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Sunday, April 7, 2013

Easter II - Suzanne Colburn

“Low Sunday” 

Alleluia, Christ is Risen….The Lord is Risen, Indeed.

Good Morning and welcome to anyone who may be visiting Christ Church today, and yes, it’s still Easter; the second Sunday in Easter.

Having just walked through Holy Week and celebrated a glorious Easter morning with an Easter Egg hunt, and a congregation of over 600 souls in both services, we find ourselves today on the “flip side of faith,” so to speak.

The headiness, the giddiness, the sensual power of sight and sound, trumpets and heavenly hosts of choirs, are moving off to stage left and we find ourselves on what has been called “Low Sunday.”

Low spirits? Low attendance? Low church? I have no idea what it really means other than it’s a stark contrast to last Sunday, the Day of Resurrection.

Perhaps “Low Sunday” means back down to reality after the high of Easter. If this is the case, then our faith journey will fall prey to the highs and lows of the emotional responses we tend to have to various movements of the Spirit within us.

St. Ignatius called these movements Consolation and Desolation[1].

Consolation when we are feeling high; when all is right with the world and we feel and know God’s wonderful presence and grace.

Equally valid in the life of the Spirit, though, is Desolation, when we don’t feel anything; and worse, when we’re convince IT was all a lie, or a fiction. God does not really exist, didn’t really rise, did God? I can’t feel it.

Or, if we are Thomas, we’d say. “I can’t see Jesus or touch Jesus; “it can’t be true.

To borrow from a Methodist colleague of mine, The Rev. Ed Deyton, “Seeing is not believing.”[2]

Seeing is not believing, and we might push things even further and say “Feeling is not believing either,” and both would be perfectly correct according to Jesus’ last comment to Thomas:
“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.” (John: 20:29)
But why bother to bring all of this stuff up on the second Sunday of Easter?

We bother because Jesus bothered to pave the way for a spiritual understanding of belief and faith that is not dependent upon religious experiences of the five senses.

Of course there is nothing wrong with those wonderfully consoling experiences when they come, and St. Ignatius and Jesus would both acknowledge the joy and hope they bring.

More sobering however, on this second Sunday of the Day of Resurrection, this “low Sunday” is the plain fact that we are called to believe whether we are in consolation or in desolation. What we see, what we hear, what we touch; all these are part of being a human being, but they are not necessary for being a spiritual being; a person of belief.

Let’s unpack this a little further and ask a more direct question. “How do we know we have faith?”

If I keep coming to church, does that mean I have faith? Does it mean I believe? Conversely, if I don’t go to church, like so many other folks, does it really mean that I don’t believe?

Here are some possible ways to answer these nagging questions:

The first one is: What does my behavior tell the world about my faith or my belief or my lack of it?

Do I treat people equally and justly? Am I compassionate to those less fortunate than me? Do I talk to others about how much my faith means to me, even in the times I doubt? Am I a forgiving person, a patient person, an open person?

A second way of assessing our faith is to think back on those times of trouble or trial.

Did we react any differently than a non-believer would? What do we do? How do we get through? Do we use our relationship with God through prayer, or do we assume God doesn’t care because we do not feel God close? Do we put more faith in what we feel than what we believe?

Even when we doubt like crazy, can we still pray like the man whose son Jesus cured, “I believe, help Thou my unbelief?” The reason Jesus was so impressed with this man’s faith was because the man recognized he didn’t know everything and still stayed in relationship with Jesus.

And this is perhaps the main point: belief, faith, whatever we want to call it, is staying relationship even when we don’t see, or don’t hear, or don’t feel. We keep talking to God because, whether we know it or not at the time, God has never gone anywhere. That’s the story of the Resurrection.

Here’s a little personal story about seeing and believing.

This past summer two of my best friends and I took a road trip to Lubec, Maine. Dorothy, who just turned 80 said that she always wanted to see the most Eastern point in Maine where the sun first hits the United States when it comes up in the morning.

Gayle and I were certainly up for this, so off we drove for four hours down east to Lubec.

Lubec, Maine feels like the end of the earth. It’s a pretty poor fishing village just this side of the border with Canada. The only rooms we could find were above a tavern that was hosting a rather raucous wedding party.

It was raining and damp and we bunked in- setting the alarm for 4am. We were told by the locals to get up at 4am and drive to South Lubec to Quoddy Point Lighthouse for the best viewing of sunrise.

4am came and it was pitch dark- of course. We packed up at made it to Quoddy Light where we, and a couple of other tourists, waited and waited and waited.

As it began to get just a tiny bit light, all we could see was pea soup fog, which, with hindsight explained to very loud fog horn we heard all night.

No clearing. No wind to blow away the fog. And no sunrise. But, as I stood there taking pictures of Dorothy and Gayle standing by the longitude and latitude sign that read “You are here, where the sun first hits the United States of America,” to prove to everyone that we really did get there, I thought to myself, well darned if this is just like the Resurrection.

You can’t see it, you can’t feel it, but with every pore of your body you know that that sun/son is rising.

I kept checking myself. Did I really believe the sun was coming up even though there was no indication of it? Yes I did. Well why couldn’t we do the same thing with the Resurrection of Jesus? Why couldn’t we assert, on faith, exactly the same way, not needing proof? What would happen if we just believed?

Both Lynn and I have talked about the monks at the monastery in Cambridge, the brothers of SSJE, of which Bishop Shaw is a member and today I want to share with you Brother Curtis’ “word” on Resurrection:
“Wherever we bury Jesus, he comes back to life. We can bury him in the Bible or in stained glass windows. We can bury him in creeds and formulas and the heritage of our own tradition. We can bury him in movies and plays and music. We can bury him in our past. We can even bury him in bread and wine. And each time from each place he rises from the dead. He sheds the words and images and walks right out into the world.”[3]

We can bury Jesus in our faith and in our doubt, too.

In the truth of Resurrection Reality, it doesn’t matter what we construct and how we know- Jesus will never be captured, contained, bound by any human construct.

Jesus’ resurrection takes our breath away simply because it always takes us by surprise and the Risen Christ is never what or how or Who we expect him to be.

Since this really is the case, how about we all just relax this Easter Season and let God be God? How startlingly wonderful this Mystery is and how blessed we are to be in Its Grasp today.

Amen
__________

[1] George E. Ganss. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A Translation and Commentary. 1992


[2] Grove Street sign in Auburndale, Ma. at the UCC-Methodist Church. Rev. Deyton was the Interim.


[3] Br. Curtis Almquist Resurrection- Brother Give Us a Word. Sat. April 14, 2012. friends@ssje.org