John 20:1-18 "The Easter Question"

         An Uber driver picked up a passenger.  They drove in silence for a long while – the driver, of course, in the front seat, and the passenger right behind him in the back.  As the many miles went, by, the passenger leaned over to ask the driver a question and gently tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention.

The driver in turn screamed, lost control of the car, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass store window. For a few moments, everything was silent in the car. 

Then, the visibly shaking driver took a deep breath and said to his passenger, "Are you OK? You scared the living daylights out of me."

The equally shaken up passenger apologized to the driver and said, "I am so sorry.  I did not realize that a mere tap on the shoulder would startle someone so badly."

"No, no, I'm the one who is sorry,” the driver replied.  “It is entirely my fault. You see, today is my first day driving for Uber.  For the past 25 years, I have been driving a hearse.”

Why do you come to church on Easter? After all, to be sitting here on these hard wooden pews is no longer one of our required cultural mores or a societal expectation.  

 Do you come to hear the preacher tell a faintly macabre but still funny joke?  Or to smell the sweet fragrance of lilies and see spring flowers actually in bloom?  Or to pretend that you are Pavarotti singing the Hallelujah Chorus with great gusto? Or because your spouse or mother reminded you that the last time you were in church was Christmas Eve? 

Or do you come because you have experienced the world to be a pretty dark place these days, and you have tried everything else and wonder if maybe the preacher will say something – anything – that will bring meaning and perspective to it all?  Why do you come to church on Easter?

If you come for the faintly macabre but still funny joke, well, you heard it.  If you come for the lilies and spring flowers, what you smell and see is what you get.  If you come to imagine yourself as Pavarotti singing the Hallelujah Chorus with great gusto, hang tight.  And if you come because your spouse or mother reminded you that the last time you were in church was Christmas Eve – well, that is between you and your spouse or mother.

However, if you come because you have experienced the world as a pretty dark place these days – what with the release of the Mueller Report, the pain and suffering on our Southern border, too many tweets, and so much fake news you do not really know who to believe, and, to top it off, the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris this past Holy Week, which seems, as blogger Christine Sine notes, “to spread a pall of smoke over all our good intentions and unfulfilled dreams.” If you have come for that reason, then you are not all that different from Mary when she set out for the garden tomb where Jesus had been hastily buried just three days before.  

Three of the Gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) tell us that the women waited until sunrise, or first light, or the breaking dawn to show up with their funeral spices.  But not the Gospel of John: for this Gospel writer, Mary tiptoed into the graveyard while it was still dark – still dark - a metaphor for her world.  No sunlight on the horizon yet, and she was afraid to even ask what will become the Easter question: In a world as dark as this one, is there any hope? 

The Easter story begins where Friday’s story left off – in bleak and gloomy sorrow, in black despair, in the midst of death and broken dreams.  All that Jesus stood for – compassion, non-violence, forgiveness - had been put on trial and found wanting.  

When Jesus cried out in pain and breathed his last, the disciples’ vision for a future free of Roman oppression and of the poor being ground to dust under imperial feet died right along with him. As Reformed pastor Scott Hoezee noted, “Easter may lead to the light, but it begins in the darkness. Easter may ultimately be about things that are high, bright, light, and clear, but it begins in things that are low, dim, dark, and murky.”

All that being said, who knows why Mary would have wanted to go to the tomb anyway?  After all, the now eleven disciples could be found either fitfully sleeping off the effects of Friday and Saturday or crying into their morning coffee cups.  That, it would seem, was the best way to deal with a bad situation.

Maybe Mary kept tossing and turning and figured that actually seeing the grave and touching the cold rock that covered it would bring closure, trigger some good old-fashioned weeping and unbridled grief that would do her good. Who knows what she expected to accomplish – or to find, for that matter? One thing we can say for sure though is that she certainly was not expecting to find an empty tomb. That much is clear.  

As Christian author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes,  "Resurrection [unlike springtime]...is entirely unnatural. When a human being goes into the ground, that is that....You say good-bye....and you go on with your life as best you can, knowing that the only place springtime happens in a cemetery is on the graves, not in them...." Her eyes dim with tears and carrying a hankie then, Mary resolutely walked to the cemetery and picked her way - in the dark - among the headstones until she came to Jesus’ grave.  

