Sermon May 13, 2007

Easter 6, Year C

Mother's Day. May 13, 2007

After John Wesley had started his famous preaching ministry - I once figured out that he must have preached about 3 times a day to have accumulated the number of sermons attributed to him! - once he'd been preaching in public for some time a strange phenomenon developed. People started coming to his house at all hours of the night, deeply fearful of what is described in apocalyptic literature as "the wrath to come": some evil hell-fire of eternal damnation that was so close to them that, they felt themselves to be - in the words of Puritan preacher Jonathan Edward's famous sermon, "sinners in the hands of an angry God" - a sort of personal victimization by God based on their fallen nature.

We human beings are deeply succeptable to living in fear - and, as the years have passed from the time of Edwards and Wesley, I suppose its fair to say that we have a great deal more to be fearful about.

One of the most fearful moments in my life happened on a spring morning around 2:00 a.m. in 1968. I was 15 years old at the time: I woke up to the wail of an air raid siren.

I had never heard a siren go off before that moment except on news footage from the Second World War.

That was because the siren was never tested, it being considered to too disturbing for many people to hear - not so much because it would be a reminder of the Blitz but because of what that siren had come to mean: it was the "Four Minute Warning".

Four minutes: the time it took for nuclear missiles fired from the Soviet Union to reach London. In retrospect, of course, the warning was more than a little silly - what, after all, could you do in four minutes? No one had a nuclear shelter.

But from the earliest time I could remember we - the first "Nuclear Generation" - were instilled with the deep and abiding fear of nuclear annihilation. So deep was that fear that it later became classified as a psychological disorder, and given a fancy name.

Four minutes. The whole household was up but didn't know what to do. The TV programming ended at around 11:45 p.m., as did the radio. Who can you call in four minutes?

You all know, of course, that this siren didn't signal a nuclear attack, but for four, long minutes, we expected a blinding flash and - being 6 miles from ground zero - death.

There was subsequently, some humor to the story of the siren - someone tried to break into the police station and it set off the siren - the worst possible sort of burglary alarm in my view! Yet we didn't know that at the time.

And don't you all remember exactly where you were on September 11, 2001 when you heard about the attacks on New York and Washington? I was just approaching the traffic lights at Coupeville. And the days and months and years that have followed have been filled with fear that some other attack is about to be launched.

In today's Gospel Jesus addresses human fear. Jesus is meeting with his disciples to eat one Last Meal, gathered together in the Upper Room. They all know that the Romans are looking for Jesus and that, when they find him, the only possible outcome is death. Death for Jesus, certainly, death for them, probably. They must have felt a deep fear for of what the future might hold - a dark night of the soul, because fear brings darkness - or, perhaps, lives there most frequently, and when its dark we can't see what's around us, and we flail around like the blind leading the blind.

In "The Message" - Eugene Peterson's colloquial translation of the Bible - he identifies just that sort of blindness: Jesus opening words of this passage are said this way: "A loveless world is a sightless world."

In the absence of love we are sightless, we are in the dark, and in that darkness fear finds a home. Without love we are fear's willing victims.

Jesus recognizes this when he says: "don't be upset. Don't be distraught." love as I have loved you, because true love drives out fear.

Love and Peace, for peace, too, is Jesus' gift to his disciples in the midst of their fear. The peace of God is unlike any other peace - not an absence of strife but a positive, embracing reality that soothes and calms - the embrace of God will carry us through the fear to Holy Peace

Revelation points to that - not only is there light in the darkness - the light that drives away the fear - but we are already in that light if we're in Jesus - there's a river of light, running through the center of town that's ours as God's good gift. The Tree of Life is here, too. The reign of God isn't about what's coming its about what's already here.

That light, that embrace, that peace - they're all sign-posts for us out of the place of fear that our culture - that our humanness - is so ready to put us in.

The thing that they all point to is wholeness.

Of Jesus and wholeness, theologian Frederick Buechner has said:

"All his life long, wherever Jesus looked he saw the world not in terms simply of its brokenness - a patchwork of light and dark calling forth in us now our light, now our dark - but in terms of the ultimate mystery of God's presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field... To be whole, I believe, is to see the world like that. To see the world like that, as Jesus saw it, is to be whole. And sometimes I believe that even people like you and me see it like that. Sometimes even in the midst of our confused and broken relationships with ourselves, with each other, with God, we catch glimpses of that holiness and wholeness that is not ours by a long shot and yet is part of who we are."

Those glimpses invite us out of our fear and into God's grace, out of our darkness into God's light, out of our fallenness and into the wholeness of God that has been promised to us since before the creation of the world.           Amen.