Forgiving and Retaining, Pentecost Sunday, 2014, the Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

So there they are, huddled behind locked doors, traumatized, frightened, blaming themselves and blaming each other, without hope after all their dreams had died on the cross two days before. Into their midst Jesus appears and says, of all things, “Peace”.

And after he breathes his very own Spirit into them, he presents them with two options: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

After all they have experienced from the Romans, from the religious leaders, from their own and each other’s betrayals, this is a choice they must now make--whether to forgive sins or to retain them; to hold themselves and others in their sin, or to release themselves and each other from it.

Someone once told me that the root of the Hebrew word for forgiveness means literally “letting go of the jugular”. The image is that you have someone by the throat and are strangling them to death. And when you choose to forgive, you let go, let them live.

The choice is ours to make.

What does a choice like this look like? One of the other well-known stories about Jesus gives us a clue.

You remember that story...The religious leaders have caught a woman in bed with a man who was not her husband. They drag her out of bed, bring her to Jesus, and make her stand there in front of everyone.

As she stands there, they talk about how horrible she is, to the point that she deserves to be tortured and killed: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now, in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.”

Imagine this scene for a moment… 

What must she have been feeling?  Humiliation, terror, shame….

And what were the religious leaders, all of whom happened to be men, what were they thinking? She has broken the commandment, therefore she must be stoned. That’s all of her story they care about. They do not see her as a human being with dignity, deserving their respect. To them, all she is is a terrible sinner, nothing more. All they could see was this one moment of adultery.

But what was her larger story? What might have driven her to risk her life to be with a man in an illicit affair? The gospel doesn’t tell us, we can only guess what her own struggle may have been. 

Like many women of her day, she was probably in a marriage arranged for her by her parents when she was 12 or 13 years old. 

Was her husband someone she loved, or who loved her?

Was her husband abusive?

Did she feel trapped? 

Perhaps this man that she had the affair with was the one person she could talk to.

Maybe he told her she was beautiful. 

Maybe he told her he loved her.

The larger dimensions of her story are lost on the religious leaders. In their version of the story, she is a terrible sinner, and nothing more.

I wonder if she started to believe the story they were telling about her.

I wonder what Jesus saw in those tear-filled eyes. What story would he tell about her.

Anyway, while the religious leaders are ranting, Jesus does something curious. He sits down on the ground and begins writing with his finger in the dirt.

Scripture scholars go back and forth about what he could be doing here, but the theory I like best is that he was doodling.

You know how it is when you’re on the phone with someone who can’t stop talking, and how it can get a little tedious? And so you grab a pen and a corner of the newspaper and you start to draw pictures of cats or airplanes, just to break the tedium of the moment.

Maybe this is what Jesus is doing as the religious leaders go on and on with their rants about this woman. He’s finding them very tedious. Maybe he rolls his eyes a few times. And he doodles.

And finally when they are done ranting, Jesus stands and speaks to them.

Now Jesus was a devout Jew. He knew the law as well as the religious leaders did. He knew that the law was given as a tool to fashion a people of love, to help us live more fully.

But he also saw that, among some of the religious leaders, the law had become distorted, had lost its purpose. The religious leaders used this beautiful gift from God to brutalize people and crush their spirits, to literally torture and kill them.

So Jesus stands up and says “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He turns the tables. “If you honestly believe you can stone this woman without making a travesty of the law God has given us, then be my guest. Who will cast the first stone?” He is taunting them.

Now who is the righteous and who is the sinner? Who bears the greater weight of sin? Is it this woman, or is it those who have taken the law--something very beautiful to help us love and live more fully--and turned it into something brutal and cruel?

Suddenly those who had seen themselves as righteous, those who sought to judge and punish, they are the greater sinners for having distorted the whole purpose of the law, turning it from a means to life into a means to death. 

With these words of Jesus, “...they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him,”

and he rises to his feet to speak to her. 

He says to her, “Woman….” 

In our English translation, this can seem rather cold and formal, but for Jesus it is a word of profound respect. This is the word he uses when he speaks to his mother. “Woman.”

It’s probably been awhile since this woman was addressed with this profoundly respectful word. 

“Woman,” Jesus says, “has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

When he tells her to “Go,” he’s using the same word Moses used when he said to the pharoah “Let my people go!” It is a call to become free from slavery and to start the journey to the promised land. This is more than an encouragement to avoid falling into sin. He’s beckoning her to a life of freedom--freedom not only from sin, but also from the crushing story the religious leaders had woven for her around that sin, a story that perhaps she herself came to believe. 

While you acknowledge the effects of sin and brokenness in your own life, begin, nevertheless, your journey to the promised land. Even as you own the mistakes and failures of the past, write yourself a new story--one that leads to a more abundant life, greater joy, more love. Step into a new future. 

