Easter sermon

What are we hoping for, expecting, on Easter.

Easter Morning 2012

Transcribed from a sermon given

By The Rev. Valerie Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

We have a pretty good idea about why Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. The one she loved and had been following was dead. He hadn’t had a proper burial and she wanted to anoint his body. We can understand that if someone has died and hasn’t had his body prepared we would want to go and do what we can. That was her intention. What she expected was to find a stone rolled across the front of the tomb and a decaying body within.

But I ask you today, what brought you here this morning? Some of you I know are here because you come to church every Sunday morning. It’s just what you do. And I’m sure that some of you are here because someone you care about a lot wants you to be here with them. And then there is everything in between. Some of you may be here because Easter is an important time for you. Others may be here because it just seems like the thing to do and you don’t quite know why you are here but it seems like the right place to be. Each one of us got up this morning and made the decision to come here, expecting something.

Maybe you expected to have some great music which I trust we are going to continue to experience. Some of you may have come because you love the Easter decorations, the feel of Easter and the smell of Easter lilies. Some of you may have come hoping you will hear some words of wisdom. Some of you may have come to see friends. Some of you may have come expecting to be a little bit bored. We all are here for a reason.

What happens to Mary Magdalene is not what she expected. The stone was rolled away; Jesus’ body wasn’t there. It was nothing like what she expected, so she began looking, searching. She was looking for was Jesus, that is she was looking for his body. So, even when he was standing right there she didn’t immediately recognize him.

What are you looking for? What are you looking for today? No matter what you think was the reason you are here, there is something that you are looking for – something that you are yearning for. Maybe you want a little bit of a sense of peace. Maybe you are looking for hope. Maybe you are looking for a break from unending worry. Maybe you are looking for some joy. Maybe you are looking for something to change your life. What is it that you are looking for?

Sometimes it is hard to put a word to what it is that we are yearning for. But we all have those deep soul desires. Something that we are looking for, searching for.

For Mary Magdalene it was Jesus. But what she found shocked her. What she found was so amazing she couldn’t believe it at first. She didn’t recognize him until he spoke to her.

We have to remember that no one, no one at time period, expected a human being to die and then three days later be up walking around. It was not part of anyone’s expectations. Even those who believed in a life after death, did not believe it could be a body walking around. Not the Jewish people, not the pagans, not the Romans, no one expected someone who was dead to be up and walking around.

Read today of several different ways that people encountered the risen Christ. We heard Peter talking about his own experience of the resurrected Christ. We have Paul telling the story of how first Christ appeared to the disciples, and then to over 500 at one time, and then to James and much later, much later, Jesus appeared to Paul. This appearance was after the ascension, after Pentecost. There was already a Christian church, because Paul was persecuting the church. He was trying to destroy it because he didn’t believe it.

Paul was riding on a donkey on his way to Damascus when something knocked him off his Donkey and blinded him. While he was lying there on the ground he had an experience of seeing Jesus. It changed his life. He describes it as having been the most recent one to have seen Christ. He didn’t say I had a feeling that Christ was there. He didn’t say I had a dream that I saw Christ. He saw the risen Christ and it changed his life.

Now these people who had the experience of the presence of the risen Christ didn’t say “I believe that Christ is risen.” They said, “I know that Christ is risen.” When you have seen something yourself you don’t believe that it is there, you know that it is there. You can be told by someone else about something and you can say that I believe that what they are telling me is the truth. But once you’ve seen it for yourself, you no longer believe it because someone else told you, it becomes the truth to you. It becomes a fact.

There are a lot of people who don’t say they believe that Christ is risen they know it. What we say at the beginning of our service is not Jesus was raised from the dead as if it happened long ago. What we say is “Christ is risen”, right now, today. Christ is Risen. The presence of the risen Christ is as much real today as it was on that road to Damascus.

What are we looking for? What are we really looking for? I think we all are searching for the same thing that Mary Magdalene was. She was searching for Jesus. We are searching and yearning to know that risen presence. There is something within us that has brought us here today, something that has brought us here today that says I need an experience of the risen Christ.

Those experiences can look very different. Some people experience the risen Christ as a still small voice inside that they can barely hear. Some people experience the risen Christ as something that is so powerful they almost feel like they have been knocked off their donkey (to put it politely). Some people may experience the risen Christ in the face of another person.

My prayer today is that everyone gathered here today has an experience of the risen Christ. You may have had it this morning with the glorious sunrise, you may have had it as you walked into the church and you saw the decorations. You may experience it in the music, or in the readings, or in the face of someone sitting near you. Perhaps you’ll experience the risen Christ when you see the children come in. They are going to be carrying a cross with flowers. Maybe, maybe your experience of the risen Christ will be while the children are looking for Easter eggs – or when we share in the bread and wine and remember that Christ asked us to remember him by breaking bread and blessing wine.

My prayer is that each one of us get a glimpse of the living Christ, the Christ that is risen, the Christ that is here with us, and that that glimpse will answer whatever it is that you are searching for, and change your life and make it so that you no longer say “I believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead” but you can feel in the depths of your being that you know that Christ is risen and present with us today.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Palm Sunday

When we are going through difficult times we want to talk to someone who has been through what we are going through. We want someone who understands.

Christ, through his passion, knows; he truly understands – and offers hope.

Palm Sunday Sermon

2012

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 15:1-39

I have found that when we are going through difficult times in our lives we want to talk to someone whose been through that themselves. When my husband was in a bad motorcycle accident he wanted to talk someone else who had been in a body cast and broken a leg. Someone who had gone through that. When I found out I was going to have brain surgery I wanted to find someone who had experienced that. I didn’t want to listen to anyone else.

When we are going through difficult times, like when we are grieving the death of someone we love, we get comfort from those who have experienced it already. Or when we are trying to lose weight we want to have the person who is helping us show us a picture of when they were grossly overweight. We don’t want some slim thing that has never known what it means to count calories. We want someone who understands. That is part of the beauty and power of the alcoholic anonymous program, and other 12 step programs. They realize that when you are struggling with something the best person to help is someone who has been through that themselves. That’s who we want to talk to. That is who we want to get support from.

Today we are reminded that Jesus has been through all of it. He knows all of human experience. At the beginning of the service we celebrate him coming into Jerusalem like a super star. People were cheering and throwing things on the path in front of him. What a glorious thing. How many of us fantasize sometime in our lives being in a position like that?

We also know that when Lazarus died Jesus wept. He knew what it meant to grieve.

And in his passion we see all of human experience in one day. He knows what it is like to be betrayed by a friend, to have those you rely upon disappear and not be there to help you, to find that the religion and the community that you supported and cared about and cared for you your whole life turns on you, condemns you, to have false accusations made about you, to have people spit on you, to be tortured, abused, mocked, nailed naked to a cross to die. And at the end Jesus says, “My God, my God why have abandoned me?” Jesus even knew what it was like to feel abandoned by God.

He knew fear; he knew hurt; he knew pain. He knows it all. That’s what Paul is alluding to as he tries to describe the nature of this Christ, this Jesus, when he writes, “Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born into human likeness.” Here he is alluding to and trying to describe the great mystery of the Christian faith, that somehow God Almighty, God the creator of the universe, the source and ground of all being, that in which everything else exists, that somehow, some way that God came into human form to experience all of what it meant to be a human being - birth, childhood, adolescence, teaching, struggle, friendship, pain, abandonment. All of it.

In John’s gospel it says, “He was with God, and he was God.” In the creeds we say that he was of one being with the father. Those are all trying to use human language to describe something that is beyond what we can quite comprehend. This great mystery that somehow God came into human form to experience all that human beings experience.

Because of that we can go to Christ, we can speak to God of our pain, and our fears, and our abandonment. Christ understands, he experienced it, he knows what it was like. We are not communicating with a being that has no idea of what we have been through, but to one who has walked there, who has suffered, and even knows what it feels like to be abandoned. To be totally alone.

We have that kind of a friend who has walked there before us and therefore can help us through whatever it is, whether it be grief, or physical pain, or emotional lose or questioning even the presence of God, because he knows, he knows.

In addition to that, the reason we want to talk to someone who has walked through the journey we are on is because we want to see that there is something ahead, that there is something beyond the struggle right now, that there is hope, that what we are going through at this moment is not the final word. And that is what we are offered through Christ, because even though his last words on the cross were “My God, my God why have you forsaken me” his last word was his resurrection. And the final word is always, always God’s abounding love.

5 Lent B - Meditation on a popcorn seed

Hold a hard, smooth corn seed in your hand. It is beautiful, secure, and inedible. Drop it in a very hot pan and suddenly in bursts open into a delicious piece of popcorn.
Sometimes we have to die to who we think we are to become what God intends for us to be.

