April 4, 2010
The Sunday of the Resurrection (Year C)
Easter Day
Acts 10:34-43; Psalm118:1-2, 14-24; I Corinthians 15:19-26;
John 20:1-18
Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed!
It is Easter. It is the holiest day of the Christian year. It is the day that defines us as a faith community. But how often do we, in the hustle and bustle of planning the menu and finding treats for our children and arranging for all that must be arranged for this day, how often do we really stop to think about the fact that the resurrection of Jesus Christ that we celebrate this day is the single most significant reality of our lives?
Because Jesus was not dead but resurrected, because Jesus surprised his friends and family with a different way of looking at death, because Jesus by his very resurrection showed us that God’s intention for all of us is new life, new hope, a whole new self, one made not in the image of Aunt Susie or Uncle Frank, with mom’s eyes and dad’s gait, but rather a new self made in the image of God.
The resurrection showed us that God’s intention for us is to love us and to be in relationship with us in a way that we have not before been, and in a way that continues with an awareness of that connection permeating our very lives and being, not only for this life but for all eternity.
I have come to believe that the resurrection, that hope-filled new way of being is what God intends for all of creation, humanity certainly, but indeed for all of creation. It is, as some would put it, “God’s Plan.” God’s plan is not a blueprint with details of walls and rooms, light switches, and plumbing. Rather it is a plan that states the goal, that perfected way of being, that end goal of relationship, new life and love for all. Once the plan, that goal, is stated as it is so clearly in the resurrection, then the Architect (Christ) walks with us as we add each layer to our lives. There is no blue print and there is no map. There is only the great good will and intention of God directing us and pulling us toward that resurrected changed way of being, toward God’s plan for us, that goal.
And so being the mortals that we are a species in need of direction and, more specifically, a set of rules to follow. We like blueprints and maps; I like blueprints and maps. It is human to want to know ”the way” so that we have a way to control the outcome.
Turns out we try to make more of those plans, blueprints, and maps for ourselves than God does. We seek ways to explain, ways to understand, ways to build, construct, follow, direct ourselves (and others, of course) until we sense, or even know, that we are “in the zone.” But too often that zone is of our choosing and not in tune with that ”plan” and goal that God has for us, that intention of life and love and oneness with God.
Of course, every time we think we have arrived in that “zone,” we are sorely mistaken. For I am also convinced it is not possible to arrive at it in this life. Instead, if we are truly following, we, like all the disciples and women who knew Jesus best, find we have multiple arrivals and departures as we inch our way closer and closer to God’s plan, that intention of God for us. And admittedly we sometimes move closer, and then, sometimes farther and father away, back stepping!
What I realized as I pondered this human desire to perfect our own way and Gods ultimate plan for each of us to know life and love eternally, for each of us to be one with God, it was time to put on 3D glasses. How many of you have seen Avatar?
I think resurrection is a lot like the movie Avatar, or like life was portrayed and the story told of Jake Sully. Jake was a man who was injured fighting for his country and now wheelchair bound. Then by a series of events found himself being part of a scientific social experiment on a planet, Pandora, far, far away.
I have seen the movie twice. The first time I went reluctantly, but the second was because the movie, like this gospel of resurrection, haunted me, and I knew that it contained another way of telling the resurrection story, a way that could be instructive to us this morning.
So the second time I went I took notes, and this is what I think the story contained in Avatar says about resurrection and about being Christian. First of all when a Christian follows that plan God has for us, we see things differently. It is as if the 3D glasses become our natural lens and the eyes we see with naturally are not clear enough. They do not define things well enough. And once we see through those lenses, the lenses of resurrection and new life, intentioned life from God, we see things we hadn’t seen before. As Jake spent more and more time as the Avatar, he said, “Everything is backwards now!” It was for him as if the only real life was the one he had as an Avatar, not as the human that he had been born as. For Christians the “real life” is the one we have when we are the most closely living our faith.
Ultimately, Jake had to choose between being part of the human race he had been born into or part of the Avatar race he had been given the chance to be born into. As he was making that decision (which took almost the whole three hour movie to make) Naytiri, his mentor and lover – how human is that – said to him, “In our world everyone is born twice, once at birth and once when they become part of the people.” For Christians that is the truth. We are born twice, at least, once at birth and then again every time we take a step closer to being the person God intends for us to be. Every time we let go of our old self and walk in the way God offers us through the resurrection, we are born again and become more and more part of the “people” called Christians, followers.
One of the most poignant scenes in the movie – for me anyway – was when Jake Sully found himself back in his wheelchair-bound body, without the air mask he needed to survive, and without the wheelchair to help him move to where he could get it. He was reaching for it, but couldn’t quite grasp it, and fell into a coma. The woman, Naytiri, his mentor and lover, the Avatar who loved him not only in body but with all her heart, the one who showed him the path toward wholeness, Naytiri found him, put the mask on his face, and when he came around, she was holding him in her arms. He was so much smaller than her gorgeous ten foot tall self. She held him and looked at him and said, “I see you, Jake Sully.” She saw him as I believe God sees each of us, in what we know as our brokenness, in our imperfection, in whatever our unglossed, non-dimensional, wheelchair is. God sees us, and loves us. But what God sees even as we are full of all that plagues us as individuals and as a human race, what God sees is the perfected one in full Avatar body. God sees us with 3D glass lenses.
Jake Sully did get a new body, a whole new body, and became a new being shortly after that, at the end of the movie. But that “resurrection” of Jake Sully was not nearly as poignant a moment (for me at least) as the one in which he was “seen” and known in his imperfection, the not yet perfected self.
What God always sees is us at our best even when we are being our most unperfected self. And that is what God’s plan is, to see us and have us see each other (and even ourselves) as God sees us. That is what the resurrection is all about, becoming what we were meant to be all along and in brilliant Technicolor! So take time to remember this most holy of days, and what a gift to you it is. As you do, may your Easter season be filled with people who love you and see you. And may we all have the courage to put on these 3d glasses and see each other and the world and all of creation as God does, that we might live more and more into a place of resurrection with God: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd