April 17, 2022

Luke 24:1-12

 

Words from Greg Sterling’s most recent message to the community of alumni from Yale Divinity School keep ringing in my ears.  Usually, these messages from the Dean’s office aren’t filled with good news.  And, this one was no exception; Thomas Troeger had passed away.  The news hit me harder than I expected, given the fact that I never knew him or took a class with him.  However, back in 2016 I attended his Beecher lectures – a series Yale offers to a scholar of distinction each year – and I was blown away.  Or, maybe not so much blown away, but moved and inspired and blessed with a kind of happiness in his presence.

That may be why the news of his death was so surprising.  In his lectures he embodied the kind of faith and vitality that he spoke about.  You could tell that thinking about God, and thinking about the ways we talk about God and communicate God to one another was a source of energy and life to him.

The title of his series was called, “The End of Preaching,” by which he meant “the whole point of it,” preaching’s essential purpose.  And though in good academic fashion it took him three days to say it, I’ll give you the simple answer here.  The end of preaching is: prayer.  That’s it.  The purpose of preaching is to inspire prayer.  But, not a single petition or a dutiful task that we can mark as “done” each day.  Rather, the purpose of preaching, the purpose of proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ, the purpose of listening to it on a Sunday morning, is to be inspired to move more deeply into the kind of prayer that is life with God, self with God, love with God – a way of being that is colored by our connection to a sacred goodness that is beyond comprehension.

Dean Sterling, in his email to YDS grads, offered a thoughtful summary of Troeger’s career, capturing his accomplishments as well as his unique impact on people.  Then he concluded, “The last time that I spoke to Tom he said: ‘I am dying, but my soul is dancing.’ Tom, may your soul dance in the presence of God forever!”

“I am dying, but my soul is dancing.”  Those are the words that keep playing in my mind.  And, I keep thinking: what a truly remarkable and amazing way to be!  What a way to enter into death!  Though I’m in no rush, I want it to be that way for me too!  And don’t you?  I know it’s Easter and we’re supposed to be talking about resurrection, not death, but I’m pretty sure that the only way for it to be that way in death is for us to know preaching’s END in life.  It is for us to us to live life as “prayer” now.  It is for us to embrace, like Troeger did, God’s eternal invitation for the resurrection of Jesus to be not just something that happened to him all those years ago, but more fully, something that happens within us now on an ongoing basis.

By now most of you know that I’m a big fan of the Persian mystic, Hafiz.  Troeger’s words brought me right to a Hafiz poem called, “A Divine Invitation.”  He says,

 

You have been invited to meet

The Friend.

 

No one can resist a Divine Invitation.

 

That narrows down all our choices

to just two:

 

We can come to God

Dressed for Dancing,

 

Or

 

Be carried on a stretcher

To God’s Ward.

 

Though not a Christian, what Hafiz knows better than most is resurrection’s meaning: love’s victory, God’s uncompromising, unending, utterly joyful will to bring you too (us too) into prayer – into that life that is fellowship with God.  In his playful way Hafiz asks us to choose now the grace that we will ultimately not be able to resist – the grace that will one day be all in  all.

What I notice this year as I focus on Luke’s telling of Christ’s resurrection is the moment of recognition in the women who come to the tomb.  As we heard, they find that his body is gone and while feeling perplexed about it two men in dazzling clothes appear before them and say, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.⁶Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ ⁸Then they remembered.”

That word “remember” is used twice here as the gospel comes to its climax.  And, that strikes me as an important message about resurrection because as I think about the forces that deaden our souls, the factors that strip life of inspiration and joy, forgetfulness is among the most powerful.  It is so easy to forget the Gospel truth; there are so many ways for the world to lull us or lead us into forgetting the divine invitation and what matters most.  I thought about naming some of them for you and hoping that I might land upon the one that gets to you the most.  But, I’ve decided to resist that temptation and instead encourage your to think on what it is that leads you into that lostness of forgetting…

So, it’s apt that the only thing those two dazzling men tell the women to do, their only instruction is to remember:  Recall what he said to you.  Recall his promises.  Recall how you’ve known him.  Recall the love you’ve shared.  Recall his love for others.  Recall how he’s moved in your life.  Recall how he’s awakened you.  Recall how he’s opened your eyes to the beauty of life, to the constancy of God’s compassion, to the intimacy of God’s presence, to the touch of God’s healing, to the movement of God’s Spirit, to the grace of God’s ways.  Recall, even at the tomb of death, especially at the tomb of death, the invitation into a life that is prayer. 

But, my friends, “to remember” doesn’t simply mean to “recall.”  It means also “to re-member,” to re-create.  What the early Christians discovered is that over and over again they were able to recall the sacred truth of their lives because the resurrection of Christ was re-membered and re-created in the lives of those who had heeded the divine invitation.  There were members among them who could say with conviction, “My soul is dancing.”  Maybe that’s why Luke doesn’t call them “angels” who had met the women in the tomb.  They were “men” in dazzling clothes because you didn’t have to be from heaven to dazzle.  Heaven had come to us, and now you too could dazzle; you too could shine the light of Christ; you too could be the one though whom God awakens the world to its sacred self.

May it be so, even for us, for the truth is that Christ is risen and rising all around us.  Amen