There she discovered only a big gaping hole that left his tomb wide open.  Horrified, she dropped her hankie, saw no need to investigate further, and immediately turned tail and ran to get help.  The clues were obvious – grave robbers.  One more sign of darkness in a world that was already too dark. “They have taken my Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him,” she declared to Peter and the other disciple.  

The two of them hightailed it back to the graveyard with Mary, presumably to check out her terrible news.  After all, you cannot always trust a hysterical woman when it comes to empty tombs and bodies disappearing! 

Like the good detectives they fancied themselves to be, Peter and the other disciple took the matter in hand and confirmed that, yup, the stone is gone, yup, the corpse is gone too.  

Odd thing about the burial linens though – still there and all folded up to boot.  Makes no sense, so they scratched their heads and stroked their beards, looking very serious.

As Hoezee notes, “Scholars claim that it is highly unlikely some ancient grave robber would have taken the time required to unwrap a well-embalmed corpse. Thieves are usually interested in speed so as to reduce the chances of getting caught. And anyway, (earlier) we were told that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had slicked up Jesus' body with aloe and myrrh (a lot of it: nearly seventy-five pounds). 

Again, scholars claim that would have caused the grave wrappings to stick to Jesus' corpse like glue. But even if some thief did the highly unlikely and arduous thing of unwrapping the dead body, you would not expect him to then be so tidy as to fold and roll up everything in the orderly fashion Peter and (the other disciple) found.”

The Gospel writer tells us that the other disciple understood, but does not say exactly what he understood: That Mary’s story was true and maybe you could believe a woman every now and then? Peter apparently was confused by everything.  In the end, the two men went home for a second cup of coffee – and left the hapless women to her weeping in the garden.  And it is still dark.

Mary, however, was determined to get to the bottom of these nocturnal shenanigans, so she peeked into the tomb.  That was when she saw two angels who asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”  

Her answer was unchanged:  “They have taken my Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him.”  And to herself she posed what would become the Easter question:  In a world as dark as this one, is there any hope?

The angels were silent and so not much help. It was still dark when Mary turned to man who appeared to be the graveyard gardener getting an early start on the day. 

Once more, she heard the same question: “Woman, why are you weeping?”  Her answer remained consistent, but it was more of plea this time, spoken in a whisper from the very darkest part of her soul: “If you took him away, please just tell me where he is.”

And the man answered not with a GPS location of the corpse, but rather with her name, “Mary!” 

Stunned, she replied, “Rabboni!”  

 And in that moment of recognition, in that moment when hope was restored in a dark world and what would become the Easter question was answered with a resounding yes – yes, in a world as dark as this one, there is hope.  Yes, there is hope because Jesus the Christ lives and all he stood for lives. Only in that moment of restored hope did the first rays of the sun hit the cold rock tomb and bath Jesus and Mary in its warmth and light.

You know, we can speculate endlessly about the historical facts of the resurrection.  Except to do so is pointless because the details we have are so varied and scattered throughout each of the four Gospel accounts – everything from the number of women who ended up in the cemetery and who they were to whether or not the tomb was being guarded by Roman soldiers to whether one angel (or was it two?) were in the tomb or outside of the tomb, or maybe they were men who looked like angels – and were the women frightened or joyful, a little of both, or simply confused?  The Gospel of Matthew even says there was an earthquake.  

Worrying about the technical details is rather like trying to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  And 17^thcentury theologians concluded, counting angels is a colossal waste of time and energy –  and I would say the same applies to trying to determine the process of resurrection!  We each have a life to live with meaning and purpose, and that should be planty to keep us occupied.  And besides,  what happens in the dark will stay in the dark.

All I know – and perhaps deep down inside you sense it too or you would not be here (jokes, lilies and spring flowers, and the Hallelujah Chorus aside) – all I know is that something happened in the dark that first Easter morning: Something happened that restored hope in a world that seemed so dark, restored hope when all hope for the future had been dashed.  

In the early part of World War II, I have been told, a Navy submarine was stuck on the bottom of the New York City harbor. It seemed that all was lost. There was no electricity, and the oxygen was quickly running out. In one last attempt to rescue the sailors from their steel coffin, the Navy sent a ship equipped with divers to the spot on the surface, directly above the disabled submarine. 