Perhaps we have to do this not only with ourselves but with other people in our lives. Perhaps we need to do this with El Buen Samaritano as our time with them comes to an end. Even as we acknowledge the sin and brokenness in our relationship, we are not bound to that. That’s not the whole story. Perhaps we can write the story of our relationship with that community these past seven years, and write it in a way that leads us all to greater love and fuller lives.

It’s the choice Jesus offers: to hold ourselves and each other in our sin, or to let go of the jugular, free ourselves and each other from an alienated past, and begin a new story, a new future, that leads to life.

I Will not Leave You Orphans

For many people in today’s world, this gospel won’t make sense. Because Jesus, as he himself puts it, is speaking about something the world cannot receive, a truth that is outside the world’s comprehension.

The world sees only with physical eyes, and if you see only with physical eyes--if, as for many folks in the West, you regard as real and true only that which can be scientifically verified in the lab or presented as evidence in a court of law, then, for you, this gospel reading will make no sense.

But if you think it’s possible that poets and musicians and artists and lovers may also have something to say, that shamans and sages and many non-Western peoples down through the centuries may also have a shot at the truth--even though it’s a different kind of truth--then these words of Jesus may speak to you.

His words may teach you something about how to die and about the connections we have with loved ones who have gone before us.

He is speaking these words to his disciples at a very difficult moment. An excruciating death is about to take him from them. They are about to have their hearts and all their dreams broken.

He’s trying to help them make some sense of what will happen to them, what his going away from them really means.  A few verses earlier, he told them “It is better for you that I go.” He wants his death to be a blessing for them and not a curse.

Over the years, I have met people for whom a loved one’s death had been a curse. The dying person said some hurtful things, or did not say the words of forgiveness or reassurance that were so desperately needed. This can leave a deep wound the person left behind must carry for the rest of their lives.

There is a tradition among many Christians to pray for a holy death. The idea is that, in addition to preparing a will, getting finances in order, and delegating power of attorney, some soul-work is also required. Maybe some forgiveness needs to be given to someone, or some words of reassurance need to be said.

It’s an important question for all of us no matter our age: How do we, like Jesus, make our dying a blessing and not a curse to those around us?

To his own loved ones who would feel abandoned, orphaned, and hopelessly devastated by his death, Jesus speaks strong words of reassurance: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.”

He’s going to leave them in one way but remain with them in another way. His death leads not to loss and abandonment, but rather to a deeper way for him to be present.

It’s in his going away that he can fully enter their hearts, get into the marrow of their bones, be with them in a way far more intimate than simple physical presence allows. By his going away, he becomes, as St. Augustine would say many years later, more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.

This is not something we can discern with our physical eyes. It takes spiritual eyes to see this.

Lovers know how this works. True, the marriage vows say “...until death do us part,” but I think many of us suspect that something more is going on in our loves, that our relationships transcend death.

It’s this “something more” that many poets and artists and indigenous peoples know. It’s a conviction of the heart that when a parent or a lover or a spouse or a friend die, they do not go away from us, but rather, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, their spiritual union with us deepens. Barriers that might have stood in the way are overcome. Our intimacy with them becomes deeper than their physical presence could allow.

"I will not leave you orphaned," Jesus tells us. "I am coming to you."

And then he takes this one step further. He says that in his going away from us, in his death, we will know that he is in his Father and we are in him, and he in us.

The image is one of a Creator continuously present in the creatures she has made, at every moment keeping them in existence, breathing life into them.

The Greeks used a simple but beautiful word to describe what's going on here. Perichoresis. Dancing around. God is like three persons caught up in one big joyful dance. Their life and work are bound together. Perichoresis. A joyful dance.

In Jesus, the second person of that Trinity, you and I are brought into the dance, into the relationship. Perichoresis. It says as much about us as it does about Ultimate Reality. It says that your life and mine--seemingly so small and insignificant in the scheme of things, with all our joys and delights, our bodily pleasures and pains, our triumphs and disappointments, our loves and our fears--our lives are precious because they are swept up in something so vast and magnificent.

This is what the mystery of the Trinity is getting at: that, like the One in whose image we are made, we are caught up in a joyful cosmic dance, a dance not for divine persons only, but for us as well. Because of Jesus, all of our lives are now part of this vast and beautiful cosmic dance.

This dance is going on right now, just beyond what our physical eyes can see. Music is playing just beyond what our earthly ears can hear. This is the love and life Jesus wants to leave with his disciples as he says farewell.

As we listen to a gospel passage like this, our consciousness expands a little. It’s time to lace up our dancing shoes.

Jesus the Gate, 4th Sunday of Easter, Year A, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

Twice each month, members of our community join people from other faith communities in Nightwalks. We walk through our neighborhood stopping now and then to pray for an end to the violence that has caused great pain to many moms and families here in the Mission. Before we head out on our walks, we run through a few ground rules about the logistics and about how to remain safe during the course of the walk.

We’re not naive. In a neighborhood like ours, things can happen very quickly. A purse can be snatched, a fight can break out, someone can fall sick and need a hand. Things can happen. So one of the ground rules in our Nightwalks is very realistic: When we stop to pray, we pray with our eyes open.

