Looking Ahead

Easter Day – The Resurrection of our Lord, April 12, 2020 | A Sermon on the Epistle for Easter | Colossians 3: 1-4 (RCL) | by David Zersen |

3So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ²Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

⁵Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly…⁷These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life… ⁸But now you must get rid of all such things seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices ¹⁰and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ¹¹In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (NRSV)

LOOKING AHEAD

There are times in life when we find it hard to look ahead and focus instead on the moment. And when a moment, like this moment, is surrounded by uncertainty or fear, it’s even more difficult to focus on the future. Statistics for the Corona virus are changing daily. Hopeful statistics from China (and even S. Korea and Italy) suggest that the current rates of Covid-19 infection will reach high points and then decline. However, even when low points may have been reached there is always the possibility that the dreaded pandemic may reoccur. Gradually, we who knew no victims of the disease are discovering friends and relatives who have it or who died from it. In many ways, we are troubled less by illness and death, however! We simply hope to make sense of something that we have never experienced before. We wish we could look ahead, but we are more than sheltered-in-place. We are stuck-in-place!

Stories about Uncertainty and fear

Going back two thousand years, our Gospel lesson for today introduces a woman who is also stuck-in-place. Mary (Mt.28:5) isn’t sure what to do. She wants to know what happened to Jesus’ dead body, the physical symbol of everything that allowed her to cling to the revered rabbi. Her questions are: “Did someone steal it? Can it be retrieved? What does the future hold? How can one make sense of anything without it?”

I can think of two artists who struggled with Mary’s questions about uncertainty. One is Ernst Barlach, a renaissance-type man in the early 1900s who wrote plays and novels, created prints and sculptures. He entered World War I enthusiastically, but was discharged with a heart problem. He returned to society as a pacifist repulsed by the horrors of battle and the stench of death. He fashioned many powerful statements in sculpture that challenged the military direction in Germany, and his art came to be regarded by the growing Nazi party as degenerate. One of his most powerful sculptures of which I own a reproduction is entitled “Das Wiedersehen” or “Meeting Again”. A craftsman who fixed a chip on it for me thought it was just two beggars. In reality, however, it is the disciple Thomas confronting Jesus for the first time after the resurrection, and crying out, “Is it really you”?

In a broader reality, however, the question is larger. It is Barlach himself, as well as you and I, facing uncertainty and fear, pandemics and war and death, who ask the questions: “Jesus, are you there? Jesus, Do you have answers for us in this frightening time? What are we to think about all this?”

Another artist, Eugene O’Neill, challenges our fears and uncertainty in a play he wrote, entitled “Lazarus laughed.” In it he lets us review the story of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha, troubled over the death of their brother Lazarus. Knowing that he is speaking to an audience with its own troubles and worries, O’Neill, takes us to the tomb where Jesus is calling Lazarus forth from death. This is not the place to quibble about whether this is resuscitation, resurrection or some- thing else. This is a moment in the presence of the Lord of life and death to realize, as Dylan Thomas put it, that “death shall have no dominion” over us. If Jesus is Lord of life and death, pandemics, wars and economic failure cannot have the final word.

Our intent today is not to analyze the details of the resurrection moment or to ask how, as St. Paul might have said, the corruptible became incorruptible. That is 2000 years behind us and people have debated that ad infinitum and have made their choices. As people of faith, we are interested in O’Neill’s take on the Lazarus story. He shows Lazarus, faced with the same concerns about life and death that trouble others, laughing hysterically and uncontrollably for the rest of the play. “What do you know that we don’t know?” his frustrated contemporaries ask. Lazarus learned that once death is behind him, he can look forward with hope and joy? This is the day when uncertainty and fear can be left behind. “If we have been raised with Christ,” writes the author of Colossians, “seek the things that are above.” (Col. 3:3) For those of us who have been raised with Christ, we need never be stuck in the present. The future is not uncertain.

Stories about resurrection hope

Mary is afraid at the empty tomb (Mt. 28:5) because she doesn’t know how to make sense of the present moment. And some of us have been wringing our hands because we aren’t sure if this will be the way the world ends, or whether this is just a challenge to our faith. However, we have been raised with Christ and we are to seek higher things. We are to pursue a new self, a new perspective, free of fear and prejudice, immorality and greed, rage, malice, slander and filthy language (yes, even that! doesn’t miss the attention of our writer). Christ is now seated at the right hand of God and we are called to center our lives not on earthly thoughts that wallow in despair. We are to look ahead and center our lives in the assurance that our future is secured.

St. Paul has made a great point about this with the analogy of immersion baptism (Rom. 6:4). In the waters of baptism, you and I are drowned, put to death, freed from an old life that could have been. We are raised to life, just as Christ was raised from death to life at Easter. Now we are filled with the Easter joy, the joy belonging to those who know that their new life is life in Christ. It is life that last and impacts every moment of our day.

