Invitations in Creating a New Future

 

Easter Sunday 2022                            St Mary's Gatesville, NC

April 17, 2022                                   Thomas E Wilson; Guest Celebrant

Invitations in Creating a New Future

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

What do we celebrate today? Is it the beginning of the end or is it the end of the beginning? And the answer is “Yes!”

I want to thank you for inviting me to join you on this Easter Morning. I join you as a guest and you have done me the honor of welcoming me as if I belonged to this community of St. Mary's. I am already here but not yet a member of this community. We share some beliefs, some norms of behavior but in order to be a member of this community I would need to be with you day in and day out, sharing laughter, arguments, weep and rejoice at the same time together; that is what makes a church.

Diane Butler Bass observed in her book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening:

“Instead of believing, behaving, and belonging, we need to reverse the order to belonging, behaving, and believing. Jesus did not begin with questions of belief. Instead, Jesus’ public ministry started when he formed a community.”

The end of the beginning, an invitation in creating a new future, a new community, is one of the themes in the lessons for today. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” In the beginning of creation, God created a vision for a new future, a community with God. But, as the story goes, the people decided they wanted to be in charge of their own staircase to the future. There were people like Jacob who saw the staircase in a vision, as an invitation to community. But even then, his sons shattered that community by selling their brother Joseph into slavery into Egypt. It should have been the beginning of the end.

Even then, God called forth Moses to bring the people back into community with God. But the people formed into competing groups, splintering the staircases. When Moses brought the people into the Promised Land, he shared God's vision for community; but over the years the vision that the people came up with was not in community with God, but rather to be in charge of their own staircases with Kings, Class structures and Religious Institutions.

In response, God called for Prophets to share the vision of a community with God going deeper down the staircase into the heart of God. In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today from the School of the Prophet Isaiah, the writer echos the invitation to the people in Exile in Babylon to take the first step. The school of the Prophet Isaiah, scholars theorize, began around 740 BC with the Prophet urging the people and rulers to to live into a community of justice instead of exploitation and greed so as to be worthy of being a Kingdom of God. The rulers were proud and stubbornly refused and the county was taken over by Assyria and later conquered by the Babylonians in 587 BC. who dragged away many to live in exile in Babylon. The school of Isaiah continued to comfort and minister to the people in the exile period and then in 539 BC , the Persians conquered the Babylon and allowed the people of Judah to return. The school of Isaiah ministered to the hopes of the returning exiles and painted a vision of the renewed community. They saw the hope that it was not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. This is language of the vision of the new heavens and new earth in the lesson for today. It was an invitation to work together for a new return to a deeper community. However, the nation chose to put its faith in a new Temple and religious institutions. Therefore it continues its decline and becomes a corrupt puppet state in the backwaters of the Roman Empire. That should have been the beginning of the end.

But Jesus echos the school of Isaiah as he begins his public ministry at the Synagogue in Nazareth, and he begins to gather a community of followers with his vision. This new community lived as if was already, but not yet; it was the not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. Yet, the vision was thwarted when they squabbled among themselves over who was the greatest. When Jesus was destroyed by the corrupt religious, economic and political institutions, the community fell apart. It should have been the beginning of the end.

Yet, some still held on to the hope. As the Gospel lesson for today starts off: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark,” a hint by the writer that a whole new dawn is coming. In this already and not yet, the already and not yet is about the struggle to believe the witness of the empty tomb and enter into community to walk down the stairway together. Peter sees the empty tomb, and goes back to regather the community together. Mary has a meeting with the risen Christ, but she want to hold on to the past, hold on to him. He tells her that the past is gone and it is time for a new vision for the future; she is told not to hold on to him; don't hold on to the past, but catch the vision of a new community. It is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. The witnesses see the empty tomb but do not begin to believe, or change behavior or understand until they re-create a new community. However the community is stymied by divisions about who really belongs in the community and who is in charge.

The apostle Paul spends his energies trying to help mold a new creation of community following the Risen Lord and he lives faithfully inviting others to join to go deeper together down the staircase into the heart of the Risen Christ. Paul writes that letter to the Corinthians and to other churches that a creation of community is being thwarted by the squabbling over matter of doctrine and personality.

The church keeps revisiting the staircase of the vision of the future. However they waste time in squabbles over doctrine and behavior so that start to cling to opposing views as heresy and refuse to speak to each other.

Constantine three centuries later, made the church the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it was an already and not yet exercise over squabbles of doctrine and control, which continues to this day.

I have been going to church for three quarters of a century. When it was time for me to be confirmed, more than six decades ago, a learned a song at church camp sung to the tune of “God Bless America”:

I am an Anglican,
I am P.E., (Protestant Episcopal)
I am High Church and Low Church,
I am Protestant and Catholic and free.
Not a Presby, or a Lutheran,
Or a Baptist white with foam,
I am an Anglican,
Just one step from Rome
I am an Anglican,
Via media, my home.

I lived in towns with rows of competing churches. I worshipped in churches which split between radical liberals, mainstream liberals, mainstream conservatives and radical conservatives and people who just didn't care.

Divisions between races,

   between economic classes,

       between political persuasion,

Division about what was thought to be really important - things like; should women come into church with heads uncovered.

    About how to deal with women.

        How to deal with gay children.

            You name it and we would fight about it and push people out of community.

Today is Easter Sunday, the day we keep hearing:“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark,” a hint by the writer that a whole new dawn is coming. Like Mary. it is not a time to hold on to the past, but to be open to see a new vision of community and join in creating a new future. It is about going beyond the boundaries of the traditional church structure; about joining with other churches, even to joining with those who do not profess a Christian doctrine, joining with people with whom we disagree to build community. A community, not as the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning, which is always what resurrection means. For as Isaiah reminds us what God continues in saying: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;”

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Invitations in Creating a New Future

The death of someone loved, we see as an end,

wanting so desperately to hold on to a past,

as if we'd a power or permission to be asked,

yet, allowing that spirit into our soul to emend.

His hopes and dreams becoming one with mine,

as I surrender myself from the center of being,

allowing him bond with me, new eyes seeing

a deeper reality, with a strengthening of spine.

His end was really the end of our beginning,

a resurrection into a new life in this world,

to journey into his dreams with sails unfurled

to live a resurrection life to new hope clinging.

The sun rising means that a new future begins,

in which we work together as if his love wins.