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 Luke 24:1-12
I remember the conversation very well. About twenty years ago I was having lunch with a young woman of this congregation who was still reeling from the consequences of her strong rebellion against parents who were very strict and dogmatic in their religious upbringing. It was a couple of weeks before Easter, and we started talking about which holiday we liked better, Christmas or Easter. I put in my vote for Christmas.
Then very quietly but effectively she said, "No, Easter is the most important day of the year for me." Then she went about how the Easter experience had renewed her life.
That conversation stayed with me over the years, and today I agree with her. As wondrous, warm, sentimental, rich and embracing as Christmas is, Easter is the day which makes the difference. On Easter we remember a time when a spiritual power was released to the world. Something happened within the small band of Jesus' followers. They caught fire with a contagious faith that, like a great conflagration, spread throughout the Mediterranean and eventually around the world.
Let's look at the story as told in the scripture. On a Friday at noon -- a day we now call Good Friday -- Jesus was crucified on a cross. Three days later, on Sunday morning, at dawn, several women went to the tomb to pay their respects and to bring burial spices. When they got there they discovered the stone covering the tomb had been rolled away, the linens had been folded, and the tomb was empty. An angel appeared to them and said, "He is risen! He is not here."
They were frightened, but they also realized that something extraordinary had happened. So they ran to tell the disciples who, although doubtful, followed them back to the tomb.
I resonate to the words that the scripture uses to describe Peter's reaction. He stuck his head in the tomb, and he was amazed at what he saw. Today and throughout the years, I also am amazed. On that first Easter a spiritual power, a spiritual energy, was released into the world. It happened on a day like today. Then and today, hope is realized. Hope becomes real on Easter Sunday.
A good synonym for Easter is hope -- and if God were to have a second name, would it not be hope? In the thirteenth chapter of Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, he puts hope into perspective. He starts by writing about the power of love and the place of love and the attributes of love -- it is kind and patient and gentle and humble and forgiving. At the end of the chapter, he lists the three transcendent forces of life -- faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these, he tells us, is love. No one will argue with that. We cannot live without love. Without love a baby will not survive. Without love, an older person, though they may be alive, inside is dead.
But what is second greatest after love? When I ask people that question, usually they name faith. But I disagree. Hope, I think, comes next. You can get along without faith. People do it all the time. They don't do very well, but they can do it. But you don't last very long without hope. Hope is always the last thing to go.
Think of any elderly person you have known who was close to death, yet staying alive because of hope. Then, when hope was gone, the person died.
Recently I came across quotations on hope by two writers who most of us are not aware once knew each other.
The first quotation was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. As you know, she was famous in the 1800s for her book Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was instrumental in ending slavery in America. She was the wife of a Congregational minister in Brunswick, Maine. They lived near Bowdoin College and rented rooms to students. One year they rented a room to a young student named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the other writer that I want to quote. I like to imagine that in the long nights of the Maine winter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a lady filled with hope, and the young student Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet-to-be, had long conversations by the fire. Certainly, one of those conversations had to be about hope -- her hope for the world and the young student's hope for his life and his future.
This is a quotation from Harriet Beecher Stowe:
When you get in a tight place and every-thing goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn.
Longfellow, in a few picturesque words, as a poet often does, remembering the many times as a boy he watched the tides from the front yard of his childhood home, said:
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
Friday, the day of the Crucifixion, the worst day in human history, was the turn of the tide. Two days later, the Resurrection released to the entire world a new life, a new charge, a new spirit, a new strength. Once, with considerable excitement, my friend Dr. Bernie Siegel, the physician and author, told me, "Arthur, I have just heard the most wonderful statement from an African-American preacher I know. He said, 'After Friday comes Sunday.' " And there's a lot to that. After Friday comes Sunday.
When we need hope, God has a way of raising up people in our midst to bring it to us. There is a young soul with the insight of an old soul, who has brought hope to millions of people. It's a little boy named Mattie Stepanek. Mattie wrote his first poem when he was three years old, and most of them before he was twelve. There was a shadow over that little boy's life and in his home. He had a rare form of muscular dystrophy which had taken the life of three of his siblings. Several of his books of poetry have been published. When you hear me read two of his poems, you'll know that this little soul is an old soul.
In his book Hope Through Heartsongs, he describes a heartsong as something that comes from deep within us. He dedicated the book like this: "This book is dedicated to all people struggling to find hope, especially children of our world and their families."
Life: That's Amazing!
When it is nighttime,
I get my nebulizer and all my medicines,
I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth,
I put on my pajamas and heart monitor,
And untangle my oxygen-mustache
So I get my special breathing wind.
When I am in my bed,
My mommy will read me a book,
And say my prayers with me.
She will kiss me and hug me and tuck me in,
And then turn on my Mommy-Songs tape.
When I close my eyes,
I go to sleep and dream and dream,
Or I go to sleep and do not dream.
When it is morning,
I wake up.
I am alive, and
I am breathing, and
I am a real boy.
That's amazing!
A little boy with everything against him can teach us how to find hope in the direst circumstances. In his life, there is hope.
Then he has a prayer that he calls The Bravery Prayer.
Dear God,
Help us to always be able
To use the feelings of
Hope and fear, together,
In one great force?
Bravery.
Bravery is extremely
Necessary in life.
If we are able
To have bravery,
We will be able
To achieve
Many goals in life.
Amen.
God raises up people who give us hope. A word of caution: There are people who are hope-dashers. We must be careful to whom we express our hopes. There may be a hope-dasher listening. These are the pessimists. I like what I recently read about pessimists: "No pessimist has enough information to be a pessimist."
Pessimists don't take into account the wondrous influence of God's response to us when we are hopeful. A quotation that has become more and more important to me, from one of my favorite spiritual writers, Evelyn Underhill, goes like this:
The more you go on with the spiritual life, the more you realize the power of spirit over circumstance.
We think we run the universe, we think we are the ones in charge, and act as if we were. We're in charge of the smallest portion, and the Spirit is in charge of the rest. Think of the times in your life when things have happened and you had nothing to do with it. The Spirit moved, and did something on your behalf.
There have been two major mystical experiences in my life. I didn't have anything to do with them! I didn't know they were going to happen, I couldn't have commanded them to happen, I couldn't have prayed them up. How many times over the years when I needed a particular kind of human being has that person appeared? Or when I have needed an idea I'll turn the radio on and an idea will come from something I hear? And the people who have given me the right book at the right time? I have no control over this. The Spirit does these things for us.
Think of the coincidences in your life -- some of them wild and bizarre. You can't understand. "How in the world could that happen?" I've got a theory, that around us, in the ether, is a spiritual grid. And the Spirit, for whatever reason, makes connections for us -- some we can understand, some we will never understand until the next life. But the Spirit is in charge -- the power of the Spirit over circumstances.
I will finish with a story I tell at least once a year. If I'm going to be remembered for anything, it will be for this story. Whenever I travel, people will come up to me and say, "Arthur, oh yes, I know who you are. The sunset story?," which really is an Easter story.
It happened in July 1983. At that time I had a cottage on a little Maine island. That summer my younger son was working as a launch operator for the Portland Yacht Club. His job was to bring people back and forth between their boat moorings and the dock.
This particular day he was working the late shift, and I would go in his boat to pick him up at nine o'clock. At eight-thirty I stepped out of the back door of the cottage and immediately was in the resence of the most magnificent sunset I had ever seen. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The ball of the sun had gone over the White Mountains eighty miles to the west and rising above the mountains was the after-glow. It was gold. Not yellow -- gold. There wasn't a breeze that night, and Casco Bay, mirror still, reflected the sky. I couldn't wait to get into that golden sea.
I ran down the eighty-two steps to the beach, rowed out to the boat, started the engine and, deciding to enjoy every second of the trip across the bay through the golden sea, very gently pushed the throttle ahead and began to creep along. But the gold was always ahead of me. I went a little bit faster, but I could not catch it. Finally I pushed the throttle to its full extent -- thirty-five miles an hour, zipping across that bay -- but no matter how fast I went it was always just ahead of me. That was unsettling! Then I did something which I almost wish I hadn't -- I looked back. The sky was black. I looked forward -- gold. Back and forth -- black, gold, black, gold.
I picked up my son, got back to the cottage, and with a degree of nervousness was telling my wife about my experience. "Arthur," she said, "I stood on the bank and watched you cross the bay. The gold was all around you, and you didn't even know it."
We only see this much in front of us. We don't see the big picture. We don't see what is really around us. And in God's great wisdom the shades are always pulled down on the past.
No matter what's going on, this is the golden moment. This moment is all we have and it is enough. We are always in the gold, and everything we need for our lives, every resource we need to live a joyful and fulfilling life, is always with us.
Easter is a golden moment. Easter com-memorates a moment when something was released into the universe, into the minds and hearts of all people who would receive it. A tremendous spiritual energy explodes into the world to all people. Rejoice, give thanks, be filled with joy -- you are in the gold. Let us pray.
For the blessings of this day, for the promise of Easter and the gift to us, we say thank you. Let us live and love. AMEN |
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