BE_IMMOVABLE John M. Buchanan
I Corinthians 15:51-58 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
April 3, 1983 (Easter) Columbus, OH

One of the bittersweet blessings of television is that private grief
and personal tragedy are brought into our living rooms. Presbyterian
journalist Hugh T. Kerr watched, as we all did, and wrote: "Watching
the distraught and strained figure of Prince Ranier...standing quietly
and faithfully beside Princess Grace's casket, listening or not listening
to the words of Biblical faith, one must surely say this of the religious
service, that here, after all, is what religion is about. It provides
the word of hope when everything else keeps silence." (Theology Today,
January 1983}

It may be other places as well: in the establishment of a common
morality, for instance; in rites and rituals by which our common life
is organized; or in the visionary adovcacy of a better world for al]
peopte. Religion is in these places as well. But it is fundamentally
at the place where life and death converge. “You can tell who the Christians
are" Horace Allen, a witty Presbyterian says. "They're the ones who
sing at their funerals...They are the strange people who think the resurrection
of Jesus Christ has something to do with the daily newspaper."

There is very little the preacher can say that will make you believe
that the resurrection happened if you don't belfeve it. Qh, we can - *
and have - spun out the possibilities. Week in and week out, we bring
our theological peculiarities into confrontation with the scientific
realities of the world in which we live. We are learning that what we
thought was pinned down definitively is not nearly as certain as we once
assumed. We are learning that the human mind is not the ultimate judge
of truth and possibility, that because we don't understand it does not
mean that it cannot be true. We have allowed for the Holy to break into
the human. We have, on occasion, actually been able to point to it.
But we are not much convinced by argument this day. As a matter of fact
we do understand that the harder we argue the more illusive the point
becomes. We do understand that there is something about this that is
lost, the more intensely we handie it and the more carefully we scrutinize
it.

John Updike, in a poem "Seven Stanzas for Easter", expressed it
for those who must preach and listen ta Easter sermons:

"Let us not mock God with metaphor,

Analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

Making of the event a parable, a sign

Painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages..."

We are not persuaded by much arquing. We seem to know that the
evidence here lies some place other than in books and scholarly tomes.
We are stopped in our tracks, however, by heroism in life which fairly
shouts that life is Lord of death, and Jove is stronger than anything.

Du

“Aman is not justified by works of the Taw but through faith in
Jesus Christ,” he wrote. “I died to the law that I might live to
God," he claimed. "It is no longer I whe live but Christ who lives
in me," is the way he tried to explain what a person does who no
Tonger practices religicen as a set of rules.

Something very important about our humanity, and about Christian
relevance, emerges from Paul’s insight here. A religion based an grace
is freeing, life-giving, nurturing, inclusive, toving. A religion based
on keeping a set of rules, however admirable, becomes an end in itself,
a demarcation line between the good people who keep the rules and the
bad people who either don't know what the rules are or who chose to ignore
them. A religion of rules is a never-ending process of trying harder
and harder to Tive up to someone else's expectations, one's parents, the
religious authorities, or God, and the only guaranteed product of that
kind of religion is guilt. Who, after atl, can ever do enough good, and
obey enough rules to guarantee that God will be pleased.

Matters of love and freedom and guilt are very near the heart of
our humanity. “Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch
like me. 1 ance was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
got itself a position in the charts and became a piece of America, not
because it is good music, but precisely because it's relevant theology.
People who wouldn't be caught dead going to church and reciting creeds,
nevertheless know exactly what it means.

Time Magazine ran a feature article several weeks ago on British
actor Dudley Moore. Moore is 5'2" with a minor physical defect and a
sky-rocketing career. Time reports; however, that he “spent seventeen
years in the offices of one shrink or another trying ta come to terns
with his childhood.“ He says: “Psychologically it was made more harrowing
by the fact that my parents felt quilty about it. That made me feel as if
I had done something wrong...1I'm not grim, but I'm stil] basically cringing."
I read in that a little more than superficial Hollywood psychology. I read,
rather, a strikingly human expression of the incredible human vulnerability
to guilt and power of guilt to shape and influence human beings a]1 their
lives.

The importance of what Paul wrote to the Galatians is the insight that
religion sometimes exploits that vulnerability and actually traffics in guilt.
My First exposure to the subject came in a class taught by a distinguished
Chicago Psychiatrist. "You Christians play psychological blackmail] with
people" he told a startled group of theological students. "First, you tell
them they are sinners by nature; unacceptable to God, to other good people
and, obviously to themselves if they think about it much. You tell them
they were born that way. and when you've got them feeling sufficiently
guilty you offer yourselves and your churches as the only way ta relieve a
little of that guilt."

He didn't have it quite right, of course. But I certainly never forgot
what he said. A lot of Christianity does exploit the inherent power of
guilt. A lot of religion is manipulative and demeaning and guilt-producing.
A lot of religion deserves what the psychiatrist said about it. |

~3-

The point even here is not philosophic, it is behavioral. It surely
is not physiological. It has to do, not with what people believe, but
how they are living their lives.

The philosophical question has haunted humankind from the very begin-
ning. “Why must we die?" Why must our humanity disentegrate in front
of our eyes? Why this double insult of mortality and awareness of mortal-
ity? Like everything else in creation, we die. Alone in creation we
know about it. The Greeks struggled with ft, and it has been the human
dilemma ever since. Immanuel Kant's "Third Great Philosophical Question"
is What May I Hope For? Human philosophy's greatest struggle is to come
out any place other than a grim pessimism of emptiness and despair, the
only good possible in the form of bravery in the face of death. It spills
over into the literature of the race. From Shakespeare's “Qut, out brief
candle..." to Emily Dickinson's enfatuation with death and dying, the
poets have told us, embarrassingly, what we've been quietly thinking
about all these years. Sometimes they have said it with elegance. Thus
Edna St. Vincent Milay on death - "I do not approve." And sometimes
they have gathered up our anger with great beauty. Thus Dylan Thomas,
at the death of his father: “Do not go gently into the night. Rage,
rage, against the dimming of the light."

Now a curious thing begins to happen - at Teast to some of us, the
more we think about it. Slowly, but surely we come to see that our mortal-
ity is not the issue, ultimately. Slowly, the accumulated years teach
us a very lovely lesson and it is that without mortality, without death,
al]? the beauty and nobility would go out of our humanity. It is a secret
the Greeks understood and we are inclined to forget. Immortals cannot
be noble. In fact, they can't Tove. The Greek gods are trivial because
they don't die. So, the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the faith which
resulted from it has, with regularity been trivialized. Somehow this
most stunning thing, which St. Paul saw was for all people - all God's
creation, whether they believed it or not - somehow well intending folk
have taken that precious reality and trivialized it, parochialized, forced
it into a self serving support system. "Believe it or burn eternally"
they somehow continue to say. On the other hand God's incredible gift
of eternal life, someone cracked recently, always comes out sounding
like “an uninterrupted gala of wining and dintng, of winters in the Bahamas
and summers on the Riviera, of disco dancing in golden Slippers and Super
Bowls on the heavenly turf, of playing bal? with Babe Ruth or making
love to Matrlyn Monroe..." (The American Scholar, the Case for Mortality,
Leon R. Kass, Spring 1983, p. 187)

We learn, in time, God's wisdom expressed in our own mortality.
We also learn that mortality fs not the point: that the point is a yearn-
ing in our souls which nothing in this life can satisfy; a spiritual
reach which exceeds our grasp; a thirst for something beyond, some sense
that what we are, now, in this life, matters, counts for something; that,
in St. Paul's words our work is not in vain. That's really it, isn't
it? - that our work, our labor, our creativity, our love, our dreams
simply do not disappear, evaporate: that our dearest and deepest loves
have something more than our mortality in them. We need that in order
to live, in order to sing and Taugh and rejoice.

-4-

Christianity suggests to each of us that the pain we experience from
guiit is answered by a God who loves us and accepts us and forgives us. We
have trouble with that most of the time. Mostly we are more comfortable
with a religton based on fair value. "We don't Tike hearing that we are
saved by grace." Karl Barth wrote. "We do not appreciate that God does not
owe us anything, that we are bound to live from his goodness alone."
(Deliverance ta the Captives, p. 40) And so we have trouble accepting and
receiving wnat we need most. And there is a very real sense that the more
intense our need for grace, the more difficulty we have with it. And there
is a sense in which all the theological rhetoric in the world probably isn't
going to convince us that God loves ‘us if we feel unloved, unlovable, and guilty.

And so, let's come at it fromthe human, perspective. At our best, we know
that gui}t ts not healthy as a permanent condition, that people can be mani-
pulated and made to do what they don't particularly want to do by exploita-
tion of guilt. We know, however, that if quilt is the motive there will be
no integrity and no authenticity and no joy to it, whatever it is, from
preparing meals to gcing to church.

In fact we do learn that people are motivated more by positive reinforce-
ment, by confidence and compliment and affection. Even though we still do it
on occasion, we know that a child isn't motivated to be smarter by calling
him stupid: nor will he be trustworthy for having been called a liar; nor
wilt he work hard as a result of being called lazy. In marriage, faithfulness
is not particularly enhanced by the fear of what will happen if you get caught
being unfaithful, but by a love given to you which is so precious it would
break your own heart to betray it.

So it is that Christianity begins with the love of God. Love for neighbor,
justice and kindness and generosity occur in life not out of fear or guilt -
but out of the acknowledgment of God's love. Even confession occurs for
the Christian mot out of guilt primarily, certainly not out of a sense that
something terrible is going to happen if we don't confess, but ultimately
because we know we are Toved,

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the unlikely good news that the God who
knows our past, loves us in spite of it. It is the improbable but liberating
ews that God knows atl there is to know about us now - and loves us still.
The freedom comes in when we shift to future tense. He is going to continue
laving us whatever is ahead, whatever we chose te do in the future.

Karl Barth, capable of the most complex philosophic argument, said this
simply and well..."Grace is the beginning of the true life of freedom, of a
carefree heart, of joy deep within, of love of God and neighbor, of great
and assurred hope." (op. cit., p. 40)

The Good News ~- the best of all news - is that the first and the tast
word about it is a word of love: God's love: truly a grace that is amazing!
Amen,

~~

tionship so painful it feels like death and there is a temptation not

to love again. For some it is the quiet humiliation of aging, the loss

of strength and stamina which feels like the loss of signiftcance and
meaning. For some of us it is the inclination to stop caring about marriage,
or the economy, or the nuclear arms race, or justice in the Third World,

or the quality of government in city hall. For some it is the inclination

ta give in to the sickness we battle daily, to cease the fight, to give
ourselves to death instead of life.

However dramatic or modest, we have our struggle, each of us. And
we, among all of humanity, need - for the sake of life - God's gift of
resurrection. We actually believe what happened on Easter morning has
something te do: with the daily newspaper.

"Bon't budge," Paul said. Stay with it. Be strong. Your struggle
is worth it. An ultimate victory has been won. Your life counts. You
are worth something ultimate and eternal. "Be steadfast," he wrote,
“immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in
the Lord your labor is not in vain."

Now unto the King of all worlds, undying, invisible, the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.