The Unstoppable Goodness of God
By Charles Rush
April 8, 2012
Isaiah 25: 6-9 and Mark 16: 1-8
[ Audio
(mp3, 3.9Mb) ]
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And when the Sabbath
was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had
bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.
And … they came
unto the sepulchre … And when they looked,
they saw that the stone was rolled away... And entering,
they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long
white garment; and they were affrighted.
And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of
Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is
not here: behold the place where they laid him.
But go
your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth
before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.
And they went
out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they
trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing
to any man; for they were afraid.
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ack-jawed amazement… What just happened? Can it be? Wait a minute?
In the late 80's Alexander Ogorodnikov
was languishing in a cell in the middle Gulag in Russia where he had been for
many years as an enemy of the state, an enemy of communist faithful. He wrote
letter after letter but never got any response from people he knew, so he
assumed that they never got delivered. Day after day in an
unlit cell, month after month only in the yard for a freezing hour, year after
year without any contact with his family.
One morning,
his cell door opens, and the guards take him to see the Warden. He was given
civilian clothes and the Warden made a speech about things in the outside world
that he didn't understand. Ten minutes later, the guards marched him to the
door. The next thing he knew, he was walking down an empty rural road in the
middle of nowhere, no idea of where he was headed next. For quite a while, he
told me that he was waiting for someone to just grab him and take him back. And
he was so dazed by the sun, the smell of the earth in the countryside, dappled
in freedom. One truck drove by him without stopping. Another.
He kept walking and walking.
Finally, he
couldn't control himself, like a floodgate he just started weeping, fell to the
ground, and he lay there looking at the blurry sky like a little boy, giddy,
almost intoxicated… What if? What if?
Like the
mother, who is not able to conceive, holding before her the positive results of
a pregnancy test. No, this can't be. But, what if?
What if? To me. You can't talk to anybody about it.
You have to see the Doctor right away.
What if…
despite all of the tragedy and disappointment, all of the injustice and cruelty…
at the heart of the universe, there is a burning coal of goodness that cannot
be stopped?
The followers
of Jesus remember that we had unmitigated goodness in our midst in the person
of Jesus. We didn't quite understand it. We didn't quite trust it and in the
end, we ended up tragically killing it. We ran away from it, denied we knew it
intimately. It was one of those weeks you would rather forget because we didn't
look good at all.
But what if? What if, we can't exactly kill God's goodness? What
if we can't wear it down? What if we can't get it to change focus? What if
death can't stop God from coming after us?
We don't know
exactly what happened to those first disciples, but it was a ‘what if' moment.
What if the Goodness of God is slightly stronger than all of the
destructiveness we humans are capable of.
What if the forces of God's reconciliation are slightly
stronger than our anarchy?
What if the center of the universe is actually driven by love
and not indifference?
What if compassion and hope radiate from the heart of our
world?
What if the Higher purposes of God
cannot be stopped by our willful resistance?
What if Love is
the higher way? Like any young person when someone first loves them, you have a
moment where you don't believe that it is happening. You know yourself. Me? Someone
loves me?
Those first
women and those first disciples, saw something eternal
in the constancy of love that Jesus lived, the constancy in the way that he
died. And that love transcended death.
What do you do
when you experience something that unexpected, something that good? You can't
just go back to the old way, doing the old things. In that moment, your life
just opens up before you, like a friend of mine that survived a battle that
raged all night when their boat should have sank but didn't. He should have
died in the pacific and didn't. ‘Every day since then', he told me, ‘has been
plus one'.
You get a new
focus, a new purpose, and this one starts as a ‘fundamental gift from God'.
What a blessing to have that moment, where you can genuinely say, ‘my life is a
gift, my spouse is a gift, my friends and family are a
gift. And I am going to live out of my higher self…
Those disciples
had that ‘aha' moment, a few here, a few there. And they found each other and
they shared what they were experiencing. They had all been running away. They
had all been determined by their fears, by their anxieties, by their lower
selves.
But they found
each other, they shared the gift like character of existence that they were all
experiencing, and they turned around, and they started heading for Jerusalem to
reconstitute themselves to living in that higher way.
They collected
some friends. They told their families. Even some strangers got involved and
they started a movement that kept picking up pace year after year, decade after
decade, century after century. Hundreds, then thousands, then millions headed
toward Jerusalem to dedicate their lives to the higher way of love that we have
seen in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The first time
I made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, there were hundreds of teenagers with me,
literally from all over the world walking up a road that had been traveled by
people before us for 2000 years, stopping at the same monasteries and shrines,
offering prayers, making commitments to God. By the time you get up to the
gates of the ancient City, there are just thousands upon thousands of people.
And when I try
to imagine this through the centuries, you just realize that we are traveling
on a river of community that precedes us. They don't have the answer to every
problem. But they all recognize that this higher way of love is the way that
will lead us home. This higher way of love will open the deeper resources of
our spiritual selves, so that the fuller purpose can be realized.
So that this
morning, across our world, 1,600 million people, a third of the population of
the world, will join with us in committing themselves to this higher way of
love and to come together and give thanks to God and connect with the Grace and
Gift of life that God has bestowed upon us, a love and grace that is more
constant than the returning spring.
I just want to
remind you this morning that you matter to God, that you are important to God.
And through you, God can do great things because you are a child of God. Take
yourself seriously. Believe in yourself. Commit yourself to the higher way. And
join the happy chorus that will lead you towards your true home, towards a life
with real fulfillment and meaning through God's love.
And a special
word to all those who come here this day, seeking some kind of blessing,
because it has been a deeply trying year, a personally really tragic year…
Through the Christ, we see that God is with us and for us, even in the midst of
injustice, even in the midst of suffering, ‘even though we walk through the
valley of the shadow of death.' All of it can be redeemed, all of it can be
healed, the goodness of God, so extensive that God's meaning can fill what is
seemingly meaningless. Nothing is beyond the realm of God's goodness.
So we don't
fear the great unknown of the future. We don't even fear death, the great wide
unknown. God's goodness is deeper and broader than death itself. And just as we
trust in the goodness of life, even when it is broken, because we know that God
is beaming goodness from the soul of the universe, so we trust in the future
and the unknown of death, because God's goodness is good in death as well as
life.
Those first
Christians used to celebrate the communion with honey on Easter as well as
bread and wine, remembering the ‘sweetness of God's grace' in this life. And
so, we shall all add some delicacies and sweetness at lunch today.
Delight in the
play of children, may you be blessed to find new love in your life this season,
give thanks for all that you have to be grateful for, live out of your gracious
self. My brothers and sisters, ‘God is not done with you yet.' Amen.
