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Celebrate What? Gospel: John
17:6-19 Have you ever noticed that the official title given in the Book of Common Prayer to the worship service that we're engaged in here this morning is "A Celebration of Holy Communion"? You can check it out for yourself on page 315. I mention that because the assumption is that each one of us has come here to celebrate and the person who leads that activity is called the celebrant. Now that raises the question: What have you got to celebrate this morning? Just this past week I was in Louisiana as part of a national church Clergy training program called CREDO, an excellent spiritual and practical opportunity for priests to take a fresh look at their own life and career to see how things are going. One of the older, retired participants shared with me his perception that he currently doesn't see much in his own life to feel good about. He proceeded to run through a sort of litany: "I'm not working so each day is empty and pointless. My eyesight is terrible, even with these huge trifocal eyeglasses. I don't hear probably half of what people are saying. The stock market just about wiped out the money I had set aside for retirement. My wife has Alzheimer’s and doesn't even know who I am." I suppose that if I asked anyone here this morning how things are going I might hear a similar list of concerns and disappointments; in short, more reasons not to celebrate than causes for celebration. There was, in fact, an item in the newspaper not too long ago about a minister who decided to include the voices of his congregation in the joy of the Offertory. As he raised the alms bason for the singing of the Doxology, he said, "Let us name aloud the blessings which we celebrate this morning." There was dead silence! He waited a moment and when no one spoke up, he stopped the worship service, dismissed the congregation, and bid them to return the next Sunday with something to celebrate. Now don't get your hopes up, I don't have the courage of that guy who dramatically dismissed his flock to go consider their blessings. Besides, even if I thought that no one here had anything to celebrate, I do and I want to tell you why. Today is the final Sunday of the liturgical season of Easter, which ends next Sunday on Pentecost. Easter is, for all Christians, the equivalent of the Jewish observance of Passover that, incidentally, this year almost coincided with Easter, happening as it did on Maundy Thursday. Passover celebrates that event way back thirteen centuries before Jesus when the Hebrews were slaves of the Pharaoh in Egypt. God raised up Moses to lead them out into freedom in what we now refer to as The Exodus. The word "Passover" comes from the fact that the angel of death whom God sent to punish Pharaoh was instructed to pass over the homes of the Hebrews, whose doorposts were painted with the blood of a lamb. So then, as today, Jews annually celebrate their deliverance by God's hand, their passage from death into life, and their establishment as a nation of God's own people. Today on this final Sunday of Easter season, I would certainly suggest that, insofar as Easter is the Christian Exodus, we by our Baptism, have some of the same things to celebrate. Things like our deliverance by God, our passage from death into life, and our origins as the community of Christian Faith. Still, even with that having been said, there is a much more personal level of what we have to celebrate together that I want to explore. In one more month, across this entire country we will be celebrating the Fourth of July—National Independence Day. The similarities of Passover and Easter that I've been describing are primarily around one important and powerful theme and that theme is Liberty. On Independence Day we will be thinking about freedom and I submit to you that Easter and Passover are like a spiritual Independence Day. What I'm getting at is that Easter provides all of us every Sunday (and everyday, for that matter) with some basic freedoms that are very worth celebrating. f you're not sure whether you have anything to celebrate this morning, let me offering four freedoms that come to my mind this morning: I. The first freedom Easter gives us to celebrate is Freedom from high pressure and hard-heartedness. The message of Easter is that the cross is empty. All of the burden that we put upon ourselves to succeed, to do right, to prove that we're better than others, or the constant drive to accumulate treasures rather than sharing with those less fortunate is completely unnecessary. What a relief that is from self-imposed demands! The wonderful good news is that God loves us and accepts us. Such generous, gracious, unconditional love frees us to live for others. Everything that there is to earn or win is ours as a gift from our Creator. It's yours for the asking and it's your both to enjoy and also to give away. II. The next freedom that Easter gives us is Freedom from hatred and blame-fixing. We don't have to get involved in the way of the world where, all around us, we see and hear people scapegoating one another. The world seeks "an eye for an eye", retaliation and revenge. As Christians we are enabled to understand, to love and to forgive. We don't have to rail against terrorists, Arabs, welfare cheats, corporate extortionists, drug dealers or anybody else. The blood of Jesus, the true paschal lamb, is available for the doorpost of every person on this planet. Easter tells us that it is God who said these words, "Forgive them because they know not what they do." Easter frees us to read the headlines and run the courtrooms with the firmness and compassion of justice rather than blind vengeance. III. The third freedom Easter offers us is Freedom from habits that consume us. I don't care whether your particular habit is smoking, pills, drinking, gossip, TV shows, or whatever it is that eats up your time, treasure and talent. I'm talking about those diversions that we employ to avoid facing reality. What Easter does is to tell us that reality is OK—that, as Jesus showed on the cross when he was offered drugged wine to ease the pain, we don't need any opiates. Easter offers no Utopia but it says that God goes with you into all the darkness and pain and that, with him, we are "more than conquerors." IV. Finally, Easter gives us Freedom from the hell of separation. Not only all the personal hells of hate, high-pressure, hard-heartedness and habits that consume us find their antidote in Easter's good news—there is also the larger and eternal spectre of alienation and meaninglessness. The promise of the resurrection is empty if it is only the continuation of the same frustration and disappointment that we experience so often here on earth. Immortality without joy, satisfaction and purpose is simply eternal misery. Easter holds out to you the Vision of a new plane of existence in which we are constantly in the loving presence of God—no more loneliness, no more confusion. Is that not a prospect incredibly worthy of celebration? So, then, before these last few precious days of Easter 2003 slip away from us, let's bring to the altar and celebrate the freedoms that God has given us: freedom from high-pressure and hard-heartedness, hatred and blame-fixing, habits that consume us, and the hell of separation. These are some of the astoundingly freeing dimensions of the new Exodus I want you to know about and this is why I am convinced that Easter makes all other declarations of independence, bill of rights, magna chartas simply pale by comparison. Easter says you are free. Not born free—but purchased at a very great price, the suffering and death undertaken for you on the hard wood of the cross. The buyer is none other than God. Your loving creator has bought you back to be with Christ forever. It's a level of freedom with present and eternal dimensions. It's a message that is, literally, life-changing. That's what I intend to celebrate this morning. Will you join me at the banquet table? Copyright 2003 Calvary Episcopal Church Gospel:
John 17:6-19 |
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