At the beginning of Wes Anderson’s animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox, Mr and Mrs Fox are trapped by a farmer and perceiving that this might be the end, they have the following interchange:
Mrs. Fox: This story’s too predictable.
Mr. Fox: Predictable? Really? Then, how does it end?
Mrs. Fox: In the end, we all die. Unless you change.
There is something in the simplicity of this exchange that in many ways captures everything that is now upon us in the aftermath of Easter.
By now the reality of Easter is upon you. The rising from sleep to see the sun has come up and darkness once again is vanquished, the sharing in worship with friends and family and the voices lifted in celebration of this thing called ‘resurrection’ which is the single most earth shattering event in the history of creation.
Yes, it is true: He is risen… He is risen indeed.
And what comes next? Where do we go from here? We have survived the Lent fast, have endured the darkness of Holy Week and now walk into our life after the culmination of the Passion… and now what?
Like Mrs. Fox’s query, perhaps this story is just too predictable. As the film (based on a Roald Dahl short story) weaves together, at the core of things is a question of whether we are meant for something beyond our base “wild” nature or just embrace who we are and live until we die. At one point in the film, a Rat decides at the moment of his death to help save a young fox. The gathered animals muse whether this was an attempt at salvation. Mr. Fox simply responds “Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.” While played as a dead pan comedic response, the reality is haunting. Coupled with Mrs. Fox’s earlier observation, perhaps the story is indeed all-too-predicable. Even if we experience redemption and nobility of purpose, we still die and will end up as nothing more than another dead animal in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.
So what is Easter about anyway then?
For starters we need to connect the data points and graph where this is all trending towards. We need to remember what Lent was about and what got us to this day. Rather than being too quick to rush and throw off the black and drab of Good Friday and grab the bright shirt that announces vitality and “He is Risen-ness” to the lily filled congregation, we need to pause for a moment and remember these weeks of fasting and releasing ourselves from the things that distract us from considering God deeply and passionately. This fasting stirred a deep hunger in us and a wanting desire that pointed to an emptiness perhaps we didn’t know we had.
On Palm Sunday we raises our voices with “Hosanna!” and partied in the streets. With Maudy Thursday we filled our cups with provision but also sat with our empty cups in Gethsemane as Jesus emptied himself completely and was taken to the mock trial and ultimately to the cross for Good Friday where his last words reached back to the Psalm of David and ripped the temple curtain in half.
In utter destitution we waited in Holy Saturday like Job in a land where no sign of God was to be found and we are left groping for some comfort, some assurance, some pardon and ultimately whether God was even active in the world any more.
And now….?
And now I will show you the most excellent way.
If I speak with the tongues of humanity and of the angels, but have no love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preservers.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child. When I became fully grown, I put childish things behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three things remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
- 1 Corinthians 12: 31b, 13:1-13
In many ways, this morning marks both the end and the beginning of everything that is vital and dear to the very heart of God. He is risen! He has risen indeed! For 24 hours as the sun makes its path across this planet, voices cry out “HE HAS RISEN!” raised in song and proclamation in more languages and dialects than we will ever know. And even as the shadow of night falls again tomorrow as night as fallen for thousands upon thousands of days across the Earth, the writer of 1 Corinthians tells us that at the very end of things, there will always be these three things that remain – faith, hope, and love. No shadow is dark enough to crush out their light, no wall is tall enough or strong enough to prevent their truth from coming into our realms, no noise of the clanging and banging of our industry can overpower these three major notes of God’s great hymn to humanity. At the end of things and at the beginning of things, these three will and do remain – faith, hope and love.
These virtues are essential to the spiritual life because they dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They are called theological virtues because they direct us to God. We might say that they are the three dimensions – the height, width and depth – in which the Christian life is lived. Let’s consider together each of these in turn.
Faith:
Faith is the virtue by which we entrust ourselves- heart, mind, soul and strength – to God despite all odds and opposition. It is the act of believing what Jesus promises to the point of grafting ourselves completely to Him with the intimacy that Jesus proclaims when he states “I am the Vine and you are the branches” in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel. Henri Nouwen, in his book Clowning in Rome, once used the image of a trapeze artist to demonstrate the act of faith in the Christian life. Imagine you are on a trapeze bar, swinging out over all the fears and questions you might have in your life and the bar you are gripping represents all that you have trusted to be the firm foundation of your being – trust in the economy, trust in nationalism, trust in institutions – and another bar comes swinging toward you – one of promise filled with purpose. The price of this gift that is offered to you is to let go of what you have held to and utterly risk everything to reach for the bar that is coming.
The moment of release and the moment of between-ness is the moment of faith.
In many ways, our taking of the Lord’s Supper is such an act of letting go. We reach out for the bread and touch our lips to the cup never fully understanding the mystery that is before us. Like all the sacraments, the Eucharist is a sign which instructs us. It nourishes and strengthens our faith by what it signifies: the wisdom, love and power of God manifested to us by Christ in presence at the meal and in His Sacrifice that we remember through the act. In this respect, the Eucharist is the sacramental “sign and seal” of God’s covenant with us that stretches back to the words told to Abraham – “I am your God and you will be my people.” The bread and the cup continually coax us to let go of what we are gripping to – our doctrines, our prejudices, our comforts, our desire for vengeance and even the ways we long to be loved – and calls us to enter into deep and abiding communion with God by accepting in faith God’s saving deeds on our behalf – not merely through our affirmation in words, but through our act of reaching out, taking the broken piece of bread, sipping from the chalice, and tasting our act of faith throughout our body. The Eucharist should move us to deeper faith by reminding us what God has in fact done for us: manifesting His trustworthiness.