Today’s gospel passage is part of a larger story in which Jesus has just given sight to a man who had been blind from birth. The man himself and the religious leaders are standing around wondering what had just happened, and Jesus in this passage is trying to help them understand it.

So to get the full impact of these words, let’s refresh our memory about that story of that blind man Jesus has just healed.

In the culture of the time, because of his blindness, he was considered ritually impure, barred from fully participating in the rituals devout Jews would use to be in right relation with God. Only people who were physically impeccable were permitted to serve God's cult. A son of Aaron, for example, a member of the priestly caste, could not officiate at worship if he had a physical impairment.

This ritual impurity carried a moral connotation, a stigma. The logic was that someone must have done something really bad for him to be both blind and excluded from the community in this way. “Master, who sinned,” the disciples had just asked Jesus. “Was it he himself who sinned or his parents that he was born blind?”

So not only is this man blind, but he also carries the shame and disgrace of a moral stigma.

This is a very common logic, and we find it all around us: it's called blaming the victim. If someone is raped, he or she must have done something to provoke it; if black people or Latinos are poor or incarcerated at high rates or disenfranchised, it must be because they are more stupid or lazy or criminal than others; if someone has HIV, it must be a punishment from God for some form of deviant behavior.

So in addition to living with a significant physical impairment, this blind man was stigmatized, shamed and disgraced. His story is one of exclusion, not only from being able to physically see, but also from fully participating in the life of his own people Israel.

In the face of this, Jesus carries out an act of inclusion. First he spits on the earth, and from the clay he makes a paste and anoints the blind man's eyes. Buried in the Greek text here is a Hebrew pun. The Hebrew word for clay is adamah, and in the story of creation in Genesis, adamah is what God used to make "Adam," humankind.

So, in this moment of healing Jesus is finishing creation. The man born blind had palpably not been brought to the fullness of creation, and so Jesus finishes the process by adding the missing clay.

But with that healing of his eyes, the man receives something else. Call it gumption. He begins to stand on his own two feet, to tell his story, even to talk back--especially to those religious leaders who had shamed and stigmatized him and left him without hope. And because he talks back, they of course throw him out of the synagogue, excommunicate him.

Jesus hears that they threw him out, so he goes looking for him, and when he finds him, they talk. In this conversation, the formerly blind comes to see Jesus, not only with his now-healed physical eyes, but also with his heart. He comes to trust him. “Lord, I believe,” he says to Jesus.

Some religious leaders overhear the man say this. They don’t get it, so Jesus tries to talk to them. He reverses their logic. “You who say that you can see, you are the ones who are blind here. This man who you say is steeped in sin, in this situation he is the one without sin. If there is sin in this situation, it lies not with him but with you who excluded and stigmatized and shamed him.”

That’s where today’s gospel about shepherds and thieves and robbers comes in. The shepherd is the symbol for teachers and leaders. The way they relate to people shows whether they are true shepherds or thieves and robbers.

What Jesus is doing here is walking us through a kind of discernment about how to tell good religious leaders from bad ones, shepherds from thieves and robbers.

In John’s words, thieves steal, kill, and destroy. They leave people less than when they found them. The laws and moral codes meant to form us into people who love and live more deeply--these are used as hammers by these thieves and robbers to crush people’s spirits, to shame and exclude them. “Woe to you,” Jesus once said to the Pharisees. “You lay heavy burdens on people’s shoulders but will not move a finger to lift them.”

True shepherds are the opposite. They leave people more than when they found them. They do not have the voice of a stranger. They know the human heart, they call people by name. What they say resonates with the inner world of people. They walk ahead of them, bringing them to pastures where they can find food to nourish them.

Teachers and leaders who are true shepherds are artists who make us more human, more alive, they awaken joy and zest and passion and purpose. “I have come that they may have life,” Jesus says, “and have it abundantly.” Like good mothers, good shepherds lead us to life, life in abundance.

This is good to know. Sometimes people ask “Is religion good or bad?” The fact is, in itself, religion is neutral. It’s like art. There is good art and bad art.

There is bad art that puts down people who are different, shuts down our hearts, makes us frightened of life, stirs up violence, misogyny, homophobia. Think of the novels of Ayn Rand that influenced much of the recent greed on Wall Street and in Washington; the misogynist and homophobic lyrics of many rap songs on the radio. Bad art.

There is good art, too: art that opens your heart, connects you with life, deepens your ability to feel and to love. Think of Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of a flower, or Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, a movie like Babette’s Feast. This is good art.

Art can be good or bad.

Like art, religion can be either good or bad.

The philosopher Hegel said you can recognize bad religion because it alienates you from yourself and from the world.

Bad religion is what the man born blind--living under shame and stigma and without hope--had experienced growing up.