A Navy diver descended to the dangerous depths in one last rescue attempt. The trapped sailors heard the metal boots of the diver on the exterior surface, and they moved to where they thought the rescuer would be. 

In the darkness they tapped in Morse code, "Is there any hope?" 

The diver, recognizing the message, signaled by tapping on the exterior of the sub, "Yes, there is hope."

Surely that is the message of Easter we desperately need this year.  Surely it is the answer to what has become the Easter question:  In a world as dark as this one, is there any hope?  And the answer is yes, there is hope.

There is hope because long ago God said yes to Jesus and no to the authoritarian system of the Roman Empire. There is hope because God said yes to the power of love and no to the power of indifference, petty jealousies, resentment, and hate.  There is hope because God said yes to all that Jesus stood for – justice, compassion, mercy - and no to the powers of the world – economic inequity, violence, and oppressive power.  Hope was restored that first Easter morning, and, because of whatever happened in that garden graveyard, that restored hope has cascaded down through the ages to us now.

         The resurrection is not a one-time event that occurred in a first century Palestinian cemetery in the dark and is, for us, only a debate in historical literalness..  No – whatever happened that morning that we confidently and faithfully as Christians call resurrection answered once and for all  what has become the Easter question once and for all:  IN a world as dark as this one, is there any hope? 

And the answer is yes – always yes, even in the darkest of times.  What matters then is not what actually happened in the cemetery garden and what all the technical details were.  What matters is what happens now, today, when each one of you leaves this church – after the preacher has told the faintly macabre but still funny Easter joke, after the lilies and springtime flowers have all been taken home, after you have felt like Pavarotti for a few minutes and the Hallelujah Chorus has been sung.  

You see, because of the resurrection, God has given us a legacy.  And because you showed up here today – for whatever reason - you are now part of that legacy.  From now on, you have been called to be people of hope in a world of darkness, living each day as if the answer to the Easter question really matters, living each day as a resounding “yes”.  

You have been called to be people of hope – and if it is too difficult to use the image of a Risen Christ to live out that restored hope, then maybe you can imagine instead a burned cathedral in Paris - believing that, in God’s good time, it will be rebuilt, and a new life will emerge from its ashes. Notre Dame is a fitting metaphor for Easter – lifting up its message that we so desperately need this year.

Go forth then, be a productive and willing part of the legacy you now own, and answer the call to be people of hope by placing that hope in all that Jesus stood for – hope in the power of compassion, hope in the power of reconciliation, hope in the power of justice, hope in the power of God’s dream for this world. It is the only way you and I will be rebuilt. It is the only way we will survive.  

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Ecclesiastes 3:1-13 "Time"

 Imagine this scenario: The bank calls you on Friday afternoon to tell you that someone is going to deposit – on a daily basis - 86,400 pennies into your account starting on Monday morning. Do the math: That is $864 a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

What an incredible windfall!  And it is not even from winning Powerball or the Maine Lottery! You are one lucky dude!  

However, there is one stipulation.  You have to spend all the money the same day it is deposited. No balance will be carried over to the next day. Each evening the bank will cancel whatever sum you did not use.  Use it or lose it!

Do the math:  $864 times seven days is over $6000 a week and almost $315,000 a year at your disposal. What’s not to like about that, right?

Now let’s change the scenario just slightly – to make it more believable, to actually make it a real life situation.  Every morning a deposit of 86,400 seconds is deposited into your time account.  Do the math: That is 440 minutes which is 24 hours. 

And the same stipulation applies: Nothing is carried over to the next day. There is no such thing as a 26 hour day (no matter how much we might wish otherwise at times). 

From today’s dawn until tomorrow’s dawn, we all have that same precisely determined amount of time.  As someone once said:  “Life is a coin. You can spend it any way you want to, but you spend it only once”

I agree with Albert Einstein:  Time is an amazing phenomenon! We all are given the same amount each day, and, in that sense, we are all equal. We get 86,400 seconds deposited in our time account whether we are a penniless nobody or Bill Gates, whether we are old or young, whether we are married or single, whether we are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist.  It does not matter who we are.  It is only matters  what we choose to do with that which we are given.

