Dear friends in Christ,
The hardest sermons to write are those for Christmas and Easter. There is pressure to be “fresh” and “relevant” as we are all aware that there will be people here who only come on the big days–Christmas and Easter – and we can become focused and even desperate in our preaching efforts that you and they hear the Good News, walk away knowing that they are beloved of God, encouraged to return for more.
These well intentioned efforts could betray a lack of faith in the actual stories we hear and the power of the Holy Spirit to enter the hearts of listeners, but I hope not. I understand the story of salvation we find in the Bible, and in our lives together as the Body of Christ, to be ever fresh and always relevant. The challenge is to listen, read, mark and inwardly digest this story for ourselves and in community!
The Good News of the Incarnation at Christmas and the Resurrection at Easter is revealed to us in the Gospel accounts we have been given. The job of the preacher is to point to Christ, to the amazing salvation we inherit because of God’s covenant and love for God’s people. Jesus comes to us as a vulnerable human baby and then dies a horrendous, unjust, painful death as he suffers in solidarity with our human condition. Through this act of self-sacrifice, we are promised forgiveness of our sins and eternal life. An incredible story. An amazing promise. A promise given by our God who is a God who keeps God’s promises!
My words in a sermon, human and imperfect every week, are hopefully a conduit for the Spirit’s work in our world; a moment in time when this wondrous story is told, when prayers are prayed, that God’s truth of Resurrection–new life in Christ for each one of us is proclaimed.
In my preparations to preach on Easter morning, I discovered a poem. Many of you know that I love poetry. The careful selection of words and the ordering of those words often provide a unique perspective and a challenge to understand something in a new way. This poem, by John Updike, most well-known for his Pulitzer Prize winning fiction and his essays, moved me to no end. I have read Updike’s “Rabbit” series, and many of his essays, and did not know until this morning that he was a person of faith.
Updike’s poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” confronts us with the true story of Easter for our lives. I am grateful to John Updike, of blessed memory, for putting these words together in this way. I pray it may touch you as well in this season, and soften whatever doubts or metaphors you may have about the Easter Good News…may Updike (as well as the Gospel writers, one another, and your human, imperfect preachers) encourage you to receive the Good News of Easter once again.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
John Updike (1932–2009)
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Easter blessings,
Nancy+
Footnote: John Updike (1932–2009) was a novelist, poet, short story writer, and critic. He is one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once — in 1982 for Rabbit is Rich and in 1991 for Rabbit at Rest. He also won two National Book Awards and three National Book Critics Circle awards. When he died he was working on a novel about St. Paul and early Christianity.
Notes courtesy of Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net