Epiphany 6C I Corinthians 15:12-26    February 15, 2004

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, "..how can you let people say that there is no such thing as a resurrection? If there’s no resurrection, there’s no living Christ. "

As we wind down this 2004 Epiphany Season, the Epistle Reading anticipates the Easter Message,

the most important and astonishing of God’s manifestations to the world.

An unknown soldier, who died in the First World War left this poem, expresses the Christian Hope which the Easter Message gives.

It is to such cries and longings of the human heart, somehow impressed and indelibly stamped with the sense that this life is not all that there is, that the Easter Message gives assurance that we are indeed ‘two-world’ beings. Yet many of us, so busy trying to succeed in this consumer-oriented,
functional and materialistic age, live as ‘one-world’ beings. At some level we may accept there is another World, but its an irrevalent world, beyond our day to day concerns.

If we were raised as Chritstians, it is likely that we will at least accept Christ as a great man of history,
an inspiration, perhaps, whose teachings may, from time to time, have something to contribute to the achievement of our agendas. Like Mahatma Gandi, who had a picture of Christ on his wall,
or Mohammad, who told his followers that Christ was a great prophet, Jesus may be one of our heros. St.Paul, however, says this is not enough! "If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot."

The Gospel doesn’t end with the earthly life of Jesus as storys of heros often do. It begins, for Paul with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. This Paschal Mystery is what validates the meaning and hope of our faith, without which, according to Paul, "everything else about Jesus would be a lie--only "smoke and mirrors."

The resurrection is not just the hope it gives in a life beyond this life, not just some "pie in the sky, in the sweet bye and bye," as important as that may be, but it is the relevance and power that it gives
to our present situation that makes the resurrection so significant to us all.

The resurrection means Christ is Alive Among Us! Now!--a fact that makes Christian Spirituality unique. The Jews revere Moses--the great Law Giver, and Elijah, the greatest of the Prophets;
Muslims revere Muhammad--the founder of Islam. To their orthodox followers these heros never died, but went straight to heaven. However, these heros are not currently living with their followers.

We, on the other hand, are called to follow and know Christ, not as some past hero, but as a promised presence: Present in the gathered community. Present when two or three are gathered together, Present in the breaking of the bread, Present in the person to whom we show acts of compassion and mercy. Christ is a living companion who will walk with us under all situations and circumstances, one who shows us the way now, at the end, and beyond.

Jesus prays in the 17th Chapter of John, "The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind--Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, So they might be one heart and mind with us,"
today, not just after we die.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that my Christian FaithTradition was not much more than a convenience to inspire me when I felt I needed it. In those days it made more sense to me, to sleep late on Sunday Mornings, to work in the yard or on some hobby that held greater interest for me than what I expected to hear or experience in Church. My functional credo was the Invictus : to be "...the master of my fate... captain of my soul." Ours was the good life, the successful life, or, at least on the road to one. Any flaws could be ironed out with hard work and staying focused, in the assurance that "God helps those who help themselves." Then came my 9/11!

Richard Rohr says that "Grace best gets at us when our guard is down." (Radical Grace, p.61). I was certainly not expecting to be blindsided by the illness and subsequent death of our 6 year old son Carl, and to suddenly find myself blind, helpless, lost, thrashing through an unfamiliar wilderness.

Within a week of hearing the diagnosis of his blood disease, we were listening to an Episcopal Priest named Sam Shoemaker, through whom we were to begin a relationship with the Living Christ and the workings of His Holy Spirit.

These words of Dag Hammerskjold, former secretary general of the United Nations, describing his transformation, resonate with my own experience: "I don’t know who--or what--put the question; I don’t know when it was put; I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer ‘yes’ to Someone--or Something--and from that hour I was certain that existance is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back’ and ‘ to take no thought for the morrow.’"

The 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard calls this "A leap of faith." The mystics call this entry into the Pashal Mystery: the dying to the self and the rising into a new life in Christ.

The truth is the only credit I can take for entering that process, was to simply grab a life-line and hang on. Over the following days and months, I experienced the paradoxical truth found in today’s Gospel reading: "You’re blessed when you’ve lost it all. God’s kingdom is there for the finding.
You’re blessed when you’re ravenously hungry. Then you’re ready for the Messianic meal. You’re
blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning." Luke 6:20s-21


The Transformation begins when you can or have to admit to yourself, that you are powerless, that you are vulnerable, dependent, lost, against a stone wall, what Alcoholoic Anonymous says must be the first step on the road to recovery. And we knew such powerlessness! The pain of Carls’ illness and death was/is unimaginable. How we survived it is still a mystery. How our marriage survived is still amazing, except for the power of Grace and the Community of Love with which He surrounded us.

"If there is no resurrection, there’s no living Christ" Paul says; if there is no Living Christ, there is no living Carl and no relationship with either of them. But in our souls we knew those relationships endured! And the joy and peace of that knowledge passed all understanding.

Christianity is first and foremost about Relationships--a love relationship with God, with others and with ourselves. We are to love God! But God, without Jesus to give him a face, a personality and a voice, is a mystery that can easily become a projection of our own image. It has been said that,
"God created man in his own image, and then man returned the favor." Jesus keeps our focus, challenges our prejudices and unmasks our idols.

At best our religion, with its rules and regulations, enables and sanctifys our relationships with Christ and with each other. At worst our religion, defends the purity of its rules and regulations at the expense of undermining our relationships with Christ and one another. Thats why schism, the rupture of relationships, is a worse sin than heresy, the dividing of the community over perceived religous orthodoxy.

Exasperated when one of his students kept referring to the "Christian Religion," the great theologian Karl Barth said to him, "Never connect Christianity and religion. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has absolutely nothing to do with religion."

Religion is man made. The latin word, ‘re-ligio’ comes from the same root as ligament--to bind.
Religion means the human effort to bind us back to God. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all gift--
not a human creation in any sense of the word. It is the movement from God to us in Jesus Christ.
The Gospel is interested in one thing alone: bringing us into an intimate relationship with God in Jesus Christ to become a new creation.

Karl Barth also says "the greatest obstacle to the Kingdom of God on earth is the church; but," he goes on to say, "the church is also the place where the redemptive love of God is most visibly manifest."

The Church, as flawed as it is, will on its better days be a model of that redemptive, forgiving love,
a place where intimacy with the Living Christ will be encouraged and demonstrated.

"God, it seems, cannot really be known, but only related to...we know God by loving God, by trusting God, by placing our hope in God. God allows us to know him only by loving him. God, in that sense, cannot be ‘thought,’" (Rohr Job and the Mystery of Suffering. p140 f.) The church, in essence, is the body of followers who are on a journey to know the living Christ by loving Him!

My own journey in the Church since that intense experience so many years ago has had many twists
and turns like any other relationship, but, beneath it all has developed a deep seated confidence of what G. K. Chesterton calls "The Mystical Minimum," "to be always secure and at rest, and foundationally grateful." The Mystical Minimum means that Everything that is given, that you are breathing today, is pure gift. None of us has earned it, none of us have a right to it. All we can do is say thank you! And let our lives be grounded in gratitude.

Let us pray: