We stand between what we were and what we shall become, when the Risen Christ is revealed.

SJF • Easter 2015 • Tobias S Haller BSG
God raised Jesus on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia. That, my friends, is the Easter message, short and sweet; the heart of the gospel and the center of our Creed and acclamation. (Don’t get too excited, though; the sermon will be a little longer...) Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. It is why we are here today, and why we are here every time we gather week by week and year by year — some of us, if we are honest about it, tending more to the year-by-year than the week-by-week! But if you can only be here one day a year — or for the first time in your life! — this is the day to be here: Easter Day, the day of resurrection.

It is fashionable in some theological circles to debate and discuss the nature of the resurrection, asking, Did it really happen? or What was it like? At the furthest reaches of skepticism you have those who suggest that Jesus was not really raised from the dead; but rather, that the power of his personality and his teaching were so persuasive that the apostles decided to continue their teaching and preaching as if he had been raised from the dead. In addition to transforming the apostles into either fools or con-men, does this really make any sense at all? Who would risk their lives to preach a gospel based on a fabric as thin and weak as wet tissue paper? Who would be willing to face down the authorities of Rome and the Sanhedrin on the basis of such a dream or a hope? Who would be willing to die — as most of the apostles did — in defense of a pious memory?

And if the apostles were con-men, if indeed they stole the body from the tomb — as the slanderous rumor would have it — then we are, as Saint Paul once said, of all people the most to be pitied, for having been hoodwinked by first-century con-artists — who, if they were con-artists, weren’t very smart themselves: for they got nothing for their scam but persecution, beatings, imprisonment, exile and death! Who is more the fool?!

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But look at what Saint Peter says: “God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” Peter is testifying as an eye witness; he’s not making this up; he’s not elaborating a pious memory, or engineering a clever scam. He saw the risen Christ with his own eyes; he and the other apostles ate and drank with Jesus over those days before he was taken up into heaven and exalted at the right hand of the Father. Whatever else one wants to say about the resurrection, Saint Peter affirms that it is real.

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Now of course, you might well say, well, what is real? What is reality? Could someone who died really come back to life — not just resuscitated, like Lazarus, but totally transformed into a person who can walk through walls or locked doors to confront his frightened followers — and we will be hearing more about that in the coming weeks. This risen Christ, this Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead by the power of God, was not merely restored to life, but was given a whole new kind of life. When Saint Paul tries to explain this to the Corinthians, he says, “It is sown a physical body, but is raised a spiritual body.”

The problem with this is that we tend to hear the word spiritual as being less real than the physical. But it is the other way around: the spiritual is more real than the physical. For God is Spirit, and God is the most real reality that is, the reality upon which all other things depend, the Creator of all that is. If God is not real, nothing else could be real!

Christ could walk through the closed doors of those fear-filled rooms, not because he was like a ghost, but because he was ever so much more real, solid and substantial than those merely physical barriers. He could walk through those barriers the way we walk through a puff of smoke or a haze of fog. The stone at his tomb was rolled away not so he could get out — he could have walked through that stone like it was tissue paper — the stone was rolled away to let the disciples see that the tomb was empty; that he had been raised. The risen Christ, in the power of the spirit, was more, not less, real than the substantial world he came to save. We, my friends, are the ghosts: dead in our sin. But the Easter message proclaims: He is alive! And if he is alive, then we who live in him are alive as well.

The spirit, you see, gives life — and compared to what is dead (as we all are in our sins) what is alive is more real,more substantial, more solid, and more full of the energy that drives the universe. That cosmos itself is supported and sustained only by the love of God who created it; the nurturing care of God’s Holy Spirit that sustains it — what the poet Dante so beautifully described as “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” And that same power — the power that moves the universe - is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

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Some skeptics will say this is impossible. But I ask you — who of us here is possible? Each and every person sitting here in this church, each and every person who ever walked this earth, at one point didn’t exist, wasn’t real — didn’t exist at all. Yet here we are! Each and every person sitting in this church, young and old, big and small, and the billions of others born upon this earth came into being from the joining of two cells: one of them smaller than a pinhead, and the other smaller still. That’s reality, my friends. Each of us here started out as a speck no bigger than the period at the end of a sentence, a wiggle no bigger than a comma. And yet here we are.

And our present bodies are as miraculous as our beginning. For as we grew from that little point, we drew substance first from our mother’s womb, then when we were born and came forth into the world with a cry as all mortals to, we grew from the food we ate, the air we breathed — yes, we are built up with material gathered from the four corners of the world — and that world itself is compacted of the substance of exploded stars! What a miracle that each of us can sit here in this church, both it and we made up from elements from the four corners of the universe, from literally billions of miles away, gathered here against all odds to this very spot, gathered from the air that God spreads upon this earth, from the water that flows so freely, from the food from far afield.