It’s what many LGBT people of my generation also grew up with. We were told that if we followed the promptings of our own hearts and our bodies that we would burn in hell for all eternity. Bad religion. It alienates us from ourselves and from people we love. It is manifest today in an alarmingly high suicide rate among gay teens and elders, and the recent effort to pass a Kill the Gays bill in Uganda. It does not lead to the abundant life that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.

Over the years I’ve heard many Native Americans talk about their experiences in the mission boarding schools where they were not allowed to return home for their native pow wows and rituals, were beaten if they even spoke their own native languages. Bad religion. It alienates people from themselves, their cultures and communities. It does not lead to the abundant life that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.

There is also good religion. Not only does it connect you with God, the source of life, but it also:
Connects you with your own heart, with the lines and curves of your own body, its desires and pleasures as well as its pains;
Good religion connects you with other people, nourishes friendships, gathers communities like this one.
Good religion connects you with the earth, with all it’s species of flora and fauna, increases your sheer delight when you’re on a hike in nature.

Good religion is seen in true shepherds like Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Chief Seattle, Harriet Tubman, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Dalai Lama, Oscar Romero--true shepherds who lead people to freedom, to greater justice, to building the beloved community, to realizing life in abundance.

In today’s gospel, Jesus is walking us through a discernment. When we pray, he wants us to keep our eyes open, to pray with discerning hearts. We have to evaluate the religious and spiritual teachings we are hearing--including those that came from Christian teachers.

What criteria do we use as we make this evaluation? In this passage, Jesus uses the metaphor of the gate to the sheepfold. He says that he is that gate. Religious teachers who are trustworthy, shepherds who are good, pass through that gate that is Jesus. Whether they are explicitly Christian or not, their teachings bring us closer to what he has taught us, make us more loving, more compassionate, more hopeful about the future, more joyful in just being ourselves. Those teachings, in other words, lead us to life in abundance. Ultimately, Jesus says, this is how you know if a religious teaching is good.

But if those teachings lead us to a sense of hopelessness, if they cause us to lose our zest and passion for life, our joy in being the wonderful beings God has made us to be, if those teachings to exclude people and close our hearts to their needs, if they cause us to abuse this fragile and exquisite planet, then these teachings are, in Jesus’ words, the work of thieves and robbers. They are not the work of God. They crush us. They do not lead to life in abundance.

As in the day of Jesus, so also in our own day, there are many religious and spiritual teachings swirling around us. As it was for the man who received his sight and for the early disciples, so it is for us: We need discerning hearts; we need to pray with our eyes open.

Significance of a Stranger, Third Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2014, Luke 24:13-35, Cathlena Plummer

God give us clear minds, open spirits, and loving hearts. Amen.

The significance of a stranger, do we ever ponder that? Do either

one of you take the time to make conversation with a person on the

street, or on the BART, or any other place that is not familiar to you?

Today I want to share this story with everyone….

on one sunny, hot, June afternoon in Utah, my Uncle , cousins, and

I were sitting around telling jokes, after cleaning up the church after

having our convocation that particular weekend.

All of a sudden we felt this gush of wind and dirt pick up in front of us

and turned itself into a devil twister and travelled to the paved highway

that runs along the entrance to the mission grounds. What was most

strange about that gust of wind was that we all chose to notice it and

look at it at the same time.

We couldn’t even tell a good joke, or pay attention to a good joke being

told but, right there in that instant we all chose to watch that gust

of wind turn itself into a devil twister. If you don’t know what a devil

twister is…. come talk to me later and I will explain further…

So we followed the devil twister’s path toward the highway and out of

nowhere a man in a white sheet or garment with black combat boots

appeared. His hair was long and dark brown, his skin was very dark,

remember we’re looking at this figure from a distance….we all sort

of looked at each other bewildered, and we all kind of accepted the

presence of this man to match those that we often think of when we

picture Jesus.

Although we were not talking we knew immediately what the other

was thinking….

The person paid us no mind or could not hear us….but he kept walking

finally over the hill and out of view….then finally we came out of our

trance, it really was like a strange trance, for 5 min? 6 min? I’m not

really sure on that. But none of us ever questioned if that could have

been Jesus? For some reason it felt right that whoever that person was

we seemed to all agree that it was Jesus.

That day that hot sunny afternoon, always pops into my head whenever

I hear the phrase, “What if that homeless person was Jesus? Or, what if

that person talking to himself incoherently was Jesus?”

It never fails to enter my thoughts especially living here in the Bay Area

and seeing all these children living on the streets, some with animals,

that they cannot afford to feed, so they beg day after day, they barely

move away from their regular sleeping spots.

The point is …. What if that was Jesus? How would you know what

Jesus looked like? You will know it in your heart, is what I always hear

when I hear myself question it….your heart begins to beat… that is what

I feel every time I see a teenager lying in the street, or sitting with his

beastly friend.

The question is am I willing to talk to him or her? Am I willing to talk to

Jesus in the flesh?

Most of the time the answer is “No, I have to hurry or I’ll miss the next

train.”

