What is good in our lives is tied to those that surround us, here in this church and more importantly in the lives of those people that touch our lives outside these walls.
O God be in my mouth as I speak
for you and fill this place with your great grace, that we may leave this place
less of what we use to be and more of what we ought to be, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
And he said to them, “Do not be
amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen, he is not
here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter
that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.
I have often thought an
effective Easter sermon is a sort of like a continuing conversation that I have
with all of you. You’re back, here I am in the pulpit, and I probably have
about twelve minutes to get this message across. So here goes.
Some of you may recall last
Easter, I said that Christian Life is not about keeping all the rules but
living our lives as a response to the story of Jesus Christ. No doubt this
surprised some Type-A Folks who think that rules are more important to God.
Yet rules like the Ten
Commandments mean little to our lives unless, they are inspired by the
truthfulness and beauty of the Christian story. In this morning’s conversation,
I want to chart a slightly different course.
I want to return to an older
story as a way of reflecting on the eternal human question, in light of the
resurrection, how does God call us to live as Christians in the world today.
My story comes from the great
stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, Seneca. While the word “stoic” survives in
modern language as a description of someone that keeps a stiff upper lip in
times of emotional distress. Stoicism was once a philosophical school or
approach to life that is said to have begun with the philosopher Zeno, four
hundred years before the birth of Christ and it continued through the great
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
For those of you not up on Roman
history, Marcus Aurelius is the Roman emperor that is killed in the start of
the movie, Gladiator.
Seneca tells the story about a
man named Stillbo, whom he thinks displayed the ideal Stoic spirit. Stillbo’s
country was captured and his wife and children slaughtered by a conqueror named
Demetrius. As Stillbo emerges from personal desolation, his wife and children
dead, alone and yet happy, Demetrius mockingly asks him whether he has lost
anything.
To which Stillbo replies, “I
have all my goods with me.”
Seneca says of this, “There is a
brave and stouthearted man for you! The enemy conquered, but Stillbo conquered
his conqueror.
I first heard this story about
twenty years ago from a professor who thought it captured the essence of the
ancient Stoic spirit. The stoic he told his students strived for
self-sufficiency. And if he succeeded in achieving it, no one could ever hurt
him. He would lose nothing that would matter because the good of the stoics’s
life was contained solely within themselves.
In many respects the spirit of
Stillbo is still with us. It emerges naturally from the devastation of daily
human life: from our Katrinas, from the ravages of the war, poverty and
violence. His spirit whispers to our souls late at night in times of despair; Don’t
become attached to anything or anyone and you will not get hurt.
My teacher told us that Stoicism
on the surface is a very practical doctrine. It will work. Do what the Stoics
tell you, practice detachment from the things of this world.
Stoics actually remind me of Mr.
Spock on the old Star Trek series, remember him. As a Vulcan, life for him was
all about being logical and banishing human emotions from his actions, dealing
with situations objectively.
And this approach is one option
that is available to us when we hear the Easter story. With its personal betrayal, a show trial,
horrible torture and a shocking death.
Perhaps Stillbo’s response is
best. We would all do better if we tried to insulate ourselves from the message
of Easter. Refuse to go to the tomb with the women and fail to head the
announcement that Jesus has risen.
But if you choose this approach
to life one key question remains, do you really want what the stoic offers us?”
While certainly a liveable
approach to human life, I believe it is a spiritual dead end.
For Christians, the Stoic
approach misses the essence of what it means to be an embodied creature made in
God’s image. In the book of Genesis it
tells us that a loving God saw what he had created and it was good. Holy
Scripture goes further in St. John’s gospel when it says “God so loved the
world that he sent his son to live and die for us”.
Those two sentences capture the
essence of this embodiment. God created us as souls attached to a particular
time and place.
And God chose to enter his
creation and to become a human being. This incarnational understanding of human
life insures that by an act of God’s creation, we are bound to one another in a
unique and particular way.
And this leads naturally to my
second point the Christian story reminds us that we don’t live our human lives
alone.
During the course of Jesus’
life, he had friends, men and women that were close to him and that he loved
deeply.
To live a fully human life in
today’s troubled world, God has given us friends and loved ones. And as God teaches us that we are dependent
on God alone, so life together with each other reminds us that we are also dependent
on one another.
For Christians there can be no
stoic ideal of self-sufficiency, no struggle to be completely independent.
Think for a moment about the
symbolism of human birth. There is not one of us who did not spend nine months
or thereabouts in our mother’s womb, living not only in her but off her. This
is a striking parable of our dependence.
To turn away from those whom the
Creator gives us is the first step on the road to hell that many people choose
to live in today. Remember, no one is more self-sufficient than Satan and we
dwell with him when we believe the myth that we need no one but ourselves.
In the Easter story however,
through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we see that our God is different.
God is not content to be self-sufficient. God continues to give himself freely
to us. God made the decision to enter
creation, to live and die as one of us, to show us the power of God’s divine
and life changing love.
Of course to commit our lives to
the story of Easter and to others is to take great risks. As they have been
given to us, so they will be taken from us. The disciples first learned this on
Good Friday and they learned it again forty days later when their Lord returned
to heaven to be with his Father.
As Christians though we realize
that a life lived out in love means that we accept this risk. It means that we
give ourselves in bonds of love which we cannot finally sustain. When the day
comes that we lose the one we love, we will learn sorrow. And we ought to. That
is part of what it means to be a human being, to come to terms with Good
Friday, the pain and limitations of human life.
For the Christian recognizes something important that the Stoic
misses. We were created for God and we have a great longing buried in our
hearts to dwell with God. “Our hearts are restless,” St. Augustine wrote,
“until they rest in thee.”
And it is on this hope that our
lives are ultimately founded, a hope that is missing from the witness of
Stillbo and his kind. For this is what separates the stoic from the Christian.
The stoic places their trust in themselves alone. And that decision insures
that they will live and die, alone unencumbered by the commitments that shape
our lives together.
On Easter Sunday let us have the
courage to renounce the myth of self-reliance. For Christians, there is no
resurrection without death, no heaven without the possibility of hell, and no
truly human life apart from the community that God has given us to share.
What did Stillbo tell Demetrius?
“I have all my goods with me.”
Well thank goodness, I don’t.
For what is good in my life is tied to those that surround me, here in this
church and more importantly in the lives of those people that touch my life
outside these walls.
And it is this dependent path,
this wonderful life together that the Risen Lord offers you today.
Alleluia, Christ is Risen.