Something to Live For

Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris

April 11, 2004

Scripture:  Psalms 118:1-2, 14-24 and Luke 24:1-12

Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed!

Recently, I was browsing in a bookstore, one of my favorite pastimes.  I was in the Religion section checking out recent arrivals.  Two teen-age girls, dressed as though they wanted to look really tough, came by and one exclaimed in horror:  “Oh, shoot (!).  We’re in the Bible section.  Let’s get outta here!”

I was really tempted to go after them, not so much to try and talk them out of their feelings as to hear and understand what in the world had ever happened to them that they would feel that way about Bibles.  “Let’s get outta here!” 

Then I thought about Jesus’ disciples and how they must have felt after his burial - so forlorn and dejected.  Perhaps believing that all his efforts had been in vain, that their faith in him had been misplaced.  “Let’s get outta here,” they must have thought on Calvary’s hill, eager to return to the safer ground of their homes and livelihoods.   

And yet, they hung around.  They checked it out for themselves.  They looked into the now-empty tomb.  They began to share the news with one another.  Soon they were shouting it to all the world.  Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is risen!

So here we are on this Easter morning, all of us right here in the Bible section.  Perhaps some here this morning are surprised to be here, after all in the Bible section.  Needing to hear it again:  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed! 

Whoever we are, however it is that we came to be here this morning in worship, we have come to be assured that it is indeed true.  This morning, just like every morning, this is the truth that gives us something to live for.

There is perhaps no stranger truth to be found on this earth.  No wonder we need to hear it again and again.  For as the great and beautiful Katherine Hepburn, who died just this past June at the age of 96, once said:  “Life is hard.  After all, it kills you.”  I don’t have to tell you that this world of ours can be a pretty rotten and scary place.  It’s full of war and violence. It’s full of people hurting other people and messing up the earth itself.  It’s full of illness and dying and suffering of all kinds. 

And God’s children—that would be us—don’t seem to be very capable of setting it right, do we?  Often times we don’t even seem particularly adept at making good decisions in our own personal lives.  We mess up.  We hurt those we love.  We abuse our bodies.  We take our closest relationships for granted.  We even forget that God is God.  We want out of the Bible section.

There’s been so much said all through the Lenten season just ended about the movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”  Although I’m not a big fan for a variety of reasons, this much can be said:  it certainly got people talking about theology!  The whole country seems to have been in the Bible section for a couple months now, sorting out just what is and isn’t true about the death of Jesus.  

Now, on this Easter morning, we affirm what we know about the life and the resurrection of Jesus.  That whatever suffering still exists on this earth, God through Christ Jesus has already felt it and experienced it first hand.   God is with us in our experience of this life - all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly.   It is this same God now who redeems it, who heals it, who makes it whole.  God raises Christ from the dead.  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!

The great scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, once said:  “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.”  God did just that in Christ Jesus, who lived and shared our suffering and died.  But then God raised him from the dead.  Jesus Christ embodied God’s perfect idea of life triumphing over pain and death.

In the resurrection, God does something entirely new on the face of this earth.  He works the most amazing miracle of all.  God conquers death.  God conquers sin.  God conquers all fear and brokenness.  God heals every wound.  That’s what gives us something to live for.  No matter what we experience, Christ is risen.  No matter how we mess up, Christ is risen.  No matter how sharp the pain, Christ is risen.  No matter how sorry the past or how bleak the future, Christ is risen.     No matter what, we have life in abundance, now and forever.  Christ is risen.  He is risen indeed!

Earlier this month, the primatologist and conservationist, famed chimpanzee researcher, Jane Goodall, was in Los Angeles, speaking at the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino.  I want to commend to you her beautiful autobiography entitled Reason for Hope:  A Spiritual Journey.   Now at age 70, Goodall reflects on that which has given her purpose and strength and hope through a life of fame and success to be sure, but, like all human life, a life that has suffered.  The death of her husband, environmental degradation, threats to the chimpanzees and gorillas she has studied and loved.  She describes growing up in a Christian home:  “Our family’s religion was never rammed down our throats, we were never forced to attend church, and we did not say grace before our meals except at school.  However, we were expected to say our prayers at night, kneeling on the floor at the side of the bed.  From the beginning, we were taught the importance of human values such as courage, honesty, compassion, and tolerance.”

She describes an experience thirty years ago, finding herself as we might now say “in the Bible section,” sitting in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and hearing the organ:  Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.”  

She writes:  “It was the glorious reverberation of the organ in an ancient place of worship, sanctified over hundreds of years by the sincere prayers of so many thousands of people.  The impact was so powerful I suppose because it came at a time when so much was changing in my life, when I was vulnerable.  When I was, without knowing it, needing to be reconnected with the Spirit Power I call God—or perhaps I should say being reminded of my connection.…Now...through experience and reflection, I believe that there was a specific message for me…a very simple one:  each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference.  Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other. “

Even now, past “retirement age,” Dr. Goodall travels the world lecturing tirelessly 300 days a year, raising funds for conservation and educational projects. Jane Goodall years ago found something to live for and that faith has sustained her through decades of determined and selfless work on behalf of the world and all of God’s great creation.

Her foundation, the Jane Goodall Institute, has started a program for high school students called “Lessons of Hope,” encouraging and empowering youth to recognize their personal values and to shape them into activities that benefit their communities.  To them, Dr. Goodall says:  “Each one of you can make a positive difference in the world.”

By her life and work, Dr. Jane Goodall testifies, “Christ is Risen.”  Her work and her words proclaim that the resurrection is a power that touches all of life.  It is new possibility, new life, and power beyond our control and outside all our rules.  Easter is the unimaginable alternative to a world so stuck in its ways that there can be nothing new under the sun.  Easter means that every life makes a difference and that for each of us, there is something to live for. 

I worry for those two girls that couldn’t wait to hurry out of the Bible section of the bookstore.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I bet they also felt that there’s not much worth living for.  Perhaps they, like so many of us, have unconsciously absorbed the fatalism, the passive resignation that inhabits so much of our culture.  It’s no use.  It doesn’t matter.  Why bother?  What good will it do?  We lament.  And all the time, the witness of Scripture and the Christian community is offering another way.  Christ is risen, and that changes everything.  “Because he lives, I can face tomorrow,” the song goes.  “Because he lives, all fear is gone.  And I know he holds the future, and life is worth the living just because he lives.”

Perhaps you have come to worship today, like Jane Goodall that day in the cathedral, needing to re-connect to God.  Needing to hear the message that each one of us matters and has a role to play makes a difference.  That each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.  For you, for all of us, the power of God opened the tomb of death and brought forth life, new life for the world and new life for each of us. 

Rev. Peter Gomes has said that life begins when God gets our attention. God rolled away the stone and got the attention of those first women at the tomb.  God got the attention of Simon Peter and the other disciples.  God got the attention of Jane Goodall, and through her, countless students.  Today, on this Easter Sunday, amidst this extravaganza of lilies and music and our best clothes, today God has our attention.  Life begins!  Each of us matters.  It’s time, as the poet Wendell Berry said; it’s time to practice resurrection. 

Christ is alive and he calls to us in our daily lives, saying simply:  “Practice resurrection--follow me.”  Follow me, to life fulfilled beyond the imagining.  Follow me, to a life full of joy and purpose and hope.  Follow me, Christ says, and I will give you something to live for.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!