Sermon: April 8, 2007
April 8, 2007
OFFERING MEDITATION:(9 a.m. – Frank Bender) Sometimes in our daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We fail to say hello many times, please, thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment or just do something nice for no reason. I want to share with you a story about Charles Plumb, who I had the opportunity to meet in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Plumb was a US Naval Academy graduate who flew fighter jets during the Vietnam War. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. He ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years as a prisoner of war. He survived that ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience. One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant many years later, a man at a table came up to him, and said, “You’re Plumb. You flew fighter jets in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and you were shot down.” Plumb said, “How in the world did you know that?” He said, “I’m the one that packed your parachute.” Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude, and grabbed his hand. He said, “I guess it worked.” Plumb said, “Yes, I guess it did, and if your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.” That night, Plumb couldn’t sleep thinking about the man. He kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform at 18 or 19 years of age. He wondered how many times he might have seen him and not even said good morning, how ya doin’, because you see, he was a fighter pilot and the man was just a sailor. Plumb thought of the many hours that sailor had spent in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silk of each parachute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t even know. Plumb points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down that day. He needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute and his spiritual parachute, and he called on all of these supports before he reached safety. As you go through your week, your month and the year, please know that many people, including Christ, have packed your parachute and enabled you to be where you are today. As we prepare for this offering, recognize that you are now charged with the task of packing someone else’s parachute. Please know that your assistance can make all the difference.
(11 a.m. – Dr. F. Wayne Bryant) A couple of summers ago, when we had the General Assembly of the Christian Church here in Portland, we had lots of visitors on that Sunday. Among the visitors was a gentleman who came in off the street who looked as though he might be homeless and perhaps hungry. One of our other guests from the Assembly, seeing this man from the streets, took a $20 bill out of his billfold and gave it to him. Later on, it was my job that day to talk about the offering and rather than deal with the old slogan, “Give until it hurts,” I talked about giving until it feels good. When the deacons passed the offering trays, the man that was homeless put the $20 bill in the plate. Now, I’m not sure how our guest who had given the $20 bill felt about that, but hopefully both of them felt glad that day that they could participate in that kind of way. It is that sort of gladness in giving that brings us to the Lord’s table as we share in our offering time. As the deacons wait upon us, may we share out of our abundance.
PRAYER OF DEDICATION:
(9 a.m. – Debbie Domby-Hood) Please pray with me. Most Gracious and Eternal God, we rejoice in this day of resurrection and give thanks to you and to your Son, Jesus, for the gift of life eternal. On this most celebrated day, a day that symbolizes new life and new beginnings, may today’s offering be a symbol of renewal. May it be used to lay the path for us to follow into renewed faith and community. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Amen.
(11 a.m. – Jim Edwards) God, we’re scared of lots of things and dying ranks right up there toward the top of the list, so we give you praise and thanks for the Easter message of the risen Christ. Into your hands he committed his spirit and into our hands he committed his mission here on earth. So bless these Easter offerings, we pray, that thy kingdom may come here on earth as it is in heaven, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
MORNING PRAYER:
(9 a.m. & 11 a.m. – Sean Harry) Let us bow to God in prayer. Holy God, we bow before you in the silence of this moment, in the holiness of this sanctuary to lift our joys and concerns to you in prayer. All around us in this season of spring, your power and majesty are making themselves known. Leaves have returned to the trees. Flowers have blooms breaking forth from their wintery slumber. These days are growing longer as the sun shines brighter to call us out of winter’s darkness. God of creation, we celebrate your glory today. Lord, as the sun shines on the earth, so does your light eliminate the dark places in our own lives. Realizing that we are human and imperfect, we confess our shortcomings to you. We admit that we are burdened with sorrow and pain, with shame and fear, with false obligation and selfish pride. In this moment, God, as we confess our sins to you in