Community
Church Sermons
Third
Sunday of Easter – April 10, 2005
My friend Len Silvester
once walked into a flying school to inquire about flying lessons. When he came
out, he was the owner of an airplane! It was a neat little two-seat Cessna 152.
Imagine that? He owned an airplane, but he didn’t know how to fly!
Len and I met at a minister’s conference. He had just bought his airplane and I had just gotten my pilot’s license. Get the picture? I had a license, but no airplane! Len had an airplane, but no license! So we became friends! And we did a lot of flying together.
One memorable trip took us to visit Len’s sister in Pennsylvania. We took off from Fall River, Massachusetts and flew over Narragansett Bay, over the state of Rhode Island, over Connecticut, over New York City. It was a fantastic flight with clear skies and unlimited visibility. It was beautiful! We flew over New Jersey and then Pennsylvania, making our way toward Pottstown. Every once in a while, we’d take a little detour to see something of interest. All the while the little 112 horsepower Lycoming engine droned smoothly on, sipping gas at a modest rate of about 6 gallons an hour.
Now its about 325 miles from Fall River to Pottstown and Len’s little airplane had a cruising speed of 112 miles per hour. That meant that the flight would last just about three hours, and at 6-gallons of gas an hour, we’d burn 18-gallons. With 24 and a half gallons of usable fuel on board, that would leave us with about 6-gallons – an hour’s reserve. That was good flight planning!
But somewhere along the line, we had forgotten all the little extras – like climbing up high to cross over New York City at about 10,000 feet – like the little side trips to check out an airport here, or a landmark there – like the headwind you almost always run into when flying from east to west. All that used more gas.
That was all bad enough, but what made it worse was that when we finally flew over Pottstown, we couldn’t find the airport! You know, things look different from up above, and besides, there were some clouds we had to fly around! So we flew back and forth over the area until we spotted the runway. The landing – thankfully -was uneventful.
Well, the fuel truck came over and filled us up, and that’s when we realized how close we’d come to disaster. We had used 24.3 gallons of the 24.5 gallons of fuel available. We were just about empty!
Have you ever had an experience like that? I mean, have you had times in your life when you started out full, but ended up running on empty?
I was startled when I first read today’s lesson from the first letter of Peter. His words sliced right through me at one point where he says, “For you know that you were redeemed from the EMPTY way of life handed down to you from your forefathers…”
Empty!
And with those sharp words, 1st Peter is making a powerful claim about the resurrection of Jesus Christ: with the resurrection, we are redeemed and filled with life itself; without the resurrection, we are empty. And Peter makes the further claim that the way of the empty life is the way passed down to us by our forefathers.
This past Friday, our Church Council had a leadership retreat during which we studied a book about the church’s work of transformation[1]. A very powerful part of what we studied was about the stories we adopt into our lives. The author shared about living in Iran during the time of the revolution when the Shah was ousted. Some of you remember that it was a very troubling time.
On Christmas Eve 1978, the writer and his family were gathered around a Christmas tree in their home in Tehran. They were under a mandatory curfew, and so could not attend services at the local German church they usually attended. So they celebrated Christmas Eve as a family in their home.
As darkness fell, they could hear the sounds of conflict outside – people on the rooftops shouting, “Death to the Shah!” and “Death to America!” They could hear the deafening rumble of tanks and armored vehicles, as well as the staccato of machine gun fire. Inside the house, this man and his wife and a friend from the United States did the only thing they could to keep their small children, whom they held in their arms, from hearing the mayhem outside. They sang Christmas carols at the top of their lungs.
Listen to what Rick Barger writes
of that evening: “Two stories were being told that night. The story told in
the streets was a version of one of the oldest of stories, the story of Cain
killing his brother Abel. That story has been reenacted in every age – a tale
of quest for power and the use of force to seize it. It is a story we have
never been able to resolve.”
Then he continues: “The second
story told that night was the story disclosed in the words of our carols:
‘Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn king; peace on earth and
mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.”
And then he makes the crucial point: only one of these two stories can be true.
Only one.
Only one can produce life. Only one can produce peace. Only one can produce reconciliation. Only one can produce the kind of world we all want to live in.
Which story do you think it is? The one passed down to us by our forefathers all the way back to Cain? Or the one that comes to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?
Our forefathers – from time immemorial - have passed down to us a lot of empty ways.
They teach our kids that their value comes from achievement, from good looks, from right clothes, from sex appeal, from popularity. And our kids fly toward these false gods until they run out of gas and crash. The empty way.
They teach us that material possessions will make us happy, that the measure of our lives is the success we attain, that violence can be redemptive, that enemies must be hated, that some people are better than other people, that the poor are poor because they are lazy, and that we are successful because we have been blessed. And as we walk down these ways handed to us by our human forefathers and foremothers, the gas tank of the world hits empty.