 But, when I do have the time the conversation, has always been

meaningful, the person is in dire straits and is just trying to make it to

the next day, you not only learn about the person in front of you, you

also learn that this could easily be yourself if you allowed it.

Now let us ponder the words in the gospel….

The Gospel tells us, the band of Jesus’ followers was now leaderless

and was falling apart, with two of them already on their way home. The

reports that Christ’s tomb was empty did nothing to alter their thinking;

it only confused them. Their entire world had come apart. The two

despondent disciples summed up the situation very neatly, "we had

hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel."

Human hope is a fragile thing, and when it withers it’s difficult to

revive. Hopelessness as a disease of the human spirit is desperately

hard to cure. When you see someone you love and care for overtaken

by illness, which goes on, and on, despair sets in. It almost becomes

impossible to hope for recovery, to be even afraid to hope because of

not being able to cope with another letdown.

The Emmaus Two had erected a wall of hopelessness around them,

and they were trapped in their misery. "We had hoped ..." What they

were saying is "We don’t expect it now, but once we did. We had it, this

thing called hope, but now it’s gone." I wonder if this is something that

we can identify with? Has something or someone come between our

relationship with God? If so, listen to the Emmaus story because the

heart-breaking experience is only its beginning!

As the travellers made their weary way to Emmaus a stranger fell

alongside them. It was going to be one of the most wonderful walks in

history! We know, of course, that it was the risen Jesus, but somehow

they didn’t recognize him. In fact Luke tells us "they were kept from

recognizing him." It wasn’t an accident that they didn’t notice who he

is or that they were too preoccupied to look at him in the eye. No, they

weren’t allowed to recognize Jesus for a purpose. It was so that they

might be in the same position as ourselves some 2,000 years later.

Visual appearances of Jesus ceased at his Ascension. They are not

granted to us. Like the two on the road we have to make do with other

people’s testimony that Jesus has risen from the dead. Like them we

don’t know quite know what to make of it. Did it really happen? What

precisely happened? How could it have happened? We have to make

up our minds as to what we believe.

On that hot sunny June afternoon we chose to believe that it was

Jesus and with that acceptance….. Jesus disappeared over the hill,

because "In his infinite courtesy, Jesus remembered the frailty of over-
strained nerves and bewildered minds and came, not too suddenly

or overwhelming upon them, but in a way which He alone could do,

revealed Himself as the Risen Christ."

This is what Jesus had shown to Cleopas and the other follower on that

day, and they did not recognize him until he broke bread with them.

They saw his hands - they were different from when he had broken

bread at the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and at the Last Supper. They

were the nail-pierced hands of Jesus. In an instant they knew him. And

in an instant, he’s gone.

Why did Jesus have to disappear? Couldn’t he have stayed longer? He

could, but he didn’t because it’s all part of the education of his last 40

days on Earth - how to manage without his bodily presence from now

on; exactly the same as we have to do some 2,000 years on. But he

is with us still by his Spirit; he is with us as we fellowship with him in

worship and, in obedience to his command, as we remember him in

the "breaking of bread" service.

I can imagine Cleopas and his friend standing in amazement; perhaps

embracing in great joy, asking each other, "Were not our hearts burning

within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures

to us?" Their world had come together again. That heart-burning

experience is something that we all need. We need it in a conversion

experience when the Spirit of God makes us realize that we need Jesus

as our Savior and Lord. We need it as we allow the Holy Spirit to apply

the truths of Scripture in our daily walk with Jesus.

Well, where are we in our experience? Are we still heart-breaking

because we need to meet the risen Christ? Perhaps we’re still in a

heart-searching process - if so, let it continue as it will surely lead to the

heart-burning experience we all need.

God deeply longs for each one of us to walk with Him in close

fellowship so He can fulfill His plans for our lives. The Emmaus Two no

doubt had walked this way many times before. Yet this day would be

different, for it was the time for a life-changing encounter with their

Lord. He can draw near to us at any time.

The ways of God aren’t always obvious so we must be open to allow

him to enlighten our understanding, to take us into a new level in our

spiritual experience. Life will never be the same again! Christ is risen

from the dead! Christ is the Savior! Christ is the hope of the world!

