"Love Triumphant"
A Sermon by Rev. Kit Wilke
Easter Sunday

March 31, 2002 At Crossroads & Woodruff Churches In Lakewood & Long Beach California

Scripture: (A) Acts 10:34-43 OR Jeremiah 31:1-6 *Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 Colossians 3:1-4 John 20:1-18 OR Matthew 28:1-10 Scripture: Matthew 28:1-10, Acts 10:34-43

Generations Together: "Dancing Love" The best dancers are the ones who don't care. The ones that aren't afraid. The ones who just celebrate the dance.

Sermon:

 I tremble, sometimes. I tremble when I have something to say and I am afraid to say it. ?When I see injustice that I am afraid to point out. I tremble, sometimes at how blind I get to my own mistakes and how my vision of the world is twisted and distorted by my own needs and desires. I tremble at how easy it is to live with my privileges as an American and my arrogance as one of the wealthiest two or three percent of the people on earth. I tremble at how unwilling I am to go out of my way to love. I tremble at the ease with which I have hurt people while believing I am doing the right thing. I tremble at how much I belong to lies. How much I belong to hopelessness. How much I belong to fear. How much I belong to death. But over and over again, one of you, or an ancient story, or a stranger on the street - or even, sometimes, a courageous enemy - will remind me that it is not death, but life and love that own me. It is not death that is final, but God's love. It is not a cold grave that finally defeats me, but a loving God who embraces me forever. I. Almost 4000 years ago God asked Abraham to imagine a new kind of immortality based in trust. Up to that point - and genetically, biologically, always - immortality is based on children. The survival of your genes, passed on in sons and daughters, in grand and great grand children down through the ages and back through time. It is part of life's great Darwinian struggle for survival. It is a struggle going back through time until the first creature - little more than a bundle of complex chemical compounds. Back to when that creature began surviving by duplicating a chemical match of itself. And eventually the complex wonder of DNA began surviving in the wrestling match with God. The wrestling match with the core of existence. Life struggled with Truth - Life struggled to survive in it's wrestling match with the All of everything: the Truth behind everything it experienced. And the guiding hand of Truth's loving embrace built more complex and wonderful life, generation after generation throughout hundreds of millions of years. For even though it felt like a wrestling match, it was an embrace of love. And Life - living things, in turn, came to understand existence more and more clearly, and fit more and more beautifully with the embrace of that unknown Truth with which life wrestled. That is who we were - and who we are - as biological beings. We wrestle with an unknown truth - knowing it better with every turn and twist - in order to survive and to pass on the only immortality biology will ever give us: our beautiful children. But within our families, as we passed on our genes, we began to think and understand. We began to develop more and more complex pictures of the universe around us. Though our pictures were always distorted and their perspective was always centered on ourselves. These pictures for survival were always painted with the hand of fear and their patterns repeated the terrors and fears of our ancestors. Now human groups competed with each other, and not only the group with the strongest genes survived, but the group with the clearest picture of the Truth. The clearest and most useful picture of the universe around them. Still, as we now traveled in groups competing with each other and developing ever more complex murals for reality in our stories, our culture and our minds, it was still children. It was still through our genes that we survived. II. But Father Abraham was asked to find another kind of immortality. Abraham was promised immortality in the form of children and grandchildren, biologically, but only if Abraham chose to trust the guiding of an unknown truth. Trust that Truth even at the cost of the only reasonable form of immortality he could understand. Trust that truth in ways that insist that you do foolish things and take profound risks. The kind of risks that allows an ethnically pure tribe to become an ethnically diverse nation. If Abraham was, in any way, going to live beyond the grave, he knew it was only through Sarah, his aged wife, having a child. When that seemed hopeless, he took Hagar, Sarah's servant as a lover and she brought forth Ishmael. But God says that it is not through Ishmael that Abraham would know the immortal promise of life. It would not be genes, but trust in God. Immortality, says God to Abraham comes through faith. Through trust in me, for I am the real Truth, not through genes. And out of that trust, when every imaginable hope for children for Abraham and Sarah is passed, the story tells us Isaac is born. The father of Israel is born when Abraham and Sarah are themselves already ancient. And through a birth based in faith - an immortality based on trust, not on genes and biology - a transformed community is born. What is transformed? Those who became part of the community of Faith became your sisters and brothers, not just those who were related to you biologically. Those who trusted the same tradition of which you were a part could become your sister and your brother. Your life could continue because the community and the culture continued. Your life continued in the life of the nation and the people bound together by a single faith. Abraham, in the founding story of Israel, says I will trust a God I cannot name, whose ways are beyond my knowing. I will trust this unknown Truth even if it means I have to give up my only possible hope of immortality through my children. Even