There are atoms in my body that once were part of other lives, that swam in the fish off the coast of Alaska, that browsed in the herds of the Great Plains of Iowa, that grew in the fruit groves of Florida. What an impossibly unlikely reality I am, that each of us is: that the substance of the universe scattered to its ends should find itself collected and gathered, here and now in you, in me!

Is it real? Can it be? And can God who works this miracle a billion times over in every human being , not work a single miracle in one human being that is a billion times as great? Can the power of God that works to bring life from such a tiny beginning to its present state, to summon the substance of exploded stars to form billions of human lives, can he not continue the amazing transformation one further step in one very special human being? What if our bodies now stand in the same relation to what we shall be in the resurrection, (when we shall be like Christ in our risen spiritual bodies) as the first beginning of our lives, when we were sheltered in our mothers’ wombs no bigger than a period or a comma — not even as big as a question mark — bear to what we are now? We are only in the middle, my friends, we are in-between what once we were as a tiny speck that was almost nothing, and what we shall be in the life of the world to come: and oh, what a sight it will be.

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For we have been given a promise, my friends, a promise passed down for nearly 2,000 years, a promise first given by our Lord himself and repeated by the angel at the tomb, who reassured those fearful, faithful, women who came to find a body. “He he is not here; he has been raised; but he is going ahead to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

“We will see him.” That is the promise. And it is real. We will not see him as we do now, only in the acts of charity and self-sacrifice done in his name. We will not see him only under the forms of bread and wine, as we see him now. We will not see him only in the icons and the paintings and the stained-glass windows, however beautiful they are they are only shadows of the things that are to come, when the glory is revealed, and we will see him as he is, see him with our own eyes — our own new spiritual eyes seeing him in his super-substantial, and spiritual body — raised from the dead, transformed and glorified for our sake and on our behalf, that we might be led into the way of transformation that will change us too, into his likeness and according to his great love and promise.

So if anyone asks you, my friends, “Is it real?” you can assure them it is the most real thing that is: more real than death, more real than life itself — this new life that is raised from the dead in the power and the glory of God, to whom we give, as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and for evermore.

Looking at the big picture of Creation, and hearing how it groans in expectation...

Proper 11a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

After my mother passed away, my youngest sister took up the task of trying to make some orderly sense out of the boxes of loose photographs that my mother had accumulated over the years. Not only were there a number of photos from her own mother and grandmother, but of those taken in my generation — and I was the oldest of six, so there were a lot of photos. There were literally hundreds of them, and it was a challenge to sort through them.

One response to organize such pictures is to divide them up into three familiar categories, at least to begin to get a handle on the task: to sort them into three piles of pictures: people, places, and things. For some pictures, the sorting is easy: the baby pictures, the school pictures, the graduation pictures, first communion, confirmation — those all go into the “people” pile; while the views of the Grand Canyon or the Belvedere Fountain in Central Park go into the “places” category; and the photos that my dad took of his model airplanes are clearly to be numbered among the “things.”

But what do you do with the picture of Mom and Dad standing in front of the Washington Monument? Is that a “people” picture or a “place” picture — or even a “thing” picture if you have a collection of pictures of monuments? How do you categorize something that seems to fit in many different categories?

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This morning’s Scripture readings face us with just such a challenge. At first glance, as with some pictures, it seems to be easy: the reading from Genesis is clearly about Jacob’s experience at the place, about Jacob’s experience of the place that he would come to call Bethel. The reading from Romans is clearly about people, in particular about us as we become children of God. Finally, the reading from Matthew is about the weeds and the wheat and the harvest — all of them things.

But when we look bit closer the categories are not quite as clear as they appear at first. The reading from Genesis is about a place — a place in which Jacob begins by making a pillow out of a stone, lying down to sleep and to dream. Clearly this is no ordinary place, and Jacob recognizes it as the gateway to the house of God — which is what Bethel means in Hebrew.

But in addition to it being about that holy place — there are those things: the stone, to oil, the ladder, the gate; and the people (or perhaps I had better say the personalities) of Jacob, the angels, and the God of Abraham and Isaac — now to become the God of Jacob as well, as he makes with him a covenant of adoption and promises to be with him to keep him wherever he goes. Whatever place he goes to, God will personally be with him.