Fifth Sunday of Lent B

Transcribed from a sermon given

March 25, 2012

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

John 12:20-33

I love when I have an opportunity to do “show and tell,” so we have something to hand out to everyone. The story today was about seeds. I am going to give each one of you a seed. Will help out from the back and I’ll start of here and we’ll give everybody and seed.

(Seeds are distributed.)

You may recognize these. They are corn seeds. In fact they are popcorn. It is what I had in my house.

You will notice as you hold onto this how incredibly hard it is. It is like a rock. It has this hard outer shell. If you think about the life of a seed, it starts out with a plant that is growing and makes a flower. Then the flower gets fertilized and a seed begins. All the energy of that plant, all the nutrients that it gets from the soil, all the energy that it changes from the sun, all of that work of the plant goes into building up the seed, of providing it everything it needs to become strong and healthy. Then once the seed is established, once it has developed and is healthy it makes this casing around itself, this hard shell, to protect itself. This keeps it from being easily hurt, and it keeps it from growing any bigger. It has that dual nature.

This popcorn with this hard shell around it will stay like that forever. After all, this popcorn has probably been in my cabinet for years. I have no idea. Don’t check the expiration date. It is said that in some of the graves in Egypt they found grain that was still okay and viable. The seed survives because it is strong and contained.

It is kind of like when we are growing up. We start out as a major investment of our family. They feed us, clothe us, and care for all our physical needs. They teach us, educate us, and help us hopefully to grow spiritually and to develop a sense of who we are, a sense of what’s important, and a sense of what the meaning of the world is. If we have had a really good healthy childhood we develop into an adult that is strong and self sufficient, and we develop what is called a healthy ego. The ego is designed to protect us. That ego keeps us from being hurt by the outside world. It protects that sense of self that we have developed. It serves like that hard outer shell on the seed. And that is important, and that is necessary, the seed has to get to that point, just as humans beings have to get to the point where they have a really good sense of who they are and what is important. But, that shell, that ego, that keeps us safe also limits us. It is hard and rigid and keeps us from continuing to grow. And as it keeps us safe from things that are hurtful outside, it also can keep us from experiencing love and letting good things come inside. And our egos can get in the way of our union with God.

So just as the seed is perfect in what it is, it is not done. Just as when we become healthy whole adults we are not done. You see, if you take this seed, this popcorn seed, and you put it in a pan that is really really hot it is going to feel like it is going to die. Because that heat could kill it, destroy it. But if it isn’t too old, the moisture, the little bit of moisture inside will expand in that heat and all of a sudden it goes “POP” and it turns from this hard thing that you couldn’t possibly eat into one of my favorite foods.

It bursts forth and that shell becomes just a little bit around the bottom because the essence of it has expanded in a way that one never would have imagined if you didn’t know the secret of popcorn. This wonderful white fluffy thing, much more than that seed could have imagined. But it took heat; it took dying as a seed in order to become that which it was intended to be.

And so it is with human beings. We become healthy adult human beings with a good established self-concept and a nice strong ego and that’s not the end. God wants more than that. God offers more than that. But in order to transcend this ego, it has to die. It has to be ripped apart. And that is uncomfortable, to say the least. Most of us have known times in our lives where we felt like we were dying. Times when perhaps we were confronted with illness, or the death of a friend or family member, or the loss of a relationship, or divorce or losing a job where suddenly your self identity as this employee is gone. Or perhaps that happened at retirement. When what you had been doing all your life to feel good about yourself is suddenly no longer there. There are lots of different ways in which we have what one writer calls “necessary suffering.” Times when we are confronted with pain and lose and it hurts and we feel like we are dying, because a part of us is.

During those times, those times of struggle, which the psalmist calls “going through the valley of the shadow of death,” we are promised that Christ walks with us, that we are not alone in those dark times. But sometimes, when we are about to experience that death of our egos, we feel like Christ felt on the cross. We may feel abandoned by God, alone. And yet it is those moments of deepest despair and lose that can be the times that burst us open so that we are able to love in a way that we never loved before and we are able to receive love in a way we haven’t before and our relationship with God takes one step closer to union.

Christ says that we must die to be reborn. And here you are at a church, a Christian church that follows a leader who was crucified and died. And who calls all of us to take up our cross and follow him. Christianity is not easy. Christianity is about a willingness to die to who we think we are in order that we can discover who we really are - beloved children of God. But as long as we hold on to that hard rigid ego self-identification we can’t realize just how much we are loved. So like the seed it is only through dying that we come to fullness of life.