human body have an average age
of seven to ten years –
but looking around this room,
some of us have lived seven or eight times that,
at least one of us nine times that.
That means we are dissolving
and reforming and being transformed all the time.

Different parts of our body
die and are reborn at different rates,
so it is not a spectacular break-out-the-fireworks event.
The heart for example,
by age fifty, will have been replaced
by at least half, while, as I said,
the skin is replaced in total
every year or so.

Not amazed yet? Try this.
Stars…
are colossal nuclear reactors
that burn so hot they transform
hydrogen into helium,
and eventually helium in to other elements.
When a star reaches the end of its life
it explodes and we call that a supernova.
It was supernovas
exploding in abundance at the core of our galaxy
that scattered massive amounts of
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
phosphorus, sulfur outward.
In other words,
the basic elements
and building blocks of life,
of which our bodies are made,
came from stars exploding
millions of years ago, and millions of light years away.

Forty-thousand tons of cosmic dust
falls on earth every year.
That is what we are made of –
the dust of stars.
So when I say at someone’s funeral,
“earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,”
it describes where we came from
as much as where we are going;
and it would be more accurate to say,
“stars to stars, ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust…”

We are composed of stars.
That is not just some hippie song lyric
or moonlight poem,
it is factual.
Astronomers have mapped
that part of the galaxy
where our dust-ness is likely to have originated.
We think we know which supernovas we came from.
Okay, so, whether on a cellular scale
or a galactic one,
we really are like that caterpillar
that melts away only to be reformed
in the hidden darkness
before its return to flight.
If we cannot be amazed at that
I fear there is nothing to say about resurrection
that can make any sense whatsoever.

Our problem
with going from science to theology
is really only an challenge of imagination.
The ability of memory
to traverse a dark soup of death
and come out the other side on a new pair of wings,
sounds like an idle tale
without the science to go with it.

But we do not have any science
to go with our primal narratives.
The wisdom laced into those ancient stories
that once seemed ridiculously fanciful,
can seem less farfetched given what we know from science.
All we need, is to allow ourselves
a grand enough perspective.

I am not here to make the case for the empty tomb
or Jesus eating fish on the shore of life
when he had sailed across the river of death.
But I am here to make the case
for your life and mine to be transformed.
No matter how old you are,
no matter how limited you may be,
no matter how solid you think your body is –
you are being remade right now,
in this moment,
one cell at a time.
You have already died –
over and over and over again;
and still you breathe.
You have been transformed,
remade,
resurrected,
one cell at a time
beginning with primal stardust
billions of years ago
and continuing right into this moment.

We have absolutely no room for cynicism.
Change and resurrection happens as naturally as,
well as naturally as
a fruit fly builds wings
from its own wontons.
Pessimism and skeptical negation
of hope and opportunity
are not born out by the facts.
Resistance to amazement
and openness
results from constricted perspective –
when our vision is hindered
and our perspective is too small

We are being remade daily
hourly even,
whether or not we believe it.
So when we get morose,
full of despair
that nothing good is possible any more,
we need to back up,
climb to higher ground,
and take a breath.
“I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
…be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating…”

If we could somehow have told those ancients
they were re-growing new skin every year,
they would have thought we were nuts.

Just like we seriously doubt Isaiah’s claim
that God can and will do a new thing.

But if memory can survive
the death of its body
and reappear with wings,
and our skin and other organs
are in a constant state of death and reformation,
it takes little imagination
to envision a new heaven and a new earth
remade and reformed
hour by hour,
day by day,
life by life.

Once again
we are riding a whale while looking for minnows
as we struggle with questions about resurrection
even as we are living it
one cell at a time.

In a cosmos
and within a skin
in which death and rebirth
and transformation
is a story told hourly,
the fire of our hope should burn bright,
the power of our drive and resistance should be fierce,
and the tenacity of our love should be relentlessly resilient.
And if we find ourselves in a dark corner
questioning if new life is possible
and hope is reasonable,
we need to step back.

In fact, we need to do whatever it takes
to gain a larger,
wider, more engulfing perspective
so that we can see
the astounding rebirth and elegant transformation
going on around us every minute –
it is, so to speak, the soup we live in.

Happy Easter.

*Liturgical Poem for Easter was: “An Impossible Darkness” by Kim Rosen

Trinity Place

 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

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