if I have to give up my son, my only child. And here, the Bible tells us, the story of the mountain of Moriah unfolds, where Abraham is called again to trust beyond any reason and any hope. He is to take little Isaac and a knife and risk eternal nothingness for the sake of trusting the unknown. He is to risk biological damnation for the sake of survival as a nation of Faith. And so we lived in a new world. We no longer lived as families and tribes struggling with unknown reality, but we were wrestling with the truth as a nation. And the nation survived when they could understand what God the Truth desired, and the nation fell when they could not understand and live as God the Truth wanted them to live. And for hundreds of years those with a profound sensitivity to the Truth - whom the Bible calls prophets - tried to keep the nation in touch with the truth that would keep it alive. III. But 2000 years later, as the story of Jesus on the cross is being written down, by Matthew Mark, Luke and John, the nation itself is dying. Israel, as it existed, is being extinguished by Rome. Again and again the people have been conquered, but this is the last time their nation, Israel, would exist for 2000 more years. The temple is destroyed. Jerusalem is burned. All the symbols that gave the citizens life in the life of the nation, were being destroyed. Survival as a people apart, trusting only their own faith, and living as a nation was over. Yet faith, and the willingness to risk, is still the requisite for survival. And in the tragedy of the destruction of Israel as a nation, Christianity is born as a fully transnational faith. Jews, Romans, Greeks all have homelands. Christianity has none. So now what is born is a deeper faith: A faith that is not at all bound to biology. The brothers and sisters of early Christianity often had no biological connection of any kind. They were bound together in a new kind of life: one which is deathless in a new way; one which required a new kind of courage. ?And a deeper kind of faith. One must hope in what cannot be seen. One must trust in a vision of a world that will be - one day - but clearly is not today. Without the assurance of immortality through children, family or tribe or even nation, faith still remains the absolute assurance that the unknown reality with which you wrestle is love. Once we were allied with our offspring against death. Once we were allied with a nation against nothingness. Now our only ally is our old opponent: the very reality with which we wrestle. And our ally is the conviction that behind the pain of our experience, there is a hidden truth to reality which is love. Why? Only this day: only Easter. Only the courage of a few women and men to believe that for Jesus who ate and drank with them, the end was not death when they ate and drank together again. That in Jesus - after his death - they discovered the real truth: that the very love of God knew suffering just like our own. God's love is poured out in Jesus. And they learned one more thing besides: that when you trust God's love the universe really is transformed. Our struggle with the Truth, is now an embrace of love. It is no longer deadly struggle. It is no longer wrestling. It is, for certain, the essence of love. We are still biological beings who wrestle for life with the universe around us. But we see that universe in a completely new way. It is not the cruel brutal deadly-ness of it that comes into our focus, but the truth hidden behind it. Our eyes focus on something deeper. They focus behind the shadows of death. They glimpse for a moment a more real truth. We talk over and over again about empty tombs. We talk about visions of the living Christ. We talk about how Christ is present where bread is broken and wine is shared. Where the songs are sung and the stories are told. Conclusion But most of all, we have erased the fear of death. And in erasing that fear, we have opened ourselves to the courageous honesty that, alone, can learn the subtle moves of our loving contender. ?The honesty that, alone, can bring our vision of life, our picture, into focus with what actually is. Out of deeper trust comes deeper truth. Out of more fearless faith comes a clearer picture of God. But now we face an even deeper call. We are called to see past the dogmas of our faith. Just as Abraham had to let go of every rational support to the idea of biological survival, so now, we are challenged to trust that the Truth behind all existence is love, when we no longer have any evidence to support that claim. We are called to believe so deeply in the love shown in the resurrection that we can believe it without the support of any dogma. ?Without any special knowledge or special revelation. We need trust it enough to be able to love across the boundaries of the creeds of our faith. We are called to believe in the love of Easter so deeply that we are no longer bound to call sister or brother only those who believe in Easter. We can dance the dance of love even with people of other faith or of no dogmatic faith. All we have to believe together is that there is one truth behind all our diverse visions and that there is enough love and joy together to give us the courage to seek that Truth. How hard is this? Look at Israel today. Until someone has the courage to believe that a State could exist that could embrace Muslim, Jew and Christian, there will be no peace there. But who would dare give up what would have to be given up to let peace happen in a single, multi-faith state where Jew, Christian and Muslim life in true equality? Still, until that can happen, there will be no peace. It is only by this next step in faith. Faith beyond all the separate dogmas, that peace can come. But today we celebrate the fact that death and death's fear no longer rule us or limit our experience of immortality. So, maybe, just maybe, that next step in peace is possible. Isn't anything possible with God?