It is not unusual to wonder these days if anything good will ever come out of Afghanistan. Surprising to many is the fact that Afghanistan has a very rich cultural history including being the birthplace of the Persian miniature style of painting, Algebra, and the poet Jalal a din Rumi, born in Afghanistan at the beginning of the 13th Century. He is the founding teacher of a mystic form of Islam called Sufism. He writes with a surprisingly contemporary voice when he says:
All day I think
about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I am sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
Rainer Maria Rilke, another poet (this time German and from the early 20th Century), advised a correspondent to “be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.” Then gradually, Rilke suggests, “you will live into the answers.”
Questions about who we are and where we come from are the kinds of questions that transcend the passing of centuries and the distinctions of culture or religion. A Japanese Christian and pastor points out the universal nature of the inquisitiveness of human beings. “From the time we are young children every one of us as human beings begin to ask questions about our existence and the meaning of it. The question of children of ‘How was I born?’ is not a biological or physiological question but is kind of a childlike philosophical or theological question [when one] first begins to experience the wonder of their existence. Why do I exist here in this world and am I given life? For what purpose am I alive?”
Of course the reality of everyday life means that we have to cope with many other issues and responsibilities and navel-gazing tends not to be one of our pastimes – many of us find ourselves going through a week without the luxury of time for thinking about much of anything except getting done what needs to be done – at work, for the family, and if you’re lucky some time for working out or kicking back. Ontological musing does not often take up a lot of space in the blackberry calendar or on the agenda. We come face to face with these issues again as we age, our bodies weaken, and the time of our death potentially draws near…. or when we unexpectedly lose a loved one or good friend to death as have many of you this past year. It all suddenly seems so fragile and there are regrets about what we have or have not shared with our loved ones…. about what we have or have not figured out about life and our place in the bigger picture.
“Questions,” the poet tells us, are the means by which we gain entry into the realm of deeper understanding – into the realm of the spiritual. Living the Questions has been the theme of our Lenten season this year at First Presbyterian, as we have encouraged each other to explore with more intentionality what it is we believe and what is the nature of faith – not what is our religion, but what is it that we are willing to stake our lives on.
Mary and the others who rushed to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning were not thinking about the profound questions of faith at the moment that they discovered the stone was rolled away. Luke says that they were perplexed by this, but entered the tomb. There they saw two men in dazzling clothes that addressed their puzzlement with a question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen!”
Some of us may feel so distant from Jesus that even the image of an empty tomb resonates very little with our own experiences. We have been told, and heard it repeated hundreds of times that the Resurrection is the central feature, the ultimate nexus of all that it means to be a Christian, but because we stumble on the “facts” of the story being told, we find ourselves reluctant to dig much deeper into the whole faith thing. There are lots of reasons to go to church, after all, good reasons – there are family connections, there are childhood memories, good music, good cookies, and good friends. For some of us these reasons are enough to merit a visit from time to time and a contribution and even some of our precious hours as a volunteer because it is a worthy thing to try to do something for someone else. For some of us that is enough.
When Paul says, as he does in the portion of 2 Corinthians that we read this morning, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all…” it may at first sound to some like the formula which we hear so often, “Christ died for your sins so that you might be forgiven.” It is a formula full of puzzling issues. Issues worthy of our questioning, for example, “If God is truly God, why would he have to give his own son for a sacrifice to placate himself?” Our questions are not about God’s intentions, we know God’s ways are often beyond our comprehension, but rather, our questions are meant to take us deeper into the implications of sacrifice – which comes from the Latin term sacrum (sacred) and facere(to make) – “to make sacred.” How is the cross an instrument of death made sacred? How is the death and resurrection of Jesus central to us and to our efforts to establish a fulfilling way of life today? Is it merely tit for tat? Jesus died so that you don’t have to? How does that kind of death bring hope to us as we deal with the nitty gritty of the daily grind?
As Biblical scholars remind us, dying “for” someone and the word “sacrifice” do not, on their own, imply substitution. In fact when we talk about dying “for” somebody in ordinary language we rarely mean that one person has taken the place of another. A mother risks her life by giving up her own food so that her child can have enough to survive – a scenario which happens all too often in many places in Africa where famine and warfare are so disruptive of food supplies – if worse case transpires, one might say that a mother died instead of her child, but not as a substitute. When, Martin Luther King, Jr. died for the sins of Jim Crow and segregation 42 years ago this weekend, he did not die instead of others – but rather he died because his love for justice was sufficient for him to risk exposure, time and again, in order to call the nation to awareness of the injustice that pervaded many of the laws and practices of the 1960’s in America. A soldier leaps on a grenade to save the life of others in his platoon is giving his life for his friends, but it is not a sacrifice which somehow overcomes future risks of life and limb for his brothers.
Paul says: For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; [Look at it!] everything has become new! “Paul makes clear [in all his writing] that Resurrection is central to the faith of the Christian, his point is that if God had not said “yes” to Jesus, if God has not vindicated Jesus [by overturning his death,] then our faith is in vain. [There is no point.]” What God has vindicated is the kind of life lived in love of others that Jesus lived in love of us and for us. That is how the resurrection calls us to new and more vital way of life – life no longer lived for ourselves.
The new life that flourishes, that new creation, is not a life of magic where suddenly sin has been lifted – we are by our nature sinners. Rather it is a new life lived with the knowledge that God vindicates the risks any of us take to live for another – to love another – to be “ambassadors” as Paul calls us. That means “ambassadors of a way of life.”
When the early converts to Christianity heard news of Jesus Christ and his Resurrection, their first question surely must have been, “So what does that mean for me? How does that change my life?” In answer to that question, Paul and other new apostles – ambassadors – would answer, “Come and see how we live!” Luke reports in the Book of the Acts that people were always remarking of the people of the way, those who would become known as Christians – “See how they love each other!”
The poet Rumi has another verse which looks at those who don’t bother to take such inquiry seriously, but rather just kind of stay on the surface of the things that pertain to faith and life and the source of hope:
These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, How much is that? Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital….
Even if you don’t know what you want,
Buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.
To be in Christ, is to seek him – to seek him – to see him in the persons around us. New life flourishes – look at it!
· A medical ministry in the ruins of Haiti’s “earthquaked” nation has opened a new field hospital to bring healthcare to a region of the country that was without a hospital.
· A group of 20-somethings who give a year or two of their lives to rebuild the homes of strangers after a flood. People who donate funds and counsel to neighbors; “Flooding with love” people who have lost everything because of the river’s rise.
· Young attorneys trying to help urban youth find meaningful life goals and jobs instead of helping to put them in jail.
· An HIV clinic which remembers those living with AIDS even if the pandemic has slipped from the headlines
· An agriculture student who looks to learn how to teach sustainable, subsistence farming to laborers in equatorial Africa and Latin America rather than learning Agri-business.
· Retired persons who give a day a week to Hospice or the Hospital, the Free Clinic or any of hundreds of programs that help neighbors and build relationships of trust.
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” is the question the mystery men ask us yet today as we attend the empty tomb on this Easter morning. Don’t just look in the graveyard – don’t just look at one empty tomb, but seek the living among the living. The new life that resurrection brings is the life transformed by love which in turn transformed the world in just a few generations. They called it Good News! It still is. To find our way in Christ is to is to live the questions. “He is risen!” Why, what, how….where is Christ Jesus alive among us today? How can I join him there? AMEN.
