Sermon, November 7, 2010

“Resurrection Life”, a Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 7, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection….(Luke 20:36) …38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”(Luke 20:38)

We Christians are an odd lot. Did you ever consider how bizarre it must seem to outsiders, that Christians revere, as the central symbol of our faith, the cross – an instrument of capital punishment? Think about it for a moment. We wear it as jewelry, we adorn our churches with it, and yet it was, in its day, an instrument of torture and death. When the Emperor Constantine rose to power in Rome, his sword, shaped like a cross, became the central symbol of the Christian faith. Would we not think it bizarre if some group of people wore little gas chambers around their necks, or gallows, or electric chairs? Why on earth do we Christians do this? Are we morbidly obsessed with pain and death? What does this strange choice of religious symbol say about us?

Then, think about what we do every Sunday morning. We gather to celebrate a festive meal together wherein we proclaim that we are partaking of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In the earliest days of the church, non-Christians thought that the Christians were cannibals because of what they heard about this ritual meal. You must admit, to the uninitiated it would sound distinctly odd to hear talk of consuming body and blood. I know from my interfaith encounters that the language of our Eucharistic prayers, particularly those we use in Rite 1 that speak of consuming flesh and blood, sound decidedly grisly to people outside our religious tradition.

Today’s gospel hints at the answer to the puzzle of the cross. Jesus talks about people who are “children of the resurrection” who, he says are “like angels in heaven”. Children of the resurrection, he suggests, see things differently than the rest of the world. As Christians, of course, we want to think of ourselves as “children of the resurrection.” We revere the cross because we see beyond its historical earthly use to something transcendent and enduring to which it points. We live with the paradox that something that was in its day a symbol of torture and death was transformed into a symbol of hope, new life, renewal and victory. In our celebration of the Eucharist, we participate in the resurrection life of the Risen Christ, believing in a sacred mystery we cannot explain, but we know to be real. Jesus invites us to be resurrection people, with a distinct vision of our world and our lives that differs markedly from that of the rest of the world. In these dark days of war, terrorism and violence, in a world where many people go to bed hungry while others suffer the ills of excess consumption, in a time of continued economic uncertainty and distress, our resurrection vision is particularly important, indeed crucial, for the survival and transformation of our world.

We live in a world where religion and politics, religion and science, religion and psychology all live in tension one with the other. Our modern ability to study and analyze our world with a depth and breadth not possible in earlier generations has tended to erode our ability to suspend disbelief and let our spiritual ways of knowing and perceiving the world inform how we live and move and have our being. Belief in resurrection is one of those religious beliefs that is hard to reconcile with our western, Enlightenment, rational way of thinking. Today’s lections remind us of the centrality of religious language and religious symbols, religious ritual and religious practice to the process of transformation and healing of the world, what our Jewish cousins call the process of tikkun olam.

Central to our faith is our conviction that God brings new life, new hope, resurrection out of the ashes and despair of death and destruction. When the world around us suffers from human brokenness, when we witness the brutal destruction and pain of terrorism and war, bioterrorism and disease, we look at the cross and remember that God brings new life out of death. God is always making something new out of that which has been destroyed. As we all learned in middle school science, matter is neither created nor destroyed. It is simply transformed from one form to another.

The cross is our visual reminder of our resurrection perspective. The paradox of the cross reveals that we are a people with a different way of perceiving reality. This resurrection perspective invites us to endure suffering, pain, grief, and loss, with faith in God and hope for the future. Resurrection in all its nuanced meanings also calls us out of our own individual struggles to engage in the common struggles of the larger community, the nation and the world. It is a vision that calls us to see beyond that which seems hopeless in this world, to imagine something beyond, something different, that “great reversal” that the author of Luke so relentlessly foretells.

In Jesus’ encounter with the Sadducees they ask Jesus a technical question arising out of their interpretation of a minute point of Jewish religious law. They pose the question to trick Jesus, hoping to back him into an intellectual corner on the basis of a technical interpretation of a Jewish religious custom in light of an emerging religious belief that was not at that time accepted by all Jews. The Sadducees were a sect that rejected the notion of bodily resurrection, while other sects, including the Pharisees, accepted it. In Jesus’ response to the Sadducees, he reveals that God’s agenda is not the same as our human agenda and God’s vision is not as myopic as ours. Things that may seem important from our limited perspective are irrelevant in God’s kingdom. That which seems impossible in the world we inhabit are completely possible with God. To see with the eyes of the resurrection is to see another dimension of reality, to see what truly matters in the scope of God’s eternity and to discern what is merely temporal and not of enduring importance.
Theologian and author, Frederick Beuchner says:

The Bible…speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. Man does not go on living beyond the grave because that’s how he is made. Rather, he goes to his grave as dead as a doornail and is given his life back again by God (i.e. resurrected) just as he was given it by God in the first place, because that is the way God is made.

Resurrection, you see, is something about God, not about us. God is always at work on us, making something new out of the old, taking the dead parts and recreating something entirely different from the ashes. In the story from the prophet Haggai, the ancient Israelites, having returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon, face a temple destroyed, their lives in ruins, their homes long since gone. They are called to look forward into a future that seems cloudy at best and to act on faith that things can be, will be better. The task before them - rebuilding the temple – requires that they make real and concrete their faith that God is fashioning something new and hopeful out of their experience of exile and destruction. Even as they look upon the ruins of Solomon’s majestic structure, as they wonder how they could possibly rebuild and recreate that sacred space, Haggai calls them to be people of hope and vision, to see beyond what looks like an impossible situation and imagine a culture restored and renewed. He focuses their gaze forward even as they keep turning their heads backward.

Some people are able to embrace a resurrection approach to the world, and some simply refuse to do so. Those who do not see through death to resurrection remain dead, figuratively, if not literally. I’m sure we’ve all known some “dead people” in our day. These are the ones for whom everything is miserable, the past was always better, it was great way back when, but now everything is awful. Any new idea or suggestion is met with a sigh of resignation, a pronouncement that whatever it is simply cannot work. The world is painted black for these folks, and nothing will get them to budge from that position. The cross is simply a tool of capital punishment and death. The Eucharist is just a nice ritual with no eternal reality to it at all. Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives has a term for such people - “cynical realists.” They are the ones who will shoot down any hopeful vision for the future with some version of “it’s unrealistic” or “it can’t be done” or “it’s been tried before and failed.”

Then there are those people who have learned to embrace resurrection vision. These are people who have journeyed to the darkest places of human existence and somehow managed to cling to a kernel of hope, rather than permit themselves to be drowned in despair. Nelson Mandela sitting in that prison cell for decades was a child of the resurrection. He could see a new South Africa even when everyone told him he was crazy to believe that apartheid could be ended. In our day to live by resurrection vision is to believe that the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved, that nations and peoples can be persuaded to alleviate the plight of the poorest of the poor, that gender equality can become a reality across the globe, that children can all receive a basic primary education, drink clean water, be vaccinated against preventable diseases like malaria and look forward to a healthy adulthood. Just yesterday at convention we heard from a SVP at ERD who told of the hundreds of thousands of lives being saved in Africa each year as a result of the Nets for Life program at ERD, which started as someone’s resurrection vision a few years ago. For Ascension, resurrection vision is manifested in the commitment of those who wish to see this congregation redeveloped and revitalized, dreaming a new future even as you grapple with harsh present realities. Jesus’ belief in resurrection as he tried to explain to the Pharisees is about much more than what happens to individual people’s bodies upon their death. It has to do with the kingdom of God, the world as God wants it to be and with our willingness and courage to be agents of that world working with God to make all things new.

This is what resurrection people do. We are blessed with a unique vision, a second sight that enables us to see through the darkness and despair of human failure, of war or terrorism, of destruction and violence, of disease or loneliness, to the possibilities of a new world, a new hope, a new life. Children of the resurrection are called to cling to the cross as we proclaim the gospel of peace and reconciliation in a war torn world. We have a mission to confront the tragedies of our time with creativity, to embrace the paradoxical and to see the world from God’s perspective, rather than our limited human vision. We serve the God of the living, not of the dead. Thanks be to God.



