“New Light on an Old Prayer”
“Thine…Forever”
1 Corinthians 15:35-58
First Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
April
8, 2007
Easter Day
“For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
forever.”
Text:
“Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in
the work of the Lord,
because
you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
-1 Corinthians 15:58
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A group of linguists recently
has asserted that the ability to create and to understand puns represents the
highest level of language development. To
illustrate their point, they offered several examples of puns that, as a reward
for coming through the snow this morning, I now am placing in your Easter sermon
basket:
A
group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby
discussing their recent tournament victories.
After an hour or so, the manager came out of his office and asked the
group to disperse. “But, why?”
they asked as they began to make their way to their rooms.
“Because,” the manager said, “ we cannot tolerate chess-nuts
boasting in an open foyer.”
A woman gives birth to twins
and, because of personal circumstances, puts them up for adoption.
One of them goes to a family in
A group of friars are behind
on their rectory payments and so they open a flower shop in order to raise
money. Since everyone likes to buy
their flowers from these men of God to support a good cause, a rival florist
down the street thinks the competition is unfair.
He asks the good fathers to close their shop, but they will not.
He pleads with them a second time to shut their doors, but the friars
refuse. So, the rival florist hires
an enforcer by the name of Hugh McTaggart to, uh, persuade them to close.
Hugh threatens the friars and trashes their store and tells them he will
be back if they do not close their business.
Terrified, they do so, proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.
Mahatma Gandhi, as you know,
walked barefoot most of the time and that produced an impressive set of calluses
on his feet. He also ate very little
which made him rather frail and, because of his odd diet, he also suffered from
bad breath. All of which made him,
then, a super-callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
Well,
clever as those puns are in terms of language development, I would suggest to
the linguists that it takes even more ability to find words to speak of Easter
and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here is at least partial proof:
how many of you want to trade places with me right now and try to explain
the resurrection?
But maybe that is the problem.
We try to explain the resurrection whereas Easter and resurrection
belong to the realm of mystery. Our
faith suffers sometimes because we try to say too much.
No one, after all, saw the resurrection of Jesus.
And yet, the church and its preachers often have pontificated about the
resurrection as if we are able to refer to photographs.
Even so, even without
photographic proof, it is clear to me that something momentous happened in the
days after the death of Jesus that to this day continues to change both lives
and life. The disciples who had
abandoned Jesus in the last days before his crucifixion, for instance, were
utterly transformed and empowered by whatever happened and remained so for the
rest of their lives. The
resurrection of Jesus is real. It
happened. It happens.
But it is not resuscitation. Resuscitation
revives a corpse for a while, but then it someday dies again.
We are not celebrating the resuscitation of Jesus today, but
resurrection, and that is something else entirely.
Resurrection cannot finally be
described or defined, only intimated and hinted.
The
problem with explanation is that we read the gospel stories and take them
literally and see history where we ought to be reading the gospels and
participating in their liturgy. So
we get caught up in fruitless and irrelevant debates about whether Jesus really
walked on water, whether he really fed five thousand people with a few loaves
and fishes, and, where Easter is concerned, if he really walked bodily out of a
tomb. But, the gospels are not
history books. They are not
biographies of Jesus. They are
worship books written by evangelists whose stories and metaphors and pictures of
Jesus mean to cry “Glory!” because even after his crucifixion his disciples
and followers experienced his presence and, in him and through him, a oneness
with God. The gospels are worship
books intending to convey the ecstatic exhilaration discovered by the followers
of Jesus that when all seemed lost, when Jesus was dead and cold and buried,
something beyond their wildest imagining was found.
They found that not even death can restrain love.
They found that not even death can constrain the presence and power of
God. They found that not even death
can compromise the hope of the gospel.
So,
I do not believe that Jesus was resuscitated, but that Jesus was raised from the
dead and lives, whatever that means? I
believe that. Not only
because many testified to it in scripture. Not
only because I have seen the resplendent fruit of the Jesus-seed that was
planted in the ground at his death blossom forth in the lives of people like
Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Daniel Berrigan and so many others over the
years and in so many of you. But
also because there have been so many times in my own life when the presence of
the spirit of Christ has been unmistakable and my life has taken certain turns
because of that presence when otherwise I may well have gone down other roads.
It
is remarkable to me the language that Archbishop Romero of
That
sounds similar to Jesus, does it not, who in preparing his disciples for the
probability of his death told them that if he dies, then the spirit that
enlivened him will be unleashed on earth in a new and powerful way and
come into the consciousness of many people and help them to live similarly
emboldened, ennobled lives as his. In
fact, Jesus said, they will do even greater works than he did.
He was not talking about resuscitation, for the reach of one person, even
if he or she has been brought to life again, is limited.
But resurrection goes beyond resuscitation and means to say that the same
spirit that was in Jesus is now unlimited and unrestrained and available to all
the children of God, to all the children of humanity.
A truly cosmic Christ.
So,
two thousand years later and across the sea from
Throughout
these Sundays in Lent, I have been suggesting that the Lord’s Prayer is
not what it first appears to be or what we commonly make of it.
It is not a prayer more holy than any other.
It is not God’s favorite prayer. It
contains no miraculous power so that by its repetition we can get God to do
something. It is, instead, the core
of what Jesus heard God “saying” to him over time as he engaged in silent
prayer during his life on earth, as he “tuned into” God’s Spirit, as the
Aramaic would have it, or, alternately, as he “set a trap” in the silence to
catch the dream and drift of God. It
is a summation of his life and gospel.
The
final sentence of the prayer, though, does not belong to Jesus.
While the rest of the prayer can demonstrably be linked to him, scholars
are in unanimous agreement that the last sentence of the Lord’s Prayer
was appended to it long after Jesus died by the early Christian community, by
the early church. The sentence
claims that everything that Jesus caught in his praying about God and passed on
to his followers is true and it commends to us the manner of living presented in
the prayer. It uses the language of
resurrection, saying, “Thine, (O God), is the kingdom and the power and the
glory, forever.”
Amen.
© Copyright First Presbyterian Church 2007