Yes, we are a resurrected people. Evolution has been telling us that since time immemorial. Resurrection is the mythical/religious name we give to the triumph of matter over antimatter, life over death, meaning over meaninglessness, cosmos over chaos. But it is also the name we give to that baffling transformative process that requires paradox – apparent contradiction – as an essential ingredient in every transformation, whether personal or global…
Assuredly, not everything in our world is in harmony, and often we are overwhelmed by mysterious forces that push our sanity and sanctity to their very limits. But before we address these big questions, let’s get our own house in order. Let’s begin by resolving and dissolving all the meaningless suffering that we ourselves cause either directly or indirectly. Then the chances are that the other great paradoxes that baffle and confuse us will not seem that irrational anymore. We then will be in a position to understand with greater wisdom and equanimity the paradoxically creative Spirit who energizes the E-mergent miracle of our evolving universe.
Then, too, we are likely to be more at peace with the paradoxical enigmas of each day. With graced intuition we will be more at ease about the fact that death is a precondition for new life; we do not know why, but it is. Chaos is the fermenting ground for creative order; light is meaningless without the dark; pain and beauty have a strange familiarity; suffering awakens us into compassion. The evolutionary cycle of creation and destruction manifests itself in every realm of life and permeates every recess of our being.
Time to sit up and pay attention. I’m asking YOU a question today, so I want to see lots of answers and comments down below!
This is a question that my philosophy students at Utica College are pondering and discussing this week and I thought it would be fun to put it before you.
I was having lunch at a cafe yesterday when someone walked up and handed me a religious pamphlet that asked whether I knew for sure that I was going to heaven when die. This is an interesting question.
It’s even more interesting that so many in the fundamentalist camp choose to start their evangelistic pitch with this question. If one’s faith is based on fear for the ego’s survival in an unknown afterlife, then it doesn’t seem to be qualitatively different from the dog-eat-dog drive for survival in this world.
I’m not trying to disparage eternal hope for anyone, but during Holy Week, Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself. His vision and ultimate concern was much larger than his drive for egoic survival. He embraced death willingly and so became the primary model by which Christians measure their faith.
There is an extent to which I believe we Christians are called to do the same. Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” Christians like to remind each other that Christ died for us, but there is also a very real sense in which we are called to die with Christ. We are participants, not merely consumers, in the unfolding drama of eternity.
Friedrich Schleiermacher said it like this in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799):
Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one’s own finite self.
The question I am putting before you, superfriends and blogofans, is taken from chapter 9 of William Rowe’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction.
How important to religion is the belief in personal survival after death? Do you think that religion must stand or fall with this belief? Can you imagine a viable religion which accepts the view that death ends everything? What would such a religion be like? Explain.
During the week after Easter Sunday, I had the opportunity to gather wild ramps with my friend Nancy in the forest around her farm. For those who are unfamiliar, ramps are kind of like little wild onions. It was a clear and mild day during an unusually rainy spring. Before heading out into the woods, we took a trip over to the greenhouse, where some seedlings needed watering. Her greenhouse is a homemade structure with a cathedral ceiling covered in clear plastic.
As Nancy walked up and down the aisles with her water-hose, I thought back to the Easter Vigil service I had attended at an Episcopal church the Saturday night prior. My friend Ed, the priest, had dedicated the church’s new Paschal candle, led us in the renewal of our baptismal vows, and sprinkled us with holy water in the same way that Nancy was now blessing the baby plants, nurturing fragile new life with the most basic elements of water and light.
After Nancy finished her botanical asperges with the seedlings, we made our way through some of the muddiest terrain imaginable toward the hillside where wild ramps were to be found. As we sloshed through the quagmire, Nancy and I talked about how she came to fall in love with organic farming. The details of that story are hers to share, but the process of telling the story as we walked reminds me of the many biblical readings from the Torah and the prophets that take place in the middle of the Episcopal Easter Vigil service. The readings chronicle the long and messy journey of the Jewish people from slavery and exile into freedom.