We cannot escape time.  It invades our every move:  “What time does the meeting start”  “What time will it end” “I don’t have time for that” “How much time will that take” “Don’t waste your time on that” “It’s time to go” “I need a time out” “What time is dinner” “It’s time we had a long talk” “I don’t have time.” 

As Baptist pastor, Elmer Towns, noted, “God has given the gift of time to every person (in every place and in every era). God has given us yesterday, today, and maybe tomorrow.”  It is up to us to make today – this day – count.

We have spent five weeks now here in church trying to reconcile our fast-paced and often frenetic lifestyles with the idea of slowing down to make each day count..  We have hoped to deepen our spirituality and make the season of Lent more meaningful. 

We have attempted to create moments here in worship for silence and stillness, moments to be “unbusy”.  We have experimented with strategies to incorporate into our lives that could help us reconnect with one another and with our unhurried God.  We have focused on finding our quiet center, and we have approached this quest from several angles.  And now we have finally come round to talking seriously and directly about time.  

Over these weeks in Lent, if we have learned nothing else, I hope we have realized that to find our quiet center, it is helpful to engage in those traditional Lenten rituals, but in new ways.  Rather than fasting from food, we need to fast from worry and fear.  Rather than rotely confessing our sins, we need to be more broadly self-reflective.  

Rather than isolating and insulating ourselves from the world, we need to be intentional about our use of time in the world. None of these Lenten rituals comes easy in our culture.  We so highly value busyness, productivity, and multi-tasking and too often devalue the intentional use of our time.

That’s nothing new though.  As a species, we have always been fixated on time.  More than that, our need to be precise in our understanding of the passage of time has increased astronomically through the ages. Egyptians were content to use sundials in 3500 BCE simply to ascertain the arrival of the spring planting season – nothing more. Likewise, Stonehenge was built about 2000 BCE, but only to mark the annual summer and winter solstices.  

More precise measures of time were introduced in the Middle Ages.  Candles were made with time markings etched into the wax or tallow. The first mechanical clocks appeared in England in 1368 followed by the first public clock tower in 1541.  Not long afterwards, clock towers began to rival churches in town squares.  In 1577, the minute hand was invented, and a watch-making industry was thriving in Geneva, Switzerland within the next ten years.  

Humanity was learning that time flies, so it is best to be productive in order to get one’s work done. Time was no longer tied to the seasons of the year, but rather to the watch on your wrist or the hourly chiming of the clock tower in the village square.  

Medieval monastics tried their best to maintain the rhythm and seasonality of life even as marking time by the hour and minute became more important to a faster-moving society.  They ably incorporated their secular chores into worship times throughout the day, creating a sense of holy rhythm  and wholeness as work and worship became two sides of the same coin.  I remember spending time in a Benedictine monastery when I was in Divinity School and experiencing that same sense of wholeness. It was a marvelous feeling of the natural ebb and flow of creation.  

In addition, some of these monastics created Books of Hours which were beautifully illustrated abbreviated forms of the daily liturgies for laypeople.  In fact, from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, more books of hours were made than any other type of book.  The tension we feel today between the inevitable passage of time and the need to reclaim that natural sense of rhythm and seasonality is nothing new!  

However, for us, finding that natural sense of rhythm and seasonality in our busy lives is often well-nigh impossible.  Imagine:  We determine who wins or loses a running or swimming race by a hundredth of a second. We measure computer memory speed in nanoseconds.  And now we even have zeptoseconds – a trillionth of a billionth of a second.

How long ago it seems that, as time inevitably passed from season to season, we flowed freely with it, accepting its moments of joy and times of sorrow, and never believing that we did not have enough of it – or that it was essential to measure it so minutely.  Surely that is what the author of the passage in Ecclesiastes was reflecting on.   “For everything there is a season…”  The good and the bad flowed through life, and it was up to us to ride the waves of life and death, of mourning and dancing, of laughing and weeping.   

Presbyterian pastor Joanna Adams tells the story of a preacher whose congregation adored him because he always finished his worship services right at noon, within the allotted 60 minutes for church. Then one Sunday, the impossible happened. The pastor preached until 12:30.

On the way out, one of his parishioners angrily inquired, "What happened to you?"

