John

    Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”  Many of us here this morning are a little uncomfortable with commands...or at least certain commands?  We chafe under the seeming inflexibility of “the rules,” we bend God’s commands and sometimes break them and try to explain them away or just plain ignore them.  Sometimes rules seem dusty and  out of date and senseless anyway.  Did you know that in Tennessee, it is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle?  In Indiana, it is against the law to shoot open a can of food. (So that’s why they make pop tops!)  In Kentucky, it is a crime to use a reptile during any part of a religious service.  “I don’t care if it is testimony time...put that snake away!”

Frederick Buechner (“Message in the Stars,” Secrets in the Dark, pp 17ff.) thought it would be really cool if we went out of our homes one night and looked up at the stars to discover that God had rearranged that celestial light show to form a message for us. Wouldn’t it be great if God juiced up the stars a bit, and rearranged them to spell out the cosmically huge words: “I REALLY EXIST!” or “I AM” or maybe even “I LOVE YOU! GOD.” Imagine the headlines the day after that message appeared in the sky. It would be better than those “God” billboards! People would be in shock. Skeptics would fall to their knees. Scientists scanning the heavens for evidence of fraud would be forced to admit it was true. Churches would be packed with the newly faithful. Wars would stop. The proof is right there.
Buechner imagines God changing the marquee from time to time over the next several years...putting the message into different languages...addings new colors, new fonts...maybe even heavenly music to accompany the celestial message. Everything would be so great until that first person stood under the heavenly light show that read “JESUS LOVES YOU!” and uttered the words that made the angels choke: “So what? So what if he exists? So what if he loves us? So what?” Would the heavens to fade to gray? Would the music die?

            At Hopwood we know about missions and missionaries.  After hearing about missions every week over the past month, we should.  We know that we don’t send out the pith helmeted, khaki short type.  Our missionaries have spiky hair and leave a wake of laughter.  We send bright folks proficient as theologians, teachers and administrators.  They are skilled artists, photographers, barbers, homemakers, accountants and welders.  They go for the short term and the long haul.  Anyone foolish enough to join the Missions Committee had best pack their bags for they will soon join the number of the sent ones.  Men, women and children, we send them all. 

    There are many paths that lead to the empty tomb of Jesus Christ.  If you were fortunate enough to have lived in the days of Christ, there were many ways to get the tomb.  Mary Magdelene came by a lonely and dangerous path, arriving while it was still dark.  Simon Peter and the other disciple came by way of a footrace, one ahead of the other.  Thomas didn’t make it to the tomb at all, but had to come to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead by a later appearance.  The Roman soldiers and the priests came to the tomb along another route, for other reasons.  They came to cook the books and get their story straight, because of the disappearance of the corpse caused them no little embarrassment. And you can bet that from that very first day a long, long train of gawkers, truth-seekers, doubters, and pilgrims have come to the tomb...right down to our own day.

It’s almost Easter, but we must walk a rough road over these next two weeks to get there. It’s almost Easter, with its “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” and its Easter Lilies and its empty tomb, but we must walk through the graveyard to get there. As I stood there last Sunday at the wall of Jerusalem, looking up the Mount of Olives towards Bethany, graves are about all you can see. There alongside the wall lie the great broken stones of the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed in 70 AD. The Jerusalem side of the Kidron Valley from the city walls down is filled with the Muslim graves...little stone graves as far as the eye can see. The Bethany side of the Valley is filled with Jewish graves...tens of thousands of them...white and hard and cold...stretching all the way to the road to Bethany.

    It’s a crying shame that the power, the immediacy, the life has too-often been drained out of the Christian faith so that for many it has become nothing more than a series of propositions to be believed, a set of actions to be rehearsed week by week.   For many this life is as dry as yesterday’s toast...no immediacy, no life, no sensory connection, no power.  It’s sad when people look elsewhere to find a connection with the spirit world, and turn away from the One who said: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4).

I've also got scars you can't see...scars on my soul. Scars caused by losing those who died too young.  Scars from being hurt.  Scars from causing other people pain.   A few are still red and angry and slow to heal.   Some scars mark wounds that go all the way to the core of our being.  You have them too.  Those are the scars we don't like to talk about at all. 

“Six days before the Passover…”   Five words set the clock ticking.  A lot can happen in six days.  How quickly those days would fly if your doctor said, “You have six days to live.”  In a poem entitled “Susquehanna” Liz Rosenberg writes:  Those many dark nights in our wedding house, Hundreds of them—like fireflies—above the quiet road till dawn,…I knew we were all going to die-- but not then, and not right away; because in those days there were more days to come.  I thought I could not run out of them.

    Thinking and praying about those saints I have known who have gone before usually gets me reaching for the Kleenex box. It starts with the first hymn.  The image of all those believers we have loved who have gone before us gathered with believers from all time really grips my imagination:  And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. Alleluia!  From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast, through gates of pearl streams in the countless host, singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: Alleluia, Alleluia.  As I behold that procession in my mind’s eye, as I think of the faithful lives lived for Christ, I’m overwhelmed with floods of emotion.
        Bernard of Clairvaux understood that.  He said:  “What does our commendation mean to them?  The saints have no need of honor from us; neither does our devotion add the slightest thing to what is theirs.  Clearly, if we venerate their memory, it serves us, not them.  But I tell you, when I think of them, I feel myself enflamed by a tremendous yearning.” (From J. Robert Wright, ed., Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church. Church Publishing, 1991, p. 496.)

    It wasn’t hard to pick out the ones who were finished.  They were the ones who picked up their bags, slung a blanket over their shoulders, and with bowed heads they simply walked away.  I wonder if the disciples felt like the deck crew of the Titanic... watching people get on the lifeboats as the deck began to tilt?  Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. ”
    Have you known people who walked away...just like that?  Have you known someone who at one time  really believed, someone who walked with God...someone who prayed, served, loved Jesus...but something changed...something snapped...something died inside them?  Have you known someone who turned their back on the Church, on the congregation, on Jesus...people who no longer go about with Jesus?