The Fifth Sunday of Easter

April 20, 2006

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

The text from John’s Gospel we read today is the same text read at my uncle’s graveside service last weekend. We were standing around on a warm and bright North Carolina spring day surrounded by budding flowers and bright green new growth on the trees. The minister was not Episcopalian and his translation was the King James Version, but the point was the same.

There we were standing in that mysterious place where our faith leads us, where people grieve and celebrate all at once—one minute shedding tears and the next laughing in the midst of family and friends; it is a place like no other. Our prayer book puts it this way, the occasion “is characterized by joy…; this joy, however, does not make human grief unchristian…. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend.”

So here we gather in this season of Easter, a time of joy dramatized by the lighting of the Paschal candle and its consequent bringing of light into darkness, turning grief into joy. And the nave still looks like Easter: the Paschal candle still burning, the coronation tapestry still hanging, the triumphal melodies still ringing. There are only a few Easter lilies left, but even so the place is dressed up, festive, the best of our silver vessels glistening in anticipation of feast.

Within this season of joy, though, our texts this morning—the texts assigned in our lectionary—at first struck me as being a little out of place. Somewhere along the way we went from resurrection stories: encounters with the risen Christ, the Christ’s appearances to Mary Magdalene and Thomas and people walking the way to Emmaus, back to Jesus’ farewell discourse, back on the way to the cross, trying to prepare people, trying to assuage their grief: “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus tells the people around him.

And what’s more, we also get ahead of ourselves, gazing into what this post-resurrection community is going to be like, speculating about what it’s all going to mean, and the joy dissipates into horror once more as a new deacon, filled with the spirit, clear of his new vocation, becomes the first martyr: stoned to death, lying motionless in a pool of cold blood. And this is Easter season? The place still looks like Easter; the church calls it Easter, but what happened to the joy, the festivity?

My mother phoned me early on a Wednesday morning to tell me that her brother had died. She had been keeping me informed in the days prior to that; the family realized it was only a matter of days, but even coming to that realization didn’t really take away the shock, the finality, the helplessness of death. My mother told me how she felt as if everyone around her-- her family, her friends, everyone-- was being taken away from her. She was confronting her humanity, our humanity, our helplessness, our mortality.

Her frame of mind was probably something like that of Jesus’ disciples—people like you and me, walking with Jesus on the way to the cross listening, trying to make sense of things, interjecting, asking questions, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” “Lord show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” They are people searching, struggling, wrestling with their faith, longing for answers, confronting their brokenness and confusion, even here in Easter season.

And the same old worldly platitudes, the same old worldly answers, the same old worldly masks just won’t do. We can’t buy our way out of this state. We can’t run. We can’t hide. We come here people in need, people in search of something larger, something—someone-- capable of sorting out all that weighs on our mind, turning chaos into creation, death into resurrection: God.

And it’s especially significant that, as broken people, we’re reading these accounts today from John’s Gospel. Of all the evangelists, John especially doesn’t let us get away with watering down our faith, from regarding it as a bank of easy object lessons or taming it too much. John from the very beginning wants us to see something larger—he knows we need something larger, something beyond our selves, something capable of reaching in, restoring hope. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” There is order, there is a plan of salvation, even when we don’t recognize it.

But John also wants us to see how God is not just out there, some abstract being, inapproachable, irrelevant; God is someone we encounter, someone real, someone who intrudes upon the world in which we live, shakes it up, makes a difference. In his farewell discourse, Jesus identifies himself with real things, things with which people are familiar: “I am the bread”; “I am the vine”; “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The “I am” statements Jesus uses here are not arbitrary. They call to mind an earlier narrative with which pious Jews would have been intimately familiar. Hopefully pious Episcopalians are intimately familiar with it as well. Moses encounters God, also in a worldly, tangible form although not so approachable in the form of a burning bush. Moses asks God for God’s Name, to which God replies: “I am who I am.” My name is “I am.” Jesus’ series of “I am” statements play on those earlier words. “I am the bread”; “I am the vine”; “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; I am the resurrection.

Jesus is identifying as God: not in an abstract sense, and not in a frightening, fiery, cloud of smoke--kind of way, but as someone real, life-sustaining, relevant, approachable: the kind of God we need when otherwise overwhelmed in desperation.

Jesus is saying yes, I know how things can be, and if you think we’ve seen darkness now, just wait for what is to come in this cross-filled world, this broken creation. But that’s not what I want you to focus on. I want you to focus on the kingdom breaking in, glimpses of it shining all around, God making creation whole again, the joy of Eastertide. I want you to have faith like your forebears, Judeans exiled in Babylon, having been stripped of their homes, their temple, their dignity, the utter helplessness we felt on 9/11 compounded many times, and still they managed to tell a story of God’s creation, God’s capacity to make something even out of a “formless void.” We are people of hope.

I referenced my uncle’s funeral, but you may recall that another funeral, the burial service for Marilyn Lagrange, took place here the day after Ash Wednesday. There we were, like now, like most of our lives, caught in this strange experience of death and ashes, but still we manage to tell the story of resurrection. I underscored in my sermon that day that the central claim of the Christian faith is not “Of dust you are and to dust you shall return,” although that is true. The central claim of the Christian faith is “Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed.” We are an Easter people. We experience life and death through the lens of Christ’s resurrection. That’s what this season is about. That’s what our faith is about.

But it works the other way, too. “Alleluia, Christ is risen” would be an empty message if it weren’t for the death that preceded it. We’d be missing the point if we took it as a ticket to remove ourselves from worldly realities like war and oppression, hatred and injustice, suffering and death. Remember how Jesus called us to take up our cross and follow him? The joy of the Easter message, though, is that those realities aren’t the last word. God’s love for us, God’s intrusion into this world and our lives, God’s life giving Spirit: they get that distinction.

Standing out there that day at my uncle’s gravesite in that strange, mysterious place where sorrow and joy come together, I listened as the words of my namesake rang out, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” The words resonated with me. Maybe I’m aptly named, or else maybe Thomas was speaking for all of us. Lord, in this broken world, “how can we know the way?” I suspect we’ve all uttered those words a time or two.

And that’s when I heard those other words, words of assurance, melodious words that somehow, mysteriously, make all the difference in the world: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” God is. And I walked away with this strange feeling of joy.

Amen.