The preacher answered, "For years I have always put a candy mint in my mouth as the service started, and I would tuck it away. It was always gone at exactly noon. That way, I never had to look at the clock or worry about what time it was. But this Sunday it didn't go away, and I finally realized I had put a button in my mouth."

All kidding aside, Adams does not deny the importance of time and notes that “knowing what time it is differentiates the foolish from the wise. Some hold on for dear life to that which is actually finished and done. Some refuse to let go of a relationship that has ceased to be nourishing. Others try to breathe life into, say, a church program that has been around for too long, but no one is brave enough to bury it.”  

She goes on to say that we all need to keep track of time. “There are deadlines to meet, buses to catch, papers to be turned in. Calendars and clocks have become our masters in modern society…. Surely much has been gained (she says) in terms of production and organization, but when life became divided and subdivided into seconds, minutes, and hours, many things were lost. We experience those losses every day (she continues). Our distance from the natural rhythms of life keeps increasing. Hardly anything is really seasonal. 

You can get tomatoes, summer's most luscious offering, anytime of the year now, though the ones you buy in January are likely to have been shipped 1,000 miles and will taste like cardboard. (She concludes that) we also live at an increasing distance from the ancient but timeless understanding that each day, each moment, is an unearned gift from a gracious God, rather than a commodity to be traded or spent for something else.”  The lines between busy and rest, work and play, have become increasingly blurred. And at what cost?

Even Jesus spoke of time – but not zeptoseconds.  “The Kingdom of God is at hand,” he preached, and “the time is fulfilled.”  Something bigger was at stake – God’s dream for the world.

         Though there is a time for everything, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote,  surely Jesus would tell us that it is time to put aside our busyness and multitasking (just like he told Martha rattling around in the kitchen with her pots and pans), that it is time to let go of our worries and fears (remember the lilies in the field), that it is time to slow down and recognize that we move too fast, that it is time to reconnect with ourselves, our God, and one another in a deeper and more meaningful way. 

Surely it is time to make time to live into the essence of Jesus’ ministry.  As Adams wrote, “Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies; do good to those who persecute you.’ It is time, not to answer evil with evil and hate with hate, but a time to answer evil with love and hate with compassion. It is time for God’s dream for the world to become a reality.

         In the end, our Lenten series has nothing to do with stopping time by insulating ourselves from the world or even cocooning ourselves in our quiet center once we find it.  Instead, it has everything to do with living into the time we are given each day, living into the natural rhythm of all that Jesus stood for – compassion, reconciliation, radical welcome.

86,400 seconds in a day.  Do the math:  That is 525,600 minutes in a year.  That is all we are given, but it is enough to live as God challenges us to live.  Listen to this song from the musical, “Rent”. It says it well:

PLAY SEASONS OF LOVE

Let me end – not only this sermon but also this Lenten worship series with an ancient Sanskrit poem.  Tuck it away in your heart, and pull out when you are feeling frazzled, when worry and fear, when busyness and multitasking, are beginning to claim you:

                              "Listen to the salutation of the dawn... 

Look to this day, for it is the very life of life. 

In its brief course lie all the realities and truth of existence: 

the joy of growth, the splendor of action, the glory of power. 

For yesterday is but a memory, and tomorrow a vision, but today well-lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope."

Luke 12:22-34 "Worry and Fear"

          Come and time travel with me – not all the way back to the first century when Jesus sat on a hillside and taught his followers about that worry and fear and even material possessions cluttered up their lives, taught them that they, even then, could now and again glimpse God’s Kingdom, God’s dream for the world, taught them that they could always find their hearts if they simply looked at what they valued most in life.

No – we will not go that far back in time.  Come and time travel with me to the year 1347. The Black Plague was raging across Europe, and people by the thousands were dying each day in fields and cities all across that part of the world. However, even worse than the plague itself was the fact that no one knew what was causing the horrendous symptoms and outrageous death toll.  Life was short, to be sure, but this was madness.

To say that people were worried and afraid would be an understatement.  The epidemic was so much more far-reaching and capricious and malevolent than anything they had ever experienced before.  

No surprisingly, some people began to suspect that a vengeful and angry God was causing the rash of deaths. They got to thinking that only by appeasing God would the spread of disease finally cease.