Amen

Doubting Thomas, Second Sunday of Easter, Year A, 2014, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

“What would happen if they found the body?” 
In these Easter days, it’s a question by outside observers of Christianity and by many Christians themselves. People respond in different ways.
There are the literalists, like Thomas in today’s gospel. “Unless I can put my finger in the wounds, I will not believe.” For many Christians, if the resurrection of Jesus is not literally a physical event, it’s a deal-breaker. If they found the body, they’d be outta here.
This is true for many modern-day Westerners: If you can’t verify something as a physical fact in a lab, or with the kind of evidence that would satisfy a court of law, then, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist, it didn’t happen. This is sense knowledge, and it’s what many Westerners use to determine what they count as real.
There are others who see the resurrection as a spiritual event, Christ becoming not physically present as he was before his death, but present in a whole new way, even more powerfully present than when he walked the roads of Palestine. This approach uses spiritual knowledge, the kind of knowledge that many here in the West regard as too subtle and evasive.
The fact is, we’ll never know exactly what happened in the tomb of Jesus. Whatever happened inside that tomb is between Jesus and God. Only they know what happened.
No living human being saw what happened inside that tomb, there was no video camera inside the tomb.
All we have are the stories of our spiritual ancestors who came to the tomb after-the-fact. Two of them saw neatly folded clothes. One of them saw angels. 
Most of the disciples saw nothing at all because they were still in bed that morning, but as it turned out that did not matter because the empty tomb was not the point. 
As Barbara Brown Taylor writes:

[Jesus] could have stayed put, I guess, sitting there all pink and healthy between the two piles of clothes so that everyone could come in and see him, but that is not what he did.  He had outgrown his tomb, which was too small a focus for the resurrection. The risen one had people to see and things to do.

There were
Frightened and disillusioned disciples locked behind closed doors to see and forgive and strengthen

• A grieving Mary Magdalene to commission as the apostle to the apostles
• Weary travelers to Emmaus who needed to hear as though for the first time the ancient stories and to break bread with him
• A doubting Thomas who needed a little reassurance

The story of Christ’s resurrection is about more than the miraculous resuscitation of a corpse. It’s about a deeper miracle within the first disciples.
Every time he came to his friends they became stronger, wiser, kinder, more daring. Every time he came to them, they became more like him. This is the miracle that clinches the resurrection.
The proof we have for the resurrection has nothing to do with what happened in the empty tomb but rather in the stories our spiritual ancestors gave us about what happened to them when they ran into him. What happened in the tomb was entirely between Jesus and God. For the rest of us, Easter began the moment the gardener said, "Mary!", called her by her name, and she knew who he was. That is where the miracle happened and goes on happening -- not in the tomb but in the encounter with the living Lord.
It’s through the stories our spiritual ancestors gave us that we encounter the risen Lord. In fact, John says this is the entire reason he wrote his gospel, handed on the stories, so that through them we, too, could meet the risen Lord, come to faith, have life.
Elie Wiesel speaks of the old rabbi who, when he saw misfortune threatening the Jews... 

it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.

"God made man," Wiesel concludes, "because he loves stories."
For us followers of Jesus, it’s through the stories our ancestors gave us that we, like them, experience the true miracle of resurrection, an encounter with the risen Jesus.
But not just their stories. We have our own stories as well.

• Of going through cancer and managing to take the next step knowing that Someone has gone before you, has fully shared your fear and pain, and will not leave you to face your pain alone
• Of struggling with an addiction, and finding Jesus at your side giving you the healing and forgiveness and hope to take the next step toward recovery
• Immigrant families standing up to injustice and racial hatred because they believe that Jesus is with them each step of the way, giving them courage to speak out

It is in our stories that we draw close to the risen Lord--stories about how we ourselves have met and been transformed by this resurrected Jesus, made more alive, stronger, kinder.
In the next few weeks, as we did last year, we’ll have the chance to gather in small groups to hear each others’ stories and to share our own.
This year our focus will be different. We’ll be reflecting on our baptisms.
Baptism is the moment that our stories were joined with those of Jesus and of the millions of his followers down through the centuries. We’ll have a chance to reflect on 
what our baptismal vows mean for each of us at this moment in our lives, 
the challenges we have faced in deciding to make and renew those vows and to live them out.
These small-group sessions will be a chance to mine your own life experiences, comb through your stories to see and savor where that risen Lord has made his appearance in your own life.
Because whether you recognized him or not, the risen Jesus has appeared in your life. It’s a fact. Guaranteed. These story-sharings will be a chance to recognize and savor how he has shown up for each of us.
In the end, our stories--those of our spiritual ancestors and our own--are the evidence we can offer those who ask us how we can possibly believe. We believe because we have found, to our surprise, that we are not alone. Because we never know where the risen Jesus will turn up next. 
It was true for the women who came to the tomb, for the disciples locked behind closed doors in fear, for Thomas, and for you and me.

Easter Vigil 2014, Matthew 28:1-10, The Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

Do you like the special effects in this gospel story? As the two women arrive at the tomb looking for Jesus, an angel appears out nowhere. He’s like a bolt of lightning. As this messenger descends, the earth shudders beneath their feet. Single-handedly he rolls back the huge stone, then sits on it as though it were his throne. The men standing guard at the tomb take one look at him and pass out.

And then, the angel turns his gaze on the women and says "Don't be afraid".

Say what? You might call this kind of advice counterintuitive. Everything about this messenger is meant to overwhelm, and we humans are after all programmed to feel at risk from what is overwhelming.

But in this case, things are different. Because what overwhelms is grace, a love that is stronger than death. This messenger is at their service in their quest to find Jesus.