“Resurrection Life”, a Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, November 7, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection….(Luke 20:36) …38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”(Luke 20:38)

We Christians are an odd lot. Did you ever consider how bizarre it must seem to outsiders, that Christians revere, as the central symbol of our faith, the cross – an instrument of capital punishment? Think about it for a moment. We wear it as jewelry, we adorn our churches with it, and yet it was, in its day, an instrument of torture and death. When the Emperor Constantine rose to power in Rome, his sword, shaped like a cross, became the central symbol of the Christian faith. Would we not think it bizarre if some group of people wore little gas chambers around their necks, or gallows, or electric chairs? Why on earth do we Christians do this? Are we morbidly obsessed with pain and death? What does this strange choice of religious symbol say about us?

Then, think about what we do every Sunday morning. We gather to celebrate a festive meal together wherein we proclaim that we are partaking of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In the earliest days of the church, non-Christians thought that the Christians were cannibals because of what they heard about this ritual meal. You must admit, to the uninitiated it would sound distinctly odd to hear talk of consuming body and blood. I know from my interfaith encounters that the language of our Eucharistic prayers, particularly those we use in Rite 1 that speak of consuming flesh and blood, sound decidedly grisly to people outside our religious tradition.

Today’s gospel hints at the answer to the puzzle of the cross. Jesus talks about people who are “children of the resurrection” who, he says are “like angels in heaven”. Children of the resurrection, he suggests, see things differently than the rest of the world. As Christians, of course, we want to think of ourselves as “children of the resurrection.” We revere the cross because we see beyond its historical earthly use to something transcendent and enduring to which it points. We live with the paradox that something that was in its day a symbol of torture and death was transformed into a symbol of hope, new life, renewal and victory. In our celebration of the Eucharist, we participate in the resurrection life of the Risen Christ, believing in a sacred mystery we cannot explain, but we know to be real. Jesus invites us to be resurrection people, with a distinct vision of our world and our lives that differs markedly from that of the rest of the world. In these dark days of war, terrorism and violence, in a world where many people go to bed hungry while others suffer the ills of excess consumption, in a time of continued economic uncertainty and distress, our resurrection vision is particularly important, indeed crucial, for the survival and transformation of our world.

We live in a world where religion and politics, religion and science, religion and psychology all live in tension one with the other. Our modern ability to study and analyze our world with a depth and breadth not possible in earlier generations has tended to erode our ability to suspend disbelief and let our spiritual ways of knowing and perceiving the world inform how we live and move and have our being. Belief in resurrection is one of those religious beliefs that is hard to reconcile with our western, Enlightenment, rational way of thinking. Today’s lections remind us of the centrality of religious language and religious symbols, religious ritual and religious practice to the process of transformation and healing of the world, what our Jewish cousins call the process of tikkun olam.

Central to our faith is our conviction that God brings new life, new hope, resurrection out of the ashes and despair of death and destruction. When the world around us suffers from human brokenness, when we witness the brutal destruction and pain of terrorism and war, bioterrorism and disease, we look at the cross and remember that God brings new life out of death. God is always making something new out of that which has been destroyed. As we all learned in middle school science, matter is neither created nor destroyed. It is simply transformed from one form to another.

The cross is our visual reminder of our resurrection perspective. The paradox of the cross reveals that we are a people with a different way of perceiving reality. This resurrection perspective invites us to endure suffering, pain, grief, and loss, with faith in God and hope for the future. Resurrection in all its nuanced meanings also calls us out of our own individual struggles to engage in the common struggles of the larger community, the nation and the world. It is a vision that calls us to see beyond that which seems hopeless in this world, to imagine something beyond, something different, that “great reversal” that the author of Luke so relentlessly foretells.

In Jesus’ encounter with the Sadducees they ask Jesus a technical question arising out of their interpretation of a minute point of Jewish religious law. They pose the question to trick Jesus, hoping to back him into an intellectual corner on the basis of a technical interpretation of a Jewish religious custom in light of an emerging religious belief that was not at that time accepted by all Jews. The Sadducees were a sect that rejected the notion of bodily resurrection, while other sects, including the Pharisees, accepted it. In Jesus’ response to the Sadducees, he reveals that God’s agenda is not the same as our human agenda and God’s vision is not as myopic as ours. Things that may seem important from our limited perspective are irrelevant in God’s kingdom. That which seems impossible in the world we inhabit are completely possible with God. To see with the eyes of the resurrection is to see another dimension of reality, to see what truly matters in the scope of God’s eternity and to discern what is merely temporal and not of enduring importance.
Theologian and author, Frederick Beuchner says:

The Bible…speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. Man does not go on living beyond the grave because that’s how he is made. Rather, he goes to his grave as dead as a doornail and is given his life back again by God (i.e. resurrected) just as he was given it by God in the first place, because that is the way God is made.

Resurrection, you see, is something about God, not about us. God is always at work on us, making something new out of the old, taking the dead parts and recreating something entirely different from the ashes. In the story from the prophet Haggai, the ancient Israelites, having returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon, face a temple destroyed, their lives in ruins, their homes long since gone. They are called to look forward into a future that seems cloudy at best and to act on faith that things can be, will be better. The task before them - rebuilding the temple – requires that they make real and concrete their faith that God is fashioning something new and hopeful out of their experience of exile and destruction. Even as they look upon the ruins of Solomon’s majestic structure, as they wonder how they could possibly rebuild and recreate that sacred space, Haggai calls them to be people of hope and vision, to see beyond what looks like an impossible situation and imagine a culture restored and renewed. He focuses their gaze forward even as they keep turning their heads backward.

Some people are able to embrace a resurrection approach to the world, and some simply refuse to do so. Those who do not see through death to resurrection remain dead, figuratively, if not literally. I’m sure we’ve all known some “dead people” in our day. These are the ones for whom everything is miserable, the past was always better, it was great way back when, but now everything is awful. Any new idea or suggestion is met with a sigh of resignation, a pronouncement that whatever it is simply cannot work. The world is painted black for these folks, and nothing will get them to budge from that position. The cross is simply a tool of capital punishment and death. The Eucharist is just a nice ritual with no eternal reality to it at all. Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives has a term for such people - “cynical realists.” They are the ones who will shoot down any hopeful vision for the future with some version of “it’s unrealistic” or “it can’t be done” or “it’s been tried before and failed.”

Then there are those people who have learned to embrace resurrection vision. These are people who have journeyed to the darkest places of human existence and somehow managed to cling to a kernel of hope, rather than permit themselves to be drowned in despair. Nelson Mandela sitting in that prison cell for decades was a child of the resurrection. He could see a new South Africa even when everyone told him he was crazy to believe that apartheid could be ended. In our day to live by resurrection vision is to believe that the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved, that nations and peoples can be persuaded to alleviate the plight of the poorest of the poor, that gender equality can become a reality across the globe, that children can all receive a basic primary education, drink clean water, be vaccinated against preventable diseases like malaria and look forward to a healthy adulthood. Just yesterday at convention we heard from a SVP at ERD who told of the hundreds of thousands of lives being saved in Africa each year as a result of the Nets for Life program at ERD, which started as someone’s resurrection vision a few years ago. For Ascension, resurrection vision is manifested in the commitment of those who wish to see this congregation redeveloped and revitalized, dreaming a new future even as you grapple with harsh present realities. Jesus’ belief in resurrection as he tried to explain to the Pharisees is about much more than what happens to individual people’s bodies upon their death. It has to do with the kingdom of God, the world as God wants it to be and with our willingness and courage to be agents of that world working with God to make all things new.

This is what resurrection people do. We are blessed with a unique vision, a second sight that enables us to see through the darkness and despair of human failure, of war or terrorism, of destruction and violence, of disease or loneliness, to the possibilities of a new world, a new hope, a new life. Children of the resurrection are called to cling to the cross as we proclaim the gospel of peace and reconciliation in a war torn world. We have a mission to confront the tragedies of our time with creativity, to embrace the paradoxical and to see the world from God’s perspective, rather than our limited human vision. We serve the God of the living, not of the dead. Thanks be to God.