Finally, we arrived at the wooded hillside that was covered in patches of wild ramps. These precious little vegetables are currently in high demand among upscale restaurants all over the country. Some farmers earn a significant portion of their annual income with a single load in their pickup trucks. And there we were, sitting in the abundance of a remote hillside in rural New York with a small fortune growing around our feet.
Is this not the essence of Easter? The triumph of abundance and life over scarcity and death! It’s no mistake that Christians celebrate this, our highest holiday, during the springtime. The smell of dirt emerging from beneath the melting snow and the sight of flowers bursting forth from their buds are sacramental reminders of the resurrection life that pervades this universe in which we live. This most precious treasure is the free gift of God for all who will open their hearts and embrace it as such.
Nancy the farmer, priest of God’s green earth, made this truth real to me in a new way as she tore off a piece of edible ramp-leaf and handed it to me on that hillside saying, “Here. This is Communion.” As I put it in my mouth, I couldn’t stop myself from saying “Amen” with my whole heart.
My first Easter sermon at First Presbyterian, Boonville. The text is Matthew 28:1-10.
Philip Gulley and James Mulholland tell a story in their book, If Grace Is True (HarperCollins: 2003), about a scene that is probably familiar to all of us (especially those of us who are parents). It goes like this:
When I was about five years old, I demanded my mother buy me a certain toy. She refused, explaining she didn’t have the money.
I recall flying into a rage and screaming, “I hate you!”
My mother was utterly unperturbed. She didn’t spank me and send me to my room, though that would have been understandable. She didn’t break into tears. She didn’t drag me to a therapist. She most certainly didn’t buy the toy. She simply said, “Well, I love you, and your hate can’t change my love.” (p.110)
I think most of us have been there, am I right? If you haven’t experienced it firsthand, you’ve probably seen something like it in public. As the father of a two-year-old, I’m intimately familiar with what goes through a parent’s head in a moment like that. I worry about making a scene. I wonder what other people must be thinking about me as a parent. I’m scared that, no matter what I do, I might be psychologically scarring my child for life.
But when I see other parents dealing with similar meltdowns in public, I don’t judge them. In fact, my heart goes out to them. I don’t think they’re bad parents. I see others like me who are just doing the best they can in a difficult moment. The only parents I worry about are the ones who return the rage in kind. You know what I’m talking about. All of us lose our cool with our kids on occasion, but it’s pretty obvious when a parent in public crosses the line verbally or physically. In the effort to maintain control of the situation, they lose control of themselves. Those are the parents that other people tend to worry about.
Imagine what people would think if the mother in Gulley and Mulholland’s story had shouted, “I hate you, too!” and stormed out of the store, leaving this five-year-old little kid to find his own way home. We would be horrified! We would run to the child’s aid and probably call the police. We would say that such a mother deserves to be locked up in jail.
Unfortunately, there are those among Christians past and present who believe that this is exactly how God behaves. Those who turn their backs on God, so they say, are doomed for eternity. Those who reject God will be rejected by God. They claim that God, who is infinitely holy and righteous, must respect the freewill of these unrepentant sinners and allow them to receive exactly what they deserve. Most Christians who believe this can quote lots of Bible verses to support their position.
What I can’t understand is this: if we would call the police on any human mother who abandoned her child in that way, then why wouldn’t we do the same for a parental deity who abandons even one of God’s children to eternal torment? Why should we worship God for doing that for which we would incarcerate a human? It doesn’t make sense.
Fortunately for us, that is not the God who we worship. The God of love revealed in Jesus Christ is more like the mother in the first story from Gulley and Mulholland’s book. When we scream, “I hate you!” at God, God responds, “Well, I love you, and your hate can’t change my love.” This God rejects the rejection of the rebellious children.