To that end, in Lubeck, Germany, the townspeople decided to appeal to God for forgiveness and put an end to the death all around them. They began bringing enormous amounts of money, jewels, and other miscellaneous riches to the local churches and monasteries. Surely they figured what better place to find God than in a church, and what better way to appease an angry God than by confessing their sinfulness by renouncing some of the wealth they had accumulated, often at the expense of others?

However, one monastery refused their offerings. The monks and priests were convinced that the money was contaminated with whatever was spreading the plague.  Consequently, they barred the monastery gates and refused to allow the citizens to enter. 

Needless-to-say, the townspeople were frantic.  In their terror, they picked up their valuables - coins, gold, and jewels - and heaved them over the monastery walls. However, like I said, the monks did not want this potentially contaminated wealth, so they threw it all back. Then the citizens then tossed everything back inside, and monks threw it all back outside. 

This game of catch continued for hours - riches thrown back and forth - until the brothers finally gave up and allowed the detritus of the town’s wealth to remain. As the story goes, within hours, piles 3 and 4 feet high filled the monastery courtyard, and for months following the incident – some say for years - the coins and jewels remained untouched.

Oh, the lengths that we will go to when fear and worry overwhelm us!  And yet, in this Bible passage we just read, Jesus tells us that fear and worry are for naught.  Both can be expressed in so many different ways, and both simply clutter up our lives. Fear and worry take up space that would be better given over to what Jesus calls the Kingdom, that way of life about which he taught and was grounded in all that he stood for. Life is too short for worries and fear, he seemed to be saying, especially when God’s dream for the world is at stake.

In this passage we just heard, when Jesus spoke about worry and fear, he used vivid examples that would have resonated with his audience.  As blogger Janice Green reminds us, in ancient Palestine, “people raised their own food, made their own clothes, and lived in homes we would consider sub-standard in our day and time. The primary modes of travel was by foot, by donkey, or camel. The average person’s wardrobe would probably have fit in a suitcase. Their water was drawn in pots from public wells”.

Against that economic reality, Jesus told these people who flocked around him, hanging on his every word, “Do not worry about food….Do not worry about clothing…..Do not worry about the essentials of life.” Life is too short when God’s dream for the world is at stake.

Easy for him to say, right?  Eyes would have opened wide at his outlandish statements, and heads would have shaken in disbelief at his words.  After all, Jesus was talking to men who were never sure where their family’s next meal would come from, who could not always provide milk on the table for their children. “Do not worry about food.”   Jesus was talking to women who knew their daughter’s sandals were too small and blistered her heels, who realized that if their son’s tunic tore one more time, it could not be repaired.  “Do not worry about clothes.”

In the midst of the jaw-dropping that his sermon evoked, Jesus went on to imagine a creation where God would provide the necessities for living a simple life.  And so his listeners began to imagine a world different from the one they had always known. 

They conjured up a world where even the birds never hungered.  They could almost hear the ravens raucously cawing out their thanks.  They pictured a world where even the flowers were clothed in beauty.  They could just see in their mind’s eye the white lilies swaying their gratitude in the field.  

Jesus then asked the pivotal question, “How much more valuable are you than birds – than flowers?”  The listeners – illiterate though they were - knew the answer intuitively: We are sons and daughters of God, made in the image of the Holy One, and we are capable of being so much more than we are. We are worth “a great deal more” than an old crow or even a lily.  Surely God will provide, so we can simply live.

And then Jesus ended his soliloquy with yet another question: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?  Don’t you know that life is too short for worrying and fear when God’s dream is at stake?”

Easy for you to say, Jesus. Do you understand how much we have to worry about these days – our children, our grandchildren, our nation, our world, climate change, polarization, declining church participation, mass shootings, hate crimes, job security, how we stack up against the expectations everyone puts on us?  What’s notto worry about?  

And yet, Jesus’ question rings true. Worry, in the end, changes nothing. What is the saying?  Worry is interest on a loan you may never need to take out.  Life is too short when God’s dream for the world is at stake.

For the next few moments, let’s us – you and I - be like the people who listened to Jesus long ago.  Let’s imagine a different world.  Let’s conjure up a world where worry and fear do not encroach on our living. Would we find a relationship between our anxieties and what scares us most, on the one hand, and our ability to live into the Kingdom, to live out the teachings of Jesus, to realize God’s dream for the world on the other?