I thought about this as I recently read Hemmingway’s classic, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was struck by the degree to which things are not always as they seem and that what seems like death can in fact open the door to life. The novel takes place during the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. The revolutionaries, aided by the Russian communists, are attempting to challenge the Republican government and oust the monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and, for that matter, all religious allegiances. A great portion of the story, which only lasts three days, but takes 500 pages!, is held in and around a cave as preparations are made to blow up a bridge to thwart the Republican’s transportation. The main character is a Robert Jordan, an American partisan who has been sent to blow up the bridge. It is clear that there is no religious belief in Jordan or in any of the story’s characters because they all subscribe to the atheism of revolutionaries. There is no hope and no future for any of them other than the prospect that they might die for a cause. However, as the story comes to an end, Robert Jordan, dying from a fatal wound, makes it possible for the remaining band of partisans, including his lover, Maria, to flee so that at least they will have a future.

What is this story telling us? Some things are not as they seem. Sometimes seeming dead ends point to greater realities. The atheists with no hope for the future are saved by a Christ figure who has no concern for himself other than to assure that his friends are set free. Did not Jesus tell us that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for his friends? (Jn. 15:14) Things are not always as they seem. Jesus’ death is not the end. A world war does not prove that God does not exist. And a pandemic does not assure that we should surrender hope and confidence in the future. If you have died with Christ in baptism, and if you have been raised with him, don’t ever find yourself stuck in the present. You have stripped off your old self and you are being clothed with new life in Christ. That new life rises with Christ today and assures eternal future.

Stories about meanings we understand

Sometimes learning how to have hope in the face of disaster is better understood by children. But sometimes you have to mature before you fully grasp the point. I once asked a friend who lives in India how to make a good curry sauce. He smiled and said to me, “You start with an old woman.” He meant that his elderly wife had spent years mastering the use of spices and herbs and she would know how to make it! A story about the Barlach statue I told at the beginning of the sermon supports that point.

Three young children lived in Berlin during the time when it was being bombed in World War II. Ernest Barlach had been a friend of this family and he had given them some of the sculptures that they now treasured. The parents warned that if they should have to go out, and the bombs would fall, the children should take the Barlachs and run. Many years later, I was staying overnight in a Lutheran Deaconess House in Eisenach, Germany with Herb Brokering, the well-known poet. One evening as we gathered in the reception area, I noticed a Barlach statue on the table and asked about it. An elderly deaconess then told her story. She had taken the statue and run—but only now in later years did she understand what that statue meant to Barlach and to her. In the face of any trouble or uncertainty, she looked into the face of the resurrected Jesus, as did Barlach’s Thomas, and said, “Jesus, are you really here? Will you not assure me of your love and protection in this uncertain time?” I think there are some present today who understand this.  Like the old deaconess in Eisenach, some of us know that often real understanding cannot be grasped without maturity. Sometimes it just takes an old woman to make a curry. And sometimes elderly Christians who have seen much in their lives, but have also seen Jesus, know how to cope in ways that children and teens and young adults may have not yet grasped.

A contemporary story from the BBC relates that same meaning for us. In the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic in Bergamo, Italy, a 72 year old Roman Catholic priest, Father Giuseppe Beradelli was seriously ill with the disease. Already 50 religious workers had died from the disease and the Church had made arrangements to get additional respirators for the priest. Father Beradelli, however, asked that his respirator be given to a younger man next to him. The attendants, moved by his decision, applauded, and shortly thereafter,  as young and the old man held hands, Father Beradelli died. He had no fear of death because he knew the meaning of life which lasts. He didn’t think of himself as a Christ figure, but he knew the meaning of giving oneself for another. He knew that in seeking the things that are above, there is no need to worry about letting things go here below.

My friends, Easter is a time for many things. When I look at the pictures friends and relatives place on Facebook, I see little chicks, rabbits, bakery and cute new dresses on little girls. Surely those are all signs of hope or, perhaps, just distractions to avoid thinking about the Corona virus. In one sense, even the Corona virus may be a distraction. Before it appeared, a little over a month ago, there were other worries and uncertainties. For the time being, concerns about job security, political harangues, marital troubles, relationships with friends, failures in school or personal disillusion could all be set aside.

Yet, whether our concerns are immediate or delayed, the Feast of the Resurrection reminds us that if we have been raised with Christ, we are to put to death the things that are earthly. We have been washed clean of such things in our baptisms and we are clothed with a new self, the white

robe of Christ’s righteousness. Today and every day we will seek, as Luther said, to be a Christ to our neighbor (“Freedom of the Christian Man”, 1520), responding to love of God at work in each of us.

Let this day then be one unlike all others. Let it be a day that assures us that nothing stands in the way of our future with God in Christ and that nothing stands in the way of our being a Christ to our neighbor.

Christ is risen, and we are risen with him.

Christ is risen! Response: He is risen indeed!

The Rev. David Zersen, D.Min, Ed.D., FRHistS

President Emeritus, Concordia University Texas

djzersen@gmail.com