Hope
“Hope,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit”. The basis of this hope is the salvation won by the death and resurrection of Christ we celebrate today and the gift of His Holy Spirit poured out in our hearts (cf. Romans 5:5-11; 8:23-25; Titus 3:6-7).
As an efficacious sign of Christ’s salvation, the Eucharist gives us hope in God for the grace to live in His friendship in this life and to inherit eternal life in heaven. The Eucharist nourishes our hope, at once pointing back to God’s salvific deeds, especially Jesus’ death and resurrection, which provides the firm ground for our hope; and forward to what we hope for, the coming of the kingdom and eternal life of communion with the Triune God.
Love
Again, the words from 1 Corinthians 13:
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child. When I became fully grown, I put childish things behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three things remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Somewhere past the orbital extent of our Milky Way galaxy hurtling at a speed beyond the speed of sound is a small 25 pound gift to the stars called the Voyager satellite. Sent into space almost 30 years ago now, the Voyager satellite carries in its core a golden plate with encoded inscriptions of greetings in over 200 languages with drawings from Di Vinci to children’s drawings of the planet Earth. Also included on the golden disc are a number of pieces of music chosen by a team of United Nations representatives and scientists that would represent the “essence” of humanity – its global priorities and aspirations – from the beginning of recorded history and into the 20th century.
One of the pieces of music chosen and is now hurtling into space a song by the Beatles entitled “All You Need is Love”. The chorus may be familiar to many of you:
All you need is Love
All you need is Love
All you need is Love, Love,
Love is all you need.
While we could debate at length about the choice of this song over the thousands of others, the refrain couldn’t be more appropriate. As the writer of 1 Corinthians assures us and John Lennon picked up on – in the end, it all comes down to love.
We are hardwired to love – it is in our bones. While the word itself has been used for a myriad of meanings from the sacred to the profane, love is something deeper than the perversions humanity can bear down upon it. Hope springs eternal, but love in the end is the lasting chord stuck – it is the sound amidst the silence of our souls and the foundation. St. Augustine states this quite well in his book Confessions. He reflects on the fact that the deepest aches of the soul are put there by love – we cannot help, in one form or another, to be lovers:
Love cannot be idle. What is it that moves absolutely anyone, even to do evil, if it is not love? Show me a love that is idle and doing nothing. Scandals, adulteries, crimes, murders, every kind of excess, are they not the work of love? Cleanse your love then. Divert into the garden the water that was running down the drain. Am I telling you not to love anything? Far from it! If you do not love anything you will be dolts, dead, despicable creatures. Love by all means, but take care what it is you love.
Easter propels us with a speed infinitely faster than the Voyager probe into the world once again with this singular call to live the promise of faith, hope and love in public. Easter places us right in the middle of the greatest love story of all and jump starts life as it was always meant to be lived. From the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the shaping of our lips around the words “He is Risen!”, we remember and experience a love story that no slick produced pop song and no 120 minute Hollywood epic can begin to capture.
And yet…
And yet…
Haven’t we heard this all before? What will make this Easter any different than years prior?
Well… perhaps you noticed that while Christ has risen and broken the bonds of sin enabling us to live fully into faith, hope and love with the completeness of the Trinity, the Cross was never taken away. In fact, this central symbol of the Christian faith remains emblazoned on everything from Bible covers, jewelry, and even holds our gaze in our sanctuaries on Easter morning. But the reality of the Cross as an ever-present reminder of what Christ modeled for us seems to escape us. Does Easter announce that we are free from such extreme measures that Jesus took… or does it announce that this is what it will cost us to be truly free and at one (which is the meaning of atonement – to be ‘at-one’) with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? We rush so quickly from Lent, Passion week, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and into Easter celebrations that we forget what is hanging on the wall right in front of us – the ever-present reminder of the price Christ paid, but also the life we too are now called to lead. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words in The Cost of Discipleship put it this way:
The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.
When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.”
–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 1948/2001), 44.
So now we have a choice – which story will we play out this time? There is the story that everyone knows all-too-well – the one where where we die. But as Mrs. Fox notes, this is the tried and true story… unless we change. And it is not merely redemption either, for to be forgiven and not live into that gift of grace is simply another death.
No… this year is to be a year that will be our death if it is to be anything remotely involving what we are celebrating today. The Cross is still here. It is where the GPS locator has taken us and it is bidding us to come and die. As Jesus sings forth Psalm 22 in his last moments we are reminded of the Psalms Jesus brought before us throughout his ministry and ultimately, as John Calvin reminds us of, that all the Psalms call us to the same place:
Although the Psalms are replete with all the precepts which serve to frame our life to every part of holiness, piety, and righteousness, yet they will principally teach and train us to bear the cross. And the bearing of the cross is a genuine proof of our obedience, since by doing this, we renounce the guidance of our own affections and submit ourselves entirely to God, leaving Him to govern us, and to dispose of our life according to His will, so that the afflictions which are the bitterest and most severe to our nature, become sweet to us, because they proceed from Him.
–John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 1:xxxix.
For as we have seen, it is in this totality and abandon to the will of the Father that Jesus resolves to embrace in Gethsemane to his last breath is what we are called to as well.
Enough with half-way.
Enough with a consumerism stain on the faith.
Enough of fear as the soundtrack of the Christian life.
“Unless you change” is what we are left with. This is the next step. This is what we are to live into and can do so with the full assurance of the One who showed us the way…
And as you step into this death for the sake of life… remember that love is there to meet you…