What if, during these remaining weeks of Lent, we intentionally tried to let go of the worry and fear that clutters our hearts? What if, into that heart space we freed up, we intentionally tried to let the Kingdom in, that way of life embodied in Jesus and his ministry?  

Are you game?  Hope so because here are some basic questions to consider.  What do you fear the most?  That you won’t be as good or proficient as people think you should be? That you aren’t who people presume you are?  

What do you worry about?  Having enough money to retire on?  Enough money to pay back student loans?  How about your job?  And your work-life balance?

What keeps you up at night?  Your children?  Your marriage?  Your health? Another mass shooting?  Donald Trump?

What if, instead of worrying about and fearing whatever presses in on your life, what if, for just a moment, you trusted in God or Spirit or who whatever you want to call that Something that is bigger than yourself, what if you could let go of those worries and fears?  Just hand them over – and see what happens.  Would you feel at peace?  Would your heart fill up with compassion?

We are going to find out.  You have a small piece of paper attached to your bulletin. It is disappearing paper because it dissolves in water.  Take a moment now and write down one thing that worries you or that you fear.  And I will invite you to come forward and drop your paper into the bowl of water, stir it around, and watch it disappear.  

This ritual action, of course, is our symbolic way of giving our worries and fears to God, perhaps for just this time in worship, but that is OK.  It is a chance to feel unburdened, a chance to trust in Something bigger than yourself, a chance to know that you are more precious than the birds in the air and the lilies in the field.

PEOPLE COME FORWARD 

The question for us this morning – and really all through the season of Lent is this: How can we clear out the clutter in our hearts and create space for God to flourish instead?  You will have to decide whether letting go of your worries and fears as we just did symbolically creates that space.  It strikes me as better than tossing our possessions back and forth over a monastery wall – though getting rid of some of that excess material clutter in our lives would not be a bad thing – but that is a topic for another sermon.  

Anyway, if the letting go that we did was helpful, then I encourage you to make a commitment to continue doing so regularly and intentionally during the remainder of Lent – through prayer or meditation or getting your own disappearing paper or simply finding your quiet center.

You see, in the end, as Jesus pointed out to his followers, life is too short for worries and fears we cannot control, especially when God’s dream for the world is at stake..  It is like Dr. Seuss pointed out in his poignant poem:

How did it get so late so soon,

It's night before it's afternoon.

December is here before it's June.

My goodness how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon?

         My prayer for you during these last couple of weeks of Lent – even as time whizzes by - is that you can open your hearts and trustingly relinquish whatever it is that keeps you up at night – and that in the open heart space, you can live more fully and meaningfully into the Kingdom – because, after all, life is short, especially when God’s dream for the world is at stake.

         Let me conclude now with some advice from Baptist pastor, Brett Younger: 

·      Life is short, so live every day as if it were your last, because some day you'll be right.

·      Life is short, so do what you love to do and give it your best.  If you don't love what you're doing and can't give it your best, think seriously about getting out of it.

·      Life is short, so recognize that today is the only day you have, eat dessert first, read good books. 

·      Life is short, so tell the truth, take care of this day, dance.

·      Life is short, so listen to the people you love, tell them how much they mean to you, visit someone else's mother in the nursing home. 

·      Life is short, so recognize that every day is a special occasion, do something interesting, have some fun, and choose to be happy.

·      Life is short, so forgive. Look past the faults of others just like you hope they will do for you. 

·      Life is short, so surround yourself with gracious people, hug your friends, care for someone you haven't cared for.

·      Life is short, so be courageous, take a chance, live so that when your life flashes before your eyes, you'll have plenty to watch. 

·      Life is short, so embrace the possibilities, try something new, see that every day is an opportunity, dream, but don't just dream, follow those dreams.

·      Life is short, so breathe and think deeply, don't give your heart to that which won't fill your heart, make the changes that will make the difference.

·      Life is short, so celebrate God's eternity, make time for the things that matter, don't leave yourself regretting things you didn't do. 

And I would add – life is short, so clear out the clutter, so your heart is emptied of rear and worry – and filled instead with compassion.