Four
Poems for Holy Week and Easter
4.
“If
I Should Die…”
Matthew
28:1-10
Luke
15:11-24
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
March
23, 2008
Easter
Day
Text:
“…for this son of mine was dead
and is alive again…” Luke
15:24a
Text:
“…he rose again from the
dead…” The
Apostles’ Creed
Text:
the scripture of our own life’s
experience
Return to the 2008 Holy Week Page
(Note to web readers:
For our Midweek Preaching Series for Lent this year, I asked five
poet-preachers, two clergy and three non-clergy, to compose an original poem,
present it, and offer preaching reflections on it.
The series exceeded even my lofty expectations, and those poems and
sermons are available on our church’s website – www.firstpresjamestown.com
– by clicking the “sermons and articles” link.
Buoyed by that series, I suggested to our staff that we base our Holy
Week and Easter worship on a similar theme: “Four Poems for Holy Week and
Easter.” The poems and sermons for
Palm/Passion Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and now, this poem and sermon
for Easter, also are posted on our website.
–TAS)
One
of the saddest and most diabolical distortions of religion occurs whenever it is
used to distract us from living lovingly, justly, and faithfully in
this life. Religion that
redirects our focus from this life to some other life after this one has little
in common, it seems to me, with the religion of Jesus.
Easter is not primarily about transport from this life into another one
just as eternal life is not about living forever, but living deeply in the
present moment. Eternal life,
properly understood, is not an expression of infinite time.
It is about living our lives now in such a way that their effects for
good radiate outward forever.
About
what happens to us when we die at the end of our days on earth I do not have
much to say today because I do not know. No
one does. A lot of preachers say
they know, but they are not at that point telling the truth. No
one knows. That is why I simply
trust God with my life and my death and my loved ones.
I trust God. Period.
Scripture says that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not
even death, and that is good enough for me.
Meanwhile,
resurrection is for the living. I am
utterly convinced of that. The Bible
has almost nothing to say about what happens to us after this life because its
writers did not know either. Rather,
through the stories of our mothers and father in the faith, it tells of our
human encounters with God, our engagements with the sacred, our experiences with
the divine in this life.
It exhorts us to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly in
this life. It encourages us to
live toward and into our true and full humanity in
this life. So it is a wonderment
to me how and why so many parts of the church go to such great lengths to teach
us to concern ourselves with heaven when Jesus was so deeply interested in
earth.
Resurrection
is a gift of God imprinted on and throughout this life, not something appended
to it at the end of it. The gospel
stories of the resurrection of Jesus are meant to signify God’s “yes” to
the life Jesus lived and the gospel Jesus preached, both of which implore us
above all else to love. “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three…and the greatest of these
is love.” But, to love is
costly. It sometimes seems as if it
asks everything of us, everything we have to give, and there are no guarantees.
Love often bids us to come and die, if not literally, then surely
emotionally and sometimes spiritually, as I suggest in my Easter poem called
Resurrection
Sometimes we give our
hearts to something or someone
and then it or they
are gone.
Loving deeply,
the letting go is
wrenching,
a searing, scarring
agony entombing us
until one day,
amid or after the
weeping and wasting,
we are set free:
alive again.
(TAS – Easter 2008)
How
must the prodigal’s father have felt when his son whom he had so long and
deeply loved announced his defection from the family, demanding his take of the
family fortune, and riding away with no plans to return?
How is it for us when our own children stray, or make ruinous decisions,
or even take their leave of us in the normal way of things?
Sometimes
we give our hearts to something or someone
and
then it or they are gone.
Loving
deeply,
the
letting go is wrenching,
a
searing, scarring agony entombing us…
How
does it feel to stand astride our husband’s open grave, or our wife’s, as
the body of this person we have cherished and touched and with whom we have
shared the intimacies and intricacies of daily living perhaps for decades is
lowered into it…or maybe it is our child to whom we must too soon say good
bye…or a parent who has been for us through all our years just a little less
than God…or a sister, brother…
Sometimes
we give our hearts to something or someone
and
then it or they are gone.
Loving
deeply,
the
letting go is wrenching,
a
searing, scarring agony entombing us…
How
does it feel to be the one to have to liquidate the family business that had
been passed through the generations or to draw down the curtain on a dearly-held
dream? How is it to get the news
that your spouse in a marriage you thought would be forever is leaving you or to
find that a friend of many years to whom you have been utterly faithful has
betrayed you? What does it feel like
to watch the great mainline church tradition you joined long ago and in which
you have been ordained, a church once robust in its social engagement and
passion for peace, slouch toward irrelevance because it lacks the courage of its
prophetic convictions and acquiesces to pietistic pablum and passivity?
Sometimes we give our hearts to something
or someone
and
then it or they are gone.
Loving
deeply,
the
letting go is wrenching,
a
searing, scarring agony entombing us…
How
does it feel to give your heart and soul to your company for years and years and
then one day you are unceremoniously discarded like fish bones wrapped in an old
newspaper? How is it to have a
stroke rob you of your speech but not your mind but no one solicits your
opinions or comes after your expertise anymore?
How does it feel to set aside a great love in consideration of other
commitments and circumstances? How
is it when arthritis gnarls your fingers and you no longer can sit at your
beloved piano making your music?
Sometimes
we give our hearts to something or someone
and
then it
or
they are gone.
Loving
deeply,
the
letting go is wrenching,
a
searing, scarring agony entombing us…
until
one day,
amid
or after the weeping and wasting,
we
are set free:
alive
again.
That
is the incomparable gift of resurrection. We
suffer a thousand deaths along our life’s path.
And yet, time and again, by the grace and power of God’s Spirit who
seems always to provide the ways and means just right for our needs, just right
for our souls, we are raised from the dead to lay hold of life and living once
more.
People
have asked me for as long as I can remember why, in the Apostles’ Creed, it
says, “On the third day he (Jesus) rose again
from the dead?” The answer is
that Jesus died many times before he was crucified on
That,
to me, is Easter and it is what the great stories of the resurrection of Jesus
mean to me for my life in this world….that while love suffers its great losses
in our lives and they may be heavy, horrific, and horrendous, they are never
fatal, futile, or final. For always
the power of God is at work in us to bring us back to life in which we are
enabled and ennobled to continue loving the world and one another.
Sometimes we give our hearts to something or someone
and
then it or they are gone.
Loving
deeply,
the
letting go is wrenching,
a
searing, scarring agony entombing us
until
one day,
amid
or after the weeping and wasting,
we
are set free:
alive
again.
Amen.
© Copyright 2008 First Presbyterian Church