Sermons at St. John's Presbyterian Church

Resurrection Hope and Life Eternal

Transcribed from the sermon preached Easter April 24, 2011

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings:  Eph 2, Matthew 28:1-10

My Mother died 7 months ago, on September 12, 2010.  I had taken the 11:30 PM to 5AM shift and had just exchanged with my sister.  I crawled into bed beside my mom and held her arm.  I wasn’t very comfortable.  My mom took up most of the space and so I had to lie straight on the edge.  Besides that I was afraid.  I thought my mom was dying, but I wasn’t quite sure in the darkness and noisy hum of the oxygen machine.  So I held her, and stared up.   On the wall of the sky light opening, a square of light shined in from the skylight, and the four square frame of the window formed a cross. Just a synchronic coincidence I supposed, but I used it to focus and pray, to breathe, to be present.  I had been like that for fifty minutes or an hour, and then I had this profound sense that my mom had risen and then expanded beyond her body.  Before I could think about it, the words came out of my mouth, “I love you mom.”  It was strange, but I wasn’t speaking to her body.  When I got my courage up, I checked her breath, and she was gone. 

Most of the language we use to talk about God and the mysteries of life and death are inadequate.   In the confirmation class we said, “All talk about God is an oversimplification.”  But I do believe there is a loving, creative force to life and that the categories we use to frame life in manageable packages, for instance “body” and “time”, cannot and do not adequately contain all beauty and truth. Christ is risen.

In West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief, Steven Kolter reports on the research from several studies done on near death experience…people whose heart stopped but were brought back to life.  In a study by Morse in Seattle, 23 of 26 children who died and were revived reported classic near death experience.  Morse videotaped these children recalling their experiences and making crayon drawings of what they saw once outside their bodies…long tunnels, giant rainbows, dead relatives, deities…But some also included pictures of the exact medical procedures performed, including elaborate details about doctors and nurses whose only contact with that child took place while that child was dead.

Several other good studies have been done, of adults who died and were revived and pilots who black out from too many g forces.  Van Lommel studied patients who had had heart attacks, and found in a two year follow up that those who had had near death experiences reported more self awareness, more social awareness and deeper religious feelings than the others.  After another two years, he found that the near death group had an increased belief in the afterlife and a decreased fear of death, while those without the experience showed just the opposite…” Then at eight years, “The near death experience group was much more empathetic, emotionally vulnerable and often showed evidence of increased intuitive awareness – while still exhibiting no fear of death and a strong belief in the afterlife.

Morse also did a study of elderly people who had had near-death experience in early childhood.  The results were the same.  All of those who had had near death experience…were still absolutely convinced their lives had meaning and that there was a unifying thread of love which provided that meaning.  Matched with the control group, they scored much higher on life-attitude tests, significantly lower on fear-of-death tests, gave more money to charity and took fewer medications.” (Kolter, Steven.  West of Jesus; surfing, science and the origins of belief. Bloomsbury. 2006.p.198)

In other studies, scientists did brain scans on Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns during prayer.  They found a marked decrease in activity in the right parietal lobe, a part of the brain called the Orientation Association Area because it helps us orient ourselves in space.  It allows us to judge angles and curves and know where the self begins and the rest of the world begins.  With this decrease of activity in this part of the brain, subjects would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind sees.

As the prayer and meditation decreases activity in the parietal lobe, it increases activity in the temporal lobe, the same area that produces out of body experience, hallucinations and religiosity…Our brains are hard wired for mystical experience. (Ibid)

Given this human propensity for the mystical, Chris Hedges responds to the new atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins:  “The question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly indifferent to the transcendent, that which cannot be measured or quantified…We all encounter this aspect of existence, in love, beauty, alienation, loneliness, suffering, good, evil and the reality of death… God is self-expanding, other affirming, community building love.  The power of God is not coercive but creative, sacrificial, and empowering love.”  (Hedges, Chris. I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Free Press. 2008. P.15)

  Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic wrote “The purity of the soul lies in the fact that it is purified by a shared form of life in which there is no opposition.”  (Eckhart, Meister. The Holiness of Being. In Matthew Fox. Passion for Creation; the Earth Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart. P.87) We accept being what we were created to be with such resoluteness and graceful simplicity that we die to the alienation and separateness and are reborn to new life.  And so baptism is a symbol of creation, of coming into being from the waters, from the womb, and it is a sign of rebirth, of moving up from the dark flood waters, beyond all that which divides and separates, to be born again with eternal vision and being.   