Which brings us to the second reading, which is clearly about people, and how we are adopted, through the Spirit of God as children of God, as the Spirit leads us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” Yet no sooner does Paul describe the personal aspect of adoption, than he turns around and applies it to a thing — the thingiest thing there is, the whole creation, the very embodiment of thingdom! For what is more a creature than creation? And Paul is bold enough to claim that redemption is not just for people, but for that whole creation; that somehow in God’s good time and place, “the whole creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God!” This is one of the Scriptures I point to whenever people ask me if I believe whether our pets, our animal companions, will share with us in the resurrection. I am also comforted and encouraged by the words of the Psalms. For they not only call upon all things that have breath to praise the Lord — and believe me, if you have a pet cat or dog, you know they have breath! — but also for the trees to clap their hands and even for the hills and mountains to leap for joy. This brings us back to Saint Paul is saying — “the whole creation” must mean “the whole creation” — that is, there is nothing outside God’s grace and redemption, for God hates nothing — no thing — that God has made.

Finally, in that reading from Matthew, we appear to be dealing with just such things — the seed, the weeds, the wheat, the harvest — but then Jesus offers an explanation of this parable to the disciples and he immediately brings in places — all places, for the field is the world. He then he tells of those people: the Son of Man and the children of the kingdom and the children of the evil one, and the enemy, and the very angels themselves, the same ones whom Jacob saw ascending and descending upon that ladder.

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So what are we to make of this? What categories can we use? Perhaps the key after all lies in that lesson from Romans. Perhaps what God is trying to tell us this morning is that the categories we create to divide up the world aren’t quite so clear as we think them to be — that we and the angels, and the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and the seed of the fields, and the trees of the forest, and the forest itself, and the hills and the valleys and the mountains — indeed that the whole of creation is groaning in the pains of childbirth until now.

Instead of an assortment of little pictures, there’s just one big picture: a view such as perhaps the first man who walked on the moon had, forty-five years ago today, looking back and seeing that the world was not split up into many different things, but is one beautiful thing, hanging there in the sky. The whole creation is awaiting the redemption that is not just our destiny but the destiny of all that God has made.

Perhaps God is saying to us that we are all in this together — that although human beings do hold a special place in God’s creation, as people who are more than mere things, yet we still share the role of creatures, with all of God’s creation. I mentioned pets, our animal companions, but there are others: we usually treat our pets fairly well, but there are others we don’t so well. It does not take a great stretch of imagination to look into the eyes of a captive orangutan, whose young have been stripped from her, sent off to a zoo somewhere — confined now to a cage in a forest in which she once ranged freely, but has now been torn down, burned down so they could plant a plantation for the production of palm kernel oil — it doesn’t take much to look into the depth of those sad, sad eyes of the captive orangutan and ask, What have we done to our fellow creatures? It does not take much of a great stretch of experience — although it seems to be a stretch too far for some — to see the collapsing ice sheets of Antarctica, the disappearing glaciers of northern Europe and Canada and the Alps, the polar bears vainly trying to swim because there is no more ice left for them to climb upon — it is no great stretch to see our profound impact on creation — and, oh, how it groans! It does not take a great stretch of imagination to look at the raging wildfires of the American West, or the smog in China so thick you can cut it with a knife, and not ask yourself, “What have we done?”

Perhaps God is trying to tell us in these powerful lessons — lessons written not only in the pages of Scripture but in the black and white of the world itself — that we do not live in heaven — we are still sleeping here on earth on our stony pillows and our dreams of ladders. And it is time to wake up, and out of our stony griefs to raise up Bethel. To take our part in making this world what God means it to be: God’s world, in which we dwell as guests. Too long have we thought that this world was just a place we could despoil and neglect, because we were headed for a better one up that ladder into the world to come. What does Saint Paul say? The creation has been waiting, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God? And when we are revealed, what are we revealed to be? Will we be seen as those who did not care, who despoiled and neglected God’s creation; or worse: will some of us be seen as enemies of God’s creation who spread bad seed upon God’s field, so that it brought forth weeds instead of wheat? Is it not written, as you have sown, so shall you reap?

My brothers and sisters, these are sobering questions for us today, far more important than the mere categories of people, places, and things. It is the whole creation — the big picture — of which we form a part, and which we change — for better or for worse — by our actions. We are not called to divide things up, but to pull them together: not to divide, but to unite. God intended humanity to care for creation — pulling it all together. Let us, my friends, be responsible stewards of that which has been committed to our care — and for which — one day — we will be called to render an account.+

The Real Thing

People Place and Thing