The End of Estrangement

A sermon for the Easter Vigil, 2009

This is the night of mystery and wonder. It is a night of the pure potential and newness of life. On this night, we celebrate Christ’s passage from death to eternal life. We celebrate Azita and Sara’s passage into new life – a life of thoughtful and intentional belonging. In the early church this was the only night on which people were baptized into the faith. So it has special significance for us when we welcome new members of the Body of Christ during this Great Vigil of Easter. With their presence we are made new, something has changed in us as well.
This night began with a spark – it is the symbol of creation and the symbol of resurrection. It sets things in motion. And what it sets in motion is the transformation of chaos into order, the transformation of sadness into joy, the transformation of anger into peace, the transformation of death into life,
Easter is God’s gentle, dynamic insistence that we are continually drawn more and more deeply into the divine life. God’s power is persuasive not coercive. God will not make us accept joy and love and peace. In fact, God allows our bad choices – as evidenced on the cross on Calvary. That action was humankind saying “no” to God’s invitation to live in love. Easter is the proof that no matter what we do, God will continue to offer us a new opportunity. On a daily basis, moment by moment we have the choice to accept or decline God’s invitation.
That invitation is conscious belonging. Sara told me today that for her, part of her baptism was the sense of opening her eyes and heart to a loving presence that would always be with her. In the 18th Century, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel identified the human condition as something he called estrangement or alienation. The journey on which we find ourselves is to overcome that estrangement from, as he put it, a unified reality. Not a very cuddly way of putting it but I believe it was 18th century German speak for what Sara so simply described. As creatures of this world, we perceive a distance between us and God. The way we have told the story says that the gap is because we have sinned and removed ourselves from God’s pure presence. Hegel saw it differently. He felt that the estrangement we experience is because we haven’t yet learned who we are. He saw human history working itself out through the process of dialectic, that old Socratic teaching of the tension between a thesis and its antithesis which results in something new – a synthesis. These deadly dull sounding ideas are actually the fertile soil for a helpful understanding of how God works in the world to bring us out of our estrangement. God responds to our thesis of estrangement, the idea that we are somehow isolated by prophetic messages – Isaiah’s beautiful image of the peaceable kingdom, God’s promise to guide and be with us. God even goes so far as to respond to our stubborn insistence that God is out there and we are struggling along by ourselves here with a novel gift of self – the incarnation – the living presence of the Divine in our midst. The crucifixion, however, was an emphatic refusal of God’s invitation to embrace the divinity in our midst. Easter is the antithesis of that execution. The synthesis of those two ideas is us. We are the church, that community that seeks to live the message of welcome and belonging. Throughout the two thousand year history of the church, we have lurched along, sometimes drawing near, sometimes wandering far off course. But the process, move/counter-move relationship with God continues. As the church, we try to accept God’s invitation, and the response is the joy that we find in one another. We are a part of God’s long-term plan to overcome our misguided sense of estrangement. The more we respond to God, the more God has to work with in us.
Accepting the meaning of Easter – that we are loved and that God is committed to us is ongoing work. It appears that estrangement, like other bad habits is hard to unlearn. Brain scientists tell us that bad habits are wired into the processes of our brain and it takes persistence to change them. The bad habit of estrangement or isolation was developed throughout human evolution and no doubt helped early members of the human race keep from being eaten by other residents of the neighborhood. We had to learn to take care of ourselves, look out for #1, we learned to compete for resources. We did not initially know that we need each other. But now that we have been knit together into the Body of Christ, it is time to break our old isolating, suspicious, competitive, fearful habits.
We do so regularly here – one of the miracles of being a congregation is that we are with people that we would never meet otherwise. And we do more than simply come into contact with them. We share joys and sorrows, we celebrate and we mourn together, we become a part of one another, and estrangement recedes a bit. Together we are the mystical body of Christ. We are that spark of God’s future born and reborn this night. Alleluia, Christ is risen and so are we.