The Israelites expressed this oneness of life in monotheism, in the idea that there is one God, one source of life, and all power and life flows from this one God.  When stratification of society separated rich from poor, slave from free, this freeing and uniting God liberated the Israelites from Slavery, brought them through the sea and through the wilderness and gave them the law to guide their lives.    And when the Israelites had made a home for themselves and some allowed prosperity and greed to divide and separate, to stagnate in the hands of the few once again, this one God sent the prophets to call for Justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. 

Now the Israelites had this long running relationship with this one source of life, but then there were the rest of us, gentiles ancient and modern.  Maybe we didn’t learn about God.  Maybe the religious people we knew were pompous and uptight; or hypocritical or both, acting as if they had God packaged up and kept to themselves.  The temple or church walls act like a barrier protecting them, keeping us out.  Maybe it became obvious to us early that we were far from perfect, far from holy, so in our sin and shame we decided we shouldn’t even try.  Maybe the life shown to us was a dog eat dog, survival of the fittest world where we were too busy staying alive and competing, and simply didn’t care or have time to stop and contemplate any divine loving mystery or the needs of others.  Or maybe we had things kind of easy for a while and were enjoying the pleasures of material life before we realized we would need more than pleasure to be happy and satisfied for very long.

Whatever it is, we wonder if we have been left behind by the God squad.  Maybe we don’t read that well, can’t follow the bulletin, can’t sing, don’t get those old words, don’t know when to stand or sit, don’t have enough money or time, not sure how to pray, feel too young, or too old, too gay, too strange.  We have a hard time not thinking that to be a part of God’s covenant people, we have to know all this stuff and be all that.  We are not that fast to begin with, and the race started while we were tying our shoes.  

But here we are anyway, despite ourselves, despite all we know and don’t know.  And despite ourselves, despite our rational science loving minds, we have this spark of hope, this divine spark.  We sense Jesus was onto something tapped into the source embodied divine love and power, and is inviting us along for the ride.  And this spark won’t go away, despite all the bad things that have been done to us, despite all the bad that we have done, we can’t kill it.  It keeps rising again, like a spring of living water that wells up to eternal life.  It keeps giving us visions of our unique beauty and our connection with all life.  It says my grace is sufficient.   My grace cleanses.  You are forgiven.  It says I love you now and forever.  Now go out and spread good news.  Head on out to Galilee, to Berkeley, to Washington, to Uganda, to Japan…and I will be there waiting for you.

All Things Considered on NPR did an interview of Anne Lamott, a member of a little Presbyterian church in Marin and a well-known writer, and asked her  “So what does the season — so much about rebirth and redemption, but also sacrifice — mean?”

"Well, it's the most profound holiday in the Christian tradition," Lamott says. "And I think two things really come to mind. One is something that the great writer Barbara Johnson said, which is that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. And I think that every year the world seems more of a Good Friday world. And it's excruciating, whether it's Japan, or Libya, or whether it’s your own best friends and their children who are sick (or struggling), which is something that makes no sense when you think about a loving God. But it's a time when we get to remember that all the stuff that we think makes us of such value, all the time we spend burnishing our surfaces, is really not what God sees. God, he or she, loves us absolutely unconditionally, as is. It's a come as you are party."

"When I was 38, my best friend, Pammy, died, and we went shopping about two weeks before she died, and she was in a wig and a wheelchair. I was buying a dress for this boyfriend I was trying to impress, and I bought a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to. And I said to her, 'Do you think this makes my hips look big?' and she said to me, so calmly, 'Anne, you don't have that kind of time.' And I think Easter has been about the resonance of that simple statement; and that when I stop, when I go into contemplation and meditation, when I breathe again and do the sacred action of plopping and hanging my head and being done with my own agenda, I hear that, 'You don't have that kind of time,' you have time only to cultivate presence and authenticity and service, praying against all odds to get your sense of humor back."

Lamott explains that she will spend this Sunday following through with her usual Easter traditions: