Easter Homily 2008
The Rev. Tricia de Beer

If someone asked you "What is the heart of Christianity?" what would you say? Some people would say loving your neighbor as yourself. Some would say it is believing certain things. I say, at its heart, Christianity is a path of transformation. It is a spiritual path in which we die to something in us and we are given new life. Just as the name first given to those who followed Jesus suggests, they were called, "People of the Way". The "way" is a path on which we are transformed as individuals and we are freed to be part of the transformation of the world.

In this Easter story from Matthew, we hear that the women waited until the Sabbath was over to go to the tomb. Perhaps they were afraid of being caught up in more controversy if they went on the Sabbath. Perhaps it took them a while to be able to move at all, after having witnessed the crucifixion. That morning though, a surprise awaited them. Their simple visit which was to be an ending became a beginning. This was one of those times when we know we are in the middle of something big. Matthew tells us they were met with an earthquake, and an angel full of light came and sat before them, and then they were given a message, left like a love note left on the pillow, "Gone to Galilee, I will meet you there." They must have asked themselves, "Can I trust this message, this vision? After all that has happened, can I re-invest myself in His kind of love?"

Life is full of these moments where we can go on loving and risking in a world we can�t control or we can hide out or even just check out. What makes it possible to go to our "Galilees", to the places where God is calling us? That first Easter, Mary must have trusted that the God who had been there the day Jesus healed her of the seven demons, would be there as she set off to take her part in the dream Jesus had for the world. In order to go, who knows what she might have had to surrender�a fear of having to be God�s messenger to a disbelieving group of men? Fear of being unworthy? Fear of what the Romans might do this time around? Something happened that she was able to trust in Jesus� promise, "Go to Galilee and there you will see me." She knew that there wasn�t anything that could separate her from the God who loved her and so she set off for Galilee. On the way, Jesus came to her giving her the courage, the freedom, the love she needed! But new life is scary even when our hearts open out to love.

At times we too decide we can risk living with an open heart, but we do it with a mixture of fear and joy. I am sure some of you have had the experience of being betrayed by a friend, a family member or colleague from whom you expected so much more. He or she kept coming up in your prayers, and a slow process of healing started. Then he invited you to lunch or something made it clear to you, it is time�it is time to let go. You had to surrender something of the shell of self protection which separated you, maybe even a little of your self righteousness, to risk re-entering this relationship. With some trepidation and relief, a new chapter began.

And sometimes, the path makes us the agent of the world�s transformation. We in the west have thought of salvation in far too individualistic terms. We think that it is between us and God. But it is about the healing of the whole creation. One woman I know took a course at church in which she found that her understanding of God was changing. She no longer thought of salvation as an individual�s ticket to heaven in the next world, but was more about living wholeheartedly in this world. She learned that in the Bible, Jesus didn�t talk so much about heaven as about the Kingdom of God which was the transformation of the whole social, economic, political, and religious life of the community. She started noticing that the salvation she needed was the freedom to be she and she prayed for God�s help. She got involved in the ministry with Haiti, and that furthered her desire to find out more about American foreign policy there. She no longer could vote the way she used to, much to her parent�s dismay. Her husband accused her of becoming too fanatical about religion and wished she would spend more Sunday mornings with him at home. Her growing relationship with God was giving her new eyes with which to see the culture from which she came. She had to surrender some of her sense of who she had been, and the need to please everyone. She trusted that the God, who was making a claim on her life, would be there to help her figure out the balance between other�s needs and her own emerging call. She wasn�t quite sure where it would take her, but she knew that God was going before her. She went with joy and fear, making only the next decision with as much love and integrity as she could.

And sometimes on that path with God, we meet up with the same issues, we met up with last month, or last year, or even the last decade. In the last two years in the wake of my son�s death, a son who had brought me such joy and delight, I have had to surrender, and surrender, and surrender... Much of the time I just couldn�t do it. I stayed angry with God for many months. At the same time my hearing started to go, and it got progressively worse. I wondered where my life was going, and who the person was who was now me. Then last summer, I went on retreat and found myself finally able to surrender to what was-- finding myself forgiving God for all that had happened and forgiving myself for my own poverty of spirit. I felt like a new person, there was gratitude and there was peace, even though nothing had changed externally. I wish I could tell you that since that moment, I have been a free person, able to fully re-invest herself and trusting fully in the God who showed up on that retreat. But I suppose my story is like most of ours in that this movement of surrendering the old life, and being willing to risk the new, is one that we need to make again and again.

Even Jesus had his time of struggling to surrender to the Lord of life. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the words he prayed are from Psalm 22, "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus said that. Like us, Jesus had his time of feeling separated from the love of God. In a way, to be human, is to struggle with the illusion that we are separate from God. And that is where all the trouble starts! We think we have to provide what we need. We become self preoccupied and turn in upon ourselves. In our pain, we have expectations of our spouse, or our girlfriend, or our children or our parents, to fulfill needs that only God can fill. It can feel like we are in exile, lonely for something we can�t even quite remember or name.

This comes through in a story about a three year old girl from Seattle, who was the firstborn and only child, but when her mother was pregnant again, the little girl was very excited about having a new brother or sister. Within a few hours of the parents bringing the new baby home, the girl made a request: she wanted to be alone with her new brother in his room, with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby, of course make her parents uneasy, but when they remembered that they had installed an intercom system, they decided they could allow it. So they let the little girl go into the baby�s room, shut the door, and raced to the intercom listening station. They heard their daughter�s footsteps moving across the room, imagined her standing over the baby�s crib, and then they heard her saying to her three day old brother "Tell me, tell me about God�I�ve almost forgotten."

We are this little girl. We come from God, and when we are very young, we still remember this, still know this. But in the process of growing up, of learning about this world, and of developing a sense of self separate from the world, we forget that we are connected to God. The world of the child with its mystery and magic is left farther and farther behind, and we trade our sense of awe and wonder and connection to God, for a false self. We begin to measure ourselves against the three A�s, appearance, achievement, and affluence. It begins in childhood. In adolescence it is intense: Are we attractive enough? Do we look good enough? Are we cool enough? (I remember spending an hour and a half doing my hair every morning. I don�t know what I could possibly have done for that long, but I did!). In adulthood it may not be so intense, but we are still asking "Am I enough? Am I good enough? And we fall farther into a world of separation and alienation, comparison and judgment of self and others. We live our lives from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. So we need this transformation of ourselves and we need to be part of transforming our world.

Transformation can be sudden and dramatic, as it was for St. Paul. Perhaps some of you have had such a life changing epiphany and can point to an exact moment when it happened. I honor that. But for most of us, dying and being reborn is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime. As we grow spiritually, we are more deeply centered in Jesus� Spirit.

Life is full of moments in which we can go on loving and risking in a world we can�t control. What makes it possible to go to our "Galilees"�to step off in trust, is knowing that Jesus has gone before us and will meet us there. God can be trusted. We can count on His love! The God who had called Jesus did not abandon Him. When the world seemed to be at an end, it was only the beginning of a whole new relationship. God, the giver of all life raised Jesus up so that He was powerfully present and available to his disciples once again. Nothing could separate them from that love.

Today Jesus� message is being passed on to us: I have gone before you, don�t be afraid, I will meet you there!