silence, we seek your forgiveness and healing and wholeness. On this Easter morning, Lord, when we celebrate your power, your redemption through your resurrected Son, Jesus Christ, may we also discover a joyous and courageous faith, enabling us to set these burdens down and to seek the forgiveness that you offer. God, we lift to you those who have taken on the mantle of leadership. These are difficult times and the path of righteousness is not always clear. In times such as these, we pray that our leaders would turn to you, seeking guidance and clarity to know your will and to gain the strength to carry that out. We lift up the leaders of this church, O Lord, and of our denomination. We pray for all Christian leaders everywhere. We hold in our thoughts those who guide our city, our state, and our nation. We pray for the leaders of all governments throughout the world that your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And finally, God, we thank you today for sending your son, Jesus, whose life and death and resurrection we celebrate today. Because Christ yet lives, we have gained access to the fullness of your love, your love, which is the most powerful force in all creation. It is stronger than our fears, more consuming than all of the evils which plague us. God, through Jesus’ resurrection, your witness shines forth, and so we thank you for that gift of salvation that comes to us through Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
THE SCRIPTURE: Matthew 28:1-8
THE SERMON: “Gladness In The Morning” (Dr. Bryant)
It’s really not hard to image the feelings of those who discovered the empty tomb on that first Easter morning. Astonished, certainly surprise, perhaps unbelieving at first. We would have been just as astonished and skeptical. Surprised by the unexpected and the unexplained. Their disbelief turned into amazement and their deep sorrow into tremendous joy. On Saturday, they would have spoken of Jesus in the past tense, but on Sunday morning, they could speak of him in the present tense. Out of the ashes of their grief was born a new beginning.
We know the story well. It had been three days since Jesus had been crucified and buried in a rock tomb. Two women went to the grave early on Sunday morning to anoint his body with spices, something that had been prevented them because they could not do that on the Sabbath, so they went on Sunday. When they arrived, they discovered the body was not there and an angel told them, “He is not here, he is risen.” Matthew reports that as they went on their way to tell the other disciples that they left garden in great joy. Mark’s Gospel does not go that far. He says that the women were frightened by the empty tomb, and though they were told to go and tell their friends what had happened, Mark says they told no one anything. In fact, there is a double negative in the Greek. It says, “They told nobody nothing.” They said nothing to nobody. Not good grammar, but it emphasizes what they were told to do.
The two stories are not quite in agreement. I tend to believe Mark. Mark’s Gospel was written before Matthew. Take my word for it. Biblical scholars tell us that Mark was the first Gospel written, Matthew was written afterwards, sometime later, and that Matthew follows Mark. Mark provides the outline and Matthew fills in the gaps and I suspect that Mark describes the event with greater accuracy than does Matthew. By the time Matthew was written, the story had taken on a different tone; it had begun to enlarge itself. Now the women in Matthew’s Gospel left the tomb in great joy. Mark’s description of the frightened women is simply more likely. The women were not alone in their hesitancy to believe. When Mary Magdalene got her nerve up finally to tell the story to the others, they didn’t believe her and when Jesus appeared to two of his disciples, they did not believe it. And when he eventually showed himself alive even to the 11, those disciples minus Judas, who had been with him through his ministry, some doubted, Mark says. It was simply too good to be true, and we can understand that.
Easter is that kind of experience. Easter always, really Easter, the kind of resurrection experience that we are talking about here, always follows darkness and pain. It only comes to those who know grief and despair firsthand. What the Roman Catholic theologian Matthew Fox calls the Via Negativa and the Psalmist refers to as the Valley of Shadows. But when it happens, the lost child is found, the cancer is removed, employment is finally gained, it dawns like sunlight breaking over mountain tops, unbelievable, awesome, breathtaking and beautiful. Like gladness in the morning.
We have just re-enacted Good Friday. Bridget has unveiled the cross from the black cloth that had been placed over it on that day. The cross was evidence of evil strength, but the resurrection proof of God’s power. The resurrection affirms that good is a more powerful force than evil. It does not seem so often when we are buffeted about by life’s cruelties, when life is so seemingly unfair to us or to our loved ones. Most of us are not so naïve as to not expect some disappointment along the way, but sometimes it feels like it has just been too much.