“Do not be afraid”, he says, as he sends them off in a new direction, away from the tomb, this place of death--”He is not here”--to Galilee. "There you will find him."

Galilee is the place where Jesus first called them to follow him, where he touched untouchable lepers, dined with whores and tax collectors, railed against the pharisees, shared bread with hungry crowds, and played with the kids. Galilee. Jesus knew well its dusty roads and fragrant fields.

And in this moment, after all that has just happened to him in Jerusalem--after his trial and condemnation, the abandonment by his friends, his torture and crucifixion, his death and burial--now after all of that, in this moment of resurrection, Jesus is going back. Back to Galilee.

The story begins again, but now with a new clarity about where it all leads. His mission continues, but now with a new conviction
that life is stronger than death
that loving with all your heart, with all its joy and struggles, really is worth it.

If you want to draw close to this risen Jesus, the angel tells the women, go to where his mission is and join him there--where people are fed, and violence is overcome with love, and outcasts are welcomed, and tears are wiped away. That is where you will find him.

The women move from sadness and fear to joy and a swashbuckling sense of purpose. They move
from Jerusalem where they buried him
to Galilee where they now join him in his great work.

Thais great work continues to this day right here in our own Galilee--in this little parish, in this neighborhood with all its terrible beauty, in our handing out fresh veggies and bread in our food pantry, in our nightwalks to end the violence in our neighborhood, our vigils to end the war, our working for a dignified future for our elders, and efforts to stop the unjust deportations that tear apart immigrant families…

...and in a trillion other ways great and small that we each do as individuals among our friends and acquaintances, in our homes and workplaces.

Here, in all of this, the risen Christ moves among us, inviting us to join him more and more closely in his great work.

In a moment, we will approach the font to renew our baptismal vows. Like the women in this evening’s gospel, we vow to join in the mission of Jesus right here in our own Galilee. This is how we draw close to him, living out our baptismal vows by joining him in this great work, becoming his heart and hands and feet right here.

The beat poet, James Broughton, has a wonderful way of describing this kind of adventure. He calls it "honeymooning with Big Joy," Let me close with his poem that he appropriately names “Easter Exsultet”.

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

Yes! On this great day, everything transforms. From this night forward, we honeymoon with Big Joy.

Good Friday Sermon, Dr. Rebecca Gordon

It’s often said that every preacher really has only one sermon in her; she just finds different ways of giving that one sermon over and over. I think that’s probably true of me. (In fact, I’ll even admit to a little actual recycling in this one.) My one sermon is about the sacrament – the thing that has been made holy— which we enact in the Eucharist, and about the pain and death at the center of that sacrament, and about how we recognize the Body of Christ there.

The Eucharist is the center of my week, like the narrow neck of an hourglass. In the best times, my daily life leads up to and flows out of the Eucharist. I think this is probably true for many people at Saint John’s, and indeed for many Christians engaged in sacramental forms of worship. If the Eucharist is the center of our worship and our week, then the cross lies at the center of the Eucharist. Everything we do in our worship flows into and out of the cross. Tonight I invite you to consider the idea that it could be the same with everything we do as Christians in the world.

We often speak of the cross on which Jesus was executed as “holy.” In Spanish, it’s called “Santa Cruz,” like Santa Cruz, the name of our neighboring city about 60 miles south of here. Episcopalians even observe a Feast of the Holy Cross. The very name of this feast day raises a question: How can we call the cross — the instrument on which Jesus was tortured and murdered — holy? It’s like calling a CIA interrogation site holy; like calling the torture cells at Guantánamo Bay holy; like calling a gallows, a guillotine, a gas chamber holy. How can we do that? To answer this question is to enter into a place that is beyond words, to enter into a mystery. Words can only lead us to the threshold; we each have to choose to step across it. So tonight, this Good Friday, I will try to use my poor words to invite you into a wordless mystery.

What kind of mystery is this? To begin with, it is the mystery of a living God who is willing always and eternally to know what it is “to live and die as one of us.” It is the mystery of a Creator who knows what it is to be a creature – to wake on a soft spring morning and smell the new plants pushing through the earth; to feel the pleasure of clean clothes on a clean body, to take that first sip of coffee, that first bite of toast, and feel the sweet and salty mix of jam and butter run down your chin, to look across the table and see other creatures whom you love, perhaps to remember last night’s sweaty crush of desire and satisfaction in the arms of some other creature. It is the mystery of a God who knows what it is to stand at night in stunned awe beneath an endless expanse of stars, galaxy upon galaxy, universe upon universe. It is the mystery of a God who falls in love with ordinary life – and who, like any living creature – wants desperately to hold onto it.