This God would rather leave the ninety-nine sheep in the field to go search for the one who is lost. Jesus tells us in Luke 15 that this good shepherd searches until that lost sheep is found and carries it home rejoicing. Jesus teaches his followers to love their enemies because that’s what God does. He says, in Matthew 5:44-45,
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Not only did Jesus teach us about God’s love, he showed it to us in the way that he unconditionally accepted the most messed-up and undesirable people of his day as members of his own family.
More than any other story in the scriptures, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection shows us just how far God is willing to go in order to reject our rejection. Last Sunday, and then again on Good Friday, we heard the story of how the powers that be in the world rejected Jesus. The political and religious authorities wanted to shut him up. His closest disciples betrayed, denied, and abandoned him. Last week, we also looked at the hard fact that you and I are really no different from the crowds who shouted, “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday and “Crucify!” only five days later on Good Friday. The cross stands as a reminder of the lengths to which we, the people of this world, will go in order to reject Jesus. Like five-year-olds throwing temper tantrums, we scream, “I hate you!” to God at the top of our lungs. With all our pretended power, we lash out with the very worst torture and death that we can muster. Intoxicated by our ability to inflict death, we delude ourselves into thinking that we’re so strong. We can even make God go away… permanently!
But then, on the third day, on that first Easter Sunday, something happened. It says in today’s reading from Matthew that there was an earthquake. Matthew is the only one of the four gospels to record this fact. What does it mean? I like to think it means that something fundamental at the very heart of reality shifted in that moment. The power of life overcame the power of death. The very worst of human hatred was undone by the very best of God’s love. In the cross, the world rejected Jesus Christ. But in the resurrection, God rejected the world’s rejection. This is what Easter is all about!
As if this weren’t enough, look again at what happens in verse 10. Jesus appears to the two Marys and gives them a message for his “brothers” (meaning the twelve disciples). Remember that the last time we saw any of them in Matthew was in 26:56, when they were all running away from Jesus in his hour of need. They rejected him. But the risen Jesus nevertheless calls them “brothers” and invites them to return to the mission they had begun together. He rejected their rejection.
This is (very) good news for people like me who struggle with our loyalty to God. If God were to respect my freewill and give me what I deserve (and sometimes ask for), I would be abandoned like a five-year-old in a department store with no way home. I am thankful that God does not respect my freewill, but goes out of the way to seek after me until I am found. I am thankful that God has rejected my rejection.
What does this mean for all of us?
Maybe you are a Christian, but you struggle with things like sin and doubt. Well, the good news for you is that you don’t have to impress God with your morals or your dogma. The only thing for you to do, in the words of the theologian Paul Tillich, is “accept the fact that you are accepted.”
Maybe you’re here today and you’re not a Christian. Maybe you want to believe in something, but can’t wrap your mind around some theological point or maybe you’re sickened by the judgmental hypocrisy of those who call themselves Christians. The good news for you is that the God of love revealed in Jesus Christ is not the cold-hearted and small-minded bookkeeper of conventional religion. The God I believe in is not standing at a distance, waiting to burn you in hell. My God is just as angry about the pretended piety of so-called “saints” to which you have borne witness. Likewise, God is not threatened by honest questions on a quest for truth.
Whatever your individual struggle may be, what I want you to take away from this Easter is that, in the resurrection of Jesus, God has rejected your rejection. Sure, you might kick and scream like a kid having a tantrum. You might even deny God’s existence or yell, “I hate you!” to the empty sky, but in those moments, the God I believe in just holds you that much tighter with an eternal love that will not let you go.
I heard this on NPR yesterday and thought it was blog-worthy. If you haven’t experienced Anne Lamott before, I highly recommend all of her books, especially Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.
If you have five minutes, I recommend listening to the interview, rather than reading it.
Yes, we are a resurrected people. Evolution has been telling us that since time immemorial. Resurrection is the mythical/religious name we give to the triumph of matter over antimatter, life over death, meaning over meaninglessness, cosmos over chaos. But it is also the name we give to that baffling transformative process that requires paradox – apparent contradiction – as an essential ingredient in every transformation, whether personal or global…
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 