There is a wonderful monologue by Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willie says, “Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken. I’m always in a race with the junkyard. I just finish paying for my car and it’s on its last leg. The refrigerator consumes belts like a damned maniac. They time those things. They time them so that when you’ve finally paid for them, they’re all used up.” We know how that feels. Most of us, perhaps all of us, have felt like that. No one is disappointment- and pain-free, and the resurrection is important because it testifies of restoration and renewal. In other words, we need the resurrection. We need the resurrection that comes as good news when we are buffeted about by the ill winds of fate and misfortune, because the resurrection is not nearly a historical fact. If it were, then it would not be nearly so important as we believe it to be. The resurrection is even more a spiritual miracle. And the glad news of Easter is promised in the words of Isaiah that the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of God’s people God will take away from all the earth, which is to say that the brokeness we experience need not be the end of life’s promise, but maybe the birth of new life; out of the ashes of our pain is born a new beginning.
Frederick Buechner says that we think of eternal life, if we think of it at all, as what appears when life ends. We would do better, he says, to think of it as what happens when life begins. In other words, we are born into eternal life. It has already begun. Resurrection and springtime are part of God’s creative order. That’s the way it ought to be. That is the way God intended it to be. Evidence of new life continually springing forth out of the old. The resurrection of Jesus testifies in a visible and very tangible way that we need not give in to the winds of autumn and dark of winter because springtime and harvest follow. Life does not end with a broken marriage or a lost job or a shattered dream, because out of the brokeness and disappointment, God can bring forth new life and a new beginning, which we appropriate by our faith, and the essence of faith is a willingness to embrace what has not yet happened and consequently is beyond proof. Faith urges us to believe what we have not yet experienced, to accept what is beyond our understanding, to give thanks and rejoice for that which is still to come. We pray every Sunday morning, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, it is still in the future, it has not yet occurred. It is something to which we look as a promise. That is, Easter is not finally about a historical event, something in the past. It is a promise of what is yet to be, after the dark night of the soul when new life will appear and new beginnings will occur. It is the promise of rain after a drought, sunshine after the night, joy and memories where there has been only grief. Easter is God’s word of promise to us that while sometimes it is hard to bear, there will be gladness in the morning. So reach out in the early morning mist as the day’s sun breaks the calmness of night and rise to a new day, a new awareness of being. May we pray?
Loving God, we thank you for Easter’s promise of life to be, a promise yet unrealized. Help that we might keep our hope undimmed even in the darkness, trusting that there will be gladness in the morning. Amen.
INVITATION TO COMMITMENT:
(9 a.m. & 11 a.m. – Dr. Bryant) As we stand to sing our Hymn of Commitment, may it be a time of renewal of our faith whoever and wherever we may be. If there are those present who might wish to join with this community of faith, I invite you to come and stand with me. Shall we be standing as sing Christ The Lord Has Risen Today (9 a.m., #216); Christ Is Risen! Shout Hosanna (11 a.m., #222)
COMMUNION MEDITATION:
(9 a.m. & 11 a.m. – Dr. Bryant) It was early in the morning when we awakened to a child’s cry. She was running a high fever. We took her to the doctor about mid-morning. The doctor, as her fever was still rising, sent her to the hospital. By evening time, her temperature had risen to 106° and she had slipped into a coma. A spinal tap disclosed spinal meningitis. Her body as she lay there that night was rigid, bowed backwards like a bow. Fortunately, she was unconscious. I spent the night watching beside her bed in fear, wondering what the future might hold, remembering my older brother who had died of that same disease and my mother’s grief. When the morning came, and with the dawn of the new day, her fever broke at last. She began to relax, came out of the coma, and in a matter of days was on her way to recovery. The joy of that morning is hard to describe. Many of us have had that experience of waiting through the night in that kind of fear and darkness, and if we have and when the morning makes it all different, we know something of the feelings of those early disciples on Easter day. It was the gladness of the joyous morning. But they had to get through Good Friday first. They had to move beyond the horror of that nighttime of Friday night and Saturday night waiting for Easter to come.
PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING:
(11 a.m. – Bill Lang) Shall we pray? Welcoming God, on this resurrection Sunday, we give you thanks for the table Jesus sets in our midst. As we face crisis and tragedy, as well as celebration and success, as we partake of the bread and the cup, give us the courage to take in the essence of Jesus, who answers hate with love and crisis with resolve to face death and yet choose life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, we pray. The gifts of God for the people of God. Amen.