“…the empty way of life handed
down to you from your forefathers..”.
Harsh words from the Bible. But oh, so true!
And not only in terms of the world, but in personal ways, too.
There was a fellow in my last church who believed that women should be subservient to men. In fact, he used to say that women should bow down and kiss the feet of men. And when a woman was a bit too uppity for his liking, he used to say that she was in need of what he called, “Cootchie therapy.” I don’t know exactly what “Cootchie therapy” was, but one day he gave it to one of the choir women, and she decked him with a left hook to the chin right there in the middle of our fellowship hall! It was sweet!
And do you know what his excuse was for his bad behavior?
You see, empty ways of life often come to us from our parents and others who influence our lives, and our culture in general. Bad behaviors. Unhealthy habits. Destructive attitudes. Faulty worldviews.
My grandmother grew up in a world where blacks were seen as dirty. My father grew up in a world where men don’t cry. I grew up in a world where winning was everything. You grew up in a world that passed on to you many ways of being and living. And some of them are empty ways. They are life stories that don’t really work and will never bring you the life you want.
But then, there is another story! There is another way! And strangely enough, it, too, is an empty way!
It is the way of the empty cross – the way of the empty tomb – the way of Jesus. 1st Peter points us toward the alternative to the ways of our forefathers, and that alternative is Christ who emptied himself of everything but for a radical trust in God and God’s ways. At the end of his life, you know, they even gambled away his robe, which was his only possession. Jesus died empty handed, but for his faith in God. And now, in the joy of the resurrection, we can see that God came through! While the ways of our forebears continue to lead us and our world to places of great emptiness and destruction, the way of the life emptied of everything but God brings new life and hope to everyone! Christ is risen!
And this past week, we saw a living example of the power of a life emptied of everything but God. According to his last wilI and testament, Karol Jozef Wojtyla (Voy-tee-wa) – Pope John Paul the 2nd – left no worldly possessions when he died. He was empty.
And yet what struck me deeply about the events of the past several days is how the world rallied together to celebrate his life. For a brief moment, the world seemed to be at peace, and out of that moment, some will go home and live their lives under the influence of what they saw in him.
But what was it that we saw? Not any of the measures of life that our forefathers tell us are most important. Not even the edicts he made which, in fact, carry with them great disagreement both inside and outside the church. No, it wasn’t any of that.
It was Christ we saw through him. There knelt in prayer before him three Presidents of the United States, each one of whom Pope John Paul the 2nd had urged not to use,the violence of war to try to bring about peace. The world has been trying that forever. And our Presidents – like all heads of state – largely ignored the pleas for peaceful resolutions to conflict. But even so, Pope John Paul the 2nd loved them and respected them as God’s children. He spoke the truth, but he spoke it in love. And there gathered at his funeral almost all the rulers of the earth, each one humbled by his truth-telling, but loving spirit.
There were Jews there, too. Strange that Jews should be at a Pope’s funeral! But Karol Jozef Woityla (Voy-tee-wa) had reached out to the Jewish world in a way rarely seen among Christians. He called them our “older brothers”, and prayed with them at the Wailing Wall. And Christians and Jews drew closer together.
And there were Muslims, too, at the funeral of the Pope! He was the first Pontiff to go and pray in a mosque. He asked forgiveness for Christians who inflicted terrible injustice and violence upon Muslims in the Crusades. And even in the midst of the great differences that exist between Christians and Muslims, bridges were built from one side to another in the face of a world where terrorism has become the way some try to bring about peace..
We saw Christ in the life of a man. Young people flocked to him because they knew he loved them and valued them not for the things the world values, but for who they are. Handicapped persons found hope in him because he lived through the suffering of his own Parkinson’s disease, demonstrating that all people have value and significance. Many of us were drawn to him, even though his teachings sometimes scolded us for giving in to lesser values than the values of God. But no one doubted the Pope’s love. No one doubted that he had emptied his life of everything to trust entirely in God.
The living Christ was in his heart, and he tried faithfully to let Christ live through him.
He was empty. And yet he was full!.
And the world saw it, and celebrated!
And here is the good news. The same Christ who lived
through Karol Woityla (Voy-tee-wah) has redeemed you, and offers you a
new story, a new way to live. 1st Peter describes it this way: “Through
Jesus you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and
so your faith and hope are in God.”
No longer are we tied to the empty ways of our forebears.
No longer must we conform to the false story of Cain and Abel, or the false
story of materialism, or the false story of self-sufficiency, or the false
story of “Cootchy therapy”, or any of the other empty ways handed down from
time immemorial.
Now we can live by another story – the story of the risen
Jesus Christ, which brings life, and healing, and hope, and joy to the world!
No matter how you slice it, life ends up in emptiness. We
come into the world with nothing. We leave the world with nothing. The question
is: with what shall we fill our lives between the two?