The God who cries out, “Abba, Father, let this cup pass from me…” But there is more to creaturehood than pleasure and ecstatic joy. Tonight we have chanted the whole of that great psalm, number 22, whose first line we are told in the gospel of Mathew Jesus himself cried out from the cross, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani? – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The mystery of the holy cross is also the mystery of the God who knows what suffering is, who knows what it is to be abandoned, to be left alone with the torturer, the God who has cried out with the psalmist: “I am poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint; my heart within my breast is melting

Good Friday is one part of the mystery of incarnation. Each year during Holy Week, we celebrate two parts of that mystery, Christ’s crucifixion and Christ’s resurrection, Good Friday and Easter. I’ll come to Easter in a moment. For now though, let us stay in Good Friday. In the practice of many poor Christian communities around the world, Good Friday, not Easter, is the most important day of Holy Week. Folks in these communities recognize the Body of Christ in the One who accompanies them in their struggles. In San Antonio, Texas, for example, the Latino community re-enacts Jesus’ passion, with far more truth than any Mel Gibson movie.

Who are these Good Friday people? They are the immigrant men who gather on street corners hoping for work. They are the nannies who must leave their own children to take care of the children of other people. They are the women, men, and children who came together yesterday at St. John’s to demand an end to deportations. They are the mothers in this and other countries from whom the Great Recession has taken their jobs, who must face their children who will not stop crying from hunger. We are all Good Friday people, those of us who lie awake in that awful time between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when physical pain or gnawing fear are often at their worst, and sleep just won’t come. When will it stop hurting? Will it ever stop? Will I lose my job? My home? My lover? My children? My mother? My life?

To enter into the mystery of the cross is to know somehow that God asks these questions with us, that God also knows what it is to be tortured, what it is to find oneself in that place where all of time and space shrink down to the an eternal now of speechless pain and separation. Many of you know that I have spent some years now working on the problem of literal torture, particularly institutionalized state torture. One thing I have learned is that torture has almost nothing to do with gathering what its proponents like to call “actionable intelligence.” Torture is about destroying social bodies by attacking the minds and bodies of the people who make up those bodies. This is what the Roman state and its upper class collaborators tried to do to Jesus and the people with him. This is what our own state continues to do to this day, in secret places around the world, and in our own prisons. When we celebrate Good Friday, we remember the God who is there in every prison cell.

Good Friday commemorates that time – 2000 years ago and yet always now -- when the God who loved life as much as we do experienced – and continues to experience – what it is for a creature to suffer and die. Good Friday is that eternal time when we recognize the God who shares our pain. Recognizing the Christ in our own pain does not take the pain away. The mystery is that sometimes this recognition transforms our experience of that pain, so that somehow we are not alone with it.

In a few minutes, we will have the opportunity to venerate – to honor – a model of Jesus’s cross, to testify to its holy nature. I want to be very clear here: what is holy about the cross is not fear, pain, and torture. There is nothing good or holy about human beings tormenting one another, or about a state that makes such torment an institution, an organized practice. What is holy is the body of Christ that suffers. What is holy is our ability to recognize that body in our own suffering and the suffering of others. When you touch that wood, I invite you to recognize the body of Christ – which is us.

In a sense, every Sunday liturgy has a little “Good Friday” inside it, and a little Easter. Our Anglican liturgical form helps us to experience the central reality of the cross with our minds, hearts and bodies, as each Sunday we retell our story. “On the night before he was handed over to suffering and death…” runs the prayer of consecration.

There at the center of the story stands the holy cross, the sign of the One who died in pain and loneliness – tortured to death for choosing the side of the poor and the unwanted, the crazy ones, the drunks and the drug addicts. It is God’s choosing God’s self-offering, that takes the cross, an instrument of torture, and makes it something holy – makes it the symbol with which we Christians are marked, as we were marked almost 40 days ago, on Ash Wednesday.

Then, in the midst of the prayer of consecration, we “confess the mystery of faith: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” Which brings us finally to Easter. Tonight, through the Eucharist we participate in death, but we also participate in resurrection and in the promise of the reign of God, which is both with us now and still to come. When we recognize ourselves as the Body of Christ we create solidarity with each other, with all humanity, with all creation, which is the only context in which death and suffering can have any meaning, can be redeemed.

We participate in a physical way—eating and drinking with our own bodies—in the Body of Christ, both crucified and resurrected. But we truly become the resurrected body only when we make the Eucharist real beyond the altar table, in the world. That is why one of our Eucharistic prayers says, “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” A truly great preacher, St. Augustine, said it this way: “You are the Body of Christ: that is to say, in you and through you the method and work of the incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken, you are to be consecrated, broken and distributed, that you may become the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”

And that is why on most days our liturgy ends with a dismissal. It is the shortest part of the service, but in some ways the most important. For here we ask God “send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”

Tonight, we are not dismissed; until Easter, we remain caught between death and resurrection. But we leave tonight secure in the knowledge that Easter does come; that, in the words of another psalm, “weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”

So tonight, as you leave this place, remember that you leave it as a faithful witness to the mystery in which we ourselves become the body of Christ, “consecrated, broken, and distributed,” that we ourselves are called to become “the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”

Amen